A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery) (11 page)

"Max, believe me, you're not going to die," I said. "Dr. Tolomeo—"

"I don't mean now," he said, lifting an irritable eyebrow. I was spoiling his scene. "I mean eventually."

I smiled as reassuringly as I could. "You're just feeling down now. It's understandable. You'll be yourself again in a few days."

"Ah, what the hell," he said wearily. "What do you understand, a kid like you."

I was having my typical success at jollying the patient up, and I fidgeted in the uncomfortable visitor's chair, wondering if I ought to go before I depressed him even more. I was rescued by the return of the nurse.

"I think maybe now he should rest."

I leaped from the chair. "I'll go, then. I'll drop in again in a clay or two, Max."

"Fine, fine." His eyelids were slipping down. "Chris?" he said as I got to the door.

"Yes?"

"When was it we were supposed to go see Ugo?"
 

"This weekend. Saturday."

"Oh." He sighed and settled himself back against the pillows, his eyes closed now. The structure of rods and pins on his legs was like a mechanical monster slowly ingesting him from the bottom up. "Well, I think I'm probably not going to make it."

By the time I got back downtown I was thoroughly depressed. Seeing Max had taken the spirit out of me, and, added to the morning's frustrating session with Colonel Antuono, it had been a tough day for a body that had not yet entirely composed itself, as Dr. Tolomeo might have said. My mind didn't feel all that composed, either. Too weary to cope with a real dinner, I stopped at a little bar on Via Ugo Bassi for a couple of stale
panini
with ham and cheese, willingly paying the extra lire charged for sitting down. Then I went up to my room in the Europa to make another early night of it.

I was starting to feel guilty, too. Here I was, concluding my third day in Bologna on a generous expense account, and what had I done to earn my keep so far? Not a thing. I grant you, it wasn't my fault, and it had hardly been what I'd call a pleasure trip. All the same, I hadn't gotten anything done and I was beginning to get fidgety. Achy joints or not, there was a major show to be organized. I picked up the telephone. No doubt Louis would have chirped gravely (yes, Louis can chirp gravely) about obsessive-compulsive work behavior, but Louis wasn't there to know. I telephoned Clara Gozzi, who would be contributing several pictures to the Northerners in Italy show, and made an appointment to visit her in Ferrara the next morning to discuss the arrangements.

My sense of responsibility pacified, I was virtuously, dreamlessly asleep by eight o'clock.

Chapter 8

It was half an hour to Ferrara by rail, over restful green countryside dotted with farms. The 10:00 A.M. train was clean and smooth-running, with good
caffè latte
available from a cart and big windows that let in the warm morning sunlight. I soaked up both gratefully and arrived relaxed and feeling almost whole again. My appointment was still forty minutes off, so I took a slow, lulling, roundabout walk to Clara's house. Lulling was just what I needed, and Ferrara was the right place for it, a sober Renaissance city of gardens, broad boulevards, and gracefully crumbling palaces, all of it bathed in the sweet, melancholy sheen of decaying grandeur.

Clara Gozzi, who was rich enough to live anywhere she liked, had chosen not to reside on the elegant, palazzo-lined Corso Ercole d'Este with the rest of the gentry. "Who wants to live in a damned mausoleum?" she'd grumbled when I'd asked her about it on an earlier visit. "Besides, half those monstrosities are let out to technical institutes and government offices. Would
you
like to live next door to the traffic police?"

Instead, she had a house on the southern outskirts of the city; in a tree-lined, middle-class neighborhood picked because she thought it looked like Aix-en-Provence (it did), where she'd spent her summers as a girl. Here, there were solid blocks of modern, four-story apartment houses built in a not-displeasing neo-Venetian Gothic style, with modest loggias, balconies, and central patios. Clara had bought an entire four-family building, left the outside as it was, and had the inside redone to her specifications. Beyond installing an elevator, a track-lighting system to spotlight her collection, and a bank of security systems, there wasn't much to the redoing. Like many serious collectors, she made only one demand of interior decoration: that it not compete with what hung on the walls. The linoleum-tile floors had been replaced with oak; other than that, the inside of the house still looked like the four separate, identical apartments it had been before, and the furniture, if not quite shabby, was surely nondescript. She had, as a matter of fact, simply had her agent buy most of it from the departing tenants; less fuss that way.

