Murder at the National Gallery

by Margaret Truman

  Saison didn’t move to take it. “Entrez,” he said.

  “Merci.”

  The sight of Jacques Saison’s studio was as revolting to Luther as the odors emanating from it. He’d never seen such chaos. Canvases were piled up and tossed haphazardly. Filthy plates and glasses covered most exposed surfaces. The man himself was a monument to dishevelment, badly needing a shave and a haircut, if not first aid. It looked to Mason as though Saison hadn’t washed his hair since starting work on the Caravaggio knockoffs. Giliberti had sworn Saison was the best art forger in the world. How could he be? How could anyone do high-quality work in such surroundings?

  Saison stumbled to where a half-filled bottle of whiskey stood on a dirt-crusted sink, poured some into a smoky glass, and lit a cigarette. “Voulez-vous un verre? Cigarette?”

  The thought of whiskey and a cigarette caused Mason to wince. He conspicuously checked his watch. He wanted out of the studio and away from its occupant. “You have the paintings?” he asked.

  “Oui.” Saison continued to lean against the sink, drawing on his cigarette and sipping his whiskey.

  “I would like to see them,” said Mason. “I have a busy schedule.”

  “The money. You have the money?”

  “Yes,” Mason said, sighing. “I have the money.” He retrieved a fat envelope from his inside jacket pocket and looked for a place to drop it. A pile of old canvases seemed as good a place as any.

  Saison opened the envelope and did a fast count.

  “I assure you it’s all there, Mr. Saison. And it is yours, provided the work you have done is satisfactory.”

  Saison’s back was to Luther. He spun around, his face creased in a fuzzy anger. “You doubt my ability?”

  “Oh, no, not at all,” Luther said. “I have—I had great faith in Carlo. You heard about him, I assume?”

  “Heard about what? He has been arrested?”

  “You haven’t heard. He’s dead. He was murdered in Washington.”

  Saison mumbled French obscenities.

  “You know you are to leave Paris for at least six months?”

  Saison ignored his reminder. He belched, rubbed his eyes, and pointed to a closet at the far end of the studio. “In there. They are in there.”

  This was Mason’s moment of truth. He was afraid to open the closet door for fear that what he would find would not be good enough to withstand the scrutiny of people like Franco del Brasco, or the Italians to whom one of the copies would be returned.

  “Go on, go on,” Saison said. “I don’t have all day.”

  Luther opened the closet door, allowing light from the studio to spill inside. Leaning against the back wall, facing him, was one of the two copies. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It was magnificent. A remarkable duplicate of Caravaggio’s original. The second copy was behind it.

  Luther slowly turned. “They look quite good,” he said.

  Saison guffawed. “It is better than good. I have worked day and night on them since Carlo brought me the original. Day and night. From the photographs. No rest, no food. It is not enough.”

  “What is not enough?” Mason asked, spirits sinking, knowing …

  “The money.”

  “Nonsense! Caravaggio is not that difficult to copy, and you know it. He had no trademarks, no subtle signature techniques to be considered. Everything is strong and direct.”

  The anger flared up in Saison again. He advanced halfway across the studio to where Mason stood. “You tell me it is not difficult to copy Caravaggio?” he shouted. A torrent of obscenities passed his lips.

  Mason held up his hands against what he thought was about to become a physical attack, “Please, Mr. Saison, no offense. The work you have done is splendid. Magnifique! But there is no more money for you.” Or for anyone else, he thought. “You have been fairly paid. More than fairly paid. Enough to go away for a year, to lie in the sun on the Riviera, to do what you wish.”

  “Carlo is dead, huh? Maybe I am next. I want more.”

  A familiar panic returned. Was this madman about to deny him possession of the copies? He didn’t have any more money to give. That was the simple truth. Whatever happened to honor? Then he remembered his resolve with the larcenous priest.

  “No!”

  Mason did something he never thought he could. He picked up the envelope filled with money, went to the door, placed his hand on the sticky knob, turned, and said, “Keep the paintings.”

