A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery) (24 page)

Max once told me that he'd seen Ugo genuinely worked up only once, and that had been over a ridiculously trivial matter, when someone had tried to overcharge him a few hundred lire for theater tickets. The overriding imperative of Ugo's life, Max had said, was
non farsi far fesso
—not to be made a fool of. It was a result, Max had airily supposed, of social insecurity stemming from a peasant background.

Whatever the root cause, Ugo was thoroughly worked up again. His face was splotched with red; in his temple throbbed an artery I hadn't seen before. I felt guilty for upsetting him, sorry that I'd been so blunt. I should have eased into this, kept my suspicions to myself until I had something more to go on.

"I don't think there's any reason to worry, Ugo," I said with more confidence than I felt. "I'm just naturally suspicious. If something does turn out to be funny about this, Christie's will take it back."

"What are you talking about?" he shouted. "How could anything be funny? The people at the museum, they checked it over."

"What museum?"

He snorted and waved his arms at the walls. "What museum, what museum—the Pinacoteca, what else? Di Vecchio examined it himself."

He quieted down enough to explain that the purchase had been conditional on Ugo's having the painting examined by experts of his own choosing. He had left it with the Pinacoteca for a few days, and Di Vecchio and his staff had concluded that there was no basis on which to dispute the painting's authenticity. There was a high probability that it was a genuine Uytewael, but if so it was an inferior one; perhaps unfinished, maybe a study, probably just an unsuccessful effort that had been discarded but not destroyed.

Di Vecchio had told him to forget his plans of offering it to Northerners in Italy; it was simply not exhibition-quality.

"So I did," Ugo said. "But then, when you said you would come here to Sicily anyway, I figured, Amedeo doesn't know everything; why shouldn't I let you decide for yourself?"

"No reason at all. But didn't he say anything about this black stuff?"

"Nothing."

I hunched my shoulders. "Well, forget what I've been telling you. All I can say is, it would never have gotten by Amedeo. He'd have noticed it, and looked into it, and he must have been satisfied with the answers he got. Maybe it was restored just before it was auctioned, maybe—"

"Notice? How could he notice? With the frame on it you couldn't see the edges."

"It had a frame when it was auctioned?"

"Sure. Over there." He pointed to the disassembled parts of a simple old frame on a worktable a few feet away. "Why did you take it off?"

"Me, I didn't take it off. Vittore took it off."

Vittore Pinto, Ugo explained, was his Catanian restorer, and it had come off because one of the panel's long-ago owners had apparently seen fit to preserve the deteriorating wood of the frame by bathing it in olive oil. It had worked fine for the frame, but over the years a greasy film had spread onto the margins of the painting.

Ugo halted. "Wait, doesn't that prove it's old? Vittore said it would take years and years for such a film to form. Doesn't that prove it's real?"

Unfortunately, I told him, it proved nothing. It was just another touch a clever forger would throw in.

"You're just like these damn psychiatrists!" he exploded. "Everything proves what
you
say. You hate your mother too much? Sure, that proves you wanted to have sex with her when you were a little kid. You love your mother too much? Sure, that proves you wanted to have sex with her when you were a little kid."

I laughed, glad to have him making jokes again, and leaned over to look at the picture. "I don't see any film now."

Pinto had removed it, according to Ugo, and had touched up the rest of the painted surface as well. The frame had undergone an oil-evaporation process, had been coated with sealant, and was now drying. On Monday the restorer would come back and refit it to the panel.

"Ugo, maybe I've been making us crazy over nothing," I said hopefully. "Could Pinto have touched up this black edging, too?"

"No, I don't think so. Vittore's good at his job, but he makes sure to charge plenty. There's nothing on his statement about this, so take my word for it, he didn't do it."

Unless he did it
without
telling Ugo. The copyist that forged the Dürer hadn't charged the council for alterations, either. But this seemed too unlikely to pursue. If Pinto had sliced off the face of the original Uytewael and made off with it, he would hardly have left the evidence of his tinkering sitting around Ugo's workshop for a week.

