The most remarkable feature of the case is that the picture was not missed for almost two days. It was assumed the painting had been removed for photography or cleaning.

I propped the article on the mantel, then looked at the others I’d brought as well. Perhaps here, in Florence, I’d see something in them I hadn’t seen before. One suggested the Mona Lisa had been stolen by someone in a plan to blackmail the French government; another implied the theft was a German plot to embarrass the French; another, dated two weeks after the crime, maintained that no fewer than three witnesses had seen the Mona Lisa on a train headed for Holland, but the lead had never been followed and the witnesses’ names never disclosed. Another suggested that a wealthy American, a “Westerner,” had stolen the painting and taken it aboard the Kaiser Wilhelm II, but when the ship docked in New York, neither the Westerner nor the painting were anywhere to be seen, a true mystery.

Three more articles—one that blamed the Louvre for their lack of security, another that ridiculed the police for their botched investigation, and one that believed the theft was nothing but a prank. Of course the Louvre had been lax. Add to that the fact that the director of the Louvre had been traveling on the day the painting went missing, and the guard who should have been in the Salon Carré with the Mona Lisa, even though the museum was closed, had stayed home to take care of an ailing child, and there was plenty of reason to suspect an inside job or some sort of conspiracy.

There was one more clipping, to my mind always the most important. It had appeared in a small Parisian newspaper, Le Cri de Paris, exactly one year and one month before the 1911 theft.

MONA LISA SOLD TO AMERICAN

Paris, July 24.—Reliable sources have reported that the Mona Lisa was quietly stolen from the gallery of the Louvre one night in June through the complicity of an official of that museum, a copy substituted in the frame. The original, it is alleged, was ferreted away to New York and there sold to an American collector.

Though never proved, this story was the basis for more than one theory that suggested the Mona Lisa now residing in the Louvre Museum was a forgery, an idea that had plagued me since I’d first read it as a teenager and the reason I was here—hoping Peruggia’s journal would provide the answer and I would finally learn the truth.

I tucked the mug shot into the wood-framed mirror above the dresser: prisoner number 378.699 in full face and profile, dark jacket, striped tie, and starched collar, thick black hair parted and combed neatly across a high forehead. With his broad cheekbones and full lower lip and despite a thickened nose that suggested street fights or barroom brawls, he was good-looking. I’d spent countless hours staring at the photo for the reason it had first entranced me, and it still did: if it were not for Peruggia’s handlebar mustache and the drooping lid of his slightly smaller right eye, we could have been brothers. For years, I’d attempted to see beyond his guarded face. Now, after reading just a little of his diary, I thought I saw his need and desire, his hunger for recognition. Something I understood only too well.