Chapter 9
The room was dark and musty, with block concrete walls and a bare concrete floor. Tamra assumed it was a basement, though her memory of getting to this place was jumbled and hectic.
Slowly she rocked, the baby’s warm weight cuddled to her chest as she swayed. Anthony was asleep, but she wasn’t ready to put him in the cold crib that had been prepared for him. Her lips grazed the top of his head and she inhaled his unique scent.
She would know her baby anywhere, just by the smell of him.
Finally she loosened her embrace and lowered the him to the mattress. He lay on his back, arms stretched over his head as if he had fallen asleep mid-yawn, and Tamra smiled lightly—the first happiness she could remember since this nightmare began.
Thank God Anthony was with her. She longed for safety and the comforts of home, but as long as she had her son, she knew she would be okay.
Heavy footsteps cascaded down the stairs and she stepped quickly to the door, slipping into the brighter room at the same time as her visitor. A sick dread boiled up within her at the rage she saw etched in his features.
“You haven’t finished!” He was tall and wide, the dark curly hair on his head nearly grazing the ceiling.
“Leonardo only brought it to me a few hours ago, and I had to get the baby down to sleep.”
The man dragged a wooden chair loudly across the floor, stopping in front of an easel.
“Get to work. We have only a few hours.”
She swallowed against the dryness in her throat while she walked past him and took her place before the painting.
A print of the real Madonna Fornirà hung on the wall behind it, and she considered where to begin.
The lighting on the corona was the most obvious defect, and she picked up her palette and began mixing several hues of gold and brown.
He was standing so close behind her, she could feel his body heat on her shoulder. “I don’t get it,” he said. “How could she get some of it so perfect, then screw up the rest so bad?”
Tamra imagined her mother sitting before this same canvas some thirty years earlier. The mistakes were too glaring to have been accidental, Claudia too good an artist to have made them. “Maybe she did it on purpose.”
“How long will it take you to fix it?”
“I’ll have it done in time.”
The man grunted and stepped away. She dropped her shoulders and took a deep breath before touching her paint-laden brush to the canvas. The scent of oil paints perfumed the air as she corrected the Madonna’s corona, memories of painting side-by-side with her mother drifting over her like the wind.
Look at the strokes, at the depth of the color variation. If you’re going to copy someone’s work, you have to take on their mannerisms, their tics. You have to be willing to trust their judgment as your own.
Tamra lost all track of time long before she finished.
Surveying her work, she stood and straightened her aching back, the light scrape of her chair on the concrete announcing her movement. The man came to stand at her elbow.
“It’s good,” he said.
“Yes, I think so.”
He turned toward her, an unpleasant grin spreading across his face. “We have some time before he gets back.” He ran his hand down her arm and she recoiled.
Tamra felt sick as his meaning registered. “No.”
“Come on, baby.” He chuckled, a thick sound that disgusted her as he stepped even closer and reached for her.
Tamra thought of running, the stairway looming in her peripheral vision, a possible means of escape, then thought of Anthony sleeping in the next room. She could never leave her son. “Get your hands off me!”
He leaned even closer, his body touching hers. “Oh, you’re a feisty one…”
“Stop it!” She backed away and he caught her, his grip unyielding, real fear biting into her consciousness and she screamed.
Then his hand was on her mouth and she couldn’t breathe. He worked to unfasten his pants and she tried to knee him in the groin, but missed. He stood upright and slapped her. “You bitch!”
In one horrifying moment, a gunshot ripped through the basement and into the man’s head. Tamra yelled in staccato bursts, covering her mouth with her hand. Leonardo stood at the bottom of the stairs, gun still in his outstretched hand.
Tamra looked back and forth between the big man on the floor and the blood splatter covering the freshly touched-up Madonna Fornirà. Anthony cried from the next room, but Tamra made no move to get him.
“Are you okay?” asked Leonardo.
She nodded.
“That stupid bastard. I knew we shouldn’t have brought him in, no matter his connections. The painting is ruined, and he scared you to death.”
Tamra thought she might be sick.
“At least there’s still the real one,” he said.
Tamra stared at him, wide-mouthed, then turned and went to get the screaming baby.
The Madonna Fornirà’s soulful eyes seemed to bore into Tamra’s conscience.
This is your fault.
“No, it’s not,” Tamra whispered to herself, dipping a swab into the heady solvent, rinsing it in a chemical neutralizer before bringing it back to the Madonna’s face.
The blood separated from the paint, one layer dissolving as the other remained intact. It was nasty work to wash away pieces of a human being, and her fingers trembled with the sheer force of will it took to remain focused on the task.
Leonardo walked up behind her, placing a cup of tea on the table. “Let me help you,” he said.
“No. I’ve got it.” She turned to look at him. “May I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“The painting over your fireplace. It’s my mother’s work. She had its mate in her sitting room.” Her mouth twisted and she sniffed. “I used to stare at that painting for hours. So beautiful! Of course, I always thought the man in it must be my father. But it wasn’t, was it?”
He suddenly looked quite old, the corners of his mouth pulling down. “No. I never knew she made two.” He stared into the past. “We were in Florence on holiday. She insisted we have dinner in the woods, bread and cheese, a bottle of wine. We dined on a bed sheet from the hotel.”
“Was she married to my father?”
He shook his head. “No. I thought she would be married to me.”
“You loved her.”
He frowned, his eyes gleaming. “Oh, yes. But I was a fool. A selfish, stupid fool who cared more for money than for love.” He gestured with his hand, palm open, to the blood-stained painting spread before them. “I cared more for this than for your mother.”
“The painting?”
“All of them. She could paint all of them, each so well. Caravaggio and Rembrandt, Renoir and Lautrec. I wanted the money she could earn selling her forgeries. I thought together we could be unstoppable.”
Her mother would never agree. Claudia de Toffoli was a woman of great character with a sound moral compass. If she loved a man who wanted her to do wrong, she would sooner be without him than oblige. “She left you.”
He nodded. “And married your father instead.”
The pain on his face was evident, and Tamra reached out and covered his hand with her own. “She kept the painting close to her through all her days.”
“As I have, mine.” He smirked. “Sometimes I talk to that painting, imagining she can hear me.”
A door closed in the distance and he raised both hands with a smile. “At last, my son has arrived.” He turned back to Tamra. “I hope you will treasure your love more than I treasured mine, my dear. For it only presents itself but once in a lifetime.”