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  As she enjoyed examining the portrait, in the back of her mind she wondered if Karol, standing behind her, was also looking at it or staring at her figure. She quickly turned around to catch him in the act, but he had his back to her, gazing out of the window. She could see him in profile, his face reflected in the windowpane, then her own reflection, and then that of Wyczółkowski’s model. All three of them were looking at each other in these foggy reflections, obscured by the lights of the living city on the other side of the glass. She wanted to say something, but she didn’t know what. She gazed at his familiar thick blue cotton shirt, and thought it would be truly awful if, during the course of this new adventure, she realized she wasn’t entirely over him.

  “I got this shirt from you, remember?” he said, without turning around.

  She snorted. “I realize that’s meant to flatter me in some way, but . . . how am I supposed to remember something like that? I’d like a glass of water.”

  “The way you like it? Ice and a slice of lime?”

  “Please, just pour me a glass of water, Karol. We’re not on a trip down memory lane, and we’re never going on one.”

  The doorbell rang, saving them.

  Fifteen minutes later they were all sitting at the dining room table. Karol struggled to connect Zofia’s laptop to a projector.

  “Do you understand everything in Polish?” Anatol asked Lisa.

  “Yes, I know Russian, and it’s easy to pick up the words. It’s worse with speaking. Polish sure is hardcore.”

  Zofia had imagined the Swedish aristocrat quite differently: tall, well built, with an ample bosom, a strong jaw, and long fair hair. But Lisa Tolgfors had a completely different sort of beauty. Stocky with a masculine figure, she looked like a fit, battle-seasoned northerner. And her aristocratic genes were evident, because Lisa Tolgfors’s face—as Zofia noticed, not without a stab of envy—was stunningly beautiful. She had the slanted sky-blue eyes of a Laplander and carelessly arranged curly black hair. Her subtle, classic features and finely shaped lips made her look like an elf princess, a creature of a different species. There was something about her that made it difficult to look away.

  She looked . . . well, like an adult version of Ronia, just as she appeared in the classic illustrations by Ilon Wikland.

  “Did you really paint it in a single day? How on earth did you get away with it?” asked Anatol, delving into the theft that had landed Lisa in a Polish jail.

  Lisa cast a glance at Zofia.

  “Well, it’s no secret we’re usually on opposite sides of the barricade,” replied Zofia. “And I’m not thrilled by colorful anecdotes about stealing valuable exhibits from Poland’s poor, decimated museums. I sincerely hope that every sticky-fingered thief will eventually end up behind bars for a long time. But right now my only concern is that we complete our task smoothly and efficiently. Is that clear?”

  Lisa saw this as a green light to answer Anatol’s question.

  “I went to the museum every day with a different look, get me? I watched the guards in the evening and they all disappeared every day ten minutes before closing time. There’s no guard there, and that’s the only security in the museum. Then I sent a fake fax to the director, as if from Uppsala University, saying I’m a doctor of fine art who’s making watercolor copies for academic reasons. Follow me?”

  Anatol nodded. Zofia felt, whatever one could say about her, that Lisa certainly had some things down to a fine art.

  “So I included a photo of my face and he said yes. All day I’d sit at the museum and make watercolor copies. The guards came and admired the fuckin’ amazing work I was doing just before they left for the night. In those next ten minutes I removed my Claude Monet”—her voice softened, as if she were talking about a lover—“put my forgery in the frame, and left.”

  Zofia hoped she wouldn’t point out that for the next two weeks, none of the museum staff, or the visitors, or the tour guides had realized the painting in the frame was a clumsy forgery; the only features of the coastal landscape that partially reflected the original were the lines of the beach and the faded colors. God knows how long the piece of cardboard stuck in place with double-sided tape would have gone on hanging there. Maybe several years until the next restoration, if not for a chance incident.

  In Gdańsk, Lisa’s car was broken into. The thieves noticed some art deco pieces from local antique shops in it and assumed they were valuable. So instead of taking the goods to an ordinary middleman, they went to a shady antique dealer who, when he saw the Monet cut out of its frame, panicked and called the police. Next morning, a senior police officer, accompanied by a sleepy interpreter, arrested Ronia at her suite at the Holland House boutique hotel.

