Vanished Smile (25 page)

The marques swirled his cognac, savoring the bouquet and the memory.

“Everybody tried to make it easy for us. What helped us was as much dumbness as luck.” Within the hour, Peruggia reported to the marques's headquarters on the Left Bank. Valfierno said, “We gave ourselves up to a quality of hilarious enjoyment. The big job was finished, the great coup had been pulled off. The most magnificent single theft in the history of the world had been accomplished, and we were proud and happy.”

Valfierno and Chaudron celebrated at a lavish dinner, wining and dining through the night. The American buyers had been told to read the newspaper on Tuesday, August 22. Although he had lined them up months before, the marques had been cagey. He had left the transactions open—no palms crossed, no contracts sealed, no irrevocable commitments made until the identity of the art for sale was emblazoned on the front page of every newspaper in New York and Paris.

The triumphant pair waited for the first editions of the morning papers. They expected the missing Mona Lisa to fill the headlines. Instead, Paris greeted her disappearance with a stunning silence. There was no picture, no word. There wasn't even a white lie noting that she had been removed for cleaning.

Neither Valfierno nor Chaudron had gone anywhere near
the museum, not even venturing across the Seine for two days. They had perfect alibis for Sunday and Monday. Suspecting a double cross, they stormed to Peruggia's apartment and roused him rudely from his bed. At first, dazed and confused, then angry and defensive, Peruggia opened a closet, took out a white wooden box, unwrapped a red cloth, and there she was. Chaudron, stunned by the true art, picked up Mona Lisa and held her like a man transfixed. The marques had imagined every possible scenario except the actual one. No one at the Louvre had noticed that Mona Lisa was missing.

He and Chaudron passed a second anxious day. That evening,
Le Temps
published an extra edition with the news, and on Wednesday, August 23, 1911, banner headlines in papers around the world announced that the unimaginable had occurred. A front-page article in
The New York Times
reported:

Once the story broke, the sting moved swiftly. The marques contacted each expectant buyer and arranged the deliveries. Reliving his greatest moment, he could not repress his delight.

“Chaudron almost died of joy and pride when he learned the prices his work had brought,” he told Decker.

The forgeries sold quickly, netting the equivalent of $90 million, and the conspirators kept the prize. The partners left the true Leonardo hidden in Peruggia's apartment, divided the money, and disappeared from Paris. After so many successful years together, mastermind and forger went their separate ways. Yves Chaudron retired to a country chateau outside Paris, occasionally doing a little work to keep from growing rusty, and Valfierno moved on to the next opportunity.

“We would have returned the painting voluntarily to the Louvre in due time,” he told Decker, “had not a minor member of the cast idiotically run away with it. To his elementary mind, it followed that the painting must be the prize.”

The marques dismissed the ensuing imbroglio as a farce caused by stupidity and greed. He never really cared what became of Mona Lisa as long as she remained lost for a reasonable time. She was much too hot to handle, he said, and any attempt to sell her would have meant immediate arrest. Even an obvious copy would have attracted attention. But Peruggia never understood that Mona Lisa herself was not for sale. Although he had been paid handsomely for his role, Peruggia gambled away the money on the Riviera and soon was looking for more. He had Mona Lisa secured in the false-bottomed case that he had built himself to her exact measurements, but he had no idea how to dispose of her until he saw Alfredo Geri's ad.

The muezzin was chanting the sunset call to prayer in the minaret of the mosque when Eduardo de Valfierno finished his story. The terrace had grown cold. The marques drained the last drop of cognac and, with a farewell salute to the American, disappeared into the evening crowd of Arab shopkeepers, French Foreign Legionnaires, and Spanish dockworkers in Morocco's darkening alleys.

THE
SATURDAY EVENING POST
The Karl Decker story featured in the June 25, 1932, issue of the
Saturday
Evening Post
was a perfect story, but was it the true story? (Courtesy of the General Research Division, The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)

EIGHTEEN YEARS LATER
, on June 25, 1932, Karl Decker broke the story. In an exclusive article in the
Saturday Evening Post
headlined
WHY AND HOW THE MONA LISA WAS STOLEN
, he revealed the confession of the late Marques Eduardo de Valfierno. Decker's tale of a suave international scam artist executing a brilliant sting and then making his stunning confession is a romantic adventure, far more satisfying than Vincenzo Peruggia's quixotic myth.

It made a perfect story, but was it the true story?

Whether the Marques Eduardo de Valfierno was a reliable source is certainly questionable. Whether he even existed is equally dubious. Since Decker never revealed the marques's true name or offered any corroborating evidence, nothing can be verified.

As with Mona Lisa herself, very little is certain about the case. To separate indisputable facts from fancy: The person who removed Mona Lisa from her frames on Monday, August 21, 1911, in a back stairway of the Louvre Museum was Vincenzo Peruggia, the Italian-born glazier who had helped to build a glass-enclosed frame for the painting. There is no question that Peruggia performed the actual theft. He left his calling card. The left thumbprint on the frame was his, and examinations by French and Italian experts proved beyond a
reasonable doubt that the Mona Lisa he returned was the same painting that he stole. Beyond that are only questions.

