A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery) (10 page)

"They may also steal some more paintings another day."

"Let me ask you something. When a seller of narcotics hears the police pounding down the door to his apartment, what does he do with the kilo of cocaine in the closet?"

I shrugged. "Flushes it down the toilet, I guess. Or throws it out the window."

"Very good. He destroys the evidence. A criminal with stolen art does the same thing when the police are about to close in. He does not flush it down the toilet, of course; the circumstances are different. But he tries to destroy it. Now: If it is cocaine, the world is better off for its loss, no?" He leaned back and economically crossed one knee over the other in the cluttered space beneath the table. "But what if it is a Tiziano, a Raffaelo? Should I risk the destruction of an irreplaceable work of art for the satisfaction of seeing a thief in jail for a year? For two years, if the courts are feeling particularly stern?"

He knew how to hit an art curator where it hurt; talk about the destruction of Old Masters. "I guess you have a point," I said.

The telephone buzzed. Antuono picked it up. "
Prego
." He sat there nodding impatiently into it. "
Si, capisco... . Capisco. . .
."

Most of what he had explained to me I had already known. The
Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Artistico
was the most celebrated art-theft squad in the world, and rightly so. With a staff of less than a hundred, they had recovered a staggering 120,000 works of art in the twenty years they'd been in operation, and I couldn't really quarrel with their first-get-the-art-then-worry-about-the-bad-guys philosophy. But when it's your own body that's been battered by the bad guys, you tend to see things in a different light.

Antuono emitted a final "
capisco
" and hung up. "No," he told me dryly, "they were not caught." He rose. "If there is nothing else, Dr. Norgren, I have a great deal—"

I looked up at him, surprised. "Don't you want a report on what I've been hearing?"

"To reply with perfect frankness, no."

"But I thought—"

"May I speak directly? This matter of your running to me with tidbits of gossip—"

"Look, Colonel," I said hotly. I was feeling distinctly ill- used. "It wasn't my idea in the first place. If you—"

"Nor mine. It was a suggestion made by your FBI, and I have no doubt it was well-intentioned. I felt it was best to accept the offer of your services. But between us, signore, truly, it's not necessary. We are well able to gather our own information "

"The FBI?" I stood up too rapidly and winced, barely managing not to groan as my knees straightened out for the first time in fifteen minutes. "How could they offer my services? How could they know I was coming?"

"I believe the original idea came to them from a Mr. . . . Let me see. . ."

"Let me guess," I said. "Whitehead."

"Ah, yes, I think so. Whitehead. Exactly."

It figured. Tony Whitehead's belief in the virtues of publicity was every bit as unequivocal as Mike Blusher's, even if more sophisticated and of purer intention. If his curator of Renaissance and Baroque art could have some part in the recovery of the Bolognese art thefts, so Tony's reasoning would run, then publicity for the museum would result. And that would of necessity be good for the museum.

I wasn't so sure. I also wasn't so sure about my obligation to stay in touch with Antuono. Tony's agreement to fund the purchase of Ugo's Boursse was contingent on my continued reporting. But the Eagle himself had just made it amply clear that he had better things to do than listen to my "tidbits." Could I therefore consider my obligation fulfilled? Could I go ahead and buy the Boursse with a clear conscience? A moral dilemma.

I knew what I was going to do, of course, but how was I going to rationalize it? We ethical people are very fastidious about our rationalizations. It was going to take some thought.

After leaving Antuono's hodgepodge of an office, I stopped at a coffee bar for a lunch of cheese and tomato
panini
. Then I went back up to my room in hopes of getting there before the maid did so that I could recover my precipitately discarded codeine capsules. No luck. She had been there and done a thorough job. I took a couple of aspirin and, with a muffled groan or two, lay myself stiffly down on the freshly made bed.

Twenty minutes later I was roused by a telephone call from the
polizia criminal
e. They understood that I was still recuperating, but would it be too much of an imposition if they came in a car and brought me to police headquarters to verify the transcript of my interview and perhaps look at a few photographs of local criminals? As miserable as I was feeling, it was still far from an imposition. It was, in fact, nice to know somebody cared.