  “I don’t honestly know why I stole it. My Claude was so beautiful that I couldn’t get him off my mind. I painted another one just like it from memory while I was in jail, but the guards took it.” She paused sadly. “The screws just don’t get it.”

  Zofia looked up in surprise at that last remark.

  “The prison guards don’t understand,” whispered Anatol.

  Zofia remained stone faced.

  Lisa scratched her calf, lost in thought. Zofia noticed she was wearing an ankle monitor. Gagatek had explained that they couldn’t let Ronia out of their sight. Zofia thought he must be a real optimist if he believed he could keep track of the famous thief with a cheap piece of plastic.

  In theory, she was just a Swede who’d messed up while trying to get the Poznań Monet out of the country. She’d told the prosecutor she loved the Impressionists, but despite her family wealth she couldn’t afford to buy one of the paintings—they fetched the highest prices at auction, and the one in Poznań was the closest and most poorly guarded. God’s truth—some rural cottages were better protected than Poland’s public collections.

  Only later did Zofia find out that Lisa Tolgfors could be guilty of far more than that. Thomas Crown in a skirt, the mysterious female thief, to whom the most audacious thefts of the past decade had been linked. In an ingenious heist, carried out on New Year’s Eve 1999, she had stolen a Cézanne from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Everyone was celebrating the new millennium, nobody had much thought about guarding the museum, and the fireworks display over Oxford had effectively stifled any suspicious noises. Nobody looks suspect on a night like that—a masked robber might at most be offered a glass of champagne, even if she’s carrying a Cézanne under her arm.

  When it came to the heist in Rio de Janeiro, the modus operandi was extremely similar. It was February 2006, and this time the thief had taken advantage during the Carnival celebration to steal some priceless works worth tens of millions of dollars. Impressionists again: Monet and Matisse. Plus Picasso and Dalí. The Carnival parade had passed below the museum windows, and the thief or thieves could have jumped out onto the dancing platforms and waved the pictures like fans without anybody taking the least notice.

  Then came Zurich in 2008, the Foundation E. G. Bührle collection—Cézanne again. And Monet again. And Degas.

  Then Paris in 2010. The Musée d’Art Moderne, Matisse and Braque.

  Then Rotterdam in 2011, the Kunsthal, once again Monet and Matisse. Gauguin too.

  And then Poznań. And Monet again. “My Claude.” And the slipup. But this was the question: Was the culprit just a spoiled Swede who’d become infatuated with a nice little painting in a Polish museum? Or was she actually the queen of art thieves? The woman who’d carried off Impressionists, totaling a billion dollars, from various museums over the past decade?

  Gagatek claimed the latter. It was good news to Zofia. She’d only have to show Lisa where the Raphael was hanging and then wait in the nearest café for her to come back with it tucked under her arm.

  By now it was late, the Wedel cake was all gone, the lamps were off, and the only source of light was coming from the slide projector displaying the nonchalant Young Man in a fur coat on the wall. Nobody noticed that he was gazing over their heads at Wyczółkowsk
i’s alluring beauty, who was almost imperceptibly smiling at him.

  “We’ve all seen Saving Private Ryan, a hopeless expedition to rescue the one surviving son from a large family, right?” The others glanced dubiously at Zofia. “I think about our mission in the same way. Not everyone has to like it, or like the way we’re doing it, not everyone would volunteer for this sort of mission, but I’d like to tell you why we’re doing it. Because, believe me, these are not just streaks of paint on a board. This boy witnessed dramatic events; secrets were entrusted to him as a friend of great men and a prisoner of evil ones. We’re not just saving a work of art. We’re saving the last prisoner of the twentieth century, the chief witness at the trial of history. Do you understand?”

