The Art Thief: A Novel

by Noah Charney

  There was a closed door at the end of the hall. He opened it.

  A metal skeletal spiral staircase led to a landing on the next floor. The wall behind the tight-wound stair was all frosted glass, and let enter bright light, despite the cloudy day outside the Galerie Sallenave. The filtered sun threw the stair in a silhouette that resembled a torqued strand of DNA. Lesgourges climbed to the third floor.

  The entire third floor consisted of one master bedroom. The vast open space was disconcerting. Lesgourges considered himself an agoraphobic sleeper, and could not be comfortable unless he could feel the walls around him. This room was a vast, oceanic nothingness. A void with rafters and skylights, flooded with concentrated beams of external light. The only subdivisions in the room came from Oriental area rugs and one Chinese screen, painted with cranes and temples. Lesgourges moved to the center of the room, where sat an enormous bed, four-poster and antique cherry, strangely floating in the otherwise modern interior, a ship at sea.

  Lesgourges’ daze was limitless. He could not have anticipated the tasteful modernity of such an ancient family name. So much of his effort had gone into affixing a sense of history to his modern prosperity, seeking a ground for his wealth in an appropriation of false past. He had a predilection for Modern art, certainly, but that was a matter of personal taste. When new visitors came to see his château in Armagnac, he told them that the medieval portraits on the wall were of his ancestors. They did not need to know, he reasoned, that the portraits had been purchased by his father, along with the property.

  But Sallenave, Lesgourges wondered, Sallenave has such an ease, a sprezzatura. He is the ideal courtier. His nobility is intrinsic, and so he can drape himself in this purple cloak of tasteful modernity, make a cocktail of past and present, the cream of both.

  Lesgourges shook his head.

  “What do you make of it, sir?” asked the officer.

  Bizot smiled. “It’s another reference to a line in the Bible. I’m beginning to sense a theme.”

  The officer’s torch illuminated a small circle of wood on the right side of the safe. Written in white chalk were the characters: PS7115.

  Bizot shook his head. “Thanks to magnificent foresight on my part, I actually brought a Bible with me. Stole it from a hotel.” Then Bizot remembered that it was not the officer who was privy to that joke. Bizot’s fat fingers fluttered through the small, wafer-paged Bible, the text showing through the paper, making it nearly illegible. He found what he was looking for.

  “I’m getting good at this. Psalms, chapter 71, verse 15. ‘My mouth shall shew forth thy righteousness and thy salvation all the day; for I know not the numbers thereof.’ Those fuckers.”

  “What does it mean, sir?”

  “It’s mocking the fact that we don’t know the combination to the safe, the numbers. We are definitely meant to be on this trail. The painting must be in there.”

  “Should we confiscate the safe, sir?”

  “No, we’d need a different warrant for that. Take too long. They’ve led us this far. They want us to find the painting. That means that the combination is here, somewhere. We’ve just been too blind to find it.”

  Lesgourges allowed his thoughts to move. The vacuity of the master bedroom, seeming never to have been inhabited, highlighted its few prominent features, like braille raised on paper. Three framed prints caught his eye. They hung on a large swath of wall, all to themselves. Like the prints downstairs, they bore identical frames and lighting devices. Only these prints were infinitely more intricate. Lesgourges recognized them immediately.

  They were, perhaps, the three most influential prints in Western art history, certainly by the most influential printmaker. Albrecht Dürer’s Saint Jerome in His Study, Knight, the Devil, and Death, and Melencolia I. Dürer’s so-called master prints. And, of course, Sallenave had all of them, in perfect condition. God, Lesgourges thought, I hate him.

  He examined each print. Such a marvel of engraving, he thought, the lines so tightly woven and spaced. Lesgourges had seen the engraving process and knew how difficult it was. Tremendous physical force was required to push the metal burin into the flesh of the copper plate, digging out metal with metal, before ink flowed into the resulting grooves, and the plate was run through a press, and the image transferred onto wet paper. Not like Rembrandt’s etchings, a technique more akin to drawing. Not that they weren’t impressive. But Dürer’s ability to coax delicate detail from a medium that required brute strength in addition to sleight of hand was unimaginable.

