The Icon Thief

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  After a calculated pause, a figure emerged from the shadow cast by one of the pillars. Sharkovsky wore a watch cap pulled down to his eyebrows, along with sunglasses he had bought from a vendor near the museum. He waited for a few seconds, wanting to be sure that the girl would not reappear unexpectedly, then opened the door and followed her inside.

  56

  “Thanks for meeting with us on such short notice,” Wolfe said, taking a seat in the conference room. She looked across the burnished table at her interviewee. “I hope it wasn’t any trouble.”

  “Glad to help,” Reynard said. “It isn’t a problem. I was in the office anyway—”

  Powell pulled up a chair beside Wolfe, placing his briefcase on the table. “Do you often work on the weekends?”

  Reynard smiled. Beneath his confident features, there was a hint of strain. “It’s been a rough week. How can I help you?”

  Wolfe took the lead. “We’d like to ask you some questions about your database.”

  Reynard’s expression remained neutral, but Powell detected a trace of uneasiness in the fund manager’s eyes. “I was under the impression that you were investigating the incident in the Hamptons.”

  “We are,” Wolfe said. “Your provenance database falls within the scope of our investigation.” From her own briefcase, she removed a sheaf of photocopies. “As you probably know, Archvadze had an extensive art collection. As part of our investigation of the heist, we’ve been looking into the provenance of these paintings. Purchase records provided by his lawyer indicate that most of the works were bought from an art dealer named Alexey Lermontov. Do you know him?”

  “I know who he is,” Reynard said. “My job obliges me to know something about all the major dealers in this city. I’m not surprised that Lermontov was the source. He has an impressive client list.”

  “We know.” Wolfe pushed the stack of photocopies across the table. “But something else was involved. Take a look at these.”

  Reynard examined the papers. “Provenance records. These belonged to Archvadze?”

  “That’s right,” Wolfe said. “His lawyer has the originals, along with the sources that were used to compile the information. Archvadze commissioned a team of historians and art consultants, mostly from the Frick, to independently research the provenance of each painting that he acquired from Lermontov.”

  “It isn’t uncommon for collectors to conduct their own provenance research. Filling out the provenance can be an effective way to increase the value of a painting. But I don’t see why this is significant.”

  “After I received these documents, I became curious as to how much of this information was in the public domain,” Wolfe said. “The obvious place to look was your database, which is freely available to researchers. But when I consulted the database, I found that the records didn’t match up. For most of these paintings, the provenance history provided by your database and the data that Archvadze compiled on his own are completely different. How do you explain that?”

  Reynard’s smile grew wider. “There’s no mystery here. Provenance information is often unreliable. Any art historian will tell you this. We’ve devoted thousands of employee hours to cleaning and checking the database, but discrepancies still appear from time to time. Without further investigation, there’s no way to know if Archvadze’s information is any more reliable than ours.”

  Powell was impressed by the fund manager’s aura of calm, which he took as a challenge. “You may be right about that, but you’re wrong if you think that Archvadze was only trying to increase the value of his collection. He never intended to resell those paintings. He bought them because he knew that Lermontov was moving stolen art from overseas. He was willing to spend millions of dollars to build his case, but always lacked a smoking gun. Until now.”

  Reaching for his briefcase, Powell undid the clasps and raised the lid. Inside was the wooden stretcher. He set it on the table, faceup, so that the marks on the other side were hidden from view.

  Reynard’s smile vanished, replaced by a look of pointed indifference. “What’s this?”

  “It’s the stretcher from Study for Étant Donnés,” Powell said. “The thief who stole the painting removed the canvas. We haven’t recovered the painting yet, but the stretcher has been surprisingly instructive.”

  Turning the stretcher over, Powell tapped his finger against the strut that ran across the center. On the wood, painted in straggling black characters, were the words ROSENBERG BORDEAUX.

