The Last Mona Lisa Read online

  “May I see her?” Simone asked.

  “Of course. You can come to that wretched graveyard of art any day and gawk at the painting like everyone else.”

  “Oh, Vincent, what a thing to say. One day, your work, and perhaps even mine, will be in such a graveyard. But I meant, when you next get to hold the painting, may I come to see it in your hands?”

  “Ticolat would never allow it.”

  “Well then, I have a better idea,” she said. “Bring the painting home for me, and I will hang it over our bed!” Simone laughed and Vincent laughed too, though he thought he would bring it home for her if he could, that he would do anything for her, anything at all.

  When they finished their food and were sipping sweet café crème, Simone said, “Oh, Vincent. This was perfect,” and he agreed, though despite all the food and drink, he was aware of an emptiness inside him.

  After dinner, they walked through the Tuileries Garden, past a fountain with its water turned off and rectangular flower beds where nothing was in bloom. Vincent kept his arm around Simone, and she pretended to be warm and he pretended he was full and content, though still he felt empty.

  When he saw that Simone was shivering, he insisted they spend the money to take the omnibus once again, and later, even after they made love and he lay on the mattress with his hand on the rise of her belly and watched her sleep and gently tugged the wool blanket up to her chin, even then, as he marveled at the fine beauty of this woman who was his, he felt empty. And later, when he couldn’t sleep and got up to pace in the room Simone had painted with green vines and ivy and to stare out the window at the half-built dome of the new Sacré-Coeur church illuminated in the moonlight, he felt it still.

  From a stack of books, he picked up Baudelaire’s poems Les Fleurs du Mal and read a stanza about death and decay. Hands shaking, he replaced the book quickly, though the poet’s words echoed and lingered.

  In the morning, Simone had a cold and did not feel well enough to go to her job at the drapery store. Vincent made a pot of tea and put enough wood in the stove so she would stay warm while he was at work at the museum. Before he left, he kissed her and felt it again, this time even stronger than before, though still he could not quite identify it, this feeling of emptiness.

  It would be months before he figured out what it was, but by then, it would be too late.

  7

  Laurentian Library

  Florence, Italy

  The sound of footsteps broke my concentration, a blond with high-heeled boots click-clacking on the hard wooden floor. I watched as she made her way toward Chiara’s desk, tugging off long leather gloves dramatically as if she were in a play. We locked eyes, and she seemed to be looking at me or through me or perhaps not at all before she turned away, leaning down to fill out a request form, her back to the room while she waited for her books, holding her gloves in one hand and thwacking them into her palm, a hypnotic gesture. Her shearling coat was ochre-colored, like so many of the buildings I’d seen in Florence, and I wondered if she’d bought it to blend in with the city, though it looked expensive, the kind of coat that gets noticed.

  Riccardo returned with her books, and when she gave him a big smile, he blushed. Then she scooped the books up and held them against her chest like a schoolgirl and headed toward the table. I noticed the other men had stopped working too, watching her as she chose a spot at the far end of the table, away from everyone. She took her time getting settled, slipping out of her coat and arranging it on the back of her chair, more time looking at one book, then the other, the whole time playing with a few blond tendrils that had escaped the slapdash twist of her hair. I pretended to be reading but couldn’t stop staring at her or the long curve of her neck. She glanced over at me, and I looked down at the journal, trying to remember why I was here, thinking again about what I had just read.

  Over the years of collecting information about my great-grandfather, I’d never read anything about him being among the artists of the Salon de la Nationale and wondered if something had happened to bar him from the exhibition. But then, I’d never come across a mention of him being an artist at all. It was oddly comforting and made sense in a way—neither of my parents were artistic, nor my grandparents from what I knew—that at least one of my ancestors should be an artist. I tried to imagine what sort of paintings my great-grandfather had made and hoped I would find out. I jotted a note to look into the salon exhibition, then checked my watch. I was surprised to see I’d been reading for hours and that it was nearly one. I wanted to keep going and would have, but the library was closing for lunch, and I had a date with Luigi Quattrocchi, the man whose email had brought me here.

  I placed the journal back into the carton, careful to cover it with Professor Guggliermo’s folders before bringing it to the front desk. I already felt a kind of ownership—as if the journal had been waiting for me and me alone all these years.

  I could have gone around my end of the table, which was shorter, but eased my way down the long end, where the blond was seated. She looked up as I passed, and we exchanged another glance. She was even prettier than I’d first thought, her face lit as if from within and with the kind of posture that suggested finishing school. Out of my league, I told myself, though it didn’t stop me from another glance, our eyes meeting again, though she looked down quickly and buried her face in a book, as if I’d caught her doing something wrong.

  In the outer office, “Mussolini” took my backpack, searched through it, then handed it back along with my phone. When I asked for my candy, she plucked it out of the wire basket and held it with the tips of her fingers as if it were some kind of poison and she did not want to touch it, then directed me through the body scanner with a less-than-gentle nudge.

  Outside, I took a moment to look down at the garden below, its hexagon shape clearer from above, then across to the other side of the upper cloister where I thought I saw something or someone moving, not a monk, a man in plain clothes, though I couldn’t be sure, the arcade cloaked in darkness.

