The Icon Thief (38 page)

“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.”

M
addy 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:
W
ALTER AND
L
OUISE
A
RENSBERG
.

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
M
ARION
B
OULTON
S
TROUD
G
ALLERY
. 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
G
ALERIE
R
ROSE
S
éLAVY
.

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—

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.

Y
ears 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.