The Giaconda Caper

It was a Thursday morning in January—stale and dank as last night’s cigar butts—and my office phone hadn’t rung all week. I was slumped at the desk, waiting out a tequila hangover, when this tall creamy blonde walked in. The way she was dressed whispered of money, and what was inside the dress hinted at my other hobby—but I was feeling too lousy to take much notice.

She set a flat parcel on my desk and said, “Are you Phil Dexter, the private psi?”

I tipped back my hat and gave her a bleak smile. “What does it say on my office door, baby?”

Her smile was equally cool. “It says Glossop’s Surgical Corset Company.”

“I’ll kill that signwriter,” I gritted. “He promised to be here this week for sure. Two months I’ve been in this office, and …”

“Mr Dexter, do you mind if we set your problems on one side and discuss mine?” She began untying the string on the parcel.

“Not at all.” Having lost the initiative, I decided it would be better to improve customer relations. I never saw much sense in private psis trying to talk and act like private eyes, anyway. “How can I help you, Miss …?”

“I’m Carole Colvin.” Her brow wrinkled slightly. “I thought you psi people knew all that sort of thing without being told.”

“It’s a wild talent,” I said in a hollow voice, giving my stock response. “There are forces beyond the control of mere humans.”

It was always necessary at this point to look sort of fey and hag-ridden, so I stared out through the fanlight and thought about the lawsuit my ex-secretary was bringing against me for non-payment of wages. Carole didn’t seem to notice. She finished unwrapping her parcel, took out an unframed oil painting and propped it in front of me.

“What can you tell me about this painting?” she said briskly.

“It’sa good copy of the Mona Lisa,”I replied. “A very clever imitation, but …” My voice faded away of its own accord as the full blast from the canvas hit my extra senses. There was an impression of great age, perhaps five hundred years, and a blurring rush of images—a handsome bearded man in medieval costume, hilly landscapes with dark green vegetation, bronze sculptures, thronged narrow streets of antique cities. Behind this montage, almost obliterated by its brilliance, was the suggestion of a dark place and of a circular wooden frame which might have been part of a large machine.

Carole was regarding me with interest. “It isn’t a copy, is it?”

I dragged my jaw back up to its normal position. “Miss Colvin, I’m just about certain this painting was done by Leonardo da Vinci himself.”

“You mean it’s the Mona Lisa?”

“Well … yes.” I gazed at the canvas, paralysed with awe.

“But that isn’t possible, is it?”

“We’ll soon see.” I pressed the button on my computer terminal and said, “Has the Mona Lisa been stolen from the Louvre in Paris?”

The reply came with electronic swiftness. “I cannot answer that question.”

“Insufficient data?” I said.

“Insufficient funds,” the machine replied. “Until you pay your last three quarterly subscriptions you’re getting no more information out of me.”

I made a rude sign out through the window in the direction I imagined the central computer to lie. “Who needs you?” I sneered. “It would have been in all the papers if the Mona Lisa had been stolen.”

“Then, more fool you for asking,” the machine said. I took my finger off the button and smirked desperately at Carole, wishing I hadn’t tried to put on a display of computerized efficiency.

She looked at me with what seemed to be increasing coldness. “If you are quite finished, I’ll tell you how I got the painting. Or don’t you want to hear?”

“I want to. I want to.” Realizing I was in danger of losing her business, I sat up straight, looking poised and alert.

“My father was an art dealer and he had a small gallery up in Sacramento,” Carole said, folding herself into a chair with an action like honey flowing from a spoon. “He died two months ago and left the business to me. I don’t know much about art, so I decided to sell out the whole thing. It was when the inventory was being made up that I found this painting hidden in a safe.”

“Nice stroke of luck.”

“That remains to be seen. The painting might be worth a few million, or it might be worth a few years in the pen—I want to find out which.”

“And so you came to me! Very wise, Miss Colvin.”

“I’m beginning to wonder about that. For somebody who’s supposed to have a sixth sense you seem a bit deficient in the other five.”

I think that was the moment I fell in love with Carole. The reasoning was that if I could enjoy looking at her while being treated like an idiot child, life should get pretty interesting if I could get her to regard me as an intelligent man. I started on that private project there and then.

“Your father never mentioned the painting to anybody?”

“No—that’s what makes me wonder if something illegal was going on.”

“Have you any idea how he got it?”

“Not really. He was on vacation in Italy last spring, and I remember he seemed rather odd when he got back.”

“In what way?”

“Tense. Withdrawn. Not what you’d expect after a vacation.”

