The Icon Thief (19 page)

He kissed her in response, his body radiating warmth and youth, although he was only a year younger than she
was. After a few seconds of this, Maddy opened her eyes a crack, peeking through her lashes, and studied his face. Closeness had turned it into the face of a child, a cherub, a boy genius. She rested her chin on his perfect chest. “I think you’re an alien being.”

Ethan looked back at her, his eyes, as always, serene and opaque. “No. Only a robot.” He paused. “So what does this mean?”

“I don’t know,” Maddy said. Running her fingers through the cornsilk of his hair, she slid off the sofa and led him by the hand to the bed. They undressed each other under the covers, not speaking. By some unstated understanding, they did not undress all the way. For now, sleep felt like the greater good.

They lay together in the dark for a long time. When Ethan spoke again, it was with a characteristic lack of self-awareness. “Did Powell ask you if the thief we saw had any tattoos?”

Maddy laughed, pressing her body against his. “Is that the only thing on your mind?”

“It just occurred to me. Powell works for an agency that investigates organized crime. And tattoos make me think of the Russian mob.”

“It’s possible.” She rolled onto her side. “For all we know, it was the Rosicrucians—”

In response, he only draped an arm across her shoulders. Closing her eyes, she found herself being pulled swiftly into sleep, something she would have believed impossible even an hour ago. It was not an ending she could have foreseen, but unlike the rest of the evening’s events, it seemed sweetly, organically right.

When she awoke, sunlight was seeping through the
curtains of the hotel room. Looking at the clock, she found that it was already morning, and realized that she was alone in bed. She straightened up, sheets gathered around her body, and saw that Ethan was seated at the desk, dressed in his undershirt and shorts. He was reading something on his laptop. “What are you doing?”

Ethan stirred, as if he had been deep in thought. “Nothing. It’s something that struck me last night—”

Maddy slid out of bed, goose bumps rising, and padded over to the desk. Placing her hands on his shoulders, she saw that he was looking at an online copy of a scanned book. “What is it?”

“The Rosicrucians.” Ethan took one of her hands absently in his own. “Your friend was right. When we were talking about Duchamp last night, something stuck in my head, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Now I know.” He looked up, his eyes gleaming. “There
is
a connection between Duchamp and the Rosicrucians. A real one. And his name is Walter Arensberg.”

I
n the early morning, as a gray false dawn crept across the rooftops, Ilya moved quietly through the yards of an unfamiliar neighborhood. He was tired and sore, his legs aching from the effort of walking in the dark, which had made it hard to maintain a consistent rhythm. Although he did not know where he was, he estimated that he was no more than five or six miles from the vineyard.

Just before sunrise made it impossible for him to look any further, he found what he was searching for. At every home, he had sought out the gas meter, which was usually mounted to one side of the house. At last, in the backyard of a summer home with a garden and enclosed patio, he saw that a tag had been hung on the meter, indicating that the gas had been turned off.

It was simple matter to break through the rear door onto the patio, and to move from there into the dining room. On the wall by the door, the keypad for an alarm system had been installed, but its liquid crystal display was dead. A flick of a light switch confirmed that the electricity had been disconnected as well.

A winterized house did have its minor inconveniences. Going upstairs to the bathroom, he found that a cross of
masking tape had been laid across the toilet. When he tried the sink, nothing came out of the tap. In the end, he stood in the shower and pissed down the drain.

Looking for a place to wash up, he removed the lid of the toilet tank. He was about to set it on the floor when he paused. Inside the tank, taped just above the filler valve, was a small waterproof bundle. He peeled away the package, shook off the adhering drops, and unwrapped it.

Inside, nestled within two layers of plastic, was a block of cash. Rifling through the bundle, he guessed that it contained upward of fifteen hundred dollars. For a moment, he weighed it in his hands, then stripped away the rest of the plastic and slid the money into his pocket.

As he washed up in the tank, his hands growing numb, he studied himself in the mirror. What he saw was not encouraging. His eyes had a wildness, a feral watchfulness, that he had not seen since prison, and the smooth, faceless surface that he had tried so hard to cultivate was gone.

