The Last Mona Lisa Page 5

  10

  I found my way back to the Palazzo Splendour, got my key from the same guy behind the front desk, on the phone again or perhaps he had never gotten off. There was no elevator, my room two flights up, and he didn’t offer to help with my bag.

  I didn’t expect much for a hundred and twenty euros a week, and I was right. My one room consisted of a tiny bathroom (sink, toilet, shower with no curtain) and kitchenette (half-sized refrigerator, hot plate, sink), a nonworking fireplace with a bare mantel above, a twin-sized bed with a worn chintz spread, a dresser topped by a wood-framed mirror, and an armoire so narrow that the three hangers only fit on an angle. The lone window had no shade, but it hardly mattered as it faced a dark alley.

  Finally unpacking, suitcase opened across the bed, I felt the excitement of the long day starting to wear off. Thoughts of everything I had left behind—my job, my loft, my friends—came over me in a rush, along with a conversation I’d had with my Chelsea art dealer less than a week ago:

  I have to close the gallery, Luke. I just can’t afford it anymore.

  What will you do?

  Take a break, travel a little. The art world has worn me down these past dozen years.

  You and me both.

  Don’t worry, Luke. You’ll find another gallery.

  I wasn’t so sure. My last exhibition, four years ago, hadn’t done well, the collectors not exactly lining up for my work, and I’d seen what happened to other artists when their galleries closed and they had no track record. They ended up in low-rent co-op galleries where the artists competed against one another, though no collectors or critics ever went to the shows, so it hardly mattered.

  I arranged my underwear and socks in the top drawer of the dresser, trying not to think about my painting, though it had already triggered another conversation, the one I’d had with my department chair—an art historian with a specialty in eighteenth-century French rococo painting, his favorites Watteau and Fragonard, artists who made fluffy, pink pictures of girls on swings or couples swooning in gardens.

  You’re going to need an exhibition if you want to get tenure.

  An exhibition? Without a gallery? Not so easy. Though I didn’t tell him my gallery had closed.

  I stopped unpacking, sagged onto the edge of the bed, and wondered if by coming here, I’d been running toward something or running away.

  Exhausted, I closed my eyes, but while my body flagged, my mind continued to spark.

  Lunch with Quattrocchi had provided more questions than answers. My visit to the university had been an exercise in frustration: Quattrocchi’s secretary, a wizened old woman who looked as if she ate Americans like me for breakfast, had admitted to typing the email to me, but when I asked if anyone else might have read it, she cut me with a look and left the room without a word.

  I lay back and stared at the ceiling’s ornate plasterwork, the only beautiful part of the room. But a minute later, I was up, too jittery to sit still, unpacking the newspaper articles I’d brought with me, along with my only photo of Vincenzo Peruggia, a mug shot. The day I’d found it remained so vivid it could have happened hours earlier, not twenty years ago.

  Dust and cobwebs. Dirt and mouse droppings. The low attic ceiling almost as oppressive as the heat beating through it: midsummer in Bayonne, New Jersey. Nothing worse, at least not to me, fourteen and trapped. Repeating ninth-grade algebra in summer school. If X equals Y…like I could give a shit. Exactly what I had told my teacher, who’d sent me to the principal, who’d sent me home. Ergo, the punishment, just one of many, this time, “Clean the attic!” An invented chore, since no one ever used it.

  I’d spent the first hour sitting on my ass alternating cigarettes with a joint, then spied the old steamer trunk wedged into a corner. I didn’t think it would amount to much, but when I swiped my hand through the dust, I saw the initials: SP. It took me a minute to figure out it must have belonged to my grandfather, Simon Perrone, who had lived in Italy and died before I was born.

  I needed a screwdriver to pry it open. Inside, right on top, a rifle, which I lifted out and inspected: pockmarked wood, metal barrel, and rusty trigger. I pictured showing it off to my pals and later did.

  Under the rifle, a photograph, a mug shot, full face and profile, and below them: il carcerato 378.699.

