Tonight's Special, read a hand-lettered sign propped on the bar; Beefeater Martinis, 75 cents. A long way from San Francisco prices and too good to pass up. The barman poured my drink and nodded his thanks when I dropped a quarter into one of the champagne glasses placed every few feet along the bar. "Snacks over there," he said, recognizing me for a newcomer. "Help yourself."
"Over there" was a table around which pilots were congregated elbow to elbow, chattering and munching. Instantiy hungry at the mention of food, I steered my way through, hoping at least for chips or nuts. They were there, all right, but so were a platter of halved, thick-sliced ham-and-cheese sandwiches; a heaped tray of cold cuts; half a wheel of cheddar cheese; hot German sausages and rolls; and more-the free lunch of yore, alive and thriving in the officers-club bar in Berlin. This much-maligned military life, I was learning, had more going for it than was generally supposed.
I snaked out a plateful of the heartier items and found a table at the back. I meant to wait for Anne before gobbling up the food, but I'd had only one meal in the last two days, and in fifteen minutes I'd wolfed down most of the plateful, along with half the martini. I was so absorbed in the process that I didn't see her come up.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
She sat down. "It's so horrible about Peter. I haven't been able to think about anything else."
"Is that what you want to talk about?"
"Indirectly, yes. Colonel Robey's counting on you now to carry Peter's share of the load, you know."
"Of course. Would you like something to drink?"
She shook her head gloomily.
"Well, you can tell Mark I'll do my best. Peter's already done all the hard work, so I think I can cope."
I was bothered by our formality and distance, and not just for personal reasons. The dynamics of art shows lend themselves to personality problems (something I figured out for myself without Louis's help), and one of my jobs was to defuse them, not create them.
I set down my martini. "Look, Anne-I apologize for cutting you off like that in the meeting."
"Cutting me off?"
"I was acting like a creep."
"No, you weren't." But her lips tipped upward and those clear violet eyes warmed slightly. "You sure were."
"All right. Now that we agree on something, how about calling me Chris?"
"All right, Chris," she said, and smiled a little less tentatively.
Pleased with this small victory, I sipped my martini and smiled back. Anne, however, quickly drifted unflatteringly off into her private thoughts and sat there looking unhappy and remote.
"What did you want to talk about, exactly?" I asked.
"Oh… sorry-I keep thinking about Peter. Look, maybe I will have a drink after all. Could I have a glass of white wine, please?"
When I returned with it, she took one gulp and was all business. "Colonel Robey's had a call from Florence. Apparently, signor Bolzano went to pieces when he heard about what happened in the storage room."
"Hardly surprising."
"No, but he's having another one of his episodes. He's threatening to pull out again. It's the sort of thing Peter would ordinarily deal with, but now, what with, with…"
I said gently, "Mark would like me to go to Florence and talk to him."
"Yes. He says you may really have to put on the pressure." She smiled slightly. "He said to tell you it's arm-twisting time."
"Oh," I said, finishing the martini and putting the glass down.
"Is something wrong?"
"No, it's just that… the thing is…"
The thing was that whatever my forte is, it isn't twisting arms. No doubt it was among my "other duties as required," and certainly it is something art curators must do from time to time. But back home, Tony Whitehead, resigned to my deficiencies, usually assigned it to others more temperamentally suited. Of whom there were many.
Someone turned on the television set above the bar. "Urghah!" it said. "Bdao! Ooghah!" A martial-arts movie.
"What I'm wondering about," I went on dishonestly, "is just what it is that's worrying Bolzano so much. His paintings are OK, after all, and he must know that the chance of another theft attempt is infinitesimal."
"There's also that little matter of the ruined Michelangelo reproduction, which I understand was a valuable drawing on its own."
"Yes, but he was making things difficult before that happened, wasn't he?"
"From the beginning. The consensus-Earl, Egad, Colonel Robey, even Peter-is that he's just a difficult, contrary kind of person who likes making waves to flaunt his power."
"But you don't think that."
"No, I think…" She rotated her wineglass slowly on the table, studying the dregs like a fortune-teller reading tea leaves. "Well, they say he's a sick old man now, and he's getting feeble, and I believe he's just… fearful, apprehensive, you know? Afraid that something will happen to his things, afraid that maybe he won't live to see them back in his villa now that they've turned up again after so long- the ones from the cache, I mean. It doesn't seem so hard to understand. I think he went along with the show in a burst of gratitude, but now he's having second thoughts."
I nodded. Feeble or not, how would I feel about parting, even temporarily, with a Vermeer I hadn't seen in forty years? I sympathized, although as problems went, I could imagine worse.
"Ee-ya-AOH!" yawped the movie. "HAI1EEE!" It had been going loquaciously along for a couple of minutes and I still didn't know what language it was in.
"Refill?" I asked, pointing to her glass.
"No… Yes, please."
I got another glass of wine for her and switched to it myself. I wasn't yet up to coping with two martinis.
"Anne," I said as I sat down, "did Peter ever say anything to you about there being a fake?"
"In the show? No." The violet eyes widened. "Is there one?"
"I think so, yes."
"But-which one?" She leaned forward excitedly. "It's that Corot, isn't it? I knew it!"
I shook my head, smiling. I knew what she meant. Quai at Honfleur was the usually estimable Corot at his gauzy worst; a soft-focus panorama of muzzy fishing boats and gray-green trees done in the "poetical" Salon manner that had made him one of the most popular artists of the late nineteenth century.
"You know what they say about Corot?" I said. "That he has the most prolific posthumous production of any artist in history. That he painted one thousand pictures, of which twenty-five hundred are in Europe, five thousand in America, and the rest unaccounted for. No, Peter wouldn't have been so pleased with himself over just another fake Corot. I think it's another one."
"You think? You don't know which one it is?"
I sat back and told her about the conversation at Kranzler's.
"A forgery…" She turned it over in her mind, then looked sharply up at me, her eyes snapping. "Chris! You don't suppose it has anything to do with his death! Of course it does! It must!"
I looked blankly at her.
"The forgery!" she cried. "Peter discovered a forgery, and they killed him to keep him quiet!"
I looked blankly at her some more. Where was everyone getting these ideas? "Who's 'they'?"
"I don't know who they is-are." She made an impatient httle noise. "But it's a clue. What else is there to go on? I told Colonel Robey Peter couldn't have been killed that way."
I put my wineglass down. "Are you saying," I said very slowly, "that you don't accept the police version of how Peter was killed?"
"I don't know what the police think, but I certainly don't believe Peter van Cortlandt was crawling around Frankfurt's red-light district last Wednesday night or any other night-" She stopped. "Well, do you ?"