“You’re sure?”
“I placed it here myself.”
“Could someone have moved it?”
“Only someone with no sense of self-preservation.”
Calvesi rolled the rack back into place and pulled its neighbor into view. Nine paintings on one side, seven on the other. None bore any resemblance—in size, support, or subject matter—to the painting they had come to see. The same was true of the adjacent rack and every other rack in the storage room. At which point Gabriel reachedthe unsettling conclusion that Penelope Radcliff, twenty-seven years old, graduate of Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, had discovered a lost portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. And now the Leonardo was gone.
***
Gabriel returned to the conservation lab long enough to collect hard copies of the photographs and infrared images of the painting, then slipped out of the Picture Gallery through a seldom-used rear door beneath the Sala della Biga. He rang Father Mark Keegan while crossing the Belvedere Courtyard.
“We need to talk.”
“I’m listening,” said the priest.
“Not on the phone.”
“That bad?”
“Ten on the Richter scale.”
They met five minutes later on the steps of the Basilica.
“ArealLeonardo?” asked Father Keegan.
“A perhaps Leonardo at this point.”
“Where is it now?”
“Gone.”
The usually unflappable papal private secretary looked suddenly unwell. “It was stolen? Is that what you’re saying?”
“It didn’t grow a pair of legs and walk out of that storage room on its own. Someone carried it out. Someone who knew it was there in the first place.”
“Someone who works for the museum?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Is that why Penelope Radcliff was murdered?”
Gabriel nodded. “She knew the painting had been pinched and took it upon herself to try to warn the art world.”
“But why didn’t she simply tell Antonio Calvesi that the painting was missing?”
“You’re a sneaky little Jesuit. You tell me.”
“Because she thought Antonio might be in on the job?”
“Correct.”
“Do you think—”
“That Antonio Calvesi is involved?” Gabriel shook his head.
“What a trusting soul you are.” They set off together across St.Peter’s Square. Father Keegan’s black cassock billowed and snapped in the gusty afternoon wind. “What now?” he asked.
