‘Yes. It was your quip about the Caravaggio that gave me the clue. I mean those Masters have an easy-to-trace provenance. And it only left one. And that was stolen by the same group of people that your husband was in business with.’

‘My goodness Ingmar, you have been busy.’

‘I have done nothing. I pay people who are in positions to gain access to information on anyone. You are not really that difficult to unearth.’

The stress gave the word – unearth – the weight of discovering an Egyptian relic.

‘All the way back to Pittsburgh in fact.’

‘So what.’

Suddenly a toughness appeared to come out of a past Lomita.

‘What are you going to do about it. I am in the clear.’

‘Are you? Neither of those paintings have been recovered. I am sure there are people who would like to talk to you.’

Lomita felt the secluded bubble of her world disintegrate. The privacy she craved caved in. By this little fuck.

‘I suppose I would be more than happy to talk to whoever, to help clarify a situation I know nothing about.’

Said Lomita.

‘Perhaps you’re right, maybe I am being a little… I don’t know.’

He was doing that annoying hand over mouth thing again, covering his eating, while his mouth turned black-blue. A quite revolting sight.

Lomita had pushed around enough food and was now sipping her sparkling water.

‘How does it help, Ingmar? I don’t know a thing, he has been dead for thirty-five years.’

This time she resisted the reference to Roberto dePirizone by the title of husband. Well, ex-husband, in fact dead husband. Why was this man bothering to persecute her in this way?

‘It’s just that the Metzinger I feel strongly about, it was a Nazi confiscation, put in the Degenerate Art Exhibition and then—’

He paused.

‘Gone. But then you.’

He hadn’t really made sense of these non sequiturs and she knew that it was because he was deeply angry, understandably deeply angry as a Jew, that this work by a Jewish artist had been treated with such disrespect by the Nazis and then, she presumed he thought, by her husband, who in some way had collaborated post war with their sympathisers. Totally understandable. She was with him. She just didn’t want to be part of this, dragged into an investigation of how this painting had landed in her possession. The annoying part was that she didn’t really like it anyway. He could stuff his Metzinger.

They finished eating. They were keeping a surprising civility, mostly due to her, and ordered coffee.

‘And you will continue with this?’

Tendered Lomita, after the plates had been cleared.

‘I don’t feel I have any choice not to continue. To uncover what happened and to bring about some form of, hopefully, of conclusion, closure if you like, to a much-maligned artist. Who I do think was touched with that word.’

‘Genius?’