  Prisoner. Signed on the back in a small, neat script, Vincenzo Peruggia.

  My great-grandfather?

  I no longer cared about the attic’s heat or the flies buzzing around my head. I couldn’t stop staring at the picture of this man, this convict!

  That night, in the middle of dinner, I laid the photo on the table, watched as my father stopped eating midbite.

  “It’s your father’s father, isn’t it? My great-grandfather Vincenzo.”

  “It is…no one,” my father said, already slurring his words, half-drunk. “You don’t know what…you’re saying.”

  I got up and bolted, not wanting the meat loaf or the canned peas anyway, my father shouting after me, “Get back here!” My mother looking like she was about to cry, which she did a lot—not her fault, she was no match for her bully husband or her delinquent son.

  Later, I met my buddies at the Kill Van Kull, showed off the old rifle, and had a few beers. But I didn’t show them the mug shot. That was for me—alone.

  I brought him up to my parents for weeks, but it was always the same. They acted like he’d never existed, like they didn’t know who I was talking about, like I was crazy. It didn’t take much research to find out they had changed the family name, one more thing they’d never told me. That was the beginning of the late-night internet searches, letters, and emails, weeks and months, years of accruing information until it became my quest to find out anything and everything about Vincenzo Peruggia: the man who had stolen the Mona Lisa!

  Holy shit! The idea that this guy, this criminal was my great-grandfather. I couldn’t figure out why my parents were so ashamed when all I wanted was to tell the world. The idea of it was so exciting and dangerous I had to know everything about him.

  And I had tried. Though after twenty years, the man remained a mystery. Until today.

  After reading only a little of the journal, the mug shot was coming to life. And I’d been right: I had more in common with my great-grandfather than with my dull civil-servant father.

  I put the mug shot aside to spread out the articles I had brought with me. First, a 1911 New York Tribune story I had long ago laminated under plastic and knew well.

  DA VINCI PICTURE STOLEN IN PARIS

  Paris, Aug. 22.—The art world was thrown into consternation today by the announcement that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, or as it is popularly known, La Joconde, had mysteriously disappeared from the Louvre Museum.

  Not a vestige of a clue was left by the person or persons who took it. A search of every nook and cranny, from roof to cellar, brought to light only the valuable frame and glass that covered it, left on a back staircase.

  The most remarkable feature of the case is that the picture was not missed for almost two days. It was assumed the painting had been removed for photography or cleaning.

  I propped the article on the mantel, then looked at the others I’d brought as well. Perhaps here, in Florence, I’d see something in them I hadn’t seen before. One suggested the Mona Lisa had been stolen by someone in a plan to blackmail the French government; another implied the theft was a German plot to embarrass the French; another, dated two weeks after the crime, maintained that no fewer than three witnesses had seen the Mona Lisa on a train headed for Holland, but the lead had never been followed and the witnesses’ names never disclosed. Another suggested that a wealthy American, a “Westerner,” had stolen the painting and taken it aboard the Kaiser Wilhelm II, but when the ship docked in New York, neither the Westerner nor the painting were anywhere to be seen, a true mystery.

  Three more articles
—one that blamed the Louvre for their lack of security, another that ridiculed the police for their botched investigation, and one that believed the theft was nothing but a prank. Of course the Louvre had been lax. Add to that the fact that the director of the Louvre had been traveling on the day the painting went missing, and the guard who should have been in the Salon Carré with the Mona Lisa, even though the museum was closed, had stayed home to take care of an ailing child, and there was plenty of reason to suspect an inside job or some sort of conspiracy.

  There was one more clipping, to my mind always the most important. It had appeared in a small Parisian newspaper, Le Cri de Paris, exactly one year and one month before the 1911 theft.

  MONA LISA SOLD TO AMERICAN

  Paris, July 24.—Reliable sources have reported that the Mona Lisa was quietly stolen from the gallery of the Louvre one night in June through the complicity of an official of that museum, a copy substituted in the frame. The original, it is alleged, was ferreted away to New York and there sold to an American collector.

