"Never mind, don't tell me." His eyes fluttered and closed. "Oh, God."
I leaned closer to the bed, put my hand on his wrist. "Max, listen. I understand why you don't want anything to do with this anymore. I'd feel the same way if I were you. Look, those five names you were going to pass along to Antuono—or anything else for that matter—I could tell him for you. Your name wouldn't have to come up. How can you just let them get away with it? What about Ruggero Giampietro? Just let them get away with murdering him when he got in their way? Max, I wouldn't tell Antuono where I got the information if you didn't want me to."
His eyes had remained pressed closed. He was breathing through his mouth.
"Max?"
"You know," he said softly without opening his eyes, "maybe I could use a nurse after all."
I had dinner again with Calvin. Then we walked back to my hotel for coffee and dessert in the bar. As we passed the front desk the clerk waved me down.
"A message for you, signor Norgren."
He pulled a form from a slot behind him and handed it to me. Tony Whitehead had telephoned. From Tokyo. I was to call him back at the Imperial Hotel. That seemed odd. He had telephoned just last night from Seattle, full of concern about my condition. It had gotten me out of bed, and we had talked for over half an hour.
I asked the clerk to have cappuccinos sent to my room and took the elevator up with Calvin.
"What's he doing in Tokyo?" I asked.
"Thinking about putting in a bid on that late Tokugawa screen, I guess."
"Good-bye, hundred and fifty thousand," I said.
Calvin peeked at the note. "The Imperial Hotel," he read admiringly. "The guy really knows how to travel. No dumps for Tony."
The glance at the hallway with which he accompanied this was patently disparaging. The Europa wasn't Calvin's kind of hotel. Nor mine. It was a commercial hotel, a big barn of a place, clean enough but shabby when you looked too closely at anything. I had made a reservation at a pleasant hotel called the Roma, where I always stay, but there had been a mixup and no room was waiting for me. With a big trade fair going on—Bologna has a lot of them—I'd been lucky to get this place. Of course, Calvin wouldn't have approved of the cozy, unpretentious Roma, either. He was staying at the four-star Internazionale a few blocks away.
I opened the door to my room, motioned him into one of the two worn armchairs, and picked up the telephone.
"Wait a minute," I said. "It's ten-thirty. Tony could have called hours ago. What time is it in Tokyo?"
The question delighted him, giving him as it did an opportunity to employ his high-tech wristwatch. He did something to his ratcheted safety bezel, pressed a micro-button on the mini keyboard, and consulted one of the dual LCD displays
"Well, um, it's two-thirty in Karachi," he said slowly. “A.M.”
"Hey, that's good to know, Calvin. I guess we better not call anybody in Karachi."
"Wait a minute, wait a minute." He fussed some more with the watch. "Tokyo! Ha! It's eight-thirty in the morning. Tomorrow, according to this." He hesitated. "Or is it yesterday? Which way does the international date line go?"
"I don't know, but we better get it straight. I don't see much point in calling him yesterday."
Calvin grumbled something and I punched in the thirteen digits it took to reach room 1804 at the Imperial Hotel.
"Tony? It's Chris."
"Everything okay there?" he asked. "You didn't get run over again or anything?"
"No. Oh, I've had a few interesting adventures with the Eagle of Lombardy, but that can wait till I get back."
"Who the hell is the Eagle of Lombardy?"
"Colonnello Cesare Antuono—the man who was so anxious to hear any shreds of information I might be willing to pass along?"
"Oh, Antuono, sure. Are you going to tell me what that tone of voice is supposed to mean?"
"Come on, Tony, the guy didn't have any use for me. The further I stay away from him the happier he is. That business about meeting with him to report 'pertinent' information— you set that up."
"Me? What for?"
"To get the museum some good press, I suppose. You contacted the FBI to offer my services, and the FBI contacted him, so he went along with it. But he didn't want to."
"Chris—"
"Tony, he told me."
"I don't give a damn what he told you. I'm telling you this FBI guy called me—I can't think of his name—Mr. . . . I can't remember. Out of the blue. Watfield, it was. Then he came over to my office. No, Sheffield. He told me he'd just gotten a call from New York, I mean from D.C., that this Colonel Antuono in Rome was looking for all the help he could get—that is, he was going to be assigned to a case in Bologna, and seeing as how we were involved in the art scene there—in Bologna, I mean . ."
Now Tony, as I mentioned earlier, has been known to deviate from the unadorned facts in the interest of the greater good, but I thought I knew him well enough to sense from his voice when I was being led astray, even over the telephone. When Tony lied, he was straightforward and fluent; it was when he was telling the truth that he tended to trip over his tongue and sound shifty. Which meant, unless he was being even more devious than I gave him credit for, that this was probably the truth. Which meant that Antuono had lied about it; he had asked the FBI for my help, then told me that he hadn't.
Which made no sense at all, whichever way I came at it.
". . . is all I know about it," Tony finished up defensively.
"I guess it was just a misunderstanding," I said.
"Of course. We're dealing with two different languages here. You didn't think," he said, sounding hurt, "that I'd purposely mislead you, do you?"
That was another question, best left alone. "Tony, what am I calling you about?"
"Well, I've had some news from Seattle I thought you might be interested in. You know that painting of Mike Blusher's—"
"Calvin told me. Blusher donated the reward to the museum."
"Not that one, the other one. The van Eyck. It—"
"The fake van Eyck," I said.
"Well, the thing is, it isn't a fake, not exactly. It—"
"What? Of course it's a fake! The techniques are eighteenth-century at the earliest, to say nothing of the craquelure, which is—"
"Will you let me say something, for Christ's sake? The van Eyck painting is a fake, yes. But Blusher took your advice and took it into the university to have it examined, and the panel that it's painted over turns out not to be a fake. Eleanor Freeman—"
"Of course the panel's not a fake! It's early seventeenth- century, manufactured for the Guild of St. Luke in Utrecht. I told Blusher it was real. I told you it was real—"
"You told me it was real," supplied Calvin, who was listening to my side of the conversation from his chair.
"I told Calvin it was real. Everybody agrees it's real. The International Herald Tribune says it's real—"
"Time says it's real," Calvin supplied.
"Time says it's real—" I said, then stopped. I hadn't heard anything from Tony for a while. Now there was a long, full sigh, deeply indrawn, slowly let out. An expensive one, considering that it was delivered from Tokyo to Bologna.
"Are you actually going to let me say something now?" he asked. "Like maybe two complete sentences?"
"I'm sorry, Tony, go ahead."
"In a row?"
I laughed. "What did Eleanor come up with?"
"Chris, the X rays show a painting under the van Eyck."
And not just any painting, either. Eleanor Freeman, the university radiographer-art historian whose specialty was Old Master fluoroscopic analysis, had concluded that the painting beneath the forged van Eyck "appeared in all probability" to be Hendrik Terbrugghen, an important seventeenth‑century Dutch painter and a member of the Utrecht Guild from 1616 until he died in 1629.