The Last Mona Lisa

by Jonathan Santlofer

  “Monks make great painters,” I said, “like Fra Angelico.”

  He asked if I had been to San Marco, and I shook my head, yet another place I had yet to see.

  “One of the gems of Florence,” he said.

  I asked him how long he’d been part of the order, and he said for ten years, since he’d been eighteen.

  “And you’re happy?” I asked.

  “I have never regretted it.”

  I said that we should all feel that way about our lives, and he asked me if I did not feel that way about mine. I wasn’t sure how to answer him, wasn’t sure how I felt about my life, which felt distant and precarious. I thought about where I’d come from, the things I’d overcome. I said, “I’ve changed my life a lot.”

  He looked at me with his big blue eyes, waiting.

  “Let’s just say I had my vices. I wasn’t exactly a good kid. Capisce?”

  “There are many examples of sinners who become saints.”

  “I didn’t say I was that bad, but I don’t think I qualify for sainthood either.” I felt like I was at confession, but there was a kindness about the monk that made me want to open up. “When I was a teenager, I was part of a group, a gang—and we did some bad things. We stole and…”

  “You know of Saint Dismas, the good thief? Another saint with a bad past. He was crucified beside Jesus.”

  “You mind if I hope for a better ending?”

  The monk laughed. “You are funny, Signore Perrone. I am certain your life will turn out well. Continua così. Avanti così.”

  “Stay on course?”

  “Sì. My teacher, an older, wiser brother, always say that.”

  “Stay on course,” I repeated and was about to say goodbye to Brother Francesco, when he stopped me.

  “Ha un amico a Firenze?”

  “Do I have a friend in Florence? You mean Alexandra, the America girl?”

  “No. A man. He comes here, ogni giorno.”

  “Every day? What do you mean?”

  “Lui aspetta.”

  “He waits?”

  “Sì. I thought he waits for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he is here when you arrive and gone when you leave.”

  “Where?”

  The monk guided me out of the alley and pointed to a spot along the east wall of the square that led to the entrance.

  “There,” he said, indicating a low set of stone stairs leading to an old wooden doorway. “That is the entrance to—how you say—the dormitory, where the monks live. Where I live. But we do not use that entry. We go in through the cloister.”

  “What does he look like, this man who waits?”

  “Tall,” he said and made a move to show the guy was also weighty or muscled. But he could not describe his face because he “wears un cappello, a hat, and sunglasses—and he is always fumando.” He mimed a smoker dragging on a cigarette.

  I asked him to let me know if the guy showed up, and he said maybe it was a “coincidenza.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But please let me know if you see him. I just want to meet him—see if I know him.”

  “I will, as you Americans say, keep an out eye,” he said.

  “An eye out,” I said and had to smile.

  32

  The idea of a stranger watching had gotten to me. I knew I would not be able to sit still or read. I checked out the stairs Brother Francesco had indicated, did a three-sixty and scanned the piazza—people milling about, some tourists taking pictures, a few monks heading toward the cloister. I stayed there a few minutes, checking out men in hats—too many—anyone smoking a cigarette—even more. Then I gave up. But now, everything that had been bothering me was buzzing in my brain—the idea of stealing the journal, Alexandra’s advance and retreat, Quattrocchi’s odd disappearance. I had left him several messages and texts; now I tried his cell again, but it went immediately to voicemail. This time, I didn’t bother to leave a message. Instead, I headed to the university.

  Signora Moretti was in Quattrocchi’s outer office.

  “Professore Quattrocchi, is he in? I need to speak with him.”

  “No,” she said and went back to her typing.

  “No what? He’s not in or I can’t speak to him?”

  She glanced up, then down, and started typing again.

  “Professore Quattrocchi missed our dinner date, and he hasn’t been answering my calls. I’m worried. Has he contacted the university?”

  She shook her head no, but this time, I thought I detected some concern.

  “I’m worried,” I said again. “Does he usually stay away without calling, without contacting you?”

  “The professore has been through much—with his loss. I do not wish to disturb him.”

  “But not to call, to drop his classes, just like that? I want to see him to make sure he’s okay.”

  Signora Moretti hesitated, sighed, then nodded. “His home is near Santa Croce.” She wrote the address on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “You will please to let me know the professore is fine.”

  I put Quattrocchi’s address into Google Maps and followed the route, holding my phone out in front of me like a divining rod. It led me past the Bargello Museum, which I had been meaning to visit to see Donatello’s young David, a sculpture that many art historians believed had kicked off the Renaissance, one more artwork I had taught and never seen. The crenellated building dominated a small square and blanketed the surrounding streets in shadow. If I was reading my GPS correctly, I was heading southeast, away from the historic part of the city into a less populated neighborhood, along one angled or curving street to another, buildings shifting from warm grays to tans to sienna and even rose. I could feel the presence of generations, the weight of it in the stone walls and peeling paint, could smell it in the air, almost taste it, not just the city’s age but its history, and I was enjoying it.

