once, reading the menu incorrectiy, I had asked for frutta e formaggio as the final course. 'No, sir,' he had sternly intoned, wagging his head, and then continued in Italian, 'Not fruit and cheese.' His finger prodded the appropriate line on the dittoed menu. 'Fruit… or… cheese!' This burst of prolixity had never again been equaled.
' Caffe o te?' he said to me this morning.
'Caffe, per piacere.'
Luigi grumbled off to the kitchen to get it.
Caffe, of course, was c affe latte, a huge pitcher of espresso and an even bigger jug of hot milk, to be mixed together in a cup large enough to bathe your head in. Along with it came hot rolls, pastry horns, zwieback, cheese, and preserves. Breakfast was another one of the reasons I kept coming back to the Augustus.
Just as I finished, Luigi returned, driven by extremity to converse once again. There was a telephone call for me, which I could take in the lobby if I wished.
It was Herr Traben of the Kunstmuseum, joyfully calling to tell me that he had a plan that met with the approval of the insurance company and museum counsel. I would take formal possession of the El Greco, which would be crated in my presence, on the following Friday-provided that the trip through Frankfurt to Rhein-Main Air Base was made in the museum's armored truck under museum guard. Once within the limits of American military jurisdiction, the painting would be fully released to me. Did I agree to this?
I did, as laughably overcautious as it seemed. (I'd carried equally valuable masterpieces on my lap in the coach section on United; and I'd certainly never felt the need of an armored truck before.) Then I telephoned Robey to give him the good news about having the El Greco in time for the opening. It took him a moment to remember what I was talking about, and then he said he thought that was nice.
'And Mark? Can you let Harry know? He'll want to make some security arrangements for getting it from Rhein-Main to Berlin. It's going to be too heavy for me to lug.'
'Fine, good idea,' he said vaguely. 'Will do.'
I made a note to talk to Harry myself when I got back.
My flight didn't leave until ten-thirty, which gave me an hour or so to visit my favorite museum. No, not the Uffizi, which, fabulous as it is, is no one's favorite museum, being laid out in a wearying
series of stuffy cubicles opening off two endless corridors. (Uffizi means 'offices' in Italian, and those are what it was built as in 1560.)
Only a few blocks away, however, is the thirteenth-century palace-museum that is the Bargello, roomy and never crowded except in July and August. The Grand Council Chamber of the Bargello is surely one of the loveliest rooms of art in the world, and it was there I went. In it are some of Donatello's finest sculptures: the handsome Saint George, the two Saint Johns, the svelte, effeminate little bronze David with which Michelangelo's stupendous marble version would contrast so effectively seventy years later. There are some gentle, touching lunettes of della Robbia too, and other things worth looking at, but it is the room itself that is so wonderful.
The vaulted ceiling must be eighty feet high. Light pours in visible shafts through narrow windows, streaking the old red-tile floors with long, pale swatches of light. Above all there is a feeling of open space. There aren't more than thirty objects in the whole big chamber, almost all of them on pedestals-not a glass case in sight-so everything has twenty or thirty feet of open space around it. There's so much space that the floating dust motes and the cool shadows combine to make a sort of natural sfumato, so that you feel as if you're in the smoky, shaded, middle distance of a painting by da Vinci or del Sarto.
I had discovered a long time ago that this serene and stately room is a place to think and sort things out. Near one of the arched stone doorways is a bench that might have been made for contemplation, and it was there I sat.
What did I know? I knew, or thought I knew, that The Plundered Past had had no forgery in it when it was originally crated in Florence; Peter had had two full days with the paintings and had seen nothing suspicious. That meant one of two things: First and most probable, the forgery hadn't come from Florence at all but was one of the three from the Hallstatt cache. They had been out of sight for forty years with plenty of opportunity for skulduggery, the Bolzanos had never gotten a hard look at them, and it could be that with all the tumult and publicity surrounding them, Peter hadn't, either, until later. That would account for his taking so long to discover it.
