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entire weekend mulling over all the details of Operation Krylov. All that Prince Philibert really did was provide me with copies of the reports that he had received and those that he had found himself, to make sure that I was fully briefed before going into action. Rather sweetly, he thought all this would put my mind at rest - but in fact he couldn’t have been more mistaken. My take on it was that hacking into confidential files and classified databases while sitting comfortably in front of your desktop was a whole lot more relaxing than risking your neck - sometimes literally - when actually carrying out the damn robbery.
    But Roi never tired of pointing out that the sophisticated investigative procedures of police forces all over the world nowadays made it much more likely that they’d get their hands on Läufer before they got anywhere near me - given the epidemic of computer crime mania which had swept through the law enforcement community. Our real enemy, Roi insisted, was Interpol’s Working Party on Information Technology Crime, closely associated with the FBI’s equally dangerous, but more distant National Infrastructure Protection Center, the NIPC.
    Late on Sunday evening, I began to organize my part of the job. The photographs of Krylov’s painting had arrived mid-afternoon. I carefully studied them, and printed up a series of enlargements so as to get to know the canvas as well as possible. It was a heartfelt work, but far from upbeat: it showed three generations of impoverished muzhiks - an old man, two middle-aged men and three small children - sitting dismally around a shabby table and staring straight into the eyes of the spectator. The old man’s face reflected the wear and tear of the daily struggle for survival typical of a Russian peasant at the turn of the twentieth century. An empty cooking pot stood for hunger, and a chubby cat, much better fed than its human companions, had clearly gorged on the countless rats in the run-down shack, which was barely heated by the tiny fire flickering at the right of the picture.
    The painting itself measured 45 by 63 inches, a slightly awkward size for me to carry. A further complication was that the canvas was attached to the stretcher by a very particular style of numbered nail, produced in Russia at the start of the twentieth century. Donna was desperately trying to get hold of a few in case any broke when I was detaching the canvas, for use when attaching the bogus copy. But apart from these two minor details, it didn’t look as if the work would be hard to handle, or to forge. A pigment analysis by electron microscope revealed that the colors used by Krylov were all produced industrially (his white, for example, was just standard titanium dioxide), as indicated by its very small particle size, compared to traditional pigments, which were ground by hand and, as a result, contained a much higher level of impurities. The canvas showed not even light cracking or flaking close to the frame, which was unusual in paintings over eighty years old. Cavalo’s notes explained that this was possibly due to Krylov priming his canvases with gesso and chalk, heavily diluted with water to maintain the elasticity of the modern machine-made fibers.
    Donna worked with horsehair brushes which she had to make herself, as the ones she needed were unavailable on the market. She aged the horsehair by soaking it in vinegar for several days and then cut it into the shapes and sizes which matched the brushstrokes on the particular painting. And that wasn’t all, not by a long shot. She laid on the final layer of paint in her country villa in Tuscany, right next to the old fireplace which she stoked with unseasoned timber to produce the blackened smoke particles which had been absorbed by Krylov’s oils as he painted the muzhiks.
    As far as studying the painting’s current location was concerned, I had to bury myself in the endless, long-winded and indigestible reports which