  My enjoyment stopped about the same time my GPS quit and I hit a dead-end street and had that feeling again, of being followed. I retraced my steps, wasn’t sure if I was being paranoid, but my radar had saved my ass more than once, and I’d learned to trust it. I found my way to a wider, busier street—the whole time looking over my shoulder—and my Google Maps came back to life.

  I kept my eyes glued to the little blue ball on my phone’s map so I missed the fact that the neighborhood had become rougher and grittier, ugly old buildings mixed with ugly new ones, more trash and graffiti than I had seen anywhere else in the city. I was glad when my GPS directed me onto a kind of neighborhood thoroughfare, one side lined with bicycles, the other with motorbikes, dozens of them all perfectly angled. Another block and I found Via dei Pepi, Quattrocchi’s street, the sign high up on a drab tan wall showing serious symptoms of water damage.

  Via dei Pepi looked too narrow for cars, which gave it a back-alley quality, though it still had charm, some of the houses with newly painted shutters on upper windows and lovely metal work covering the ones on street level, though I realized they also served as bars. Several houses had cracked stone surfaces and more water erosion, but others showed obvious signs of gentrification, freshly painted facades and shiny new doors, and number fifteen—Quattrocchi’s home—was one of these. Three stories painted ochre bordering on yellow, shutters dark green, not a bit of peeling paint or water damage. The door looked new too, dark wood, and curved to fit into a stone arch, above it a half-moon transom of metal florets. In the center of the door, a dangling metal knocker. I lifted it and let it fall back against the wood, the noise sharp and hollow.

  There was no answer.

  Then I noticed the small but new-looking bronze plaque with a buzzer and an oval grating that appeared to be an intercom. I pressed it, waited, then tried again. Nothing.

  I lifted the metal knocker and let it fall back.

  Again nothing
.

  I tried calling Quattrocchi’s number, thought I could hear a muted ring from inside the house before I got his voicemail, said it was me, and that I was just outside his door.

  I crossed the narrow street and looked up, the shutters closed, everything about the place still and quiet. It didn’t make sense, Quattrocchi disappearing without notifying the university or anyone, and it felt bad.

  Without really thinking about it, I found the number of a nearby police station and called.

  “Persona scomparsa,” I said.

  The cop asked how long the person had been missing.

  “Pochi giorni,” I said. “A few days.”

  “Non abbastanza tempo.” Not enough time, he said and hung up.

  I called back, got the same cop. “Can you at least check his house?”

  The cop asked if I was a relation. When I said no, he hung up again. “Fuck you too!” I said to a silent phone.

  Was I overreacting? It was possible Quattrocchi had gone away and wanted to be left alone. It was true he had been through a lot—though he had seemed okay at our lunch, friendly and eager to talk. So what had changed?

  I looked back at his house, the shuttered windows, everything still. I’d always trusted my gut, and right now, it was telling me that something was wrong.

  33

  The gray-and-white marble room was square and austere, smaller than I had imagined from seeing it in photos, but taller and soaring, crowned by a perfect dome of circles and semicircles. I stared up as if looking into heaven, what I imagined Michelangelo had in mind when he had designed the Medici Chapel—the most famous tomb in the world, created for the Italian banking family who had ruled Florence for two hundred years and left their mark everywhere in the city.

  After my futile search for Quattrocchi, I had come back to the library and read until the lunch break. I hadn’t planned on coming to the chapel until Chiara mentioned it was just around the corner. It wasn’t exactly—there were few actual corners in Florence—but all I had to do was follow the long wall of San Lorenzo back toward my hotel and there it was, in Piazza di Madonna, literally across the street from my hotel. How many times had I walked right by it, how many times had I noticed but not noticed the small modest plaque, Cappelle Medicee, and not given it a thought.

  I stood practically alone in the center of the chapel—the only other person a guard seated in a far corner, typing away on a cell phone—and did a slow three-sixty, taking in the feeling of strength and monumentality Michelangelo had given the sculpture, the architecture, the blind windows that suggested there was no way out. There were no actual windows, a kind of glorious claustrophobia, and I had to wonder if Michelangelo wanted people to feel trapped here, as if in purgatory. I looked up at the more than life-size figure of Lorenzo de Medici, face hidden in shadow, a withdrawn and brooding quality that made me think of what I had just read—Vincent seeing his son for the first time in the hospital nursery, holding him and thinking he was all he had left of Simone, all he left in the world. Then Simone’s mother, Marguerite, had shown up in a fury, accusing him of killing her daughter, a terrible scene to read, and Vincent had spared neither reader nor himself, accepting the blame and powerless to stop Marguerite from taking the baby and telling him he would never see the boy again.

  It felt right that I should be thinking about that now, ruminating on birth and death in a funerary chapel.

  I shivered, gazed back at the pensive Lorenzo de’ Medici flanked by the allegorical figures of Dawn and Dusk, massive sculptures that only the great Michelangelo could have created, then did an about-face to take in Lorenzo Giuliano, equally massive but with a handsome idealized face and impossibly long neck, poised as if about to stand up, everything about him so alive, the two figures in stark contrast.

