'I'd sure like to know what's going on,' Robey said mildly. 'I'd really like to know what's going on.'
Harry stood up, scraping his chair back along the floor. 'Mr. Bolzano, I'm going to have to ask you to come with me.'
Bolzano looked at him. 'I'm not coming with you.'
'Yes, sir, you are,' Harry said. 'By entering these premises you place yourself within the jurisdiction of United States military authority. I think we'd better go now, please.'
'It was a cruel trick, signore,' Bolzano said to me. 'Of all people, you should have realized how cruel.'
I pressed my lips together and said nothing, fighting the urge to pity this small man with the big, hurt eyes, who was aging and shrinking in front of us. You tried to kill me twice, I said silently. You didn't hesitate over blowing up innocent guards. And you murdered Peter van Cortlandt, snuffing out that good man's life in the most vile, repellent way imaginable.
'I realized,' I said.
Harry took Bolzano's arm. 'Chris, I'm gonna need you too. You mind coming along?'
The last words I heard as the door swung closed behind us were Robey's.
'Will somebody please tell me what the hell is going on?'
Chapter 21
'All right, I understand most of it,' Anne said, shaking her tea bag up and down over her cup to discharge the last droplets, 'but-damn!' The paper tag at the end of the string had come loose and the bag had plopped into the cup. She fished it out with a pencil and dumped it into an ashtray. 'I understand that Bolzano had Peter killed because Peter found out about the Vermeer, and he was trying to do the same to you, and I sort of understand why, but there's a lot that still doesn't make sense, Chris.'
'All right, shoot. I think I've got it all straight.'
I should have. I'd just spent six hours in police offices, first at Tempelhof Security, then at Polizei headquarters, giving and gathering information while a numbed Bolzano went through the dismal process of interrogation and detainment.
The high point of the evening had come when I was asked if I could identify two muttering, arrogant hoods who had just been herded in by a squad of grim, efficient Polizei. I could, with ease and with pleasure. Skull-face was just as ugly and mean-looking as I remembered, No-neck just as awesomely houselike. Simply looking, at them brought a dull ache to the kink in my nose.
Finding them had been a personal coup for Harry. In looking through Bolzano's things he had seen the brief notation 10 in that day's space in a pocket calendar. He had suggested that the Polizei send men to the Inter- Continental, Bolzano's Berlin address, to see if anything turned up at 10:00 p.m., and the two thugs had walked in, finally justifying Harry's obsession with calendars and nicely wrapping matters up. In the nick of time, too; Harry was sure the subject of the meeting was to have been my overdue demise, which Bolzano had come to Berlin to oversee personally. When the two men were shoved into his presence, Bolzano, who had been contemptuously defiant until then, gave up, and it was all over.
It was after 1:00 a.m. when I got back to Columbia House, where I found a note from Anne asking me to call her whatever the time. When I did, she sleepily asked me to give her ten minutes to change and then to come over for something to drink and to tell her everything.
I asked for an additional ten minutes so that I could shower and change, too. I even managed a fast shave, but the cozy fantasies I'd begun to hatch didn't last any longer than it took me to walk the hundred feet of curving corridor between our suites. She had put on jeans, a blousy denim shirt, and tennis shoes, and not-of course not- the silky shift I'd been dreaming her into, and in which she would have looked smashing. And the drinks were tea, coffee, or hot chocolate.
As a matter of fact, hot chocolate sounded great after those long, grubby hours at police headquarters, and she looked smashing just the way she was. Which is not a bad way to look at things when nobody's given you a choice anyway.
'OK, first of all,' she said, 'what was the point of it all? Bolzano had that micropattern drilled in a real Vermeer, and a fake provenance made up, and all the rest of it. Why, exactly?'
'Because he couldn't afford to let anyone know he had his old painting back,' I said, stirring the contents of the cocoa packet into the hot milk and contentedly sniffing the friendly aroma.
'But why? Had he collected some insurance on it that he didn't want to give back?' She shook her head. 'No, that doesn't make sense. Why would anyone that rich need to go around killing people over insurance money?'
'It wasn't insurance money; it was self-preservation. They'd have put him away for the rest of his life if word had gotten out that he had his old Vermeer back.'
'For the rest of his life? Are you serious?'
'He got it back on his own, you see, from an ex-Nazi in Potsdam, and he broke a lot of East German, West German, and Italian laws to do it. And apparently there was another murder at that time, too, aside from a few waggeries like smuggling and bribery. They would have had enough to lock him up for a hundred years.'
She shivered. 'What a horrible little man. Chris, what was going on in Peter's mind? Why did he tell you Bolzano didn't know anything about it?'
'Well, consider: Here's Bolzano, fiendishly proud of his collection and loving Vermeer above all other painters. Does it seem likely he'd pretend a beautiful, fantastically rare Vermeer was just a second-rate copy and stick it away with a bunch of old fakes that he obviously didn't give a damn about? There have been plenty of cases where collectors pretended their fakes were originals, but this is the first one I ever heard of the other way around.'
I took a swallow of the chocolate. 'I'd have said the same thing Peter did: Of all the people in the world, he'd be the last one likely to know.'
'But what did Peter think was going on? After all, he knew the picture was supposed to be a copy of a real one that'd been looted. If this was the real one, then where did he think… I mean… I'm confused.'
'I don't think Peter had that quite figured out, either. But he knew what he knew.'
'And it killed him.' She was holding her cup in both hands before her face. 'And it almost killed you,' she said quietly into it.
'You call that almost getting killed? Broken nose, bullet crease, bomb that missed by a whole thirty feet? Nah, those are just the usual curatorial contingencies. 'Other duties as required.'
'She laughed, but not very enthusiastically. 'You know, I can understand, why Bolzano tried to get rid of you; you're a Vermeer expert-'
'Who's been staring at a Vermeer for two weeks,' I muttered, 'without knowing it.'
'But why Peter? Wasn't his field nineteenth-century art? How did he know Peter had found out?'
'Oh, he called him that night-from Frankfurt.'
'I thought you told me he didn't call him.'
'I told you Bolzano told me he didn't call him. But he did. Peter beat around the bush, I guess, but Bolzano was able to figure out that he was onto it.' I shrugged. 'He had him murdered the same night, before he could come back and talk to me or anyone else connected with the show. And then he staged the break-in in the basement.'
'The break-in in the basement,' Anne said, putting down her cup and leaning forward. 'That part I think I understand. He was stealing his own Vermeer before you got a good look at it.'
'Exactly.'
'But he couldn't take just the Vermeer, because that would have seemed suspicious-since it wasn't even supposed to be real.'
'Right.'
'So those men were going to take everything?'
'No, because then he'd have to keep them all in hiding from then on. No, they were just going to steal the Vermeer, plus a few of the copies, and one or two originals to make it look good.'
'Pretty devious.'
'To say the least. And then when the theft didn't come off, he tried to use it anyway as an excuse to pull out
