Vanished Smile (2 page)

No magical skyline emerged through the lavender mist. The year was 1911, before the vertical city was invented. The steel and glass skyscrapers would come later, once Otis's new mechanical lift was accepted as something more than a risky contraption.

With a tip of his homburg to the ladies gathered on the first-class deck, the marques slipped through the crowd, hastening without seeming to. Impatience makes fools of clever men, and he was careful never to convey the impression of a man in a hurry. In his work, patience and precision were paramount, and he had perfected both virtues, although he was not a virtuous man.

His passport, which had been issued in Argentina, identified him as Eduardo de Valfierno. Although he had used a dozen of the more common Spanish names, this was the alias that
clung. The surname had been conferred by a caustic acquaintance. The title was his own addition. In his passport, every page was stamped with visas, indicating that he was both a man of the world and never long in a single place. The contents of his luggage indicated his occupation.

The marques passed through New York customs, declaring that he had in his possession one Mona Lisa, and went directly downtown. The
Mauritania
was his sixth Atlantic crossing in a year, and on each trip, he had carried a Mona Lisa in his Vuitton luggage. He aroused no suspicion. New mechanical methods of printing were making reproductions ubiquitous, and increasingly, travelers were returning from the Grand Tour with copies of masterworks.

If the customs inspectors had been better versed in the traffic of art or the marques less imposing in his demeanor and dress, he might not have sailed through with such ease, because the Mona Lisa he carried was a wood panel apparently of great age, not a painting on canvas.

From the rolled brim of his homburg to the tips of his gray doeskin gloves, the Marques de Valfierno appeared to be a gentleman of means and refinement. An imperial bearing and courtly manners gave him a distinction that opened palace gates in Europe and made him an Honoréd guest in the nouveau-riche mansions going up along Fifth Avenue. Envious colleagues groused that “his front was worth a million dollars.”

By the time the marques reached the financial district, a commotion of horse-drawn hansom cabs, milk wagons, peddlers’ carts, motorized cars from the R. E. Olds Company in Detroit, new Model T Fords, and the first “autostages” with seats for a dozen riders clogged the cobblestone streets. Carrying the Vuitton case, the marques entered the stony sanctuary of a downtown bank. The space was as cavernous as a basilica,
the atmosphere hushed. Vaulted ceilings and marble floors bespoke an architecture chosen to inspire faith that capital would be closely guarded and investors’ secrets held fast.

In the privacy of a windowless room in a safe-deposit vault, he opened the case, removed the painting, and with extreme care, placed it beside five others. Each was a flawless fake—an exact and brilliant forgery.

That evening the Marques de Valfierno—in translation, “the Marquis of the Gate of Hell”—would dress in white tie and tails and linger over brandy in a private dining room set with white damask, crystal candelabra, and vases of calla lilies. His dinner companion would be a man of substance. Clouded in curls of cigar smoke and eased by the finest wines and champagne, the marques would make his irresistible pitch.

The scheme itself was a work of art. He would offer, for a kingly price, the most coveted woman in the world. He would confide that his was a rare offer, extended only to the six wealthiest, most discerning men, each a renowned collector of priceless art and beautiful objects. The offer would never be repeated. Whichever man placed the highest bid would win. Although, as a point of honor, he could not be more specific, in the course of the conversation, certain names were mentioned—Morgan, Mellon, Carnegie, Huntington, Altman.

In the eighteenth century, the English were the “barbarians [who were] buying up everything.”
^∗1
Now it was the Americans’ turn. Freshly minted millionaires were sweeping across Europe, amassing art with the same lack of scruples that they had amassed fortunes, forming many of the great collections (Frick, Morgan, Carnegie, Mellon, Widener, and Huntington, whose wife described him as “scrupulously dishonest”). For
continental conmen like the marques, separating American magnates from their millions had become an art form and lucrative profession. Sharks at home, the Americans were innocents abroad—irresistible targets for every kind of scam. None was more clever or daring than the Mona Lisa caper.

