Gabriel received this revelation with mixed emotions. He was encouraged that Raphael had shown an interest in something other than advanced mathematics. He was less pleased to hear that the boy had flouted his father’s long-standing edict that no one enter his studio when he was not present.
“How many times have I told you—”
“Mama said it was all right.”
“Did she?”
The child nodded his head vigorously.
“And what do you do when you visit my studio, Raffi?”
“Sometimes I do my schoolwork. It’s very quiet.”
“And when you’re not doing your schoolwork?”
“I draw.”
That would explain the missing pages in Gabriel’s sketchpad and the foreshortened pencils. He had suspected that someone had been using his supplies without authorization but had not wished to sound like a mentally unbalanced madman by confronting his wife and young children.
“What sort of drawings?” he asked.
“Still lifes, mainly. Mama arranges them for me.”
The plot thickens. “How many still lifes have you made, Raffi?”
He shrugged in reply.
“Anything else?”
“I drew a copy of the Leonardo sketch. The one of the girl.”
“Where is it now?”
All of Raphael’s drawings, Gabriel discovered when they returned home, were carefully dated and stored in a handsome leather art portfolio, a gift from the child’s mother. The still lifes were far more advanced than anything made by Gabriel’s students. The copy ofHead of a Young Woman, also known asStudy for an Angel, was near photographic. Gabriel asked his son whether he had traced the picture. The boy swore he had not.
Unconvinced, Gabriel led Raphael into his studio and asked him to draw a copy of his copy. The boy scarcely glanced at his source material. The young woman, it seemed, had been culled from his prodigious memory.
Gabriel dated the sketch and placed it in Raphael’s portfolio. “Will you come to my class next Wednesday?” he asked.
“No,” replied the child, and walked out.
31
San Tomà
By eleven o’clock the following morning they had a bidding war on their hands. The competitors were five in number and scattered around the globe—the Singaporean shipping magnate, the hotheaded sheikh from Abu Dhabi, a Swedish steel baron, the third-richest man in China, and a mystery buyer represented by a French art consultant named Stéphane Tremblay. Monsieur Tremblay, Gabriel explained to Ingrid, was the former director of the paintings department at the Louvre. A very serious player indeed.
“He rang Peter van de Velde last night. Said his client has the hots for the painting.”
“How hot?”
“A hundred and twenty-five million. When the Swedish steel baron bid a hundred and thirty, Tremblay and his client immediately went to one fifty.”
With Gabriel’s permission, Ingrid unleashed the hacking malware Proteus on the art consultant’s phone, and by early afternoon she was sifting through his emails, text messages, and telephone metadata. His clients included some of the wealthiest and most prominent collectors in France, none of whom appeared interested in acquiring a newly discovered Leonardo being offered for sale by a third-tierdealer in Amsterdam. Tremblay’s mystery client was listed in his contacts only as Archimedes. Their most recent exchange of text messages made it clear that Archimedes was in it for the long haul.
All this Ingrid explained to Gabriel after walking Irene and Raphael home from school. They spoke outside on the loggia, where the panel was drying in the tangerine light of the declining sun. The beautiful girl from Milan appeared to be eavesdropping on their conversation. Her heavy-lidded eyes, with their mismatched pupils, tracked Ingrid’s every move.
“How much longer?” she asked.
