A Glancing Light

He shrugged.

'Will he be able to walk?'

Dr. Tolomeo looked uncomfortable. 'You must understand that a long, somewhat painful course of therapy will be required. More operations may be necessary.' He sighed. 'He will never walk as he did before.'

Depressed, utterly washed out, I took a taxi from the hospital to the Hotel Europa and followed Dr. Tolomeo's advice; I slept away the rest of the day, waking up every few hours to grope for the bottle of pain capsules. At about 10:00 P.M. I dragged myself out for a bowl of soup and a plate of spaghetti and clam sauce at the first trattoria I came to, then went back to my room, fell onto the bed again, and slept through until eight the next morning.

When I awakened I could tell the worst was over. My body had composed itself. The lingering aches that Dr. Tolomeo had promised were there, all right, but I was more stiff than hurting, as long as I didn't do anything silly such as stamping my foot on the floor or clamping my teeth together. It wasn't bad enough to endure the spaciness that went along with the painkillers, so I threw the bottle away, relying on aspirin instead. I showered for the first time since Monday, the day before yesterday, finding some bruises and contusions I hadn't realized were there, then called the hospital to see if I could talk to Max.

I couldn't. He had spent a restless night, I was told, and he was asleep. Try again in the afternoon.

Half an hour later, over caffe latte, rolls, and jam in the hotel breakfast room, I was trying to concentrate on my exhibition notes, but thinking about Max instead—worrying about him and also nursing a highly unaccustomed feeling: the desire for vengeance on his behalf. On mine, too, for that matter. The obvious connection between Max's announcement that he was about to tell the police everything he knew, and the attack on him just a few hours later, had not escaped me.

It had not escaped the two policemen who had interviewed me, either, and we had spent substantial time reconstructing the scene. Amedeo Di Vecchio and Benedetto Luca, who'd been Max's and my tablemates, had to be formally considered as suspects, unlikely as it seemed on the face of it. Beyond that, who could say? There had been about fifty people in the room and, given Max's pickled state and robust voice, none of them had been out of earshot. I had suggested that the policemen get a guest list from Di Vecchio, and they had said they would.

Thinking hard, I broke open the second crisp breakfast roll. Was there anything I was forgetting, anything I'd neglected to tell them, anything that might help find Max's attackers? I had described the thugs, told them their names, described the car as well as I could, which was pitifully— 'small, purple or red, or dark anyway, no hood ornament.' (According to Dr. Tolomeo, it was the absence of a hood ornament that had saved me from those nasty perforations.) What was I forgetting—?

I sat up with a start, almost spilling my coffee. What I was forgetting was my appointment with Colonel Antuono. Yesterday's dreamy haze had constituted a sort of nonday, and I'd forgotten this was Wednesday. I was due in less than an hour. I gulped down the rest of the coffee, went upstairs to grab a jacket, and ran—or as near to it as I could, given the state of my joints—off to my meeting with Cesare Antuono.

If the Eagle of Lombardy couldn't help, who could?

Even at my creaky, halting pace, it was only a five-minute walk. According to the instructions Tony had passed on to me, Antuono's office was in the Palazzo d'Accursio, which served as the city hall and was one of the old buildings bordering the Piazza Maggiore in the heart of town.

The attendant at the great main door, under a benevolent bronze statue of Pope Gregory XIII, had never heard of Colonel Antuono, so I went up the main staircase, an imposing sweep of red-carpeted stone steps, on my own. It was slow going for a man in my condition, not just because it rose three flights at a single sweep, but because the extremely shallow steps were slanted backward. This was an amenity of Italian fifteenth-century public architecture that permitted the gentry to mount to the upper floors without troubling to get off their horses. But what suited noble status and equine anatomy wasn't so easy for human ligaments that had taken a rude beating a couple of days before.

On the upper floor were most of the city bureaus, but the people there shook their heads when I asked about Antuono's office. Not up there; that was all they could say. Back down I went, stiff and grumbling, feeling a hundred years old, and grateful that there was a railing to hang on to. Maybe I'd been a little overhasty in tossing those pain pills after all.

   The grimly handsome Palazzo d'Accursio is not only huge, but confusing. Like many medieval buildings it was built slowly, over several hundred years, and when that happened, plans tended to get lost, ideas to change, styles to evolve. The result, as in this case, could be an unpredictable hodgepodge. I wandered around until I finally found the office I was looking for, in a bleak little courtyard jammed with haphazardly parked cars. In a low annex, beside a plain door set into a colorless, much-patched stucco wall, was an unprepossessing sign:

CORPO VIGILI URBANI

SETTORE CENTRALE

COMMUNE DI BOLOGNA

A question occurred to me, not for the first time. Unless I had it wrong, the vigili urbani were little more than traffic police, but Antuono was with the prestigious carabinieri, the national police force, something like our FBI. Not just your everyday carabinieri either, but the elite art-theft unit, the Comando Tutela Patrimonio Artistico. And according to Max and the others, he was a figure of importance within it. Why would he be housed in this dismal place? Carabinieri headquarters were several blocks away on the Via del Piombo, in an imposing building befitting its status.

When I opened the dusty, glass-paned door, I found myself in a small room with a worn, linoleum-topped counter. Behind the counter a uniformed clerk was sitting in a wheeled wooden chair, with a wire basket full of envelopes in his lap. He was slowly—very slowly—inserting them into the wooden pigeonholes that ran the length of one wall, wetting his finger with his tongue every time he picked one up.

I waited. I cleared my throat. He continued to insert envelopes.

'Prego,' I said finally, 'dove si trove l'uffizio del signor Colonnello Antuono?'

Without turning around to look at me, he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. I went down a short corridor crowded with gray file cabinets and stacked cardboard cartons lining both walls, but I must have read the thumb- jerk wrong, because no offices opened out of it. There was, however, a small table wedged between a couple of the cabinets, at which another clerk, this one in civilian clothes, fussed over the hopeless task of filing the dog-eared contents of a tableful of bruised and sagging cardboard cartons.

'Prego, signore,' I said, hoping for better luck this time. 'Dove si trove l'uffizio del signor Colonnello Antuono?'

At least this one looked at me. He paused reluctantly (leaving his finger inserted in a folder for ease of later reference) and examined me with impassive gray eyes. He seemed surprised to have been addressed, and maybe a little annoyed; I wondered when the last time was anyone had spoken to him. Stooped, balding, narrow-shouldered, with old- fashioned green plastic cuffs protecting the sleeves of his white shirt, he might have lived his whole life alone in this windowless dungeon of a corridor, the quintessential clerk, filing and refiling his curling papers. And probably prefering it that way.

'Colonnello Antuono?' he repeated sourly. Yes, he was annoyed, all right. He jabbed a forefinger—the one that wasn't occupied in the files—against his thin chest.

'Io sono Colonnello Antuono.'

Chapter 6