When I looked at the transcript, I was astonished to find it lucid and complete, with the remarks I made while I was unconscious being, if anything, marginally more coherent than what I said after I woke up. I signed it, then leafed through a few thick loose leaf books of photographs, but was unable to find either of the thugs. The two policemen accepted this fatalistically, then shook my hand with expressions of gratitude. I was courteously taken back to the Hotel Europa, where I went back up to my room to try to sleep again. I napped for almost two hours, and woke up at 3:30, feeling better and worrying about Max. I caught a taxi at the stand in front of the hotel and headed for the hospital, this time without calling first.

Chapter 7

Among the many social skills in which I seem to be lacking is the knack of providing cheerful solace at hospital bedsides. My conversational charms atrophy, my sense of humor withers, my smile petrifies. My friend Louis, who experienced this firsthand after his double-hernia operation, has a ready explanation, of course: My relief that it is someone else and not me in the bed creates a powerful sense of guilt, which in turn effects an overcompensatory reaction that sharply suppresses any behavior approximating good cheer.

Maybe so—who am I to argue with Freud?—but if I felt any relief at seeing Max, then it was deeply suppressed indeed. I had run into Dr. Tolomeo in the hallway outside the room, and he had taken me aside for an ominous warning. "Your friend—It looks worse than it is. Don't be frightened when you see him."

It was a good thing he told me, because Max was a frightening sight. He was propped into a semi-sitting position by the mechanical bed, with his naked legs straight out in front of him. Instead of the casts I'd expected, there was a horror- movie contraption of bolted-together steel rods encasing each leg from just above the knee almost to the ankle. Heavy steel pins—six on each leg—skewered the limb, piercing it through and cruelly transfixing it between the rods. The flesh was ghastly; purple, red, and black, swollen and split open like a hot dog that had been on the grill too long.

"Sit down, will you?" he said. "I wouldn't want you to faint on me." He was trying to sound chipper, but his voice was feeble, the words blurry, as if he had something in his mouth. He seemed to have lost thirty pounds. Once-sleek skin sagged clammy and pale beneath his eyes. His mustache had been shaved off to allow for five or six gruesome stitches, and without that imposing landmark his face seemed featureless and indistinct, like an out-of-focus photograph.

He didn't look remotely like Alfred E. Neuman.

"I look like hell, don't I?" he said.

"Not too bad. How do you feel?"

"You have to be kidding."

I saw a sluggish movement of tongue where it wasn't supposed to be, and realized that under the wound on his lip some teeth had been knocked out. Why that should have shocked me more than the state of his legs I don't know, but it did. I remembered the mushy sound of that heavy fist hitting him in the face, and I felt a single cold drop of sweat trickle down between my shoulder blades.

"Do you want me to come back another time, Max?"

 
"No, no," he said quickly. "Stay, I'm glad you're here. And I don't really feel too bad. They keep me doped up."

 
A good thing, I thought.

"These things on my legs … They're not as bad as they look. They're supposed to be better than casts for my kind of fractures. They say I'll be able to start walking a little as soon as the swelling goes down and the cuts heal up. Next week, maybe."

"Really. That's great." I'd believe it when I saw it.

"Maybe sooner," he said. "They say I'm doing fine. They're amazed, in fact."

Well, there I was, doing my usual sterling bedside job. Poor Max was working like mad to cheer me up.

"Glad to hear it," I said heartily, finally sitting down. "Anything I can do for you?"

"Do? No." He shifted awkwardly on the bed. There were ropes strung from the metal rods on his legs to a simple pipe frame over the bed, keeping his feet a few inches off the mattress, and movement was difficult. At one point he twisted too far and gasped.

I flinched. "Do you want a nurse?"

"Uh-uh. Chris ... " He shrugged awkwardly. His mouth moved like an old, old man's as he probed with his tongue in the gap between his teeth. "They told me you came back, that you actually tried to fight off those two goons. I heard you wound up in the hospital yourself."

"Just for observation. I wasn't hurt." My own pains and aches had shrunk to insignificance the second I'd seen Max.

