“But Marco thought she was a beauty, too. ‘Overpainted,’ he complained to me every time he came downstairs. He didn’t use many words, Marco. He didn’t need to with me. Days and nights he worked on it, until there was life in the child’s face and her petite blue dress had texture and the warm glow of silk. One afternoon, Marco came down for lunch. I give him his soup and he looks across the table. ‘ Gainsborough,’ he said to me, ‘it’s a Gainsborough.’ Every museum in England wanted to buy it back.

“Many people would just have paid Marco the price he asked for the restoration, and still my husband would have been happy. Lowell Caxton did that. But then he came back the next week, when Marco had come home for his lunch. I let him in the house-that’s when I met him. He had under his arm a small package wrapped in brown paper. It was a Titian-very small, very beautiful. We have it still. You come to my home, you’ll see it.”

“In your apartment? A Titian?”

“But so very little. It’s a study, just a piece of one of his great works. You know The Rape of Europa?”

Of course I knew it. Everyone who had ever taken an art course in college had studied it. Rubens had called it the greatest painting in the world. And I had seen it many times because it was part of the collection at the Gardner Museum. Was this just another coincidence? “When did you say Mr. Caxton gave you the Titian?”

Mrs. Varelli thought for a moment. “Thirty, thirty-five years ago.”

Before Denise, before the Gardner Museum theft.

“And Denise Caxton, was she a client of Mr. Varelli’s?”

“First she came many times with her husband. Then alone. Then with other people-maybe dealers, maybe buyers. I never met them in the studio. Sometimes Marco would tell stories about them.”

“Did he feel the same way you did about Mrs. Caxton?”

Mrs. Varelli tossed back her head and laughed. “Of course not. She was young, she was quite beautiful, and she knew how to make an old man feel wonderful. She’d practice her Italian on Marco. She’d flatter him and tease him and bring him fascinating paintings to examine. Always looking for gold where there was none. Wasting Marco’s time, if you ask me.”

“Do you know who the men were that she brought recently?”

“No, no. For this, I give you the names of my husband’s workmen. Maybe they were introduced or can tell you what these men looked like. You give me your card, and next week I call you with their telephone numbers.”

“Is that the only reason you didn’t like Denise?”

“I don’t need many reasons. She was trouble. Even Marco thought she was trouble.”

“How, Mrs. Varelli? What did he tell you about her?”

“Like I said, Miss Cooper, Marco didn’t use a lot of words. But these past few months, on the days that Mrs. Caxton came to see him, he didn’t come home smiling like he used to. She was trying to get him to work on something that upset him, gave him agita. That he did say. ‘At this age, I don’t need any agita. ’”

“But didn’t he get any more specific than that?”

“Not with me. I was just glad he didn’t want to work with her any longer. He didn’t seem to like the people she was bringing around.”

“Did Mr. Varelli talk about Rembrandt ever?”

“How could one make his life in this world and not talk about Rembrandt?”

I was grateful that she had not responded by saying what a stupid question I had asked. “I mean recently, and in connection with Denise Caxton.”

“You don’t know, then, that Marco is”-her chest heaved visibly as she breathed deeply and changed the wording. “Marco was the world’s leading expert on Rembrandt, no? Perhaps you’re too young to know the story.”

Mrs. Varelli went on. “Rembrandt’s most famous group portrait is called The Night Watch. Have you ever seen it?”

“Yes, I have. It’s in Amsterdam, at the Rijksmuseum.”

“Exactly. Then maybe you know that originally, more than three hundred years ago, it had a different name.”

“No, I’ve only heard it called by this one.”

“When he painted it, it was entitled The Shooting Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq. Over the decades, it became so covered with grime that people assumed that the setting was at nighttime-the name you know it by. Well, after World War Two was ended-in about nineteen forty-seven- when Marco was just getting a reputation as a restorer, he was part of the team of experts put together to restore the enormous painting. During the cleaning, it lightened brilliantly. That’s the first time anyone in the twentieth century realized that it wasn’t a night scene at all.

“Marco was the only member of that restoration group still alive fifty years later. When anyone-and I mean anyone, Miss Cooper-has a question about the attribution of a Rembrandt today, it was only my Marco who knew the truth. Monarchs, presidents, millionaires-they all came to see Marco Varelli about their paintings.”

“Denise Caxton, did she ever bring him a Rembrandt?”

“This I don’t know.”

“Did your husband ever say that she or anyone else asked him to look at paint chips recently?”

Again Mrs. Varelli looked at me as though I had no brain at all.

“That’s what my husband did every day of his life. Paint, paint chips, paint streaks, paint fragments. From this, Miss Cooper, come masterpieces.”

“Excuse me, Alex. Could I see you a minute?” Mercer was speaking to me from the hallway.

“May I go back to Marco now?”

“If you’d give us another few minutes, Mrs. Varelli, we’ll be out of your way,” he said to her.

I thanked her for her graciousness at such a terrible time and walked back to the room in which the coffin rested. Mike was standing next to the dead man’s head.

“I hope by paying your respects to the deceased you got more than I did from the widow,” I said to them as I reentered the room. “A bit of art history and a hunch that Denise Caxton was nothing but trouble.”

“Then I’d say Mrs. Varelli’s got great instincts. Remember that case I had a few years back in Spanish Harlem? The Argentinian dancer, Augusto Mango, who died prematurely during a sexual encounter with a rabid fan?”

“Very well.”

“You know how we found out it was murder and not a bad heart?”

“No.”

“Some doctor declared him dead at the scene. I think he must have been a podiatrist. Then, at the funeral parlor, while they were combing his hair into place, the mortician found a bullet hole in the back of his head. Small caliber, barely the trace of an entry. The fan’s husband was the killer. Post headline was Don’t Tango with Mango.

“Well, Mr. Zuppelo wouldn’t make such a good barber.”

Mike carefully turned Marco Varelli’s head away from us and smoothed the thick white hair back from his left ear, much as he had done at Spuyten Duyvil when we first saw the body of Denise Caxton. There was the unmistakable mark that a bullet had pierced the skull of the gentle old man.