  Though never proved, this story was the basis for more than one theory that suggested the Mona Lisa now residing in the Louvre Museum was a forgery, an idea that had plagued me since I’d first read it as a teenager and the reason I was here—hoping Peruggia’s journal would provide the answer and I would finally learn the truth.

  I tucked the mug shot into the wood-framed mirror above the dresser: prisoner number 378.699 in full face and profile, dark jacket, striped tie, and starched collar, thick black hair parted and combed neatly across a high forehead. With his broad cheekbones and full lower lip and despite a thickened nose that suggested street fights or barroom brawls, he was good-looking. I’d spent countless hours staring at the photo for the reason it had first entranced me, and it still did: if it were not for Peruggia’s handlebar mustache and the drooping lid of his slightly smaller right eye, we could have been brothers. For years, I’d attempted to see beyond his guarded face. Now, after reading just a little of his diary, I thought I saw his need and desire, his hunger for recognition. Something I understood only too well.

  “I won’t let it slip away,” I said, as much to the photo as to myself. I had managed to get away and become somebody, and no way I was going back. That lost Bayonne boy was going to stay lost, and I wasn’t going to resurrect him. “I’ll get the truth,” I said, nodding at the mug shot, believing it for the first time. “No matter what!”

  11

  John Smith reviewed the dossiers he had transferred to his phone: one on the American and another on the Italian professors—the late Antonio Guggliermo and his younger lover, Luigi Quattrocchi, along with the emails between Quattrocchi and Perrone. He put the cell phone down and sat back, taking in the bedroom and small sitting room he would be using as his temporary base of operations. The hotel was far from deluxe, but he’d never cared for luxuries, always found them unnecessary, even frivolous. He pictured his Lyon apartment, sparsely furnished and spotlessly clean. As a kid, he’d imagined an exciting life beyond the projects, and though he’d made it out, enough of a feat, excitement had eluded him. Until now.

  Tired but keyed up, he dropped to the floor and did a set of one-armed push-ups until he felt awake, determined. Breathing hard, he was up fast. Ignoring the Smoke-Free sign, he lit a cigarette, opened a window, and angled his muscular torso half outside.

  You do your work well, Smith, but you do not go the extra yard, do not make the sacrifices.

  A work review from his arrogant Danish supervisor, Andersen, only a week ago. A man who had been at the job less than three years, who enjoyed telling his subordinates and anyone who would listen that his name derived from the English Andrew, and that it meant manly and masculine. Not so Smith ever noticed.

  Sacrifices? Apparently long nights and weekends didn’t count. This job was his life; didn’t Andersen know that?

  He dragged hard on his cigarette, watched the smoke break up and disappear.

  Of course he knew what his supervisor meant—that he had not been instrumental in solving cases. Unlike analysts who had not only tracked a missing artwork but whose data resulted in an actual arrest and return.

  And you do not play well with others.

  That really got to him. Smith imagined punching the guy, watching blood trickle over his pale-blond mustache and weak chin.

  He would show his supervisor, the others too, would prove he could not only go the distance but a lot further, do whatever was necessary, whatever it took. After twenty years as a criminal intelligence analyst, he had an instinct for when he was onto something, and he had that feeling now.

  Another deep drag, the smoke held in his lungs until they ached.

  As far as INTERPOL knew, he was on sick leave (minor surgery, nothing serious, though he needed a week or so to recuperate), a surprise to his colleagues as he had never taken a sick day in his entire career. No room for failure, he thought. To fail now would be the end of his career, and that was not going to happen. He had made his decision, and there was no going back.

  He flicked his cigarette out the window, watched it spark and fall. Looked across the darkened Piazza di Madonna at the gray-stone building and its electric sign, Palazzo Splendour, blinking in the night like one of INTERPOL’s damn red notices.

