Outside it was cold. Frost in the trees. I stopped in front of the Café des Abbesses and peered through the steamy window. Inside was my old friend Max Jacob. Drawing pictures in the air for a pretty young woman who stared at him captivated. I had not seen Max in months. Not since he had aligned himself with Picasso and Braque and that bastard Apollinaire.

I longed to sit with Max and the pretty girl. To drink coffee. To be part of their lively conversation. But no. I turned away and vowed never to come back to this place again. I was an outsider. Always would be.

I headed down the hill and walked swiftly to the Place de l’Odéon. I ignored the omnibus. I needed to keep moving. I headed up the hill and started to run as fast as I could. I know now that I was running away from the future into the safety of the past. But all the time I was running I thought about those sculptures in Picasso’s studio. And how I might use them against him.

15

I stopped reading where Peruggia had drawn a heavy pencil line at the bottom of the page, noted that he had done this before, his personal demarcation to end a passage. I thought of him in Picasso’s studio, how humiliated and furious he must have felt, and understood it too—the competition between artists. I got up and stretched, my back stiff from sitting for too many hours. The guy with the ponytail looked up and nodded and I did the same, noting with more interest that the blond was back at the end of the table. I’d been so absorbed in the journal that I’d missed her coming in.

Chiara had just left her post to follow Riccardo into the back room, Beatrice hunched over her desk as usual. The ponytailed scholar crossed the room to peruse a stack of books. I took advantage of the moment and did what I had planned to do earlier—emptied half the contents of the Duccio carton, placed the journal inside, then covered it with folders and papers. If someone was looking for the journal—and from what Quattrocchi had said, a collector of rare papers was—they would not think to look for it in here. It was a risk if the librarians checked. Would they think I stole it? Quattrocchi had said no one knew it existed, but had the library gone through Guggliermo’s papers and seen it? I had no idea, but it was a risk worth taking.

I brought both cartons up to Chiara’s desk. She asked if I’d found what I wanted among the Duccio papers, and I told her I had but needed to read more and would be requesting them again.

“Certo,” she said, adding her usual flirty smile.

I went back to get my laptop and backpack, once again made a point of taking the long way around, smiling when I passed the blond, and this time when she returned it, I stopped and, in what I considered to be one of the boldest moves in my thirty-seven years, leaned down and asked in my best Italian if she would like to get a coffee.