The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (34 page)

Raymond-la-Science Callemin proved he deserved his nickname by declaring that his last wish was to have his body turned over to the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris. That was done. Bertillon’s father and the Society for Mutual Autopsy would have approved.

8

THE THIEF

A
year after the
Mona Lisa
vanished, the officials of the Louvre were forced to confront the unthinkable: that she would never return. The blank space on the wall of the Salon Carré had been filled with a colored reproduction of the painting. But that had begun to fade and curl, and people now averted their eyes as they passed it, as if to avoid the reminder of a tragic death.

So one day when the doors to the museum opened, patrons discovered another painting hanging there: also a portrait, but this one of a man,
Baldassarre Castiglione,
by Raphael. Though Raphael, a few years younger than Leonardo, had learned from studying the older man’s work, this portrait is markedly different in spirit from
La Joconde.
The sitter is somber, even tired; he looks as if he has not smiled in a long time. Raphael’s masterpiece may have reflected the feeling of the curators that even though the space on the wall was now filled, there would be a hole in the museum’s soul forever.

i

But was the
Mona Lisa
truly gone for good? Occasionally, stories appeared about sightings of the famous painting. James Duveen, the nephew of Henry J. Duveen, one of London’s leading art dealers, later related that his uncle actually had a chance to buy the
Mona Lisa.
The elder Duveen was convinced that the offer was genuine, a hunch that later proved correct.

One morning, Henry J. Duveen was in the Bond Street showrooms… when he heard a man arguing with an assistant.

“I won’t go away,” the fellow was saying. “I’ve come to see the head of the firm, and see him I will.”

The man was creating something of a scene, so my uncle went over.

“What is the trouble?” he asked.

“I must see you alone and at once. It is a very important matter.”

Henry J. Duveen, not liking the look of the man, did not take him to his private office but to the far side of the large entrance gallery.

“Well?”

“Will you give me your word of honor that you will never reveal what I am going to tell you?”

My uncle began to think the seedy-looking foreigner was mad and tried to humor him.

“Of course; of course,” he murmured.

“If you don’t,” snarled the Italian, “I and my friends will know how to deal with you. You’d better be careful! Now listen; I have the Gioconda here in London. Will you buy it?”

My uncle stared at him open-mouthed. It was too incredible a thing to grasp all at once. That this anarchistic-looking fellow should —

“Well, what do you say? What’s the figure you’ll give me?”

Henry J. Duveen suddenly realized that the man was not mad. His brain worked like lightning. He took the only way out: he burst out laughing as though he thought the whole thing was a hoax, and walked away. As my uncle said to me afterwards: “I believed the fellow all right; he had nothing to gain by lying; but I would sooner have gone around with a stick of dynamite in my pocket for the rest of my life than have had any knowledge of that affair!”
¹

ii

Another dealer proved not to be so cautious. Alfredo Geri, owner of the Galleria Borgognissanti in Florence, Italy, was an active dealer in art and antiques. He often placed advertisements in newspapers in several European cities, including Paris, offering to buy old works of art. But he could hardly have imagined what he would be offered in a letter he received in November 1913. The sender, who signed himself “Leonard,” claimed to have the
Mona Lisa
in his possession.

At first, Geri thought his correspondent was a crackpot or a hoaxer. But Leonard said he was an Italian who had been “suddenly seized with the desire to return to his country at least one of the many treasures which, especially in the Napoleonic era, had been stolen from Italy.”
²
He also mentioned that although he was not setting a specific price, he himself was not a wealthy man and would not refuse compensation if his native country were to reward him.

That struck a note in Geri’s heart. He glanced at the return address on the envelope: a post office box in Paris. Probably, Geri thought, the painting had long ago been spirited out of Paris, but just suppose… Though Geri was a businessman, he was also a collector, and collectors always live with the hope of finding a treasure among the trash.

Geri took the letter to the most knowledgeable art expert in Florence: Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi Gallery. (Within the Uffizi’s collection was a genuine Leonardo:
The Adoration of the Magi.
) Poggi thought following up on the offer was worth a try, but suggested Geri should demand that Leonard bring the painting to Florence, where Poggi could inspect it. Poggi had a document from the Louvre that detailed certain marks that were on the back of the original panel; no forger could be aware of these.

Geri did as Poggi suggested, but Leonard proved to be an elusive figure. More than once, he set a date for his arrival in Florence, and then sent a letter canceling the meeting. Geri assumed that he was a hoaxer after all, until on December 9 he received a telegram saying that Leonard was in Milan and would be in Florence on the following day.