1911 was a year of grand escapades. In the boatyards of Liverpool, a magnificent new ocean liner was under construction. Its builders boasted that it would be “unsinkable.” In Antarctica, Captain Robert Falcon Scott was trudging across the frozen plateau to the South Pole, the Union Jack folded in his pack, dreaming of making history, and in Paris, a plan was brewing to pinch the most famous painting in the world. Of these three grand escapades, the first seemed assured of success, the second likely, and the third not only improbable but impossible.

SUNDAY IN THE LOUVRE WITH LISA
. Another scorching day in Paris, ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit, no hint of a breeze, no hope of a shower. The air was close, the sun so blazing that even the carriage horses were wearing straw hats. For more than fifty days, temperatures had rarely dropped below ninety degrees. The country beyond Paris was burning. Thatch-roofed farmhouses and acres of parched forest had become tinder, and spontaneous-combustion fires broke out near Poitiers, Orleans, and Beaumont, Albertville, Dijon, and Fontainebleau.

Within the galleries of the Louvre Museum, even in the late afternoon of August 20, the heat was a physical presence so overwhelming that it trivialized four thousand years of art and
history. Maximilien Alphonse Paupardin slumped on his stool in the doorway of the Salon Carré, as sated and overstuffed as a Rembrandt burgher. He was weighed down by the weather and by an unseasonable midday meal. In everything except name, Paupardin was a simple man who felt elevated in a uniform—first in an army uniform and now in the costume of a Louvre guard. A uniform gave him stature, confidence, a defined place in the world. Out of uniform, he felt diminished.

He was ignorant of the history that surrounded him. He knew nothing of the medieval knights in suits of mail who had staved off Anglo-Norman invaders from the parapets of Fortress Louvre or the lusty young kings, Frangois I and Louis XIV, a Valois and a Bourbon respectively, who, imagining Paris as a new Rome, had turned the Louvre fortress into a palace fit for a Caesar. Paupardin knew only one emperor, the cocky little Corsican and epic pillager, Napoleon Bonaparte.

On an average day, several hundred visitors would traipse through the galleries—students, artists, foreign travelers, and Frenchmen from the provinces—but visitors were few on this Sunday afternoon at the end of summer. An occasional tourist had wandered through from the Grande Galerie, not staying long enough to arouse the guard's interest or register in his memory. He stirred on his stool, his nap arrested.

Had a ripple of gas disturbed him, his midday meal returning? Did he catch a sudden whiff of oleander or hear an alien sound? He raised an eyelid. Three “macaroni” were whispering together. The old guard glanced at them with disdain. They were dressed in their Sunday best, black suits and straw boaters, but no suit could disguise what they were—young working-class men who had immigrated to Paris from the mountain towns of northern Italy looking for work and, more often than not, finding trouble.

There was one other visitor. The boy had returned with
flowers. A young Goethe enamored of all things Italian. The guard recognized him, a quintessential German, hair flaxen, eyes ice blue, warmed now by the lust to possess the dark lady. He mooned over her, gazing into her liquid eyes, and she seemed to answer. Eyes are the mirror of the soul, her creator, Leonardo da Vinci, believed.

Men had been coming to court her for years, bearing flowers, notes, and poems that Paupardin scooped up and tossed out at the end of the day. She accepted their attentions democratically but gave nothing in return, just the same half-smile. She conferred it on all equally. A promise, a tease, a warning. No man could be sure. The lovesick boy would return the next day and the day after.

Like rival lovers paying suit, the three olive-skinned men watched the German. Bemused? Mocking? Wary? Their faces gleamed as if in rapture, features shining and dissolving in a heat so oppressive that, if
The Victory of Samothrace
were sculpted of wax, it would dissolve like the wings of Icarus. The flowers the boy proffered were already wilting.

Paupardin saw the visitors without seeing them, as he saw the paintings without seeing them, the masterpieces of the Louvre collection, each in its place, unchanged for decades. He was anticipating the next day, Monday, his day of rest, when the museum was closed for cleaning and the staff reduced.

The old guard pulled a soiled handkerchief from his pocket to mop his face, and caught her watching him. She was smiling as if she knew he had overindulged at noon and dozed on the job. It was the disconcerting smile of a mother or a mistress. He wiped his face to blot her out and sighed with resignation.