"Well, I just wanted to say . . . I just wanted to tell you how much I—"

"That's okay, pal. You would have done the same for me." "I hope so. I'd like to think so." He dropped his eyes. "I'm not sure, though."

"Sure you would have. Look, it wasn't anything that extraordinary. There wasn't really time to think about it. Believe me, all I—"

"Chris," Max said abruptly, "those guys really scared me."

"Of course they did. You'd have been crazy not to be scared. How do you think I felt?"

"I mean
really
scared. I'm still scared."

"Well, naturally. Anybody—"

He jerked his head with a listless kind of impatience, finally deciding to come out with what I knew he was driving at. "I'm not going to talk to Colonel Antuono. I can't, Chris. This was just a warning. The next time they'll kill me. I know these people. They're animals."

"I know, Max, but are you just going to let those bastards—" I clamped my mouth shut. Who the hell was he to be giving lessons in moral duty to him? Nobody had issued a sadistic warning to me. My involvement was circumstantial and temporary, my own fault. And I was doing fine, walking around with a few lingering aches. Max was the one impaled on that orthopedic Iron Maiden, hoping, in Dr. Tolomeo's dark phrase, to adjust.

"Chris, you ought to be scared, too. You ought to get out of here and go back to Seattle."

"Me? What do I have to be scared about?"

"You saw their faces. You could identify them."

"If they were going to kill me over that, they'd have done it then," I said, none too confidently. If running you down with a car doesn't qualify as attempted murder, what does? "I'm not going anywhere. I have things to talk about with Clara and Amedeo. Then I'm going down and see about that Boursse of Ugo's before he changes his mind
Then
I'm going home."

His eyes closed. "I'm too tired to argue with you. I just wish the hell you'd clear out."

A husky, gray-haired nurse came in with a tray of equipment. "I must examine the insertion sites," she announced brightly in Italian.

I stood up. "I'll go."

"No," Max said. "She does this every couple of hours. It just takes a few minutes. Don't go yet." But he looked terribly haggard now, and gray-faced with pain.

"I don't know ....." I looked at the nurse.

"It's all right," she said. "He's fine. It isn't as bad as it looks." So everyone kept telling me. "Go outside, and then you can come back in ten minutes."

"Please," Max said.

"Sure," I said. "Of course I will."

Fifteen minutes later, she emerged, wafted on a pungent billow of antiseptic, and motioned me back in with a tilt of her head. "I gave him something for the pain," she whispered. I returned to find the bed straightened and Max neatened as well, even to having had his hair combed. His face looked tired but no longer drawn with pain; wistful and relaxed. "Hi there, buddy," he said. His hands, which had been gripping the sheets the whole time I'd been there, were loosely clasped on his abdomen.

"The thing is," he was murmuring pensively, mostly to himself, "the thing is, you don't really mean to stay, not forever."

The subject had apparently changed.

"You always mean to go back home someday," he went on dreamily. "And then one day you realize you stayed too long. You go home to America, but it isn't home anymore. You feel like a foreigner. So you run back to Italy, only that's not home either. It doesn't even exist, the Italy you thought you lived in. You made it up. You've never even seen the real Italy, let alone understood it. You've never been anything but a foreigner to them." He shook his head, sadly, slowly. "And they'll never let you be anything else. Can you even understand what I'm talking about?"

"Sure, I can," I said. "I'm hearing the Expatriate's Lament, as sung by the great Italian tenor Massimiliano Caboto. "

You have to understand Max. When he was in his cups— or high on painkiller, apparently—he sometimes shifted from his natural ebullience to a tranquil but distinctly theatrical melancholy. Comedy to Tragedy, and often as not on this very subject. I had long ago learned that taking it at face value tended to make him genuinely downhearted, as if he began to believe what he was saying. And this didn't seem like the time to make Max downhearted. He had more than enough to be glum about as it was.

"You sting me," he said, hamming it up to show me he wasn't taking himself seriously. But a moment later he said: "I'm a man without roots, Chris. I'm alone now, ever since Giulia died. I'm going to die here, 5,000 miles from my native land. They're going to bury me in the corner of the cemetery they save for Englishmen and other crazy people."