  I thought of Vincent, who had contemplated his own death for days and weeks after Simone’s death, the man riddled with guilt that made it impossible for him to sleep, and the nonstop drinking he had used as a temporary salve over his excruciating pain, something too familiar to me.

  I regarded the allegorical figures flanking Giuliano, Night and Day, the former imagined as a woman, everything about her exaggerated, overlong arms and legs, more highly polished and finished than her male counterpart, Day, an almost brutish figure with a lionlike head half-hidden by his massive shoulder. I moved in for a closer look at his roughly chiseled face, which looked unfinished, and remembered the entire tomb had never been completed, that Michelangelo had planned not only to be its architect and sculptor but to paint a fresco of the resurrection, but he never did.

  I thought again of Vincent, contemplating suicide for weeks, until he realized he had a reason to live—his son! He’d written pages describing in detail how he had dressed and shaved and put on his best clothes and had gone to see Simone’s mother in her Paris apartment, and though she had slammed the door in his face, he’d refused to leave, pounding on her door until she had no choice but to let him in. He pleaded to see his son, and she had relented that much. Vincent had lovingly depicted the baby, with soft blond hair and blue-gray eyes like his mother, then described how he’d held him and kissed him and begged Marguerite to let him take the child home or at least let him visit. She had refused, accusing him of having nothing, no money, no way to care for a child, and Vincent knew she was right. He’d left her apartment a beaten man, once again considering the ways he might take his own life, all of it written in such painstaking prose, I could hear his words and see him prowling the streets of Paris, dejected and suicidal, the great-grandfather I had never known, more alive to me than my own parents.

  A glance back at Giuliano, so regal and alive, then across the room at Lorenzo, dark and brooding, and those allegorical figures surrounding them, and it came to me that the entire room was an allegory of transition—Dawn to Dusk, Night to Day, the passage of time, the days of our lives leading toward our eventual deaths.

  But Vincent had not chosen death. Not yet. With the one thing, the only thing that mattered to him—his son—he knew what he must do to get him back.

  The journal pages continued to echo in my mind as I made my way back to the library—why my great-grandfather had made the decision to contact Valfiero again, the answer to why he had gone ahead with the theft after Simone’s death. It was simple: he needed the money to persuade Simone’s mother that he could be a father to his son. And I knew something else: had he not been in the depths of despair, he would never have done it. The last pages I’d read were not only filled with Vincent’s anguish over his decision but his plans—the tools he would need, which day would be best.

  I took the stairs to the upper level of the cloister two at a time. I had to get to the library to see if I was right, to see if the next pages would tell me more about the theft itself.

  34

  Smith typed in his code, the email encrypted, as usual. The INTERPOL insignia filled the top half of his screen, the message from his supervisor, Andersen, below it.

  Interesting assignment for you. Suspicion of art theft ring based in Bahrain. Need analyst to coordinate with the National Central Bureaus. On-site. 12–18 months. Great opportunity. Full file and TBD when you return. Hope you are feeling better.

  Bahrain? And for twelve to eighteen months on-site? No fucking way. This was no “great opportunity.” It was punishment. Banishment. And for what? Taking sick leave? No, Andersen was trying to make him quit so he would not have to fire him, basically impossible after all the years he had put in. But Bahrain? He might as well have said Siberia.

  Smith typed BAHRAIN into Google, scanned the data—island in the Persian Gulf…gained independence from the UK in 1971…government protests and human rights violations—then slammed the laptop cover shut. The nerve of that guy, who had been at INTERPOL what—three years? Smith knew about the latest INTERPOL directive too: pare down and cut waste. Was that what he’d become, waste?

 
; Smith raised the window with such force it shook in its frame. He would show them. He was onto something a lot bigger than Andersen or any other art analyst had done, doing things none of them would dare to do.

  He stared across the plaza at Perrone’s hotel, decided that next time, he would throw a scare into him. In real life, Perrone had been quite different from the man Smith had known only from his file: cagier, smarter, perhaps not so easily duped or scared. But there were ways to frighten the toughest, smartest men; Smith knew that.

  He nodded at the thought and felt calmer, pleased with himself, thinking how scared men made bad choices, mistakes. He straightened up and shivered, not just from the cold but from the notion that he too might be making bad choices.

  35

  Steam was rising off the Seine in the first light of dawn. I concentrated on slowing my pace and taking deep breaths. I passed early-morning fishermen and vendors setting up to sell souvenirs to the tourists. I kept my head down. The painting was under my jacket and I pressed it tightly to my chest. Tears burned my cheeks. But I had done it. Stolen the world’s most famous painting for my son.

  I got home and spoke to Simone. Told her I had brought her the painting as promised. Wrapped it in one of her scarves and placed it in a trunk I had specially built with a false bottom. Draped the trunk with a cloth and put a vase in the center so that it looked like nothing more than an ordinary table.

  Then I waited.

  A day passed. Then another. I scoured the newspapers. But there was no mention of the theft.

  How was that possible?

  More than once I opened the trunk to make sure the painting was still there. Afraid I had been dreaming.

  Another day passed. Still no news.