The Icon Thief

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  A second later, she grew convinced that someone was standing just outside the room, watching her in silence. She pulled away from the eyeholes, looking over her shoulder, but the doorway was empty.

  Maddy turned back to the wooden door, her paranoia dissipating, and looked inside again. After a long moment, she knew. Whatever the answer was, she would not find it from here. Part of her wanted to pull back now, when it was still possible, but deep down, she saw that even as she boarded the bus to Philadelphia, she had known in her heart that there was no other way.

  She forced herself to concentrate. Her first task was to determine if the installation was, in fact, protected by glass. Through the eyeholes, she thought that she could detect a breeze, perhaps the hum of an air conditioner. Then she saw a tiny smudge hovering a few inches from her eyes. It was a fingerprint.

  “Goddamn it,” Maddy whispered. Judging from the print, the glass was a good eight inches behind the door. It would not be hard to break through the wood, but the glass was another issue entirely.

  Maddy left the darkened room and went back into the gallery, which was empty. Taking a seat on the bench, she unfolded a map of the museum across her lap. On the map, each of the rooms was numbered. Adjoining the room with the wooden door, however, she saw a room with no visible entrance or exit. It was the only unnumbered square in the entire museum.

  She went into the next gallery, which was also deserted, with gleaming sculptures by Constantin Brâncus‚i arranged in a kind of altar. If there was a way into the hidden room, it had to be here.

  Sure enough, to one side of the altar, she saw a closed door with no visible markings. Sensing that it was necessary to move boldly, she went up to the door and tried it. It was a sliding door with a recessed handle below the keyhole, and it slid an eighth of an inch before catching on the latch. The door itself was thick and heavy. She stood there for a moment, hoping that she would see another way inside, but was finally compelled to accept the inevitable.

  A few startled tears sprang into her eyes. Fuck the men who were trying to kill her. Fuck Ethan for leaving her alone. She had never asked for this. Her one source of consolation, in this moment of utter loneliness, was that by breaking into the installation, she was knocking the pieces from the board.

  A restroom lay in the direction from which she had come. Maddy retraced her steps, ignoring the persistent sense that she was being watched. Pushing open the door of the ladies’ room, she went inside.

  The bathroom was empty. Maddy entered the stall farthest from the entrance and shut the door behind her. She emptied out her canvas tote, placing the tools on the floor, and used the box cutter to slice open the pack of spark plugs. When she was done, she slid the box cutter into her pocket, removed the spark plugs, and put one of them inside the empty bag.

  Wrapping the canvas securely around the spark plug, she set it on the toilet seat, took the hammer, and shattered the plug with two sharp blows. The sound of porcelain breaking was muffled, but still audible in the bathroom’s close confines. She set the hammer aside and opened the bag. The spark plug had fragmented into several irregular shards. Fishing around with her fingers, she chose two of the largest pieces and slipped them into her other pocket.

  Maddy replaced the tools in her bag. The remaining spark plugs and blister pack went into the garbage. Then she washed her hands and emerged into the corridor, heading for the Galerie Rrose Sélavy.

  58

  Years ago, in Moscow, a boy of fifteen had waited in a restaurant, listening to an old man explain how to follow a person without being seen. The vor had revealed a mouthful of yellow teeth whenever he chewed a piece of salted fish, washing it down with vodka; the boy, who had not been offered a taste, had been young and bursting with ambition, but he had also been smart enough to listen.

  “You think you’re ready,” the old man had said, his breath sour with pickled vegetables. “But shooting a drunk in the back of the head and following a cautious man through the city are two different things. You always want two men. If one gets picked up, the other takes over. Put yourself where he is going to be, not where he is now. And when the time is right, you gun him down.”

  Now, many years later, Sharkovsky thought back to that old conversation. Before the girl appeared at the museum, he retrieved a copy of the floor plan from a trash bin at the foot of the steps. The east entrance, where he was standing, was the most prominent, but another set of doors lay to the west. Even if the girl entered here, there was no guarantee that she would leave by the same way.

