A Glancing Light

men, square jawed and intense. Their eyes roved nervously, looking for—what? Fellow terrorists trying to rescue me?

Another guard, a senior officer from the look of him, also moved grimly along with us. Five armed men, for God's sake, and all of them convincingly out of sorts. A bomb, I thought dazedly. Somebody's planted a bomb in my duffel bag.

'Che c'e?' I pleaded again. I tapped my chest. 'Sono americano! '

This had all the effect it deserved, which was none, except possibly to increase the tempo of the quick- marching. At such times one's life flashes before one's eyes. In my case it was the previous two hours, starting with the request from Mr. Marchetti that I leave early. Even at the time, it had struck me as unusual, and now all I could think about was how my bags had lain in the packed lobby for almost an hour, nominally under the supervision of the bell captain, but in reality available to anyone who chose to tinker with them. The duffel bag would have been especially easy prey. I'd lost the key to the tiny padlock years ago, and had never bothered to get another. I used the bag for underwear, socks, and shoes; nothing valuable.

I was brought to a jolting stop in front of a gray metal door that said PRIVATO on it, then made to wait while one of the guards unlocked it, and then shoved roughly inside. The older officer and the guards with the semiautomatics crowded into the bare little room with me. There was only a metal table in the center with a couple of battered chairs around it. These were not put into immediate use. Instead, I was jammed up against a wall and patted down again, this time more harshly.

'Il passaporto,' the officer said and stuck out his hand.

I handed it to him. He barely glanced at it before putting it in his pocket. He was a bulky man of about fifty, tense and breathing hard.

'Parla italiano?' he asked. His lips barely moved when he spoke. He was keeping a tight rein on his anger. With each breath his nostrils flared.

I nodded. I was feeling less flustered, more pointedly frightened. The room was very small and private, the guns very big, the men hard-bitten and tough-looking. I knew that one of the reasons the police forces of Italy had put together their admirable record against terrorists was that they did not always observe the same niceties of behavior toward accused or suspect persons as did, say, the police in America.

If you had asked me how I felt about that a few minutes earlier, when I was just another passenger at an airport in a city that had suffered more than its share of terrorist horrors, I would have told you I felt just fine about it; no problem. But now that I appeared to be a suspected terrorist myself, I seemed to have developed a finical concern for the civil rights of detainees, or prisoners, or whatever it was.

'I don't know what you found in that bag,' I began in Italian, 'but—'

Sit down, I was told.

I sat. One of the guards moved behind my chair, out of my sight. The other continued to watch me coldly from across the table. I could smell the oil from the guns.

'This morning,' I said, 'my bags were left in the lobby—'

Abruptly the senior officer took off his cap and slammed it on the table. I jumped.

'I want to know what activates that bomb,' he said tightly. 'I want to know how to dismantle it.'

So there actually was a bomb. In my old red duffel bag, traveling companion since my college days. I'd understood that, of course, yet I hadn't really believed it. I still didn't really believe it. A single, cold drop of sweat rolled down my side.

'I don't know anything about a bomb,' I said numbly. 'All I know—'

He leaned forward suddenly and twisted the collar of my jacket in his hand. 'You bastard, I've got two good men on that thing, you understand?' He was a squarish man with close-cropped gray hair that grew low on his forehead, and thick, curled ears. When he spoke, knobs of gristle shifted and crackled in his cheeks like lumps of tobacco. He gathered more material into his fist and twisted, hurting my neck, forcing my face closer to his. 'Do you have any idea what's going to happen to you if they get hurt?'

You will understand when I tell you that I felt very much alone at that moment, and scared, too. Big, angry, powerful men and brutal weapons seemed to fill the anonymous little room. I felt like a character in a Kafka story, intimidated and confused and acutely aware that the situation was not under my control. But I was offended, too, and that stiffened my spine. I stared steadily back at him, waiting for him to let go of my jacket.

When he did, I spoke. 'I don't know anything about a bomb,' I said as coolly as I could. 'My bag was left in the lobby of the Hotel Europa for an hour this morning. This was at the instruction of a Mr. Marchetti—or somebody who called himself Mr. Marchetti—the assistant manager.'

'You left it open?' Even the skepticism was an improvement. At least he was listening.

'Unlocked. There wasn't anything valuable in it. Look, I'm an art curator. I'm here working with the Pinacoteca and the Ministry of Fine Arts. The carabinieri will vouch for me. You can talk to Colonel Antuono.'

His heavy gray eyebrows unclenched themselves for the first time. 'You're working with Colonel Antuono?'

'Uh . . . well, yes, you could say that.'

It was delivered with less than perfect assurance. The heavy eyebrows drew ominously together again.

Antuono had given me his card, on which he'd penciled his Bologna telephone number. I took it out of my wallet and handed it to the officer. 'Go ahead and call him.'

There was a telephone on the wall. He went to it at once, but turned and leveled the card at me before picking up the receiver. 'If you're wasting our time, if one of my men is harmed . . .'

'Look, if I knew there was a bomb in that bag, do you think I'd calmly walk up, put it on the X-ray counter, and just hang around waiting to see what happened?'

He considered this for a moment, then picked up the telephone and spoke without dialing. 'Cristin, get me a Colonel Cesare Antuono, two-three-nine-two-eight-five. I'll take it in the west office.'

The receiver was slammed back into its holder. 'You wait here,' he told me, and headed for the door.

'I have a ten-fifteen plane,' I said, not very hopefully.

'Not today.' He turned to the guards. 'Stefano, you stay here. Be careful. Don't speak to him. Call me each ten minutes until I return. Maurizio, I want you outside. Both of you, be alert; we don't yet know what's happening.'

Stefano followed his instructions to the letter. He pushed one of the chairs against the far wall, about ten feet from me, and sat down to watch me relentlessly, holding the semi-automatic in his lap, one hand on the barrel, the other at the finger guard; a posture that did not encourage conversation. His eye never left me, even during the telephonic check-ins. There were four calls in all; forty slow, silent minutes, lots of time to think.

With more than enough to think about. Somebody wanted me dead. Enough to blow up a few hundred innocent people who happened to be on the same airplane. There were other possibilities, of course: that someone else on the plane was the target, or that this was a terrorist action not aimed at any individual, and that—in either case—the selection of my bag for the bomb was random, or if not quite random, then merely a matter of convenience and accessibility.

The second telephone call hadn't been made yet before I rejected this as not credible. If I were just a tourist, or on some other business, then maybe it might have happened that way. But I'd been asking a lot of questions about the thefts, I'd been seen with Antuono, and I'd already been involved in a murderous street assault—during which, as Max had pointed out, I'd seen the faces of our attackers. I'd even tried to identify them at the police station. With all of that going on, it was asking too much to treat the finding of a bomb in my bag as no more than an unhappy coincidence. There was no question in my mind that I was the target, and that it was related to the thefts.

Yet the idea of killing so many people just to get to me was so monstrous I couldn't make myself believe that either. What could I know that anyone found so dangerous? Max's idea that I could identify the two thugs didn't hold water; I'd already failed to do it once. Did someone think he'd told me the names of the five people who knew his security arrangements? Well, he hadn't, not that I hadn't asked, and even if he had, how was anyone to know I hadn't already been to Antuono with it? So what did I know? What did someone think I knew? Or was someone afraid of what I might find out? Well, like what, for instance? And if it wasn't something I knew or might find out, then what was it?