A Glancing Light

I went to the dusty table he'd gestured at, and involuntarily let out my breath. What I'd mistaken for an untidy pile of rubbish—rolled-up old blueprints or mechanical drawings— was, it appeared, an untidy pile of rolled-up Old Masters worth approximately $100,000,000. Not that Croce would be paying anything near that. There were also two painted panels, each about two feet by a foot-and-a-half.

I recognized the panels immediately. Two Madonnas Enthroned, one by Fra Filippo Lippi that had been taken from Clara's collection, and one by Giovanni Bellini from the Pinacoteca. They were a joy to see, their authenticity fairly jumping out at me. All the same, I thought that a little theater wouldn't hurt. I picked them up gingerly, peered at them from a couple of inches away, turned them over, muttered a little, and laid them carefully back on the table.

'Well?' Croce asked.

'They're the real thing.'

'Ah!' he exclaimed. 'I knew it the minute I saw them.'

He sidled up to me, prattling away. 'I saw them and I knew. I had faith, I had conviction. Basically, one appraises from the soul, from the innate, spiritual perception an art lover humbly brings to a timeless work of art. Don't you agree, dottore?'

I wondered if that was the way he appraised his Comic Abstractionists, too, 'Maybe,' I said. 'But what do you need me for, then?'

'Faith,' he said, 'has its limits. This is a business matter.'

'Come on, let's go, let's go,' Ettore said. 'We're in a hurry.' He pointed at the rolled-up paintings. 'Get on with it.'

'That's, uh, not going to be possible,' I said.

Croce looked shocked. 'Not possible?'

'Huh?' Pietro said.

Ettore's battered face hardened in a way that made me back up a step. 'What's the problem?' he asked.

The problem was the condition of the canvases. From the look of them they'd been rolled up two years ago and never unrolled since. Probably they'd been bound with string or rubber bands until today. The rolling-up had been done with care, thank God, but no matter how careful you are, you can't take a thick, stiff piece of fabric that's been out flat for centuries and curl it up into a cylinder without doing harm. The canvas buckles, and the old paint and varnish, friable as a layer of nail polish, splits and loosens. If you then try to unroll it two years later without proper preparation, you multiply the destruction tremendously.

Add this to the mutilation suffered when they'd been cut from their frames—whatever had been overhung by the lip of the frame had necessarily been sliced through—and the result was twenty-one irreplaceable masterpieces gravely damaged. Sure, they could always be repaired with modem techniques and materials that simulated the old ones, but that magic, indefinable beauty—what it was that had made them masterpieces in the first place—was beyond the reach of twentieth-century formulas and recipes.

'I can't unroll them,' I said, and briefly explained.

Croce's foxy face clenched with suspicion. 'I'm not paying for anything I haven't seen.'

Ettore shrugged. 'Please unroll them.' He reached for the nearest one.

I grabbed his arm. He looked down at it, then up at me. 'Don't do that, dottore.'

I let go. I was sure he wouldn't need much of an excuse to take up where he'd left off on Via Ugo Bassi. A question of restoring honor, I supposed. He'd been on the pavement when Pietro came along and chucked me into the street.

'You unroll them,' I said, 'and they'll crack in a thousand places. They won't be worth anything to anybody.'

The three of them looked at each other, not so sure anymore that I was one of the boys.

'I won't pay for anything that's damaged,' Croce said. He nervously patted his gleaming hair, wiped his hands, and fingered the edge of one of the canvas cylinders, delicately bending up a small corner. It was as stiff as dried leather.

He bit his lip. 'He's right,' he said. 'But you must understand I can't accept these without authentication. My instructions are clear.'

We were at an impasse. Unrolling them was out of the question—I would have fought off Ettore and Pietro to prevent it—but I didn't want to see the deal fall through, because that would mean the pictures might go back underground for years, maybe even into the river, as Salvatorelli had threatened. I couldn't think of what to do. We all eyed each other uncertainly. Oddly enough, it was Pietro, surfacing briefly from his torpor, who resolved it.

'Well, can't you tell without unrolling them?' he asked. He picked one up in his big hand—I flinched, but he was gentle—and held it up to his eye like a telescope. 'You can see inside a little,' he reported hopefully, and handed it to me. 'Maybe with a flashlight?'

'Oh, well, yes, of course,' I said quickly, taking it. 'All I said was I wouldn't unroll them. I never said I couldn't tell if they were genuine or not.' At least I hoped not. No one contradicted me, so I suppose I hadn't. 'But signor Croce here said he had to see them for himself, that he couldn't take my word for it.'

Now, as hoped, Pietro and Ettore swung their persuasive glowers in Croce's direction. He cleared his throat, rubbed his temples, tugged on his bow tie. 'I'll have to speak with my client about it.'

Ettore jerked a thumb at a telephone sitting in a corner, on the dusty floor. 'Call him.'

'No, no, that's impossible. I'll see him tomorrow.'

 Ettore shook his head. 'No deal. We either do it now, or not at all. You don't trust the great dottore?'

'Ah, you can trust him,' Pietro said reassuringly. 'Come on.'

The sides had shifted again. Now it was Ettore, Pietro, and me against the irresolute Croce.

'All right,' he said at last. 'I'm at your mercy, dottore.'

 So he was; more than he knew. 'Don't worry,' I told him, 'I won't lead you astray.'

I was a little disturbed—but only a little—at my previously unsuspected capacity for duplicity. Tony Whitehead, I'm sure, would have been astounded. And probably delighted. Without giving Croce time to reconsider, I got down to work. I don't remember exactly how I got through the next thirty minutes, but it was a virtuoso performance. I went from one rolled canvas to the next, peering keenly into them (without benefit of flashlight, no less), pointing them toward the window and minutely rotating them—a degree this way, two degrees that way—like big kaleidoscopes. After an appreciative murmur or two, I would make my pronouncement.

'Aha, Correggio, without a doubt; the soft, painterly, almost antilinear style, the luscious flesh tones. . . And this, this with its icy elegance of line can be nothing but a Bronzino. . . . And this? Let me see—Ah! Tintoretto, no question about it. The masterly use of repoussoir, the receding diagonals . . .'

It was sheer mummery, of course. I couldn't see a thing. But luckily for me, they had a list of the paintings to refer to, and I somehow managed to bring it off. In a sense I wasn't lying, because I was sure they were authentic, even if I didn't happen to know a few trivial details, such as which was which. I knew it from their smell, their feel, their condition, a hundred little clues. Maybe even by way of a little innately spiritual perception.

'All right,' Ettore said the instant Croce hesitantly nodded his acceptance of the last one. 'Where's the money?'

'I'll drive you there,' Croce said, darting his tongue over his lips. His protuberant eyes glistened. He was looking extremely shifty. More so than usual.

'That wasn't the arrangement,' Ettore said. His face had stiffened, darkened, as if a shutter had clanked down over it.

'Of course it was. You're trying to change things now.' Croce's voice was on the rise. 'What do—'

'The money was to be left in two packages, wrapped in paper. Somewhere nearby.'

'It is, it is Only fifteen minutes from here. Come, I'll take you.'

'No, you'll tell us,' Ettore said stonily.

'But—' Croce's forehead shone with perspiration. He looked at all three of us, but help wasn't coming from anywhere. 'All right, then,' he said. 'It's in the Giardini Margherita, near the tennis courts. Just to the east of them, in the shrubbery, next to a stone wall, there's a—a concrete pedestal, a vent of some sort with metal grills in the sides. The grill on the east side, away from the courts, toward the wall, it comes off. The packages are inside,