An Inside Job Quiz

Quiz Instructions

The following 20‑question quiz spans the entire narrative of An Inside Job. Questions 1–8 cover plot and sequence, 9–13 explore character motivation, 14–17 examine themes and symbols, and 18–20 ask you to synthesise events from across the novel. Formats are mixed; multiple‑choice options include one correct answer and three plausible but objectively wrong distractors. Short‑answer items require a sentence or two. The complete answer key with brief explanations follows the final question.

Part 1: Plot and Sequence (1–8)

1. Multiple choice
How does Gabriel Allon first discover the body of the young woman?

A. A diver finds it near the Punta della Dogana.
B. He spots a dark mass in the lagoon while photographing tourists.
C. The Carabinieri fish it out after a late‑night tip.
D. Chiara notices it during a family sail.

2. Multiple choice
What personal connection does Gabriel realise he has to the woman after he reconstructs her face?

A. She was a fellow restorer at the Vatican.
B. He had sketched her years earlier in Florence.
C. He once sat near her at Bar Dogale.
D. She was the sister of an old intelligence contact.

3. Short answer
What discovery does conservator Penelope Radcliff make while restoring a Vatican painting, and why is it significant?

4. Multiple choice
How is the Leonardo panel stolen from the Vatican Museums?

A. A night‑crew guard removes it during a fire drill.
B. A Camorra‑linked impostor posing as a priest takes it during a power outage.
C. It is swapped with a copy by a senior curator.
D. It is smuggled out inside a hollowed‑out statue.

5. Short answer
What role does the London art‑world team (Julian Isherwood, Sarah Bancroft, and others) play in Gabriel’s counter‑scheme?

6. Multiple choice
During the sting at Côte d’Azur Airport, how is the real Leonardo retrieved?

A. French customs confiscate it for an authenticity check and seize it permanently.
B. Jacques Ménard removes it for photographing, then swaps it with Gabriel’s perfect forgery.
C. Ingrid distracts the banker and walks off with the painting.
D. A Carabinieri team boards the jet and arrests the dealers.

7. Multiple choice
After the sting, what happens to the $500 million paid by oligarch Alexander Prokhorov?

A. It is returned to Prokhorov to avoid a diplomatic incident.
B. It is donated to the Vatican’s charitable fund.
C. Ingrid redirects the funds to Ukraine’s Oschadbank.
D. It is split among the London art dealers as payment for their help.

8. Short answer
Describe the outcome of the assassination attempt on Pope Donati in St. Peter’s Square.

Part 2: Character Motivation (9–13)

9. Multiple choice
Why does Gabriel, despite his retirement, persist in investigating Penelope Radcliff’s death?

A. He is paid by the British art world to solve art crimes.
B. Chiara insists he clear the family name after the press photo.
C. He feels a personal connection after recognising the victim and cannot let her remain anonymous.
D. The Carabinieri threaten to expose his intelligence past if he refuses.

10. Multiple choice
What drives Cardinal Matteo Bertoli to conspire with the Camorra?

A. A desire to finance a new papal palace.
B. He is blackmailed over an illegitimate child.
C. He has embezzled Vatican funds through fraudulent investments and needs the Leonardo’s value to cover the losses.
D. He wants to outbid the Russian oligarch for the painting himself.

11. Short answer
What personal and professional motives does Pope Luigi Donati have for his aggressive reform agenda?

12. Multiple choice
Why does art historian Giorgio Montefiore oppose stripping the overpainting that conceals the lost Leonardo?

A. He believes the overpainting is a Raphael original.
B. He is bribed by the Camorra to block the discovery.
C. He fears institutional embarrassment, but later greed leads him to confirm the painting’s authenticity—and to his murder.
D. He is secretly the forger of the fake Leonardo.

13. Short answer
What explains Ingrid Johansen’s willingness to risk her life for Gabriel’s operation?

Part 3: Theme and Symbolism (14–17)

14. Multiple choice
The novel opens with a Leonardo da Vinci epigraph: “Beauty perishes in life but is immortal in art.” How does this idea most directly play out in the story?

A. The killer is an artist who murders his models.
B. The painted panel survives centuries of obscurity, theft, forgery, and violence, embodying art’s permanence.
C. Gabriel gives up his restorer career to become a full‑time painter.
D. The Pope declares all art to be a holy relic.

15. Short answer
The title An Inside Job refers to multiple layers of treachery. Give two examples from the novel where a trusted insider betrays an institution.

