It sounded funny even to Nick, the word “lute,” in his Dorchester accent. A few months ago, he’d never heard of a lute. And he’d never seen that painting before. But since that day in the TV room at Shirley, he’d done his research. This girl didn’t know it yet, but that painting was incredibly valuable. And famous. Maybe, Nick thought to himself, as he quickened his pace down the stairs, famous enough to get someone a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

In some ways, you could say, it was the most famous painting in the world.

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Professor Adrian Jensen didn’t try to hide his distaste as he carefully undid the clasps of his professional-grade, polystyrene bicycle helmet, pulled it off his head, and shook free his glorious halo of reddish-gold hair. Even though he’d managed to find a table as far back from the bar that ran the length of the crowded tavern that squatted—as it had, for nearly two and a half centuries—in the heart of one of Adrian’s least favorite suburbs of Boston, he could barely hear himself grumble over the clatter and din of the two dozen blazer-clad, khaki-draped academics clustered together about that aging parapet of oak, enthusiastically chattering, laughing, carousing, as they toasted one another over the conclusion of what had to be the three longest days of Adrian’s professional life.

Placing the helmet on the empty seat next to him, he kept his eyes low so as not to attract the attention of any of the beaming blowhards at the bar, should they look his way. The sad truth was, he only had himself to blame. One of the many maxims that had guided his life through a world so continuously inhabited by a surging sea of lesser minds was the tired-to-the-point-of-cliché belief that nothing good ever came from being out past midnight. And here he was, a quarter past two in the morning, having barely survived a seventy-two-hour conference put on by the Historical Society of Charlestown, Massachusetts—of which, by no fault of his own, Adrian had inherited a charter membership as part of his tenure at Tufts—adding precious moments of insult to already unbearable injury, in the quest for a bit of food in the one place left open after the city’s official closing time.

At least the table in front of Adrian was set precisely enough. A glass of barely adequate white wine, which he’d ordered from a passing waitress, stood to the left of a bowl of slightly stale buttered rolls. If he could just keep his head down long enough for the kitchen to complete his citrus and beet salad—the only item he was willing to risk ordering off a menu that included kielbasa and something titled “Fenway egg rolls”—he might just escape with some level of dignity intact.