  “Before the painting was sold at auction, someone pasted a forged label across these words, hiding them,” Powell said. “We don’t know who was responsible, but we suspect that the forgery took place in Russia, which is where this painting resided in recent years. You recognize the words?”

  Reynard’s face was very still, like a waxen cast of its former self. “No, I don’t.”

  “They indicate that this painting was, at one point in its history, part of the collection of Paul Rosenberg, who was one of the most important Jewish art dealers and collectors in the Paris of the thirties and forties. He represented Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, along with many other artists. At the start of World War II, he fled to the United States, leaving the bulk of his collection at a bank in Bordeaux. The following year, it was seized by the Nazis.”

  Powell pointed to a square of paper pasted to the stretcher, which had also been concealed by the false packing label. It bore the words DUCHAMP / ROSENBERG / NIKOLSBURG / 2.12.1941. “This label indicates that the painting was taken to Nikolsburg Castle in the Sudetenland, which was a storage facility for looted art, including works owned by collectors who died in the death camps.”

  Reynard examined the label, but did not visibly react. “I still don’t know why you’re showing this to me.”

  “We’re getting there,” Wolfe said, taking up the thread. “When the Russian army occupied Czechoslovakia near the end of the war, the castle ended up in the hands of the Soviets. The official story is that the castle was burned in the fighting, along with all the paintings inside. However, catalogs and other documents from the Rosenberg collection have been found in an archive in Moscow, which has led historians to conclude that the art was taken secretly to Russia.”

  “It was state policy,” Powell said. “Russia had assembled a task force of its own, the Trophy Commission, to seize art and valuables as its army smashed through Germany. They saw it as a form of retribution, reparations for twenty million dead soldiers and civilians. Some of these works were returned, but others, like this one, disappeared. Based on other hidden marks on this painting, which our art crime team is still working to identify, our best guess is that it spent the past sixty years in a vault controlled by Russian intelligence.”

  “In recent years, with the breakdown of more conventional methods of money laundering, these paintings have reappeared on the market as a means of financing covert operations,” Wolfe said. “We believe that Archvadze learned that Lermontov, while posing as a sophisticated art dealer, was actually the leading paymaster of Russian agents in the United States. More recently, he’s branched out into arms trafficking, but he built his fortune on looted art. Many of these works were owned by men and women who died in the Holocaust.”

  Reynard’s face, although still fixed, had gone pale. “And Archvadze told you this?”

  “Archvadze is dead,” Powell said. “He was poisoned at his own home, on the night of the heist, with a binary weapon provided by the assassination laboratory of the Russian secret services. He was killed because he was getting too close to the truth. Or didn’t you know this already?”

  “You still haven’t explained why you’re telling me this.” Reynard’s voice was very quiet, as if he did not trust himself to retain control at a higher volume. “This has nothing to do with me.”

  “But it does,” Wolfe said. “Faking provenance was simple in the past, when sale and ownership information was opaque and easy to falsify. These days, however, most of this information is
online, which makes it much more transparent. In order for the flow of stolen art to continue, Lermontov had to find a way to fake provenance in public databases. Especially yours.”

  A point of color appeared in each of Reynard’s cheeks. “If the database contains false information, I take full responsibility. But it doesn’t mean that I, or anyone else at this firm, approved the deception.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” Wolfe said. “I know something about your business model. You use algorithms to search for anomalies in the information you’ve gathered, both to catch bad data and to identify potential investments. Provenance history that seems inconsistent with similar works by the same artist is exactly the kind of deviation that your algorithms are designed to discover. Lermontov’s fake provenances should have sounded the alarm. But they didn’t.”

  “There’s only one explanation,” Powell said. “It was deliberate. Which would only be possible if someone built a back door into the system, a way to override your database’s internal checks. As far as we can tell, you’re the only person at this firm with the access and authority to do so.”

  There was a pause. Reynard’s mouth was pressed in a tight line, like that of an angel on a gravestone. “What do you want from me?”

