“That he was crazy? Yes, I have considered it, but I’ve found nothing in his journal to suggest that he was.” I handed him the page I had torn out of the journal.

“A page from Peruggia’s diary,” he said. “You offer this as proof?”

A moment to realize I had not said where the page was from, and yet he had identified it.

“My Italian is quite poor,” he said, though he skimmed the page before handing it back to me. “And?”

“And I was hoping you might know what the rest of it said, what it was your great-uncle put in his paintings to distinguish them from the original.”

“I have no idea,” he said, lips tightly compressed as if he were trying to hold words in. “Now, you will excuse me, but I have things I must attend to.”

I folded the page back into my breast pocket. I felt he knew more than he let on and tried to think of what to say, to ask, something that would get him to cooperate. “I’m thinking of writing about this.”

“About what?”

“The theft—and your great-uncle’s involvement in making the forgeries.”

“I would advise against that,” he said, more cautionary than threat, then led me back to the foyer.

I stopped a moment to look through an archway into the living room, most of the furniture covered with sheets, not the sort of thing one did for a short vacation. Then I spotted a painting. “Is that a Vermeer?” I asked and moved in for a closer look before he could stop me. The painting depicted a woman playing piano, another woman holding a letter, a black-and-white-checkered floor like a series of diamonds, all suffused with the famous Vermeer light. “Is this your great-uncle’s work?”

“I must ask you to leave,” Chaudron said, his hand on my back.

Then it clicked. I knew the painting. It had once hung in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. A painting—along with twelve others—that had been stolen in 1990, an unsolved crime that still baffled the authorities. Was this an Yves Chaudron forgery, or could it possibly be the original?

“It’s remarkable,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” Chaudron said impatiently. “It is my great-uncle’s. You can see he had a meticulous hand.”

I did. If it was a copy, I no longer had any doubt that Yves Chaudron was capable of producing a perfect forgery of just about anything. Then I realized Yves Chaudron had died long before the Gardner Museum theft, so when had he seen the painting to copy it so perfectly? I made a note to find out where the painting had been before it had made its way to the Gardner.

“How did you get it?” I asked.

A pause, another sigh. “It was among his things when he died. He had no children, so everything went to my older sister. Now I must ask you—”

“And your sister—”

“Is dead.”

“I’m sorry. So your great-uncle’s effects came to you?”