  Saint Jerome sits in his study, the bottle-light flowing in from the windows to his right. He leans over intently, writing his famous translation of the Bible from Greek into Latin, the Vulgate. Above him on the wall: an hourglass, a cardinal’s hat, candles, prayer beads, and more. A gourd hangs from the ceiling, above a sleeping dog and lion, friend to Jerome, who removed a thorn from its paw. A precariously balanced skull stares out from the windowsill, where books, pillows, and discarded slippers rest, as Jerome cannot, until he completes his calling. A crucifix on the desk reminds him, should he tire, that he must complete his translation. In case we were uncertain of his sanctity, a halo of light surrounds his head.

  In Knight, the Devil, and Death, three figures move from right to left, perhaps toward the fantastical castle on the hilltop, in the distance. The knight smiles ever so slightly, much of his face hidden by his helmet, his armored body supported by a mighty horse. He is a warrior who has survived many combats, but two phantoms are forever at his shoulder. Death, bearded and skeletal, with a snake-entwined crown, mocks the knight, holding aloft an hourglass to indicate that, despite his battle skill, his time is inevitably finite. Behind the knight walks the Devil, a hybrid monstrous horned goat, with owl’s eyes and talons. Is he ready to snatch the knight’s soul the moment Death permits it? Is the knight evil, or is it merely evil to have killed others, no matter the name or cause? Lesgourges had read once that the knight was the ideal Christian soldier, who does not fear Death and the Devil because God is with him. Whatever, thought Lesgourges.

  Perhaps the least explicable, Melencolia I contained a multitude of details that seemed to lead to no clear explanation. An angel sits in brooding thought, her head leaning on her left hand, a compass in her right. Beside her, a putto sits on a stone-cut wheel, his back to an unidentifiable stone monument, from which hangs a balance, an hourglass, and a bell. Strangest of all is a square cut into the monument, divided into sixteen smaller squares, each containing a different number between one and sixteen, in no apparent order. A ladder leans against the monument, with a dark sunburst and rainbow, perhaps a comet or solar eclipse, over a seaside town in the distance. In the foreground, along with the angel, there is a geometrically cut multiangled stone, a hammer, a starving dog asleep, a sphere, a piece of wood, four used nails, a saw, pliers, a plane for shaving wood…Lesgourges could not even identify all of the objects.

  These works were clearly full of symbolic meaning. He had once heard someone mention that Melencolia I contained a key to Masonic mysticism, although he had heard many things that sounded more conspiratorial than art historical. Still…

  He paused for a moment. Wait, he thought. No. But…

  He looked back at the engravings. A hammer, a plane, a compass…

  Bizot and his men had swept the first three floors for clues. Bizot had a full notebook, and the interiors were well documented in photographs. Now to check the top floor, he thought, and then sort through all that we’ve gathered. We found the safe. Now we just need the combination.

  Bizot had just reached the top of the stairs, when he heard Lesgourges shout.

  “Jean! Jean! I think I’ve got it!”

  “I do not believe it! That is amazing,” Elizabeth whispered, as she stood alongside Barney, Wickenden, and Delacloche in the museum Conservation Room, staring at the X ray that mocked them from its perch on an easel.

  Hidden beneath the white surface lay an underpainting. Elizabeth could not, at
first, process what she was seeing. It looked as though an angel, with its back to the viewer, was startling a young woman, who craned her neck around coyly to see her gentle assailant. Delacloche recognized it immediately.

  “Holy flying shit,” she said. “That’s Caravaggio’s Annunciation.”

  “The painting that was stolen last month?” Elizabeth had read about it, and it was much spoken of, at luncheons among the art literati. But it was the furthest thing from expectation, that it would appear underneath this stolen, and apparently fake, Malevich.

  “Did Malevich underpaint?” Wickenden asked politely.

  “Not with a Caravaggio,” replied Barney.