  Wolfe handed him a sheet of paper with a Bureau letterhead. “We’re here to offer you a deal. Immunity in exchange for your testimony against Lermontov. You’ll be treated as a confidential informant, so your name will stay out of the public record. This offer expires in exactly one minute.”

  Reynard studied the page as if he were reading a bad balance sheet. “And if I refuse?”

  “We come back with a subpoena,” Powell said. “We confiscate your records, the data on your servers, and the art in your storeroom uptown. And we’ll make sure that the press gets there ten minutes before we do.”

  The fund manager’s eyes grew dangerously bright. “You don’t have any evidence.”

  “We don’t need evidence to get what we want,” Wolfe said. “You’re already vulnerable. Investors are wondering if you can be trusted. If we raid that storeroom, it’s over. You have two options. If you cooperate, you can walk away with your reputation intact. Refuse, and we bury you. The choice is yours.”

  Reynard only stared at the page. Watching him, Powell reflected that the agreement conceded a great deal, but they were running out of time. If they wanted to keep the case away from counterintelligence, they had to push the art trafficking angle at their briefing with the executive assistant director, which was only a few hours away. In the end, the fund manager, though a tempting target, was secondary. It was worth giving up their case against him for a stronger position against Lermontov.

  When Reynard looked up, his eyes were cold. “If I’m doing this, I want protection.”

  “Of course,” Wolfe said. “We have an interest in keeping you alive. Anything else?”

  “No. There’s nothing more that you could possibly do for me.” Taking a pen from his breast pocket, Reynard signed the agreement. He contemplated his own signature for a moment, then said, “I want to make one thing clear. I knew that Lermontov was moving art, but he never said where it came from. We had a deal. He would be allowed to falsify information in our database, and in exchange, he’d feed me information about private art transactions.”

  Powell guessed that this was less than the complete truth, but decided not to force the issue. “What else did he ask you to do?”

  Reynard exhaled. “Favors. Like bidding on the painting. He was the one who told me to buy it—” He broke off. “There’s another thing. Maddy is in danger. Sharkovsky has orders to kill her in Philadelphia.”

  Powell looked up from his notes. For a second, he was unable to process what he had just heard. “What?”

  “She got paranoid,” Reynard said, a tremor appearing in his voice for the first time. “Most of what she said was nonsense, but along the way, she figured out that some of the provenance data was fake. Sharkovsky was sent to silence her, but she got away. Instead of going to the police, she took a bus to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I don’t know why. But he’s following her there.”

  Powell’s eyes fell on the immunity agreement on the surface of the table. In his mind, he saw Maddy’s face, strangely confused with that of Karina Baranova. “If she dies, the deal is off.”

  “I know.” Reynard’s voice was toneless. “It isn’t what I wanted. I had no choice—”

  Wolfe, looking through her notepad, pulled out her phone and dialed a number. “We need to warn her. If she turns herself in to the police, she should be safe until we can get her into protective custody.”

  As Wolfe waited for Maddy to answer the phone, Reynard turned to Powell. “I’m not a monster. You don’t understand the kind of pressure I’m under. My investors depend on this fund’s reputation. Endowments and pensions have entrusted me with their savings. If Maddy had gone public, it would have destroyed people’s lives. Everything I’ve built for myself would be gone—”

  Powell wondered if Reynard really believed what he was saying. He thought of the woman under the boards, her head and hands missing, her identity erased. Again, for an instant, he saw Maddy’s face superimposed over that of the dead girl, and imagined how it would feel to see her body in the morgue.

  A second later, Wolfe closed her cell phone. “No answer. It went to voicemail.”

  Powell looked at Reynard. They came to the same conclusion at once, but Powell was the first to speak. “She’s turned off her phone,” Powell said, rising from his chair. “She’s at the museum now.”

  57

  Maddy had switched off her phone a few moments earlier, out of sheer habit, soon after passing through the museum’s doors. Inside, a wall was covered with the inscribed names of donors and trustees. She turned away from the roster, oddly afraid of what she might see there, but not before glimpsing the names of two of the dead: WALTER AND LOUISE ARENSBERG.

