Murder at the National Gallery by Margaret Truman Read Free Book Online Page A

aircraft hangars, and through thick forests of umbrella pines and cypresses.
    By the time they turned off the main road onto a rutted dirt path wide enough for only a single automobile, the sun had come up, and Giliberti was able to turn off his headlights. They went a hundred yards before reaching a break in the heavy vegetation lining the road. Giliberti turned through the opening and proceeded on yet another dirt road until arriving at a rambling, ramshackle farmhouse covered with vines. Two largedogs of mixed origin, one yellow, the other black, came around the side of the house and barked as the men got out of the car. Giliberti noticed the apprehension on Mason’s face and told him in Italian that they wouldn’t bite.
    The dogs, tails wagging in energetic circles, followed them to the front door. Giliberti knocked. The door was opened by an elderly woman wearing a black dress and white apron, a white net on her hair. She was stout; her face was sweet. The two young men who’d protected Sensi at the restaurant came up behind her. Giliberti said something to the woman in Italian, and she stepped back to allow them to enter.
    Inside, there was a musty coolness, and the strong odor of garlic and stale tobacco. The woman disappeared to the left; Mason and Giliberti followed one of the two men to the right, into a living room overflowing with old furniture. Drapes were drawn tightly over every window, keeping the room in virtual blackness, broken only by two lamps in opposite corners that spilled small amounts of yellow light onto a worn red carpet. From one of the darkened corners came the voice of Luigi Sensi, who sat in a chair that all but swallowed him.
    “Ah, Signor Sensi,” said Giliberti. “We are early. I apologize for that.”
    The old man struggled to his feet and leaned on the cane that had been hooked over an arm of the chair. “Better to be early than late,” he said gruffly. To Mason: “You have come.”
    “Yes.”
    Sensi hobbled from the room and out the front door, Mason and Giliberti behind him, followed by the two young men. This day, without their suit jackets, the bodyguards’ shoulder holsters and revolvers were plainly in sight. The dogs joined the entourage as Sensi led it across the broad front yard and through a series of grape arbors fat with fruit. The guards opened large doors to a barn partially collapsed at one end, and they entered. The smell of hay and manure was pungent. Sensi gave an order in Italian, and the two men went up a ladder to a loft. Mason heard them rummaging about. Eventually, one descended the ladder; the other handed down a large rectangular object wrapped in burlap.
    Sensi instructed the young man to unwrap the object near a broken window that allowed a shaft of light to illuminate a small portion of the darkened barn. He motioned for Mason to come closer. “Look,” he said. “Come see.”
    Mason felt as though his shoes were glued to the floor. He was weak from his physical illness the night before and from the hangover he’d suffered since waking. But something other than those maladies kept him from stepping forward. Sensi had beckoned him into the holiest of churches, into a sacred shrine of a lost civilization. Although the only light cast upon the object came through the window, the entire area seemed to glow.
    “Yes, let me see,” he said, his words breaking the inertia. He stood at Sensi’s side and looked down at the thing that had brought him to this rundown farmhouse in southern Italy. His gasp was involuntary. He pressed his lips tightly together to keep any further sounds from emerging.
    Sensi was amused at Mason’s behavior. “Come closer,” he said, gesturing toward the painting. “Examine each inch. Touch it if you wish.”
    The chore of examining it cleared Mason’s head, gave him purpose. He went on one knee and did what Sensi had invited him to do, using a magnifying glass he’d pulled from his pocket.
    When he stood twenty minutes