An exceedingly fat French woman brushed against him as he walked. Elata stopped, gave her a nasty look—but she was oblivious, chattering to her almost equally rotund companion about the uselessness—inutile—of art. Elata spoke little French, and that word specifically might be interpreted as edging toward “vanity” rather than uselessness, but he had an ear for such conversations. He had heard them all his life, beginning at his own dinner table when he’d expressed his desire at age eight to become an artist.

Which, despite everything, he had become. If a forger might be considered an artist.

The human brain’s ability to draw fine distinctions cannot be overstated, especially in the gray realm of morality and ethics. Elata’s mind was particularly supple; it had no great difficulty justifying his actions. First and foremost, there was the need to survive; he had to eat. If he had come quite a distance from the days when he was truly starving—as the Rolex and privately tailored sports coat he wore over his jeans attested—that distance was not so great as to dim the memory.

His second justification was that he was actually an artist. As such, he not only understood what the masters he imitated were doing, he extended it. Copying them had become part of his art, part of the great tradition of master and student that many of them had followed during their own apprenticeship. He learned their style and technique, then addressed himself to subjects as they would have. He did not copy paintings directly. If, when he was finished, others believed that the work on his easel had been done by the master himself, that was irrelevant to him. Elata himself never passed the paintings off as anything other than his own. And as far as he knew, those who sold them did not either.

That this knowledge was a product of willful ignorance made no difference to him morally, even if it might make such baubles as the Rolex possible.

And then there was the final justification, the grand and undebatable one—art itself. For art transcended all. It transcended da Vinci as surely as it transcended Marc Elata. It transcended Picasso, it transcended Elata’s present employer and greatest patron, Gabriel Morgan. It endured and would endure, even if every work in this museum were burned tomorrow.

Elata shuddered and turned abruptly, afraid that he had somehow inadvertently shared his thoughts with the rest of the room. But he had not. The tourists continued to wander through like cows grazing in a field.

He glanced at his watch. Still another three hours to kill.

Elata had not come to Paris to prepare himself for another round of paintings. His job was quite different—Morgan had hired him to detect a forgery rather than produce one.