“Interesting. Let’s see if I can pick up something more to go on.” I leaned forward and touched the slightly crazed surface of the painting. Once more there was a strong psychic impulse—images of a balding man I knew to be Carole’s father, bright glimpses of cities. The latter would have been unknown to me had they not been accompanied by the intuitions which elevate the psi talent and make it roughly equal to a course in chiropody as a viable means of earning a crust.

“Rome,” I said. “Your father went to Rome first, but he spent most of his time in and around Milan.”

“That’s correct.” Carole gave me a look of grudging approval. “It appears that you do have some genuine ability.”

“Thanks. Some people think I have nice legs, too.” Her compliment was partly lost on me because I had again half-seen a dark place, like a cavern, and a circular wooden machine. There were distracting undertones of mystery and centuries-old secrets.

“We’re not much further on, though,” Carole said.

“I thought we were doing pretty well.”

“You haven’t answered the big question—did Leonardo paint the Mona Lisa twice?”

“That’s the way it seems to me, Miss Colvin. I don’t know how this will affect the value of the original.”

“The original?”

“I mean, the other one.” I stared at the painting in awe, letting its sheer presence wash over my senses, then I began to get a feeling there was something not quite right about it, something difficult to put a finger on. The Mona Lisa stared back at me, the famous smile playing about her lips just as I remembered it from all the prints I’d seen. Her face was exactly right, the rich medieval background was exactly right, and yet there was some detail of the picture which seemed out of place. Could it, I wondered, be something to do with those plump smooth hands? To impress Carole, I assumed a look of deep, brooding concentration and tried to decide what it was in the painting which was ringing subconscious alarm bells.

“Have you fallen asleep?” Carole said, rapping the desk with an imperious knuckle.

“Of course not,” I replied huffily, and pointed at the Mona Lisa’s hands. “Do these look right to you?”

“You think you could have done better?”

“I mean, in the Louvre painting does she not have one hand sort of cradled in the other one? Instead of separated like that?”

“Could be—I told you I don’t know anything about art.”

“It might explain the existence of two Mona Lisas.” I began to warm to my theory. “Perhaps he did this one and then decided it would have been better with the hands in repose.”

“In that case,” Carole said reasonably, “why didn’t he just paint the hands over again?”

“Ah … well … yes.” I swore at myself for having concocted such a dumb theory. “You’ve got a point there.”

“Let’s go.” Carole got to her feet and began wrapping the painting in its brown paper covering.

“Where to?”

“Italy, of course.” A look of impatience flitted across her beautiful features. “I’m employing you to find out if this painting is legally mine, and it’s quite obvious you won’t be able to do it sitting here in Los Angeles.”

I opened my mouth to protest, then realized that the assertive Miss Colvin was right in what she said, that I needed some of the money she so obviously had, and that a spell in the Mediterranean sun would probably do me a lot of good. There was also a powerful element of curiosity about both the painting itself and that part of my psi vision I hadn’t yet mentioned to her—the dark cavern and its enigmatic wheel-like machine …

“Yes?” Carole challenged. “You were going to say something?”

“Not me. I’ll be glad to wave goodbye to this place for a few days. How do you say arrivaderci in Italian?”

We caught the noon sub-orbital to Rome, were lucky with a shuttle connection, and by early evening had checked into the Hotel Marco Polo in Milan.

The travelling had made me hungry and I did justice to the meal which Carole and I had in a discreet corner of the dining room. A glass of brandy and a good cigar helped me to enjoy the cabaret, even though most of the singers had to rely on the new-style tonsil microphones to make their voices carry. I guess it’s a sign of age, but I insist that real singers can get along perfectly well with the old type of mike they used to clip on to their back teeth. Still, considering how badly the day had started off, there was little to complain about. I had a glow of wellbeing, and Carole was looking incredibly feminine in something gauzy and golden. Into the bargain, I was earning money.

“When are you going to start earning your money?” Carole said, eyeing me severely through a small palisade of candle flames.

“I’m already doing it,” I assured her, somewhat hurt by her attitude. “This is the hotel your father stayed in while he was in Milan, and there’s a good chance this is where he made the connection. If it is, I’ll pick up an echo sooner or later.”

“Try to make it sooner, will you?”

“There’s no controlling a wild talent.” Sensing the need for more customer relations work, I introduced a bit of echo chamber into my voice. “Right now, as we sit here, the intangible billowing nets of my mind are spreading outwards, ever out …”

“Yes?”

