A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery) (23 page)

A few miles north of the city we finally pulled into a seaside neighborhood of handsome villas and small apartment buildings, and parked in an unpaved alley bordered on both sides by eight-foot stucco walls topped with broken glass.

"We'll leave the car here," Ugo said. "We're going out for dinner later. "

Half a dozen boys of nine or ten trotted up. Cigarettes dangled from several of the small mouths. Ugo gave one of the smokers, a hot-eyed kid wearing a torn Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt, a 1,000-lire note.

"Protection money," Mary told me. "They watch the car. The Mafiosi begin early here."

Ugo scowled at her. "Very funny," he muttered. "See, I'm laughing. I'm going inside to get the pictures ready for Cristoforo."

He unlocked a tall, spiked gate in one of the walls and stalked down a path through a sparsely planted rock garden toward the house, a modern, boxlike three-story structure painted pale blue.

"Oh-oh, now I've made him mad," Mary said with no sign of repentance. "I'll have to be good for the rest of the day." As usual, when Ugo wasn't there, she spoke English to me.

She closed the gate behind us and shook it to make sure it was locked. As we followed a few yards behind Ugo a startlingly large bulldog gallumphed out from behind a corner of the house and made fearsomely for her, spittle drooling from its dewlaps and lovelight shining in its eyes.

"Hello, Adamo, how are you, dog?" she said, tugging hard on both its ears and accepting with apparent enjoyment a slobbering show of affection. "Say hello to Christopher."

I gingerly patted the monstrous head and tried without success to avoid the frantic wet-mop of a tongue. "More protection?" I asked.

Ugo, who had paused a few feet ahead of us, made the connection to "protezione" and answered in Italian. "Yes," he allowed, "there's some theft around here."

"
Some
theft?" Mary echoed. "You have to nail everything down if you want to keep it." To me she said: "We've been lucky, but twice last year they robbed the neighbors across the way."

Ugo, never one to stay in a snit for very long, burst out laughing. "After the first one," he told me, "they got a watchdog, a big expensive Doberman. They thought that would take care of the problem. So what happened? Well, the next time the crooks came, along with everything else they stole the dog."

Adamo, who had calmed down enough to notice Ugo, waddled amiably over to him. Ugo knelt, grasped its flaccid chops, and fondly rocked the big head from side to side. "But nobody would steal you, would they? You're too ugly to steal, aren't you?" The dog grinned and wagged its stump of a tail.

Mary put one hand in the crook of Ugo's elbow and one in mine. "Come on, let's go in. Chris has had quite a day. I'm sure he'd like to relax and have a drink."

True enough, but I didn't get much time to relax. Their housekeeper had barely set down three glasses of a sweet, musky marsala, and Mary had just begun to ask polite questions about the show, when Ugo started fidgeting. He crossed his right leg over his left. He reversed them. He uncrossed them and tapped his toes restlessly against the tiled floor. He pulled up his shirt cuff to look with ostentatious anxiety at his watch. He sighed.

"Is something bothering you, love?" Mary asked. "You have an itch in an indiscreet place, perhaps? Would you like to be excused?"

"No, no. It's just the time. It's after four o'clock, and the light won't be good much longer. I want Cristoforo to see the paintings before it goes."

"Of course. I'd like that." Not that I thought for a minute that it had anything to do with the light. Ugo was like a big kid; he just couldn't wait any longer to show off his picture gallery. And I was happy to oblige; I'd rather look at old paintings than drink wine anyway. Especially when I know the wine will still be there when I come back. I put my glass down on a marble-topped sidetable. I'd been flattered to see that Ugo felt comfortable enough with me to serve the marsala in big, square tumblers instead of the stemmed wine glasses he found too dainty for his yeoman's hands.

Mary stood up. "I'll leave the two of you to it, then. Don't forget about the time up there, We have early dinner reservations: eight o'clock."

Ugo sprang out of his chair, grabbed the bottle by the neck, and tucked it under an arm. "Bring your glass," he told me. "We'll have a toast."

I complied. Looking at old paintings
while
drinking wine was even better.

