The Last Mona Lisa

by Jonathan Santlofer

  “I don’t know anything about that!” I bolted up, knocking my chair to the floor.

  “Sit down,” Smith said.

  I wavered a moment, then righted the chair and sat.

  “What did Étienne Chaudron tell you about the Vermeer painting, the one in his living room?”

  “That his great-uncle painted it.”

  “Why did you take it off the wall?”

  “It was already off when I got there. I stopped to look at it, that’s all.”

  Smith eyed me coolly. “There are two dead bodies on the floor, but you take your time to look at a painting?”

  I told him yeah, that I liked art, and his eyes went dark, almost black.

  “You understand you are in serious trouble.”

  I didn’t answer, slipped off my jacket, pushed my shirt sleeves up, wanted him to see my muscles and tattoos—my version of a big-dick contest.

  Smith rolled up his sleeves. No tats, but his muscles were bigger than mine.

  He told me that the Vermeer was on its way to a lab for testing to see if Yves Chaudron had painted it or if it was, in fact, the original. If the paints and solvents dated earlier than Chaudron, then the painting would go to the Gardner Museum for further tests. Then he asked again why I had taken it off the wall. When I didn’t answer, he slammed his hands down on the table so hard, it rocked.

  I kept my cool, repeated the painting was already on the floor, or maybe it had fallen off when that thug attacked.

  He glared at me, a muscle in his jaw twitching, asked why I’d gone to see Étienne Chaudron, and I told him the truth—that I’d been reading about his great-uncle, Yves, the art forger, so I wanted to meet him. “If you have the journal,” I said, “then you know what Peruggia wrote.”

  Smith sucked in a breath, something behind those dark eyes I couldn’t read. “Truth for truth, Perrone?”

  I waited; a flickering overhead light added a kinetic throb to the moment.

  “A deal of sorts. I have the journal but haven’t read it, because I don’t read Italian. For that, I’ll need an interpreter.”

  “I’m sure you have plenty at INTERPOL.”

  “True.” Smith paused. “But I want someone discreet. I want you.”

  I saw it in his face: Smith had no intention of turning the journal over to INTERPOL. I didn’t know why, but now I had something he wanted. “Why should I help you?”

  “Because the games are over, Perrone, and you’re in trouble. I may be the only friend you have, your only chance.”

  I laughed, and that did it. Smith reached out and grabbed me by my shirt, a vein in his temple pulsing. “Luigi Quattrocchi is dead! Étienne Chaudron and his girlfriend are dead! The girl’s blood on your phone, your shirt, your hands!”

  “You trying to pin that on me?” I wrenched free. “You know I had nothing to do with that. Fuck you, Smith!”

  “What I know and what I will tell the French police are two different things. You get my drift, buddy?”

  “I’m not your buddy.”

  “You got that right,” Smith said. “You will be arrested and found guilty when an INTERPOL agent testifies against you.”

  “Fuck you,” I said again, but much of the fight had gone out of my words. I could see it, my arrest and trial spooling out in front of me, the obvious verdict.

  “You play ball with me, or that’s it—you’re a guilty man. And believe me, the French prisons are not nearly as nice as the ones in the States, and from what I know, those aren’t very nice at all.”

  I fought the urge to throw a punch, took a deep breath, tried to think. Smith would learn what he needed from the journal anyway, no reason not to tell him. I asked him what he wanted to know, and he said, “Everything.”

  “What do I get in return?”

  “My protection, INTERPOL’s protection—and you’re going to need it.”

  He had a point. If he hadn’t come along, that thug would have blown my brains out. I took a moment, then said okay. Smith lit another cigarette and sat back. I told him how Valfiero had lured my great-grandfather into stealing the painting, how Chaudron had made copies, and how the pair had schemed to make forgeries and sell them as the original. When I stopped, he asked again why I’d come to Paris to see Étienne Chaudron.

  “I wanted to see if he could add anything to what I’d read.”

  “There’s something else you’re not telling me.”

  I told him he was wrong, that there was nothing else.

  He stared at me, said he knew all about me: my past, my present, the school suspensions, the arrests for breaking and entering.

  “Ancient history,” I said. “Who cares?”

  “I think a judge and jury will. Your delinquent past isn’t going to play well in your murder case.” He added a mean grin. “Your prints all over the townhouse, the girl’s blood on your phone—”

  “What’s my motive?” I folded my arms across my chest, trying to hide my anxiety.

  “How about art theft? It runs in your family. You were in Chaudron’s home earlier, saw the Vermeer, wanted it, and went back to steal it. But you know, Perrone, that hardly matters. Your DNA alone will convict you.”

  I kept my mask of cool in place best I could, but I knew he was right.

  “I want your full cooperation, and I want it now. Starting with why you went to see Étienne Chaudron and what you learned from him.”

  “I already told you.”

  “There’s more. You know it and I know it!”

  I was pretty sure he was bluffing. The way he kept threatening, then backing down, my Kill Van Kull radar reading him like it would any punk on the street. Something was off. Smith had a secret, same as me.

  62

  I walked fast, shoulders hunched, head down, no direction in mind. I just had to keep moving. The rain was coming down hard now. It soaked my hair and streaked my face. I didn’t think Smith was following me or having me followed, but I couldn’t be sure and wanted to put as much distance between us as possible. He’d let me go with a threat to turn me in for the murders of Étienne Chaudron and his girlfriend. I knew he was bluffing, or he’d have already done it. Letting me go had been the proof.

  I crossed streets, turned corners, and cut through alleyways, always checking over my shoulder, consumed by one thought—reading the pages I had found in the back of the Vermeer painting. I kept my hand flat against them, wedged in my pocket to keep them dry, to make sure they were there. I replayed the way I had tricked the man with the gun into taking the wrong page—the intentional feint toward my breast pocket, a decision made in a split second, directing him to the page I’d torn out of the journal and brought with me to Paris, not the ones I had just found hidden behind the Vermeer. It still amazed me that I had pulled it off, and I was pretty damn proud of myself.

  After an hour of walking, wet and shivering but fairly certain I had not been followed, I looked for a place to stop. I peered through the window of a bar, too crowded. Another block, a courtyard with a small graveyard, tombstones tilted and worn. I circled the periphery, superstitious about walking over the dead. Then came to a back street where I spotted a shabby-looking café. Under its tattered awning, I took a minute to shake off the rain and smooth my hair.

  Only two people at the bar, both huddled over drinks. Neither one looked up when I came in.

  The bartender offered me a table, but I asked first for the men’s room.

  A bare bulb dangling from a chain illuminated a toilet, pitted sink, grimy black and white floor tiles. I blotted my face with a paper towel, tried hard to ignore the smell of urine and ammonia, got the pages out of my side pocket, and unfolded them. The first page stopped me. This was it, what I’d been looking for. The sentence continuing exactly from the last one I’d read…

  …look very carefully at the shadow cast by Lisa del
Giocondo’s left hand. Where the hand meets the book. You will see two tiny marks. They will look like nothing more than that. Because you need to turn the painting upside down and look again. Now use the magnifying glass and you will see exactly what the forger Yves Chaudron has painted into every one of his copies.

  Two marks. The letters Y and C. For Yves Chaudron. The forger has dared to sign his work!

  This is all the proof you need to identify the forgeries. When you find the one without Chaudron’s initials you will have found Leonardo’s original!

  I stared at the words, the paper trembling in my hand, could hardly believe I’d found it. I would have to go back to the Louvre and see the painting again, but this time, I’d know what to look for. I skimmed the remaining pages quickly. They appeared to be written after Peruggia had gotten out of prison. I put them back into my pocket, would read them later. The first page, the important page, I folded into a small square, found the tiny tear in my pocket, and forced it through until it lodged inside the lining.

  I caught my reflection in the mirror above the sink, dark shadows of my beard and mustache, hair slick with rain, one eye swollen from the fight, a crack in the mirror bisecting my other eye and making it appear smaller. I stared at my face, but it was my great-grandfather who stared back.

  63

  The rain was no more than a drizzle now, everything cloaked in heavy fog as I made my way down the street, trash floating in puddles, half the lights burned out, shops closed, homes dark—not a desirable neighborhood for this time of night.

  A man, hulking and ragged, appeared out of the mist, and I flinched.

  “Pardonnez-moi,” he said, apologizing for startling me. “Je ne voulais pas vous effrayer.” A homeless guy with a surprisingly young face half-hidden under a scraggly beard and matted hair.

  I dug around in my pocket, came up with a handful of damp, crumpled euros, and handed them to him.

  He thanked me and wished me “bonne chance.”

  I wished him good luck as well. I felt like we both needed it. I was tired, my body aching and heavy, the day finally catching up to me. And I was lost.

  I huddled under a bus stop, got my cell phone out, and ordered an Uber. I felt for the paper in my jacket lining again, my mind churning with thoughts and images—Yves Chaudron’s initials in the paintings, the dead girl on the staircase, Smith’s threats—so I didn’t see anything until the blow came against my back. Stunned and stumbling, I turned but was hit again, and this time, I went down, knees against concrete, filthy water splashing into my face, my mouth. I looked up to see the man who had been fighting with me and Smith, the recognition processed in split seconds before he hauled me to my feet, knife at my neck, a hiss in my ear. “You have other papers.”

  “I already gave them to you,” I said, trying to breathe, to think.

  “Time to kill you.”

  “No—wait. You’re right. There are other pages, but they’re—in my hotel room.”

  “Perhaps your life means nothing to you,” he said, his flat, colorless eyes on mine as he drew the knife around to the back of my neck, slid it across my skin. “It is up to you.”

  I didn’t think, thrust my arm into his gut, heard the air go out of him, saw him stagger and hold his side, then fall. I sprinted down the street, saw the Uber turning onto it, waved my arms, shouted for it to stop, pulled the door open, “Allez! Allez! Go! Go!” I said, collapsing into the back seat, winded, in shock.

  I looked back to see the man on the ground getting to his feet and staring after the car as we drove away.

  The driver asked what I’d been doing in such a bad neighborhood, but I didn’t answer, intently checking the lining of my jacket to make sure the paper was still there. I touched the back of my neck, and my hand came away stained with blood. Then I noticed my knuckles and palms were scraped, the knees of my jeans torn and bloodied.

