A Glancing Light

'What are you talking about?' he shouted. 'How could anything be funny? The people at the museum, they checked it over.'

'What museum?'

He snorted and waved his arms at the walls. 'What museum, what museum—the Pinacoteca, what else? Di Vecchio examined it himself.'

He quieted down enough to explain that the purchase had been conditional on Ugo's having the painting examined by experts of his own choosing. He had left it with the Pinacoteca for a few days, and Di Vecchio and his staff had concluded that there was no basis on which to dispute the painting's authenticity. There was a high probability that it was a genuine Uytewael, but if so it was an inferior one; perhaps unfinished, maybe a study, probably just an unsuccessful effort that had been discarded but not destroyed.

Di Vecchio had told him to forget his plans of offering it to Northerners in Italy; it was simply not exhibition- quality.

'So I did,' Ugo said. 'But then, when you said you would come here to Sicily anyway, I figured, Amedeo doesn't know everything; why shouldn't I let you decide for yourself?'

'No reason at all. But didn't he say anything about this black stuff?'

'Nothing.'

I hunched my shoulders. 'Well, forget what I've been telling you. All I can say is, it would never have gotten by Amedeo. He'd have noticed it, and looked into it, and he must have been satisfied with the answers he got. Maybe it was restored just before it was auctioned, maybe—'

'Notice? How could he notice? With the frame on it you couldn't see the edges.'

'It had a frame when it was auctioned?'

'Sure. Over there.' He pointed to the disassembled parts of a simple old frame on a worktable a few feet away. 'Why did you take it off?'

'Me, I didn't take it off. Vittore took it off.'

Vittore Pinto, Ugo explained, was his Catanian restorer, and it had come off because one of the panel's long- ago owners had apparently seen fit to preserve the deteriorating wood of the frame by bathing it in olive oil. It had worked fine for the frame, but over the years a greasy film had spread onto the margins of the painting.

Ugo halted. 'Wait, doesn't that prove it's old? Vittore said it would take years and years for such a film to form. Doesn't that prove it's real?'

Unfortunately, I told him, it proved nothing. It was just another touch a clever forger would throw in.

'You're just like these damn psychiatrists!' he exploded. 'Everything proves what you say. You hate your mother too much? Sure, that proves you wanted to have sex with her when you were a little kid. You love your mother too much? Sure, that proves you wanted to have sex with her when you were a little kid.'

I laughed, glad to have him making jokes again, and leaned over to look at the picture. 'I don't see any film now.'

Pinto had removed it, according to Ugo, and had touched up the rest of the painted surface as well. The frame had undergone an oil-evaporation process, had been coated with sealant, and was now drying. On Monday the restorer would come back and refit it to the panel.

'Ugo, maybe I've been making us crazy over nothing,' I said hopefully. 'Could Pinto have touched up this black edging, too?'

'No, I don't think so. Vittore's good at his job, but he makes sure to charge plenty. There's nothing on his statement about this, so take my word for it, he didn't do it.'

Unless he did it without telling Ugo. The copyist that forged the Durer hadn't charged the council for alterations, either. But this seemed too unlikely to pursue. If Pinto had sliced off the face of the original Uytewael and made off with it, he would hardly have left the evidence of his tinkering sitting around Ugo's workshop for a week.

Besides, who in his right mind would go to all that risk and trouble to make off with a Joachim Uytewael, for God's sake? What kind of market was there for Uytewaels? Even in Ugo's relatively modest collection there were paintings worth nine or ten times as much. Was I inventing all this?

Tentatively, I fingered the tarry black border again. No, I wasn't inventing anything. Something wasn't right here. Maybe there was a simple and legitimate explanation, but something wasn't right.

'Ugo, tell me: Does it look exactly the same as when you first saw it? I mean exactly.'

He studied it, lips pursed. 'Yes. A little nicer since Vittore cleaned it.'

'You're absolutely sure it's the same painting Clara brought back from London?'

'Ten minutes ago I was sure,' he grumbled. 'Now, with all these questions, who knows?' He chewed on a plump underlip. 'You're starting to worry me, damn it. The fact is, Cristoforo, I didn't see it when she brought it back. I was in the middle of moving back here from Milan. I had no time for it. Clara took it straight to the museum. The first time I saw it was when it got here a week, two weeks, later.' He grabbed up his tumbler and gulped down the rest of his wine. 'But so what? What are you saying?'

'I don't know. How did it get here from the museum?'

 'It came with the rest of my paintings. Max arranged with the shipping company there, I forget their name —'

I looked at him. 'Salvatorelli?'

'No, not them. From Milan. Albertazzi.'

Another theory bit the dust. Albertazzi Figlio were also well-known transporters of fine art. But unlike the Salvatorellis, they were incontestably upright; not a shred of rumor about underworld connections attached to them.

'The Pinacoteca's in Bologna, Albertazzi's in Milan,' I said. 'How did it get from Bologna to Milan^? Or did the movers just pick it up at the museum on their way south?'

'How do I know? Can I take care of every detail? Can't I trust the Pinacoteca?'

He banged down his glass, threw up his hands and stumped angrily around the little room, lapsing into a muttered dialect I couldn't understand.

Two circuits calmed him. He stopped, facing me. 'Cristoforo,' he said quietly, 'let me get this straight. You're worried that if we could see under that black stuff, we'd see two pieces of wood, two layers of wood.'

'Right.'

'But if you're wrong, there'd be one solid piece, the way there's supposed to be.'

'True.'

He smacked his hands together. 'Fine! So then let's see. What are we standing here talking for?'

He went quickly to the workbench, rummaged for a moment, and came back, freshly energized, with a wood chisel in his hand. Ugo was first and foremost a man of action.

'Wait!' I jumped between him and the picture. Chisels being addressed to seventeenth-century paintings tended to turn curators into men of action, too. 'What are you going to do?'

He blinked at me. 'I'm going to scrape it off and see what's underneath. Why not?'

'For one thing, you just paid millions of lire for this. Hundreds of millions.'

'So? It's mine, isn't it? Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt the picture. Just this crap on the edges.'

We were dancing absurdly around, Ugo trying to bull his way past me, me holding him off.

'Ugo, I just think the painting might be a forgery. You can't just chip away at it when you feel like it. Besides, it isn't yours.'

He stopped shoving and peered skeptically up at me. 'Who says, not mine?'

'Not yours to do anything you want with, It's yours as an article of public trust. You're its custodian, its guardian, not its owner. You're the one who's responsible for preserving it for posterity—not scraping away at it with a chisel to see what's underneath.'

Okay, it was a little windy, but this kind of thing has a better ring to it in Italian. And being exactly what I really believe, it was delivered with sincerity. In any case, the appeal to Ugo's better instincts did the trick.

'Cristoforo, you're right,' he said, lifting his jowls a little, as befitted a guardian of the public trust. He put down the chisel. 'So what do we do?'

I'd been giving this some thought. 'The top person I know on early sixteenth-century Flemish painting is Willem van de Graaf at the Mauritshuis.'