It occurs to him then that it is precisely in this that he is an artist—that he, too, is an artist and that this is his art. His particular talent is in arranging things so that everything depends on one moron. So that you could also say that this is how he gives chance a role in the equation, that he plays fairly. This is how he shows the world that we are all toys in the hands of an imbecile—this is his art.
He is now extremely nervous, frightened. Not that he could be implicated in the affair, for Perugia knows nothing about who he is, much less his friends. Only Valérie could ultimately make things very difficult for him, and he will take care of her later. But if they are caught, all his plans will disintegrate—everything he has spent more than a year putting together, his plans to secure his future. Most of all, the act that would have defined him forever, the one that would have declared once and for all who he was: Valfierno.
The three Italians hide in the Cour Visconti behind four big wooden boxes containing recently arrived works of art. Perugia knows they cannot stay there; dozens of windows give onto the Cour Visconti and anyone could see them. It’s a question now of seconds, perhaps a minute. Two minutes if he were very lucky, he thinks, but luck is something he has never had; that star.
“Look, he’s leaving,” whispers Michele, and Perugia sees that the guard has picked up a bucket and is going through a side door that leads to the vestibule. He must be going to get water or soap; he won’t be long. Just the thought that he might be lucky in spite of everything causes him to lose a few seconds, and he loses a few more crossing his fingers.
“Okay! Let’s go!”
The three of them move quickly across to the vestibule, then across to the door and out into the street. They are on the street! They had taken off their aprons as they went, and now they are walking along the Quai du Louvre in the sunshine. In seconds they have become just three more ordinary guys, walking.
Valérie Larbin turns over in her bed, and the movement wakes her. She is startled, her head jerks, and she sees that it is light. In a fog, she reconstructs what happened: it’s the morning of the day on which maybe…She remembers the words Valfierno didn’t say, the drinks she had to get to sleep, something she dreamed that left her neck tight. She closes her eyes and tries to go back to sleep. The best choice.
Vincenzo Perugia is sure you can see it on him. It’s just not possible that you can’t see it, he thinks, that I look the same now as I did yesterday, that it was all nothing. He sidesteps a puddle. The Lancelotti brothers walk beside him. He’s told them to flank him, just in case; the Rue Saint-Merri is dangerous, a refuge for petty criminals, and he has to be careful, though he doesn’t believe anyone’s going to think to steal the piece of wood he carries under his arm, wrapped in a white cloth. I can’t believe no one can tell I’ve got millions of francs here under my arm! he laughs to himself. I’m lucky they’re all so stupid.
“Here we are,” says Vincenzo Lancelotti, and the three men look to either side before opening a narrow door with peeling paint. They go down a dark passageway, climb two flights of a dilapidated staircase, and bang on a small door.
“Vovonne! We’re here,” says Vincenzo Lancelotti, and a woman with meaty arms and sagging breasts opens the door for them without saying anything. Yvonne Séguenot is his girlfriend; he has offered her some money in exchange for storing an object for them for a few days. “Don’t tell me it’s the first time,” he had said. “Or the last, I bet,” she had replied. Now, in her soot-blackened kitchen, she serves the men a pastis.
“The Signore’s health,” Perugia declares, and the four glasses clink together. The woman reaches for the panel of wood, still wrapped in its apron.
“Don’t touch that, woman,” says Perugia, and Michele takes it from her and begins to unwrap it.
“Leave it, Michele, don’t take it out.”
“Come on, I want to see it.”
“The Signore told us to leave it wrapped, to wait for him before we took it out.”
“Come on, Vincenzo, he’ll never know.”
“You never know. Don’t risk it.”
Perugia takes it from him and hands it back to the woman, telling her to keep it under her bed until he asks for it, to go on with her normal life and not to worry about anything.
“I got to go. I’ll be back at seven,” he says, and leaves. The Signore had been very clear: they were not even to think about not going to work. But spending the whole day at his boss Perrotti’s workshop was going to be almost as hard as the robbery itself. He was going to have to act as if nothing had happened, he thinks, and that kind of acting is what he is no good at.
Sir Galahad has just won the third race at Longchamps, and Valfierno reproaches himself for not having bet on him—his friend Sebastián had pointed him out as a hot tip. Then he thinks how stupid it all is.
It is three in the afternoon. The sun is beating down, the men are sweating, the women open their parasols, and Valfierno is cold. He is trembling—fear of the cell, he thinks. Right about now they’ll be telling the police about him, he says to himself. They’ll have been caught and they’ll be giving me up. Everything is lost. I am lost. They’re coming to get me. Even though they don’t know who I am or what my name is, they’ll tell the police every last detail about me: what I look like, my accent—anything they can remember. If they get tough with the Italian he’ll remember a lot, thinks Valfierno, and he tries to calm himself by reminding himself how little Perugia knows, but it doesn’t work. Everything is lost; I am lost—or maybe not, he thinks, but now he cannot bear not knowing. It’s obvious that when he planned this whole thing he overestimated the strength of his nerves. How could he possibly have thought that he could spend this whole day not knowing what had happened? But in order to know he would have had to give them a telephone number or an address—far too big a risk. But he’d been mistaken to think he could last the whole day in this state.