  12

  New York City

  His wife had already stripped off her makeup and applied a coating of some absurdly expensive cream on surgically tightened skin that made her flesh look shiny and radioactive.

  “Nice party—you did a good job,” he said, although she had hired a caterer and waiters, so it was not exactly work or a job. Plus, he’d paid for it.

  Without looking up or answering, she dropped her silk kimono onto the Empire couch where it slid to the floor in a heap. She made no attempt to pick it up, got into bed, switched on a lamp, and plucked a paperback off her night table, bloodred nails tapping the cover, something with murder in the title.

  “Don’t strain yourself with the heavy reading,” he said.

  “It’s a gangster story,” she said, “something you can relate to.”

  He took a step toward her, hands twitching at his sides while a series of old images skittered through his mind: the back of a bookie shop, smoke-filled and crowded; late-night rides with his father where not a word was spoken, other times a lecture he dared not interrupt; slaps across the face and worse, much worse.

  “Go ahead,” his wife said, angling her jaw, “hit me. I know you want to.”

  But no, he would not give her the pleasure of seeing him lose control or anything she could use against him in a courtroom, this once beautiful young girl he’d stolen away from a much younger man, her beauty now more memory than fact. He considered how he might kill her, arranging her body into some artful pose out of Goya or Velázquez. But he would never do such a thing, dirty his own hands, though at sixty-four, he saw no reason why he shouldn’t have a third wife, one who would appreciate him.

  “Are you going to read for long?” he asked.

  “Why? Will it bother you all the way down the hall?”

  They hadn’t slept in the same room for years.

  He turned away, thinking there had to be a way out of the marriage and the prenup. An accident? Not difficult to arrange, though he had more important things on his mind these days.

  He headed down the carpeted hallway, then the winding staircase to the first floor of his townhouse. Did not stop to look at the painting on the landing, one of Renoir’s fleshy pink nudes, too sweet for his taste, picked out by that thirty-nine-year-old gorgon upstairs. For a moment, he considered slashing it.

  Another staircase took him into the finished basement and his home office. The only things on the desk, two books: a well-worn copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, his favorite novel—the first half, when the hero, Raskolnikov, commits murder and considers himself a superman and above the law,
but not the second, with its dreary meanderings on guilt and repentance, something he could not comprehend. One simply went after what one wanted, the message of the second book on his desk: Machiavelli’s The Prince.

  Behind the desk, a tall wooden bookcase, a few art books, a row of auction catalogs, the rest of the shelves bare. He removed the remote device from the top drawer of the desk, hit a few buttons, and the bookcase slid on casters to expose the wall behind it. Another code and the wall itself swung open. Behind it, a steel door. One more code, fingers tapping quickly, the door opened, and he stepped into the vault. He hit the remote one more time, and everything closed behind him—the wall, the bookcase all sliding back into place.

  This was always his favorite moment, standing in the dark, waiting. He savored it until he could no longer wait, then flipped a switch, and the room was flooded with light.

  Eighteen paintings. Eleven drawings. Thirteen prints. Each artwork with its own spotlight, accumulated over the past thirty years beginning legitimately with a small Blue Period Picasso. Beside the Picasso, the only other legitimate sale in the vault, a Rembrandt etching, currently worth a half million dollars—a pittance compared to the other artworks in the room. He often loaned these two pieces to museum exhibitions to show he was not only legit but generous.

  He switched off the alarm and checked the thermostat to make sure it was at its constant sixty-eight degrees, then the dehumidifier, both backed up by a small generator, before perusing his collection. He paused in front of a Monet seascape, taking in the rich blues and purples of the sky and water. From there, to a small Van Gogh painting of a congregation leaving a church. He took his time, occasionally running his fingertips over paint, a sin—oily skin against delicate pigment—but he could do what he pleased, like flick his tongue over the painted nipple of a Gauguin nude, imagining the taste of sweat and salt, along with the history, the lives lived inside the painting, the artist Paul Gauguin in Tahiti with this unimportant though beautiful young woman he had immortalized.