Chapter 3 - A Signature Is Not an Answer
I spent the morning trying to reconcile the man who had stopped a stranger from hurting me with the man whose signature had authorized a suspicious painting to disappear. The two versions occupied the same body, the same gray eyes, the same expensive suit. It was possible that both were true. That was what frightened me.
Inspector Conti examined the shipping document before I contacted Luca. She confirmed that the signature image matched a corporate authorization used by one of his galleries, although she warned me that a copied signature was not proof that Luca had read the particular document. Her officers requested the warehouse records. The warehouse refused immediate access and referred them to lawyers.
“Give us time,” Chiara said.
“How much?”
“I don't have an honest answer yet.”
She arranged for a legal advocate to review the debt documents and gave Nina and me advice about documenting contact from strangers. She also suggested we avoid the apartment for a few nights because somebody had found our address. Nina knew a woman who managed a communal artists' residence. We moved there, not because Luca told us to, but because it had an attended entrance and people I trusted.
Then I called Luca from a table in a busy café, with Nina at my side and Chiara aware that I was meeting him. He arrived alone. He had changed into a navy jacket and looked more like a weary businessman than the man who had silenced a ballroom.
I slid a copy of the shipping order across the table.
“Did you sign it?”
He read the page. His expression closed.
“I signed a group of export authorizations yesterday.”
“That's not what I asked.”
“Yes. I signed this.”
The admission emptied the air between us. I had expected an excuse. A denial would have been easier to fight.
“Then why did you look surprised when I said my father's name?”
“Because Matteo Riva came to my office last year. He said a painting passing through my warehouse was stolen. Vittorio Valenti assured me Riva was trying to blackmail him.”
“And you believed the man making money from the sale.”
Luca stared at the shipping document. “I believed the explanation that cost me least.”
It was the ugliest answer he could have given, and perhaps the most useful. I refused the espresso he offered to order. I wanted him to understand that he couldn't smooth over a fact with hospitality.
“My father died six months ago. He spent his final year trying to clear his name. You could have looked at the photographs. You could have asked an independent conservator.”
“Yes.”
“You didn't.”
“No.”
I waited for him to tell me he had reasons. His gaze moved to the entrance, where commuters were coming in out of the rain. For a second he looked like someone considering the nearest exit. Then he pushed the order back.
“I'll give Conti the internal records.”
“Why?”
“Because I should have looked the first time.”
I had no reason to believe him yet. “Don't give them to me. Give them to the investigator, complete and unedited. And don't contact me through men stationed on the street.”
He nodded. When he stood, a customer near the window recognized him and looked away. I saw how effortless that kind of power was. I also saw that he had left his coffee untouched.
That afternoon, I met the legal advocate, Teresa Morelli. She reviewed a photograph of the paper Dad had made me sign at seventeen and asked me to obtain the original. The signature had been attached to a purported guarantee for an amount that had since multiplied many times. Teresa was careful with her language: a lender's claim was not a judgment, and my age and the circumstances of the signature mattered. She would challenge it rather than promise a miracle.
I left her office lighter by an ounce. Sometimes an ounce was enough to walk another block.
Nina had meanwhile visited Dad's former landlord. The man disliked Valenti and agreed to let us retrieve a box the collectors hadn't taken. It was labeled CHRISTMAS LIGHTS, which explained why nobody had wanted it. Inside were a tangled string of bulbs, an empty biscuit tin, and one envelope addressed to me in Dad's small, neat handwriting.
My hands began shaking before I opened it.
Sofia, if you're reading this, I failed to convince them. The debt wasn't a debt when it started. It became one when I wouldn't certify the Harbor Madonna. Do not trust my first statement. I signed it after they threatened you. Find the photographs before you choose whom to believe.
He had dated the note fourteen months before he died. I reread it until the words blurred. It didn't absolve every bad choice he'd made, and it didn't explain why he hadn't told me while he was alive. But it gave me a direction. I had spent months grieving a man whom I thought I'd understood and whose life was apparently full of sealed compartments.
At the bottom of the page he had written: The blue paint is on the wrong side of the frame.
I held the letter beside the auction photo. The Madonna's cloak appeared blue in both, but the wooden border had an odd fleck on its inner left edge. I enlarged the image until the pixels broke apart. Dad had once shown me how a conservator sometimes left a tiny modern marker on a replacement piece, clearly documented, so a future examiner wouldn't mistake it for the original.
We needed a proper inspection. More urgently, we needed the artwork not to leave the country.
At six that evening, Chiara called. Luca's company had delivered some records. The shipping schedule was real, but someone had entered a last-minute change that diverted lot nineteen to a warehouse operated by Valenti's holding company. Luca's corporate signature remained on the file even though the amendment had been approved after his office closed.
“Someone used his authorization,” she said, “or his office allowed it. We're checking.”
“Where's the painting now?”
“Not where the original order says.”
May you like
As I ended the call, Nina's phone lit up with a photograph from an unknown sender. It showed Dad outside a warehouse, clutching his restoration bag. The timestamp in the corner read 4:17 a.m., the morning he died.
Behind him stood a man whose emerald ring caught the security light.
