How had I missed it? Long was everywhere.
* * *
–
I hopped in my car and bombed up I-95 back to Boston, the revelation setting my imagination on fire. Long was the accomplice. Had he been there the night of the theft, to help hoist Edwin into the museum?
Or had he been the mastermind? Maybe my vision had been clouded from the beginning, and Edwin was just a patsy, an impressionable, innocent kid who had been dragged into something and then set up as the fall guy.
A few weeks after Prum gave me the memory stick, I boarded a flight to Chicago for another leg of the book tour. As the flight attendants droned their way through the safety presentation, I opened my Facebook app and navigated to a private group of Victorian salmon fly-tiers.
A fight had just erupted after a member posted an old article about Edwin’s arrest. “I know this happened back in 2010 but never heard about it and it is kind of amazing,” he said, unaware that he had just touched the third rail by bringing up the topic of the Tring heist.
The conversation quickly turned to the missing skins. “His mate is still out there,” replied a British tier named Mike Townend.
Jens Pilgaard asked, “Does anyone have an idea of who it could be that holds the feathers?”
I snapped screenshots, hoping to preserve the thread before it was deleted. As the plane taxied, the flight attendant announced it was time to switch our phones off, but there was no way I could miss this.
“His partner in crime, who I believe was the mastermind of this crime . . . thinks he is immune from prosecution,” wrote Townend.
“He goes by the name of Long. Your days are numbered.”
This was, to my knowledge, the first time Long had been called out publicly. He entered the thread to deny any involvement. “I heard people going around with rumors about me, and couldn’t care less,” he wrote. “It’s not like I’m going to live by fly-tying, it’s JUST a fucking hobby to me.”
Noticing the flight attendant standing over me with a cross look, I guiltily shut my phone off. By the time we landed a couple of hours later, the moderator had deleted the entire thread.
I wrote Long to see if he’d be willing to tell me his side of the story, but he declined.
If anyone had the missing skins, I was sure it was Long.
And then Edwin, who was performing in ensembles and chamber orchestras throughout Germany, broke his silence. For the first time since the arrest, he returned to the forum with a post entitled “Long Nguyen.”
“Ladies and Gentleman of the Flytying world,” he wrote, “most of you have heard of me, and for obvious reasons I have chosen to remove myself from mainstream flytying. However, I have found a need to address something that has been disturbing me for some time.
“My friend, Long Nguyen from Norway, has been . . . publicly slandered for his supposed involvement in the museum theft I committed alone in 2009. Two people, one from Denmark and another from the UK, even went so far as to go on a rumor spreading vendetta that Long was the ‘Brains behind the operation.’
“I am more appalled at the behavior of . . . the flytying world towards Long, than the flytying world is at my own actions,” he declared.
Bud Guidry, who had banned all discussion of the so-called “Tring incident,” was not happy. “I’m done with this bullshit. I’ve tried to keep this away from members for years, and you still are like a bad weed: rid yourself of it, and it just keeps coming back uglier than ever.
“You wanna defend Long,” he added, “by all means do so . . . what I fear most is you have only driven the nail deeper into Long’s back.” Turning his attention to the community, he wrote: “You have no clue of the time and effort I have spent trying to keep this one subject out of this forum over the years. Been a struggle to say the least.”
* * *
–
For three years, I had been periodically nudging Edwin with interview requests, without luck. But now that he’d spoken about details of the case publicly for the first time, I had to try again. I wrote to him saying it was time to speak.
Surprisingly, he responded. “I hope you understand that talking about my story and addressing this publicly is a bit like rubbing salt into an old wound, and I’ve needed time to think about your request,” he wrote.
I excitedly replied to ask him for dates when we could meet, then waited impatiently for a reply. Twenty-four hours turned into a week, then two weeks, and still none came. I read and reread my e-mail. Had I been too eager? Had I said something that scared him off? Did he spook easily?
When at last he offered me a window, it was less than a week away. Feeling I was on the brink of solving the mystery, I booked a ridiculously expensive flight to Düsseldorf without hesitation.
“Is there any reason we should be nervous for our safety?” my wife, Marie-Josée, asked as we packed.
We were newlyweds. She had been a lawyer at one of the firms that partnered with the List Project, helping twelve Iraqis navigate to refuge in America. While we knew each other over e-mail, we had never met in person until she came to one of my book tour events in Los Angeles. I moved to L.A. ten days later, bought a ring within two months, proposed at four months, and married her exactly a year later.
If this interview had happened a couple of years earlier, I wouldn’t have given the question of security a second thought, but a lot had happened since then. We’d just bought our first home and were hoping to start a family. I was calculating risk differently these days.
I tried to brush the idea off. “He’s a flute player!” I said. “He stole feathers. He’s not gonna do anything!” But with the interview only days away, I wondered if I was being reckless. What kind of person was Edwin really? For all the time I’d spent investigating his crime, I didn’t know much about his personality. How much could you really know about someone from their online persona? I realized I’d never even heard his voice before. Would he only give one-word answers? Was he quick to anger? How would he react when I confronted him with all the evidence I’d gathered?
