You will understand when I tell you that I felt very much alone at that moment, and scared, too. Big, angry, powerful men and brutal weapons seemed to fill the anonymous little room. I felt like a character in a Kafka story, intimidated and confused and acutely aware that the situation was not under my control. But I was offended, too, and that stiffened my spine. I stared steadily back at him, waiting for him to let go of my jacket.
When he did, I spoke. "I don't know anything about a bomb," I said as coolly as I could. "My bag was left in the lobby of the Hotel Europa for an hour this morning. This was at the instruction of a Mr. Marchetti—or somebody who called himself Mr. Marchetti—the assistant manager."
"You left it open?" Even the skepticism was an improvement. At least he was listening.
"Unlocked. There wasn't anything valuable in it. Look, I'm an art curator. I'm here working with the Pinacoteca and the Ministry of Fine Arts. The carabinieri will vouch for me. You can talk to Colonel Antuono."
His heavy gray eyebrows unclenched themselves for the first time. "You're working with Colonel Antuono?"
"Uh . . . well, yes, you could say that."
It was delivered with less than perfect assurance. The heavy eyebrows drew ominously together again.
Antuono had given me his card, on which he'd penciled his Bologna telephone number. I took it out of my wallet and handed it to the officer. "Go ahead and call him."
There was a telephone on the wall. He went to it at once, but turned and leveled the card at me before picking up the receiver. "If you're wasting our time, if one of my men is harmed . . ."
"Look, if I knew there was a bomb in that bag, do you think I'd calmly walk up, put it on the X-ray counter, and just hang around waiting to see what happened?"
He considered this for a moment, then picked up the telephone and spoke without dialing. "Cristin, get me a Colonel Cesare Antuono, two-three-nine-two-eight-five. I'll take it in the west office."
The receiver was slammed back into its holder. "You wait here," he told me, and headed for the door.
"I have a ten-fifteen plane," I said, not very hopefully.
"Not today." He turned to the guards. "Stefano, you stay here. Be careful. Don't speak to him. Call me each ten minutes until I return. Maurizio, I want you outside. Both of you, be alert; we don't yet know what's happening."
Stefano followed his instructions to the letter. He pushed one of the chairs against the far wall, about ten feet from me, and sat down to watch me relentlessly, holding the semi-automatic in his lap, one hand on the barrel, the other at the finger guard; a posture that did not encourage conversation. His eye never left me, even during the telephonic check-ins. There were four calls in all; forty slow, silent minutes, lots of time to think.
With more than enough to think about. Somebody wanted me dead. Enough to blow up a few hundred innocent people who happened to be on the same airplane. There were other possibilities, of course: that someone else on the plane was the target, or that this was a terrorist action not aimed at any individual, and that—in either case—the selection of my bag for the bomb was random, or if not quite random, then merely a matter of convenience and accessibility.
The second telephone call hadn't been made yet before I rejected this as not credible. If I were just a tourist, or on some other business, then maybe it might have happened that way. But I'd been asking a lot of questions about the thefts, I'd been seen with Antuono, and I'd already been involved in a murderous street assault—during which, as Max had pointed out, I'd seen the faces of our attackers. I'd even tried to identify them at the police station. With all of that going on, it was asking too much to treat the finding of a bomb in my bag as no more than an unhappy coincidence. There was no question in my mind that I was the target, and that it was related to the thefts.
Yet the idea of killing so many people just to get to me was so monstrous I couldn't make myself believe that either. What could I know that anyone found so dangerous? Max's idea that I could identify the two thugs didn't hold water; I'd already failed to do it once. Did someone think he'd told me the names of the five people who knew his security arrangements? Well, he hadn't, not that I hadn't asked, and even if he had, how was anyone to know I hadn't already been to Antuono with it? So what did I know? What did someone think I knew? Or was someone afraid of what I might find out? Well, like what, for instance? And if it wasn't something I knew or might find out, then what was it?
This got me nowhere. I took a different tack. Who knew that I was flying to Sicily this morning? That question gave me more answers than I knew what to do with. When I thought back over my conversations of the last few days I realized I'd blabbed to everyone about it. I'd told Salvatorelli, I'd told Luca and Di Vecchio, I'd told Clara, I hadn't missed anyone. I'd told Max, I'd told Calvin, I'd told Tony. Not that I entertained any suspicions about the last three, but who knew whom else they'd mentioned it to?
Of them all, in fact, there was no one, even Salvatorelli, whom I could seriously cast as a murderer in my mind. Certainly not as a mass murderer. Yet one of them must have . . .
Croce. Filippo Croce, the sleazy art dealer from Ferrara, the man with the pointy-toed shoes who'd come to Antuono with his story about the Pittura Metafisica paintings in the Salvatorelli warehouse. Had he still been in the room when I'd told Clara I'd be visiting Ugo, or had he already left? No, he'd been there. It had been right at the beginning; he hadn't yet delivered his harangue on revolutionary perspectival structure. Filippo Croce .. .
When the door finally opened, it wasn't the senior officer who came in, but Colonel Antuono, in his natty uniform, but looking cross and tired in spite of it. "You can go," he muttered to Stefano, who rose meekly and left. I heaved a sigh, grateful to see the last of the semiautomatic.
"You understand I have no jurisdiction here, in this matter of the bomb," he said. "My official concern is with the pictures."
"I understand." Whatever the reason he was there, I was glad to see him. Under these circumstances he qualified as an old friend.
He pulled the vacated chair up to the table and wearily sat down. The tunic strained across his stooped shoulders. He undid a button. He tapped slowly on the table, regarding me with something close to resignation.
"Why do you do these things?" he said at last, very quietly.
"Do what? What did I do?" I said, not that he seemed to expect an answer. "All I know is, at eight o'clock this morning I got a call from a man who said he was Mr. Marchetti, the assistant—"
"There is no Mr. Marchetti. The name of the assistant manager is Pugliese."
"Well, sure, it was just a ploy. I've already figured that out. It was just a way for someone to put a bomb in my bag." When I heard my own words, I came perilously close to letting out a nervous giggle. What was I doing in a situation like this?
Antuono wondered the same thing. "And why," he asked with testy patience, "would someone wish to do such a thing?"
"I have no idea why, but I think I might know who." I told him what I'd been thinking about when he came in.
"Again you persist with Croce," he said when I'd finished. "Why would Filippo Croce want to do you harm?"
"I don't know, goddammit! Didn't I just say that?" I was getting a little testy myself. It hadn't been my idea of a wonderful morning, and the idea that someone had tried to end my life—and was likely to try again—was still filtering through the unreality of the last hour. "But he was right there when I told Clara I'd be on that plane."