For years, I’d been writing letters and emails for any information regarding my great-grandfather. Most went unanswered. The ones who did answer invariably demanded money, but none had ever panned out. This time, the information had come free of charge and with no ulterior motive—at least none I could see.

“Scusi, signore,” said one of the monks, young, with a russet-colored beard and startling blue eyes. “You wait for library to open?”

“Yes!” I practically bit his head off, then apologized. “You speak English.”

“A little,” the monk said.

I told him I spoke Italian.

“Il bibliotecario e’ spesso in ritardo,” he said. The librarian is often late.

I checked my watch. It was exactly ten; the library was supposed to be open.

The monk asked where I was from and I said, “New York, but my people are from Ragusa,” though I had never been to the Sicilian town and hadn’t meant to say where my family had been from; I hadn’t meant to say anything.

The monk extended his hand. “Brother Francesco.”

“Luke Perrone,” I said and glanced back at the door that led up to the library.

“It will open soon,” he said. “Pazienza.”

Patience, right. Never my strong suit, and clearly not now, when I’d bolted from my life on nothing more than a hunch.

I watched Brother Francesco rejoin the others in the garden, noted him whispering, then all three monks looking my way, their eyes narrowed in the cold winter light. I moved into the shadow of the arches to avoid their stares, leaned back against a pillar, pictured my Bowery loft and the haphazard collection I’d begun as a boy in my Bayonne, New Jersey, bedroom. It now filled an entire corner of my painting studio: copies of hundred-year-old newspaper stories, a floor plan of the museum with my great-grandfather’s escape route mapped out in red marker, a metal file cabinet crammed with articles detailing the theft and various theories, one drawer devoted to the letters and emails I had begun writing as a teenager to anyone who might know anything about the crime or about my great-grandfather—and the answers, which were few and rarely, if ever, illuminating.

A cold wind whipped through the cloister, and I shivered. A tap on the arm, and I flinched.

The young monk again. “Mi scusi, ma la biblioteca e’ aperta.”

I gave him a quick nod, then headed down the arched path to the wooden door, which now stood open.

3

INTERPOL Headquarters

Lyon, France

John Washington Smith read the emails for a second time. Like everyone in INTERPOL’s Art Theft Division, it was his job to watch all the obvious communiques and websites—antiquities dealers, art galleries, anyone suspected of smuggling or selling stolen art or artifacts—all of it continuously updated on one of his three computer screens. Of particular interest to him—something that had, over the years, become an obsession—was the 1911 theft of Leonardo’s most famous painting, what went on during its two-year disappearance, and the idea that the Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum today was not the original. For years, he’d heard the rumor that the thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, had kept a prison diary, something that had never been confirmed. But here was the thief’s great-grandson, Luke Perrone, an American artist and art historian—someone he’d had under communication surveillance for years—emailing with an Italian professor about just such a diary.