Besides, who in his right mind would go to all that risk and trouble to make off with a Joachim Uytewael, for God's sake? What kind of market was there for Uytewaels? Even in Ugo's relatively modest collection there were paintings worth nine or ten times as much. Was I inventing all this?

Tentatively, I fingered the tarry black border again. No, I wasn't inventing anything. Something wasn't right here. Maybe there was a simple and legitimate explanation, but something wasn't right.

"Ugo, tell me: Does it look exactly the same as when you first saw it? I mean exactly."

He studied it, lips pursed. "Yes. A little nicer since Vittore cleaned it."

"You're absolutely sure it's the same painting Clara brought back from London?"

"Ten minutes ago I was sure," he grumbled. "Now, with all these questions, who knows?" He chewed on a plump underlip. "You're starting to worry me, damn it. The fact is, Cristoforo, I didn't see it when she brought it back. I was in the middle of moving back here from Milan. I had no time for it. Clara took it straight to the museum. The first time I saw it was when it got here a week, two weeks, later." He grabbed up his tumbler and gulped down the rest of his wine. "But so what? What are you saying?"

"I don't know. How did it get here from the museum?"

 
"It came with the rest of my paintings. Max arranged with the shipping company there, I forget their name—"
 

I looked at him. "Salvatorelli?"

"No, not them. From Milan. Albertazzi."

Another theory bit the dust. Albertazzi Figlio were also well-known transporters of fine art. But unlike the Salvatorellis, they were incontestably upright; not a shred of rumor about underworld connections attached to them.

"The Pinacoteca's in Bologna, Albertazzi's in Milan," I said. "How did it get from Bologna to Milan
^?
Or did the movers just pick it up at the museum on their way south?"

"How do I know? Can I take care of every detail? Can't I trust the Pinacoteca?"

He banged down his glass, threw up his hands and stumped angrily around the little room, lapsing into a muttered dialect I couldn't understand.

Two circuits calmed him. He stopped, facing me. "Cristoforo," he said quietly, "let me get this straight. You're worried that if we could see under that black stuff, we'd see two pieces of wood, two layers of wood."

"Right."

"But if you're wrong, there'd be one solid piece, the way there's supposed to be."

"True."

He smacked his hands together. "Fine! So then let's see. What are we standing here talking for?"

He went quickly to the workbench, rummaged for a moment, and came back, freshly energized, with a wood chisel in his hand. Ugo was first and foremost a man of action.

"
Wait
!" I jumped between him and the picture. Chisels being addressed to seventeenth-century paintings tended to turn curators into men of action, too. "What are you going to do?"

He blinked at me. "I'm going to scrape it off and see what's underneath. Why not?"

"For one thing, you just paid millions of lire for this. Hundreds of millions."

"So? It's mine, isn't it? Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt the picture. Just this crap on the edges."

We were dancing absurdly around, Ugo trying to bull his way past me, me holding him off.

"Ugo, I just
think
the painting might be a forgery. You can't just chip away at it when you feel like it. Besides, it isn't yours."

He stopped shoving and peered skeptically up at me. "Who says, not mine?"

"Not yours to do anything you want with, It's yours as an article of public trust. You're its custodian, its guardian, not its owner. You're the one who's responsible for preserving it for posterity—not scraping away at it with a chisel to see what's underneath."

Okay, it was a little windy, but this kind of thing has a better ring to it in Italian. And being exactly what I really believe, it was delivered with sincerity. In any case, the appeal to Ugo's better instincts did the trick.

"Cristoforo, you're right," he said, lifting his jowls a little, as befitted a guardian of the public trust. He put down the chisel. "So what do we do?"

I'd been giving this some thought. "The top person I know on early sixteenth-century Flemish painting is Willem van de Graaf at the Mauritshuis."

"At the what?"

"It's a museum in The Hague. I'd like him to see this."

 
"Sure, tell him to come down."

"No, I mean I'd like to take it there. That's where his laboratory is. I could fly up there with it on Monday morning. If it's genuine, I'll take it gladly, and I can have the Mauritshuis ship it on to Seattle for the show. If it isn't— well, I'll call you, and we can figure out what to do from there."

"But what about the frame? I wouldn't like to see it in the show without a frame."