I assumed we were going to spend a leisurely hour or two in his top-floor gallery, but instead he led me on a double-time tramp through it, allowing only hurried pauses in front of the four paintings he was lending us for the exhibit, and another stop before the Boursse he would be selling to the museum.

The little Boursse was as exquisite as I remembered it, a meticulously executed interior scene along the lines of his
Woman Cooking
in London's Wallace Collection. But this one was even more intimately domestic:
A Mother Ridding Her Child's Hair of Lice
—not a hugely appealing subject to today's art lover, but in seventeenth-century Holland a frequently used image of maternal love and a homely metaphor for good government. Sipping the fragrant wine, I looked at it lovingly no longer covetously), but I could hear Ugo behind me, shifting impatiently from foot to foot, could feel him psychologically yanking at me.

I turned away from the picture. "Ugo, are we in some kind of hurry?"

"No, no. Well, yes. Don't you want to see my surprise?"

 
"Surprise?"

His face fell. "You don't remember?"

I did, dimly. "In Bologna, at that bar. You said something about a surprise. . . ."

"Yes, come!" Now he was physically yanking me. "You can look at your Boursse some more later." We bypassed the elevator (too slow?) and started down the steps. "Do you remember," he said with a nervous laugh, "you once told me there was somebody missing from your show?"

"Uytewael," I replied.

More properly Wtewael, Joachim, made fractionally more accessible to the nonspeaker of Dutch by its alternate spelling. Uytewael was another painter of the Utrecht School, one of its leaders in his day, but little-known now. He was a legitimate part of Northerners in Italy, having spent two formative years in Padua when he was in his twenties. Originally, a single rare Uytewael had been included in the loan we were getting from the Pinacoteca, but the picture had proved too fragile to travel, so the show was without one. Or had been until now.

I stopped him on the stairs and stared at him. "You haven't gone out and bought an Uytewael, have you?"

He grinned again and tugged at me to move along.

I held him back. "You're going to lend it to the show? That's great, Ugo! But where—"

He put a fist on each hip. "Hey, Cristoforo, you want to talk about it, or you want to see it?"

Chapter 16

I wanted to see it. We took the lower flight of stairs in what seemed like two strides, and Ugo pulled me into a big ground-floor room that served as a workshop and storage area. There, in the center, clamped to an easel by wooden vises, it was: a small, unframed mythological scene,
Venus in the Forge of Vulcan
, a favorite subject in those days.

I began to move closer, but Ugo grabbed me by the arm again. "Wait. Look at her eyes." He led me, not to the easel, but from left to right in front of it. "You see?" he whispered reverently. "Wherever you move, the eyes follow you."

"Ah," I said, "so they do."

So they did. So do the eyes of the
Mona Lisa
(as any self- respecting Louvre guard will tell you if you let him), of the Rembrandt self-portraits, of Hals's
Jolly Toper
—and of ten thousand other pictures in the galleries of the world— including several others in Ugo's collection. So, for that matter, do the eye-dots on a six-year-old's Happy Face drawing. The fact is, any two-dimensional rendering of a three- dimensional face looking directly out of a picture will appear to be looking at you wherever you stand, if you take the trouble to notice. It is an artifact of human perception.

But of course I wasn't about to tell Ugo and spoil his pleasure in it. I was filled with gratitude. Ugo's generous gesture was going to eliminate a significant gap in the show. I moved slowly closer, looking at the picture of the near-nude figures: two bearded men, Venus, Cupid. It was painted on a panel, like Blusher's van Eyck-
cum
-Terbrugghen, only on this one the crackling ran the way it was supposed to. With time, an irregular groove had appeared down the center, marking the separation between the two planks beneath, and some of the glue used in joining them had leached to the surface, staining the figure at the anvil.

I walked around it to look at the back. The panel was from the Utrecht St. Luke's Guild, I thought, which was as it should have been. Besides the guild logo there were a couple of brands on it; one I recognized as an old quality-control mark, the other I thought was the stamp of the panel maker. A few strips of linen, brown and cracked with age, had been glued into the joint for support. I shifted to examine it from the sides.