  8

  The restaurant’s cream-colored walls were dotted with framed stills from old black-and-white Italian movies. The clientele young, students I guessed. They looked the same the world over—here a bit more stylish, the boys with scarves coiled around their necks, the girls in V-neck pullovers and skintight jeans. A heavyset man, older by thirty or forty years, waved me over. I made my way through the tightly packed tables, generic techno-pop adding an electric throb to the din, everyone talking and smoking cigarettes, my eyes already stinging.

  Quattrocchi nodded as I approached, and we shook hands, his soft and warm.

  “How did you recognize me?”

  “I Googled you,” he said, “and there were pictures. If you don’t mind me saying, you are a lot better-looking in person. Forgive me if I am embarrassing you,” he said. “You just arrived. You must be tired.”

  “Actually, I’m great,” I said, and it was true, that despite jet lag and hours hunched over the journal, I felt more energized than I had in years.

  Quattrocchi looked like an Edwardian gentleman in his brocade vest and paisley ascot, out of place among the students, several of whom acknowledged him with an affectionate nod or smile as they passed our table.

  “It’s obvious they like you,” I said.

  “And I them—although teaching can be bloody hell at times.”

  “I’ll second that,” I said. “So you’re English? Not Italian?”

  “No, not English, but I went to Oxford. The accent and expressions were hard to give up, though honestly I did not try,” Quattrocchi said. “I wager that you expected me to be wearing glasses.”

  “Why? Oh… Your name. Of course. Quattrocchi—‘four eyes’ in Italian. It hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “It would if you had grown up with it!” Quattrocchi lifted a carafe. “Wine?”

  I told him I’d stick to
sparkling water and he frowned, insisting a glass of vino would make me feel good.

  “Too good,” I said, recalling blurred days and lost nights.

  Quattrocchi signaled the waiter, asked if he could order for me, then did, minestrone soup and a bottle of Pellegrino. “Specialty of the house and best thing on the menu.” He leaned forward, the buttons of his vest threatening to pop, and whispered, “Have you seen the journal?”

  “Yes. It was at the very bottom of the carton, buried under folders.”

  “Was it? I thought I’d put it in on top. I must be getting old. Well, I am old.” He dragged a hand over thinning hair he had combed forward in a failed attempt to hide his near baldness. “I must have forgotten. It was a difficult time, Tonio dying and… Is it interesting, the journal, I mean?”

  It took me a moment to recognize that Tonio was a nickname for Antonio Guggliermo, the professor who had acquired the journal.

  I told him it was very interesting and asked if he’d read it. He seemed appalled at the question.

  “Not a word. I might have if Tonio had lived, but no… I am just getting used to the fact that I am…alone.” Quattrocchi’s voice cracked, and there were tears in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, realizing that Quattrocchi had obviously been more than a cataloger of Guggliermo’s papers.

  “No need to be sorry,” he said, swiping the tears away. “I was one of the lucky ones. I found love at a very young age. Tonio was my professor at university. I was twenty-one. He was forty-two. We were like Leonardo and Salaì.”

  “But you weren’t ten!” I said. I knew all about Leonardo and his young lover, not just from my years of teaching art history but from my obsession with everything Leonardo.

  “Nor a thief, nor conniver, nor beautiful—though I looked a lot better than I do now!”

  “From what I’ve read, Leonardo was a beautiful young man who liked to parade through the streets of Florence in rose-colored tunics and purple stockings—but he grew old before his time.”

  “Don’t we all.” Quattrocchi dragged a multi-ringed hand across his comb-over. “You know that officially Salaì was Leonardo’s adopted son.”

  “Didn’t he forge some of Leonardo’s paintings and try to sell them as originals?”

  “Never proved, but possible. Though he must have cared for Leonardo—he stayed with him until his death.” Quattrocchi looked away, eyes tearing up again. “Sorry. I am very nostalgic these days. It has only been a month since Tonio died, and on the day before his ninetieth birthday.” He dabbed his eyes daintily, then pulled himself together and launched into a discussion of how gay artists dominated the Renaissance—“Michelangelo and Donatello among them—though only brave Leonardo was out, the others in the closet, and probably wise, as homosexuality was against the law in fifteenth-century Florence.”

  “Maybe too out for his time,” I said. “He was arrested for sodomy with a male prostitute. And you must know his treatise on the male organ—‘On the Penis’—where he claims the penis acts without the will of man and how it should be adorned rather than concealed? It’s very popular with my students.”

  “Your art history class must be a lot more fun than mine!”

  “I try.” I smiled. “You said Professor Guggliermo asked you to contact me. How did he know to do that?”

  “Oh, I imagine Tonio discovered you were Vincenzo Peruggia’s great-grandson, and you are not difficult to find—Facebook, Twitter, your university profile. Tonio was a serious researcher and, despite his age, sharp as a tack.” Quattrocchi signaled for the check and insisted upon paying when it came.

  Outside, the air was chilly, the street wide, a mix of old tan and sienna-colored buildings. Quattrocchi was heading back to the university, and I walked with him, hoping for more answers to my questions.