  Saison’s expression said he was stunned, confused. He spread his hands and smiled. A yellow, crooked smile. “The paintings are no good to me. What good are they?”

  “That’s your problem,” Mason said. “Aw revoir, Monsieur Saison.”

  He stepped into the foul hallway and slammed the door behind him. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and said aloud, softly, “What are you doing?”

  The door opened. “Come in,” Saison said. “No need for anger. Take the copies. I never want to see them again.”

  The sense of relief Mason felt was palpable. He followed the Frenchman back into the studio, went to the closet, and brought both copies to the center of the large room. “Do you have something I can wrap these in?”

  Saison looked at him through bloodshot eyes. “You want something to wrap them with? That will cost you extra.”

  Mason glared at him.

  Saison said, “A joke. Just a joke.” He rummaged through a pile in a corner until coming up with two large pieces of cloth. He threw them at Luther, who immediately went to work wrapping the paintings, using masking tape to secure the flaps on the back.

  “Merci, Saison.” Mason held a painting under each arm as he headed for the door. “Enjoy your holiday. You’ve earned it.” With that he was out the door and fairly running down the stairs.

  He stopped on his way back to the George V to purchase a number of items, including framing tools in an art-supply store, then went to work in his hotel room. First, he dismantled the two Gaisser paintings. He carefully removed the Grottesca copies from their stretching frames, positioned them behind the Gaisser works, and put everything back into frames. He picked each up and examined every inch, front and back. It would work. He would get through Customs, even if one of Carlo’s friends in the Italian Customs Service wasn’t available to slide him through, as planned.

  His call caught Court Whitney at the Gallery as he was about to leave. “Did you talk to Paul?” Mason asked.

  “Yes. Frankly, Luther, Paul says you’ve been taken. He says Gaisser was worse than a minor artist. Sure you want to go through with this purchase?”

  “Yes. I don’t intend to hang them in my apartment. They’re gifts.” Why he felt the need to defend his artistic integrity was lost on him. “They’ll make nice gifts. One for my mother back in Indiana. I’ll give the other to Julian.”

  “Expensive gifts,” Whitney remarked.

  “Nothing is too expensive for my mother. You must meet her one day, Court. She’s a darling woman. The Gallery has no interest in them?”

  “That’s right, Luther. Go ahead and buy them.”

  “Thank you, Court. As I said earlier, I’m feeling like the proverbial new man. Maybe minor, mind you, as I’m sure Paul would agree, but new.”

  20

  “You read this?”

  Steve Jordan slid that morning’s newspaper across the desk to his assistant, Gloria Watson, who’d joined the Washington MPD art squad after graduating with a degree in art history from American University. Being a cop seemed more exciting than working in the musty back rooms of museums, provided she could even find such a job.

  She read the article:

  LONDON—A major art-insurance fraud has been uncovered, according to officials of London’s Metropolitan Art Squad. Lord Adam Boulridge, a descendant of the Duchess of Monmouth and a noted collector of works by British artists, has been charged with arranging to have a portion of his collection “stolen” in order to profit from insurance on the works. Working closely with investiga
tors from the insurer, Lloyd’s of London, police authorities last night arrested Lord Boulridge at his castle on the Northumberland Coast. His Lordship, according to police, has confessed to the scheme. In a brief statement made while being led away, he said, “In this perilous economy, it is not easy being a peer of the realm.”

  “Not easy being royalty,” Jordan said. “Especially when you’re in jail. The British tabloids should have a ball with this for the next two years, the Royals having quieted down.”

  “It doesn’t say whether they recovered the art,” Gloria said.

  Jordan laughed. “Probably being sold in Hong Kong or Beirut as we speak.”

  “What tops the list this morning?”

  “For me? A meeting. For you? Get everything in place over at the Atlas Building for the pre-Columbian sting.”

  “Mrs. Smith still going through with it?”

  “She hasn’t told me otherwise. What’s the matter? You look like you just sucked on a lemon.”

  “The Atlas. I hate going there. It gives me the creeps.”