“Marqués.”
He is greeted by an acquaintance and he touches the brim of his top hat in salutation; the other smiles. Not all is lost, maybe the plan worked—soon I’ll know, he thinks, and he knows, too, that he will manage to wait out the next three hours because in any case he has no choice, and because he is the Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno, with his walking stick and his top hat and his acquaintances who so deferentially greet him—greet him, the Marqués de Valfierno.
But perhaps he no longer exists, he thinks, and he can’t be sure. Right now, at this very moment they are singing like birds, telling them everything, and they’ll get me and put me back in jail, in a French jail, in prison with Frenchmen, and in the middle of his panic he has a memory: in prison with a Frenchman—they were together for so long. To go back to all that! he thinks with a start: Perrone, Juan María.
They’re going to put me in jail; they’re going to find out everything, who I really am, my name. They’re not just going to put me in jail, they’re going to put an end to me, to the Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno, to all of that, and for a moment he feels relief. I won’t have to act anymore, he tells himself, I won’t have to keep up this theater; but right away he sobers. In that case, he really would become nobody, he would have to start the whole thing over again, and he smiles at another gentleman who greets him amiably as he walks past.
There is no light he likes more than the light you get at six or seven in the evening, when the rays of the sun enter the studio almost horizontally and turn the air inside into something thick. Chaudron has a sip of wine from a broken cup and takes two steps back. There on the easel in front of him is a canvas with a charcoal sketch of the figure of a woman sitting with a child in her arms before a background of rocks and waterfalls. Lifting the broken cup to the canvas in a toast, he smiles to himself and leans forward to make an adjustment to the Virgin’s left arm.
“Perugia!”
“Signore?”
“Yes, it’s me, open up, open the door!”
The door opens on a small, poorly lit kitchen. There is
enough light, however, to see the enormous smile on Perugia’s face.
“Do you have it?”
“What do you think, Signore?”
It takes a huge effort for Valfierno to maintain his composure. To hug the Italian would be a stupid mistake.
With a short piece of charcoal pencil, Valérie extends the line of her eyebrow. Her face is stretched tight, tilted upward, eyes wide open, mouth in a small O. She finishes and rummages for the copper mascara and her brush. Before applying it, she takes a step back and assesses herself in the mirror: she is radiant. Yesterday Valfierno had told her that he didn’t want to see her tonight, and so she is going to the Faux Chien. Screw him, she says to herself, if he thinks he can toss me aside that easily he is very much mistaken.
There she is: those thin, slightly cold lips in that indecipherable expression, that famous expression in which you can see a smile or disapproval or resignation or sadness or much more. Those lips like a mirror, in which each man sees what he wants, or what he fears, or what he can, thinks Valfierno. And those eyes that follow you whether you move to the right or the left, or raise or lower your head, or move away. And the chubby hands that hint at the hidden volume of the breasts behind them, and everything around them that leads you back to the eyes, the smile, the face that never stops telling you what you think it’s telling you. Now I’ll make you open your mouth, he thinks, and is surprised; for that moment, he is so far from being Valfierno. He smiles to himself and looks back at her. There she is, exactly as he has seen her so many times at the museum, so many times in copies and photographs and reproductions, except that now she is his, she is his the way everything else is his: without anyone else knowing or able to find out.
“Congratulations, Perugia.”
“No, on the contrary, congratulations to you, Signore. Your plan worked perfectly.”
“Now then, tell me everything…”
The two men are sitting in the kitchen with glasses of wine. At the end of the table, leaning against the wall, La Joconde looks at them distractedly. Valfierno is surprised by her size—now that he has her, she is so small! In the museum she seems imposing, but then that’s true of everything there. And she looks too much like Chaudron’s copies; for a moment he wonders if she is one.
“…and then, just in time, we spotted a guard at the door, imagine! Right when we were almost out! But…”
Perugia recounts the day’s events in a torrent of detail, with the occasional exaggeration for heroic effect. Valfierno listens as if it scarcely matters to him; he cannot stop listening to his own thoughts, the sheer excitement of knowing that he has finally gotten what he wanted, that he finally has what everyone wants, and now that it’s his, he will do with it what no one could guess: this is his masterpiece.
“Tell the others to come in, Perugia.”
“Yes, Signore.”
Yvonne Séguenot and the two Lancelotti brothers file into the kitchen with their eyes lowered. The room is crammed and smells of garbage and stale sweat. Valfierno takes out a bulging wallet and counts out several large bills: some for the woman, some more for the brothers, more still for Perugia.
“I don’t need to tell you that you must not say a word to anyone. If anyone talks, it will be all of you who get hurt, and only you. So keep your mouths shut and wait for my instructions. If you keep doing what you’re told, there’ll be plenty more of this,” he says, and he takes Perugia’s arm and leads him into the other room.