The long absence, the random recovery, and his spurious grasp of history cast doubt on Peruggia's claim that he alone planned and executed such a stunning crime. His account sounds dubious, and Decker's story sounds phony. If Peruggia was not the lone thief and the marques and his expert forger were fictions, the mystery remains: Who masterminded the theft and, even more puzzling, why?

From the first, there were rumors of politics at play. The theft conveniently coincided with the flare-up in Morocco between France and Germany. Was Mona Lisa stolen to avert or foment war? To embarrass France? To rile Germany? There were persistent stories of a German man of means and middle age, a frequent visitor to the Louvre, who cultivated one of the Italian workers. He supposedly filled the young man's mind with false history and patriotic fervor. Over months of clever goading and suggestion, the German planted the notion that returning Mona Lisa to Italy would be a grand act of patriotism that would bring honor to the young man's family.

While the young Italian presumably was Peruggia, no trace of the German svengali has turned up. His motive remains obscure, and in any case, the denouement was a fizzle. The only trail left to follow is Decker's own.

SINCE HIS DAYS
as a cub reporter for Hearst, Karl Decker had been making or manufacturing the news. He did not invent a story out of whole cloth, but embroidery and embellishment were journalistic skills he had learned from the
master. The young reporter played by Hearst's rules, which meant pretty much anything goes to get or manufacture a story.

The motto “While others talk, the
Journal
acts” expressed the Hearst creed. If governments failed to right public wrongs, journalists should charge into the breach. In the 1890s, Hearst adopted the cause of Cuban rebels seeking independence from Spain. As his newspapers played the story, ruthless Spanish villains were denying the rights of Cuban freedom fighters, who were all noble and pure of heart. In his drumbeat to the Spanish-American War, Hearst dispatched the artist Frederic Remington to Havana to cover the impending conflict. According to a now classic account, finding the city calm, Remington telegraphed the publisher:
EVERYTHING QUIET STOP THERE WILL BE NO WAR STOP COMING HOME
. Hearst wired back:
PLEASE REMAIN STOP YOU FURNISH PICTURES STOP I WILL FURNISH WAR
.

At the height of his Cuba campaign, Hearst seized on the plight of a damsel in distress. Evangelina Cisneros, daughter of a revolutionary family, was nineteen, beautiful, and imprisoned in Havana. Hearst made her cause a crusade. He sent the young Karl Decker to spring Evangelina from her jail cell. Decker rented a house across an alley from the prison. One midnight after her prison bars were filed and the guards bribed, he laid a ladder across the rooftops, climbed to the jail, and spirited Evangelina away.

In the purple prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne's son, Julian, who was on the Hearst payroll, the rescue had the elements of a classic myth: “A tropic island, embosomed in azure seas off the coast of the Spanish Main, a cruel war waged by the minions of despotism against the spirit of patriotism and liberty, a beautiful maiden risking all for her country, captured, insulted, persecuted, and cast into a loathsome dungeon,” and her
savior, “a young American of the best and oldest strain, with the Constitution in his backbone and the Declaration of Independence in his eyes.”

Decker and Evangelina arrived in New York to front-page headlines and a hero's welcome. A tumultuous crowd of more than one hundred thousand cheered them at a rally in Madison Square Garden. Their next stop was Washington, where President William McKinley received them at the White House and praised Decker's exploit as “a heroic deed.” A few days later, the U.S.S.
Maine
exploded in the harbor of Havana, either from spontaneous internal combustion or from a mine explosion. The cause was never determined, but “Remember the
Maine”
became a rallying cry that drew the United States into war.

In its daring and in its complete disregard for international law, the Cisneros jailbreak is unsurpassed in the often tawdry and tarnished annals of American journalism. Decker became the poster boy for the “journalism of action.” His name continued to make headlines in the Hearst papers:

DECKER'S MOST RELIABLE SOURCE
was often himself. As Julian Hawthorne wrote, “He had imagination to conceive, ingenuity to plan, coolness and resolution to carry out, and then—best of all—that wonderful power of belief in the possibility of the impossible.”

Decker loved a big story, and in January 1914, there was no bigger story than the recovery of the lost Leonardo. Through the years, he must have followed her misadventures and recognized the tantalizing tease waiting to be woven into a fiction as remarkable as Mona Lisa herself.

Maybe he was simply in the right place at the right time for an exclusive story. The possibility is no more or less plausible than anything else about the Mona Lisa caper. On the other hand, Decker may not have been in Casablanca at all. There are no stories datelined Morocco with his byline in the
New York Journal
of January 1914, and the gentleman thief Marques Eduardo de Valfierno reads like a stock character. That the two men happened to meet on the day the missing Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre seems more than serendipity. That Decker had the scoop on the criminal case holding the attention of the world and sat on the story for more than twenty years seems highly improbable.

When the
Saturday Evening Post
story broke, both the heist and the marques had passed into history. Decker was sixty-four. His feats of derring-do were old news, and the style of heroic journalism that had made him a legend was discredited. By the 1930s, American journalism had undergone a bleaching.
The New York Times’?
, staid style, the antithesis of Hearst's
yellow journalism, had become the model. Readers were better educated and less easily gulled. The new reporter was a cool observer transcribing from the sidelines, not plunging headlong into a story. “Just the facts, please” became the motto.