'Killed,' Luca emended gravely.
'Not merely killed,' Di Vecchio said, his small mouth twisted by a grimace of repugnance. 'He was found in the Margherita Gardens with a cork stuffed between his lips. There were one hundred and sixteen bullets in his body.'
'My God,' I said.
'I have a friend,' Luca said, his creased face grim, 'the physician in charge of the mortuary. He told me that the bullets fell out of his body and rattled on the table like beads from a rosary.' He let the unsettling image sink in a moment. 'And now, of course, his brother, Bruno, will say nothing. Who can blame him?'
But even this wasn't enough to subdue Max entirely. 'Look,' he said, 'nobody would hurt me. Paolo Salvatorelli was
Di Vecchio stiffened in the way that many Italians do when the Mafia comes into the conversation, even indirectly. 'The code?' he repeated coolly. A long time before, he had made a point of telling me that the long arm of the Mafia no longer reached to Bologna. 'The spirit and collective solidarity of the cooperative movement have eliminated it here,' he had informed me. Amedeo Di Vecchio frequently sounded like the dedicated Communist he was.
'Hell, forget it,' Max mumbled, a little bellicose now. 'Don't worry about me, I can take care of myself just fine.' He got up to head for the restroom with the doggedly straight, precise stride of a man who's had too much to drink and is therefore bent on showing how steady he is on his feet.
'Ah, but can he take care of himself?' Luca asked doubtfully, watching him go. 'Massimiliano has many virtues, but is prudence one of them?'
'Oh, I think Max is pretty prudent,' I said. 'He's had a little wine tonight, but—'
'When the theft at the Pinacoteca occurred,' Di Vecchio interrupted, 'the first thing I did was to telephone the other local museum directors and some of the more prominent gallery owners to tell them to be on their guard. These things often occur in clusters, you know.'
'I know.'
'I awoke Massimiliano from sleep. When I warned him he could be next, his response was to laugh.' Di Vecchio allowed himself a thin, retributive smile of his own. 'The only painting of value in his shop, he informed me, was Clara's Rubens, and it was unlikely that the thieves would know about that or even bother with it, given the riches they had already helped themselves to at the museum. No, they were probably already on their way to Rome. What did he do? Nothing. He went back to sleep, simply leaving the useless Giampietro to his task.' He twirled his wine glass irritably by the stem. 'Do you call that prudence?'
'No, indeed,' Luca answered for me.
'What about Clara Gozzi?' I asked. 'Did you warn her?'
'No,' Di Vecchio said defensively. 'Why would it occur to me they would go to Ferrara?'
Max came back looking fresher. He'd washed his face and dampened and combed his hair, and I caught a whiff of the cologne the Notai stocked in its restroom.
He was more conciliatory, too. 'Look,' he said amicably, 'all I meant was, what can I do that anyone would be so afraid of? I don't have any inside secrets. I can just tell what happened to me, that's all—the same as you. It's my duty. They're not going to go around killing ordinary citizens.'
Luca waved a magisterial hand. 'It makes no difference. These policemen are all the same, you'll see. One way or another this Colonel Antuono will line his pockets.'
He let go a deep sigh. '
Chapter 4
With Luca's Ciceronian world-weariness the evening's energy seemed to fizzle out. Conversation tapered off at the other tables as well, and people began coming up to wish me good night, to thank Di Vecchio for the dinner, and to pay their respects to Luca, who accepted them in kingly fashion.
Among them was Ugo Scoccimarro, one of the three contributors—along with the Pinacoteca and Clara Gozzi—to Northerners in Italy. He was also the owner of the Boursse I was hoping to get for Seattle. I was surprised to see him there at all. The thickset, balding Scoccimarro, a native Sicilian, had complicated things for me by moving from nearby Milan, where he'd lived for three years, back to Sicily several months before; I was planning to fly down there to settle things with him before I left Italy. But as it turned out, he was in Milan on business, and when word had gotten to him about the reception, he had taken the two-hour train trip to Bologna.
Scoccimarro was an extraordinary being in the world of art collectors; a peasant in the literal sense of the word. Like his father and grandfather, he had provided meager and toilsome sustenance for his family by making olive oil, growing almonds, and keeping a few sheep for the production of romano cheese, which he made himself twice a year. Then providence had smiled. The Aga Khan had decided to put up a condominium development on the Strait of Messina, and Ugo Scoccimarro's rocky eleven acres on the coast near Scaletta Zanclea just happened to be the perfect spot for it. Smooth-talking representatives in suits and ties had appeared at Scoccimarro's decrepit stone farmhouse one day in 1967 to ask him what he wanted for the land. The flabbergasted, twenty-three-year-old Ugo got up his nerve and stammered out a demand for fifty times what he thought it was worth, then almost fainted when it was accepted on the spot; no arguments, no bargaining
He had slapped his forehead and grinned when he told me the story. 'I could have asked for ten times more. ' But it had been enough to start him on a remarkable career.
Ugo had turned out to be a shrewd businessman, putting his money first into country land, then into commercial developments in Catania, and finally into the production of an aperitif called Jazz!. This was one of those awful medicinal concoctions the Italians seem actually to enjoy. Made from olives and almonds, and based on a family recipe, it was an immediate success. Reluctantly, Ugo had moved to Milan to build his new factory; it was the only place he could find the technical skills he needed.
Some years ago he had gone to an auction and bought himself a ready-made art collection of twenty-five paintings, mostly of the Utrecht School, a group of seventeenth-century Dutch artists who had come to Rome as students and been heavily influenced by Caravaggio. Ugo had bought them as an investment, he said, but although they had quadrupled in value in nine years, he had never tried to sell one, as far as I knew, although he'd bought a few more. The truth of the matter, I thought, was that Ugo Scoccimarro, former tiller of the soil, was thrilled at being a gentleman art connoisseur, and saw little need to make any changes. The day I had asked him if he would lend some of his pictures to the exhibition, he had swelled before my eyes and practically floated away like a helium-filled balloon.
The reason I hadn't seen him during the reception, he explained now, was that he had just arrived. His train had been delayed for two hours before it ever got out of Milan. Knowing he was going to be late, he had eaten en route in the dining car. He was lucky to have made it at all.
The others clucked at his misfortune; he had missed a fine dinner. But I thought I knew better. Ugo Scoccimarro, like many a self-made man before him, was of several minds about his social position. On the one hand, he was pugnaciously proud of his peasant background. On the other, he was often desperately insecure. I knew him, for example, to be uneasy about his table manners. He was happiest with a napkin tied around his neck, a tumbler of wine at his elbow, and a plate of pasta in front of him (which he preferred to eat with the help of a spoon), and he went to considerable lengths to avoid dining among the gentry. I didn't doubt that his missing dinner was premeditated.
He grinned warmly at me, his brown teeth as square and sturdy as the painted ones on a German nutcracker. 'Ah, Cristoforo, I'm glad to see you.' He spoke Italian with a broad Sicilian accent that I had seen lesser men sneer at behind their hands. 'My train doesn't leave until after midnight. Let's go and drink a brandy somewhere.'
