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Descartes felt a moment of panic: My god, is he gay? Does he think I’m hitting on him?
    “No, no, it’s not about your sex life or anything,” the inspector blurted. “It’s about a painting I saw at the museum. It’s six, seven hundred years old, but the faces looked modern. A man and a woman—John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene.”
    “Ah, yes. The Puccinelli. Puccinelli prefigures Botticelli in some important ways, you know,” the painter went on, and Descartes nodded, though of course he didn’t know, or hadn’t known, until this moment. “Human figures in low relief. Not much depth or volume to them. Doesn’t that painting remind you of a cinema poster?”
    “That’s it!” Descartes exclaimed. “I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but that’s it.” His mind makes a connection between the religious painting and the playful painting of Marilyn Monroe on the half shell.
    “Puccinelli died half a century before Botticelli was born,” Dubois went on, “but it’s almost as if Botticelli apprenticed with him. Puccinelli worked in Siena and Florence, so Botticelli would have seen his works, of course.” He smiled. “Sorry. You didn’t ask for an art-history lecture. Did you have a specific question about the painting, Detective?”
    Descartes suddenly looked self-conscious. “I was wondering ... Obviously you have quite the knack for copying. Could you do a copy of that one?”
    Dubois smiled, again almost flirtatiously. “Come.” He led Descartes to a stack of paintings leaning against the studio’s back wall. When he’d flipped halfway through the stack, he motioned for the inspector to look.
    Descartes was stunned. The picture leaning so casually against a wall, in a jumble of other paintings, was a perfect likeness of the one in the museum. “Would you consider selling it to me? Not that I could afford it, I’m sure.”
    Dubois laughed. “Ah, Detective, this is my own personal copy. It has, shall we say, sentimental value to me.” Seeing the detective’s crestfallen expression, he added, “But I expect I could dash off another copy without much trouble. Maybe not quite this good, but close. I suspect you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.”
    “What would it cost?”
    The artist smiled. “For you, Inspector? No charge. Consider it my initiation gift.”
    Descartes raised his eyebrows, puzzled. “Initiation?”
    “Your initiation into a new addiction, Detective. Art. Its joys and its sorrows.”
    Descartes laughed. “I won’t get addicted. I just happen to like this one painting.”
    “It always starts with one painting, Detective. That’s the gateway drug. Soon you’ll be coveting others. Other portraits of Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. Other works by Puccinelli. Works by later artists he inspired. A Madonna and Child by Botticelli, for instance.”
    The next day at noon, the inspector, Mme. Clergue, and Devereaux took the two Madonna and Child paintings to the Radiology Department at Avignon Hospital for an X-ray examination, which the museum lacked the equipment to perform. One painting—the painting Dubois had hung on the wall thirty-six hours before; the painting the inspector had tagged with his used chewing gum—looked uniformly gray in the films. The second painting—the one the museum had displayed proudly for two years since its “restoration”—lit up, the word D UBOIS in white block letters. “I’ll be damned,” said Descartes. “You had the copy and he had the original. And he brought it back. He actually brought it back.”
    Once more Madame Clergue cried, with a mixture of humiliation and relief—humiliation at having been fooled, relief at having the lost masterpiece restored.

Chapter 6
    Dubois
    A less skilled, less confident artist would have begun by sketching the Madonna’s outlines in pencil, then painting over them meticulously. The result might have been close to the original in all its dimensions, yet it would have been patently