I got that. What Peruggia had wanted too, to be somebody. What we all wanted, dreamed of as kids, before the world got too real and dreams got crushed.

We were quiet a minute, but I could see Smith was still caught up in something, his eyes unfocused as if he were looking inward.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve had two semi-serious relationships in twenty years. Both ended badly. I blamed the women, but it was me. It was always about the job—gotta get ahead, you know—and where did it get me? Stuck behind a desk wanting to get out, same place I started.”

“You’ve got plenty of time. How old are you anyway?”

“Forty-seven.”

“Hell, you’ve got half your life ahead of you.”

“Yeah, the old half.”

I laughed, but it made me look at my life: a job back home in jeopardy, no gallery, all the women I’d pushed away—and now Alex.

“When you’re young, you think you have all the time in the world,” Smith said. “Then one day, you wake up and you’re forty-seven and you think: how the hell did that happen? You know, I bumped into one of those women not long ago, the last one I was involved with—two years we were together. She’s married now, couple of kids, showed me pictures on her phone. I congratulated her, but you know what, it made me sad and sorry for myself, all that wasted time.”

“Threw yourself a real pity party, huh?”

“Fuck you,” he said. “I regret it is all. She was a good woman. Sometimes you don’t know how precious something is until you lose it.”

I pictured Alex across from me in the café, then saw her leaving.

“I’m not blaming anybody but myself,” Smith said, “but I gave up a lot for this damn job.”

“You think I had it so easy? Oh, wait, you know my whole life story.”

“Yeah, I do. And I know it wasn’t served to you on a silver platter. Boo-hoo. You think Bayonne comes close to the projects?”

“So it’s a contest—my lousy life versus your lousy life?”

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Fuck you,” I said.

A few seconds passed, then we both cracked up. Laughed for a full minute, stopped, then laughed again. Smith rolled his big shoulders as if shaking it all off, the laughs, the philosophy, the self-pity.

“Hang on a sec.” He went to the closet, got a shopping bag, and handed it to me. “I thought you might want this back.”

Inside was my great-grandfather’s painting. I stared at it a moment, a rush of warmth spreading through me, then at Smith. “Thanks,” I said and meant it.

“Let’s get back to work,” he said. “I’d like to finish so we can plan our strategy.”

I asked what strategy, and Smith said to find the real Mona Lisa—or at least discredit any forgeries. He went back to his laptop, all business, read off the screen, identifying the three known copies of the Mona Lisa—one in Vienna, one in Dusseldorf, another in a small museum in Antwerp—all dating from around the time Chaudron would have been making his copies. “If we locate another,” he said, “that would be four, and if Peruggia was right, Chaudron painted six.” He said he’d email and print out the stats on the forgeries, and I asked why, but Smith had already hit Print, and his portable copier was spitting out the page.