“Hold on a minute,” I said. Quite unexpectedly, the intangible billowing nets of my mind had caught a fish—in the shape of a passing wine waiter. He was a slim dark youth with knowing brown eyes, and my psi faculties told me at once that his recent past was linked in some unusual way with that of Carole’s father. I immediately tried to connect him with the Mona Lisa Mk. II. There was no positive response on the intuitive level, and yet I became more certain the wine waiter would be worth questioning. That’s the way ESP works.

Carole followed my gaze and shook her head. “I think you’ve had enough to drink.”

“Nonsense—I can still crawl a straight line.” I left the table and followed the waiter out through double doors and into a passageway which probably led to the cellars. He glanced back when he heard me, then turned around, his eyes sizing me up like those of a cattle-buyer examining a steer.

“Pardon me,” I said. “Do you mind if I speak to you for a moment?”

“I haven’t got a moment,” he said. “Besides, I don’t speak English.”

“But …' I stared at him for a few seconds, baffled, then the message came through, loud and clear. I took out the expense money Carole had given me, peeled off a ten and tucked it into the pocket of his white jacket. Will that buy you a Lingua-phone course?”

“It all comes back to me now.” He smiled a tight, crafty smile. “You want a woman? What sort of woman do you want?”

“No. I do not want a woman.”

He grew even more shifty-looking. “You mean …?”

“I mean I’ve got a perfectly good woman with me.”

“Ah! Do you want to sell a woman? Let me tell you, signor, you have come to the right man—I have many connections in the white slave market.”

“I don’t want to sell a woman, either.”

“You are sure? As long as she has got white skin I can get you two thousand for her. It doesn’t even matter,” he said generously, jiggling cupped hands in front of his chest, “if she hasn’t got much accoutrements. As long as she has that flawless white skin …”

I began to get impatient. “All I want from you, Mario, is some information.”

The gleam of avarice in the waiter’s eyes was quickly replaced by a look of wariness. “How did you know my name?”

“I have ways of knowing things,” I told him mysteriously. Actually, I wasn’t sure whether I had esped his name or whether it was the only Italian one I could think of on the spur of the moment.

“Pissy,” he said. “That’s what you are—pissy.”

I grabbed him by the lapels and raised him up on his toes. “Listen, Mario, any more lip out of you and I’ll …”

“You’ve got me wrong, signor,” Mario babbled, and I was relieved to discover he was more of a coward than I am. “I mean, you are one of the pissy ones who know things without being told of them.”

“P-S-I is pronounced like sigh,” I said, letting go of his jacket. “Try to remember that, will you?”

“Of course, signor.” He stood back to let another waiter pass between us with a bottle of wine. “Now, tell me what information you want to buy, and I will tell you the cost. My scale of charges is very reasonable.”

“But I’ve already paid you.”

“Non capisco,” Mario said in a stony voice and began to walk away.

“Come back,” I commanded. He kept on walking. I took out the roll of bills and he, displaying a sixth sense which aroused my professional envy, promptly went into reverse until we were facing each other again. It was as if he had been drawn towards me by a powerful magnet, and I began to realize that here was a man who was capable of selling his own grandmother. Indeed, from his earlier conversation, it was possible that he had already disposed of the old lady, venerable accoutrements and all. Making a mental note to be careful in my dealings with Mario, I asked him if he could remember a Trevor J. Colvin staying at the hotel in April.

“I remember him.” Mario nodded, but I could tell he was puzzled and slightly disappointed, which meant he had no idea of the money potentials involved. I decided to keep it that way.

“Why do you remember Mr Colvin in particular? Had you any … ah … business dealings with him?”

“No—he didn’t want a woman, either. All I did was introduce him to Crazy Julio from Paesinoperduto, my home village.”

“Why was that?”

Mario shrugged. “Signor Colvin is an art dealer. Crazy Julio, who hasn’t two lira to rub together, came to me with some ridiculous story about an old painting he had found on his farm. He wanted to show it to an art dealer, preferably one from another country. I knew it was a waste of time, but I’m a businessman and if Crazy Julio was prepared to pay for my services …”

Wondering how much he knew of what had transpired, I said, “Did you perhaps translate for them?”

“No. Julio has English. Not very good English, though—he is too crazy for that.”

“You didn’t believe he had a painting which might be worth money?”

“Crazy Julio?” Mario sniggered into his hand. “His farm is just a patch of rock and his only crop is empty Pepsi bottles.”

“I see. Can you take me to him?”

Mario stopped sniggering on the instant, all his predatory instincts aroused. “Why do you want to see Crazy Julio?”

“The arrangement we have,” I reminded him, “is that you answer my questions. Can you take me to him?”

Mario stuck out his hand. “A hundred dollars,” he said peremptorily.