Clara Gozzi had come into the world rich by birth, had been made considerably poorer by a short, disastrous marriage in the 1950s to a dashing, self-styled Luxembourgian count (subsequently done in by wife number three), and had recouped her original wealth and more by her hardheaded management of the Gozzi interests in publishing, kitchenware, and sporting equipment. She was richer even than Ugo Scoccimarro and, like him, scorned the pretensions and niceties of refined social behavior. But whereas Ugo did it from motives of pride and stiff-necked insecurity, Clara did it without giving it a thought. In other ways, she was altogether unlike Ugo: imperious, supercilious, peremptory in her dealings with others.

But underneath this spiky exterior there was—well, I wouldn't go so far as to call it a heart of gold, but certainly a strongly developed philanthropy. Clara was one of those people who had no use and little patience for other human beings as individuals, but who gave handsomely to charitable causes. Knock on her door and ask for a handout to buy your first meal in three days and you were out of luck; write her a letter and ask for $10,000 dollars for an international feed-the-hungry plan and you'd probably get it.

Most people thought of her as an essentially misanthropic woman burdened with a grudging and high-handed sense of noblesse oblige. I saw her differently: as a physically ill- favored woman who'd been taken advantage of in an early marriage (she'd been seventeen) and had thereafter erected a thorny, unscalable facade to protect herself. After a while she'd probably come to enjoy playing the Tartar, and she was rich and influential enough to get away with it.

I liked her. Naturally. More or less. And I was pretty sure she liked me. The one usually goes along with the other. In my dealings with her I'd found her to be intelligent, forthright, and without artifice; she knew what she wanted, what she said was exactly what she meant, and her mind was unlikely to change. In the flighty, volatile art world, traits like those made up for a lot of personality flaws.

It was signora Gozzi, you may remember, who had lost several paintings to thieves the same night the Pinacoteca was 'woken into two years earlier. Six had been taken from her home, and one—the Rubens that had eventually wound up in Blusher's warehouse and was now on its way back to her—had been stolen from Max's workshop. I had been in touch with her on the telephone about the Rubens several times in the last ten days, but we had yet to discuss the specifics involved in her loan of four other paintings to the exhibition.

Often these specifics are the trickiest part of putting together a show. Understandably enough, lenders can get picky about the security and transportation of their treasures. Some insist that paintings be hand-carried in airplanes, rather than crated up and shipped as baggage. This usually means a separate trip for every piece, with two seats paid for each time; one for you and one for the painting. First class, of course; Titians and Holbeins don't travel economy class. Sometimes lenders demand extra insurance coverage. Sometimes they come up with finicky sets of demands that seem, to a curator at any rate, designed to make life difficult:
This
particular painting may be reproduced in the catalogue, but not on postcards;
that
particular painting may be shown in Cleveland and Chicago, but not in Baltimore. You just never know.

On the other hand, some lenders have little to tell you. From what I knew of Clara, I expected her to be one of these. Crusty, yes, but she wasn't a stickler. Or so I hoped.

My pressing of the buzzer wasA GLAINUIPIG- LIU111
      
Yid

 
answered by a tall, annoyed- looking woman in a severely tailored suit. She peered distractedly and with impatience at me, as if I'd interrupted some terribly pressing task. This was the third time in a year I had come to see Clara, and the same woman had responded each time in the same way. By now I was beginning to understand that this was her normal manner. It was, I supposed, what came of working too long for Clara.

"I'm Christopher Norgren," I said in Italian. "I have an appointment with signora Gozzi."

"You're too early," she told me brusquely, remaining in character. "Your appointment is in fifteen minutes. You'll have to wait."

Clara's querulous voice rang out. "Who is that? Christopher? You're early, damn it. Come in, come in!"

Under the stern eye of the maid, or secretary, or whatever she was, I headed for the doorway from which the gruff voice had come, walking down a long, unfurnished hallway hung like a museum gallery with rows of contemporary paintings on both walls: Kiefer, Dine, Diebenkorn, others I didn't know. I didn't like any of them. Clara's tastes were quite eclectic, more so than mine, and her collection was arranged chronologically, with the most recent on the ground floor, the earliest (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) at the top. The higher I climbed, the happier I usually was.

