A Glancing Light

implication was of feelings too profound for speech—'most terrible of all, I have to live with Giampietro's death . . . and what I almost did to you.'

He dropped his chin to his chest and spoke in a monotone. 'Isn't that punishment enough, Chris?'

I sighed and stood up.

His head lifted. 'What are you going to do?'

'I'm going to call Colonel Antuono,' I said.

Chapter 21

I would have, too, but as I walked through the lobby of the hotel on my way up to our room, one of the morning-coated men behind it answered a telephone and signaled me with a raised forefinger.

'For you, dottore. He says important.' The forefinger described an elegant arc, directing me to a house telephone where I could take the call.

'Do you want to recover the paintings?' was the startling greeting. The words were in Italian, rushed and indistinct, tumbling frantically over each other. This, I thought, was the 'somewhat agitated gentleman' who had tried to reach me earlier.

I suppose I ought to say that I responded with a thrill of excitement and anticipation, but the truth is, I was annoyed. I wanted to go upstairs and tell Anne about Max. I wanted to call Antuono. Then I wanted to get on the train and go to Lake Maggiore with Anne. I didn't want to talk to some raving Italian about some harebrained scheme to get back the stolen paintings.

'What paintings?' I said querulously. 'Who is this?'

'What paintings? Do you think I'm playing a game with you? Are you testing how far you can go? I'm telling you, I'll destroy them!'

His voice was unsettling. He seemed to be shouting, but muffling the sound with a cloth over the mouthpiece. The result was a disembodied croak, a breathless, disturbing combination of bellicosity and trepidation. The skin on the back of my neck prickled. Was it conceivable he actually had the paintings?

'Now look,' I said, trying to sound reasonable, reassuring, 'if you really have the paintings, there's no need —'

'Shut up. Leave the hotel. Walk quickly to the corner of Via Nazario, by the back of the fruit market. Wait there. Do it at once. Hang up and go outside.'

'Wait, I don't know where it is—'

'Outside, then to your left one block. There won't be another chance, you understand?'

'All right, give me five minutes. I have to—'

'You think I'm insane? No. No telephone calls to your carabinieri friends, no running upstairs to your girlfriend. I warn you—'

He knew about Antuono, about Anne. That meant he knew me. He was disguising his voice. That meant I knew him. I searched in my pocket for a pen and tried to catch the attention of the man behind the desk. If I could scribble a note to Anne—

'Stop!' the voice yawped in my ear. 'I can see you.'

I stopped dead. I was standing in a glassed-in vestibule at the entrance to the lobby, separated from Via Montegrappa by a row of four clear-glass doors. Across the narrow street was a row of three-story buildings with shops on the ground floor and shuttered windows above. I scanned the upper stories without being able to see anything. Was he really watching me? The situation's comic-opera aspects, marked until then, vanished. A lone shiver crawled down the center of my back. I had the unpleasant feeling that things were about to get away from me; had already gotten away from me.

'Oh, yes,' he said triumphantly, 'that's right, I can see. I have binoculars. Put your pen back in your pocket.' When I did, he said: 'There, that's better,' and laughed, but there were brittle shards of panic in it. 'I've had enough,' he told me. 'This is it, things are getting too difficult for me. I warn you, I'll burn them!' Possibly he was faking, trying to make me believe he was on the edge of hysteria. If so, he was doing a good job.

'It's too risky,' he babbled on. 'It's not worth it. If you don't want to do it, fine, excellent, to hell with them. I'll just—'

'All right, take it easy. But what do you have in mind? You have to tell me—'

'I have to tell you nothing! I'm finished arguing with you! Go now, this instant, otherwise it's all off. I mean what I say. The pictures are on your conscience!' And the connection was broken.

'Wait!' I said. 'Are you there?' I jiggled the telephone. 'Hello?'

I was stalling, of course, trying to buy time for thought, but there was only a rush of questions, jumbled and chaotic. Did this lunatic really have the paintings? What was it he wanted me to do? And why me? And was it really someone I knew? Croce? Salvatorelli? Di Vecchio, even, or Benedetto Luca? Surely not Ugo? Clara?

And of course the critical question: Was the object not restitution but something else? Max had tried to kill me once. Was this another attempt, before I got to Antuono? No, impossible. I'd left him a mere ten minutes before; besides, how could he know I'd go to the hotel and not to Antuono's office? Someone else, then? Had I made it onto the Mafia's hit list, too? If so, what better way to lure me than to tell me that the retrieval—in fact the continued existence—of a Bellini, a Perugino, a Giorgione, a Correggio . . . all depended on my cooperation?

But by the time I replaced the receiver, I'd made up my mind to go. I pushed out through the doors and turned left, as directed. I'd like to say that I was being courageous, but the truth is that I wasn't being anything. I didn't make a conscious choice, I just started walking. I couldn't think of anything else to do.

The Mercato Ugo Bassi was a vast farmers' market under a single roof. Walking to Via Nazario took me to the alley at the rear of it, where the delivery dock was. The back of an Italian farmers' market isn't much different from the back of an American one, except that the cheeses smell better, or at least riper. There were sweating men unloading vegetables from decrepit trucks; piles of empty crates; lettuce leaves and spoiled fruit on the ground; puddles of rancid water everywhere. The day was overcast and muggy, the fresh smells slightly tainted with rot.

I stood in the center of the alley where I could be seen easily, and in a few seconds a small blue car—hadn't I seen it somewhere before?—threaded its slow way through the trucks and workmen, and stopped in front of me, leaving its engine running. The door was pushed open. I got in. The one coherent thought I remember having was: If I get killed, how is Anne ever going to find out what happened to me?

As soon as I pulled the door closed, the car continued slowly down Via Montegrappa, rocking over the alley's uneven cobblestones. I recognized the driver the moment I looked at him: Pietro, the gorillalike thug who had smashed in Max's face and tossed me with such ease into the street, just a block from where we were now. Somehow I wasn't surprised. And I recognized the car now. The last time I'd seen it, it had bounced me around, too; only then I'd been on the outside of it, scudding painfully over the top.

When we stopped at Via dell'Indipendenza, Pietro turned to study me. It was the first time I'd gotten a good look at him• shaven, compact head on a muscular cylinder of a neck, dull, sleepy eyes in a stolid face with an immense, under-slung jaw. Fred Flintstone without the hair. Bulky arms bulged inside a blue leather jacket like sausages about to burst their casings. Through the jacket's open front I could see the strap of a shoulder holster. I returned his look as steadily as I could, fighting down the impulse to fling open the door and bolt. As we pulled onto the main street he grunted something.

'What?' I said nervously. 'I didn't hear you.'

He looked at me again. The heavy eyelids went slowly down, then up. He had long, thick eyelashes. 'Ciao,' he said.

 'Oh. Ciao.'

I settled back a little more easily. Nice to know there weren't any hard feelings.