The Icon Thief (37 page)

On the other side of the bridge, however, as she neared the string of museums that ran along the parkway, this argument seemed less tenable. She averted her eyes from the windows she passed, afraid that they would reveal that she had gone mad, and it was only belatedly that she noticed, waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change, that she was standing in front of a hardware store.

She went inside. Passing a glass display case, she saw,
to her surprise, that she didn’t look half bad. The bruises on her face had faded, and her eyes no longer had that haunted look. If she had seen a hint of insanity, she might have turned back, but this glimpse of her old self was enough to keep her going.

Picking up a basket, she wandered through the store, pulling objects off the shelves at random. A canvas bag came first, followed by a hammer, a putty knife, a painter’s apron, and a set of box cutters. As she drifted down the aisles, she told herself that she was buying these things only as a precaution, in case the installation did not give up its secrets at once. She was going to the museum only to look.

And in any case, she said silently to herself, there was no harm in being prepared.

The obvious way inside was through the wooden door itself. Duchamp had bought the door in a small town near Cadaqués, and the double doors had been sawn in half, resulting in four panels that were roughly the same size. These panels were secured together at the back with thin strips of wood, and were hung on a metal track, allowing them to be slid apart so pictures could be taken of the interior.

As she took her purchases to the cashier, however, she was bothered by another recollection. The components of the installation were very fragile, grass and wire and calfskin, and required their own microclimate to keep them from deteriorating further. Therefore, at some point, contrary to Duchamp’s intentions, the tableau behind the doors had been protected by a glass panel.

Remembering this, she felt a renewed sense of despair. It would be all but impossible to get past the glass. Even
if she managed to do it without killing herself, the noise would bring the guards within seconds.

The clerk rang up her purchases one by one. “Anything else I can help you find?”

She was about to shake her head, her thoughts elsewhere, when she noticed a package hanging on the wall behind the cash register. It was a blister pack of four porcelain spark plugs. Looking at it, she recalled a piece of lore from her delinquent adolescence. “Can I get those spark plugs, please?”

“Sure.” The clerk took down the spark plugs and added them to her order. “Thirty-four dollars and eighteen cents.”

She gave him two twenties, which represented all of her remaining cash. Declining a bag, she pushed the tools into the canvas tote, laying the apron on top to hide the rest, and left the store with change in hand.

Feeling adequately equipped, she headed for the museum. As she walked along the parkway, she found that she had no conception of what would happen when she was facing the installation at last. It was easy to envision the steps leading up to that moment, but when she got to the point of standing before the wooden door itself, the screen in her head went blank.

Crossing the oval, she reached the steps of the museum. As always, tourists were running up the steps and posing alongside the statue of the boxer that had been erected on the sidewalk. Maddy was feeling less than triumphant, so she merely trudged upward, the tote bag bouncing lightly against her thigh.

When she had reached the top of the steps, she paused, looking out at the museum’s Greek Revival façade. Its
three wings formed a bracket shape, one directly before her, the others to either side.

She stood there for a full minute, watching visitors ascend the second flight of steps that led to the main entrance. Looking around the courtyard, trying to defer the moment when she would need to pass through those doors herself, she saw that the layout of the museum was perfectly symmetrical. The east and west wings mirrored each other exactly, with a sense of balance that was rigorously enforced.

A second later, she observed that this was not precisely true. There was, it seemed, a single asymmetrical element. Off to her right, at the center of the eastern portico, a window the size of an ordinary door had been set among the pillars, looking into one of the galleries on the lowest level. When she looked at the wing to her left, she saw that there was no corresponding window on the other side.

Looking at the anomalous window more closely, she took a sharp breath. Through the opening, she saw a vertical pane of glass divided by a horizontal strut, with faint images picked out on its surface. It was
The Large Glass
. The window opened on the room devoted to Duchamp.

She continued to look through the window, which was the only one that opened onto any of the galleries, convinced there was a message here that she was supposed to see. The gallery had been placed at the exact center of the eastern portico, and for reasons that she could not begin to imagine, a window had been installed there, and only there, disrupting the symmetry of the larger museum.

In the end, she tore herself away from the window and
forced herself to mount the main steps. Passing between the pillars, she paused briefly at the entrance. In the glass of the doors, she could see her reflection outlined against the afternoon sky. Although it was hard for her to make out the features of her face, she did not think that she looked like a lunatic.

She pushed open the door and went into the foyer. Behind her, the door swung shut. For a moment, except for the distant sounds of visitors in the courtyard, the space at the top of the steps was silent.

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.

“T
hanks 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
R
OSENBERG
B
ORDEAUX
.

“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.”