  “How is that possible? To paint over something without ruining it?” Wickenden inquired.

  “It’s quite simple,” began Barney. “It’s what we do, here in Conservation. The watchword in art conservation these days is to never do anything to a painting that you can’t undo. That’s one of the reasons why the field is now called conservation, and used to be called restoration. We try to prevent future damage, and leave the original intact as much as possible. Today, less is more.

  “In the past, restorers would repaint without documenting their actions, would edit out bits they didn’t like, change a color here and there, and otherwise ruin. In Bronzino’s Allegory of Love and Lust, for instance, a restorer painted out Venus’s nipple and tongue, and added a fern to cover Cupid’s ass, because when it was acquired, in the Victorian period, the head of the National Gallery thought it was too naughty.

  “But these days, we record every change we make, and we use paints that can be removed without damaging the original. The addition of chemicals to the paint we make to restore makes them constitutionally distinct enough from the original paint, that they can be removed with chemicals, while the original is left untouched.”

  “So, you’re saying that you can remove this white painting on top, and expose this angel painting underneath, without damaging it?”

  “Sure. Just give me some time.”

  Delacloche had been thinking the whole while. “If that is really what it looks like, I mean, the stolen Caravaggio, then we’re going to need to ID it.” She took a breath. “This is just too bizarre for me to process.”

  “Do any of the museum staff know enough about Caravaggio?” Wickenden asked.

  “No.” Delacloche was biting the flesh of her thumb. “We need an Early Modernist. Ms. Van Der Mier, do you know…”

  “Simon Barrow.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Barney. “He’s perfect. Can you contact him?”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth replied. “I can. Barney, can you have this stripped and revealed by tomorrow morning?”

  “I’ll have to make sure of the constitution of the top-layer paint. It could be easy and can take a few hours. But if the paint on top is too similar to what is beneath it, it might be a very slow process. Weeks, rather than hours. I’ll see—and I’ll let you know what I can do.”

  “Good. Thank you, Barney. I’ll see if Professor Barrow can come by tomorrow morning. If he gives a positive ID to the Caravaggio, then we’ll have to return it to the church from which it was stolen. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but we’d better contact the Carabinieri, and…and this has turned into an enormous bloody mess.” Elizabeth was breathing harder now. “And I have to call…Lord Harkness, and then speak to the board. Any of you are welcome to shoot me now.”

  “I’ll call the Carabinieri,” said Wickenden. “This case just got a lot more interesting.”

  “It was interesting enough before,” Elizabeth said, as she walked toward the door.

  Barney spoke: “Why would the ransomers keep the stolen Malevich, but give us back the stolen Caravaggio? The Caravaggio is worth maybe ten times more than the Malevich. Unless, maybe they didn’t realize it was under this white piece of crap that they gave back to us? But then, who painted over it?”

  “This is too much for me to process right now.” Elizabeth massaged her temples. “Let’s make our phone calls and reconvene tomorrow morning, first thing. A whole lot of shit is going to hit the proverbial fan tonight.”

  Encroaching night dimmed the city to blue, as Elizabeth’s phone rang. Her office hung like a lamp in the cobalt. Windows allowed the evening to drift inside. Elizabeth could have looked out onto the city of London: St Paul’s Cathedral under white floodlights, the cradled luminosity of Somerset House. But Elizabeth Van Der Mier’s eyes were shut. She did not hear the first ring and only picked up on the second.

  “Yes? Oh, Geneviève. Thank you for…that would be good, if you could come by again tonight. I’m glad that you thought to call me here. Can you…all right. I’ll see you soon.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Bizot and Lesgourges stood in front of the three master prints, on the bedroom wall on the third floor of the Galerie Sallenave. Bizot stood to Lesgourges’ right and, from the other side of the room, they remarkably resembled the lowercase letter b. Both leaned in simultaneously to examine the third engraving.

  “A hammer, a plane, a compass…all tools used by a carpenter.” Lesgourges could not believe his own words. “What’s the quotation, again?”

  Bizot was dumbstruck. He fumbled to open his notebook and flipped to find the passage.