I could hire a bodyguard but didn’t know how I could do so without ruining the interview. Would it be possible to have Edwin frisked before he came into the room? Could I just put an armed goon in the corner without explaining who he was?
I found the highest-rated security service in Düsseldorf on Yelp and got one of its partners, Jan, on the line. He was comfortingly true to Germanic stereotype: a deep, flat voice, all business, dispassionate. A bodyguard cost fifty-two euros an hour, available for six-hour blocks. It seemed foolish to haggle with someone you were hiring to protect you, so I agreed.
“Tell me about this guy,” Jan said, the sound of a retractable pen clicking in the background.
“He was born in New York and moved to London a few years ago before coming to Düsseldorf to play the flute—”
“Not biography,” Jan interrupted. “How big is he?”
I’d spent years tracking this person and didn’t even know how tall he was. “Six feet, maybe?”
“How old is he?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Uh-huh,” Jan said. “Have you met him before?”
“No. And to be honest, I don’t even know if he’s going to show.”
“When and where is the meeting?”
“May twenty-sixth, at the Stage Forty-Seven Hotel in Düsseldorf.”
“What is this guy’s name?”
“Edwin Rist.”
“What’d he steal, again?”
“Feathers.”
There was a lengthy pause. He said Edwin would probably be intimidated if a bodyguard were in the room; better to have one wait in the hallway with a room key. I could hold on to a walkie-talkie and squawk it if we needed him.
I agreed to the plan.
“Okay,” said Jan. “We’ll send Klaus. Bring cash.�
��
* * *
–
In the days leading up to the interview, I prepared an exhaustive list of questions with manic intensity. I knew I couldn’t start out by asking where the missing skins were, but I also didn’t know how much time he would give me. I sequenced the questions in a way that I hoped would back him into a tighter and tighter corner. I would feign ignorance about certain parts of the story, to see whether he would tell me the truth or lie. I would find out Long’s true role.
As I rehearsed, I couldn’t escape the nagging question: What if Edwin didn’t show up? What if he was just toying with me, summoning me across the world to sit in an empty hotel room? I had just plunked several thousand dollars down for flights to a German city I’d never been particularly eager to visit, and another few hundred for a German bodyguard, but I didn’t even have Edwin’s cell phone number. It was not the most considered step I’d taken.
As we inched our luggage through the security line at LAX, Marie-Josée asked a question I couldn’t answer: “Remind me why he agreed to talk to you?”
22
“I’M NOT A THIEF”
The night before the interview, jet lag and jittery nerves kept me up. While Marie-Josée slept, I watched the German version of the Home Shopping Network on mute, where Hausfraus peddled a Spanx-type shirt called the Schlankstütz. It had taken me years to get Edwin to speak to me, and now I would stumble into it half-asleep. What if I failed to notice some key revelation? What if I forgot to confront him with a critical piece of evidence?
When the northern sun rose and light began to filter through the pewter sky, I was still awake. As Marie-Josée slept, I tiptoed into the separate sitting room, where I had mounted a shotgun microphone on the coffee table. Stashed beneath a nearby ottoman was a second recorder; a third was hidden behind the TV. I wasn’t leaving anything to chance.
Klaus the bodyguard showed up at ten, an hour before Edwin was scheduled to arrive. Looking every bit the part, he was a behemoth, six-four and 250 pounds, crammed into a tracksuit. He had a buzz cut, looked as though he’d shaved with a knife, and barely spoke a word of English. He gestured at a chair in a dark corner of the hallway outside our room, produced two walkie-talkies from his jacket, and handed me one with a reassuring glance.
Back in the room, I stretched out on the sofa and stashed the walkie-talkie behind one of its cushions. As I pored through the pages of questions I’d prepared, the many versions of Edwin Rist that had appeared throughout the investigation thrummed through my mind. Edwin Rist committed the natural history crime of the century. Edwin Rist was a genius, masterminding a heist that netted him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Edwin Rist was a virtuosic flautist. Edwin Rist just did something dumb, like a lot of teenagers. Edwin Rist had some kind of disorder, maybe Asperger’s. Edwin Rist was desperate for money to provide for his needy family. Edwin Rist was the future of fly-tying. Edwin Rist was a black mark on the community of fly-tiers. Edwin Rist was impulsive. Edwin Rist was the best anyone had ever seen. Edwin Rist was a narcissist. Edwin Rist was a felon. Edwin Rist didn’t work alone. Edwin Rist was just a mastermind’s pawn. Edwin Rist still had a lot of the stolen loot, to be sold decades down the road. Edwin Rist beat the system—
* * *
–
A ringing phone startled me out of a deep sleep. “Edwin Rist is waiting for you in the lobby,” the receptionist said. Marie-Josée groggily entered the sitting room as I nervously started the recorders. I showed her how to operate the walkie-talkie, returned it to its hiding place, and made my way down to meet him.
Out in the hallway, I shot Klaus a readying glance. He took a step back into the shadows as I turned to go down the steps.