  As she had expected, there was no bag check, and security was nonexistent. After buying a ticket, she went into the great hall. A wide stone staircase ran up one side of the room, with visitors seated on each of the steps. At the top, a bronze huntress pointed an arrow toward the main doors.

  She entered the galleries, clutching the strap of her tote bag. The paintings were a blur, but as she passed one doorway, her eye was caught by the image of a woman lying naked before a seascape, her pose startlingly familiar. Going closer, she found that it was a nude by Courbet.

  When she saw the artist’s name, she discovered that the entire museum was speaking to her. This sensation was accompanied by an equally strong conviction that she was being watched. Turning, she saw that the gallery was empty except for a teenage couple staring at another nude, their fingers interlaced. No one was watching her. The only voyeur here was herself.

  She returned to the main line of galleries. Two rooms later, she passed a painting by Paul Gauguin, who had read Rosicrucian books on the beaches of Tahiti. It was a picture of a yellow hill, the grass dry, girded by a fence decorated with human skulls. A smoldering idol perched on its crest. The caption helpfully noted that the hill was a sacred enclosure where human sacrifices took place.

  After entering a rotunda with an obsidian fountain, she rounded a corner into the eastern wing. The nineteenth century fell away, replaced by modern and contemporary art. Here, for instance, was a sculpture by Max Ernst, a bronze idol with two circles for eyes and a larger circle for its howling mouth. The caption said that Ernst had once taken the sculpture into a hayfield, laying it in the grass so that he could view it under the light of the moon.

  A few rooms later, before she was ready for it, she entered the Duchamp wing.

  On the wall beside the door, a placard read MARION BOULTON STROUD GALLERY. She glanced at it briefly, vaguely recognizing the name of a dead patron of the arts, but then her perspective shifted and the words disappeared, replaced by another set that had been concealed by lenticular lenses. When she saw these new words,
she knew that this room, too, had been prepared for her arrival.

  The hidden words, revealed as if by an act of magic, were GALERIE RROSE SéLAVY.

  Maddy moved farther into the gallery. Visitors drifted between the works on display, passing through on their way to the next obligatory stop on the tour. To one side hung an early work by Duchamp, the portrait of a bearded man whose left hand glowed with an otherworldly light, as if it had been dipped in phosphorescence. The anomalous window stood nearby.

  To her left, a doorway led to a small room adjacent to the main gallery. The room was dim and nondescript, with no indication of what lay inside. She did not want to go into it yet, but knew that she had no choice. Gathering the remaining shreds of her courage, she crossed the threshold.

  Her initial response was one of disappointment. The room was small and shabby, like a penitent’s cell. Under her feet, there was a soiled carpet, in contrast to the other galleries, which were floored with concrete. A wooden door stood to her left, taking up most of the wall. The door was weathered and worn, set into an archway of real bricks. There was nothing else.

  But through a pair of tiny holes, drilled at eye level, a cool white light was visible.

  Maddy looked up at the ceiling. There were no cameras. From the main gallery, it was impossible to see the wooden door, which was set perpendicular to the entrance. Reassured by her apparent solitude, she went up to the door, catching the scent of fragrant wood, and bent her face to the eyeholes.

  Her first impression was that she was looking at her own corpse. For a second, it was as if a window had opened on the past, and she knew, with horrifying certainty, that she had died on the floor of Ethan’s apartment, and all that followed had been nothing but a fantasy generated by her dying brain.

  Then her vision cleared, and she saw that she was looking at a different body, a nude woman lying in the grass, her face concealed by the edge of a brick wall, a lamp shining in one hand. Pictures did not do justice to the persuasiveness of the illusion, the Lake Geneva landscape remarkably convincing, a waterfall sparkling in the background, an effect created by a rotating disc and a lightbulb in a biscuit tin. While living, I made this compact copy of the universe, my grave—