A Deceptive Clarity (12 page)

It took only one look to convince me of what I should have known days before; that Anne had been right in her conviction, that Harry had been right in his conjecture, and that the
Polizei,
Robey, and I had gotten it all wrong. Peter van Cortlandt, with his taintless French cuffs and clean, slender hands, would never have gone near the place; not willingly. The man, as Anne had said, was just too fastidious. And if that doesn't sound like a cogent reason, all I can say is that if you'd known him, you'd have thought so, too.

And that meant, of course, what Anne had said it did: that his death had not been a straightforward, squalid little affair but a more complex matter trumped up to look like something it wasn't. Unexpectedly, I felt a whooshing rush of relief. Funny to be relieved when you realize that someone you liked hadn't died in an accident after all but had been murdered. But that's what I felt. Regardless of what I'd been telling myself, I'd been troubled by the sordidness of the thing, and finding out I'd been wrong made a big difference.

I had stood too long staring at the Hotel Paradies; long enough for the wet snow to collect on my eyebrows, long enough for a puffy-faced woman with copper hair to open the front door and call out across the street to me.

I turned and walked back to the
Hauptbahnhof,
reflecting. What about motive? Was there really any reason to think, as Anne did, and Harry seemed to, that it was anything more complicated than a robbery? Peter did carry a lot of cash on him; once I saw him ask a waiter if he could change a thousand-dollar bill at the Thanh Longh, a tiny Vietnamese restaurant on Geary, not far from the museum. (I wound up paying the $9.80 lunch check for the two of us, although Peter had repaid me by 2:00 p.m.)

More than that, Peter
looked
rich—the way he talked, lit his cigarette, crossed one slim leg over the other. As considerate and polite as he was to anyone who came his way, he moved in an aura of self-assured complacence that would probably make a really poor man want to kill him on sight.

So the obvious motive was robbery, especially since the valuables he'd carried with him were missing. And yet, by the time I took my seat on the smooth, silent airport train, I knew I didn't buy it. It was too elaborate for so ordinary a theft: watch, ring, wallet. Peter's killer—or killers—had gone to a great deal of trouble throwing up a smoke screen to befuddle the police. They must have drugged him, put him into a walking trance so that witnesses would remember seeing him "drunk" in a couple of bars, dragged him into that awful hotel, arranged for the tattooed Utelinde ... but why go through all that when a blow on the head and a quick toss into the Main would have sufficed? Why kill him at all?

And if it wasn't robbery, then I could think of only one reasonable alternative: Anne's hypothesis that "they" had killed him to keep him quiet about the forgery he'd found, the forgery he'd been so quietly jocular about. The idea no longer seemed absurd. One week he discovers a forgery in The Plundered Past, and the next he's murdered in a well-planned setup; set up to have no apparent connection with the show, set up to make his friends, his associates, his family only too happy to see the resulting inquiry get as little publicity as possible. Given the circumstances, "they" must have reasoned, there was hardly likely to be an outcry for an exhaustive investigation. The sooner he was buried, the sooner his miserable end could be forgotten.

It made sense, but it was all conjecture. No, not all. He was murdered; of that I was now certain, and his murder was not what it seemed. It had been natural enough for Harry to think along those lines, but why, I wondered irritably, had Anne been able to see it from the beginning, while I, with all my smug condescension, had not? Well, I would tell her that she was right and I was wrong when I saw her next, and I would try to say a few more things too.

As the Lufthansa jet, predictably punctual, rose from the runway, bound for Italy, I was turning a hundred questions over in my mind, and two in particular: Who were "they"? And what was the forgery Peter had found? The first I couldn't do anything about, other than put it in the hands of the police. The second, I could. And would.

I began that evening. Fog and ice storms over much of northern Italy made it impossible for the jet to take off from Milan's Malpensa Airport, where it had made an intermediate stop. I checked into an Agip Motel near the airport, called Lorenzo Bolzano to tell him I'd be a day late, and then telephoned Robey's office in Heidelberg, which would not give me his telephone number but promised to give him mine.

