It had not escaped the two policemen who had interviewed me, either, and we had spent substantial time reconstructing the scene. Amedeo Di Vecchio and Benedetto Luca, who'd been Max's and my tablemates, had to be formally considered as suspects, unlikely as it seemed on the face of it. Beyond that, who could say? There had been about fifty people in the room and, given Max's pickled state and robust voice, none of them had been out of earshot. I had suggested that the policemen get a guest list from Di Vecchio, and they had said they would.
Thinking hard, I broke open the second crisp breakfast roll. Was there anything I was forgetting, anything I'd neglected to tell them, anything that might help find Max's attackers? I had described the thugs, told them their names, described the car as well as I could, which was pitifully— "small, purple or red, or dark anyway, no hood ornament." (According to Dr. Tolomeo, it was the absence of a hood ornament that had saved me from those nasty perforations.) What was I forgetting—?
I sat up with a start, almost spilling my coffee. What I was forgetting was my appointment with Colonel Antuono. Yesterday's dreamy haze had constituted a sort of nonday, and I'd forgotten this was Wednesday. I was due in less than an hour. I gulped down the rest of the coffee, went upstairs to grab a jacket, and ran—or as near to it as I could, given the state of my joints—off to my meeting with Cesare Antuono.
If the Eagle of Lombardy couldn't help, who could?
Even at my creaky, halting pace, it was only a five-minute walk. According to the instructions Tony had passed on to me, Antuono's office was in the Palazzo d'Accursio, which served as the city hall and was one of the old buildings bordering the Piazza Maggiore in the heart of town.
The attendant at the great main door, under a benevolent bronze statue of Pope Gregory XIII, had never heard of Colonel Antuono, so I went up the main staircase, an imposing sweep of red-carpeted stone steps, on my own. It was slow going for a man in my condition, not just because it rose three flights at a single sweep, but because the extremely shallow steps were slanted backward. This was an amenity of Italian fifteenth-century public architecture that permitted the gentry to mount to the upper floors without troubling to get off their horses. But what suited noble status and equine anatomy wasn't so easy for human ligaments that had taken a rude beating a couple of days before.
On the upper floor were most of the city bureaus, but the people there shook their heads when I asked about Antuono's office. Not up there; that was all they could say. Back down I went, stiff and grumbling, feeling a hundred years old, and grateful that there was a railing to hang on to. Maybe I'd been a little overhasty in tossing those pain pills after all.
The grimly handsome Palazzo d'Accursio is not only huge, but confusing. Like many medieval buildings it was built slowly, over several hundred years, and when that happened, plans tended to get lost, ideas to change, styles to evolve. The result, as in this case, could be an unpredictable hodgepodge. I wandered around until I finally found the office I was looking for, in a bleak little courtyard jammed with haphazardly parked cars. In a low annex, beside a plain door set into a colorless, much-patched stucco wall, was an unprepossessing sign:
CORPO VIGILI URBANI
SETTORE CENTRALE
COMMUNE DI BOLOGNA
A question occurred to me, not for the first time. Unless I had it wrong, the vigili urbani were little more than traffic police, but Antuono was with the prestigious carabinieri, the national police force, something like our FBI. Not just your everyday carabinieri either, but the elite art-theft unit, the Comando Tutela Patrimonio Artistico. And according to Max and the others, he was a figure of importance within it. Why would he be housed in this dismal place? Carabinieri headquarters were several blocks away on the Via del Piombo, in an imposing building befitting its status.
When I opened the dusty, glass-paned door, I found myself in a small room with a worn, linoleum-topped counter. Behind the counter a uniformed clerk was sitting in a wheeled wooden chair, with a wire basket full of envelopes in his lap. He was slowly—very slowly—inserting them into the wooden pigeonholes that ran the length of one wall, wetting his finger with his tongue every time he picked one up.
I waited. I cleared my throat. He continued to insert envelopes.
"Prego," I said finally, "dove si trove l'uffizio del signor Colonnello Antuono?"
Without turning around to look at me, he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. I went down a short corridor crowded with gray file cabinets and stacked cardboard cartons lining both walls, but I must have read the thumb-jerk wrong, because no offices opened out of it. There was, however, a small table wedged between a couple of the cabinets, at which another clerk, this one in civilian clothes, fussed over the hopeless task of filing the dog-eared contents of a tableful of bruised and sagging cardboard cartons.
"Prego, signore," I said, hoping for better luck this time. "Dove si trove l'uffizio del signor Colonnello Antuono?"
At least this one looked at me. He paused reluctantly (leaving his finger inserted in a folder for ease of later reference) and examined me with impassive gray eyes. He seemed surprised to have been addressed, and maybe a little annoyed; I wondered when the last time was anyone had spoken to him. Stooped, balding, narrow-shouldered, with old- fashioned green plastic cuffs protecting the sleeves of his white shirt, he might have lived his whole life alone in this windowless dungeon of a corridor, the quintessential clerk, filing and refiling his curling papers. And probably prefering it that way.
"Colonnello Antuono?" he repeated sourly. Yes, he was annoyed, all right. He jabbed a forefinger—the one that wasn't occupied in the files—against his thin chest.
"Io sono Colonnello Antuono."
Chapter 6
I suppose my heart didn't really sink, but it didn't swell with confidence, either. Now I wouldn't want you to think that I go around stereotyping people based on their physical appearance. But I do admit to a slight tendency to forejudge, to generalize, to ... okay, okay, to stereotype. And whatever vague image I had in mind for Colonel Cesare Antuono, this wasn't it.
Well, think about it. The Eagle of Lombardy—in green plastic cuffs?
But this was an unworthy reaction on my part, and I knew it. I smiled warmly and held out my hand. "Colonnello Antuono, io sono Christopher Norgren. Sono felicissimo di conoscerla. "
"Dottor Norgren?" he said, continuing to sound surprised. He pushed a plastic cuff up on his arm and out of the way and studied his wrist watch. "Eleven o'clock already," he said mournfully in English. "The time flies away." He gave a last, longing look to his folders, and finally removed his finger, first inserting a torn paper marker. He had, I gathered, abandoned all hope of working on his files for a while. He extended his hand without perceptible enthusiasm. "I'm happy to meet you also. "
From under a couple of moldy cartons he produced an armless, wooden antique of a swivel chair. "Sit down, please."
He used a folder to brush the dust off the seat (no wonder they were dog-eared), and motioned me into it.
There was a somewhat strained silence. "I'll go and get another chair," he said.
I looked around at the cramped space. There were folders and cardboard file boxes everywhere. I didn't see how he could squeeze another chair in. "Maybe we ought to talk in your office," I said.