The Last Mona Lisa

by Jonathan Santlofer

  “Jesus. That’s him. How did you do that?”

  “You did it,” Rodriguez said. “I only followed your direction.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said and stared at the sketch, a sense of accomplishment accompanied by a chill of recognition.

  Inspector Cabenal studied the sketch, said INTERPOL would run it through their identification databanks and fax it out to all the Paris precincts.

  “I think he may have killed several people,” I said, the young monk and Quattrocchi in my mind.

  “You need to write a statement, everything that occurred, everything you remember,” Cabenal said.

  I thought I had answered all her questions, more than once, and said so.

  “Not all,” she said. “Do you prefer a laptop or a pen and paper?”

  I chose the laptop and typed for a long time. I described, in detail, how I’d received Quattrocchi’s email and came to Florence, my first day in the library, the thrill of opening the journal and beginning to read. I wrote of Brother Francesco’s warning—Ha un amico a Firenze?—and how I suspected it might have been the cause of his death. I wrote of my search for the booksellers in Florence and Paris and their suspicious deaths. I wrote about Étienne Chaudron and his girlfriend, their bloodied faces and dead bodies sparking in my mind as I did so. I saw the missing journal page behind the Vermeer painting and the initials in Chaudron’s forgeries and wrote it all down, every detail, every event that had happened since I’d left home, thinking as I typed that this was what I had hoped to tell the world—not the deaths but the discovery. Instead, it was a police report that no one outside of a few INTERPOL officers would ever read.

  The only thing—the only person—I left out was Alex. She was gone.

  It was all gone, what I’d hoped to discover, what I’d hoped to do with the knowledge. It felt like a folly, and a deadly one.

  I stopped typing and scrolled through the pages. It looked like a proposal for a book I would never write.

  I glanced again at the forensic artist’s sketch and saw the man who had attacked me in Étienne Chaudron’s living room, on the drizzly Parisian street, and again in the park, his knife slashing at Smith—a juddering horror film, the images etched into my mind forever along with a thought: no question the man would be coming back for me.

  Cabenal read my statement, occasionally stopping to glare at me. Afterward, when the statement was printed out and I signed it, she handed me my cell phone and said I was free to go.

  I thought: free to go where? I wasn’t ready to go home, to face my tenuous teaching job and no art gallery, to leave behind so many things unanswered, to leave Smith.

  On my way out, I stopped at what appeared to be the sergeant’s station, a uniformed gendarme manning a desk, constantly on and off the phone and looking harried. Clearly, it was a busy morning for crime in Paris. In between calls, I sympathized with him in my best French. I kept up the banter and false camaraderie, then very casually asked where they had taken my “partner” John Smith. I hoped he was too busy to ask for an ID, and he didn’t. He took another call, skimmed through a mess of papers on his desk, and said, “Hospital Saint-Jacques,” then went back to his call.

  There were dark clouds over Paris as I hurried down the street, turned the corner, found a bench, and made the call. “I’m looking for a patient, an American, John Smith.” I was put on hold for so long I was startled when a voice came back on the line. The woman asked if I was a relative and when I didn’t think fast enough to say yes, she said she could not give me any information.

  “I just want to know if he’s okay?”

  A gap of silence, then, “All I can tell you is that Mr. Smith is no longer in critical care.”

  “So he’s doing better?”

  “I’m sorry, that is all I can tell you,” she said, then hung up.

  I called Cabenal, and it went straight to voicemail. I left a message asking about Smith’s condition. Reminded her we had a deal, that she’d agreed to let me know if Smith survived. I sat on the bench for maybe twenty minutes, waiting for her to call me back, then walked the Paris streets for a couple of hours, but my phone never rang, and I knew what that meant.

  I wasn’t sure where I would be sleeping that night, but I knew what I wanted, and it would not be hard to find.

  78

  How many bars had I hit?

  I remembered the first, a hotel bar on Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and not five-star, where I picked up a woman or she picked me up, married she said, her husband “un bum.” I told her I was a bum too, the two of us laughing like that was the funniest comment ever, making out in between shots of whiskey, not a pretty picture I’m sure. At some point, I obviously left, because I was in another bar, this one a couple of notches lower than the first, where the bartender cut me off after three, maybe four drinks. I left—actually I was led out by the bartender, swearing at him the whole time—Connard!—T’es un salaud!—Va te faire foutre!—not my finest performance, though I remember feeling proud that I knew all those French curse words. I realized too late that the third place was a gay bar and could have scored big—I had a vague memory of some guy in leather licking my face. After that, I couldn’t remember much. It was clear I’d thrown up, though I had no memory of it, only the telltale reek of vomit.

  I was awakened by a gendarme nudging me not so gently in the ribs with his boot. I managed to get to my feet, my head splitting, body leaden, still nauseated and surely disgusted—with myself.

  For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the name of the hotel I’d been staying in, and the anonymous key card was no help. I tried checking into a small boutique hotel, but the woman at the desk was not having it, and I couldn’t blame her, not when I caught my reflection in a window and realized I smelled like a vomitorium.