Twenty minutes later, while I was under one of those functional, unenclosed Italian showers where the entire bathroom serves as the shower stall and the water runs down a drain in the middle of the floor, the telephone rang. I grabbed a towel and ran for it.

"Chris?" Robey's daydreamy voice asked. "Where are you—Florence? Is there a problem with Bolzano?"

"I'm in Milan. I'll see Bolzano tomorrow."

"Ah."

"That's not what I called about, though. There's another problem." I sat down on the bed, toweling my hair, and went through what Peter had told me one more time.

"A forgery in The Plundered Past," Robey mused, with all the feverish intensity he might have shown if I'd told him we needed another bottle of glue for the partitions. "Are you going to be able to find it?"

"I don't know. That's what I'm calling about. I think I may have to bring in some technical help. It's expensive. Can the budget stand it?"

"Oh, don't worry about that. If we need help, we'll get help. You let me worry about the budget."

These words were so unlike any I'd ever heard at the San Francisco County Museum of Art that I was momentarily struck dumb. "That's good," I finally managed.

"Well, that's what I'm here for." He was ready to go back to whatever else was on his mind.

"There's something else, Mark. I think Peter's death was a setup; I think he was killed because of the forgery."

"You
what
?"
I had his full attention at last.

I explained as well as I could the conclusions I'd come to in Frankfurt, but my reasoning sounded pretty lame even to me, and I could feel his concentration wander as I told him about the seedy Hotel Paradies.

"Well, yes," he said. "I can certainly see why you'd think that. Hm." Back to business as usual with Robey. It was what he'd said to Anne.
 

"But what do
you
think?" I asked.

"Well ... I wouldn't rule it out."

That was what
I'd
said to Anne. "Mark, I think I ought to talk to Gucci about it."

Silence.

"Do you have any objection?" I asked.

"No, no objection. Just—well, I wouldn't want to see a lot of adverse publicity about the show. It's bad enough already."

"I'm as concerned about the show as you are, but Peter's been killed, for God's sake—"

"You're right, you're right," he said soothingly. "Totally. I was just worried about the media getting a hold of it in some sensational way, that's all. I know you'll conduct yourself discreetly."

"I'll be discreet," I said, not showing my annoyance.

"Of course you will. And Chris?"

"Yes?"

"Assuming for the sake of argument that you're right about Peter's death having something to do with the forgery, then, well ... I guess what I'm trying to say is pretty obvious."

"I don't think I—"

"Well," he said with a long, slow sigh, "you'd better take care of yourself." Pregnant pause. "Hadn't you?"

And that was the first time, right then, while I sat naked on the bed, with my hand still on the cradled telephone, that it belatedly dawned on me that I was in danger myself. Peter had been killed, I was now assuming, because he'd come upon a forgery. And here was I, doing everything I could to find the same forgery. I remained there, thinking that over for a while, but I never seriously considered— never considered at all—giving up the investigation.

I don't mean to imply that I'm particularly brave, because I don't think I am. (I was proud of the way I'd reacted in the storage room, but I knew very well I had charged into that fracas instinctively, without stopping to think about it, which is a different thing than bravery.) But when I get started on a problem, there is a dogged streak that surfaces—that old anal fixation, I guess—and it had most certainly surfaced now. I was not about to pull back until that fake was identified. And until Peter's killer was found.

Resolute as all that may sound, I was glad I'd bought a small bottle of Italian brandy at the airport, and when I'd slipped into my robe, I poured myself a substantial dollop. Then I sat down at the small round table and called Harry Gucci.

It was after eight, but he was still in his office.

"Hey, Chris!" he cried happily. "What's up? Where are you, anyway—Frankfurt? Florence?"

"Milan. Harry, you were right. I think Peter was murdered, and that it had something to do with the forgery."

"What brings on this change of heart?"
 

"Well, I'm not sure it'll make much sense to you, but I had a look at the Hotel Paradies today."
 

"And?"

"And Peter van Cortlandt would never in a million years have walked into that place. Not of his own free will. It didn't really hit me until I saw it."

"That's your evidence?"

"I'm afraid so. But I know I'm right, Harry."

The earpiece whistled with a sigh. "Yeah, I think you are, too. The whole thing doesn't sit right, does it?" He was quiet for several seconds, if you don't count tooth-sucking.