Glancing down, he saw a spot of blood, no larger than a dime, on the tip of one shoe. It was Zhenya’s. Two points of warmth bloomed on his cheekbones as he reached down and wiped away the smear. The smudge that it left on his finger filled him with renewed resolve.

He spent the following hour scavenging equipment from the house. In the kitchen, he drew a carbon steel knife from the block next to the oven, guarding its tip with a disc of cork from the bulletin board beside the refrigerator. It went into the holster inside his waistband, where it fit snugly. Even better, in the drawer of a nightstand in the upstairs bedroom, he found a rectangular device, no larger than a deck of cards, that lay cold and heavy in his hand. It was an electric stun gun.

As he continued his search, he tried to get a sense of his resources. He had next to nothing. His passports were in Brighton Beach. Without proper identification, it would be hard to travel or find a place to stay.

He needed information as well. If Vasylenko wanted him dead, then the entire
bratva
could be compromised. Before anything else, he had to find out how deep the poison went, and if there was anyone left to be trusted.

Ilya glanced at the package that he had propped against the bedroom wall. Here, at least, was a source of leverage. For a moment, he thought about stashing it nearby, perhaps in this very house. Then he decided that he would need to keep the painting close, and that he was not going to remain here for long.

From a set of luggage in the bedroom closet, he took a rolling suitcase that was large enough to hold the painting. He was about to leave when, passing through the kitchen, his eye happened to fall on the phone on the counter. On an impulse, he put it to his ear and heard a dial tone.

Ilya stood there for a moment, the suitcase in one hand, the phone in the other. He did not want to make this call, at least not yet. Before he could bring himself to put down the receiver, however, he had already dialed. After three rings, a fatherly voice answered the phone, roughened by vodka and cigarettes: “Yes?”

Ilya felt his heartbeat kick into a higher tempo. He set the suitcase down. “It’s me.”

There was a pause. “Ilya,” Vasylenko finally said, his tone guarded. “I never expected to hear from you again.”

“I know.” Ilya groped forward one word at a time. “You wanted me dead. Why?”

“Because you failed me in Budapest. That painting was important in ways that you couldn’t begin to imagine. There were other reasons, to be sure, but that one alone should suffice.”

Ilya closed his eyes. “Sharkovsky told me that you’re working for the Chekists. That you betrayed the oath you swore—”

“The only oath that counts is the one a man swears to himself,” Vasylenko said. “I don’t expect you to understand my reasons, but before you judge me too harshly, I would advise you to look closely at your own life. For all your talk of righteousness, you are still a man who can do nothing but kill.”

Ilya, thinking of the dog in its plastic carrier, pushed the memory away. “Which gives you all the more reason to fear me.”

“I have no doubt that you could hurt us. Given your nature, I would expect nothing less. But consider this. Not even a Scythian can survive on his own. These men will find you and kill you. Right now, I’m the only one you can trust, because you have something I want. Now tell me where you are.”

Ilya saw the world go red, like the smudge that had been left on his forefinger. When it cleared, he spoke carefully. “This is the last time that you will ever hear my voice. Tell Sharkovsky that I’m coming.”

Hanging up, he pulled the phone out of its jack. Sharkovsky, he reflected, might not know all the answers, but he would, at least, know some of them. From his pocket, Ilya withdrew the stun gun, his thoughts already turning to how it might be used. Then he slipped it into his suitcase and left the house.

“Y
ou know who Walter Arensberg was,” Ethan said, angling his laptop so that she could see the screen. “A renowned art collector and the most important patron of Duchamp during his lifetime.”

“I know,” Maddy said, standing behind the chair in which Ethan was seated. “He bought most of Duchamp’s major works, then left his collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But I don’t see why this matters.”

“It matters because Arensberg was obsessed with the Rosicrucians.” Ethan pointed to his browser. “He was convinced that Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, was the true author of the works of Shakespeare, and spent years looking for coded messages in the plays. He also claimed that Bacon was the founder of the Rosicrucians, and that his grave was the real tomb of Christian Rosencreutz.”