I touched his hand, trying to esp enough information to be able to proceed without him. All I could pick up was a blur of anonymous grey-green hillside strewn with boulders. The information I already had was enough to let me find Julio by working through a local inquiry agent, but that would use up extra time as well as money.

“Here’s fifty on account,” I said to Mario, slapping five bills into his palm. When can we go?”

“Tomorrow morning I will borrow my mother’s car and drive you to Paesinoperduto myself. How’s that?”

“It suits me.”

Mario gave a dry cough. “There will be a small extra charge for the use of the car. My mother is a widow, you understand, and hiring out the car my father left her is the only way she can afford a few little luxuries.”

“That’s all right.” Wondering if I had been too harsh in my assessment of Mario’s character, I arranged to meet him outside the hotel early the following day. I went back to the table and gave a glowing progress report to Carole. She was pleased enough to let us get on to first-name terms, but any hopes I had of further developments in the relationship were dashed when she insisted on our going to bed early, and separately, so that we would be fresh in the morning.

My room was cold and I slept rather badly, troubled by ominous dreams about a dark place and a strange wheel-like machine.

In the morning we waited outside the hotel for about ten minutes before Mario arrived to pick us up in a mud-spattered Fiat. It was my first time in Italy and, under the impression that Mediterranean countries were warm even in the winter, I had brought only a light showerproof. I was shivering violently in the raw wind while, in contrast, Carole looked rose-pink and competent in tweeds and fur. When Mario saw her the whites of his eyes flickered like the tallies of a cash register.

“Three thousand,” he whispered to me as she got into the car. “That’s the top rate around here.”

I bundled him into the driver’s seat and put my mouth close to his ear. “Keep quiet, you little toad. We Americans don’t sell our women—besides, she doesn’t belong to me.”

Mario glanced again at Carole and then eyed me with surprise and contempt. “You are a great fool, signor. A woman like that cries out for love.”

“You’ll be the one who cries out if you don’t shut up and start driving.” I slammed the door on Mario, but he rolled down the window and held out his hand.

“Two hundred kilometres at twenty-five cents a kilometre makes fifty dollars,” he said. “Payable in advance.”

Seething with hatred, but trapped, I paid him the money and got in the back seat beside Carole. As the car moved off with a loud churning of dry gears, she drew her coat closer around her and gave me a cool stare.

“You’re very generous with my money,” she said. “I could have bought this heap for fifty dollars.”

“Very funny.” I huddled up in the opposite corner, numb with the cold, and brooded on the unfairness of life. Mario was a character straight out of a blue movie, but I had an uneasy feeling he might be right about Carole. Perhaps, in accordance with the whole blue movie ethos, she was sitting there, ice cold on the outside and burning hot within—a human antithesis to a Baked Alaska—just waiting for me to produce my dessert spoon and gobble her up. Perhaps, incredible as it seemed, she was a girl who longed to be dominated and ravished. I allowed myself a lingering glance at Carole’s slim-sculpted legs and waited for her response.

“Keep your eyes on the scenery, junior,” she snapped.

“That’s what I was doing,” I said weakly. Mario’s shoulders twitched a little and I guessed he was sniggering again. I began staring out of the window, but the scenery was little consolation because we travelled only two blocks, went round a corner and halted in the dimness of a shabby garage.

“Just a short delay, folks—I’ll be with you in a minute,” Mario called out. He leaped from the car, disappeared underneath it and a few seconds later we heard a querulous whine, like that of a dentist’s drill, coming up through the floor. I bore it for as long as I could, then got out and looked under the vehicle at Mario. He had disconnected its speedometer cable and was turning it with a power drill.

“Mario!” I bellowed. What in hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Just covering my expenses, signor.”

“What do you mean?”

“I swore to my mother, on my honour, that we were only going twenty kilometres today, but I saw her taking a speedometer reading anyway.” He began to sound aggrieved. “The old bitch doesn’t even trust her own son! How do you like that? Every time I use her car I have to turn the speedo back or she would rob me blind.”

I gave a strangled cry of fury, grabbed Mario by the ankles and dragged him out from under the vehicle. “This is your last chance,” I told him in a shaking voice. “Drive us to Paesino-whateveryoucallit right now, or the deal is off.”

“All right. There’s no need to get tough.” Mario looked furtively around the garage. “By the way, now that you’re at my depot—are you interested in drugs? Pot, hash, speed, snow: You name it, I’ve got it.”

“Have you a telephone? I want to call the police.”