  The Atlas Building, located on a decayed portion of Ninth Street populated by pornography shops and grim bars, near the National Portrait Gallery—and only a few blocks from the National Gallery of Art—had been a stately turn-of-the-century home to Washington’s most prestigious law firms. But as the once-genteel neighborhood declined, and the lawyers prospered, they moved out. In the 1960s, the building’s new owner turned it into a low-rent artist’s colony, home to more than two hundred area artists over the ensuing years. The owner’s decision to “support the arts” was not altogether altruistic. Renting to struggling artists meant few complaints about the building’s deteriorating interior and exterior and lack of services. There was no water, and only occasional electricity. Break-ins were frequent, although the few artists remaining in the building pointed out that thieves never stole their art, just answering machines and small radios. But you couldn’t beat the rent. Artist Richard Dana, a former intelligence officer friendly with Mac and Annabel Smith, paid $167 a month for a huge studio. Another Washington monument, in this case to decay.

  Steve Jordan and his art squad sometimes rented space in the Atlas when they needed to front a sting. The building was seedy enough to be believable. It was known as an artists’ haven. And the occasional use of it wouldn’t threaten Jordan’s budget—at all.

  “Well, Watson, you may not like going there, but you will. The phone line comes in this morning. Jacob signed the lease. It went to the landlord first thing this morning.”

  Jacob Will, a Maryland artist, had been arrested by Jordan a year ago for laundering hot art. A deal was struck to avoid prosecution. When Jordan needed a front, in this case renting a studio in the Atlas Building on a month-to-month basis, Jacob provided it.

  “Check in with me after lunch,” Jordan told Gloria.

  Jordan’s meeting was at MPD Headquarters, Second District, on Idaho Avenue, N.W. Present were representatives from the law-enforcement agencies investigating the murder of Carlo Giliberti. Jordan knew everyone in the room except for two men sitting together at the head of a conference table. They were introduced by Washington MPD chief of detectives Emil Vigilio as New York City detectives.

  One explained their reason for being there. “We’d been investigating Carlo Giliberti for six months,” he said. “Customs tipped us to the possibility that Giliberti was smuggling in stolen art from Italy and selling it to a gallery down in Soho. We put the arm on the owner. Helped him to see the light, and he decided to cooperate. The last stuff Giliberti brought in was a couple of paintings by an artist named”—he consulted a scrap of paper—“Preti. Mattia Preti.”

  “Stolen from San Francesco di Assisi, in Cosenza,” Steve Jordan said.

  “Right.”

  “Jordan heads up our art squad,” Vigilio said. “Go on. We’re listening.”

  “We couldn’t do much with Giliberti. Diplomatic immunity and all. Diplomatic impunity is more like it. We were ready to pass the information on to authorities in Italy when he got it in the neck, down here.”

  “What was his source of stolen art?” Jordan asked.

  The New York cop again checked his notes. “Hard to say. From what the Italians tell us, stealing art is getting to be big business for the local mafiosi.”

  Which wasn’t news to Jordan. Unlike organized crime in the States, with drugs, extortion, prostitution, and other crimes providing the major sources of income, art theft was an important criminal industry in Italy. The fact that Italy had more priceless art to steal undoubtedly had something to do with it, supply equaling demand.

  The New York detectives completed their report, and after some discussion and a promise of further cooperation, left.

  “Giliberti wasn’t as clean as we thought he was,” said Vigilio. “I’d say Mr. Giliberti’s untimely departure from this world wasn’t a random killing. Looks like a mob hit to me.”

  “Over some paintings?” one of Vigilio’s detectives said, laughing. “Drugs, maybe. But art?”

  Jordan had heard it before. In a city whose murder rate increased every month, his focus on recovering stolen paintings was viewed by many colleagues as dilettante police work. Who cared whether some rich art collector got ripped off when the city’s citizens were being gunned down over a pair of sneakers, or a Washington Redskins jacket?

  “You have any information on Giliberti smuggling art into the country?” Vigilio asked Jordan.