That was inconvenient, for Poggi had gone on a trip to Bologna. Geri sent him an urgent telegram, using oblique language in case someone else should read it:
“OUR PARTY COMING FROM MILAN WILL BE HERE WITH OBJECT TOMORROW. NEED YOU HERE. PLEASE RESPOND. GERI.”
³
Poggi wired back that he could not arrive by the following day, but would be in Florence the day after that, a Thursday.

Geri prepared to stall. He was well aware that many people had claimed to have, or to know who had, the
Mona Lisa,
and that all these claims had been dead ends. But somehow he had a hunch that Leonard was different. Accordingly, when a thin young man wearing a suit and tie and sporting a handsome mustache arrived at the dealer’s gallery the next day, Geri showed him into his office and pulled down the blinds, emphasizing the secret nature of the conversation.

Eagerly — perhaps too much so — Geri asked where the painting was. Leonard replied that it was in the hotel where he was staying. Perhaps because he could not believe that someone would leave such a valuable object in a hotel room, Geri showed him a photographic reproduction of the
Mona Lisa
and asked if this was the painting.

Leonard nodded, with a quizzical look. Didn’t everyone know what the
Mona Lisa
looked like?

Geri pressed him further. The original, he asked. You have the original?

According to Geri’s account, Leonard replied, “I repeat: we are dealing with the real Gioconda. I have good reason to be sure.”
⁴
Leonard coolly declared that he was certain because he had taken the painting from the Louvre himself. He then gave an abbreviated account of the theft. Interestingly, some of his details were different from those known by the French police to be true. He said, for example, that he had entered the museum on Monday morning with other workers. If that were true, he would have been stopped, for everyone going in was checked against a list; moreover the police had found evidence that someone had stayed overnight in a storage closet from Sunday to the morning of the theft.

Geri was not aware of these discrepancies, but he was curious about one thing. Had Leonard been alone when he stole the painting? he asked. Leonard “was not too clear on that point. He seemed to say yes, but didn’t quite do so [but his answer was] more ‘yes’ than ‘no.’”
⁵

Eventually the discussion got down to the reward — though here the two men differed in their later accounts. Leonard claimed, “When I came to Florence and was in Geri’s presence, these were my exact words: ‘I want nothing; I set no price on the restitution I am making to Italy.…’ Then Geri said to me, ‘We’ll do things in such a way as to make us all content.’”
⁶

Geri, on the other hand, said that when he asked Leonard what kind of reward he had in mind, the thief boldly answered 500,000 lire. That was the equivalent of $100,000 and quite a fortune in those days, though of course the painting itself was valued far higher. Geri, holding his breath, thought that he had better agree, so he said, “That’s fine. That’s not too high.”
⁷
The important thing was to recover the painting, and he would promise Leonard the sun and the moon if he had to.

Naturally, Geri was eager to see the painting, but he feared he would not be able to determine whether it was genuine without Poggi’s help, so he asked Leonard to return the following day at three o’clock. Geri showed the man out, tempted to follow him, not knowing if he would ever see him again.

The next afternoon, with Poggi present, Geri grew anxious when Leonard did not show up at the appointed time. Had he been frightened off by something? The minutes went by and finally the doorbell rang. There stood Leonard, a quarter of an hour late on an errand that could bring him half a million lire!

Geri introduced Poggi, and to his relief, the two men “shook hands enthusiastically, Leonard saying how glad he was to be able to shake the hand of the man to whom was entrusted the artistic patrimony of Florence.”
⁸
As the three of them left the gallery, “Poggi and I were nervous,” Geri recalled. “Leonard, by contrast, seemed indifferent.”
⁹

Leonard took them to the Hotel Tripoli-Italia on the Via de’ Panzani, only a few blocks from the Duomo, the magnificent basilica whose dome had towered over the city even before Leonardo da Vinci lived there. Leonard’s small room was on the third floor. Inside, he took from under the bed a small trunk made of white wood. When he opened the lid, Geri was dismayed: it was filled with “wretched objects: broken shoes, a mangled hat, a pair of pliers, plastering tools, a smock, some paint brushes, and even a mandolin.”
¹⁰
Calmly, Leonard removed the items one by one and tossed them onto the floor. Surely, Geri thought, this was not where the
Mona Lisa
had been hidden for the past twenty-seven months. He peered inside but saw nothing more.

Then Leonard lifted what had seemed to be the bottom of the trunk. Underneath was an object wrapped in red silk. Geri held his breath as Leonard took it to the bed and removed the covering. “To our astonished eyes,” Geri recalled, “the divine Gioconda appeared, intact and marvelously preserved. We took it to the window to compare it with a photograph we had brought with us. Poggi examined it and there was no doubt that the painting was authentic. The Louvre’s catalogue number and stamp on the back of it matched with the photograph.”
¹¹