I gaped at the wheel for a moment while a fantastic concept struggled to be born in my mind. The device did look like a roundabout, yet it had more in common with a Victorian cartoon animation machine. Realization exploded behind my eyes like a grenade.
Leonardo da Vinci—possessor of one of the most fertile minds in human history, creator of technologies that were far ahead of their times—had also invented moving pictures!
This machine, hidden for centuries in a cavern on a poor farmer’s land, had to be the richest treasure ever to come out of antiquity. Beside it the tomb of Tutankhamun was a trifle, the Elgin marbles were reduced to insignificance—because the device itself was only one part of the incredible find. Where a lesser man would have experimented with the animation of simple drawings or silhouettes, Leonardo’s towering vision and ambition had prompted him to aim for perfection, to base his work on his most acclaimed painting.
If my surmise was correct, the Mona Lisa was merely one frame in the world’s first movie!
Hardly daring to breathe, I stepped into the viewing box and peered through the two holes. I had been right. Lenses concealed within the woodwork brought my gaze to a focus on yet another painting of the beautiful Florentine lady. She looked startlingly real in the uncertain light, and in this picture her hands were in a much higher position, as if she was raising them to her throat. The famous smile seemed a little more pronounced, too. I had to step back to give myself time to assimilate what I had seen, and I noticed that Julio had hung his lantern on a hook projecting from the wall. He scuttled about, lighting other lanterns, then took hold of the long crankshaft in preparation for turning it.
“Does the mechanism still work?” I asked him.
Julio nodded. “I grease it and made it work.” He wound the iron handle and the framework began to turn. It moved very slowly at first, then settled into a smooth noiseless rotation which indicated perfection of balance. Julio gestured with his free hand, inviting me to look through the eyepiece again. He was grinning with proprietary glee.
I swallowed painfully as I stepped into the ornate box. Wonder was piling on wonder in a way that was almost too much to bear. On top of everything else that had transpired, I was about to have the privilege of actually viewing Leonardo’s supreme masterpiece brought to magical life, to commune with his mind in a manner which nobody would have thought possible, to see his sublime artistry translated into movement. Perhaps I was even to learn the secret of the Giaconda smile.
Filled with reverence, I put my eye to the viewing holes and saw the Mona Lisa miraculously moving, miraculously alive.
She raised her hands to the neckline of her dress and pulled it down to expose her ample left breast. She gave her shoulder a twitch and the breast performed the classiest circular swing I had seen since the last night I witnessed Fabulous Fifi Lafleur windmilling her tassels in Schwartz’s burlesque hall. She then drew her dress back up to its former position of modesty and demurely crossed one hand over the other, smiling a little.
“Oh, God,” I whispered. “Oh, God, God, God, God!”
Julio kept cranking the machine and I watched the show over and over again, unable to take my eyes away. It was a marvellous simulation of reality, marred only by one slight jerk near the beginning of the sequence—obviously where Julio had abstracted a painting to sell.
“Let me see it,” Carole said, tugging at my sleeve. “I want to see it, too.”
I stood back and let her look through the eyepiece. Julio twirled the crankshaft happily, jumping up and down in his tennis shoes like a demented dwarf. Carole viewed in silence for a full minute, then turned to me with wide eyes.
“It doesn’t seem possible,” she said faintly.
“Of course it’s possible,” I replied. “With a bit of practice some girls can do fantastic things with their accoutrements. Why, I remember when Fabulous Fifi Lafleur used to …”
“I’m talking about da Vinci,” Carole snapped. “I don’t know much about art, but I didn’t think he would go in for that sort of thing.”
“All artists are the same—they do whatever the paying customer wants them to do.” I was speaking with new-found cynicism. “It’s known that da Vinci was commissioned to design entertainments for various nobles, and some of the high-born were pretty low-minded.”
“But all that work …”
“He probably had the assistance of a whole school of artists. Beside, a project this size accounts for the long periods of apparent unproductivity in da Vinci’s career. When he should have been working on the Sforza statue he was down here working on Lisa’s left …”
“Don’t be vulgar,” Carole put in. She turned back to the still-rotating machine. “How much do you think it’s worth?”
“Who knows? Say there are sixty paintings involved. If they were smuggled out and away from the Italian Government they could fetch a million dollars each. Perhaps ten million each. Perhaps a billion—specially that one where she …”
“I knew this was going to be a lucky day,” a familiar voice said from behind me.
I spun and saw Crafty Mario standing at the entrance to the chamber. He was holding the shotgun which Crazy Julio had dropped outside, and its barrels were pointing at my stomach.
“What do you want?” I demanded, and then—realizing just how rhetorical the question was in Mario’s case—I added another. “Why are you pointing that gun at me?”
“Why did you steal my mother’s car?” Mario gave one of his most unpleasant sniggers. “And why did you threaten me with the police?”
“You mustn’t pay too much attention to the things I say.”
“But I can’t help it, signor—especially when I hear you saying things like sixty million dollars.”
“Now see here!” I started forward, but Mario stopped me by raising the shotgun.
“Yes?”
“We’re being silly, with so much loot to go around. I mean, out of sixty million you can have fifteen.”
“I prefer to have sixty.”
“But you wouldn’t take a human life for an extra forty-five million, would you?” I looked into the polished pebbles that Mario used in place of eyes, and my spirits sank.
“Back against the wall, the three of you,” Mario ordered.
Carole clung to me as we moved to the wall. Crazy Julio tried clinging to me as well, but I fended him off—with perhaps only a minute to live I was entitled to be choosy.
“That’s much better,” Mario said. Now, I will inspect the merchandise for myself.”
He went towards the machine which was still spinning on its well-greased bearings. Covering us with the gun, he stepped into the viewing box and peered into the two holes. I saw him stiffen with shock. He kept glancing back at us and then into the eyepiece again, fascinated. When he finally emerged from the box his face was almost luminescent with pallor. He walked towards us, his mouth working silently, and I held Carole close against me as we waited for the explosion of pain.
Mario appeared not to see us. He took the storm lantern down from its hook on the wall, and with a stiff-armed movement flung it into the centre of the machine. There was a sound of breaking glass, then flames began to lick up around the dry timber structure.
“You fool!” I howled. “What are you doing?”
“You will see what I’m doing.” Holding me in check with the gun, Mario collected the other lanterns and hurled them against the machine as well. The wooden rim of the wheel began to burn fiercely and I knew that the paintings, my sixty Mona Lisas, were igniting, crumpling, turning to worthless ash.
“You’re mad,” I shouted above the crackling of the flames. “You don’t know what you’ve done.”