"Are you going to follow up on it?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'll follow up, but technically this is the
Polizei's
case, not the U.S. Army's; all I can do is sort of work along with them. I think it'd be a good idea if you talked directiy with the guy that's running the investigation in Frankfurt."

"Oh, sure, I can hear it now: 'Herr Inspektor, I know with certainty that Peter van Cortlandt would never have gone to bed with a prostitute in the Hotel Paradies.'
 
'
Ja?
And how do you know this, Herr Doktor?' 'I know, Herr Inspektor, because it would have offended his aesthetic and hygienic sensibilities.' That'll really get them going, won't it?"

Harry laughed. "OK, leave it to me. Listen, do you have any idea at all who might have wanted to kill him?"

"No. Nobody."

"Well, somebody. What about motive?"

"All I can think of is what Anne Greene suggested to me: Somebody wanted to keep him quiet about the forgery." I stood up and looked at the sleet thrumming against the black window pane. "It isn't much, is it?"

"I wouldn't exactly call it a watertight case, no," he said cheerfully. "But have a little faith. Hey, what about the forgery, by the way? Any luck yet?"

"No. But I'll find it."

"Right on. And Chris?
 
You really want to be–"

"I know." I swallowed the rest of the brandy. "Careful."

Chapter 9

I have been to Florence a dozen times, first as an impoverished graduate student grinding out a dissertation, and then as an expenses-paid curator from a rich and acquisitive museum, but I have never stayed anywhere except at the Hotel Augustus. When I was a student, it was a little more than I could realistically afford; now it is a lot less. Whenever I turn in my expense account after a visit, Tony predictably fumes and tells me I ought to put up at the Excelsior ("At least think about appearances, Chris. Jesus Christ, what will the Uffizi people think?")

One reason I stay there is that it's interesting; a sixteenth-century town house that's been altered so many times you can't figure out where the original rooms were. The exterior is nothing to write home about: a plastered facade of mustard yellow—plain, peeling, and ugly—with a few touches of old stonework that are next-to-invisible under all the grime. But inside it's a clean family hotel with Florentine touches that never fail to please me: vaulted ceilings, worn stone, seats tucked in corners, surprising little reading niches, handsome but transparently fake antique furniture old enough to be antique in its own right. There is a tiny bar with a domed ceiling on which is a creditable fake seventeenth-century fresco of birds and foliage.

The other reason I stay at the Augustus is that it's on the Via della Scala, just around the comer from the ancient church of Santa Maria Novella, to which I never fail to make my own personal pilgrimage as soon as I arrive. This time was no exception, even though the taxi let me off at the hotel less than half an hour before Lorenzo Bolzano, Claudio Bolzano's son, was due to pick me up.

Five minutes after I'd checked in and been effused over by the ancient receptionist like the old client I was, I was inside the church, standing before a shadowed fresco in pale browns midway down the left wall of the nave. Inconspicuous, washed-out-looking, pretty much ignored in this city crammed with fabulous art treasures, it is a landmark in the history of art.

There have been a lot of landmark artworks and a lot of landmark artists, but only once has a painter single-handedly launched with a single painting a movement that changed art forever. The painter was Masaccio, the painting was
The Holy Trinity,
and the movement, if that's a strong enough word, was the Renaissance. In painting, anyway; Donatello and Brunelleschi had already gotten the ball rolling in sculpture and architecture.

The twenty-four-year-old Masaccio's innovations were stunning. He used light as no painter before him had. Even the great Giotto's light had been flat, sourceless, an obvious necessity but no more. Masaccio illuminated with it, hid with it, molded with it. And Masaccio's figures are the first "clothed nudes"; they look as if they could get out of their robes if they wanted to, and nobody in a painting had ever looked that way before. Even more important, the chapel in
The Holy Trinity
is the first painted space that is not "on the wall" but an extension of the space in which the viewer stands. The awestruck Vasari said it was like peering into a cave in the wall. And Masaccio accomplished this not merely with an artist's cunning but with a deft, precise application of Brunelleschi's new insights into the laws of perspective.