“So—leave the painting here until the police have finished asking you their questions—” Valfierno stops talking as he sees the expression on Perugia’s face. “Now, don’t worry, Perugia, I told you already, it will just be routine procedure. They will come to interview you; they might search your room, but you don’t know anything, you have nothing to tell them, they won’t find anything. You were working that day, so don’t worry, and try to stay calm. That’s the most important thing, Perugia—to stay calm. Do what you normally do, and don’t spend any of that money until I tell you. And most of all, don’t breathe a word of this to Valérie.”
“Who?”
“Don’t pretend, Perugia. Don’t treat me like a fool. I know everything about you, what did you think?”
Vincenzo Perugia says nothing, surprised. He wonders how this man could know what no one knows; now he feels completely under his control. Valfierno also remains quiet, perhaps for a moment too long. He might have said too much. Above all, he thinks that he used a phrase that is not his, that sounds as if it came from someone else. He clears his throat and wipes his mouth with a handkerchief. Once the police have finished the interrogation, Perugia is to take the painting to his house and wait for instructions, he tells him: under no circumstances should he decide anything on his own.
“I will be going on a trip now for a few days. When I return, I will come by and give you the rest of the money and take the painting with me, understood?”
“Yes, Signore, of course,” replies Perugia, wondering why the Signore doesn’t just take the painting now and be done with it. He tries to think of a reason, but he can’t. Still, he tells himself, the Signore knows what he’s doing. Everything so far has gone well, the Signore knows exactly what he’s doing, and if that is his decision then there must be a reason.
5
“YOU DON’T KNOW HOW MANY times I’ve asked myself who he was, what happened, why he never came back. So many times in twenty years.”
Back in the café in Dumenza’s main square, nothing has changed from the previous day, nor, in all likelihood, in the past several decades. Perugia is wearing the same cotton shirt, or one just like it, equally worn, under his suspenders. We have ordered a jug of the local red wine with two glasses, some cheese and some olives. The other patrons are no longer paying any attention to us. Perugia pushes his hair back with his hands. His fingers are stubby, his nails bitten down.
“And you never mentioned him?”
“Who?”
“Who are we talking about? The Signore. The man you called the Signore.”
“What do you mean I never mentioned him?”
“To the police, to the prosecutors, to the newspapers.”
“What was I going to tell them? That some man I didn’t know told me to do it? For what? They wouldn’t have believed me, they would have called me a liar. I may be a lot of things, but I’m no liar.”
I had been told that for an Italian, to be a thief was not a serious dishonor, whereas to be thought a liar—this was truly terrible.
“And anyway, you’d prefer people to think that you’d done the whole thing on your own. You were a hero, right, Perugia? The lone crusader?”
Perugia gives me a hostile look and I decide to watch what I say. We have already talked about the theft itself—about that night and that incredible morning—and I am trying not to ask him questions that could sound hostile or accusing; it’s a complicated balance. Now I try to bring him back by recalling his memories of triumph.
“That must have been a great moment.”
“Which one?”
“The one where you return with the painting under your arm, knowing that you did it, that you have what everybody wants,” I say admiringly. I learned a long time ago that to make someone talk, nothing works better than a little flattery. To show that they’re truly worthy of the praise, they end up saying things they didn’t intend to.
“Yeah, sure. I was nervous but very happy.”
He lifts his glass and silently we toast, I suppose, the success of the robbery. Then he tells me how they left the painting in the house of that French washerwoman—“that cow, Lancelotti’s girl,” he says—for a few days, waiting for the police to come to his room to ask him their questions. Finally they did come. It took them two months, but they came.
“They were a couple of idiots,” he tells me, “French idiots. They asked me if I’d ever worked in the Louvre and I said, sure, and they asked a few other things, I don’t remember what.”
“Wer
en’t you nervous?”
“Why should I be nervous? I hadn’t done anything,” he says, and though I can’t explain it, he seems quite serious. He tells me the only thing that spooked him was when they asked him why he’d arrived at work late on that Monday, the twenty-first of August. He tells me that they knew he hadn’t got in until nine o’clock. “I said, ‘How should I know?’ and that it was a Monday, and you know how you often sleep late on a Monday, what difference does that make? And I smiled at them,” he says, “not too much, and they smiled, too, and nodded, and agreed with me. Then they looked around a bit but of course they didn’t find anything. Then they went.”
“And you thought that you had convinced them?”
“Sure, what else was I supposed to think? I didn’t even think about it; they believed me.”
“And then you took the painting back to your room.”
“No, no, I’m not that stupid, mister. No, I waited a few days, a couple of weeks. When they didn’t come back, then I took it home.”
“How did you carry it?”
“How was I supposed to take it? I wrapped it up in a cloth again and stuck it under my arm and took it, just like that. I just walked with it, no problem, through the Marais.”
Perugia pours more wine and chooses an olive. I try to imagine myself in the same situation—how terrifying that walk would be—and I consider the advantages of a limited imagination. It takes a certain intelligence to be able to imagine potential dangers. Perugia had other strengths. He decided to build himself a wooden toolbox with a false compartment in which he could hide the painting.
The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa Page 23