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"Happy?Married?"
"Yes, to both."
"But no children?"
"Not yet."He waited a moment, then said."Can you help us?"
"I wasn't inLa Mano Nera, but I am familiar with the group.I was a very young man when they were operating in the sixties and early seventies.I had no respect for them.Despite their pristine black gloves, they were messy.They made mistakes.Costly errors."
"I thought they were very successful," she interjected.
"Not as much as you might believe."
"Do you know anything about the art of our ancestors?"she pressed."A reason why someone would steal their work?They were talented artists, but they weren't very successful."
"I met Lucinda and Tomas," he said.
She sucked in a breath at his answer."You did?"
"I was twenty years old.I went to Tomas's studio on a few occasions under the guise of being an artist myself.But I was more interested in meeting the artists, some of whom were connected to private collectors, museums, and galleries.Tomas's store and his studio were an important part of the art scene in Rome."He paused."Are you sure you want to know more about them?Sometimes, the truth is not what you want it to be."
"We want to know the truth.We don't care what it is," Nick said firmly.
"Very well.Lucinda Rossi and Tomas Caruso were not well-known artists because they weren't real artists."
"What does that mean?"she challenged."You might not have thought they were good, but art is subjective."
She didn't know why she felt the need to defend Lucinda, but she did.
"They weren't artists," the man said."They were forgers.They didn't create art; they copied it.And from that perspective, they were very, very good."
"You're lying," she said, shocked by his words.
Silence followed her statement.
"Aren't you?"she asked.
ChapterSeventeen
Nick was as stunned by Sam's statement as Isabella."How do you know they were forgers?"he challenged.
"Because I made the mistake of stealing a painting that turned out to be a fake.My customer was not happy, and I barely escaped with my life.I was determined to find out who had painted such a brilliant piece of work that I could have been fooled, because I was very good.Someone told me there was a group of students working at a studio run by Tomas Caruso, and some of them might be working on forgeries.I went to the studio under the pretense of being an artist, and I became friends with some of the younger ones, most notably David Leoni."
"That's another guy who had a painting stolen," Isabella murmured.
"I didn't realize that."
"Let's get back to the group," Nick said."What did David Leoni tell you?"
"After many cocktails one evening, he said that Lucinda was a brilliant forger, that she could copy any painting and no one would know, and that he was learning a lot from her.I asked him why he would want to do that, and he had a one-word response—money.He needed money to live so he could support his own art.Over the next few weeks, I tried to get closer to Lucinda, but she was guarded.I didn't have success getting her to open up to me.David also clammed up, probably regretting what he'd already said.There was a change in the workshops after that.Some were closed to only private, smaller groups of students, and I couldn't get into them.I didn't want to spend my life chasing them.I had other things to do, so I moved on.About a month later, I heard Lucinda and Tomas died in a mysterious fire."
"All you have is some drunk guy's theory about Lucinda," Isabella said, a heated note of anger in her voice as she defended her great-grandmother."That's not worth much."
"You can believe me or not.It makes no difference.I heard you wanted information about your relatives.Because you are connected to someone I care about, I came—at some risk of personal jeopardy, I might add."
"Your personal jeopardy doesn't matter to me," Isabella retorted."You're a thief."
As her anger increased, Nick knew he had to keep the peace.He didn't want Isabella to run Sam off, not when they needed information.