  When the girl appeared at last, then, he silently followed her into the museum, hanging one or more rooms behind unless there was reason to go closer. Before long, he began to guess where she was going, and was not surprised when she entered the darkened room adjacent to the main gallery. She remained there for a long time before emerging, her features intense and pale. Before heading after her, he lingered behind for a second, then slipped into the tiny room.

  Inside the cramped space, he saw the wooden door, and understood immediately that there was something of value behind it. Going up to the eyeholes, he peered inside. At first, the sight made him smile, but when he considered what the girl might be planning, it stifled his amusement at once.

  He turned away from the eyeholes. As he had expected, she was still in the gallery next door. Glancing inside, he saw her trying a door next to the altar, one that could only lead into the rear of the installation he had just left. It was not difficult to guess what she had in mind.

  When the girl headed for the bathroom, Sharkovsky retreated into another gallery. As he waited for her to come out, his eye and jaw continued to ache. It was hard to think clearly through the fog of pain, but he forced himself to focus. If the girl broke into the installation, the guards would appear at once, taking her out of his reach forever. There would be no room for error.

  After she emerged from the restroom, Sharkovsky tracked her at a distance until she returned to the gallery. From around the corner, he watched as she took a seat on a bench, looking fixedly at the upright panels of glass on display, which caught the rays of the sun through a nearby window. Reaching beneath his sweatshirt, he checked his revolver, then withdrew into the next room.

  As the minutes ticked away, the girl remained on the bench, not moving, her eyes on the work of art before her. Her hands were folded in her lap, the canvas tote bag over one shoulder. Around her, other visitors drifted singly and in pairs. She ignored them, or so it seemed, as if there were nothing on her mind except the masterwork that stood a few feet away.

  Maddy, for her part, was really looking at the guards, two of whom were posted in this wing. Every few minutes, one would peek into the gallery, sweep an eye across the room, and leave. It was half an hour before closing time, and the crowds had gradually diminished.

  At last, she watched as one of the guards, a woman, passed through the gallery, then left through the door at the far end of the room. There was no one else in sight. For the moment, she was alone.

  She forced herself to stand. The room with the installation was a few steps to her left. Moving forward, she approached the doorway, a shuddering void in her chest where her heart should have been, and went inside.

  Before her stood the wooden door, light shining through its eyeholes. She reached into her bag and removed the putty knife. Approaching the installation, she inserted the knife in the vertical seam between the two halves of the door. With her hands gripping the handle tightly, she slid the blade upward, feeling it snag on the strip of wood that held the panels together.

  Maddy forced the knife farther up, the wood splintering, and felt the blade break through. She withdrew the knife and let it fall to the floor. Reaching out, she took hold of the upper panels, as if opening a pair of shutters. Under her fingers, the wood was rough but fragile. When she drew the panels apart, they slid open like barn doors, guided by an unseen metal track.

  Behind the panels hung a curtain of velvet with an opening cut f
or the eyeholes. Pulling this curtain aside as well, she was met by her reflection in the glass. When her focus shifted, she saw the chamber. A short intervening space was lined with more velvet. At the end of it, four feet away, lay a brick wall with an irregular opening through which the body in the grass was visible.

  Reaching into her pocket, she removed the two shards of porcelain. She set one of the pieces on the floor, keeping it in reserve in case her first attempt failed, then weighed the other shard in her hand. It was no larger than the joint of her thumb, but she knew that it would be enough.

  She remembered what she had once learned in a high school parking lot. Tempered glass was under tremendous pressure. If breached at any point with something small and sufficiently dense, it would shatter cleanly.

  It was not necessary to throw it very hard. Rearing back, she concentrated on a point at the center of the glass, as if aiming for the body’s hairless gash, and tossed the shard smoothly forward.

