"I'm really going to give him an earful," he declared, loosening his belt a notch. "There's a lot I can tell him."
The look that passed between Di Vecchio and Luca was a dark one this time. Di Vecchio glanced warily around at the other tables. Luca slowly licked his lips, frowning.
Di Vecchio laid a slim, cautionary hand on Max's forearm. "Massimiliano, you have to be careful. You can't go around shouting things like that."
"Someone might overhear," Luca said.
"I'm not shouting," Max said, and promptly lowered his voice. "Well, maybe a little. Anyway, what do I care if people overhear? I haven't made a secret of it." He made an impatient gesture. "Am I the only one who wants the rest of those pictures found?"
Di Vecchio made soothing noises. "Of course not. We don't say you shouldn't cooperate with the police. Don't you think I'm going to cooperate? But do you see me going around advertising it?"
"Think," Luca said somberly. "Think about what happened to Paolo Salvatorelli, God rest his soul."
"Paolo Salvatorelli?" I repeated. "Is he connected with Trasporti Salvatorelli?"
"Of course," Luca said. "The two brothers founded it; Paolo and Bruno."
At this point I got what is commonly, and accurately, referred to as a sinking sensation. Trasporti Salvatorelli was the firm I was counting on to ship thirty-two paintings worth over $40,000,000 from Italy to the United States. I had an appointment with them on Friday to confirm the arrangements and sign the papers. They had been recommended unreservedly by Max, who did most of his shipping through them, and by the Pinacoteca and the Ministry of Fine Arts— that is to say, Di Vecchio and Luca—both of whom had a lot more to lose than I did, since most of the paintings belonged to the state. Luca had, in fact, generously assigned one of his deputies to the onerous chore of grinding through the preliminary paperwork with Salvatorelli, which would have otherwise fallen to me. For this, I probably owed him my sanity.
So far, I had no cause for complaint, but lately the Salvatorelli name seemed to be cropping up in ways that did nothing for my confidence. Accidentally shipping Clara Gozzi's Rubens to Blusher without even knowing they had it, for example. And now, if I was understanding Luca, one of the two brothers who ran the firm had been done in by the Mob. You will understand when I say that I was starting to get just the least little bit apprehensive.
"What did happen to Paolo?" I asked woodenly.
They explained. It was a matter of common supposition that the Salvatorelli brothers had some knowledge of the art thefts of two years earlier—
I came halfway out of my chair. "What? We're trusting those paintings to—"
Luca's sonorous, calming laughter bathed me. "Knowledge of," he said. "That is not to imply any connection with. They are simply in a position to hear things, you understand."
"They're wholly reliable," Di Vecchio said. "We've used them many times. We've trusted our Guido Renis to them, and our Raphael. There's no cause for concern, believe me."
I settled back, not entirely pacified, while Luca, with some help from Di Vecchio, filled in the pieces: Despite these suppositions of "knowledge," the notorious Captain Cala, for all his sound and fury, had been no more inclined to seriously pursue the subject with the Salvatorellis than with anyone else. But Colonel Antuono was a different matter, and expectations had risen that the brothers would be subjected to painstaking interrogation when he took over. There were even rumors that Paolo had set up a secret contact with Colonel Antuono on his own. At that point the underworld had taken matters into its own hands.
Max brought his lengthy story to its point. "He was shot," he said to me with a shrug.
"Killed," Luca emended gravely.
"Not merely killed," Di Vecchio said, his small mouth twisted by a grimace of repugnance. "He was found in the Margherita Gardens with a cork stuffed between his lips. There were one hundred and sixteen bullets in his body."
"My God," I said.
"I have a friend," Luca said, his creased face grim, "the physician in charge of the mortuary. He told me that the bullets fell out of his body and rattled on the table like beads from a rosary." He let the unsettling image sink in a moment. "And now, of course, his brother, Bruno, will say nothing. Who can blame him?"
But even this wasn't enough to subdue Max entirely. "Look," he said, "nobody would hurt me. Paolo Salvatorelli was one of them. Everybody knows that. He could tell secrets, inform on them, break the code—"
Di Vecchio stiffened in the way that many Italians do when the Mafia comes into the conversation, even indirectly. "The code?" he repeated coolly. A long time before, he had made a point of telling me that the long arm of the Mafia no longer reached to Bologna. "The spirit and collective solidarity of the cooperative movement have eliminated it here," he had informed me. Amedeo Di Vecchio frequently sounded like the dedicated Communist he was.
"Hell, forget it," Max mumbled, a little bellicose now. "Don't worry about me, I can take care of myself just fine." He got up to head for the restroom with the doggedly straight, precise stride of a man who's had too much to drink and is therefore bent on showing how steady he is on his feet.
"Ah, but can he take care of himself?" Luca asked doubtfully, watching him go. "Massimiliano has many virtues, but is prudence one of them?"
"Oh, I think Max is pretty prudent," I said. "He's had a little wine tonight, but—"
"When the theft at the Pinacoteca occurred," Di Vecchio interrupted, "the first thing I did was to telephone the other local museum directors and some of the more prominent gallery owners to tell them to be on their guard. These things often occur in clusters, you know."
"I know."
"I awoke Massimiliano from sleep. When I warned him he could be next, his response was to laugh." Di Vecchio allowed himself a thin, retributive smile of his own. "The only painting of value in his shop, he informed me, was Clara's Rubens, and it was unlikely that the thieves would know about that or even bother with it, given the riches they had already helped themselves to at the museum. No, they were probably already on their way to Rome. What did he do? Nothing. He went back to sleep, simply leaving the useless Giampietro to his task." He twirled his wine glass irritably by the stem. "Do you call that prudence?"
"No, indeed," Luca answered for me.
"What about Clara Gozzi?" I asked. "Did you warn her?"
"No," Di Vecchio said defensively. "Why would it occur to me they would go to Ferrara?"
Max came back looking fresher. He'd washed his face and dampened and combed his hair, and I caught a whiff of the cologne the Notai stocked in its restroom.
He was more conciliatory, too. "Look," he said amicably, "all I meant was, what can I do that anyone would be so afraid of? I don't have any inside secrets. I can just tell what happened to me, that's all—the same as you. It's my duty. They're not going to go around killing ordinary citizens."
Luca waved a magisterial hand. "It makes no difference. These policemen are all the same, you'll see. One way or another this Colonel Antuono will line his pockets."
He let go a deep sigh. "0 tempera!" he said "0 mores!" Understandably, he did better with Cicero than with Shakespeare.
Chapter 4
With Luca's Ciceronian world-weariness the evening's energy seemed to fizzle out. Conversation tapered off at the other tables as well, and people began coming up to wish me good night, to thank Di Vecchio for the dinner, and to pay their respects to Luca, who accepted them in kingly fashion.
Among them was Ugo Scoccimarro, one of the three contributors—along with the Pinacoteca and Clara Gozzi—to Northerners in Italy. He was also the owner of the Boursse I was hoping to get for Seattle. I was surprised to see him there at all. The thickset, balding Scoccimarro, a native Sicilian, had complicated things for me by moving from nearby Milan, where he'd lived for three years, back to Sicily several months before; I was planning to fly down there to settle things with him before I left Italy. But as it turned out, he was in Milan on business, and when word had gotten to him about the reception, he had taken the two-hour train trip to Bologna.