  I ended up in a third-rate motel that didn’t care what I looked like, where I slept for a full day, awoke to drink maybe a gallon of water from the bathroom tap, went back to sleep for I’m not sure how long, finally got up, took a shower, and realized I had left my bag of clothes at one of the bars.

  I dumped my shirt in the trash, washed the vomit from my jeans, cleaned off my leather jacket and wore it out, zipped up to hide the fact that I was shirtless. I was surprised that I still had my wallet and silently thanked the manufacturer of my jeans for the zippered inside pocket.

  I found a vintage shop, rummaged through a rack of shirts, chose one that looked clean and not too hideous. I bought a pair of cheap sunglasses too, my eyes stinging, but it was more that I felt like hiding. After that, I found an internet café where I had several cups of black coffee and used one of their computers to do a search to find the nearest AA meeting, which I did in the American Church near Les Invalides. The church was for Americans abroad, the meeting held in English, maybe twenty people. I listened to a young woman testify about her husband getting custody of their two small kids. Then a man, a professor of English literature, wearing a suit and tie, talked about being drunk at work and having no memory of why he had three sexual harassment charges against him, though it no longer mattered, because he had already been fired from his university despite having tenure—a cautionary tale if I ever heard one.

  After that, there was a lull, and it seemed as if no one else was going to talk. I hadn’t planned to share or qualify, but then I was standing and introducing myself. “Hello. My name is Luke, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  I heard my name echoed back to me, both comforting and distressing: I couldn’t believe I was here after a decade of sobriety.

  I shut my eyes, didn’t want to see the people in the room, though I knew they’d all been down this road and wouldn’t judge me. I saw Quattrocchi and Brother Francesco in my mind but didn’t know what to say about them. I saw Smith, my arm around him, the weak smile he had managed despite the fact that he was dying, and that was it, I couldn’t stop the tears. I tried to s
niff them back, kept blinking and swallowing, but it was no use.

  A dozen voices told me it was okay, to let it out. I wiped my cheeks and tried hard to pull myself together. “I lost someone,” I said. “A friend. Not my fault but—” I stopped. It wasn’t my fault, was it? It had been Smith’s idea to follow me, not mine. But if I hadn’t gone searching for the journal in the first place, he might still be… I had to stop thinking like that. It was no use, no help, and too late.

  It’s a disease, like measles or chicken pox. Alex’s words.

  I was glad she wasn’t around to see me like this, and though I wanted to see her, I doubted I ever would.

  “I feel…” What did I feel? As if I’d lost everything, but all I said was, “I want to be clean and sober again,” and everyone nodded. And later, when people came over to pat me on the back and congratulate me for being there, I felt the tears gathering and fought them so hard because I knew if I started crying again, I might never stop.

  79

  New York City

  The painting sat on the vault’s concrete floor, just below another version of itself. For over an hour, he had been looking from one to the other: two sets of eyes, lips, the same folded hands. The paintings appeared identical down to the cracks in the paint. But how to know if one was real—and which one—the question he had been obsessed with for so long?

  He gazed at the portrait, whispered, “Tell me, Lisa.” Of course he knew her story well, had read everything there was to know about Lisa del Giocondo, the silk merchant’s wife: born in 1479 into a minor branch of the distinguished Gherardini family, married at fifteen, five children, outlived her husband, Francesco del Giocondo, who had commissioned the portrait when Leonardo was strapped for cash, a situation soon altered as commissions began to pour in, so that the painting was never finished, never delivered.

  “Are you her?” he asked, looking from one set of eyes to the other.

  He sat back, dropped heavily into his gold Platner chair.

  When he had begun monitoring the American, all he wanted was information, something that would absolutely, finally, tell him whether or not his painting was the original or a forgery, something he had wanted, needed to know for so many years, that he alone owned the world’s most famous painting. And his chances had just doubled. Of course no one could know, or he might lose them both—or worse, get caught—though he would never let that happen.

  Another look from one Mona Lisa to the other, cell phone already to his ear.

  “That man of yours, I need you to terminate his employment.” Other than sending him this painting, which was, he had to admit, a great gift, the man’s actions had been totally out of control, nothing he had instructed, and way too risky, inviting trouble he did not need.

  “Okay, I’ll let him go.”

  “I do not want him going anywhere.”

  “I see.” A pause. “I’ll have it taken care of.”

  “I want you to take care of it. No one else, understood?”

  “But that’s not my—” The middleman stopped. “Of course.”

  “And I will need verification, some documentation, photos. Find a way to get them to me. Safely, of course.”

  The collector hung up, took a step closer to the paintings, eyes flicking between them. “Oh, Lisa,” he said. “What I do for you.”

  80

  It had been a week since I’d gotten back to New York, the first few days spent getting over my bender, nursing my grief and exhaustion and shame. When not attending AA meetings, I had stayed home, moving from bed to couch, finally to the paint-stained chair in my Bowery studio where I’d stare, for hours, at the makeshift altar I’d created for my great-grandfather so many years ago. It appeared different now, laced with danger and tragedy. I considered dismantling it, had started twice, but a sense of hollow disappointment and unfinished business stopped me. Intersession would be over in a couple of days. I’d be back in the classroom, and I worried about facing my department chair and dealing with the tenure committee. What would I tell them? What did I have to show?