16. Multiple choice
How does the author use the sfumato technique—both literally in Leonardo’s work and as a metaphor—in the narrative?

A. It represents the blurred line between guilt and innocence in the Vatican.
B. Gabriel’s forgery relies on sfumato to deceive experts, and the technique symbolises the moral ambiguity of his scheme.
C. The assassin uses smoke bombs to escape St. Peter’s Square.
D. Sfumato is the code name for the hacker’s malware.

17. Multiple choice
What does the empty transport case left by Peter van de Velde after the sale symbolise?

A. The loss of religious faith in modern Europe.
B. The Camorra’s dominance over the art world.
C. The carelessness of the thieves, which makes the recovery possible.
D. Gabriel’s emotional emptiness after leaving intelligence work.

Part 4: Synthesis (18–20)

18. Short answer
How does the scheme to defraud the Russian oligarch of his $500 million and redirect the money to Ukraine draw together the novel’s central conflicts—art theft, Vatican corruption, Camorra finance, and personal vengeance?

19. Multiple choice
Which of the following correctly traces the chain of events that ties the Camorra, Cardinal Bertoli, and the London art dealers together?

A. Bertoli steals the painting → sells it to the Camorra → the Camorra auctions it through Christie’s → Julian Isherwood buys it at auction.
B. The Camorra blackmails a Vatican guard → a fake priest steals the panel → Bertoli uses it to cover fraudulent loans → the London dealers orchestrate a fake bidding war to ensnare the Camorra and oligarch.
C. Penelope Radcliff sells the painting to Peter van de Velde → van de Velde gives it to Franco Tedeschi → Tedeschi donates it to the Vatican → Bertoli authenticates it.
D. Gabriel steals the painting from the Vatican → he offers it to the Camorra → the Camorra sells it to Julian → Julian returns it to the Pope.

20. Short answer
The epigraph mentions immortality through art. By the novel’s end, in what ways has the lost Leonardo achieved a kind of immortality—and what does its survival cost the characters?

Answer Key

1. B. While delaying his return to the church, Gabriel photographs two tourists at the Punta della Dogana and notices a dark mass in the lagoon. He hires a water taxi, retrieves the bloated corpse, and chooses to handle the situation himself rather than calling the police.

2. C. After mentally reconstructing the victim’s face in the morgue, Gabriel realises she is the anxious young woman he sat near nine days earlier at Bar Dogale, a café his family sometimes visits. This transforms the case into a personal quest.

3. Penelope Radcliff discovers a pentimento—an entirely different painting hidden beneath a “Manner of Raphael” Madonna and Child. Infrared examination reveals a work of far higher quality, which she believes to be a lost Leonardo da Vinci, giving meaning to the cipher LDV14521519.

4. B. During a fifteen‑minute Vatican‑wide blackout, a Camorra‑linked impostor dressed as a priest (later identified from Gabriel’s composite sketch) collects the painting from guard Ottavio Pozzi, who has been blackmailed, and exits through St. Anne’s Gate with the panel in a large satchel.

5. The London art‑world figures—Julian Isherwood, Sarah Bancroft, Oliver Dimbleby, and others—collude to run a fake bidding war for the Leonardo, driving the price to $500 million and ensuring the Camorra banker sells the painting (really Gabriel’s forgery) to oligarch Alexander Prokhorov, after which the money is diverted to Ukraine.

6. B. Jacques Ménard, French art‑crime chief, boards the private jet to inspect the painting. He takes it to a terminal room for photographs, where Gabriel has prepared his copy. The two works are compared, acknowledged as a good match, and swapped; Ménard returns the forgery to the plane while Gabriel leaves with the original.

7. C. After the sale, Ingrid, the hacker‑thief, transfers the $500 million from SBL PrivatBank to Oschadbank in Ukraine. Christopher Keller confirms the receipt as Russian missiles strike Kyiv, weaponising the oligarch’s money for a geopolitical purpose.

8. As Pope Donati addresses the crowd from the window, an assassin in clerical garb fires three shots. The first two miss, but the third strikes Donati in the chest. The bullet, however, hits a lightweight bulletproof vest Donati wore after a premonition. Veronica Marchese tackles the gunman and is shot but survives surgery. Carabinieri officer Luca Rossetti kills the assassin. Donati later reveals he suspects Cardinal Bertoli and Camorra boss Lorenzo Di Falco ordered the hit, though he suppresses the conspiracy to avoid scandal.

