I nodded my commiseration. "It happens."
It does, too, unbelievable as it may seem. Clara's case was far from the first example. The most recent one, as far as I know, happened a few years ago on Christmas Eve when a priceless group of pre-Columbian artifacts was taken from the great National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. How did the thieves get in? They got in because the alarm system was switched off. How did they know it would be switched off? They knew because it had been switched off ever since it had broken down three years earlier.
"I leave the alarms on all the time now," she said grimly.
I didn't doubt it. The National Museum of Anthropology does, too.
Chapter 9
I'd barely had time to put my feet up after getting back to my hotel room when the telephone rang.
"Hi." The familiar voice on the other end said. "I'm here. "Where've you been?"
"Uh . . . Calvin?" It took me a second to remember that Calvin Boyer, the Seattle Art Museum's marketing director, the man who had hustled me off to Mike Blusher's warehouse, was coming to Bologna to take care of his end of the arrangements for the show. The plans we'd laid in Seattle only last week seemed from another lifetime.
"Right, sure," he said. "Let's get together. We ought to go over some stuff."
"Where are you, downtown?"
"Yeah, I'm staying at the Internazionale, a couple of blocks from you."
We agreed to meet in half an hour, at 6:00, at the Caffè Re Enzo, a café-bar in the arched stone colonnade of the Podesta Palace, the long, fifteenth-century building that forms the northern side of the Piazza Maggiore. It was a place we'd had drinks in when we'd been in Bologna on a preliminary visit six months earlier.
It was only a five-minute walk for me, but I headed right there, chose a good table looking out over the piazza, and ordered an espresso, which was quickly brought, along with the usual tall glass of water. Then I settled down, my head tipped back against a carved rosette on one of the ancient, peeling columns, to wait for Calvin and take in the scene.
Bologna's Piazza Maggiore is enormous, one of the world's great public squares. Offhand, the only open civic space I can think of in Italy that is larger is the one in front of St. Peter's, and this one is livelier if not quite as handsome. Directly across from me, some 500 feet away, was the hulking Basilica of San Petronio. To my right, making the piazza's western border, the Palazzo Communale (with Colonel Antuono no doubt in his stuffy little "office" at that very moment, happily ferreting away his dog-eared folders in his dog-eared cardboard boxes). On my left another long, porticoed building, the Pavaglione, completed the perimeter of the square. Five big tour buses stood next to one another at one corner of the basilica, hardly noticeable in the vast space.
And in the center, milling about on six acres of stone- block pavement, were the people. Ordinarily, I don't go in much for people-watching, but when I'm in Italy I make an exception. The scene before me was a bigger version of the one that can be found in the main plaza of any Italian town in the late afternoon of a fine day. At about five o'clock you can count on groups of talkative old men beginning to materialize. I've yet to make out where it is they all come from. The square just gradually fills up, like a swimming pool being fed through a hole in its bottom. After a while, women and younger people also appear and get into the act in smaller, marginally less voluble numbers.
It always gives me the feeling that the curtain's just gone up on a crowd scene in a Donizetti opera, that it's all being choreographed for my benefit, and that in another moment everyone will burst into glorious song. They never do, of course, but they gather into noisy clusters, talking, laughing, arguing, jabbing each other with their index fingers, eloquently smacking their own foreheads and lifting their hands to the sky. Every now and then—at least to the eyes (and ears) of a phlegmatic American observer—they give every appearance of being on the verge of physically attacking each other, only to have the crisis dissolve into laughter and good fellowship.
Add to this a few hundred kids chasing the whirring flocks of pigeons that inhabit the place, and a few hundred tired, overexcited tourists trying to keep up with tour guides who are brandishing red or yellow umbrellas and urging them on with exhortations in German, Japanese, and French, and you have a bracing spectacle that's worth a trip to Bologna in itself. Not something I'd want to do every evening, you understand, but once a visit anyway.
Calvin showed up as I was finishing my coffee. "Six hundred years working on that church, and they still can't get it right," he said, slipping into a chair across from me. He was looking at the Basilica of San Petronio, begun in 1390 and, as Calvin had pointed out, with its marble facade not yet completed.
I laughed. "You can't hurry these things." A profundity worthy of Benedetto Luca himself.
Calvin took his first good look at my face. "Jeez, what happened to you? What did you do, get run over by a train?"
"A car," I said, and explained.
He listened, his chubby, rabbity face gloomy and intent, then thought a long time before speaking. "If you work it right," he said, "our workmen's comp insurance ought to cover you."
That was why he was a marketing director and I was just a curator.
"It's okay, Calvin. My own policy'll pick up most of it."
He shrugged. "Suit yourself. Well, I'm glad you're okay."
The waiter appeared. Calvin ordered a Cynar, one of those peculiarly bitter European aperitifs along the order of Ugo's Jazz! They claim it's made from artichokes, and I don't doubt it. Somewhere, somehow, Calvin had actually gotten to like it. I asked for a martini, which in Italy brings you a small glass of Martini-brand vermouth.
"So," Calvin said after his first sip. "Did you hear about Mike Blusher's reward?"
"I heard he's getting $150,000."
"Correction, we're getting $150,000."
"Come again?"
"Blusher's donating the money to the museum."
I was stunned. "To us? All of it?"
"Every bit. In appreciation."
"For what?"
Calvin grinned. "I'm not too clear on that part. For helping him get the publicity he wanted, I guess. And this is getting him even more. He actually made Time this week. Or, who knows, maybe he just felt guilty taking all that money for doing nothing. Tony said not to ask too many questions, just take it and say thank you."
"That I can believe. Well," I said with a sigh, "I guess Blusher's not pulling anything after all."
"Well, sure," Calvin said, blinking his surprise, "what did you think?"
For all his pitchman qualities, Calvin is at heart an innocent. It's one of the things I like about him.
"No matter," I said. Why harass Calvin with the complex and nefarious schemes Clara and I had been hatching in Blusher's behalf? None of them held water anymore anyway. A guy who gave away $150,000 to which he was legitimately entitled could hardly be accused of pulling a fast one.
So why didn't I trust him, even now?
A gusty wind had whipped up. A square of tissue paper, the kind local vendors used for making little cones to wrap fruit, blew up onto the table and caught on the stem of Calvin's glass. He brushed it away. "Blusher followed your advice on the other one, by the way."
"What advice?"
"You told him to take that van Eyck—"
"That fake van Eyck."
"—in to Dr. Freeman to have it X-rayed."
"Oh, yeah. But I didn't tell him to, I just said he could if he wanted to. What did she find?"
"I don't know. I haven't heard."