The Heist. Daniel Silva

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      Paintings lined the wide central corridor and covered the walls of two otherwise empty bedrooms. Bradshaw had used a third bedroom for storage. Several dozen paintings, some in frames, some on their stretchers, leaned against the walls like folding chairs after a catered affair. Most of the paintings were Italian in origin, but there were several works by German, Flemish, and Dutch artists as well. One, a genre painting of Dutch washerwomen working in a courtyard, probably by an imitator of Willem Kalf, appeared as though it had recently been restored. Gabriel wondered why Bradshaw had decided to have the painting cleaned while others in his collection, some more valuable, languished beneath coats of yellowed varnish—and why, having done so, he had left it leaning against a wall in a storage room.

      On the opposite side of the center hall were Bradshaw’s bedroom and office. Gabriel quickly searched them with the thoroughness of a man who knew how to hide things. In the bedroom, concealed beneath a Gatsbyesque pile of colorful shirts, he found a wrinkled manila envelope stuffed with several thousand euros that had somehow escaped the attention of General Ferrari’s men. In the office, he found file folders swollen with business papers, along with an impressive collection of monographs and catalogues. He also discovered documentation suggesting that Meridian Global Consulting had rented a vault in the Geneva Freeport. He wondered whether the documents had escaped the attention of the general’s men, too.

      Gabriel slipped the Freeport documentation into his coat pocket and crossed the hallway to the room Bradshaw had used for storage. The three Dutch washerwomen were still toiling away in their cobblestone courtyard, oblivious to his presence. He crouched before the canvas and examined the brushwork carefully. It was quite obviously the work of an imitator, for it lacked any trace of confidence or spontaneity. Indeed, in Gabriel’s learned opinion, it had a paint-by-numbers quality to it, as if the artist had been staring at the original while he worked. Perhaps he had been.

      Gabriel headed downstairs and, under the watchful gaze of the Carabinieri man, retrieved a handheld ultraviolet lamp from his overnight bag. When trained on an Old Master canvas in a darkened room, the lamp would reveal the extent of the last restoration by making the retouching appear as black blotches. Typically, a Dutch Old Master painting from that period had suffered minor to moderate losses, which meant the retouching—or inpainting, as it was known in the trade—would appear as speckles of black.

      Gabriel returned to the room on the second floor of the villa, closed the door, and drew the blinds tightly. Then he switched on the ultraviolet lamp and pointed it toward the painting. The three Dutch washerwomen were no longer visible. The entire canvas was black as pitch.

       7

       LAKE COMO, ITALY

      AT A CHEMICAL SUPPLY COMPANY in an industrial quarter of Como, Gabriel purchased acetone, alcohol, distilled water, goggles, a glass beaker, and a protective mask. Next he stopped at an arts-and-crafts shop in the center of town where he picked up wooden dowels and a packet of cotton wool. Returning to the villa by the lake, he found the Carabinieri man waiting in the entrance with fresh gloves and shoe covers. This time, the Italian didn’t make any noises about a one-hour limit. He could see Gabriel was going to be a while.

      “You’re not going to contaminate anything, are you?”

      “Only my lungs,” replied Gabriel.

      Upstairs he removed the canvas from its frame, propped it on an armless chair, and illuminated its surface with as much light as he could find. Then he mixed equal amounts of acetone, alcohol, and distilled water in the beaker and fashioned a swab using a dowel and cotton wool. Working quickly, he removed the fresh varnish and inpainting from a small rectangle—about two inches by one inch—at the bottom left corner of the canvas. Restorers referred to the technique as “opening a window.” Usually, it was done to test the strength and effectiveness of a solvent solution. In this case, however, Gabriel was opening a window in order to strip away the surface layers of the painting to see what lay beneath. What he discovered were the lush folds of a crimson garment. Clearly, there was an intact painting beneath the three Dutch washerwomen working in a courtyard—a painting that, in Gabriel’s opinion, had been produced by a true Old Master of considerable talent.

      He quickly opened three more windows, one at the bottom right of the canvas and two more across the top. At the bottom right, he found additional fabric, darker and less distinct; but at the top right, the canvas was nearly black. At the top left, he found a tawny-colored Roman arch that looked as though it was part of an architectural background. The four open windows gave him a rough sense of how the figures were arrayed upon the canvas. More important, they told him that, in all likelihood, the painting was the work of an Italian rather than an artist from the Dutch or Flemish schools.

      Gabriel opened a fifth window a few inches below the Roman arch and discovered a balding male pate. Expanding it, he found the bridge of a nose and an eye that was staring directly toward the viewer. Next he opened a window a few inches to the right and found the pale, luminous forehead of a young female. He expanded that window, too, and found a pair of downward-cast eyes. A long nose emerged next, followed by a pair of small red lips and a delicate chin. Then, after another minute of work, Gabriel saw the outstretched hand of a child. A man, a woman, a child … Gabriel studied the hand of the child—specifically, the way the thumb and forefinger were touching the chin of the woman. The pose was familiar to him. So was the brushwork.

      He crossed the hall to Jack Bradshaw’s office, switched on the computer, and went to the Web site of the Art Loss Register, the world’s largest private database of stolen, missing, and looted artwork. After a few keystrokes, a photograph of a painting appeared on the screen—the same painting that was now propped on a chair in the room across the hall. Beneath the photo was a brief description:

      The Holy Family, oil on canvas, Parmigianino (1503–1540), stolen from a restoration lab at the historic Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, July 31, 2004.

      The Art Squad had been searching for the missing painting for more than a decade. And now Gabriel had found it, in the villa of a dead Englishman, hidden beneath a copy of a Dutch painting by Willem Kalf. He started to dial General Ferrari’s number but stopped. Where there was one, he thought, there would surely be others. He rose from the dead man’s desk and started looking.