Deceptions, Anna Porter [ebook reader with built in dictionary .txt] 📗

found on cacti in Mexico, it is known today as carmine and is more vibrant than the reds some other baroque artists used. Caravaggio had been a contemporary of Orazio and a visitor to his studio. Artemisia might even have been introduced to this red by him. She had certainly used it in some of her known work.

After two hours with Arte Forense’s powerful microscopes and chemical scanners, its multispectral imaging and dual-laser Raman spectroscopy, Helena found nothing that indicated pigments not known in Artemisia’s time. One puzzle remained unsolved: the signature. While it, too, used contemporary pigments, it was not applied at the same time as the rest of the painting. Its positioning suggested that it had been added some time after the other paints had dried, possibly much later. She would have to study the surface under the signature again.

Andrea had returned with the book she’d been seeking and had been hovering at Helena’s elbow for a while, not wanting to interrupt her friend’s work but ready to help if needed.

“She used a lot more blues and reds early on than I remembered. This book has some of her letters to the Duke of Alcalá demanding more funds for her paints. I think many assume that she would have been penniless when she left Rome after the trial, hurriedly married off to a third-rate artist she would barely have known.” She offered to copy the letters to and from Alcalá. “And look at her hands,” she opened the book to a drawing of a very delicate hand with long tapered fingers, holding a thin brush. “It’s by Pierre Dumonstier le Neveu. An admirer and perhaps a lover. He certainly put a lot of effort into this drawing.”

“You’re right, those hands don’t look like they had been bent and cut with twine, though that drawing was done at least a decade later if I remember correctly,” Helena said.

“Could your painting have been done before the trial?” Andrea asked.

“No. It looks too accomplished for that. But there is a lot of pent-up rage here. Her late works are much less emotional. Perhaps soon after she arrived in Florence.”

“Her hands could have healed in a couple of years, and we know she was already presenting her work in Florence two years after she left her father’s house in Rome. Or maybe her lover altered her hands to please her.”

Andrea suggested Giulio’s for lunch. It was close and usually not too crowded with tourists. At least not in October. “During the summer, Rome has become unbearable. One can’t even move along Ripetta, and I would never venture onto the Corso.”

She led the way to a door at the back of the building, down a narrow street, past a couple of shoe stores, and into a dead-end alley, then back into the light at a small square. The restaurant had an unassuming exterior, but there were fine white tablecloths, waiters with white aprons, and a pleasantly effusive maître d’. He asked how Andrea’s parents were, whether her father had finally decided to retire and her mother’s famous roses had survived the latest heat. A disadvantage of having one of the old family names in Italy was that everybody thought they knew you, and, indeed, everybody knew just enough about you that they could engage you in cheerful, overly familiar chatter. Andrea was old stock, her family related to one of the popes — way back, but in Rome, ancient credentials counted. “My father will never retire,” Andrea said. She added for Helena’s benefit: “Been too busy for too many years and loves having all those connections. A retired lawyer in his line of law is nobody. No more ‘Signore Avvocato’ this, ‘Signore Avvocato’ that . . .”

“Didn’t you almost marry a lawyer?” Helena asked.

“Lucky escape.” The lawyer had followed her to the conference at Mont Blanc that had cemented Helena’s and Andrea’s friendship. He had said he missed her too much, couldn’t be in Rome without her, not even the food tasted the same when she was gone. In the evenings, he was anxious for her company, seemed eager to learn what had been said and who had said it, so eager that Andrea became concerned. It was Helena, always suspicious of men as handsome as Andrea’s lawyer, who had discovered that he had been retained by one of the mafia syndicates to defend a Sicilian boss on murder charges. The chief prosecutor, the pubblico ministero, had been one of the conference speakers, and the lawyer was using Andrea as his ticket in.

When they had settled at a corner table, both with their backs to a wall, Helena told her friend about her adventure in Strasbourg and the dead man who had been her initial contact with Gizella Vaszary. When she mentioned Vladimir Azarov, Andrea whistled. “Him again. I had him in my sights last year for the Palermo Caravaggio. He offered to pay our boys what they wanted with maybe a little discount since it’s a famous work and impossible to move. This one would be a big score for a man with an oversized ego, but no one owned up to the heist. No one has seen it. I hear Azarov has been buying stuff for his boat in the Adriatic. A couple of old masters and a Giacometti sculpture.”

“That was for his new place in London. He has moved some of his art into storage at the Luxembourg airport. I am not sure how good his connections are with Volodymyr Zelensky, the new man in Ukraine’s president’s office, but I doubt they’re strong. For one thing, Azarov was friendly with the previous president, the confections king, and Zelensky had choice words, and no time, for that man on his television program.”

“I heard Azarov is selling some of his Russian shares.”

“If they let him. Vladimir has always managed to keep his nose out of politics and particularly out of Putin’s way. ‘No sense tangling with the tiger,’ he once told me.