The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr Read Free Book Online Page A

into the entryway. In front of them a large courtyard with a few small lemon and fig trees lay open to the sky. In another era, it would have been a gracious setting, but now it had a dilapidated, untended look, with a pile of dead leaves blown into a corner, weeds sprouting here and there from cracks in the tiled floor. They stood in the entryway while the old woman went in search of the Marchesa. They could hear her high, raspy call—“Maria! Maria!”—fading down one of the corridors, and then silence.
    “One old lady in search of another,” Laura whispered to Francesca.
    A few minutes later they heard voices coming toward them and the stumping of the old custodian’s cane on the tiled floor. Then two women appeared side by side. To Francesca, they seemed to be about the same age, but they were a study in contrasts. The Marchesa was tall and thin, her carriage erect, and she wore a colorful spring dress, a bit out of style perhaps, but still elegant. Her face was long and narrow, her eyes deep blue, blond hair turning to gray, cut short and neatly coiffed. There was something about her appearance that put Francesca in mind of British aristocracy, of the way, Francesca imagined, that Agatha Christie might have looked. Except, of course, the Marchesa’s ancestry was Roman as far back as anyone could trace.
    The Marchesa greeted them politely but with reserve. Francesca felt a momentary impulse to curtsy. She introduced herself and Laura, and the Marchesa held out a frail, trembling hand. On closer encounter, the Marchesa showed her age. Her face was deeply lined, and her lipstick, thickly and inexpertly applied, had smudged at the corners of her mouth and the margins of her narrow lips.
    “So,” said the Marchesa, “you have come to see the archive? Now, what is it that you are searching for? What is the subject?”
    They explained—the origins of Caravaggio’s painting of St. John, once owned by the Marchesa’s ancestor Ciriaco Mattei. Francesca had already explained this to the Marchesa some weeks ago on the telephone, but she did not seem to remember.
    “Well, since you are here,” the Marchesa said, “I will let you enter. But in my opinion, it will be a waste of time. This German woman has already gone through everything. We have become friends. She has seen everything and done everything.”
    The Marchesa led the way to the archive, down a flight of stone stairs to the cellar. They entered a large rectangular room, dimly illuminated by the daylight that filtered through two rectangular windows high on the opposite wall. There was no glass in the windows; they were covered only by a rusted iron grating and opened directly at street level. The Marchesa turned on a light—a single bare bulb suspended from the high ceiling. At the center of the room there was a long wooden table, squarely placed under the light of the bare bulb. Several opened cardboard boxes sat on the table, along with a few large leather-bound volumes and folders containing loose sheets of paper. Many more boxes sat on the brick floor. Along the walls, the Marchesa had installed—recently, by the looks of it—gray metal shelves to hold the archives.
    Francesca thought of the Doria Pamphili archive, with its high ceilings, shaded lamps, and tiled floors. This place felt damp and smelled musty, the odor of decay.
    The Marchesa lit a cigarette. She was, Francesca and Laura would soon learn, an inveterate smoker. For the last few years, she told them, she had occupied herself with reorganizing the archives according to a new scheme she had discussed with the German woman. “Un grande impegno”—“a big undertaking”—the Marchesa remarked, gazing at the hundreds of volumes and folios on the gray metal shelves.
    She opened a small notebook and asked them to sign their names. “Now, what is it you are looking for?” she asked again. And again Francesca explained. They would start with the inventories of the 1600s, and then try to