  The result was astonishing. As soon as it was struck by the porcelain, the glass disintegrated, making a soft tinkle as thousands of fragments, like snow or sleet, rained down to the floor. She was amazed that it had worked so well. Only a few frosty stalactites still hung from the top of the installation. Using her bag like a cudgel, she knocked away the remaining pieces, feeling cold air on her face.

  Maddy went into the chamber, her feet crunching in the glass, and found herself in a cramped space hung with black velvet, like the interior of a photographer’s hood. The air was cool, with an odor of moldering cloth. Turning briefly around, she drew the sliding doors shut behind her, leaving only a narrow gap. As she approached the opening in the wall, she felt a trickle of warmth along her right arm. Looking down, she saw that she had cut her elbow.

  Through the opening in the brick, the dummy lay on the table. Now that she was inside the chamber, rather than looking through the eyeholes, its careful mimesis fell apart. The trees in the background were nothing but ink and paint, with a sheet of blue plywood and some wads of cotton standing in for sky.

  Up close, the figure lying in the grass, rather than a woman’s naked body, seemed like a dismembered doll. It did, in fact, have a head, which was normally hidden by the bricks. The area where the face should have been was covered in a blond wig, as if the head had been twisted brutally around.

  Maddy reached through the opening, which was large enough for her head and shoulders, and took the dummy in her arms. As she lifted it, twigs snapping and breaking, the body came apart in three pieces. The largest piece, the one with the torso, turned out to be a framework covered with calfskin. Another piece consisted of the hand and forearm. The last piece was the left thigh, which detached itself from its socket as she hauled it up from the table.

  Beneath her hands, the dummy was brittle, carefully painted to look like human flesh. When she reached around to where the figure’s back should have been, she found that the armature was hollow, like half of an industrial mold. As she raised it, the head fell backward, nearly spilling off the neck.

  Maddy turned the figure over. When she saw the struts of the underlying framework, which was lined with gray putty over a grid of wire, she was seized by a deepening horror. There was no interior, just half of a shell, with nothing to be found underneath. No secret. No message.

  She ran her hands across the armature, searching frantically for something, anything, that would justify what she had done. After an endless second, her fingers found a lump at the base of the figure’s neck where the spinal column would have been. Something was buried in the putty.

  Maddy pulled the figure through the opening in the wall. She heard something crack as she turned it upright. Taking the box cutter from her pocket, she extended the blade and began to chop at the putty on the neck’s inner surface, her elbow and forearm slick with blood.

  Caught up in the work at hand, she did not notice the shadow that had fallen across the entrance to the chamber. Sharkovsky looked through the gap, seeing the girl’s head outlined against the light. He felt a flicker of regret that he would not have a chance to prolong his retribution, but the feeling passed.

  Raising the gun, he aimed at the back of her head and pulled the trigger. The gunshot was loud in the confined space. A hole appeared in the girl’s skull, light visible through the clean aperture, and she fell forward, dead at once.

  Sharkovsky lowered the gun. He was about to turn away when he realized, belatedly, that instead of the damp explosion of a bullet striking bone, he had heard a dull whump. He had shot the dummy by mistake.

  He raised the gun again. As his vision adjusted to the dim light, he could see Maddy staring at him, the dummy lolling back in her arms, her eyes wide. She opened her mouth to speak.

  “No last words,” Sharkovsky said. He aimed, his finger tensing on the trigger—

  —and then his body convulsed, an electric surge of pain traveling along the highways of his nerves. His hand spasmed, pulling the trigger, the bullet sinking harmlessly into the ceiling. The room tilted like a fairground ride, and then the floor came up to strike him on the side of the face.

  Sharkovsky lay on the carpet, trying to move his arms and legs, his mind caught in useless suspension. He wondered if this was how it felt to die. With an effort that struck him as heroic, he rolled his eyes upward, taking in the shadowy figure standing above him. The shadow let the stun gun drop to the floor, then knelt and pried the vor’s fingers away from the revolver.