  “Do you know what he had intended to publish about the journal?”

  “No. And he never got the chance. His dying was”—he took a deep breath—“such a shock. You must think that death at his age could not have been a surprise, but Tonio was not your typical ninety-year-old. He walked several miles a day and was the picture of health. Had it not been for the accident, I’m certain he would be sitting here right now.”

  “Accident?”

  “Hit-and-run. Can you imagine, leaving an old man to die in the street?” Quattrocchi shook his head. “And then, on top of that, just a day after Tonio’s death, some hooligans or drug addicts ransacked our apartment. It has taken me weeks to get it back to normal.”

  “What did they take?”

  “That’s the strange part: nothing. Perhaps they were looking for something, though the police speculated it was just a gang of malicious kids, or they’d have known enough to steal our antiques, several of which they broke!”

  “But they didn’t take the journal.”

  “No. It was in Tonio’s office at the university.”

  The thought came to me buzzing and electric: if I had been searching for the journal and the answer to a hundred-year-old mystery for twenty years, others might be searching for it too. “How long did Antonio have the journal?”

  “No more than a few weeks. Though it made an impression. He told me more than once that he was reading the most extraordinary thing—the diary of the man who stole the Mona Lisa!”

  “Oh. So you know its contents.”

  “Only that much.”

  I asked if he had discussed the journal with anyone else, and he seemed insulted.

  “No. Why would I?”

  “Did Professor Guggliermo?”

  “As he planned to publish something, I imagine he would have kept the discovery to himself.”

  “Do you know where he got it?”

  “I assume a rare-book dealer. Antonio worked with many, mostly in Florence, a few in Paris and Germany.”

  “Did he have a list of those dealers, perhaps a receipt for his purchase of the journal?”

  “I went through his papers, and I do not remember coming across it, and Tonio was a very orderly man.” He paused as if picturing something. “Though I did not get to his desk until recently. That first week, I could not face it, you understand.”

  “Yes, of course. Did he have a phone book or an appointment book?”

  “It was the only messy thing Tonio owned. He had it for years and refused to replace it. Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing that either.”

  “What about his cell phone?”

  “Tonio despised them and did not own one.”

  Quattrocchi’s pace was agonizingly slow. He’d opened his topcoat and was sweating, unlike me, freezing in my leather jacket. The streets kept changing—wide, then narrow, curved, then angular—until we came into a large open square lined with fancy shops and with an ornate old carousel in the center, though it didn’t seem to be working.

  “Piazza della Repubblica, once the site of the old Roman Forum,” Quattrocchi said, pointing out the triumphal arch, which we cut under, then ambled along irregular streets, Quattrocchi’s arm looped through mine. Every few minutes, he’d stop to catch his breath, then he’d take my arm again and we’d start down another narrow street of old ochre-colored buildings. Other than an occasional sigh or catching his breath, Quattrocchi had been mostly quiet, when he suddenly stopped and faced me.

  “I just remembered something, a call I received from a collector of rare papers. That’s what he called himself, a collector of rare papers. He said he’d heard about the journal from an old friend of Professor Guggliermo’s, though he did not furnish a name, or if he did, it didn’t mean anything to me. He asked if I knew of its whereabouts and offered a reward.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That I had no idea what he was referring to. I had already carried out Tonio’s request—that I contact you about the journal—and I had no interest in making money fro
m it. Between Tonio’s pension and my salary, I have more than enough.”

  “And he accepted that explanation?”

  “I assume so. I have not heard from him since.”

  Wind whipped through the street, and I shivered, more from the idea that someone other than me had been looking for Peruggia’s diary than the cold. I asked again if anyone else might have known about the journal, my mind still dwelling on the break-in and the collector of rare papers.

  “The only person, other than myself, would be my secretary. She types up my lectures and emails, all my correspondence. But she is a lady of seventy-eight years old, has been at the university for almost fifty years, and is entirely trustworthy.”

  “Do you mind if I speak to her?” I asked.

  “Signore Per-own-nay,” he said, enunciating every syllable of my name. “Signora Moretti is the soul of discretion. But if you insist, it will be, as you Americans say, your funeral.”

  9

  He has followed the two men from the restaurant, allowed plenty of space though there was no chance of losing them, the fat man’s pace so slow he has had to stop, duck into alleyways, or hide behind parked cars. Not that they would recognize him. But he knows them, has viewed their pictures on his computer screen: Perrone, taller and more striking than he appeared in two dimensions, Quattrocchi fatter, leaning against a fence now and gulping for air like a fish out of water.

  He sees them head toward the university, stops alongside a line of bicycles and motorbikes and lights a cigarette, watches college students coming and going, talking and laughing. He can’t remember a time when he felt so carefree.

  The smudge of a memory: his brother, falling. He drags the back of his hand across his eyes as if to erase it, though it lingers, an afterimage that carries with it an emotion he was certain he had disposed of years ago.

  He squeezes his eyes shut, opens them when he hears the fat Italian laughing like a girl. He imagines he will scream like one too. He studies Perrone, strong and arrogant-looking, the kind of man he likes to bring down.