There were no youngsters among the custodians who guarded the patrimony of France. Age and lethargy were job requirements. Only retired noncommissioned officers of the French army could apply to be guards at the Musée du
Louvre. The country they had served allowed them one final tour of duty before relegating them to permanent pasture and probable penury. This was their last shuffle, and ambitions rarely if ever strayed beyond a good meal, an afternoon nap, or perhaps a few moments with a grandchild.

The guard shifted his substantial weight on the insubstantial stool and repressed a belch, regretting his choice of cassoulet, a dinner suitable for a winter Sunday, not the doldrums of August. The afternoon meandered in half-time. By four o'clock, when the bell clanged signaling the museum's closing, the “macaroni” and the young Goethe had disappeared.

Paupardin picked up the oleander and folded his stool. The Grande and Petite Galeries emptied, footsteps echoing, the many doors banging shut. Outside the Louvre, Paris shimmered in the glaze of heat. In the Tuileries Gardens just beyond, a halfhearted game of boule was ending.

Summer is not a popular season in Paris. Average August temperatures chase rich and poor to the vineyards of the Loire valley and the cooling beaches of Normandy. This August was the worst that Parisians forced by one circumstance or another to remain in town could remember in a dozen years. The heat wave had hung on for weeks. Less than one millimeter of rain had fallen in Paris during the entire month, and in a single day, four people had collapsed with sunstroke. At six o'clock, it was still ninety-one degrees. The cafés of Pigalle were deserted. The Seine stood still. Along its banks, the sheltering plane trees and chestnut trees drooped.

Night like liquid velvet settled over the mansard roofs, innocent, if a night is ever innocent. A night is young but never innocent, and as Sunday merged with Monday and the city awakened to a new day, the game that would stun Paris and astound the world was afoot.

No one would notice for more than twenty-four hours.

THE FIRST GULP
or Tuesday, August 22, was as unsurprising as a glass
oivin ordinaire
. Water carts washed the cobbled streets. Workers in blue overalls swept the quais with faggot brooms. Under the girders and skylights at Les Halles, what Emile Zola called the belly of Paris, horses and workers performed the morning ballet, mongers shouting their products and prices through the central market. The bells of nearby St-Eustache tolled.

Louis Béroud followed the narrow Seine channel along Quai Saint-Michel. At the point where the Boulevard Saint-Michel disgorged, he crossed and continued along the Quai des Grands Augustins, perhaps stopping to look at the steeple of Sainte-Chapelle rising out of the cluster of government buildings that comprise the judicial heart of Paris, housing courtrooms, jail cells, and the office of the chief of the Paris police. Béroud may have stood once in the upper chapel, with sunlight fiery through the finest glass in Paris, and thought of God. The river was languid, the water level so low that the color had concentrated to a murky ocher. He decided not to cross at Pont Neuf, still called the “new bridge” though now it was the oldest in Paris, and he continued on to the Pont des Arts.

Paris saunters through history in the present tense, neither extolling its past nor rushing to embrace its future. If the analogy were extended to other capitals, Athens would exist in the past perfect, Rome in the past imperfect, New York in the future imperative. Perhaps because Paris was never the seat of empire, never the center of the world like Athens and Rome, its past is not preserved as a glorious ruin but incorporated into the present. At the same time, a bedrock conservatism
prevents the avant-garde from being quickly accepted and instantly absorbed. New York, where nothing remains new for long, is a work in progress, a process as much as a place. There the new is seized and swallowed whole. But Paris responds to change with the caginess of a concierge, acutely curious yet deeply suspicious.

Louis Béroud belonged to a formal world that was passing with the Belle Époque. He was a fine-looking man in his mid-fifties, with strong, regular features and an abundance of white wavy hair. Béroud dressed conservatively in a black frock coat and striped trousers. His ideas were as traditional as his dress.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, there were as many “isms” in painting as there were in politics. Impressionism, as shocking as a glimpse of stocking not so long ago, now appeared tame enough for the parlor wall, and one artistic “ism” eclipsed the next in a dizzying rush to modernity—fauvism, symbolism, primitivism, and now cubism. (Surrealism and Dadaism would come later, like exclamation points after the folly of a war to end all war.)