'Oh my,' he said breathlessly. 'What's happened? Oh dear Lord.'
The guard explained, quickly and efficiently, calling him 'sir.'
'And who is this… person?' the sandy-haired man asked, looking down at me with his nose wrinkled in distaste.
I spoke from a sitting position at his feet. 'Chris Norgren. I'm-'
'Christopher Norgren? You're Dr. Norgren? Good heavens. Oh, really.' He said it the way he might have if I'd embarrassed us both by showing up for a cocktail party on the wrong night.
Meanwhile, I was looking at the drawing again, dazedly trying to figure out what it was about it that bothered me. I twisted my head nearly upside down so I could see it right side up. That was a mistake. The blood thumped painfully at the back of my nose, and I quickly jerked upright. That didn't feel too good, either. The picture swam and blurred. I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes again. There was a crust on my lips, and my shirt front was sodden; blood, no doubt, but I had no wish to see. My head felt as if it were pumped to bursting with Jell-O. I considered blacking out again, and I think I did.
As if they were coming from a moving echo chamber, the voices around me floated hollowly back into range.
'Yes, sir, I just had a look.' That was one of the airmen. 'I can't tell if they got away with anything. The guard out in back is out cold. I called for a medic. This poor bugger could use one, too.'
That's me, I reflected with distant interest. This poor bugger.
'Yes, of course. Certainly.' The mild voice of the small man. 'I believe he's unconscious.'
'Not unconscious,' I mumbled, suddenly figuring out what it was about the drawing. I waved my hand vaguely toward the smashed crate. 'The picture… there's something the matter with it.'
The ensuing silence was so long that I tried opening my eyes again. Things were wavery but not too bad. The sandy-haired man, who was studying the drawing judiciously, turned his attention to me, back to the wrecked drawing, and then back to me once more. He pursed his lips.
'So it would seem.'
'No, I mean the drawing itself. Look at the pencil lines. See how they glisten?' 'Glisten?' he said.
'Yes, glisten.' I rubbed the back of my neck, annoyed at having to look up at him from the floor, but not about to try standing. 'That means there was graphite in the pencil.'
'Graphite.'
'Yes, damn it, graphite.'
'Ah, graphite, yes.'
'Look… they didn't start using graphite in Europe until the end of the sixteenth century. Before then pencils were made of lead alloyed with tin.'
'Tin,' he said. 'Of course. I see, yes. Tin.'
'Listen…' My voice began to rise a little. I did not en: joy being humored by this irritatingly bland little man, 'Don't you see? Michelangelo worked on the Cascina studies around 1500. He died in 1564-which means he had to have drawn this posthumously.'
I thought that was pretty good for a man in my condition, but he only said in that dry, patient, maddening way: 'Posthumously.'
'Goddammit,' I snapped with as much emphasis as I thought my nasal passages would bear, 'it's a forgery -a fakel'
If he says 'Forgery,' I thought, I am going to bite him on the knee.
He was saved, however, by the appearance of two teams of medics hurrying down the corridor with folded stretchers on wheels. 'Over here, please, you men,' he called, wiggling a finger at them. Then he looked down again at me.
'Well, of course it's a fake,' he said calmly. 'What else would it be?'
Chapter 4
I think I ought to say at this point that this kind of thing doesn't usually happen to me. I'm an art historian, as you've gathered, curator of Renaissance and Baroque painting at a major San Francisco museum. And despite what you may have read about art curators, I don't find myself habitually entangled in international theft or deceit on the grand scale, and certainly not in murder. It's not that I'm particularly unadventurous or fainthearted, you understand, but thrilling-chases-through-the-capitals-of-Europe are things I read about on long flights, not things I do.
Not until lately.
'Well, of course it's a fake. What else would it be?'
Much as I wished to pursue that laconic rejoinder, I had to let it pass. The medics, with quiet speed, did several things to my face-some hot, some cold-stuck a needle into my arm, and settled me unresisting onto the gurney. I was trundled off down the long hallway trying to focus on the questions that were already beginning to flutter off out of reach. Could I really have stumbled on Peter's forgery by having it literally thrown in my face? It seemed unlikely. And how did that tweedy little man know it was a forgery? Peter had said no one knew. Was there a second fake? If so, why hadn't Peter mentioned it? And… and…
It was too much to think about. Instead, I found myself sleepily and contentedly absorbed in the neon ceiling lights whizzing by like the lights of local train stations seen from a night express, and in the warm, lovely sensation of giving myself entirely into the competent, responsible hands of others.
I was at the Air Force hospital for two days, much of it passed in a dopey haze that I barely remember, while white-coated people took X rays, stuck more needles in me, and prodded me with cheerful insistence. 'Does this hurt? No?… Does it hurt now?… Now?' Sooner or later they got their way, and then left me to doze until the next one turned up.
At one point-sometime during the first afternoon, I think-I wafted out of a soft, drugged haze to hear someone greet me in what seemed to be Japanese.
'Dr. Norgren? Hariguchi.'
'Hariguchi,' I replied sleepily, and forced up leaden eyelids. A thin, bearded, somewhat shabby, and altogether occidental man was in a chair at my bedside. He looked at me quizzically for a moment, and then he spoke again.
'Harry,' he said. 'Gucci. My name. Like the shoes.'
'Oh. Hi.'
'Hi. How're you doing?'
'Not bad. Who're you?'
'Harry,' he began again. 'Gucci. Like the-'
'No, I mean… I mean…' I'd forgotten what I meant.
'I'm with OSI-Office of Special Investigations.' He put a card in front of my eyes and held it patiently there for me to read, which I blearily pretended to do, although it could have been his Safeway card for all I knew. Or cared.
'They said you'd be able to answer some questions. OK?'
'Sure, if they said so.' For myself, I doubted it. I felt as if I were floating ten feet off the ground, bumping lazily against the ceiling like a helium-filled balloon.
'Great.' From a pocket in his shapeless, shawl-collared cardigan he produced a small dog-eared notebook stuffed with protruding bits of paper and held together with a thick rubber band. He touched the tip of a mechanical pencil to his tongue. 'All right. For starters, can you tell me anything about those two bozos in the storage room? The guard never got a good look at them.'
'The two-'
'What'd they look like?'
'Oh. Pretty ugly.'
I think he repressed a sigh. Things were going to be harder than he'd anticipated. 'Anything else? Were they tall? Short? White? Black? Did they say anything? Call each other by name? Were they skinny? Fat? American?