  “No, but it’s happening all the time through embassies. Diplomatic pouches are getting bigger and heavier every day.” He opened a small notebook. “Italy leads the list, although there’s plenty of action from other countries, too. The old Soviet Union for one. Italy’s loaded with art, a lot of it in churches and convents. They can’t afford to pay for security. Easy pickings.” He went on to cite statistics from a conference in Rome he’d attended a few months ago. Drawing law-enforcement officials from sixteen countries, it had been held in conjunction with an unusual art exhibition featuring stolen art taken back by the art-recovery division of Italy’s carabinieri, its police department.

  “Twenty-nine thousand pieces of art were stolen last year in Italy alone,” said Jordan. “They recovered maybe five thousand of them. The Mafia, as the New York guys said, is heavy into art theft over there. No doubt about that. Ten billion dollars’ worth of art stolen every year around the world.” He looked at the detective who’d made light of stolen art. “Yeah, the numbers are worth killing for. I had a meeting last week with the Bureau’s Interstate Theft Unit. They estimate there’s at least fifty thousand pieces of stolen art floating around this country alone. We recover ten percent.”

  “Unless you get lucky like we did,” said Carl Kelley, head of the National Gallery of Art’s three-hundred-person security force.

  “Caravaggio?” Jordan said. “Grottesca?”

  “Right. Didn’t take the police to find it. A curator. Luther Mason.”

  “We have to keep these curators off our turf,” Jordan said, laughing.

  “Amazing,” said Kelley. “Finding it after a couple of hundred years.”

  “The carabinieri just recovered a Raphael missing for two hundred years,” Jordan offered. “Worth a cool twenty-four million.”

  “I never worry about anybody stealing our art,” Kelley said. “The wife buys it all at tag sales.”

  “Back to Giliberti,” Vigilio said. “If he was killed by the mob for whatever reason—art, drugs, sleeping with the wrong woman, forgetting to kiss the godfather’s ring—we can stop looking for the murderer in the general population.”

  “I’ll do some more checking,” Jordan said. “Maybe I can narrow it down a little.”

  “Yeah, do that, Steve,” Vigilio said. “If it pans out to be a mob hit, we’ll pass what we know on to the Italians and the FBI. Anything else?”

  The meeting ended.

  In Cincinnati, Ohio, Harry Whitlock had recently received a generous bonus from his employer, pr
ompting his wife to buy new furniture and to sell the old at a tag sale. The orange-and-white zebra-pattern couch went quickly. Cindy had returned to the flea market to buy another print from the dealer who’d sold her Fragonard’s A Stand of Cypresses in an Italian Park, which had gone nicely with the old couch. The new couch was green: She bought a landscape by someone who’d signed it “Carracci” to hang over it.

  No one at the tag sale showed interest in the Fragonard print until a couple stopped by, perused what was left, and huddled at the far end of the driveway, talking quietly. “I’m telling you, that picture is worth a lot of money,” the man told his wife.

  “I don’t like it,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. They’re selling what could be a rare masterpiece.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because they don’t know anything about art. Like I do. I’ll do the negotiating. They’re asking thirty bucks.”

  A few minutes later, the couple left the Whitlock house carrying the Fragonard print, as well as a table lamp with a frayed cord. Cindy wouldn’t take less than thirty dollars for the print but threw in the lamp.

  21

  Annabel awoke with a start. It was as dark outside as in the bedroom. Mac felt her sudden movement and sat up. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I—”

  “Just a bad dream.”

  “Yes. No.” She snapped on the reading lamp. “Mac. I think I know who smashed my Tlatilco.”

  His light came on, too. “Who?”

  “I can’t be sure. But I know how to find out.”

  They got up, showered, dressed, and sipped coffee in the kitchen until sunrise.

  “What time does it open?” he asked.

  “Eight.”

  When Annabel Reed, now Annabel Reed-Smith, closed her legal practice in search of fulfillment as a gallery owner, she had put the contents of her office in a self-storage facility in Alexandria. She hadn’t visited those dead files in over a year.

  “You don’t remember his name?” Mac asked as they crossed the Potomac River on the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge.