Madonna and Corpse Read Online Free PDF Page A

sentiments. The papal palace and the art museums were fine for the flocking tourists, but Descartes couldn’t be bothered to care about power-hungry priests and self-indulgent artists who’d lived half a millennium ago. But now, the fact that a crime had occurred at the museum—not just spray-paint graffiti or rock-throwing vandalism, but something offbeat and baffling—suddenly made the museum itself intriguing. It was as if he’d discovered a youthful, racy photo of an elderly spinster aunt. Perhaps, he thought, there were similar mysteries, unknown depths to be plumbed, within the soaring walls and mighty towers of the papal palace.
    Descartes’s hunger pangs brought his mind back to the primal exigencies of the body. He needed to eat, he needed to take a dump, and he needed to take a nap. For need one and maybe need two, he angled toward a Moroccan couscous place a block beyond the Palace of the Popes. The food was simple but tasty, and the prices weren’t bad, especially if you flashed your badge to remind the manager that you were a cop. Descartes’s mouth began to water as he imagined the restaurant’s chicken tagine, the succulent, tangy meat—seasoned with green olives and lemons and sweet, plump raisins—falling off the bone, the savory juices saturating the small pearls of couscous.
    A few doors before he reached the restaurant, he passed Cinema Vox and paused to see what was playing. Leaning against the theater’s large front window, he cupped his hands around his eyes to block the glare and peered in at the posters. The Avengers, Battleship, and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Foreign crap, he thought, conveniently overlooking the fact that he actually preferred foreign crap—especially American action thrillers—to the depressing, pretentious fare French filmmakers produced.
    Just as he was pulling away from the window, something he’d glimpsed shifted from his subconscious, and he leaned back in for another look. For some reason, the cinema had a large print of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus hung over the refreshment stand, but the picture wasn’t quite right. Descartes stared, then laughed out loud. Instead of Venus, Marilyn Monroe perched on the clamshell, her feet in stiletto sandals, her pleated white dress swirling around the tops of her thighs, her mouth open in her signature vampish smile. It was an unprecedented experience for the detective: seeing a modern painting that was a playful riff on a classical masterpiece—one of the few classical masterpieces Descartes actually knew. With the force of an epiphany, he realized that art itself—like the museum he’d just left—was both more intriguing and more sexy than he’d ever dreamed.
    After chasing his lunch with two strong hits of espresso, the inspector decided to forgo his nap and gut it out until bedtime, so as not to wreck his sleep cycle even more thoroughly. Instead, he spent several hours in Avignon’s library—a spectacular old building, he noted with newly appreciative eyes, housed in what had been a cardinal’s palace back in the fourteenth century, when the popes called Avignon home. Situated in the vast reading room, surrounded by ancient frescos, hand-glazed floor tiles, leaded windows, and an ornate coffered ceiling, Descartes scanned a stack of books about art restorers and art forgers. He learned, to his surprise, that the line between restoration and forgery was not as bright a line as he’d assumed, and that in practice, the two endeavors were often separated by only the narrowest and most slippery of slopes. A restorer hired to repair a flaked-off Virgin Mary here, a water-stained Jesus there, might eventually be asked to re-create entire scenes, repaint entire canvases ... and might well be tempted to sell similar re-creations for more than the paltry wages museums paid for restorations. The more Descartes read, the more flooded with fakes the art world seemed—and the more gullible and foolish art