Chapter Twenty-seven

I FLEW INTO florence at dusk, not a cloud in the sky, the great Renaissance city laid out below in all its haunting beauty. I was in the cockpit of a FedEx plane that had been diverted from Istanbul to pick up two large crates as a special favour to the FBI.

The pilots, a pair of cowboys – one English and the other Australian – invited me to sit in the spare seat up front. Had I known they would spend the entire flight arguing about cricket, I would have stayed in the back.

A truck from the Uffizi headed on to the apron to meet us and, between the gallery’s three storemen and the two cricket-lovers, the large crates were craned out of the belly of the plane and into the back of the truck in a matter of minutes. As much as any city on earth, Florence itself is a work of art, but seeing it again brought me little joy. The last time I had walked its streets had been with Bill and, once again, I found myself overcome with regret about the way I had treated him.

We entered the city in the twilight, travelled down narrow side streets little changed in five hundred years and stopped outside a pair of huge oak doors I dimly remembered. The workshop was located in a separate complex to the museum – a group of old cellars and warehouses, their stone walls six feet thick – which had once housed the Medicis’ vast stores of grain and wine.

Cameras checked every inch of the street before the oak doors swung back and the truck entered a huge security area. I climbed out of the cab and looked at the hi-tech consoles, squads of armed guards, racks of CCTV monitors and massive steel doors that barred further entry into the facility. The place bore little resemblance to the one I had visited so many years ago, and I wasn’t surprised – the Uffizi had been bombed by terrorists in the early nineties, and the museum obviously wasn’t taking any chances.

Two guards approached and fingerprinted the storemen and driver with handheld scanners. Even though the men had known each other for years, the guards had to wait for the central database to validate the men’s identities before the steel doors could be opened. As the truck and its cargo disappeared inside, I was left behind. A guy in a suit appeared, arranged to have me photographed for a security pass and told me the director and his team were waiting.

With the pass pinned to my coat, a guard strapped a copper wire trailing to the floor around my ankle: any static electricity generated by my clothes or shoes would be carried away by the wire and sent to ground, avoiding any risk of a spark. After robbery and terrorism, a tiny flash igniting the volatile chemicals used in art restoration was what facilities like the workshop feared most.

The Uffizi specialized in repairing large canvases and frescoes and, though there had been many changes since my previous visit, the director had told me on the phone that they still had the huge photographic plates and chemical baths necessary for that work. It was those that would very soon determine the future of my mission.

The man in the suit led me to an elevator, we went down six floors and I stepped into what looked like a conference room: four opaque glass walls, a long table and, on one side, two technicians sitting at computer screens connected to a huge array of hard drives.

Three women and half a dozen men stood up to greet me. One of them extended his hand and introduced himself as the director. He was surprisingly young, but his long hair was completely grey and I guessed that the risk of ruining priceless works of art must have taken its toll. He said that, in the few hours since we had first spoken, the people gathered in the room had put together a strategy to try to recover an image from the mirrors. None of them, he said, held out much hope.

‘Then again, ’ he added with a smile, ‘sometimes even art restorers can work miracles. Ready? ’

I nodded, and he flicked a switch on the wall. The four opaque walls turned completely clear. They were made from a type of glass called liquid crystal – an electrical current had rearranged the molecules and turned it transparent.

We were standing in a glass cube, suspended in mid-air, looking down on a remarkable space.

As big as a football field and at least sixty feet high – arched, vaulted and pure white – it was probably even older than the reign of the Medicis. Standing in it, dwarfed by the vast expanse, were hydraulic hoists for lifting monumental statues, gantries to raise and lower oil paintings, stainless-steel cleaning baths big enough for an obelisk and a steam-room to remove centuries of grime from marble and stone. Moving between them were silent, battery-operated forklifts, small mobile cranes and dozens of supervisors and specialists in white scrubs. Some workshop – it looked as if NASA had taken over the catacombs.

Almost directly beneath me a Titian was being cleaned and, not far away, men and women were working on a set of bronze doors by Bernini which I had once seen at the Vatican. But most spectacular of all was a group of panels which had been joined seamlessly together and fixed to one wall. Produced from the huge photographic plates used in its restoration, it had been put there either as an inspiration or a memento of the facility’s outstanding work.

It showed da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

It was life-size and as vivid as if it had been painted yesterday, and I had a fleeting sense of what it must have been like five hundred years ago to have entered the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie and seen it for the first time.

The director, putting on a wireless headset, pointed out two gilt frames standing against the wall. The mirrors had been removed and both of them were hanging from an overhead crane. As we watched, it lowered them into a tank of blue liquid – a solvent which they were hoping would separate the film from the glass without damaging it. If it failed, or the silver nitrate fell apart, we could all go home.

Almost immediately, a large tent was lowered over the tank, blacking it out. ‘If they can get the silver nitrate off, it has to be treated like a film negative – it can’t be exposed to light, ’ the director said.

I was consumed by doubt. What hope was there really? Sure, the Uffizi had restored Michelangelo’s marble Pietà after a deranged Australian had taken a hammer to it, but even they didn’t believe you could tease an image out of old mirrors.

The director clamped the headset to his ear, listened for a moment then turned to the rest of us: ‘It worked – they’ve got the film off intact. ’

As the others smiled and clapped, he turned to me: ‘They’ll encase the film in a frozen slab of gelatin to stabilize it, then move it into the darkroom for processing. ’

Two minutes later, men in white scrubs wheeled a large trolley out of the tent and pushed it into a glass-sided freight elevator. I watched the two mirrors, wrapped in foil blankets, rise up.

The elevator stopped at a block-like room, cantilevered over the vaulted space, which I guessed was the darkroom.

‘It could take a while, ’ the director said, ‘but once they’ve “developed it” the technicians will be able to tell if the film has captured anything. ’