On the other hand, some lenders have little to tell you. From what I knew of Clara, I expected her to be one of these. Crusty, yes, but she wasn't a stickler. Or so I hoped.
My pressing of the buzzer wasA GLAINUIPIG- LIU111 Yid
answered by a tall, annoyed- looking woman in a severely tailored suit. She peered distractedly and with impatience at me, as if I'd interrupted some terribly pressing task. This was the third time in a year I had come to see Clara, and the same woman had responded each time in the same way. By now I was beginning to understand that this was her normal manner. It was, I supposed, what came of working too long for Clara.
"I'm Christopher Norgren," I said in Italian. "I have an appointment with signora Gozzi."
"You're too early," she told me brusquely, remaining in character. "Your appointment is in fifteen minutes. You'll have to wait."
Clara's querulous voice rang out. "Who is that? Christopher? You're early, damn it. Come in, come in!"
Under the stern eye of the maid, or secretary, or whatever she was, I headed for the doorway from which the gruff voice had come, walking down a long, unfurnished hallway hung like a museum gallery with rows of contemporary paintings on both walls: Kiefer, Dine, Diebenkorn, others I didn't know. I didn't like any of them. Clara's tastes were quite eclectic, more so than mine, and her collection was arranged chronologically, with the most recent on the ground floor, the earliest (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) at the top. The higher I climbed, the happier I usually was.
I entered an unfinished room that had probably once been the dining room, and was treated to a restrained version of the full Mediterranean greeting: bear hug, back-pats, even a kiss on, or at least in the vicinity of, each cheek. This was uncharacteristically exuberant for Clara. I understood that I was being thanked for my part in recovering the Rubens.
"This is Christopher Norgren," she announced in Italian to a shiny-faced man with pale, plastered-down hair and a dandy's pencil-line mustache. "A scholar of note in his field, but lamentably narrow."
Had Clara delivered her many such remarks with a smile or even the mordant lifting of an eyebrow—anything to suggest irony—she would have been regarded as a witty woman. But she never did. Her pouchy, homely face rarely changed its indifferent expression.
"Sono molto lieto—" the man began, but Clara interrupted him.
"His Italian stinks. If you hope to be understood, Filippo, use English."
"Okay, sure, but, you know, my English stinks." He said this in English with a grin, a small man of fifty in a polka- dot bow tie and a checked, wasp-waisted sport coat. His accent reminded me of Ugo's speech, so I assumed he was Sicilian, too. He held out a manicured hand with bulky rings on two fingers. "I am Filippo Croce. And you are Christopher Norgren?"
I was used to the mild wonder with which this was asked. The trouble is, you see, I don't look like any kind of a museum curator, let alone a curator of Renaissance and Baroque art. At thirty-four, I'm a little young for the job, but more than that I don't look scholarly or even particularly intelligent; I don't look patrician; I don't look ... well, consequential. I'm of average build, average height, with an average brown mustache, and I look, so I've been told, like your average, easygoing, nice guy who works in computer store or maybe for the government. I mean, I look like a curator to me, but enough people have told me I don't so that I'm used to it by now.
"You two don't know each other?" Clara said, surprised. Her English was excellent, the slight accent not so much Italian as a sort of generic Continental, the result of having homes in four countries. "But no, of course you wouldn't. Filippo's been in Ferrara less than a year, haven't you, Filippo?"
"Five months," he said to me. "I was in the south before. I am a dealer in art." With a small flourish he produced an embossed card:
F. Croce
Galleria d'Arte Moderna
Corso della Giovecca, 16
Ferrara
"Christopher is the man who rescued Max Cabot the other night," Clara told him.
"I'm afraid I didn't do too good a job," I said.
Croce clucked sympathetically.
"It was Max's own fault, of course," Clara said crossly. "If he hadn't gone around shouting about going to the police, it wouldn't have happened at all. Stupid man." She hadn't been at the dinner the other night, but of course the story wouldn't have taken long to get to Ferrara.
"They smashed both his legs, you know," I said. "He won't ever walk normally again."
I suppose that what I had in mind was to stir up a little sympathy for poor Max, but it was wasted on Clara. "The man doesn't understand the meaning of discretion, of simple prudence, " she said, going along with Di Vecchio and Luca. "Careless, thoughtless. He runs off at the mouth." This was accompanied by an illustrative twirling of fingers at her own mouth. "What about the other one, Scoccimarro? Wasn't he with you, too? Was he hurt?"
"No, we were on our way back from seeing him off at the station when it happened."
"Ugo's a good sort. If you ask him something he gives you the answer. You can tell him I said so."
"I will. I'm flying to Sicily on Saturday."
"You can also tell him he likes his grappa too much."
There was an awkward silence broken by Croce's clearing of his throat. "Well, signora, perhaps I go now. I can return—"
"Filippo is trying to convince me I can't live without some more pictures," Clara said, gesturing at three huge paintings propped along the walls, mounted but unframed. "What do you think, Christopher?"
I looked at them. Each was about seven feet by six and consisted of pallid, empty backgrounds on which a few lurid streaks of purple, orange, and bloody red had been whacked on with a trowel–thick and garish. Two of them were done on pegboard, with the holes clearly showing and even some hooks and brackets attached. They seemed to be examples of Comic Abstractionism, which Penny Hauck, Seattle's curator of contemporary painting, had once explained to me, It was, she said, an ironic Abstract Expressionist movement dedicated to demonstrating the absurdity of the Abstract Expressionist movement in today's image-ridden world.
I know, I don't understand it either. I'm just telling you what she said.
"Well?" Clara said.
If it were I, I thought, I could live without them. "They're not really the kind of thing I'm too informed about," I said delicately.
"Christopher's very discreet, Clara said. "He means he can't stand them."
I've been told (by Tony Whitehead, mainly) that I'm not catholic enough in my tastes, that I should strive to appreciate modern and postmodern art more and curb my anachronistic tendency to think in terms of better and worse.
"Taken in their own context," Tony once demanded, "can you stand there and say that the chipped urinals and rusty bottle racks of neo-Dadaism are any less valid, any less 'art' than the sculptures of Michelangelo, the paintings of Raphael? Can you?"
"You're damn r—" I'd begun.
"Of course you can't. You know damn well that art historians don't make that kind of culturally biased value judgment."
"But I'm an art historian and I make that kind of value judgment, so obviously they do," I'd said, which I'd thought was pretty good, but which didn't seem to strike him as much of an answer.
This is all by way of saying that Clara was right. I couldn't stand the stuff.
Croce tipped back his head and laughed indulgently. "You don't like these pictures so much?"