"Well, she's not going to come up with anything, or at least not what Blusher's hoping for. There's no Rembrandt or Titian under that van Eyck, Calvin. Nobody paints over a—"
"I know, I know. You told me. Hey, you want to go get some dinner?"
I nodded. The wind was beginning to make things unpleasant, not just because it was sucking little whirlpools of litter and grit up onto the table, but because it had driven many of the old men from the square into the protection of the long portico. They had not noticeably adjusted their volume, so that what had been a charmingly boisterous clamor now sounded like a war happening a few feet away.
I waved to the waiter. "Il conto, per favore."
"Watch this, watch this," Calvin whispered to me. He pulled out a thin black calculator the size of a checkbook. It had what I had come to recognize as the look of one of his airline gift-catalogue toys.
"Automatic currency converter?" I asked.
He shook his head.
"Expense analyzer and recorder?"
He shook his head again. He was punching keys and concentrating hard, his tongue sticking out.
When I'd paid the waiter, Calvin motioned for him to stay, punched another key, and held out the calculator to him. The waiter looked confused. Calvin kept sticking out the calculator. The waiter glanced at me for help. "Prego. . . ?"
I shrugged. I didn't know what Calvin was doing, either.
Finally, the waiter took the calculator from him and looked at the display. He smiled politely and looked at me again. This time it was he who shrugged.
Calvin took it back and showed it proudly to me. The display said "WHERE IS / DOV'È, DOVE C'È"
He went back to punching buttons while the waiter remained restively at the table. There were a lot of people waiting to be served. "Calvin," I said, "I can ask—"
"Sh, sh." He made a mistake, muttered, hit a few more buttons and grinned. This time he showed the display to me first: "A GOOD RESTAURANT / UN BUON RISTORANTE,'
"Ah," said the waiter again, and began to reply.
"No," Calvin said, and tapped the calculator. "Here."
He handed it back to the waiter. "It works both ways," he told me proudly.
"Calvin," I said, "he's in a hurry. There are a million people here, and he's the only waiter. Why don't you just let him tell us?" According to Clara Gozzi's standards, my Italian might stink, but this I could handle.
Calvin did some grumbling about the calculator's costing $170, but pocketed it with reasonably good grace while the waiter told us about a restaurant a few blocks away on Via Nazario Sauro, then quickly made his getaway.
To get there we crossed the Piazza Nettuno, a small square named for the famous sixteenth-century fountain by Giovanni da Bologna in its center, a flamboyant, thirty-foot high wedding cake of bronze and stone topped by a nude, muscular, triumphantly male Neptune. At its base sirens riding dolphins squeezed their ample breasts, producing five jets of water from each nipple. Four sirens, forty streams. Michelin demurely describes the whole thing as having "a rather rough vigour."
Calvin paused, studying the sirens appreciatively. "Oh, Debbie said to say hi," he said absently, then flushed. Debbie was the young woman who handled incoming calls in the staff offices, the one Blusher had inquired about in his genteel way, "the one with the knockers." You didn't have to be Louis to figure out the association.
He fumbled in his pockets and came up with an envelope. "She gave me your messages, the personal ones anyway."
I opened the envelope and pulled out two telephone message slips. The first was from "Mr. Poulsen." The message was "Can't get to you till 5/1." I turned slightly away from Calvin, suddenly feeling naked. Five days gone, and only two personal calls, one of which was from the plumber who was supposed to repair my garbage disposal unit. It didn't say a lot for my life outside of work.
The other was more personal, but it didn't do anything to raise my spirits, either. The caller was described as "Anne." Under MESSAGE Debbie had written: "No message. Just wanted to say hi."
Anne.
I stuffed the envelope into my pocket. "Come on," I said a little roughly, "let's go find this restaurant."
The meal with Calvin was not what you would call sparkling. He told me his plans for the next couple of days: meetings with Di Vecchio's staff at the Pinacoteca and with Luca. I told him about mine: a visit to Trasporti Salvatorelli in the morning, a meeting of my own at the Pinacoteca in the afternoon, and then, the following day, off to visit Ugo for the weekend.
Calvin was talkative, as always, but I had turned gloomy and uncommunicative, and after a while he tired of carrying on a conversation with himself. We parted company early, and Calvin went off to to whatever Calvin does at night in unfamiliar cities. I went back to my room at the Europa and moped.
You will have noticed by now that there's no woman in this story. Well, sure, there's Clara Gozzi, but you know what I mean. This absence of a Significant Female Other in my life was not the result of personal persuasion. It was just that things hadn't been going well for me in that regard lately.
My divorce, only eight months old, had come after ten years of a marriage that I thought was going just fine. I loved Bev, I was happily faithful to her, I enjoyed her company. We laughed a lot, our lovemaking was terrific, we liked the same music, the same food, the same sports, the same people.
And then one Saturday, when I got back from looking over a Mantegna Head of St. Paul that the museum had just gotten from Geneva, she wasn't there. No note on the refrigerator door, no clothes cleaned out of the closet, no nothing. She was just gone. This, mind you, after we'd casually agreed that morning on the Chinese restaurant we were going to for dinner. Two horrible days followed; repeated telephone calls to the police, the highway patrol, the hospitals. There was even one awful visit to the morgue. In the end I found out she'd moved in with a stockbroker, a guy I'd never even heard of. Moreover—worse, in a way—she'd been having an affair with him for a year and a half completely without my knowledge or even my suspicion.
Which shows you what can happen when you're dumb enough to leave your beautiful wife home alone while you spend your weekends blissfully buried in the fifteenth century. Oh, later on, when I thought about it, I could see that we'd been drifting apart a little over the previous year or so, but the truth is, at the time, I just didn't have a clue.
The long divorce negotiations, miserable as they were, at least had the virtue of killing the feelings I still had for Bev. But they went on so long, and I got so tired of our carping at each other through our lawyers, and niggling over every piece of furniture, every book, every tape, that in the end I gave almost everything to her, and was relieved to be done with it. The only thing that was important to me that I wound up keeping was our dog, Murphy, which, in effect, I traded for our new $8,000 car.
Impossible, you think? I'm exaggerating, you say? The system doesn't work that way? Well, think twice before you get divorced is all I can say.
The worst of it was, Murph got killed by a car a month later, so I came out of it with nothing at all that was worth anything.
And I loved that damn dog.
Now, while all this was going on, I took on a temporary European assignment, working with the Department of Defense to help put together a traveling exhibition of Old Masters paintings that had been looted by the Nazis in World War II, and later recovered for their owners by the American military. Anne Greene was an Air Force captain, a community liaison officer, assigned to the exhibition, to do whatever community liaison officers do. We met at the U.S. Air Force installation in Berlin, where the show was administratively headquartered.