Maddy wanted to wrap her arms around Ethan’s smooth chest, but something held her back. “Was he crazy?”

Ethan scrolled to the next page. “Well, let’s see. He claims to have discovered the location of the tomb, based on the shape of some gravel on the floor of Lichfield
Cathedral. He notes that two of the pebbles look like a vulva, a symbol for the philosopher’s stone. Later, he finds that the gravel has been removed, which he takes as evidence of a massive cover-up.”

Maddy wasn’t sure what to say. “And what does this have to do with Duchamp?”

“Everything. An artist is always influenced by his patron’s obsessions. Look here.”

Ethan opened a web page in his browser’s recent history. On the screen, Maddy saw a photo of one of Duchamp’s earliest readymades, a ball of twine sandwiched between two metal plates. “I’ve seen this work before,” Maddy said. “Arensberg put something inside the ball without telling Duchamp what it was—”

“And here, on the plates, Duchamp inscribed a coded message with missing letters, a reference to Arensberg’s interest in Shakespearian cryptography. But the most important thing about this piece is the day it was made.”

Maddy read off the date in the caption under the photo. “April 23, 1916. Which is—”

“Easter Sunday. And three hundred years to the day after the death of Shakespeare.”

Maddy was surprised by this sudden eagerness, which seemed even less explicable in light of his earlier skepticism. She was on the verge of asking him about this when a musical tone sounded from across the room. Going to her purse, Maddy took out her phone. “It’s Reynard.”

When he heard this, Ethan’s enthusiasm seemed to wither. “You’d better take it.”

The phone rang again. Maddy thought about letting it go to voicemail, but in the end, she answered it. When
Reynard spoke, there was a hollowness to his voice that she had never heard before. “Are you in Southampton?”

Maddy shut her eyes. She had been dreading this moment. “Yes. I’m with Ethan.”

“I want both of you in the office right now,” Reynard said. “I know it’s the weekend, but I need you here anyway. I assume that you’ve seen the story that came out this morning—”

Maddy glanced at Ethan, who was watching her intently. “No, I haven’t seen it.”

Reynard read off the name of an influential art website. “It’s bad, and it’s only going to get worse. But I’m sure you knew that already.”

He hung up. Maddy, feeling Ethan’s eyes on her face, went to the laptop and typed in a web address. When the page loaded, the lead headline and the name of the author came as a blow to the gut. They read the story together. After they had reached the end, Maddy looked at Ethan. “We’re fucked.”

“Yeah, I know.” He rose from the chair. “Come on. We’ve got a long drive home.”

As they hurriedly dressed and checked out of the hotel, Maddy kept her distance. She did not speak again until they were driving west on the Montauk Highway. “This isn’t going to end until they find that painting.”

“If they ever do.” Ethan looked out at the road. “I still can’t see why the thief went for that particular work. I know something about these guys. Aivazovsky is more their style. Why the fuck would they care about Duchamp?”

“They care because it was worth eleven million dollars. It isn’t so complicated.”

“It might be more complicated than you think,” Ethan said. “I’m not sure how much you know about our pricing system, but it’s what you call a multifactor model. The price of a work of art is a function of a set of variables, including size, provenance, and sale history. Feed in the right variables, and it spits out a range of prices. For this painting, the range was between three and seven million.”

Maddy’s background in computational finance was less than extensive, but the underlying point was clear enough. “Which means that eleven million is way outside the expected range.”

“Exactly. It’s crazy. There’s no good explanation, unless—” Ethan hesitated. “Unless we failed to account for some important variable. Ever since the auction, I’ve been trying to figure out what factor might be missing, and a strong possibility occurred to me this morning. It’s the occult factor.”

She searched his face for irony, but saw that he was serious. “That’s hard to believe.”

“But it isn’t unprecedented. At the turn of the century, occult societies commissioned art based on Rosicrucian principles. These commissions were a source of demand, which drove prices. What if this demand still exists? Maybe it’s underground, and collectors say they’re buying art as an investment when, in fact, they’re driven by other factors. And if this demand is strong enough for certain works, it might be enough to upset our pricing model.”