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when she was twenty years old and, judging by the reviews of her work, was naturally blessed with magnificent skills in draftsmanship and the use of color. But she soon discovered that, in the real world, she was just one more wannabe in a whole mess of wannabes, and that she would never become one of the Old Masters. She faced up to the bitter fact that her name would not live on through the centuries draped in glory, that there were no more Sistine Chapels left to paint and no more papal art patrons like Julius II and Leo X. Even the smallest jobs attracted thousands of desperate candidates, scrapping like piranhas.
    So Donna gave her life plan a serious make-over and set off in a better-paid direction. Inspired by her idol Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, she moved into forgery. Michelangelo, wrote his good friend and biographer Giorgio Vasari, “also counterfeited drawings by various old maestros in a masterly manner; he handled them and aged them with smoke and other materials, staining them in such a way that they looked old, and making them indistinguishable from the originals.” On one well-known occasion, he sculpted a
Cupid
, buried it for a time to age it, and then arranged for it to be discovered during archaeological excavations. It was sold to a cardinal as an antique and Michelangelo received thirty gold ducats for it. Donna’s working methods were much less colorful: her studio was a sophisticated laboratory equipped with ultraviolet and infrared cameras, state-of-the-art microscopes and all the other instruments she used to analyze the chemical composition and physical properties of all the pigments, varnishes, canvases and gemstones that she required. But the appliance of science had also made her a whole lot richer than Michelangelo ever was.

CHAPTER FOUR
    At the crack of dawn on Friday, September 25th, Cavalo boarded an Alitalia flight to Rome, had lunch with Donna at an elegant restaurant in the Piazza Farnese and then went straight back to Fiumicino airport - a carry tube slung over his shoulder containing a roll of assorted folios and some lithographed reproductions of Piranesi’s
Views of Rome
- to catch his return flight to Porto. He spent all day Saturday playing chess, a game he was just as devoted to as his father and grandfather had been. Very early on Sunday morning, he got behind the steering wheel, and set off to drive across the border with Spain at Fuentes de Oñoro and have lunch with me at the tavern in San Martos del Castañedo, in Salamanca province, roughly halfway between our two home towns.
    Over the four long hours it took me to get there, I stayed glued to the radio news bulletins on the German general election which was taking place that day. I was really curious to see whether Kohl would be re-elected Chancellor or if the Social Democrat Schröder would manage to defeat him and form a coalition government with the Greens. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ I thought to myself, ‘if Germany became the first major economic power to abandon nuclear energy?’ It would rock the nuclear power industry to its foundations and maybe help the world become a cleaner place. Would the German Greens have that much influence if Schröder won? I really hoped they would.
    I parked my BMW in the town square and cut through a narrow alleyway which took me straight to the tavern. The old sixteenth-century building, its facade covered in scaffolding and still only half-restored, had always seemed to me to have a self-consciously beat-up look about it. The inside was fixed up from top to bottom in modern country style: beech and pinewood beams and furniture, wrought iron everywhere, stacks of clay pottery, bunches of dried flowers and linen and cotton fabric on all sides. I pushed open the heavy door and pulled up short to avoid bumping right into a scruffy character who just stood there, staring at me with the eyes of a religious fanatic. From previous experience, I knew that he wouldn’t