She remembered nothing of what happened and at first asked if Manita was all right, as if she was the one with the problem. She couldn’t move, the stitches and brace that held her head in place, to protect her brain, was to provide a long, slow recovery. She had fractured her skull, allowed light into a place that was always in the dark. She wondered, through that crack where the light shone in, whether it had changed her perception of life and her feeling towards the things that had happened in her life. It made her give a thank you every day; she had never felt the need before, in a way it made her brighter, that light. It brightened up her life.

Lomita had survived, but the blood transfusion was to carry another story.

*

Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence by Caravaggio was painted in 1609.

It was stolen from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily on 18 October 1969. So there you have it. By the Mafia. Roberto dePirizone was owed a massive payment for work executed in Los Angeles and there was no way of paying him. This was used as collateral; pledged as security for the payment that would eventually come. On the black market the painting would fetch only a tenth of its market value, which was estimated at $25 million. But if all else failed this was a good fallback. So, for a time Roberto and Lomita, though in intense privacy, and not benefitting from it on their wall, were the proud owners of a Caravaggio.

*

Jean Metzinger painted En Canot in 1914.

It had been missing since 1938.

After the Degenerate Art Exhibition, it had been supposedly pillaged by the Nazi regime. Which indeed it was, but was traded in a transaction in the 1950s from an about-to-be-publicly-embarrassed German family to the Mafia in Naples. It then, through an amicable interfamilial negotiation, found its way to Roberto, again as payment for work achieved and underpaid: he had no particular affection for cubism, just liked the idea that it was valuable and celebrated.

This time it did get across to Los Angeles and it did hang on his wall. His security only allowed selected visitors and, in their world, there was an understanding that you did not ask questions. It lived happily with them both, Lomita being oblivious to its dubious history until the unravelling of her dead husband’s estate revealed its provenance.

She immediately asked her second husband to dispose of it. To where she never asked, nor expressed concern.

She just wanted no part of the involvement in that kind of world. That world died, and with great relief, with Roberto dePirizone.

*

Did Ingmar Lorken know about all that?