"The guy with the Rubens? I don't even know him."
I shook my head. "You're slipping. You told me you'd done business with him."
"I said—? "
"At dinner last week with Amedeo and Benedetto." Another fragment that had meant nothing at the time.
Max frowned, licked his lips, made a partial recovery. "Oh—well–business with him, sure, but I don't know him. I mean—"
"Max, there's no point in this. I'm going now."
"Chris, wait—"
I hesitated. There were loose ends. If he wanted to talk, I would stay a while longer.
"Let me ask you this," he said. "Can you really believe I'd try to kill you over something like this? To cover up some stupid little swindle?"
"It's pretty hard to believe, all right."
"Well, there you are."
"But I believe you'd kill me to cover up a murder."
"A mur—"
"You're the one who stole Clara's Rubens." It occurred to me that I was beginning to enjoy this. One more thing never to tell Louis.
"What? Out of my own shop? Jesus Christ, who's the one on the pills, you or me?"
"Your watchman caught you and you wound up killing him. Right?"
"I don't believe I'm hearing this. I mean, Giampietro, he was an old friend."
"So was I an old friend."
He swallowed and raised his hands, palms out; a placating gesture. "Chris, do me a favor and give this some thought before you do anything stupid. You know this doesn't add up."
"Oh, it adds up. Amedeo told me he called you right after the Pinacoteca break-in. He wanted to warn you there might be more thefts. It took me a long time to see what that meant."
He tried to laugh, not successfully. "All right, don't keep me in suspense. What does it mean?"
"It gave you a chance to jump on the bandwagon. You hopped out of bed, went downtown, and took Clara's painting from your own shop, figuring everybody would assume the same gang was involved. Which is exactly what everybody did."
I took a deep breath. I was positive I was right, but all the same I was somewhat in advance of the available facts here. And I wanted to get more information from him, not give it to him. "That list of names you had was just so much camouflage, wasn't it?"
"The hell it was," he said hotly. "Amedeo was on it, the two guys who installed the security system were on it—"
"I'm not saying you couldn't name five people, Max. I'm saying it was a smoke screen all the same."
"Smoke screen!" He gestured angrily at his legs. "You think those bastards did this to me because of some stupid smoke screen?"
I didn't have an answer for that yet.
My silence encouraged him. He pushed the bed tray roughly aside. The saucer clattered to the floor with the cigar. Ashes mingled with orange juice. "This gets nuttier by the second. First you walk in here and tell me I tried to kill you. Five minutes later you tell me I screwed around with one of Ugo's paintings and then forged this Terborch—"
"Terbrugghen, Max," I said. "Terbrugghen."
He shook his head impatiently. "Terborch, Terbrugghen. Then I'm supposed to be in some kind of scam with Mike Blusher, for God's sake. Five minutes after that you tell me I robbed a painting in my own shop and killed an old man who was like a father to me."
He licked his lips again and pulled himself a little higher on the bed. "Look, you said—I think you said—I tried to kill you to keep you from finding out about Ugo's picture. Only you also said the real reason was to keep you from finding out I stole the Rubens and killed Giampietro. Well, which is it? Am I missing something, or what? Is there supposed to be some connection there?"
"I don't know the connection yet," I said.
"Well, what do you know, for Christ's sake?" he asked, spilling over with righteous anger of his own. "That Amedeo called me to tell me about the break-in? He called every goddamn gallery-owner in Bologna! What the hell are you picking on me for?"
But I'd thought that through before I'd come. Sure, a lot of people could have piggybacked on the museum robbery and stolen the Rubens. For that matter, a lot of other people had access to Ugo's Uytewael before it was shipped to Sicily. And sure, Max wasn't the only person in Italy who knew Mike Blusher. And true, there were even other people—not very many, though—with the skill to forge the Terbrugghen, the van Eyck, the panel itself.
But who else was there to whom all these things applied? No one; only Max.
"Look, you're not seeing this right," he said when I ticked these points off to him. "Why—"
"Added to which, your ears almost fell off when I walked in here. That was enough all by itself."
He opened his mouth to argue some more, but gave up at last, sinking back against the pillows. "All right, Chris. What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to call Antuono. So long, Max." I headed for the door.
"Chris, wait."
I stopped.
"We go back a long way, Chris."
I said nothing. I preferred not to think about that.
"You have to believe I never wanted to hurt you," he said. "I tried like hell to keep you from going to Sicily, remember that? But you just wouldn't listen. . . . I just didn't know what else to do." His eyes gleamed. "I swear to God, Chris— I told him I didn't want you killed, not even hurt."
"Who'd you get to do it?" I asked. "Who put the bomb in my bag?"
He gave me a wry smile. "Bologna's like anyplace else. If you have the money and you know the right people, you can get anything done."
"Well, you sure seem to know the right people, Max."
"But the thing I want you to know—the important thing–is that I just wanted you scared off, just a loud noise, basically. At least tell me you believe that."
"I don't." I started for the door again.
"Wait—will you at least let me explain? Then go ahead and do whatever you think is right. I won't try to stop you."
I hung back.
"Come on, Chris, what is there to lose? I won't lie to you, I promise."
"All right, Max." But first I pulled the door open. I had seen too many movies, read too many books, where someone confronts the villain, announces that he is on his way to the police, and then hangs around to chat, with uniformly unfortunate results. I couldn't imagine Max doing me any harm in the condition he was in, but I was taking no chances.
"Sit down, will you?" he said. "I don't want to talk up at you."
I sat a good six feet away from him. "Go ahead."
It was a rambling, teary, self-justifying story that took almost half an hour. His difficulties had begun, he said, when his wife developed ovarian cancer. Bills had piled up, first from unsuccessful medical treatments, then from prodigiously expensive alternative therapies. In a year he was $150,000 in debt. His business was on the edge of failure, the creditors already squabbling over the proceeds. And more money was needed for a new course of ozone therapy and immunostimulants in Venezuela.
Then had come Amedeo Di Vecchio's lifesaving call in the middle of the night. There were art thieves afoot! Who knew who their next victim might be? As I'd surmised, Max had jumped at the unexpected chance, making off with Clara's Rubens and killing—accidentally killing, he said— the old watchman who'd come upon him in the act. Nine days later, while he was still trying to find a receiver for the picture, Giulia died. His crushing need for money abated. The painting was put in a bank vault in Genoa while he thought about what to do with it.
Max had a problem. Not the police, but the Mafia. They found it not at all amusing that someone had horned in on their meticulously executed robberies, to make a clumsy and amateurish heist of his own. They didn't like being exploited, and they'd let it be known that whoever was responsible might surely expect a word or two of reproach from them. When they found him.