A Glancing Light

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.'

'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 caffe 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