A Glancing Light

'At the what?'

'It's a museum in The Hague. I'd like him to see this.'

 'Sure, tell him to come down.'

'No, I mean I'd like to take it there. That's where his laboratory is. I could fly up there with it on Monday morning. If it's genuine, I'll take it gladly, and I can have the Mauritshuis ship it on to Seattle for the show. If it isn't— well, I'll call you, and we can figure out what to do from there.'

'But what about the frame? I wouldn't like to see it in the show without a frame.'

'I'll take it along with me. One of their conservators will be glad to mount it.'

He hesitated only briefly. 'All right, sure.'

'Good—hold it, what am I thinking of? This won't work. You'd have to get a rider on your insurance.'

'Don't worry. I'll take care of it tomorrow.'

'In one day? On a Sunday?'

'Sure, why not?'

I shook my head. 'Well, maybe you can, but you're not going to take care of getting customs approval in one day. No, we'd better—'

'I'll take care of it,' he said.

I smiled. 'Obviously, you've never had to deal with the Italian government on—'

'I told you, don't worry. I'll take care of it, you'll see.' He puffed out his plump chest. 'Me, I'm on very good terms with the officials here. They'll do anything for me.'

Chapter 17

La Vecchia Cucina was a homey, rustic place—floors and beamed ceiling of dark wood, walls of rough, whitewashed stucco, a stone fireplace—given a touch of elegance by black-tied waiters and thick white linen. Ugo, ever sensitive to social nuances, basked in being fawningly received as a man of importance, and grandly introduced me to Fabrizio, the proprietor, as a great art scholar from America.

We were shown to a prominent table by Fabrizio himself, who pulled out Mary's chair for her and raised a scandalized fuss when he discovered a faded wine stain at the edge of the snowy tablecloth. The maitre d' was summoned and castigated. Two waiters rushed up. One whisked the offending cloth away; the other slung a new one onto the table with the deft, snapping flick of the wrists that is practically an art form among Italian waiters. Places were rapidly reset while Fabrizio murmured apologies for the inconvenience.

Ugo lapped it all up, dismissed Fabrizio with a forgiving, seigneurial wave of the hand. Glasses of the infamous Jazz! were brought to us. Ugo toasted my health, downed the aperitif with every sign of genuine pleasure, smacked his lips and said 'Ah!'

I steeled myself, tossed the stuff back, smacked my lips, and said 'Ah!' too.

It was as bad as I remembered. I noticed that Mary took only a small sip and set her glass off to the side.

Ugo rubbed his hands together. 'I thought you would enjoy an authentic Sicilian restaurant,' he told me, 'not a fancy place. You feel adventurous? You want to try some of our traditional foods?'

I was hungry, not adventurous. The last meal I'd had was a Continental breakfast at the Europa twelve hours before. What I wanted was the biggest plate of lasagna the kitchen could make, but not at the cost of disappointing my host. 'Absolutely,' I said. 'I've been looking forward to it.'

Others were helping themselves from a self-service antipasto table, but Ugo, who may have felt such behavior in my presence would have been declasse, had a waiter deliver a platterful to us. Almost everything on it was from the nearby sea: a marinated salad of shrimp and octopus; mussels baked with olive oil and bread crumbs; thin, fried cakes made of tiny, transparent fish complete with heads and tails; fresh tuna, fresh sardines; sea urchins in the shell—all at room temperature and all delicious, except for the sea urchin, which I regarded doubtfully, not quite sure how to approach it.

'One eats only the eggs, this orange stuff,' Ugo explained, turning over a shell on his own plate. 'It's like caviar. One scoops it up with a piece of bread, so.'

I tried one and found it like a mouthful of unflavored gelatin, nothing remotely like caviar. The bread was good, though. 'Interesting,' I said.

' Now,' Ugo said brightly, 'a test for freshness. If we turn it over'—he did so with the tip of a knife—'we should find that the spines still move. And so they do.' He leaned toward me, over the purple, feebly waving spines, happy and maybe just a little malicious. 'You ate it while it was alive! What do you think of that?'

Not a lot, really. What we were looking at was reflex activity in the rudimentary nerve fibers under the exoskeleton, unconnected to any central nervous system. (You're right, this is not the sort of thing I'd ordinarily know, but I'd once done a project on the Echinodermata for a high school biology contest; I'd gotten an honorable mention for it.) Once again, though, why disappoint Ugo? Who could blame him for a little jovial malice after the way I'd ruined his day over the Uytewael? I looked down and grimaced. 'My God, it's still wriggling!'

For some people it would have been overkill, but Ugo beamed and showily tossed the insides of another urchin into his mouth.

'And look at these little fish!' I went on, shuddering. 'You can see their eyes!'

Ugo delightedly shoveled in a dozen of them, eyes and all. Mary watched my performance without comment, but with one eyebrow infinitesimally raised.

His good humor restored, Ugo ordered the other courses for us, and the rest of the meal went well: spaghetti with fresh sardines, and grilled mullet with fennel, accompanied by two bottles of Corvo Bianco that went quickly to my head. Then coffee with a gigantic cassata Siciliana—a heavy, iced cake made with ricotta cheese and jellied fruit. We all ate and drank heartily and laughed a great deal.

Ugo and I were in the middle of telling Mary about the Uytewaei (by this time it seemed quite funny) when the restaurant went tense and quiet. Ugo stopped in mid-guffaw. I turned to follow his gaze and the gaze of everyone else I could see.

Two men in dark, conservative suits had entered and sat down at a table near the fire. They were conversing with Fabrizio in low voices.

'What is it?' I asked. 'Who are they?'

'Sh!' Ugo said severely. 'They are politicians.'

 'Politicians?'

He looked at me. 'You don't understand what 'politician' means here?'

'The Mafia?'

It was Mary who answered. 'The grown-up variety this time,' she said in a low voice. She had switched to English. 'Not just your plain old everyday Mafia, either. You're looking at the big wheels themselves, the padroni.'

The Sicilian Mafia. Right there in the room with me. The people who had tried to blow me up that morning. Well, not precisely. Antuono had said that the ones who were directly involved were now in Bologna. Still, if these men were the padroni here, then it could hardly have happened without their knowledge, probably not without their authorization. These were the shadowy figures who pulled the strings, or at least the figures for whom the strings were pulled.

I shifted my chair to have a better look. They couldn't have been less intimidating. One was in his fifties, pudgy and bald, with thick glasses and a black fringe of baby-fine hair. The other, white-haired and fragile-looking, was about seventy, with elegant, long-fingered hands that he waved as he spoke, like a man leading a Haydn quartet. They had ordered a bottle of wine and were sipping from small glasses while people from other tables— almost in procession—came to them, bobbed, said a few words, and departed. Most left small offerings from their own tables: fruit, or pastry, or more wine.