"I'll take it along with me. One of their conservators will be glad to mount it."

He hesitated only briefly. "All right, sure."
 

"Good—hold it, what am I thinking of? This won't work. You'd have to get a rider on your insurance."

"Don't worry. I'll take care of it tomorrow."

"In one day? On a Sunday?"

"Sure, why not?"

I shook my head. "Well, maybe you can, but you're not going to take care of getting customs approval in one day. No, we'd better—"

"I'll take care of it," he said.

I smiled. "Obviously, you've never had to deal with the Italian government on—"

"I told you, don't worry. I'll take care of it, you'll see." He puffed out his plump chest. "Me, I'm on very good terms with the officials here. They'll do anything for me."

Chapter 17

La Vecchia Cucina was a homey, rustic place—floors and beamed ceiling of dark wood, walls of rough, whitewashed stucco, a stone fireplace—given a touch of elegance by black-tied waiters and thick white linen. Ugo, ever sensitive to social nuances, basked in being fawningly received as a man of importance, and grandly introduced me to Fabrizio, the proprietor, as a great art scholar from America.

We were shown to a prominent table by Fabrizio himself, who pulled out Mary's chair for her and raised a scandalized fuss when he discovered a faded wine stain at the edge of the snowy tablecloth. The maitre d' was summoned and castigated. Two waiters rushed up. One whisked the offending cloth away; the other slung a new one onto the table with the deft, snapping flick of the wrists that is practically an art form among Italian waiters. Places were rapidly reset while Fabrizio murmured apologies for the inconvenience.

Ugo lapped it all up, dismissed Fabrizio with a forgiving, seigneurial wave of the hand. Glasses of the infamous Jazz! were brought to us. Ugo toasted my health, downed the aperitif with every sign of genuine pleasure, smacked his lips and said "Ah!"

I steeled myself, tossed the stuff back, smacked my lips, and said "Ah!" too.

It was as bad as I remembered. I noticed that Mary took only a small sip and set her glass off to the side.

Ugo rubbed his hands together. "I thought you would enjoy an authentic Sicilian restaurant," he told me, "not a fancy place. You feel adventurous? You want to try some of our traditional foods?"

I was hungry, not adventurous. The last meal I'd had was a Continental breakfast at the Europa twelve hours before. What I wanted was the biggest plate of lasagna the kitchen could make, but not at the cost of disappointing my host. "Absolutely," I said. "I've been looking forward to it."

Others were helping themselves from a self-service antipasto table, but Ugo, who may have felt such behavior in my presence would have been déclassé, had a waiter deliver a platterful to us. Almost everything on it was from the nearby sea: a marinated salad of shrimp and octopus; mussels baked with olive oil and bread crumbs; thin, fried cakes made of tiny, transparent fish complete with heads and tails; fresh tuna, fresh sardines; sea urchins in the shell—all at room temperature and all delicious, except for the sea urchin, which I regarded doubtfully, not quite sure how to approach it.

"One eats only the eggs, this orange stuff," Ugo explained, turning over a shell on his own plate. "It's like caviar. One scoops it up with a piece of bread, so."

I tried one and found it like a mouthful of unflavored gelatin, nothing remotely like caviar. The bread was good, though. "Interesting," I said.

" Now," Ugo said brightly, "a test for freshness. If we turn it over"—he did so with the tip of a knife—"we should find that the spines still move. And so they do." He leaned toward me, over the purple, feebly waving spines, happy and maybe just a little malicious. "You ate it while it was alive! What do you think of that?"

Not a lot, really. What we were looking at was reflex activity in the rudimentary nerve fibers under the exoskeleton, unconnected to any central nervous system. (You're right, this is not the sort of thing I'd ordinarily know, but I'd once done a project on the Echinodermata for a high school biology contest; I'd gotten an honorable mention for it.) Once again, though, why disappoint Ugo? Who could blame him for a little jovial malice after the way I'd ruined his day over the Uytewael? I looked down and grimaced. "My God, it's still wriggling!"

For some people it would have been overkill, but Ugo beamed and showily tossed the insides of another urchin into his mouth.

"And look at these little fish!" I went on, shuddering. "You can see their eyes!"