This surge of well-being lasted until I walked under the blue canopy and up to the glass doors of Columbia House. The guard-a new one-sat at the entry desk coldly watching me.
'ID,' he said.
With a rising sense of deja vu, I removed the yellow card from my wallet and held it out. He wouldn't even take it, but only looked at it contemptuously and shook his head.
'Uh-uh. No banana.'
'But I just walked out of here a few minutes ago-right by you. All I did was take a walk around the plaza.'
'Look, mac, I don't give a shit about people going out; I watch 'em coming in. Now, you got a real ID, or just this cockamamy thing?'
Apparently I had not caught him on one of his better days. For that matter, I was not feeling overly civil myself. This ID business was wearing thin. Who was this callow twenty-year-old to deny me entrance when I had legitimate business here? Had he just spent two miserable days in the hospital? Had he broken his nose in the service of his country? Why was I being put through these continuing expressions of distrust?
'This card,' I said with the quiet, telling dignity of a Peter van Cortlandt, 'this goddamn card has gotten me into this goddamn building three goddamn times-'
'Not by me-' He straightened up suddenly, staring over my shoulder, and saluted stiffly.
'Sir!'
Two men carrying attache cases approached the desk from the lobby. One of them, a civilian, looked familiar, but it wasn't until he pursed his lips in a prim but amicable little smile that I recognized him: the dry, tweedy little man whose greeting in the corridor a couple of days before had been 'Who is this… person?'
Today he was more friendly. 'Good morning, Dr. Norgren. I'm very happy to see you up and about.'
The other man was in an army uniform with silver eagles on the shoulders; a colonel. 'So you're Norgren,' he said with a slow smile.
The guard was still holding his rigid salute. 'All he's got is a USAREUR privileges card, sir, and we were told-'
The colonel off-handedly returned the guard's salute. 'Oh, he's OK, Newsome, you can trust me on that.' He held a hand out to me. 'I'm Robey. Happy to know you.'
Colonel Mark Robey, the man in charge of The Plundered Past, was a distinct surprise. Gifted as I am with a remarkable ability to stereotype at the drop of a hat, I had conjured up someone lean and silver-templed, with something of the Lincolnesque about him: craggy, taciturn, and clothed with authority-your average army colonel, in other words, with maybe a little bit of art curator thrown in. But the hand that was thrust out to me belonged to a drowsy, soft-voiced man, comfortably overweight, with a pleasant, easygoing face, a dreamy gaze, and nothing at all of the flinty-eyed warrior about him.
'How are you feeling?' he asked. 'Pretty much recovered?'
There is a distinctive and endearing V-shaped smile that can be found on Archaic Greek and Etruscan figures- gentle, lethargic, and (in a nice way) not quite all there. Art people refer to it as the Archaic smile. Mark Robey had the first live Archaic smile I'd ever seen.
'Pretty much, thanks, Colonel.'
'Mark,' he said. 'Call me Mark, Chris. Let's see, I think you've already met Edgar Gadney, although from what he told me I'm not sure you'd remember. He's responsible for logistics and day-to-day administration. We'd be lost without him.'
Gadney nodded briefly. He was holding my ID card between thumb and forefinger, like a fussy matron sipping tea in a drawing-room comedy. Around his neck was a thin, silvery lanyard attached to a pair of glasses through which he was examining the card with meticulous care. Mild though he appeared, he was unmistakably vexed. He waggled the offending card and frowned.
'This is very bad, very bad. It will have to go.' He was as solemn as a surgeon telling me my original- equipment heart would need to be replaced with a Jarvik. 'Form one seventy-four is not by any stretch of the imagination an appropriate card. You should have one-dash-ten-eighteen.'
'Sorry.' I spread my hands apologetically.
'Lack of proper identification,' he said severely, 'can lead to no end-'
Robey, whose attention had wandered off somewhere, now rejoined us. 'I think Chris gets the message,' he said pleasantly. 'Do you suppose you could fix him up with a one-dash-whatchamcallit?'
Gadney compressed his lips to consider the wide-ranging implications of this question. 'Well, I don't see why not.'
'Thanks, Mr. Gadney,' I said, 'I'll appreciate that. So will the guards.'
Gadney took his eyes from the card and lifted them to mine. 'Egad,' he said.
I waited, but only silence followed. 'Pardon?'
'Call me Egad,' he said improbably. He removed the glasses and let them hang from his neck, continuing to regard me somewhat uncertainly. 'You're rather young to be a curator, aren't you?'
People say that to me a lot. I'm not that young, really; thirty-four isn't an unheard-of age for the job. What surprises them, I think, is that I just don't have a very curatorial look. Art curators, they think-and they're generally right-look and sound like Peter van Cortlandt or Anthony Whitehead: urbane, suave, aristocratic. Many are second- or third-generation collectors or curators. I guess I look like what I am, which is a second-generation hodge-podge of Swedish, German, Russian, and Irish. My father was a machinist with a night-school diploma, fingertips that had black grease permanently ground into the whorls, and an objet-d'art collection consisting of eighteen Indian-head pennies and a dozen dubious fossils from a 1949 trip to Arizona. I got my degrees at San Jose State (night classes, like Dad) and Berkeley, not at Yale (as Peter did) or Harvard (Tony), or even Stanford.
In museum circles I had often seen and quailed under that doubtful look when I was introduced as San Francisco's curator of Renaissance and baroque. And even under Gadney's inoffensive scrutiny, I confess to a small stab of insecurity. Way down deep, you see, I'm not so sure that I really am a bona-fide art curator, and not just a fraud who's picked up the jargon. Art, after all, doesn't have a lot you can hang your hat on, and there are times when I know I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. (I'm still waiting for someone to explain neoplastic constructivism to me, for example, and I've lectured on the damn thing!) Never have I heard my self-assured colleagues confess such uncertainties, and in my dark hours I sometimes wonder if they-the Peters, the Tonys-were simply bom to the field and I was not.
I murmured something noncommittal to Gadney as we walked through the lobby, and then asked Robey the question I'd asked Harry Gucci in the hospital.
'Did they get away with anything from the storage room?'
'Nope, everything's accounted for, thanks to you. You broke in on them before they got properly started. The only thing damaged was that picture they heaved through the door. Aside from your nose, of course. But we can repair that.' He smiled sympathetically. 'The picture, I mean.'
I nodded ruefully. 'That's good, anyway. But about that drawing
…' I turned to Gadney. 'Something has been bothering the hell out of me. Down there, in the basement, when I said that Michelangelo was a forgery, you said-I thought you said-that of course it was.'
'Of course I did.'
'I don't understand. Why 'of course'? And how did you know about it?'
'How did I-' He stared at me in bland astonishment. 'You don't know? I put the entire episode down to your understandably confused state of mind at the time. I assumed you knew all about the copies.'
There was a discreet hint of reproach, as if I'd failed to do my homework. 'Along with the twenty genuine works of art, signor Bolzano has lent us twelve copies of pieces that were looted from his collection by the Nazis but have never been recovered. The idea is to publicize them, you see, in hopes that they might be recognized, and that information on where they really are might turn up. The Michelangelo sketch is one of them.'
I had, as a matter of fact, done my homework, and I knew about the copies. But that didn't explain it. Anyway, I didn't like abandoning the idea that I'd already solved Peter's mysterious puzzle.
'Yes,' I said, 'but this wasn't just a copy; this was a forgery-an original pencil drawing, with the paper smoked and crisped to look old-all very expertly done.' I shook my head firmly. 'No, this was a painstaking fake, a forgery-done to mislead.'
It was Robey, with his disconcerting tendency to wander abstractedly in and out of conversations, who
