A Glancing Light

'Oh, Antuono, sure. Are you going to tell me what that tone of voice is supposed to mean?'

'Come on, Tony, the guy didn't have any use for me. The further I stay away from him the happier he is. That business about meeting with him to report 'pertinent' information— you set that up.'

'Me? What for?'

'To get the museum some good press, I suppose. You contacted the FBI to offer my services, and the FBI contacted him, so he went along with it. But he didn't want to.'

'Chris—'

'Tony, he told me.'

'I don't give a damn what he told you. I'm telling you this FBI guy called me—I can't think of his name—Mr. . . . I can't remember. Out of the blue. Watfield, it was. Then he came over to my office. No, Sheffield. He told me he'd just gotten a call from New York, I mean from D.C., that this Colonel Antuono in Rome was looking for all the help he could get—that is, he was going to be assigned to a case in Bologna, and seeing as how we were involved in the art scene there—in Bologna, I mean . .'

Now Tony, as I mentioned earlier, has been known to deviate from the unadorned facts in the interest of the greater good, but I thought I knew him well enough to sense from his voice when I was being led astray, even over the telephone. When Tony lied, he was straightforward and fluent; it was when he was telling the truth that he tended to trip over his tongue and sound shifty. Which meant, unless he was being even more devious than I gave him credit for, that this was probably the truth. Which meant that Antuono had lied about it; he had asked the FBI for my help, then told me that he hadn't.

Which made no sense at all, whichever way I came at it.

 '. . . is all I know about it,' Tony finished up defensively.

 'I guess it was just a misunderstanding,' I said.

'Of course. We're dealing with two different languages here. You didn't think,' he said, sounding hurt, 'that I'd purposely mislead you, do you?'

That was another question, best left alone. 'Tony, what am I calling you about?'

'Well, I've had some news from Seattle I thought you might be interested in. You know that painting of Mike Blusher's—'

'Calvin told me. Blusher donated the reward to the museum.'

'Not that one, the other one. The van Eyck. It—'

'The fake van Eyck,' I said.

'Well, the thing is, it isn't a fake, not exactly. It—'

'What? Of course it's a fake! The techniques are eighteenth-century at the earliest, to say nothing of the craquelure, which is—'

'Will you let me say something, for Christ's sake? The van Eyck painting is a fake, yes. But Blusher took your advice and took it into the university to have it examined, and the panel that it's painted over turns out not to be a fake. Eleanor Freeman—'

'Of course the panel's not a fake! It's early seventeenth- century, manufactured for the Guild of St. Luke in Utrecht. I told Blusher it was real. I told you it was real—'

'You told me it was real,' supplied Calvin, who was listening to my side of the conversation from his chair.

'I told Calvin it was real. Everybody agrees it's real. The International Herald Tribune says it's real—'

'Time says it's real,' Calvin supplied.

'Time says it's real—' I said, then stopped. I hadn't heard anything from Tony for a while. Now there was a long, full sigh, deeply indrawn, slowly let out. An expensive one, considering that it was delivered from Tokyo to Bologna.

'Are you actually going to let me say something now?' he asked. 'Like maybe two complete sentences?'

'I'm sorry, Tony, go ahead.'

'In a row?'

I laughed. 'What did Eleanor come up with?'

'Chris, the X rays show a painting under the van Eyck.'

And not just any painting, either. Eleanor Freeman, the university radiographer-art historian whose specialty was Old Master fluoroscopic analysis, had concluded that the painting beneath the forged van Eyck 'appeared in all probability' to be Hendrik Terbrugghen, an important seventeenth?century Dutch painter and a member of the Utrecht Guild from 1616 until he died in 1629.

'I don't believe it,' I said flatly.

'Why not?'

'Because it's all too weird, that's why. Every time I turn around there's another update on the story that's more bizarre than the one before. I don't know what kind of scam Blusher is pulling, but there's something.'

'Chris, he just pledged the museum $150,000,' Tony said reproachfully.

'Well, I'd spend it pretty fast if I were you.'

'I'm working on it. Look, it's weird, all right, but it's true all the same. Neuhaus and Boden agree with her.'

I relented slightly. 'What's it look like?'

'Half-length portrait of a young man playing a lute, seen three-quarters from behind; very Caravaggist. You know the type; Terbrugghen's done a bunch of them. This one's monogrammed and dated 1621. I haven't seen the X rays yet myself, but Eleanor tells me even the brush strokes and the construction are right. She says if it's not by Terbrugghen it's by the world's greatest Terbrugghen scholar.'

No, I thought stubbornly, not necessarily the greatest, just a Terbrugghen scholar. Eleanor knew the Old Masters' methods; so did a lot of other people, including forgers. You can check books on the subject out of the library.

'Any craquelure?'

'Yeah, and this time it runs the right way. And of course, as you pointed out, the thing is done on a Utrecht guild panel, complete with logo, from the first third of the seventeenth century—which isn't exactly easy to lay your hands on. So if what you're thinking is that it's a forgery, I don't see it.'

I relented some more. 'It sounds authentic,' I allowed, 'but I still—'

'Chris, listen. Would someone paint a first-class forgery, then cover it up with another one so nobody could see it? That's crazy. Look, tell me, just what is it you think the guy's pulling?'

'I don't know. How much reward money's involved?'

'None, as far as anybody knows. There aren't any missing Terbrugghens in the Interpol list or the carabinieri bulletin. It may never have been stolen. For all anybody knows, somebody painted over it a hundred years ago because he didn't know it was worth anything.'

I still wasn't satisfied. 'Tony, have they done any physical tests for age, any pigment analysis, any—'

'No, apparently Blusher jumped three feet off the ground when he heard the X-ray results, and he didn't want anyone fooling with it anymore. He had a truck there for it inside of an hour. I hear it's in a bank vault now.'

'So what's going to happen to it?'

'Who knows? It's up to him.'

'You mean he gets to keep it?'

'I don't see why not. Who else has a claim? The shippers say they don't know how it got into the shipment or where it came from, and nobody knows who owned it.'

^“What about the Italian government? There's a law about taking art out of Italy.'

'Wrong, there's a law about taking genuine art out of Italy. You can take out all the fakes you want to. Blusher's saying that when it left Italy it was a forged van Eyck, not a genuine Terbrugghen, so Italy has no claim. Personally, I think he's right, and from what I hear so far, they're not going to contest it.

'There you are, Tony,' I said excitedly, 'that's the scam! It's genuine, all right, and he had it painted over to get it out of Italy. Then, once it's here he sets up this elaborate routine that winds up with the supposedly amazing discovery that there's a valuable work of art underneath—and he gets to keep it. '

'Oh, sure, nice and simple. All it leaves is one or two inconsequential little questions.'