I entered an unfinished room that had probably once been the dining room, and was treated to a restrained version of the full Mediterranean greeting: bear hug, back-pats, even a kiss on, or at least in the vicinity of, each cheek. This was uncharacteristically exuberant for Clara. I understood that I was being thanked for my part in recovering the Rubens.

"This is Christopher Norgren," she announced in Italian to a shiny-faced man with pale, plastered-down hair and a dandy's pencil-line mustache. "A scholar of note in his field, but lamentably narrow."

Had Clara delivered her many such remarks with a smile or even the mordant lifting of an eyebrow—anything to suggest irony—she would have been regarded as a witty woman. But she never did. Her pouchy, homely face rarely changed its indifferent expression.

"
Sono molto lieto
—" the man began, but Clara interrupted him.

"His Italian stinks. If you hope to be understood, Filippo, use English."

"Okay, sure, but, you know, my English stinks." He said this in English with a grin, a small man of fifty in a polka- dot bow tie and a checked, wasp-waisted sport coat. His accent reminded me of Ugo's speech, so I assumed he was Sicilian, too. He held out a manicured hand with bulky rings on two fingers. "I am Filippo Croce. And
you
are Christopher Norgren?"

I was used to the mild wonder with which this was asked. The trouble is, you see, I don't look like any kind of a museum curator, let alone a curator of Renaissance and Baroque art. At thirty-four, I'm a little young for the job, but more than that I don't look scholarly or even particularly intelligent; I don't look patrician; I don't look ... well, consequential.
 
I'm of average build, average height, with an average brown mustache, and I look, so I've been told, like your average, easygoing, nice guy who works in computer store or maybe for the government. I mean, I look like a curator to
me
, but enough people have told me I don't so that I'm used to it by now.

"You two don't know each other?" Clara said, surprised. Her English was excellent, the slight accent not so much Italian as a sort of generic Continental, the result of having homes in four countries. "But no, of course you wouldn't. Filippo's been in Ferrara less than a year, haven't you, Filippo?"

"Five months," he said to me. "I was in the south before. I am a dealer in art." With a small flourish he produced an embossed card:

F. Croce

Galleria d'Arte Moderna 
Corso della Giovecca, 16 
Ferrara

"Christopher is the man who rescued Max Cabot the other night," Clara told him.

"I'm afraid I didn't do too good a job," I said.

Croce clucked sympathetically.

"It was Max's own fault, of course," Clara said crossly. "If he hadn't gone around shouting about going to the police, it wouldn't have happened at all. Stupid man." She hadn't been at the dinner the other night, but of course the story wouldn't have taken long to get to Ferrara.

"They smashed both his legs, you know," I said. "He won't ever walk normally again."

I suppose that what I had in mind was to stir up a little sympathy for poor Max, but it was wasted on Clara. "The man doesn't understand the meaning of discretion, of simple prudence, " she said, going along with Di Vecchio and Luca. "Careless, thoughtless. He runs off at the mouth." This was accompanied by an illustrative twirling of fingers at her own mouth. "What about the other one, Scoccimarro? Wasn't he with you, too? Was he hurt?"

"No, we were on our way back from seeing him off at the station when it happened."

"Ugo's a good sort. If you ask him something he gives you the answer. You can tell him I said so."

"I will. I'm flying to Sicily on Saturday."

"You can also tell him he likes his grappa too much."

There was an awkward silence broken by Croce's clearing of his throat. "Well, signora, perhaps I go now. I can return—"

"Filippo is trying to convince me I can't live without some more pictures," Clara said, gesturing at three huge paintings propped along the walls, mounted but unframed. "What do you think, Christopher?"

I looked at them. Each was about seven feet by six and consisted of pallid, empty backgrounds on which a few lurid streaks of purple, orange, and bloody red had been whacked on with a trowel–thick and garish. Two of them were done on pegboard, with the holes clearly showing and even some hooks and brackets attached. They seemed to be examples of Comic Abstractionism, which Penny Hauck, Seattle's curator of contemporary painting, had once explained to me, It was, she said, an ironic Abstract Expressionist movement dedicated to demonstrating the absurdity of the Abstract Expressionist movement in today's image-ridden world.