Aaron Elkins: A Deceptive Clarity

I stared into his face. "You all right?" I had the impression he was in better shape than I was.

My voice startled him. His eyes popped open to see my blood-smeared face a few inches from his own.

"Ock!" he said. "Jeez!"

"It's not as bad as it looks. Just a broken nose, I think." Just, indeed.

"Lean your head against the wall, man. You're gonna bleed to death." Frowningly solicitous, he put a hand on my forehead and gently tilted me back, beginning to take charge, which was fine with me. I had begun to tremble, which seemed to me a very reasonable reaction, considering.

"I better get on the brick," he said.

From a holster on his belt he produced a toy-size black radio with a stubby little antenna. "Bingo Five," he said into it, "this is Falcon Six…"

I smiled groggily-did they really talk like that?-and then I must have blacked out, because the next thing I knew my eyes were closed and he was standing up, leaning over me. "They'll be along in a minute. Don't you worry, buddy, you'll be OK."

"Sure. Don't worry about me, I'll be fine." I was actually feeling a little better. The bleeding had stopped, and although my head hurt in a dozen places, the pain was dull and remote, as if it were in someone else's head. I couldn't breathe through my nose, but that was no surprise under the circumstances. My wrists, which had hurt so shockingly from those two crisp little blows, seemed to be all right, to my surprise; I had thought they were broken. I felt good enough, in fact, to try opening my eyes again.

I was looking directly at the shattered crate that lay at the base of the wall across from me. I forced my eyes open wider.

"Christ," I said softly.

"Yeah," the guard said, following my gaze. "You're damn lucky."

But I wasn't thinking about how it would have been if the heavy wooden container had caught me more directly. I was looking at what was inside it.

The crate itself, perhaps four feet by three, and seven or eight inches wide, leaned crazily against the wall, as ripped and twisted as if it had been glued together out of popsicle sticks. Half-in, half-out of it was an ornate gilt picture frame of the Italian Renaissance, fractured and sprung; and within this there was an age-stiffened, yellowed drawing that had buckled and cracked into several pieces. Even upside down and mangled as it was, the style of its artist was instantly recognizable.

Michelangelo, God help us. Michelangelo.

Such is the flinty soul of the art curator that that crumpled, broken drawing produced an icier clutch inside my chest than anything that had gone before.

I moved to it, again on my hands and knees. Michelangelo, all right; a fine, careful study for the The Battle of Cascina, the great fresco designed for Florence's Palazzo Vecchio but never executed. All that remained were a few of these rightly celebrated studies. This one was a pencil drawing, highlighted with white here and there, of a nude male caught bathing, twisting in surprise, every visible muscle taut and satiny, like carved, polished marble. It was Michelangelo at his most powerful, sculpting with pencil.

And yet, somehow… I frowned, trying to focus my eyes better. What was it…?

With a noise like an armed invasion, two airmen came clumping excitedly down the long corridor, and then a third. Behind them scampered a slight sandy-haired man in a tweedy suit, hard-pressed to keep up.

"Oh my," he said breathlessly. "What's happened? Oh dear Lord."

The guard explained, quickly and efficiently, calling him "sir."

"And who is this… person?" the sandy-haired man asked, looking down at me with his nose wrinkled in distaste.

I spoke from a sitting position at his feet. "Chris Norgren. I'm-"

"Christopher Norgren? You're Dr. Norgren? Good heavens. Oh, really." He said it the way he might have if I'd embarrassed us both by showing up for a cocktail party on the wrong night.

Meanwhile, I was looking at the drawing again, dazedly trying to figure out what it was about it that bothered me. I twisted my head nearly upside down so I could see it right side up. That was a mistake. The blood thumped painfully at the back of my nose, and I quickly jerked upright. That didn't feel too good, either. The picture swam and blurred. I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes again. There was a crust on my lips, and my shirt front was sodden; blood, no doubt, but I had no wish to see. My head felt as if it were pumped to bursting with Jell-O. I considered blacking out again, and I think I did.

As if they were coming from a moving echo chamber, the voices around me floated hollowly back into range.

"Yes, sir, I just had a look." That was one of the airmen. "I can't tell if they got away with anything. The guard out in back is out cold. I called for a medic. This poor bugger could use one, too."

That's me, I reflected with distant interest. This poor bugger.

"Yes, of course. Certainly." The mild voice of the small man. "I believe he's unconscious."

"Not unconscious," I mumbled, suddenly figuring out what it was about the drawing. I waved my hand vaguely toward the smashed crate. "The picture… there's something the matter with it."

The ensuing silence was so long that I tried opening my eyes again. Things were wavery but not too bad. The sandy-haired man, who was studying the drawing judiciously, turned his attention to me, back to the wrecked drawing, and then back to me once more. He pursed his lips.

"So it would seem."

"No, I mean the drawing itself. Look at the pencil lines. See how they glisten?" "Glisten?" he said.

"Yes, glisten." I rubbed the back of my neck, annoyed at having to look up at him from the floor, but not about to try standing. 'That means there was graphite in the pencil."

"Graphite."

"Yes, damn it, graphite."

"Ah, graphite, yes."

"Look… they didn't start using graphite in Europe until the end of the sixteenth century. Before then pencils were made of lead alloyed with tin."

"Tin," he said. "Of course. I see, yes. Tin."

"Listen…" My voice began to rise a little. I did not en: joy being humored by this irritatingly bland little man, "Don't you see? Michelangelo worked on the Cascina studies around 1500. He died in 1564-which means he had to have drawn this posthumously."

I thought that was pretty good for a man in my condition, but he only said in that dry, patient, maddening way: "Posthumously."

"Goddammit," I snapped with as much emphasis as I thought my nasal passages would bear, "it's a forgery -a fakel"

If he says "Forgery," I thought, I am going to bite him on the knee.

He was saved, however, by the appearance of two teams of medics hurrying down the corridor with folded stretchers on wheels. "Over here, please, you men," he called, wiggling a finger at them. Then he looked down again at me.

"Well, of course it's a fake," he said calmly. "What else would it be?"

I think I ought to say at this point that this kind of thing doesn't usually happen to me. I'm an art historian, as you've gathered, curator of Renaissance and Baroque painting at a major San Francisco museum. And despite what you may have read about art curators, I don't find myself habitually entangled in international theft or deceit on the grand scale, and certainly not in murder. It's not that I'm particularly unadventurous or fainthearted, you understand, but thrilling-chases-through-the-capitals-of-Europe are things I read about on long flights, not things I do.

Not until lately.

"Well, of course it's a fake. What else would it be?"

Much as I wished to pursue that laconic rejoinder, I had to let it pass. The medics, with quiet speed, did several things to my face-some hot, some cold-stuck a needle into my arm, and settled me unresisting onto the gurney. I was trundled off down the long hallway trying to focus on the questions that were already beginning to flutter off out of reach. Could I really have stumbled on Peter's forgery by having it literally thrown in my face? It seemed unlikely. And how did that tweedy little man know it was a forgery? Peter had said no one knew. Was there a second fake? If so, why hadn't Peter mentioned it? And… and…