I needed a screwdriver to pry it open. Inside, right on top, a rifle, which I lifted out and inspected: pockmarked wood, metal barrel, and rusty trigger. I pictured showing it off to my pals and later did.

Under the rifle, a photograph, a mug shot, full face and profile, and below them: il carcerato 378.699.

Prisoner. Signed on the back in a small, neat script, Vincenzo Peruggia.

My great-grandfather?

I no longer cared about the attic’s heat or the flies buzzing around my head. I couldn’t stop staring at the picture of this man, this convict!

That night, in the middle of dinner, I laid the photo on the table, watched as my father stopped eating midbite.

“It’s your father’s father, isn’t it? My great-grandfather Vincenzo.”

“It is…no one,” my father said, already slurring his words, half-drunk. “You don’t know what…you’re saying.”

I got up and bolted, not wanting the meat loaf or the canned peas anyway, my father shouting after me, “Get back here!” My mother looking like she was about to cry, which she did a lot—not her fault, she was no match for her bully husband or her delinquent son.

Later, I met my buddies at the Kill Van Kull, showed off the old rifle, and had a few beers. But I didn’t show them the mug shot. That was for me—alone.

I brought him up to my parents for weeks, but it was always the same. They acted like he’d never existed, like they didn’t know who I was talking about, like I was crazy. It didn’t take much research to find out they had changed the family name, one more thing they’d never told me. That was the beginning of the late-night internet searches, letters, and emails, weeks and months, years of accruing information until it became my quest to find out anything and everything about Vincenzo Peruggia: the man who had stolen the Mona Lisa!

Holy shit! The idea that this guy, this criminal was my great-grandfather. I couldn’t figure out why my parents were so ashamed when all I wanted was to tell the world. The idea of it was so exciting and dangerous I had to know everything about him.

And I had tried. Though after twenty years, the man remained a mystery. Until today.

After reading only a little of the journal, the mug shot was coming to life. And I’d been right: I had more in common with my great-grandfather than with my dull civil-servant father.

I put the mug shot aside to spread out the articles I had brought with me. First, a 1911 New York Tribune story I had long ago laminated under plastic and knew well.

DA VINCI PICTURE STOLEN IN PARIS

Paris, Aug. 22.—The art world was thrown into consternation today by the announcement that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, or as it is popularly known, La Joconde, had mysteriously disappeared from the Louvre Museum.

Not a vestige of a clue was left by the person or persons who took it. A search of every nook and cranny, from roof to cellar, brought to light only the valuable frame and glass that covered it, left on a back staircase.