  I fumbled the card from my shirt pocket, hands shaking. Not feeling very tough anymore, I got the cell phone to my ear and made the call.

  64

  I slammed the palm of my hand against the hotel room door, knuckles too bruised to make a fist.

  Smith opened it. He was in boxer shorts and a tee, eyes puffy from sleep.

  “Attacked—” I said before my knees gave out.

  He got an arm around me, led me to the bathroom, knocked the toilet seat down, and told me to sit. Helped me out of my jacket, then my shirt, ran a washcloth under cold water, dabbed at the back of my neck. “It’s nothing, just a flesh wound,” he said, opened the medicine cabinet, came out with a bottle of alcohol, swabbed the back of my neck, then helped me up again.

  I washed my hands, watched the water go from red to pink.

  Smith doused them with alcohol too, told me not to a baby when I winced.

  “Now tell me what happened.”

  I tried to explain it, seeing the guy, the fight, in fragments, how he’d come out of nowhere.

  “Did you recognize him?”

  “Yeah, the same guy we fought with earlier.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No.”

  “How you’d get away?”

  “I’m a tough guy, remember? You know my history.”

  “Yeah, real tough,” he said. “Take your pants off.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Smith indicated my knees, the torn fabric, the bloodstains. I eased my pants down, sat on the toilet seat again.

  “So what was he after? The truth this time, Perrone.”

  “Might be time you called me Luke. I mean, with my pants down and all.”

  Smith almost laughed, handed me the washcloth to clean my knees, asked if I had other pants, another shirt, which I did, back in my hotel room.

  “Good,” he said. “So the man you fought with… Was he injured from the shot fired earlier?”

  “He was holding his side, so probably, or I wouldn’t have gotten away.”

  Smith led me out of the bathroom, offered me the only comfy chair. I took in the room for the first time, utilitarian and bland, a charmless businessman’s hotel. He got a couple of tiny liquor bottles out of the mini fridge, held them up. “Scotch or vodka?”

  I told him I didn’t drink.

  “Right. I forgot.” He handed me a glass of water. “Here you go, Lucky.”

  I scoffed a laugh. “Is John Smith really your name?”

  “John Washington Smith.”

  “Has a ring to it,” I said.

  “Now tell me what you didn’t tell me before.”

  I drank the water. It did little to calm me. I wanted the scotch, could practically taste it. I needed a moment, closed my eyes, and silently recited words I knew by heart: Honesty—Hope—Faith—Courage—Integrity—Willingness—Humility—Brotherly Love—Justice—Perseverance—Spirituality—Service. More than their meaning, it was the act of saying them that helped. Then I told Smith I was ready.

  I described how I’d found the pages in the back of the Vermeer and how I’d switched them on the guy who’d attacked me. I looked down at my bloodied knees and raw palms, admitted I’d been in over my head. Smith didn’t take the opportunity to gloat, which I appreciated.

  I asked him what was next.

  “Now that we know what to look for, we go see the painting.”

  “No way that Louvre curator is going to give me another private viewing.”

  “An INTERPOL employee can make certain demands,” he said, a look sliding across his face, what I’d seen before, something he wasn’t saying.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Whatever you’re not telling me. I just came clean. How about you?”

  Smith went to the window, pulled the curtains back, and peered out. “Nothing to tell,” he said. “You were the one holding things back, not me.”

&n
bsp; “And I said I regretted it.”

  He said he was sorry I had to get hurt to feel that way, but he needed my honesty from now on, and not just because my life depended on it.

  “That is a factor,” I said, then gave him my word: no more heroics, no more secrecy. I reached out and we shook hands, still waiting for him to say what it was he wasn’t telling me.

  “Kill Van Kull,” he said, reading the tattoo on my arm.

  “Name of my teenage crew—but you already know that, right?”

  “There are pictures in your file.”

  “Of my tattoos?”

  “No. Of you with your buddies, your crew.” He shook another cigarette out of a pack. “So the initials in the painting… We’ve got to be certain Peruggia is telling the truth.”

  “I’m sure he is,” I said.

  “Maybe. For now, we proceed with skepticism and caution.”

  “Caution for sure,” I said and asked if he had any idea who the guy was who’d attacked me twice.

  “Who knows? A thug. Hired help to do someone else’s dirty work, to protect their interests.” He shrugged. “It continues to amaze me what people will do to own a piece of canvas covered with paint.”

  “Not just any canvas and paint.”

  Smith nodded, then laid out what he needed from me. If Peruggia was telling the truth, Smith wanted to be the guy, the INTERPOL agent who after a hundred years revealed that the Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum was a fake.

  I said fine, then told him what I wanted: the right to tell my great-grandfather’s story because it was my story too.

  Smith paused. “All right. Once I break the case, the story is yours. But we work together. No secrets.”

  “None,” I said.

  He handed me my leather jacket and bloodstained shirt, checked his watch, told me to go to my hotel and get a few hours of sleep. “It’s late, and we’ve got a lot to do.”

  I asked for a day off. There was something I needed to do.