A Glancing Light

terminology. Not that I'd tell that to Di Vecchio, of course. Anyway, a Botticelli was a Botticelli. One didn't take its theft lightly.

Most of the pictures had been taken from the second-floor room in which I was now standing, and the one next to it. These rooms were different from most of the others in that they had no windows, only skylights. Assuming the thieves had used a rope ladder, the skylights would have made it easy to enter and leave the gallery without being observed, and the absence of windows would have given them privacy while they worked. The question was, how had they gotten in, and gotten the pictures off the walls, without tripping the alarms? Surely their security system hadn't just happened to be off, like Clara's. And where had the night guards been? It was something I'd never asked Di Vecchio about before; but then I'd never been put into the hospital in connection with it, either.

From the corner of my eye I saw a guard watching me steadily. I thought it best to stop studying the skylight and instead focused on the wall in front of me, on which hung a large wooden altarpiece, a Christ Enthroned by the thirteenth?century Florentine master Cimabue. Cimabue is one of those artists I know I should like, I really should. Very important historically. A splendid craftsman, the teacher of Giotto (maybe), the man who bridged the gap between the art of antiquity and the new humanistic world view, etc., etc. But I just don't like him; he gives me the creeps.

Tony Whitehead has pointed out that this is hardly an apt sentiment from a curator of a major art museum, and that the least I could do would be to come up with a more felicitous way to put it. So I suppose I ought to rattle on about the frozen Byzantine angularity of Cimabue, or the grim, Gothic starkness. But the long and short of it is that Cimabue gives me the creeps. Sue me.

Not that I didn't stay there studying the altarpiece under the eye of the guard. I seem to spend a lot of time studying paintings I don't like under the eyes of museum guards. The problem is, I always feel rotten just striding through a gallery, however wretched, in which some poor guard spends most of his working life. As a result, I usually feel compelled to demonstrate some appreciation, even if it's pretense. Just one more sign of insecurity resulting from my infantile anaclitic redefinition of love objects, I suppose.

When I'd stood there long enough to make him feel better (all right, Louis, to make me feel better), I walked back to the elevator landing and went through the frosted-glass double doors that led to the administrative wing. Di Vecchio was in his office, severe and upright behind his steel desk in the armless, no-nonsense secretary's chair he favored. He glanced up from a letter he was reading and waved me into a rigid, molded-plastic chair, also armless. Three years ago, when the amiable, elderly Dr. Sorge Begontina had still been director, this office had been a homely, clubby place reeking of cigar smoke and stocked with ratty, comfortable furniture: a battered wooden desk with a row of cubbyholes at the back, threadbare Persian carpet, even a couple of sagging, horsehair-stuffed armchairs that were probably older than Begontina.

But with the coming of Amedeo Di Vecchio, the horsehair had gone, as had the cigar smoke and the friendly clutter of Etruscan pottery shards and odd bits of Roman sculpture— a marble forefinger, half a sandaled foot, a fold of toga—that had weighted down open books or piles of paper, or simply sat there. Now the lines were clean and the furniture steel and plastic in simple primary colors. No more arms on the chairs. The only art on the walls was a set of engravings of the Greek ruins at Paestum. Beyond those frosted glass doors Di Vecchio might live in a Renaissance world of vibrant, subtle colors and bursting forms, but when it came to decorating his personal workspace, his own austere socialist's taste came to the fore.

I settled myself into the hard chair as comfortably as I could while he signed the letter and placed it on a tray. He adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses on the bump at the top of his nose and sat more erectly in his own comfortless chair. With his fringe of a beard, his gaunt limbs, and his glittery eyes he looked like something from a Byzantine mosaic himself.

'Good afternoon, Christopher.'

'Amedeo, do you happen to like Cimabue?'

He blinked. 'Of course. I find him deeply moving. Cimabue is superb, without peer; the greatest of all the Duecento masters. Why do you smile?'

'Was I smiling?'

'You are smiling.' But he didn't pursue it. Di Vecchio, I knew, considered me insufficiently serious-minded; not as bad as Max, but not adequately professional, either. He raised a finger to touch his cheek in the same spot where my most visible bruise was. 'You're all right now?'

'I'm fine. I can't say the same for Max.'

'I know,' he said grimly. 'I went to see him yesterday. Why wouldn't he listen to me? Why wouldn't he listen to Dr. Luca?'

'He's listening now. He won't talk to Antuono.'

He glanced sharply at me. 'I didn't tell him not to talk to Antuono. I told him not to shout to everyone in Bologna that he was going to do it. I want him to talk to Antuono if he knows something. You think I don't want those pictures back?'

I said something soothing. Di Vecchio scratched irritably at the grizzled edge of his red beard and grumbled. 'Well,' I said, 'let's get down to business.'

My business with Di Vecchio was the same as it had been with Clara Gozzi: going over the particulars arising from the loan of paintings to Northerners in Italy. This took a lot longer to get through with Di Vecchio than it had with Clara. Partly this was because the Pinacoteca was lending us twenty- four pictures, compared to Clara's four, but mostly it was because Clara was an easygoing sort who was happy to trust the details to others, while Di Vecchio was a fussy stickler who—well, Di Vecchio was Di Vecchio. It took us two hours, most of which was spent trying to answer his finicky questions on insurance; specifically, on the federal special indemnification grant we'd gotten over and above the usual National Endowment of the Arts funding. Like Clara, I'm not too detail-oriented, and it was rough going.

'Very good,' Di Vecchio said, terminating the exacting discussion at last.  Folders and finders were shoved into a desk drawer, and he leaned back—that is to say, he sat up straighter—in his unyielding chair. 'I understand you were at Salvatorelli this morning when the Eagle of Lombardy swooped down on his prey. Is it true you rode back to Bologna with the great man?'

I wasn't surprised to learn he already knew about it. The art world grapevine is amazing, practically instantaneous. 'It's true,' I said. 'We had a chat.'

'And is he getting anywhere, our Eagle?'

'Well, as I understand it, the Morandi and the Carra —'

He jerked impatiently. 'I'm not talking about the Morandi and the Carra. He hasn't been sent to Bologna to recover Morandis and Carras.'

'He thinks there may be a connection, though, or at least that one could develop. He thinks Filippo Croce set this up as a sort of advertisement to the people who have the paintings.'

'It could be. What is he doing about this?'

'I don't know. I suppose he's keeping an eye on Croce to see what develops.'

He made a hissing sound. 'To see what develops,' he repeated disdainfully. 'Forgive me, but I don't feel cheered. Christopher, they've already had those paintings for almost two years. Who knows what's happened to them by now? For all we know, by now they've been—'

Don't say it, I thought.

'—carved up and recombined. Would we even know them?'

Carved up and recombined. Words to strike dismay into the heart of the most steel-nerved of curators. Di Vecchio was referring to the barbaric, increasingly common practice of mutilating art to make it more saleable and less recognizable at the same time. A skillful and corrupt restorer, for example, might take a five-by-seven-foot late-Renaissance mythological painting, too big for today's rooms, and chop it into fragments, creating three or four smaller pictures, and usually throwing away—throwing away!—twenty to forty percent of the original canvas as unusable.

Or a beautiful old French cabinet might have the maindron—the proud stamp of its maker—removed, and the rich old finish stripped and redone. Or the signature of a famous sixteenth-century painter might be changed to that of a lesser- known one. Or the painting itself might be altered in any of a thousand ways.

At first glance, these alterations don't seem to make much sense. Don't they drastically reduce the value of