The effect on Mario was gratifying and immediate. He pushed me back into the car and we drove off without even waiting to disconnect the power drill from the speedometer cable. It thumped on the bottom of the car a few times before falling behind us. Carole gave me a puzzled look, but I shook my head, warning her not to ask any questions.

All I knew for sure was that, if Mario got the slightest inkling of our business with Crazy Julio, he would move in like a hungry shark let loose in a paddling pool.

The drive westwards into the first slopes of the Graian Alps was far from pleasant. There appeared to be no heater in the car and, for some reason known only to themselves, my nipples reacted to the cold by becoming unbearably painful. They were so hard they almost tore my shirt each time we lurched into a pothole. Carole was remote, wrapped in her plumage like a haughty bird. Even Mario had nothing to say, no criminal propositions to make. He drove with broody concentration, swerving every now and then in attempts to run over stray dogs. When we reached Paesinoperduto two hours after setting out, I felt like a very old man.

“Here we are,” Mario announced, suddenly regaining his voice. “And I have a good idea.”

“Yes?” I said warily.

“Crazy Julio’s farm is two kilometres north of here, and the road gets even worse. You and the signora will stay here and have some coffee and I will bring Julio to meet you.”

I shook my head. “Nothing doing, Mario. You are going to stay here while Miss Colvin and I drive to the farm by ourselves.”

“That is impossible, signor. The car insurance would not cover you to drive it.”

“The car hasn’t even got insurance,” I challenged.

“Also, you don’t know the way.”

“I can psi myself straight to it at this range.”

“But, do you think I could permit a stranger to drive off in my mother’s car?”

“Let’s see.” I glanced around the deserted market square in which we had stopped. “I bet I can even psi the local police station from here?

“Be careful with the brakes,” Mario said resignedly, getting out of the driver’s seat and holding the door while I got in. “They pull to the right.”

“Thanks.” I let out the clutch pedal and steered the car towards the square’s only northern exit.

“That was quite an exhibition,” Carole said as we left the shabby cluster of dwellings behind. Did you have to be so tough with that poor boy?”

“If that poor boy isn’t in the Mafia,” I assured her, “it’s because they gave him a dishonourable discharge.”

We drove along a deteriorating road which took us up into the sunlit boulder-strewn hillsides I had psi-glimpsed on the previous evening. At one point—as if entering a baronial estate—the road crossed the remains of what had been a massive stone wall some centuries earlier. Faintly surprised at the idea of any medieval nobleman spending money on such unpromising land, I skried all around with a mounting sense of anticipation. There was a definite impression of richly apparelled horsemen coming and going. When a track branched off to the right towards an isolated farmhouse clinging to the mountain, I knew at once that we had reached our destination. The car rocked violently on the stony ground, but I was too excited even to wince at the sawing of my nipples on the inside of my shirt.

“Is this it?” Carole’s voice was full of doubt. “It doesn’t look to me like a place where you’d pick up an original da Vinci.”

“Me neither—but I can tell you something big was going on here a few hundred years back.” I stopped the car as it became in danger of being shaken to pieces. “Da Vinci spent a lot of his life in Milan, and it would have been quite easy for him to come up here in person any time he wanted.”

“To that hovel?” Carole said scornfully, looking at the farmhouse ahead of us.

“It doesn’t seem old enough. No, there’s a cavern of some sorts around here, and that’s probably where Julio found your painting.” My heart speeded up as, once again, I glimpsed the circular wooden machine. This time I discerned something extra—there seemed to be a whole series of canvases arranged in a curving row. “I’ve a feeling there could be a lot more paintings in it.”

Carole’s gloved hand touched my shoulder. “You mean there’s an underground storehouse?”

“I don’t think that’s the …” I stopped speaking as the figure of an elderly man emerged from the farmhouse and approached us. He was dressed in a pricy-looking chalk-striped grey suit, but the effect was spoiled by his frayed, collarless shirt and filthy tennis shoes. The double-barrelled shotgun on his arm confirmed my opinion that he had a very poor taste in separates.

I rolled down my window, projecting friendliness, and shouted, “Hi, Julio! How are you? How’s it going?”

“What you want?” he demanded. “Go away.”

“I’d like to talk to you.”

Julio raised the shotgun. “I no want to talk to you.”

“It’s just for a few minutes, Julio.”

“Listen, mister—I shoot you as soon as look at you.” He scowled in the window at me. “In your case, sooner.”

Stung by the insult, I decided on a more forceful approach. “It’s about the Mona Lisa you sold to Signor Colvin, Julio. I want to know where you got it, and you’d better tell me.”

“I tell you nothing.”