And I began to feel a faint, intuitive stirring of doubt. Was there something not quite right here? Or was I getting paranoid? Was I going to be seeing forgeries every time I turned around now?

Ugo was busy pouring wine at a worktable. He came to my side with two tumblers. "You're surprised, yes?" he burbled. "You like it? It's not such a terrible painting, is it?"

"Mm, " I said. Abstractedly I took the glass he offered. What was holding my attention was not the painted surface, or even the back, but the very edges of the panel. You don't often get to see panel edges. They're usually glued solidly into sturdy frames, not just for appearance but for bracing. But this one was unframed, and the edges were coated with what looked like a compound of tangled yarn embedded in tar. This in itself was not extraordinary. In those days masses of plant fibers were sometimes glued to the hidden joints of a panel for additional stability. However, I couldn't recall seeing them cover the entire perimeter the way they did in this case.

My silence was getting to Ugo. "Cristoforo, what's the matter? You don't like it?"

"I don't like this," I said, fingering the edging.

"I'll have it taken off," he said anxiously. "Right away, don't worry."

"No, I mean I don't like the way it feels." I pressed a finger gently into it.

Ugo did the same. "How should it feel?"

"After four hundred years? Brittle, dry. It shouldn't still give this way. When did you say you got this?"

"In January, why? What's wrong?"

"January," I repeated. "Four months ago. Ugo, I could be wrong, but I don't think this stuff can be any older than that. Maybe newer."

His lips jerked. He didn't quite see where I was heading, but he didn't care for the general direction. "What do I care about this . . . this substance? What does it matter?"

I explained. What I was worried about was a waggish little caper that went back at least three hundred years. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the city council of Nuremberg had given permission to a painter to take down and copy Dürer's great self-portrait, which hung in the town hall. To make sure he didn't do something dastardly, such as swiping the original and substituting his own copy for it, they marked the back of the panel with various seals and hard-to-copy brands. Whereupon this resourceful crook carefully sawed off the front panel with Dürer's painting on it. He then used the thinned boards as the base for his copy, which was dutifully returned to the council complete with certified seals and markings still on the back, and made off with the famous original. (Not to worry; as often happens, it eventually found its way back into public hands and is now the showpiece of Munich's Pinakothek.)

Ugo took my undrunk wine back. He put both tumblers on the worktable with the bottle, returned, and looked soberly at the little painting.

"You think someone sawed off the front of my picture," he said slowly, "and painted a copy of it on another piece of wood, and then glued the copy on the panel? And then they stole the real picture and covered up what they did by putting on this black stuff?"

That was what I was thinking, all right. It wasn't only the freshness of the black adhesive, it was the painting itself that was worrying me. It wasn't an obvious forgery, like Blusher's fake van Eyck, but there were things about it that made me wonder: the washed-out colors, the flatness of the forms, a lack of the elaborate detailing that usually characterized Uytewael. True, I hadn't seen much of his work, and what I'd seen had varied in quality from picture to picture, so maybe I was imagining things. Besides I was by no means expert in this obscure Dutch Mannerist's work. But taken all together, I was uneasy, and I was truthful about it with Ugo.

"But, Cristoforo, look how
old
it is," he said. "See the cracks, see how it's stained, see the patches? Look how it was fixed up—here, and here, and here—a long time ago."

"Yes, I see." The trouble was, I told him, those were just the sort of "imperfections" a knowledgeable forger would supply. "Where did you get this, Ugo?"

"From Christie's, in London. Clara was there for an auction, and she called me to say it would be offered. She knew," he added proudly, "that I am a collector of the Utrecht School."

"Clara?" I said. "Clara Gozzi?"

"Sure, Clara Gozzi. She said it was going to go for a low price, a bargain. She wanted to know, did I want her to act as my agent."

"And you told her to?"

"I said yes, all right, up to £100,000."

"And what did you wind up paying?"

"I got it for £93,000."

About $150,000. A bargain, all right—if it was really an Uytewael.

"Where did it come from? What's its provenance?"

"What the hell do I care where it came from?" He grabbed me roughly by the shoulder and swung me around to face him. "What are you saying, they stuck me with a fake? That's impossible!"