  “The carpenter stretcheth out his rule; he marketh it out with a line; he fitteth it with planes, and he marketh it out with the compass, and maketh it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty of a man; that it may remain in the house.”

  They looked from the rough-scrawled text in Bizot’s hand to the engraving on the wall and back.

  There was a long silence.

  Bizot stroked his beard. “I’m certain that this is it.”

  “It’s certainly the only thing I’ve seen that seems to connect with the passage.” Lesgourges observed the sober reverie of the moment. “Of course this proves all our presuppositions wrong, but…”

  “This must be right. Do you see what I see?”

  Lesgourges looked at the engraving. Then he looked harder. Then he observed.

  “I do.”

  They were both staring at the same thing: a square containing sixteen smaller squares, each small square containing a number between one and sixteen.

  “The combination is somewhere in there.”

  Silence.

  “Jean,” resumed Bizot. “I think you did it.”

  Bizot and Lesgourges stood, arms crossed, brows knit, eyes squinting, necks leaning in.

  “God, I hate numbers. My brain doesn’t function in rational terms,” said Bizot. “The answer must be there. We’re staring at it, hidden in plain sight. Those bastards have handed us a puzzle.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “Let’s start from the beginning.” Bizot extended his diminutive legs in front of him. “Alors…et puis ensuite…What do we have? A four-by-four square of sixteen total smaller squares. Each of the smaller squares contains a number, from one to sixteen, not in order. Reading from left to right, the top row contains 16, 3, 2, 13. The row below it: 5, 10, 11, 8. Below that: 9, 6, 7, 12. And the bottom row contains 4, 15, 14, and 1.

  “We need a total of seven numbers, each between zero and fifty, for the combination to the safe. Now what?”

  Lesgourges looked up and to the left. When in thought, he often put his right pinky finger inside his right ear. It was his Think Button, as he liked to say. He was pressing it.

  “My guess is that we are staring at the seven numbers we need. We just don’t know which seven. There is some pattern, some order in which you are meant to read the numbers in the square. For instance, if it was a simple pattern, like two diagonals, then the solution might be…let me see…3, 11, 12, then 16, 10, 7, and 1. Or if it’s meant to be a serpentine pattern, then perhaps the combination is 4, 9, 5, 16, 3, 10, 6. But combinations of seven numbers in a four-by-four arrangement are unsatisfying. It’s not clean, while all of these other clues have clicked nicely into place.” Lesgourges s
topped speaking and began to mouth the numbers that passed through his head. “Bizot, do you think we should try to figure this out now? I mean…”

  “I considered that. It would be easier to think from the office, and we could call more people in on it. But it was hard enough to get the search warrant, and if we leave here with no hard evidence, just an art-historical treasure hunt, then we may have missed our chance. By the time we got another warrant, if I could convince one out of them, then Courtil would be back from the south. To come here again would risk tipping the thieves, and then they might disappear. They may want to prove a point, and we may retrieve the painting, but they’re political thieves, not martyrs. They’re not going to want to be caught. I think we should test our mettle here. There must be some unifying principle. Otherwise we’re grasping at straws. Based on the other clues, the answer should be obvious, right on the surface. We just don’t know how to look yet…what? Jean, what is it?”

  Lesgourges was staring at the square.

  “Tu as trouvé quelque chose, Jean? What is it?”

  Lesgourges smiled. “Give me…just…one…moment.”

  Bizot looked from Lesgourges to the square, and back. “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”

  “Look at the top row of numbers.”

  Bizot leaned forward and squinted at the numbers before him: 16, 3, 2, 13.

  “Do they have something in common?” he asked, impatient. “What am I supposed to do with them?”

  Lesgourges’ excitement bled through his words. “We’ve been staring at the stars, without seeing the constellations. It’s simpler than we thought.” He paused, and touched his finger to his lips, then shook his head with a smile. “Add them.”

  “Add them?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Bizot mumbled to himself. “16 plus 3 is 19, plus 2 is 21, plus 13 is 34.”