“Come on, Julio.” I got out of the car and loomed over him. “Where is the cave?”

Julio’s jaw sagged. “How you know about the cave?”

“I have ways of knowing things.” I used quite a lot of echo chamber in the voice, aware that peasants tend to be afraid of espers.

Julio looked up at me with worried eyes. “I get it,” he said in a low voice. “You are pissy.”

“P-S-I is pronounced like sigh,” I gritted. “Try to remember that, will you? Now, where’s that cave?”

“You make trouble for me?”

“There’ll be no trouble as long as you’re a good boy, and there might even be some money for you. The cave is this way, isn’t it?” Following a powerful instinct, I began striding up the hillside towards a stand of dark-green trees. Julio jogged along at my side and Carole, who for once had nothing to say, left the car and came after us.

“I find it three-four year ago, but for long time I no touch,” Julio said, panting a little as he struggled to keep abreast. “I no tell anybody because I want no fuss. Then I think, why should I not have smart city clothes? Why should Crafty Mario be the only one to have smart city clothes? But I take only one picture to sell. Just one.”

“How many paintings are in the cave?”

“Fifty. Maybe sixty.”

I gave a short laugh. “Then it was pretty dumb of you to pick one as well known as the Mona Lisa.”

Julio stopped jogging. “But, signor,” he said, spreading his hands, “they are all Mona Lisas.”

It was my turn to stop in my tracks. “What?

“They are all Mona Lisas.”

“You mean there are fifty or sixty paintings in there, and they’re all the same?”

Julio shifted his feet uneasily. “They are not all same.”

“This doesn’t make sense.” I glanced at Carole and saw she was equally baffled. “Come on—we’ve got to see this for ourselves.”

By that time we had reached and entered the cluster of trees. Julio set his shotgun down, darted ahead of us and dragged some pieces of rusty corrugated iron out of the way. Beneath them was an irregular opening and the beginning of a flight of stone steps which led downwards into blackness. Julio went down them, nimble in his tennis shoes, while Carole and I followed uncertainly. I felt her hand slip into mine and I gave it a reassuring squeeze as we reached the bottom step and began moving along what seemed to be a subterranean corridor. The daylight from the entrance rapidly faded.

I tapped Julio’s shoulder. “How are we going to see? Have you got a flashlight?”

“Flashlight no good. I buy one with money Signor Colvin give me, but the crooks no tell me I have to keep on buying batteries. This is better.” Julio struck a match and used it to light a storm lantern which had been sitting on the stone floor. As the oil flame brightened I saw that the tunnel ended at a massive wooden door. Julio fumbled at the lock and pushed the door. In spite of its weight and great age, it swung open easily, with uncanny silence, and there was spacious darkness beyond. Carole moved closer to me. I put my arm around her, but at that moment I was too preoccupied to derive any enjoyment from the embrace—the mysterious chamber, at whose entrance we stood, contained the answers to all the questions which were pounding in my head. I could almost feel those cloaked figures from half-a-millennium in the past brushing by me, I could almost hear the master himself as he went secretly about his work, I could almost see the strange machine. The greatest genius of all time had left his imprint here, and his lingering presence was so overwhelming that ordinary mortals felt humbled and unwilling to intrude.

“What you wait for?” Julio snapped, marching into the chamber with the lantern held high.

I followed him and, in the shifting light, discerned the outlines of a circular framework which resembled a wheel lying on its side. It was large—perhaps twenty paces in diameter—and at its rim was as tall as a man. Beneath the spokes of the wheel was a dimly seen system of gears with a long crankshaft running out to a position near where we stood. The whole thing reminded me of an early type of funfair merry-go-round, except that in place of the carved horses—and difficult to see properly because of the intervening frames—there was a series of paintings. All of them were attached to the inside of the rim, facing the centre. At the closest point on the machine’s circumference there was a structure like an elaborately ornamented sentry box, on the rear wall of which were two small holes at eye level.

I gaped at the wheel for a moment while a fantastic concept struggled to be born in my mind. The device did look like a roundabout, yet it had more in common with a Victorian cartoon animation machine. Realization exploded behind my eyes like a grenade.

Leonardo da Vinci—possessor of one of the most fertile minds in human history, creator of technologies that were far ahead of their times—had also invented moving pictures!

This machine, hidden for centuries in a cavern on a poor farmer’s land, had to be the richest treasure ever to come out of antiquity. Beside it the tomb of Tutankhamun was a trifle, the Elgin marbles were reduced to insignificance—because the device itself was only one part of the incredible find. Where a lesser man would have experimented with the animation of simple drawings or silhouettes, Leonardo’s towering vision and ambition had prompted him to aim for perfection, to base his work on his most acclaimed painting.

