The Commission
Elena Marchetti was on a ladder in Boston with a scalpel in her hand when the Rinaldi offer came in.
She was removing two hundred years of yellow varnish from a third-rate portrait of a Puritan minister, and she was thinking, as she worked, that her whole life had become a slow careful process of scraping away other people’s mistakes. Her ex. Her apartment. Her mother’s Alzheimer’s facility bills that she paid on the first of every month. Elena was thirty-one, the best attribution specialist on the East Coast under forty, and completely broke.
Her phone buzzed. She glanced down. Unknown number, international, the flag icon showing Italian colors.
She climbed down and answered.
“Signora Marchetti.” The voice was masculine, polished, warm. “My name is Marco Rinaldi. I represent a private collection in Rome. We have a piece that requires urgent attribution. I am told you are the only specialist we would trust with it.”
“What piece.”
A pause that felt expensive.
“I will not say over the phone. If you are interested, we will fly you to Rome this weekend, first class, all expenses. We offer eighty thousand euros for six weeks of work. A bonus of equal size if the attribution is confirmed. Are you interested.”
Elena was so interested her knees nearly buckled on the ladder.
She kept her voice level. “I’d need to see the piece first.”
“Of course. The car will collect you Sunday morning at eleven. Grazie, Signora. I look forward to meeting you.”
He was gone before she could negotiate.
She looked up at the Puritan minister. The Puritan minister looked down at her with his yellowed eyes. She peeled off her gloves and sat on the top of the ladder and laughed, because eighty thousand euros was six months of her mother’s facility and a plane ticket out of her life, and she did not yet know how much more it was going to cost her.
Sunday morning a black Mercedes picked her up. A private jet took her from Logan to Fiumicino. A second Mercedes met her at the tarmac and took her, through the glitter of a Rome evening, to the Palazzo Rinaldi on the Aventine.
The palazzo was the kind of building that did not have a sign. Four stories of pale travertine behind a high wall, a wrought-iron gate that opened without anyone touching it, a gravel courtyard with a single cypress in the center. Her driver opened her door. A valet took her single small suitcase. A butler led her through a marble foyer that smelled of beeswax and old roses into a library lit by one lamp, and in the chair beneath the lamp sat the most dangerously beautiful man Elena Marchetti had ever seen.
He stood when she entered.
“Signora Marchetti.”
He was tall. Black hair swept back, silver at the temples for his age—thirty-five, maybe thirty-six. A charcoal suit that had been built for his body. Dark eyes with a slow attentive intelligence. A mouth that smiled like a promise he had every intention of breaking.
“Marco Rinaldi,” he said. “Welcome to Rome.”
She had prepared a professional handshake. He took her hand and turned it over and pressed his mouth, briefly, to the inside of her wrist, and her pulse leapt hard enough that she knew he felt it.
He straightened. He smiled.
“Please,” he said. “Sit. We have a great deal to discuss.”
She sat. She crossed her legs. She tried to look like a woman who had not just had her wrist kissed by a man who she understood, immediately, on sight, was very bad for her.
Marco walked across the library to an easel covered by a cloth. He paused. He looked back at her.
“Before I uncover this,” he said, “I must tell you that what you are about to see is not publicly documented. If you accept the commission, you sign a confidentiality agreement that survives your death. If you decline, you will be returned to Boston on tomorrow’s flight with a generous courtesy payment and no further contact. Do you understand.”
“Yes.”
“Do you accept the terms.”
“Show me the painting first.”
He smiled. He liked that answer. She could see him liking it. He lifted the cloth.
Elena stopped breathing.
It was a Caravaggio.
It was an unknown Caravaggio. She had spent three summers cataloguing his provable output, and she knew every documented canvas by heart, and this—a half-length of a young woman in a red dress holding a skull, the light rolling across her collarbone with the specific brutal tenderness of Merisi’s brush—this was not on any list.
“Where,” she breathed, “did you get this.”
“That,” Marco Rinaldi said softly, “is exactly what we do not want you to ask. We want you to tell us what it is. Not where it came from. Will you do that for us.”
She could not speak. She could only nod.
“Then you are hired, Signora Marchetti. Welcome to the family.”
He poured her a glass of wine she did not remember accepting. Somewhere in the house a door closed. Somewhere in the house, she was almost certain, a second man—someone with a walk identical to Marco’s—was listening from the other side of a wall.
She did not know yet, that first night, that she had just met the first king of three.
