“I’ve been known to attend the Wednesday General Audience. And on Sunday mornings I sometimes wander over to St. Peter’s Square to hear His Holiness pray the Angelus. I believe he saw me standing beneath his window once, but I’ve had no contact with him other than the occasional phone call from his private secretary. We engage in an elaborate pantomime. He asks how I’m getting on, and I assure him that I’ve never been better. Today he told me that a dearfriend had popped into Rome unexpectedly. It was the best news I’ve had in a very long time.”
“You should find someone else, Veronica.”
“I tried that once before. And look how that turned out.” She drank some of her late husband’s wine. “Besides, I’m too old to lose my heart to another man. I am, however, considering taking a lover. Someone young and beautiful and wildly inappropriate. The whole of Rome will be talking about nothing else.”
“Have you anyone in mind?”
She waved a hand dismissively. “Enough about me, Gabriel. Tell me about the woman at the center of this brewing Vatican scandal.”
“There’s not much to tell, really.”
“Does she have a name?”
“I would assume so. But there’s no record of it.”
“She’s from Rome, this girl?”
“Milan, I’d say.”
“What does she look like?”
“Pale hair, large eyes, quite pretty.”
“Sounds like trouble. And how old is this fair-haired girl from Milan?”
Gabriel smiled. “Five centuries, at least.”
***
“It could be the work of one of his pupils or followers.”
“TheLeonardeschi?”
“Exactly.”
“Possible,” conceded Gabriel. “But the fact that it is now missing would suggest that someone thought it was a real Leonardo.”
“Why wasn’t it reported stolen?”
“No one knew it had vanished.”
“An inside job?”
“Most museum thefts are.”
They were seated on opposite sides of the table in Veronica’s formal dining room, partaking of a first course ofvitello tonnato. The photos and infrared images lay between them, along with Veronica’s copy of Giorgio Montefiore’s Leonardo monograph.
“Have I ever told you about my recurring nightmare?” she asked.
“Which one?”
“The one where I arrive at the Villa Giulia early one morning to find that the entire collection of the Museo Nazionale Etrusco has been stolen and all my security guards have fled the scene of the crime.”
“Talk about a scandal,” remarked Gabriel.
Veronica took up her knife and fork. “Let us say for argument’s sake that the missing painting is an actual Leonardo.”
“Let’s,” agreed Gabriel, and helped himself to more of the veal.