  10

  Zofia would have taken back her words if she’d known how apt they were, how perfectly her team’s situation fitted the metaphor of the guardian of great secrets, the chief witness in the trial of history. At the same moment as she geared up to tell the incredible story of the Young Man, in a completely different part of the world a certain man was also making a decision—that nobody should ever be able to find the chief witness and discover his secret. Having him be found meant a diplomatic scandal, an international crisis, and turbulence in the world markets. It was a price that had to be paid. He didn’t regard the lives of a few people scheming away in an ugly city in Poland as a cost at all, or even an obstacle. Hardly a blip.

  This man glanced at his watch. It was nearly one p.m.

  He still had to meet with the military guy, and if it went smoothly, he’d have time for lunch before two—keeping the order of his day, something he took great care to do, in view of his age.

  He knew the meeting with Captain Patridge shouldn’t drag on. What was there to talk about? Once again the army had proved that it looked best in Hollywood movies and parades. The last time it had been of any use was during World War II—the next seventy years had been a run of incidents and stupid conflicts as it pointlessly played the world’s police, which usually led to even bigger trouble.

  The army looked good, but it did everything too noisily and ineffectively, leaving a total shitstorm behind, for which they then had to spend decades taking the blame—think Vietnam or Iraq.

  His department consisted of dull and unspectacular bureaucrats, but they got everything done efficiently, quietly, without a trace, and for good.

  That was why diplomacy would always be the queen of politics, he thought.

  Just then his secretary announced that his visitor had arrived.

  11

  “It’s the early sixteenth century, around 1510. This is when the Young Man is born, in Rome, into a really good family. His father is twenty-seven-year-old Raffaello Sanzio, his mother is the spirit of the Renaissance, and his godparents, alongside Raphael, are two other geniuses of the time: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti. When the Young Man was still smelling of fresh paint and only just getting used to life on a thirty-by-twenty-three-inch wooden panel, the Mona Lisa was already a few years old. I have a reason for mentioning her—it’s the same technique, the same foundation, almost identical dimensions, the same three-quarter angle turned to the left, the mysterious smile playing on the lips. Mona Lisa and the Young Man are spiritual siblings; the two most perfect portraits in the history of art.

  “What happened after his birth? His father sold him quickly and moved on to better-paid commissions for the pope. He died soon after without reaching the age of forty. And the Young Man hung on the walls in various palazzos, enjoying the high life, touring Rome, Genoa, Mantua, Modena, and finally ending up in Venice with the Giustiniani family. And then his life took a turn, after which nothing would ever be the same. One day, handsome, fed up, and furious, Prince Adam Czartoryski, ambassador of the Russian empress to the king of Sardinia, appeared in the Giustinianis’ drawing room.

  “Why was he so fed up and furious? The empress had sent him there as a punishment for putting his hand up the skirt of her grandson’s wife; Alexander was, after all, the future tsar. So the prince was passing the time in Italy looking for gifts for his mama, who had decided to turn the family palace into Poland’s first museum. He brought his progenitor some fine souvenirs from Italy: Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine and Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, which at the time was regarded as a self-portrait. This was at the start of the nineteenth century.

  “The Young Man was in select company. On one side he had a fine Italian bella ragazza, and on the other the Good Samaritan, painted by Rembrandt. For the next hundred and fifty years this threesome, appearing as LRR—Leonardo-Raphael-Rembrandt—was inseparable and regarded as Poland’s greatest artistic treasure. We’ve never had anything more valuable.

  “May I have some water? Thanks. No, no lime and no ice.

  “Well, as you can easily imagine, with the move to Poland, la dolce vita was at an end, and the adventures were about to begin. Wars against the Russians, uprisings, revolts, the Napoleonic wars, peasant rebellions, one incident after another, typical Poland. The paintings soon ended up in chests and cellars, until finally in the mid-nineteenth century the prince decided to evacuate them to a palace he’d just bought in Paris, the Hôtel Lambert on the Île Saint-Louis.

  “It must have been an interesting time for the Young Man, because the prince’s Paris residence was at the heart of Polish émigré life, the intellectual and artistic center of a nation deprived of a state. And the salon of the Parisian bohème. Chopin and George Sand, Adam Mickiewicz, Delacroix, Berlioz, Liszt, Balzac . . . Everyone who was anyone was seen at Czartoryski’s.

