I have to close the gallery, Luke. I just can’t afford it anymore.

What will you do?

Take a break, travel a little. The art world has worn me down these past dozen years.

You and me both.

Don’t worry, Luke. You’ll find another gallery.

I wasn’t so sure. My last exhibition, four years ago, hadn’t done well, the collectors not exactly lining up for my work, and I’d seen what happened to other artists when their galleries closed and they had no track record. They ended up in low-rent co-op galleries where the artists competed against one another, though no collectors or critics ever went to the shows, so it hardly mattered.

I arranged my underwear and socks in the top drawer of the dresser, trying not to think about my painting, though it had already triggered another conversation, the one I’d had with my department chair—an art historian with a specialty in eighteenth-century French rococo painting, his favorites Watteau and Fragonard, artists who made fluffy, pink pictures of girls on swings or couples swooning in gardens.

You’re going to need an exhibition if you want to get tenure.

An exhibition? Without a gallery? Not so easy. Though I didn’t tell him my gallery had closed.

I stopped unpacking, sagged onto the edge of the bed, and wondered if by coming here, I’d been running toward something or running away.

Exhausted, I closed my eyes, but while my body flagged, my mind continued to spark.

Lunch with Quattrocchi had provided more questions than answers. My visit to the university had been an exercise in frustration: Quattrocchi’s secretary, a wizened old woman who looked as if she ate Americans like me for breakfast, had admitted to typing the email to me, but when I asked if anyone else might have read it, she cut me with a look and left the room without a word.

I lay back and stared at the ceiling’s ornate plasterwork, the only beautiful part of the room. But a minute later, I was up, too jittery to sit still, unpacking the newspaper articles I’d brought with me, along with my only photo of Vincenzo Peruggia, a mug shot. The day I’d found it remained so vivid it could have happened hours earlier, not twenty years ago.

Dust and cobwebs. Dirt and mouse droppings. The low attic ceiling almost as oppressive as the heat beating through it: midsummer in Bayonne, New Jersey. Nothing worse, at least not to me, fourteen and trapped. Repeating ninth-grade algebra in summer school. If X equals Y…like I could give a shit. Exactly what I had told my teacher, who’d sent me to the principal, who’d sent me home. Ergo, the punishment, just one of many, this time, “Clean the attic!” An invented chore, since no one ever used it.

I’d spent the first hour sitting on my ass alternating cigarettes with a joint, then spied the old steamer trunk wedged into a corner. I didn’t think it would amount to much, but when I swiped my hand through the dust, I saw the initials: SP. It took me a minute to figure out it must have belonged to my grandfather, Simon Perrone, who had lived in Italy and died before I was born.