He said he was sorry I had to get hurt to feel that way, but he needed my honesty from now on, and not just because my life depended on it.

“That is a factor,” I said, then gave him my word: no more heroics, no more secrecy. I reached out and we shook hands, still waiting for him to say what it was he wasn’t telling me.

“Kill Van Kull,” he said, reading the tattoo on my arm.

“Name of my teenage crew—but you already know that, right?”

“There are pictures in your file.”

“Of my tattoos?”

“No. Of you with your buddies, your crew.” He shook another cigarette out of a pack. “So the initials in the painting… We’ve got to be certain Peruggia is telling the truth.”

“I’m sure he is,” I said.

“Maybe. For now, we proceed with skepticism and caution.”

“Caution for sure,” I said and asked if he had any idea who the guy was who’d attacked me twice.

“Who knows? A thug. Hired help to do someone else’s dirty work, to protect their interests.” He shrugged. “It continues to amaze me what people will do to own a piece of canvas covered with paint.”

“Not just any canvas and paint.”

Smith nodded, then laid out what he needed from me. If Peruggia was telling the truth, Smith wanted to be the guy, the INTERPOL agent who after a hundred years revealed that the Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum was a fake.

I said fine, then told him what I wanted: the right to tell my great-grandfather’s story because it was my story too.

Smith paused. “All right. Once I break the case, the story is yours. But we work together. No secrets.”

“None,” I said.

He handed me my leather jacket and bloodstained shirt, checked his watch, told me to go to my hotel and get a few hours of sleep. “It’s late, and we’ve got a lot to do.”

I asked for a day off. There was something I needed to do.

“We don’t have time to waste.”

“There’s someone I need to see,” I said, “in Florence. You can go with me if you don’t trust me.”

“We have to stay in Paris, go to the Louvre. We could be here for a while.”

“This won’t take long,” I said. “I can fly to Florence and be back the next morning. I’m asking for twenty-four hours, that’s all.”

Smith asked who I was seeing, and I said a friend and that it had nothing to do with any of this.

“The blond?”

“So you were watching me—us—in Florence.”

“Yes. And no doubt the other man was too. Possibly others.”

“I need to see her,” I said. “You going to make me beg?”

“You’re not going to run, are you?”

I promised him I wouldn’t.

He hesitated a moment, seemed to be mulling it over.

I told him he could trust me, and I meant it.

“Okay,” he finally said. “You have one day.”