If my surmise was correct, the Mona Lisa was merely one frame in the world’s first movie!

Hardly daring to breathe, I stepped into the viewing box and peered through the two holes. I had been right. Lenses concealed within the woodwork brought my gaze to a focus on yet another painting of the beautiful Florentine lady. She looked startlingly real in the uncertain light, and in this picture her hands were in a much higher position, as if she was raising them to her throat. The famous smile seemed a little more pronounced, too. I had to step back to give myself time to assimilate what I had seen, and I noticed that Julio had hung his lantern on a hook projecting from the wall. He scuttled about, lighting other lanterns, then took hold of the long crankshaft in preparation for turning it.

“Does the mechanism still work?” I asked him.

Julio nodded. “I grease it and made it work.” He wound the iron handle and the framework began to turn. It moved very slowly at first, then settled into a smooth noiseless rotation which indicated perfection of balance. Julio gestured with his free hand, inviting me to look through the eyepiece again. He was grinning with proprietary glee.

I swallowed painfully as I stepped into the ornate box. Wonder was piling on wonder in a way that was almost too much to bear. On top of everything else that had transpired, I was about to have the privilege of actually viewing Leonardo’s supreme masterpiece brought to magical life, to commune with his mind in a manner which nobody would have thought possible, to see his sublime artistry translated into movement. Perhaps I was even to learn the secret of the Giaconda smile.

Filled with reverence, I put my eye to the viewing holes and saw the Mona Lisa miraculously moving, miraculously alive.

She raised her hands to the neckline of her dress and pulled it down to expose her ample left breast. She gave her shoulder a twitch and the breast performed the classiest circular swing I had seen since the last night I witnessed Fabulous Fifi Lafleur windmilling her tassels in Schwartz’s burlesque hall. She then drew her dress back up to its former position of modesty and demurely crossed one hand over the other, smiling a little.

“Oh, God,” I whispered. “Oh, God, God, God, God!”

Julio kept cranking the machine and I watched the show over and over again, unable to take my eyes away. It was a marvellous simulation of reality, marred only by one slight jerk near the beginning of the sequence—obviously where Julio had abstracted a painting to sell.

“Let me see it,” Carole said, tugging at my sleeve. “I want to see it, too.”

I stood back and let her look through the eyepiece. Julio twirled the crankshaft happily, jumping up and down in his tennis shoes like a demented dwarf. Carole viewed in silence for a full minute, then turned to me with wide eyes.

“It doesn’t seem possible,” she said faintly.

“Of course it’s possible,” I replied. “With a bit of practice some girls can do fantastic things with their accoutrements. Why, I remember when Fabulous Fifi Lafleur used to …”

“I’m talking about da Vinci,” Carole snapped. “I don’t know much about art, but I didn’t think he would go in for that sort of thing.”

“All artists are the same—they do whatever the paying customer wants them to do.” I was speaking with new-found cynicism. “It’s known that da Vinci was commissioned to design entertainments for various nobles, and some of the high-born were pretty low-minded.”

“But all that work …”

“He probably had the assistance of a whole school of artists. Beside, a project this size accounts for the long periods of apparent unproductivity in da Vinci’s career. When he should have been working on the Sforza statue he was down here working on Lisa’s left …”

“Don’t be vulgar,” Carole put in. She turned back to the still-rotating machine. “How much do you think it’s worth?”

“Who knows? Say there are sixty paintings involved. If they were smuggled out and away from the Italian Government they could fetch a million dollars each. Perhaps ten million each. Perhaps a billion—specially that one where she …”

“I knew this was going to be a lucky day,” a familiar voice said from behind me.

I spun and saw Crafty Mario standing at the entrance to the chamber. He was holding the shotgun which Crazy Julio had dropped outside, and its barrels were pointing at my stomach.

“What do you want?” I demanded, and then—realizing just how rhetorical the question was in Mario’s case—I added another. “Why are you pointing that gun at me?”

“Why did you steal my mother’s car?” Mario gave one of his most unpleasant sniggers. “And why did you threaten me with the police?”

“You mustn’t pay too much attention to the things I say.”

“But I can’t help it, signor—especially when I hear you saying things like sixty million dollars.”

“Now see here!” I started forward, but Mario stopped me by raising the shotgun.

“Yes?”

“We’re being silly, with so much loot to go around. I mean, out of sixty million you can have fifteen.”

“I prefer to have sixty.”

