She turned just as the man appeared at the end of the promenade. His arms pumped. His feet banged against the tile floor. And the whole world seemed to stop turning as he told them, “She’s gone.”
The words weren’t a cry, and they were far from a whisper. They held no trace of panic or fear. It was more like disbelief. Yes, that was it, Kat decided, although she couldn’t tell if it was his or hers.
“Leonardo’s Angel,” the man said again as the party made its way down the center of the grand promenade. The big double doors to the Renaissance room were standing open. A fireproof, bulletproof Plexiglas barrier still stood, sheltering the Angel from harm. Lasers shone red all around. But there was no mistaking that the frame at the center of it all—the heart of the Henley—stood empty.
“Gone?” Gregory Wainwright stumbled toward the Plexiglas barrier, reaching out for a painting that was no longer there. “She can’t be—” the director started, then seemed to finally notice that the frame wasn’t empty after all. The Angel was gone, but something remained: a plain white card and the words, “Visily Romani.”
If they had searched Kat, of course, they would have found a card exactly like it. If they had peeled back the top layer of canvas that covered the four frames Kat’s crew carried, they would have seen that Angel Returning to Heaven was not the only painting to leave the Henley that day, although somehow Kat imagined that only four walked out the front door.
Leonardo da Vinci’s painting was gone. The five children trapped in the mayhem were no longer a top concern. And so it was that Simon, Angus, Hamish, Kat, and her cousin walked out into the fading drizzle with four masterpieces secured in their artist’s portfolios, covered with blank canvas—a clean slate.
Kat breathed the fresh air. A clean start.
In the days that followed, no reporters would be able to interview any of the young artists who had been in danger that day. The Henley’s trustees waited for a call or visit from one or more attorneys, and word about what monetary damages there might be, but no such call or visit ever occurred.
It seemed to some as if the schoolchildren who had been locked in the Impressionist exhibit that day had simply gathered their bags and blank canvases, and walked out into the autumn air, and faded like smoke.
One of the docents reported seeing the children board a waiting school bus, an older driver at the wheel.
Many people tried in vain to gain a statement from officials at the Knightsbury Institute, but no one could uncover where the school was located—there certainly was no record of any such institution in London. Not in all of England. Some of the children had sounded American, the guards had said, but after three weeks of failed attempts, the coughing children with their hazy eyes were forgotten for a bigger story on another day.
No one saw the man in the Bentley who sat watching them walk from the museum in a single line. No one but he noticed that the portfolios they carried were a tad too thick.
No one but his driver heard him whisper, “Katarina.”
Chapter 35
Gregory Wainwright was not a foolish man. He swore this to his wife and to his therapist. His mother assured him of that fact every Sunday when he visited her for tea. No one who truly knew him thought that he was personally responsible for Henley security—he employed specialists for such things, after all. But the Angel . . . the Angel had gone missing. Had disappeared. And so Gregory Wainwright was fairly certain that the powers that be at the Henley would be inclined to disagree.
Perhaps that is why he did not tell a soul that his security card had somehow gone missing in the chaos of the fire. Perhaps that is why he did not say a lot of things.
If it had been another painting, perhaps all might have been forgiven. But the Angel ? Losing the Angel was too much.
The article that appeared in the evening edition of the London Times was not exactly what the public had expected. Of course, the color picture of the lost Leonardo loomed large in the center of the page. It went without saying that a headline about the robbery at the Henley dominated everything above the fold. And it was only a matter of time, Gregory Wainwright knew, before the old stories about the Angel would resurface. His only surprise was that it had taken less than twenty-four hours for the press to turn the story from a recounting of the Henley’s—and society’s—loss, to a retelling of the Henley’s shame.
It wasn’t Wainwright’s fault that Veronica Miles Henley had purchased the Angel soon after the end of World War II. Wainwright hadn’t taken the painting from its original owner and offered it to a high-ranking banking official who had been of great service to the Nazi party. Gregory Wainwright wasn’t the judge who had ruled that, since the Angel had been purchased in good faith from the banking official’s estate, and since it would hang in a public exhibit, it should not be forcibly removed from the museum’s walls.
None of this was my fault! the man wanted to scream. But, of course, screaming simply is not done. Or so his mother told him.
The press was loving all of it. The Henley was being villified, and Romani was being made out as some sort of hero—a Robin Hood who headed a merry band of thieves.
Still, if there was one thing that Gregory Wainwright could be grateful for, it was that the journalists never heard about the boy.
Wainwright remembered every detail of that day as if he were reliving it over and over again. . . .
“Our guards assure me that the room in which you were found had been completely evacuated prior to the fire-protection procedures taking effect,” Gregory Wainwright said as he sat across from the young man with the dark hair and blue eyes, in the small interrogation room of Scotland Yard. The detectives had assured him that they were too concerned with tracking down the real thief to take much time with the boy; but the Henley’s director had felt otherwise.