It was May but still chilly enough for Edwin to be wearing a peacoat. He was taller than I expected, over six feet. He had a three-day stubble and wore designer lenses and a thin silver chain around his neck. He extended his hand with a wan smile.
Five winters had descended since the crime, four since the arrest, and three since the sentencing. I wondered if he realized how consumed by his actions I’d become. As we approached the room, I wondered why he had shown up. What did he stand to gain from speaking to me? Did he think he could outsmart me? Would he outsmart me?
* * *
–
“Edwin, meet my wife, Marie-Josée.” She greeted him as we entered the room, and I could see his eyes settle on the imposing microphone and audio equipment. “She’s going to take care of the recording today,” I said, even though we’d never discussed whether the interview would be recorded. To my relief, he agreed. Sirens wailed in the distance as I offered to take his coat, patting it down lightly as I guided him toward his chair. Marie-Josée poured him a cup of tea, took a seat on the sofa, and donned an oversize pair of headphones to monitor the recorder’s audio level.
“How much time do we have?” I asked.
“We could be done in two hours, or we could be here till the evening,” he said with a smile. “Depends on you.”
I looked down at my questions. Of the 284, there were really only two fundamental questions that I’d come to Düsseldorf to answer. The first: Did he really have Asperger’s, the diagnosis of which kept him from prison?
The second: Was Long sitting on the missing skins?
* * *
–
For the first two hours, I peppered him with questions about his life. He spoke happily about his childhood, the flute, Germany, and learning to tie flies. I liked him—he had a wry sense of humor and was thoughtful, often pausing to gather his thoughts before responding in full paragraphs. In another life, we might have been friends.
When I felt he was comfortable enough to discuss the events of June 23, 2009, I asked him if he had known much about the historical importance of the skins he had taken.
He knew Alfred Russel Wallace’s birds were kept at the Tring, he said, but he didn’t realize that he’d taken any of them until he got back to the safety of his bedroom, the morning after the heist.
“What’d you do with the tags?” I asked casually.
“It depends,” he said. “Some of them I took off. I didn’t take them all off.” If he had known Wallace collected them, he said, he “probably would have treated them with a little bit more respect.”
Doing my best to appear nonchalant, I brought up the opinion I’d heard from so many tiers over the years—that museums didn’t really need so many birds to do their research, and that they ought to sell them to the community, where they could be truly appreciated.
“Did you resent the Tring for having all these beautiful birds?” I offered.
“Em . . .” His diction reflected his many years spent abroad—American ums had become British ems; his ands now sounded more like German unds. “I wouldn’t say I resented it. I mean, it was a shame.”
He took a sip of tea before saying that with museum specimens, “after a certain period of time—I think about a hundred years—technically speaking, all of the scientific data that can be extracted from them has been extracted from them. You can no longer use DNA, because what you would want to do it for is to prolong and help living birds, which hasn’t really worked anyway, because they’re still going extinct, or will go extinct depending on what happens with the rainforests.”
This was absurd, of course—scientists had recently extracted 419-million-year-old bacterial DNA from salt deposits on an old buffalo skin in the Michigan Basin, but I didn’t interrupt.
“As far as measurements and things,” he said, “they were taken ages ago.” He believed their only real value was historical. “I understand that they’re preserved because if they’re not, they might fall apart after fifty years in the sunlight or something like that, but they are collecting dust, so to speak. I didn’t have a problem with that because I know this is how museums operate. I do actually think it’s a shame that this is how it is. . . .
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“Again, I’m not a scientist,” he acknowledged, “but I do view it as a shame that they’re in a box in the dark, where an idiot with a rock can go in and take them.”
It was a curious stance: he almost seemed to blame the Tring. I relayed the anguish that Prum and the museum’s curators had expressed over the fact that these skins might have held answers to questions that hadn’t even been asked yet, but Edwin was unmoved.
He told me he’d feel bad about it if it were true. “But at the same time, I’d say ‘If you haven’t made the breakthrough yet, when are you planning on doing that?!’ Because as far as preservation is concerned, em, aren’t we kinda running out of time, ever so slightly? You know?!
“I dunno,” he chuckled. “I think that things such as illegal poaching are probably hurting more. I think that, technically speaking, had the museum just put all those things up for sale, you would have nullified fifty Indian Crows’ worth of demand, which is fifty Indian Crows that would probably still be alive in the wild.”
“Whoa,” I said, my poker face slipping for a moment. “You’re making the case that by taking the Tring’s birds, you saved live birds in the wild?”
“Well, that’s a flowery way of putting it, and I wish that that were true.” He grinned, then added: “Maybe in a sense it technically is true.”
I glanced over at Marie-Josée. Her eyelids were heavy, but she was making a valiant effort to stay alert. I wondered if Klaus was awake in the darkness of the hallway outside. As soon as I met Edwin, I had realized our bodyguard was unnecessary, but I wasn’t about to interrupt the interview just to send him packing.
Edwin sat there patiently, his posture perfect. Annoyed as I was by his self-serving misreading of the state of modern scientific research, I wasn’t there to debate him, at least not yet. I steered the conversation to the matter of his sentencing.
The Feather Thief Page 19