9. C. Gabriel initially resists involvement, but after the autopsy he agrees to help because the victim is no longer an anonymous drowning: his eidetic memory and forensic sketch confirm she is the woman he noticed at Bar Dogale. That personal recognition, and the threat she posed to his children’s world, compels him to investigate despite his retirement.

10. C. Bertoli has for decades pocketed donations, taken kickbacks, and partnered with Nico Ambrosi to launder Camorra money through Vatican investments. When the fraudulent loans—especially the New Bond Street property—threaten exposure, he uses the stolen Leonardo to plug the hole, conspiring with the Camorra to make the Church an unwitting partner rather than face a devastating audit.

11. Donati is a reformist pope who wants to root out the institutional corruption he encounters daily—from financial mismanagement to the Curia’s lavish apartments. Professionally, he seeks to return the Church to its spiritual roots and to modernise its stances (e.g., on LGBTQ inclusion). Personally, his sabbatical in Umbria and his lost love for Veronica Marchese fuel his conviction that the Church must change, even if it means breaking the institution to save it.

12. C. Montefiore initially dismisses the pentimento as insignificant, invoking his authority to block stripping the overpainting. However, after the painting is stolen, he is lured by greed and the chance to authenticate a lost Leonardo; his confirmed opinion leads the Camorra to murder him once his usefulness—and his loose tongue—become dangerous.

13. Ingrid is a former thief who found a measure of redemption through her alliance with Gabriel and Danish intelligence. She respects Gabriel’s moral gamble—using criminal skills for a just outcome—and is drawn to the challenge and danger. Her technical brilliance (hacking, pickpocketing) and loyalty, as well as the chance to settle old scores with the kind of criminals she once was, motivate her to take enormous risks.

14. B. The hidden Leonardo panel survives centuries of obscurity, an inside‑job theft, multiple murders, forgery, and a multimillion‑dollar scam, yet it is eventually restored and unveiled at the Vatican Museums. Art outlasts the mortal lives of the people who schemed and died around it, directly echoing the epigraph.

15. Two clear examples: (1) Vatican guard Ottavio Pozzi, blackmailed by the Camorra, opens the storage vault and hands the painting to a fake priest; (2) Cardinal Bertoli, the sostituto of the Secretariat of State, uses his position to embezzle Church funds and conspire with the Camorra, ultimately facilitating an assassination attempt on the pope. Both are inside jobs that betray their institutions.

16. B. Gabriel painstakingly employs Leonardo’s sfumato technique—achieving soft, seamless transitions—to create a forgery convincing enough to fool an expert. Metaphorically, the technique mirrors the moral haze of the operation, where forgery, theft, and deceit serve a seemingly noble end, blurring the sharp line between right and wrong.

17. C. After sealing the $500 million deal, the drunken van de Velde leaves the empty transport case behind on the jet. The abandoned case symbolises the thieves’ overconfidence and sloppiness—character traits that enable Gabriel’s team to swap the painting unnoticed and ultimately recover the original.

18. The scheme fuses all major threads: the stolen Leonardo (the object) is the key that unlocks the Camorra‑Vatican financial fraud orchestrated by Cardinal Bertoli. To recover the painting and punish the criminals, Gabriel recruits the London art dealers, who manipulate the market and entrap the Camorra banker and the sanctioned oligarch. The cash paid by the oligarch is hijacked and sent to Ukraine, funding its defence with the very money that was meant to whitewash Vatican losses. In doing so, Gabriel avenges Penelope Radcliff’s murder and the assassination attempt on Donati while never himself firing a shot—an act of spycraft that turns a piece of art into a weapon of justice.

19. B. The sequence is: blackmail of Ottavio Pozzi → fake‑priest heist → Cardinal Bertoli uses the painting to whitewash defaulted loans → Camorra controls SBL → the London dealers, led by Gabriel, create a phantom bidding war that attracts the Camorra and Prokhorov, ultimately trapping both. Options A and C reverse or invent events; D omits the crucial financial layer and casts Gabriel as the original thief.

20. The lost Leonardo achieves immortality by surviving not only physical centuries but also the criminal conspiracies that surround it; it is authenticated, restored by Gabriel, and finally unveiled to the world—a lasting work of art. However, that survival exacts a heavy cost: Penelope Radcliff is murdered for finding it, Giorgio Montefiore is killed for confirming it, Ottavio Pozzi and his brother are executed, and the reformist pope’s life is nearly taken. The painting’s immortality is built on a trail of mortal sacrifice, underscoring the epigraph’s tension between transitory life and enduring art.