A Glancing Light

you also said the real reason was to keep you from finding out I stole the Rubens and killed Giampietro. Well, which is it? Am I missing something, or what? Is there supposed to be some connection there?'

'I don't know the connection yet,' I said.

'Well, what do you know, for Christ's sake?' he asked, spilling over with righteous anger of his own. 'That Amedeo called me to tell me about the break-in? He called every goddamn gallery-owner in Bologna! What the hell are you picking on me for?'

But I'd thought that through before I'd come. Sure, a lot of people could have piggybacked on the museum robbery and stolen the Rubens. For that matter, a lot of other people had access to Ugo's Uytewael before it was shipped to Sicily. And sure, Max wasn't the only person in Italy who knew Mike Blusher. And true, there were even other people—not very many, though—with the skill to forge the Terbrugghen, the van Eyck, the panel itself.

But who else was there to whom all these things applied? No one; only Max.

'Look, you're not seeing this right,' he said when I ticked these points off to him. 'Why—'

'Added to which, your ears almost fell off when I walked in here. That was enough all by itself.'

He opened his mouth to argue some more, but gave up at last, sinking back against the pillows. 'All right, Chris. What are you going to do?'

'I'm going to call Antuono. So long, Max.' I headed for the door.

'Chris, wait.'

I stopped.

'We go back a long way, Chris.'

I said nothing. I preferred not to think about that.

'You have to believe I never wanted to hurt you,' he said. 'I tried like hell to keep you from going to Sicily, remember that? But you just wouldn't listen. . . . I just didn't know what else to do.' His eyes gleamed. 'I swear to God, Chris— I told him I didn't want you killed, not even hurt.'

'Who'd you get to do it?' I asked. 'Who put the bomb in my bag?'

He gave me a wry smile. 'Bologna's like anyplace else. If you have the money and you know the right people, you can get anything done.'

'Well, you sure seem to know the right people, Max.'

 'But the thing I want you to know—the important thing–is that I just wanted you scared off, just a loud noise, basically. At least tell me you believe that.'

'I don't.' I started for the door again.

'Wait—will you at least let me explain? Then go ahead and do whatever you think is right. I won't try to stop you.'

 I hung back.

'Come on, Chris, what is there to lose? I won't lie to you, I promise.'

'All right, Max.' But first I pulled the door open. I had seen too many movies, read too many books, where someone confronts the villain, announces that he is on his way to the police, and then hangs around to chat, with uniformly unfortunate results. I couldn't imagine Max doing me any harm in the condition he was in, but I was taking no chances.

'Sit down, will you?' he said. 'I don't want to talk up at you.'

I sat a good six feet away from him. 'Go ahead.'

It was a rambling, teary, self-justifying story that took almost half an hour. His difficulties had begun, he said, when his wife developed ovarian cancer. Bills had piled up, first from unsuccessful medical treatments, then from prodigiously expensive alternative therapies. In a year he was $150,000 in debt. His business was on the edge of failure, the creditors already squabbling over the proceeds. And more money was needed for a new course of ozone therapy and immunostimulants in Venezuela.

Then had come Amedeo Di Vecchio's lifesaving call in the middle of the night. There were art thieves afoot! Who knew who their next victim might be? As I'd surmised, Max had jumped at the unexpected chance, making off with Clara's Rubens and killing—accidentally killing, he said— the old watchman who'd come upon him in the act. Nine days later, while he was still trying to find a receiver for the picture, Giulia died. His crushing need for money abated. The painting was put in a bank vault in Genoa while he thought about what to do with it.

Max had a problem. Not the police, but the Mafia. They found it not at all amusing that someone had horned in on their meticulously executed robberies, to make a clumsy and amateurish heist of his own. They didn't like being exploited, and they'd let it be known that whoever was responsible might surely expect a word or two of reproach from them. When they found him.

So Max sat nervously on his secret for over a year, and then another opportunity presented itself, a way out. Ugo Scoccimarro, moving back to Sicily from Milan, asked Max to oversee the shipping of his collection to his new home. Among the paintings was one that Ugo himself had never seen: a Joachim Uytewael that Clara Gozzi had bought for him in London and that was now at the Pinacoteca being authenticated. As Ugo's agent, Max had no difficulty in picking up the picture at the museum for hand delivery to the Milanese shippers.

But he did it by way of a two-day stop at his workshop, where he cut the face of the painting from the panel. The sawed-off back was replaced with a copy, the exposed edges were hidden with a thick layer of bogus canamograss, and the piece was reframed. If there were differences from the original, as no doubt there were, Ugo would never notice. How could he? He'd never seen the original. The Uytewael was then shipped off to Sicily with the rest of the collection, while the multitalented Max used the old panel itself as the base for a painstakingly forged Terbrugghen Lute Player. The 'van Eyck' that he then painted over it was an added subtlety.

'What's all this got to do with the Rubens?' I asked.

'Everything.' I had the impression he was disappointed in me for not having seen it for myself. 'It was my way of getting rid of that damn Rubens without the Mafia finding out I had anything to do with it. I got it into one of Salvatorelli's shipments to Blusher, along with the fake Terbrugghen—'

'So Salvatorelli was part of this, too?'

Max shook his head. 'I do a lot of business with them, I'm always around the warehouse. It was nothing to slip the pictures into one of those big shipments to Seattle. And I figured Seattle was far enough away so the Mafia'd never connect me with it when the picture turned up.'

'But they did.'

His hand went to his knees. 'Yeah.'

'I don't get it, Max. What was the point? You never tried to collect any money on the Rubens. Blusher donated it to the museum.'

'Ah, that was the beauty part,' he said with every appearance of pride.

He'd given up the idea of getting money for the Rubens almost from the start. Selling it to a crooked receiver or turning it in for the insurance reward, even through a third party, would very likely have led the Mafia to him, a prospect he didn't care to think about.

So he had conceived the idea of using it, through Blusher, as a come-on. Its appearance in the Seattle warehouse would create plenty of preliminary media attention. Then, when the reward was later donated to the museum, there would be even more, and any lingering skepticism about Blusher's motives and honesty would vanish. This would be especially helpful when the second unexplained item in the shipment, an ostensibly 'genuine' Terbrugghen under it.

'And that's the story,' Max said. 'I won't go into the sordid business details.'

He didn't have to. It was an old scam. The newly famous, long-lost Terbrugghen could now be sold to a wide-eyed collector who had heard and read all about it. Making a few extra copies of the painting (something Max had neglected to mention) and also selling them as the original was nothing new, either. The trick was to make sure the buyers were: (a) naive; (b) out of the international art mainstream; and (c) from widely separated parts of the world—say, Oman, South Korea, and Uruguay.

If Max and Blusher managed to sell all four copies at roughly $400,000 each, the total would come to $1,600,000, against which the donation of the Rubens reward was no more than a modest investment. But of course Blusher had been too eager, too obvious, too out-and-out dumb, Max didn't know that part of it yet, but I thought I'd leave it to someone else to tell him.

'And now,' he said wistfully, 'I've got what I deserve, Chris. I'm a cripple for life. I'm still $100,000 in debt. I'll never have a single day free from pain. And most terrible of all, Chris'—his voice trembled, cracked; the