The less likely possibility was also less attractive: The forgery was part of the collection that had been shipped from Florence, all right, but it had been slipped in after it was in American care; that is, one of the famous originals had been made off with, and a fake-a most excellent fake, I knew-had been put in its place.
Now, substituting a fake for a familiar painting is extraordinarily difficult and complex, over and above the problems of artistic reproduction. It requires an immense amount of detailed information, such as the weight and balance of the picture and its exact appearance, including the auction-house marks or other annotations on its back, repairs that have been made to the frame, and so on. Such information simply cannot be gotten without inside help. And that meant someone on the exhibition staff would have had to be involved. (That's what made the idea so unattractive.) And that someone was very likely to be a member of the senior staff.
Gadney, for instance. What the hell had he been doing that day in Florence? I couldn't imagine what kind of paperwork would require opening the crates, but then it was the army that was doing the shipping, and I didn't doubt that they had paperwork requirements I'd never dreamed of. That wouldn't be too hard to check. In any case, Gadney had had a day alone with the opened crates, right in the palazzo, within striking distance of the copies- while Bolzano was in the hospital, Lorenzo was off to Rome, and Peter and Earl had gone on to Naples. That hardly proved him a criminal, but it did give me a suspect to start with, and that gave me a sense of making some progress.
Would that mean that Gadney had something to do with Peter's murder? I rolled that around my mind while I used my last fifteen minutes to make a lightning tour of the rest of the Bargello. (I always like to stop and look at the young Michelangelo's smarmy, godawful Bacchus downstairs because it soothes me with proof that even the best of us can have bad days.) By the time I walked back out through the great courtyard, I had decided that wondering about Egad's role in a murder was going a long way beyond what the facts, such as they were, warranted. Anyway, that part of it would have to be Harry's job; I had the forgery to figure out.
I did a little more figuring on the Alitalia flight from Florence. There was another possibility aside from the two I'd already considered. Maybe the forgery was something that had been in the Bolzano collection all along. That would mean either that Bolzano and Lorenzo hadn't been aware of it… or that they had. But if the admittedly expert Bolzano and his son hadn't spotted it in years of living with it, how could Peter have found it in a few weeks-and how could he think I could find it in a cursory walk-through?
As for the idea that either of the Bolzanos had knowingly permitted a forgery to be part of the show, that made no sense at all. People with fakes in their collections don't put them on public exhibit to be scrutinized by thousands.
By the time I changed to a Lufthansa 707 in Frankfurt- only flights originating in Germany are permitted to land in Berlin-I had exhausted the subject and myself, and I let my thoughts wander to something more pleasant.
Anne Greene. Somehow, thirty thousand feet above it all, with a little plastic jug of coffee and an Apfelstrudel on the tray in front of me, it seemed like a good time to haul out and consider something that had been niggling away at me, buried under weightier matters: Why had I behaved to Anne at the staff meeting like such a condescending and supercilious prig? And then, a couple of days later, why did I back off so cravenly from the prospect of dinner? It certainly wasn't that I found her unattractive; on the contrary, I liked the way she looked, I liked the way she spoke, and I liked, from what I could tell, the way she thought and felt.
Was I still loyal to Bev or, rather, loyal to the idea of being married to Bev, and unwilling to risk a step that would make an end of it? Maybe, but what was left to make an end of? I knitted my brows, sipped the surprisingly good coffee, and considered. Was it simply a matter of 'once burned, twice shy?' Having walked trustingly, even eagerly, into one lousy relationship, was I afraid of blundering into another? Did Anne's very attractiveness frighten me into a defensive stance that shielded me against more damage to my shaky ego?
Where was Louis when I needed him? I sighed and, as the wheels thunked down on the Tegel runway, put it all out of my mind.
For about forty-five minutes. As soon as I got to Columbia House I dialed her room.
'Well, hi,' she said. 'What happened in Florence?'
'It went fine. Bolzano's pacified.'
'Congratulations. The colonel will put you in for a decoration.'