  “But LRR’s grand social life didn’t last long. Prince Adam died, and a few years later the Communards began their Parisian revolution and changed the Hôtel Lambert into a fortress; just in case, the works of art went back to Poland, where miraculously things were peaceful. Our threesome ended up in Kraków, on the wall of a brand-new Czartoryski Museum, and the Young Man began to lead the life of an admired exhibit. Did he like it? I should think so, though I’d have missed the adventures and the Parisian balls, for which Chopin specially composed his polonaises.

  “Shall we have something to eat? Pizza, perhaps. No mushrooms for me, no seafood, and no pineapple.”

  12

  Captain Clifton Patridge was born and raised in an American military family and had spent his entire professional life in the army, but he wasn’t the type of soldier who thought that law, order, and security only came from a uniform, and that civilians are sheep who need to be protected from themselves. But he did have a problem with civilians who “supervised” the army. The president of the United States was commander in chief of the armed forces, but after him, Patridge believed there should only be generals issuing orders, with a clear military hierarchy.

  Unfortunately, the longer he served and the higher he ranked, the more civilians appeared in his realm, convinced they were his superiors. NATO officials, Defense Department officials, CIA heads, White House employees—and now, on top of all that, the self-important, sulky State Department, sarcastically dubbed Foggy Bottom, from the name of the district where its headquarters was located.

  “It’s all in the report, sir,” Patridge said to the arrogant pencil pusher, to whom he had assigned the rank of four-star asshole.

  “Captain Patridge, we have to have it. Us. Not the Poles, no way the Germans, and definitely not the Russkies or Chinks, who’d make a saw out of it and use it to cut off our balls.”

  “Well, we didn’t find it. Just as we didn’t find a hiding place, a legendary treasure chest, or a painting. Believe me, we searched every building and shelter in those mountains, and two of our guys paid with their lives exploring those caves.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? I read the report. Just tell me how likely it is that the Poles will find it.”

  Patridge thought of Gmitruk and their last evening in the café at Kalatówki. About the cold beer, the black glove on the Pole’s hand, wounded during his heroic action,
and about his dreams of a new life in retirement. Could his answer do the man harm? In the military, things were simple; the goodies were our allies, the baddies were our enemies. In the world of four-star assholes, everyone was an enemy, and there was no tactical analysis behind their decisions, just paranoia, arrogance, and a fight for greater power.

  The Polish major had saved sixty-one people. Anyone who puts on a uniform dreams of performing such a heroic feat, but nobody ever gets the chance. Best-case scenario, you spend your life on training courses; worst-case scenario you get sent away to murder some poor souls for political and economic interests. Gmitruk, on the other hand, had had his opportunity and had taken full advantage.

  “Will the Poles find it?” Patridge repeated to stall for time. “It’d be easier to answer if someone would finally tell me what it is we’re actually looking for. If I’d known back in Poland, maybe we wouldn’t have come home empty-handed.”

  “Would you rather be informed or alive, Captain? Because if I’d told you what we’re looking for, you wouldn’t be here. An issue of national security. Now answer the question.”

  Patridge realized there was no point in pushing it.

  “I have no idea if they’re looking for anything. But if anyone’s going to find it, they will. It’s their soil, their secret, their . . . for want of a better word, treasure. They have the motivation, the knowledge, and pretty well-trained men. But I honestly don’t know how you could prevent them or really discourage them from it. Give them a few extra F-16s? Lift visa restrictions? Promise them some more rockets?”

  “Don’t bother your head with that sort of thing, Captain. This is no longer a military operation. Off you go.”

  13

  “Don’t imagine that the Young Man just languished on a wall until 1939. He sat out the First World War hiding in Dresden and was supposed to sit out the Second, safely hiding in the countryside, but two weeks after the war began he was ‘given protection’ by the Germans. They were extremely well prepared for their pillaging—before the war their historians had done special reconnaissance to find the best morsels. Naturally, LRR was at the top of the list. The trio was destined for the Führer’s museum that was to be established in Linz, Austria, along with many other pearls of world art being plundered or bought all over Europe.