“But you wouldn’t take a human life for an extra forty-five million, would you?” I looked into the polished pebbles that Mario used in place of eyes, and my spirits sank.

“Back against the wall, the three of you,” Mario ordered.

Carole clung to me as we moved to the wall. Crazy Julio tried clinging to me as well, but I fended him off—with perhaps only a minute to live I was entitled to be choosy.

“That’s much better,” Mario said. Now, I will inspect the merchandise for myself.”

He went towards the machine which was still spinning on its well-greased bearings. Covering us with the gun, he stepped into the viewing box and peered into the two holes. I saw him stiffen with shock. He kept glancing back at us and then into the eyepiece again, fascinated. When he finally emerged from the box his face was almost luminescent with pallor. He walked towards us, his mouth working silently, and I held Carole close against me as we waited for the explosion of pain.

Mario appeared not to see us. He took the storm lantern down from its hook on the wall, and with a stiff-armed movement flung it into the centre of the machine. There was a sound of breaking glass, then flames began to lick up around the dry timber structure.

“You fool!” I howled. “What are you doing?”

“You will see what I’m doing.” Holding me in check with the gun, Mario collected the other lanterns and hurled them against the machine as well. The wooden rim of the wheel began to burn fiercely and I knew that the paintings, my sixty Mona Lisas, were igniting, crumpling, turning to worthless ash.

“You’re mad,” I shouted above the crackling of the flames. “You don’t know what you’ve done.”

“I know very well what I have done, signor,” Mario said calmly. “I have destroyed a piece of pornographic filth.”

“You!” I cackled like a madman. “But you’re the most evil person I’ve ever known. You’ve robbed me since the minute we met, you rob your poor old mother, you tried to sell me a woman, you tried to buy Carole for the white slave trade, you’re a drug pusher, and you were prepared to murder us a minute ago. You can’t even drive a car without trying to run over cats and dogs.”

“These things you say may be true, signor,” Mario said with an odd kind of dignity, “but they do not prevent me from being a patriot. They do not prevent me from loving my glorious Italia.”

“Huh? What the hell has patriotism got to do with it?”

“The great Leonardo was the finest artist who ever lived. He is the pride of my country—but tell me, signor, what would the rest of the world think of Italy if it was learned that the immortal Leonardo had prostituted himself in this way? What would they say about a nation whose noblest artist had wasted his divine gifts on …” Mario’s voice quavered with anguish, “… on medieval skin flicks?”

I shook my head, blinking back tears as the machine collapsed inwards on itself in showers of topaz sparks. The chamber filled with smoke as the last fragments of the oil paintings were consumed.

Mario pointed to the exit. “All right—we can leave now.”

“Aren’t you going to shoot us?”

“It isn’t necessary. Even if you were mad enough to talk about this, nobody would believe you.”

“I think you’re right.” I gave Mario a curious stare. “Tell me, doesn’t it bother you that you’ve just lost sixty million dollars?”

Mario shrugged. “Some days you win, some days you lose. By the way, because of all the trouble I’ve had, if you want to travel back to Milan in my mother’s car there will be a small extra charge …”

Carole stared at me thoughtfully as we sipped our after-dinner liqueurs. “You were very brave once or twice today—even with a gun pointed at you.”

“It wasn’t much. For all we know, Crazy Julio had no shells in it.” I smiled at Carole across the candle flames. “I mean, he wouldn’t even buy flashlight batteries.”

“No, you were brave. I was quite impressed.” Carole lapsed into another silence.

She had been like that all through the meal, even when I had pointed out that the painting she still had back in Los Angeles would make her a very rich woman. I guessed that the events of the day had been quite a strain on her, and that she was suffering from a reaction.

“It hardly seems possible,” she said in a small voice.

I squeezed her hand. “Try to forget it. The main thing is that we got out of that cave in one …”

“I’m talking about the Mona Lisa,” she interrupted. “That trick she did with her … urn … accoutrement. Do you think I could do it?”

I drained my brandy in one gulp. “I’m sure you could.”

“Are you an expert on these things?”

“Well, I’ve seen Fabulous Fifi Lafleur a few times, and if she can do it you probably could.”

“Let’s go up to my room and find out,” Carole said in a low husky voice.

I tried to gulp more brandy from the empty glass and almost shattered it against my teeth. “You’re kidding,” I said, not very brilliantly.

“Do you think so?”

I looked at Carole, and something in her eyes told me she wasn’t kidding. I’m too much of a gentleman to say anything about how the rest of that night worked out, but I’ll tell you this much.

Every time I look at a copy of the Mona Lisa, especially when I notice that famous smile, I can’t help smiling back.