The Collector

Alan Refkin

Description

Mauro Bruno must find the Mona Lisa, which has been stolen and replaced with a forgery while on display at the Vatican.
For only the fourth time in two centuries, the French have allowed the Mona Lisa to leave the Louvre, this time at the request of the pope, who wants to exhibit it in the Vatican Museums. However, once on display, the Museums’ former curator notices a nearly imperceptible discrepancy in the painting, leading to the discovery that it’s a forgery. Faced with the crisis of losing the most valuable painting in the world, the pope turns to Mauro Bruno and his associates, who’d previously performed discrete investigations for the Vatican.
As they begin, Bruno and his colleagues try to understand how the world’s most famous painting, which is kept inside an alarmed environmental enclosure fifteen feet from the nearest person and under constant visual and physical surveillance, could be stolen. Even in transit to the Vatican, it was under continual visual monitoring with a security team inches from the masterpiece’s enclosure, leaving the investigators bewildered about how a theft could have occurred. However, they soon learn that the Mona Lisa is one of many heavily guarded museum masterpieces that have been stolen and replaced with a forgery, the thefts having gone unreported.
With only two weeks before the Mona Lisa returns to France, and not having a clue as to the identity of the mysterious person they call the Collector, they must find and retrieve the Mona Lisa.

Sujets

• Adventure (Guyana)
• Suspenso
• Ciudad del Vaticano
• Museum
• Mystery
• Art
• Adventure
• Cliffhanger
• Collector
• Drama
• Intrigue
• Suspense
• Fiction
• Action
• Vatican

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 23 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663254412
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

PREVIOUS BOOKS BY ALAN REFKIN
Fiction
Matt Moretti and Han Li Series
The Archivist
The Abductions
The Payback
The Forgotten
The Cabal
The Chase
Mauro Bruno Detective Series
The Patriarch
The Scion
The Artifact
The Mistress
Gunter Wayan Series
The Organization
The Frame
The Arrangement
The Defector
Nonfiction
The Wild Wild East: Lessons for Success in Business in Contemporary Capitalist China
By Alan Refkin and Daniel Borgia, PhD
Doing the China Tango: How to Dance around Common Pitfalls in Chinese Business Relationships
By Alan Refkin and Scott Cray
Conducting Business in the Land of the Dragon: What Every Businessperson Needs To Know About China
By Alan Refkin and Scott Cray
Piercing the Great Wall of Corporate China: How to Perform Forensic Due Diligence on Chinese Compa nies
By Alan Refkin and David Dodge
THE COLLECTOR
A MAURO BRUNO DETECTIVE SERIES THRILLER
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ALAN REFKIN
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE COLLECTOR
A MAURO BRUNO DETECTIVE SERIES THRILLER
 
Copyright © 2023 Alan Refkin.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
 
 
 
iUniverse
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6632-5440-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-5441-2 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023912926
 
 
 
iUniverse rev. date: 07/20/2023
Contents
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Author’s Notes
About the Author
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
To my wife, K erry
and
Fran and Raylee McG ough
1

