Chapter 3
So that was how I'd gotten myself involved in the Bologna thefts, at least from Tony Whitehead's perspective, and I suppose he had a point. I thought about it while he went back to Steamer's counter to get us some more wine, and when he came back I had an answer for him.
"I'll make a deal with you."
He brightened. This was the kind of talk he understood.
"I'll brave the Mafia and act as a conduit to the carabinieri, or whatever I'm supposed to do," I said, "if you put that sixty thousand dollars back in the Renaissance and Baroque budget to buy that Boursse."
"No way, Chris. Can't be done. It's too late to reallocate the budget. Absolutely impossible. I couldn't shake loose a dime."
I was familiar with Tony's style. I waited.
"Maybe twenty thousand," he allowed after a few seconds.
I waited. I sipped my wine and watched the sea gulls. What we were negotiating for was enough money to buy a small domestic painting by Esaias Boursse, a nearly unknown seventeenth-century Dutch painter. Most of his work deserves its obscurity, but occasionally he created paintings of stunning beauty. Some of them were believed for decades to be by Vermeer, which gives you some idea.
The one I had in mind was owned by Ugo Scoccimarro, who was on my list of people to see in Italy, inasmuch as he was lending us four paintings for the exhibition. I had seen the Boursse several years before—an interior domestic scene, exquisitely done—and asked Scoccimarro if he would consider selling it. To my surprise he had said yes, as long as it was to a museum. The price was a nominal $60,000.
This year I had finally gotten Tony to include it in our acquisitions budget, only to have the money snatched away for something else a few weeks later. It was a common enough occurrence; I had merely sighed and put it out of my thoughts. But I was reminded of it when I went to Michael Blusher's warehouse. The panel on which the fake van Eyck had been painted was much like the panel on Scoccimarro's Boursse, which I had previously examined and researched thoroughly. (That was how I happened to know all about the marks made by seventeenth-century water-driven frame saws, etc., not that I'd tell Blusher. Or Calvin, for that matter.)
So the Boursse was on my mind again, and it had belatedly occurred to me that there might be a way to get it after all.
"All right," Tony said, "all right. Maybe I could get you thirty."
"Thirty's no help. It has to be sixty. "
Tony examined me over the rim of his wine glass, his eyes narrowed against the sun. "You used to be such a nice kid," he mused. "When did you get to be such a wheeler- dealer?"
I grinned. "Been taking lessons from the best of them, boss."
He smiled back. "Okay," he said. "It's a deal."
"Un cappuccino doppio, per piacere," I called to the white-jacketed barman who stood leaning against the wall and looking, if possible, sleepier than I was.
"Va bene, signore, subito."
Like a mechanical toy that had just had a coin inserted into it, he jerked to life at his espresso machine, an imposing rococo apparatus of chrome tubes, levers, and spouts that sat in gleaming splendor on the marble countertop. He placed a cup the size of a bucket under a spout and slowly, with fierce, firm-jawed concentration, pulled down one of the long levers. With a faint, drawn-out hiss of steam the velvety aroma of good coffee suffused the cafe, and the big cup was half- filled with espresso as black as ink. A generous dollop of milk was tossed, not poured, into a metal pitcher and held up to another spout, thin and snaky, and still another lever was depressed. There was another hiss while the pitcher was rotated and jiggled, and in a few seconds the milk was a steaming froth. The barman topped off the cup with it, then lifted a shaker of shaved chocolate and glanced keenly at me for further instructions. At my nod the chocolate was sprinkled over the milk with a showman's flourish and the completed production was borne to the table.
"Grazie, " I said.
"Prego, signore."
He went back to station himself behind the bar and, with a sigh, leaned against the wall once more, exhausted by his efforts. The internal mechanism switched off to await the next customer. All was still.
Ah, Italia. It was nice to be back. Not that there was any shortage of espresso bars in Seattle these days, but for the real drama, the true spectacle, of cappuccino-making, you had to come to the mother country.
It was Monday, a little after 4:00 P. M . Italian time; seven in the morning by my biological clock, and I hadn't slept the night before, what with long, gritty layovers in Chicago and Rome. (Is it my imagination, or was there a time in the remote past, a time without "hubs," when you could actually fly directly from one place to another?) There was going to be a "small, informal" reception and dinner for me in three hours, and I was trying to perk up my sluggish nervous system with a fix of caffeine. I was also concentrating on an article in the International Herald Tribune, which I'd picked up at the airport and skimmed during the taxi ride to Bologna.
The piece began on an inside column on page four, and I'd overlooked it in the taxi, but it had my total attention now.
STOLEN RUBENS ON WAY BACK TO ITALY
Seattle—Peter Paul Rubens' Portrait of Hélène Fourment, conservatively valued at $1,500,000, will soon be back in the hands of its Italian owner, Clara Cozzi, almost two years after its disappearance from a Bologna restorer's workshop.
The theft of the Rubens, one of a trio of art burglaries in and around Bologna in the early morning hours of June 22, 1987, resulted in the murder of Ruggero Giampietro, 71, a night guard at the workshop. Along with five other paintings stolen from Mrs. Gozzi's palatial Ferrara home and some eighteen from Bologna's Pinacoteca Nazionale, the picture had been the object of a frustrating international search effort.
The seventeenth-century masterpiece was discovered unharmed by Michael Blusher, 46, a Seattle importer of objets d'art.
I paused. Just how reliable was this article? Could a reporter who referred to the stuff that Blusher imported as "objets d'art" be trusted? I took my first long, grateful swallow of coffee and continued reading.
Mr. Blusher, president of Venezia Trading Company, found the painting last week in a large shipment from Bologna. Attempts to determine how it got into the shipment have met with defeat.
"I knew right away I had something special," Mr. Blusher said. "The first thing I did was get a guard, which I paid for out of my own pocket. Then I yelled for help."
The help arrived in the form of Christopher Norgren, 34, Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art at the Seattle Art Museum. Mr. Norgren immediately identified the two-by-three-foot picture as the stolen Rubens, a determination subsequently verified by other art authorities. American and Italian customs agencies have worked together to minimize bureaucratic delay, and Mrs. Gozzi's agents have already arrived in Seattle for the purpose of bringing the painting back. Mr. Blusher will receive a substantial reward, according to a spokesman from Assicurazioni Generali of Milan, which insures Mrs. Gozzi's collection.
A second object unexplainably included in the shipment was a panel bearing the purported signature of the fifteenth-century Dutch artist Jan van Eyck. This was denounced by Mr. Norgren as a forgery, although he identified the wood on which it was painted as an authentic Dutch art panel several hundred years old.
None of the twenty-four other paintings from the three thefts has been reliably located, although rumors abound. The total value of the missing objects is in the vicinity of $100,000,000.