  I wanted to forget everything that had happened, especially Smith’s death, but his ghost would not give up. Most of all, I wanted to forget Alex. Impossible. I could not stop thinking about her—who she was and where she was. I had tried her cell phone twice, listened to a recording that told me it was no longer a working number, had searched Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, had called Brooklyn Friends and was informed they’d never had a student named Alexandra Greene.

  Had she lied about everything?

  I had done my share of lying too, but not about my name.

  Would I ever find her or hear from her? Did she even exist? I tried to pretend I didn’t care, though I thought about her every day, dreamed of her most nights. I wondered if she ever thought of me, if she had ever cared for me at all.

  When my mother called and asked me to visit, I said yes, mainly out of guilt—it had been six months since I’d seen her. I took the bus from Port Authority, brought my laptop along and tried to do some schoolwork, but there was so much on my mind that I couldn’t.

  Bayonne’s West Sixth Street never changed, and the overcast day didn’t help, gray sky, gray houses, gray leafless trees, gray siding of my old attached home in need of a touch-up. I was planning my escape before I reached the front door.

  Inside, it seemed smaller than I remembered, the ceiling low, plastic-covered furniture crowded, fake flowers on the laminated-wood dining table, the air musty with melancholy. My mom had prepared dinner, and it wasn’t bad, had even made those pop-up oven rolls I’d loved as a boy, and I still liked them. She had stopped drinking a few years ago and was the better for it, though she still looked a decade older than her fifty-eight years, and it made me sad. My dad, the same age, looked eighty, and not a good eighty, fleshy pouches under bloodshot eyes, splotches of red on his cheeks and nose. He was distant at dinner, where he sucked down a six-pack, then collapsed in front of the blue light of the TV.

  My mom and I stayed at the kitchen table and talked, a rarity. The quiet woman I’d known all my life was unusually loquacious, and for the first time, I saw her as a separate person, not just my mother, and recognized that she was lonely. At one point, she said she was proud of me and all I had accomplished, and she brought out a scrapbook she kept with photos from my college graduations and my degrees, articles and pictures of exhibitions and reviews, a couple of interviews, all laminated, a total surprise. It made me feel really bad that I hardly saw her, and when she asked me to stay over so we could have breakfast together, I said yes.

  My old room was preserved like a museum, but to what I wasn’t sure. There were none of those sports banners or trophies that “good” high school boys had in their bedrooms. Mine still had posters for Judas Priest’s Painkiller album, one for Iron Maiden, and the flyer I’d framed from GG Allin and the Murder Junkies’ last performance. The lava lamp I had thought so cool at thirteen was still on my nightstand, along with three books, European Artists, Fight Club, and Colleges in America. I flipped through the college book, noted the pages I had turned down and the places I’d circled twenty years ago, all art schools.

  I looked through European Artists for a while, then caught up on a few emails. I tried to sleep but couldn’t, my old bed too narrow and too soft. I watched a YouTube video about a virtual reality project the Louvre was going to unveil with its upcoming Leonardo exhibition: a seven-minute ride inside the Mona Lisa where the viewer got a speedy art history lesson including highlights of Leonardo’s methods and Lisa del Giocondo’s life, ending with a virtual ride on one of Leonardo’s flying machines, as if it had actually been built, the viewer soaring through the painting’s dreamy landscape.

  Part of me wanted to take that ride—mainly to see if I might catch a glimpse of Chaudron’s initials, though if they existed, the Louvre would surely not reveal them. I was sure the experience would
be fun and easy; sit back, do nothing, be entertained. Nothing wrong with that. Or was there? Did people really need to take an imaginary flight inside a painted landscape? Couldn’t they just look at the artwork? Wasn’t that enough? The thing that really got me was that you didn’t have to be in the museum or anywhere near the painting, just get on a virtual reality platform and voilà! The only thing missing was the actual painting.

  I switched off the YouTube video, thinking always something new, but the idea irritated me. Or did it threaten me—threaten the notion of old-fashioned painting? Old-fashioned. Was that what I’d become? I could hear Vincent sneering at the cubists, saw him fleeing Picasso’s studio, running from the future into the safety of the past. I hated the idea of being conservative or nostalgic, something every artist had to face, how much of the past we wanted to preserve while moving forward.

  It was late and I tried sleeping again but could not stop thinking, my mind stuck in the past, in Vincent’s head, feeling angry and vulnerable and endangered. It was finally happening—no one needed the real thing, art and artists becoming obsolete.

  But I knew something else: that there were people out there willing to kill for actual paintings and surely for the Mona Lisa, even a forgery.

  That was it. I was up. No way I’d sleep now.

  The attic looked worse than ever. Dust like tumbleweeds, spiderwebs like suspension bridges. I guessed the last person to clean the place was me, age fourteen, and I hadn’t done a good job back then. The steamer trunk was still there, several new layers of dust on it since I’d last opened it. Now I opened it again. More dust, the smell of mildew. I expected to see the rifle, forgetting I’d not only taken it to show to my Kill Van Kull buddies but later sold it at an antique gun convention for thirty dollars.