T he frail eighty-three years old Italian man was five feet four inches tall, had gray hair that was sparse in spots, and walked with a cautious gait, keeping his movements slow and his stride short. His name was Dottore Cristoforo Milani, although he was known to employees of the fifty-four Vatican Museums by his descriptive moniker, the curmudgeon, because of his age and gait. Born in Rome to affluent parents who survived World War II with their wealth intact because they’d kept their money in a Swiss bank, he showed an early love of art. He was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca, the second oldest art academy in Europe and the most prestigious in the country, where he gained an encyclopedic knowledge of art, artists, and the painting techniques they employed. After receiving his doctorate in art history and distinguishing himself at smaller museums, he was hired by the Vatican Museums at the age of thirty and became its curator twenty years later, responsible for seventy thousand works of art, twenty thousand of which were on display. The Museums, as with everything in the Vatican, were under the authority of the pope, who delegated their oversight to the secretary general of the Vatican’s Governorate. The curator was third in the pecking order. No trustees, governing boards, committees, or other bureaucratic layers existed.
The curmudgeon remained curator for thirty years, leaving in early 2022 when he reached the mandatory retirement age of eighty. Because he was a micromanager and spent all but his sleeping hours at the Museums, he never married, had few friends, and had no hobbies. Retirement bored him. Therefore, because the only thing that made him happy was to be around art, he established a daily routine of going to the Vatican Museums when they opened at eight-thirty and looking at works in the various galleries before having a late lunch at the Bistrot La Pigna in the Courtyard of the Pinecone and returning home. Occasionally, that routine was broken when the pope invited him to his apartment, the two having established a strong friendship over the years. During their talks, the pontiff would inevitably ask the former curator a seemingly endless list of questions about the life and works of his favorite artist, Leonardo da Vinci. Milani, an expert on Renaissance masters and their paintings, had an encyclopedic knowledge of these artists and spoke at length to the pontiff about Il Florentine, which da Vinci was sometimes called in his time because the famed artist and inventor lived near Florence.
The pope’s curiosity was because of his birthplace—the two hundred-person hamlet of Anchiano, which was less than forty miles from Florence. Given the size of the hamlet, one might assume that the pontiff was the most famous person to begin their life on that small patch of earth. However, that assumption would be wrong because, in 1452, Leonardo da Vinci took his first breath in Anchiano. That commonality made him feel incredibly connected to the Renaissance master and his works, his favorite painting being the Mona Lisa.
The pope’s admiration for da Vinci, and that they were from the same hamlet, resulted in his lobbying the French government for more than a decade to allow the Mona Lisa to be displayed at the Vatican, even though Milani told him there was little chance of this happening because the painting had only left France three times since it was first exhibited in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre in 1804. Therefore, the pontiff wasn’t surprised when each request was politely denied. However, one day a thought came to him when he realized that asking the French to do something extraordinarily rare was fruitless unless he reciprocated by exchanging an equally rare work of art. Subsequently, his next request to the president of France proposed sending da Vinci’s Saint Jerome in the Wilderness and Raphael’s Transfiguration to the Louvre for two weeks in exchange for exhibiting the Mona Lisa at the Vatican for the same duration. That suggestion came from Milani, who said that Raphel’s work would be of particular interest because it was commissioned for the French cathedral at Narbonne by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, who instead donated it to adorn an alter in Italy, where it has been ever since.
The president of France consulted with the Louvre’s curator, asking for his opinion on the exchange. With ten million visitors to the Louvre annually, and eighty percent viewing the Mona Lisa, the curator was reluctant to let the museum’s number one exhibit and the most valuable painting in the world leave its protected confines. However, the thought of bringing another da Vinci and Raphael’s Transfiguration to temporarily replace it, and the publicity and crowds that would ensue, was irresistible and changed his mind.
Once he recommended to the president of France that they accept the pope’s offer, a deal was struck and a date set for one year in the future, which would allow both museums time to put in place the transport and security arrangements for the nearly two billion dollars in paintings that would pass between them.
For those who planned the exchange, the year passed quickly. The day soon arrived when, on a charter flight with heavy security and a police motorcade from the Ciampino Airport, the Mona Lisa made the eleven-mile journey to the Vatican and was taken directly to its exhibition space in the Room of the Creed in the Borgia Apartments, which was on the first floor of the Apostolic Palace.
The Apostolic Palace was the official residence of the pope and contained the papal apartments, various offices of the Catholic Church, public and private chapels, the Vatican Museums, the Vatican Library, the Sistine Chapel, and the Borgia Apartments. However, this pope did not reside there. Instead, wanting to live in less lavish surroundings, he resided in a suite in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, a building adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica, which was used as guest quarters for clergy coming to the Vatican and as the temporary residence for members of the College of Cardinals who took part in the papal conclave to elect a new pope. The Room of the Creed, one of six rooms comprising the Borgia Apartments, displayed frescoes of the Apostle’s Creed on scrolls held by the twelve apostles, the creed being Christian teachings.
The Vatican’s current curator, who’d held that position for a year, was at the Louvre when the Mona Lisa was taken from the Grand Gallery in its environmentally controlled and bulletproof enclosure, and rode in the back of the armored vehicle transporting it to the Charles de Gaulle Airport, keeping it within eyesight until it arrived at the Room of the Creed.
Inside the Borgia Apartments, six discretely armed men in civilian clothing, formerly with Italy’s special forces, supplemented Vatican security. The exhibition area was similarly secure, with everyone entering the Apostolic Palace required to pass through an airport-style security scanner. Within the Room of the Creed, three infrared-capable cameras monitored the painting from different angles, and a ring of f