  Ilya straightened up, pointing the gun at the man on the ground. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the girl in the chamber was staring at him. Without turning his head, Ilya asked quietly, “Are you all right?”

  Maddy did not reply. A second later, she allowed the body to drop from her hands. She followed it to the floor, slumping against a curtain of velvet, blood streaming from the wound in her elbow.

  Ilya turned back to Sharkovsky, gun still raised. As the old man’s gaze met his own, he sensed that their long story was reaching its conclusion. Faintly, he heard footsteps and shouts.

  Behind him, hands clenched, Maddy forced herself to her feet. Her face was pale, but her eyes remained fixed on his. “Don’t—”

  Ilya glanced at her, surprised, then turned back to Sharkovsky. He aimed the revolver at the vor’s good eye. And then he paused.

  There was more than one kind of balance to consider. If he killed Sharkovsky, the full remembrance of his crimes would die along with him. Memory was a fragile thing. It did not persist beyond the lives of the men involved, which lasted for only a moment. There were other debts, too, that had yet to be paid. And as he felt the girl’s eyes on his face, it occurred to him that there might be another way.

  He lowered the gun. Reaching into the bag at his side, he removed a cardboard tube and placed it in the old man’s arms. Sharkovsky stared up at him, a crust of froth on his lips, his eyes throwing sparks of hatred.

  Ilya was turning away when he saw something on the floor. Recognizing it, he picked it up, the shard strangely heavy in his hand. He closed his fist around it. Then, eyes meeting Maddy’s for one last time, he left the room.

  Outside, the gallery was packed with guards and visitors. At the sight of the gun, they fell back. Looking past their startled faces, Ilya observed that both of the exits were blocked.

  Without pausing, he went to the window that looked out onto the courtyard. He tossed the porcelain shard underhand, as if skipping a stone on a pond. The heavy glass clouded but did not shatter. He shot the window twice, then lunged forward, head down, and plowed through to the other side, falling to the courtyard below. Through the window, a breeze ran through the gallery for the first time in years, carrying with it the sounds of the unseen city.

  59

  When Maddy awoke, her first impression was that she was dreaming. She was draped in what felt like a gossamer dressing gown, loose around the shoulders, the kind that a heroine might wear in a gothic romance. Before her eyes hung a diaphanous curtain, as if she were lyi
ng in a canopy bed. A bracelet encircled her wrist. Off to one side, an unseen object glowed with an unsteady light.

  A moment later, her head cleared, and she saw that what she had taken for a canopy was a translucent sheet strung along a rod next to the bed, that her gown was fastened at the back with twill tape, and that the bracelet around her wrist was a plastic identification tag.

  Someone was seated nearby. It was Powell. He was leaning back in an armless chair, reading a hardcover book. Without the slightest sense of surprise, she saw that it was a biography of Duchamp.

  Maddy sat halfway up, the sheets sliding smoothly beneath her body. The glow to her left turned out to be a rack of medical monitors. A pulse oximeter was clipped to her finger. “Am I under arrest?”

  Powell looked up. “Because of certain extenuating circumstances, the museum won’t be pressing charges. How do you feel?”

  “I’m fine,” Maddy said automatically. A second later, she realized that this statement was true. Her elbow warmly throbbed. Looking down, she saw that the gash in her arm had been sutured and bandaged. At first, she was unable to remember how she had cut herself, and then the memory of what she had done came rushing back. She sank back against her pillow. “Fuck.”

  “Try not to move too much,” Powell said. “You lost consciousness at the museum, partly from shock and blood loss, but also because of some other issues. We need to keep you under observation for a few days.”

  Maddy pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “The man who came after me—”

  “Sharkovsky, you mean? He’s in federal custody. You don’t need to worry about him. The man who saved your life incapacitated him before he escaped. He returned the painting, too. We’re not sure why. As far as we can tell, it’s undamaged. Unlike the installation.”