But what did I know? Antuono already suspected Salvatorelli. And I still didn't know where the pictures were. We'd get nowhere, and Salvatorelli would find some other way of disposing of the paintings, perhaps for good.
". . . if you don't want to do it," he was ranting, "just say so, you understand me? I'll throw the damned things in the Reno and be done with them!"
That I doubted, but I couldn't chance it. "All right, I'll do it," I said. "But first I have to know—"
"You have to know shit," he said, and hung up.
Pietro drove a few blocks beyond the station to a neighborhood of nondescript apartment buildings. With featureless exteriors of raw concrete, they might have been built ten years ago or ten weeks ago. The ground floors were mostly occupied by small light-manufacturing operations— electrical switches, cardboard containers—or various kinds of wholesalers. All very functional and commonplace. It was hard to believe we were a five-minute walk from the colonnaded Renaissance streets of the city center.
We parked in front of a ten- or twelve-story building that looked like every other building on the block, and entered a marble lobby devoid of ornament or furniture. I tucked the address away in my mind: Via dell'Abbate 18. We took the elevator to the seventh story and walked to the end of a musty corridor that hadn't seen much recent use; it certainly hadn't seen much care. Pietro knocked on an unnumbered door.
"Who's there?" someone called from the other side.
"Pietro" was the mumbled reply.
What, no secret knock, no coded greeting? What kind of way was this to run a big-time heist?
The door was opened, first a crack and then all the way. Behind it—no surprise—was Ettore, Pietro's scarred, tough partner with the chewed-up ear and the mashed-down nose. Unlike his more easygoing associate, Ettore apparently hadn't forgiven me for inconveniencing him the previous week. There was no friendly "Ciao," only a malignant narrowing of his eyes and a peremptory jerk of the head to motion me in.
The moment I was inside, the hairs on the back of my neck lifted. The pictures were here, all right; I could smell the acrid, leather odor of old paint and ancient canvas. But all I could see, aside from some scattered, littered pieces of office furniture, was a nervous, buglike man with a polka- dot bow tie, who was standing near the single dirty window and watching us.
Again with no sense of surprise, I saw that it was Filippo Croce. If anything, I felt a little let down. "Is this the buyer?" I asked.
"Let's get to work," Ettore said. "Come on, dottore, earn your money. The sooner we start, the sooner we finish."
He's assuming I'm one of them, I realized. They think I'm being paid for this. Salvatorelli hadn't told them what's going on.
It had taken a few seconds for Croce to recognize me. "You're their expert?" he asked, advancing. "You're going to authenticate them?" His tone was part incredulity, part glee.
What was he so happy about? "Why not?" I responded gruffly. "You don't trust my judgment?" I saw no reason to disabuse anyone there of the notion that I was one of the crowd; just another crook. And I now understood why Croce, as buyer, had agreed to meet with, and be seen by, an unknown third party like me. He'd been told I was "their" expert, a bought, bent consultant.
"No, no, I trust it implicitly," Croce said. "It's just that I'm quite surprised. Delighted, really. I hope this is the first of many—"
"Let's get on with it," Ettore growled. "They're over here."
I went to the dusty table he'd gestured at, and involuntarily let out my breath. What I'd mistaken for an untidy pile of rubbish—rolled-up old blueprints or mechanical drawings— was, it appeared, an untidy pile of rolled-up Old Masters worth approximately $100,000,000. Not that Croce would be paying anything near that. There were also two painted panels, each about two feet by a foot-and-a-half.
I recognized the panels immediately. Two Madonnas Enthroned, one by Fra Filippo Lippi that had been taken from Clara's collection, and one by Giovanni Bellini from the Pinacoteca. They were a joy to see, their authenticity fairly jumping out at me. All the same, I thought that a little theater wouldn't hurt. I picked them up gingerly, peered at them from a couple of inches away, turned them over, muttered a little, and laid them carefully back on the table.
"Well?" Croce asked.
"They're the real thing."
"Ah!" he exclaimed. "I knew it the minute I saw them."
He sidled up to me, prattling away. "I saw them and I knew. I had faith, I had conviction. Basically, one appraises from the soul, from the innate, spiritual perception an art lover humbly brings to a timeless work of art. Don't you agree, dottore?"
I wondered if that was the way he appraised his Comic Abstractionists, too, "Maybe," I said. "But what do you need me for, then?"
"Faith," he said, "has its limits. This is a business matter."
"Come on, let's go, let's go," Ettore said. "We're in a hurry." He pointed at the rolled-up paintings. "Get on with it."
"That's, uh, not going to be possible," I said.
Croce looked shocked. "Not possible?"
"Huh?" Pietro said.
Ettore's battered face hardened in a way that made me back up a step. "What's the problem?" he asked.
The problem was the condition of the canvases. From the look of them they'd been rolled up two years ago and never unrolled since. Probably they'd been bound with string or rubber bands until today. The rolling-up had been done with care, thank God, but no matter how careful you are, you can't take a thick, stiff piece of fabric that's been out flat for centuries and curl it up into a cylinder without doing harm. The canvas buckles, and the old paint and varnish, friable as a layer of nail polish, splits and loosens. If you then try to unroll it two years later without proper preparation, you multiply the destruction tremendously.
Add this to the mutilation suffered when they'd been cut from their frames—whatever had been overhung by the lip of the frame had necessarily been sliced through—and the result was twenty-one irreplaceable masterpieces gravely damaged. Sure, they could always be repaired with modem techniques and materials that simulated the old ones, but that magic, indefinable beauty—what it was that had made them masterpieces in the first place—was beyond the reach of twentieth-century formulas and recipes.
"I can't unroll them," I said, and briefly explained.
Croce's foxy face clenched with suspicion. "I'm not paying for anything I haven't seen."
Ettore shrugged. "Please unroll them." He reached for the nearest one.
I grabbed his arm. He looked down at it, then up at me. "Don't do that, dottore."
I let go. I was sure he wouldn't need much of an excuse to take up where he'd left off on Via Ugo Bassi. A question of restoring honor, I supposed. He'd been on the pavement when Pietro came along and chucked me into the street.
"You unroll them," I said, "and they'll crack in a thousand places. They won't be worth anything to anybody."
The three of them looked at each other, not so sure anymore that I was one of the boys.
"I won't pay for anything that's damaged," Croce said. He nervously patted his gleaming hair, wiped his hands, and fingered the edge of one of the canvas cylinders, delicately bending up a small corner. It was as stiff as dried leather.
He bit his lip. "He's right," he said. "But you must understand I can't accept these without authentication. My instructions are clear."
We were at an impasse. Unrolling them was out of the question—I would have fought off Ettore and Pietro to prevent it—but I didn't want to see the deal fall through, because that would mean the pictures might go back underground for years, maybe even into the river, as Salvatorelli had threatened. I couldn't think of what to do. We all eyed each other uncertainly. Oddly enough, it was Pietro, surfacing briefly from his torpor, who resolved it.