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inferior: clearly the work of a cautious, tentative copyist. From years of experience, Dubois knows that it’s not enough to imitate Botticelli; no: he must boldly become Botticelli, just as a skilled actor temporarily loses himself in the character he’s portraying.
    So he begins by sketching a collage of disjointed, deconstructed images atop the brilliant white lead: A pair of downcast girlish eyes here, another pair there. A rosebud of a mouth, floating freely in one corner of the panel. A baby’s pudgy arm and outstretched fingers, reaching for nothing but the edge of the panel. Dubois dashes off these images swiftly, with the bold strokes of a limbering-up exercise not meant for any eyes but the artist’s alone. As he sketches, he moves in an almost balletic dance with the panel, accompanied once more by the intricately entwined voices of “10,000 Virgins.” In his mind the trappings of the modern world blur and dissolve, like the paint he’s scraped off the panel, and he travels back and back and back: back to a time when Lorenzo de Medici— Il Magnifico —ruled Florence with an iron hand and a golden purse; back to a time when Michelangelo and Leonardo and Botticelli blazed across the starry firmament like dazzling comets. The sketches are the perfect way to warm up. But more than that, they’re also a brilliant part of his plan.
    They take less than an hour. He steps back to survey his work. Although he’s drawn them with a crayon of dull gray lead—he casts the crayons himself by melting down fishing weights—the images are bold and energetic. They’re just the sort of studies, he feels sure, that a cocky twenty-two-year-old Botticelli might dash off, brimming with confidence after eight years of grueling apprenticeship.
    Satisfied with the images, and with his own chameleon-like transformation from an aging Frenchman to a youthful Botticelli, Dubois exchanges the lead crayon for a broad brush. He dips it in white lead, and in minutes the sketches have vanished, covered by another silky coat of primer: the foundation for the painting itself. Thanks to a series of extensive, expensive experiments he performed years before in Rome, Dubois knows that if the finished painting is X-rayed—as he’ll earnestly suggest that it be, for everyone’s peace of mind—the London dealer and her American client will be astonished. Beneath the lovely Madonna and Child, their eyes will behold a hidden treasure: the ghostly image of Botticelli’s own preliminary study for the finished work. The panel, they’ll realize, is a miraculous two-for-one deal, easily worth ten times the paltry five million pounds Dubois has settled for! It’s a steal, they’ll congratulate each other. All parties to the transaction will be delighted, including Dubois, who earmarked part of the five million for a secure, climate-controlled vault in Switzerland, where the genuine Botticelli—the genuine genuine Botticelli—awaits him, safe, sound, and spectacular.
    Only the final piece of his plan remains to be set in motion.

Chapter 7
    Descartes
    Six weeks after Madame Clergue’s “original” Botticelli was restored to its prominent spot in Gallery 11—six weeks after the lead-signed fake was consigned to an ignominious storage bin—Descartes received a call from Detective Sergeant Reginald Smythe of New Scotland Yard. According to the excruciatingly courteous Smythe, London’s National Gallery was having serious doubts about the authenticity of one of its prize paintings. The painting was Caravaggio’s Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist, which had passed through the hands of an art restorer in Avignon, a Jacques Dubois, several years before. Before Smythe traveled all the way from London, he wondered, might Inspector Descartes be so very kind as to determine, by discreet observation, whether Dubois was, in fact, still in residence and available for interrogation? Of course, Descartes assured the British detective, he’d