Stealing Mona Lisa

by Carson Morton

  “And this is Mademoiselle Julia Conway.”

  “And where did you find this one?” Madame Charneau asked with obvious approval.

  “It would be more accurate to say that she found us,” commented Valfierno.

  “The marquis was kind enough to let me accompany him,” said Julia with a sly look to Valfierno.

  “Bienvenue. You are most welcome to my humble house.”

  “Madame Charneau runs the best boardinghouse in all of Paris,” Valfierno said.

  “The cleanest, anyway,” Madame Charneau corrected him.

  “The best and the cleanest,” Valfierno continued. “She will take good care of you.”

  “Aren’t you going to stay here too?” asked Julia, an edge of concern creeping into her voice.

  “Émile and I will be sharing a modest pied-à-terre on the Right Bank,” replied Valfierno.

  “Well, what bank is this, then?” Julia asked.

  Valfierno gave her his best Gallic shrug. “By the process of elimination, the Left.”

  “As I mentioned in my last cable,” Madame Charneau said, handing Valfierno an addressed envelope bulging with a set of keys, “as soon as I received your first telegram, I located this house for you. It should suit your purposes well. It’s on rue de Picardie, a very quiet street. It’s not bad for such short notice and the rent is quite moderate. I have arranged for a car as you requested. It will be waiting for you in a garage on rue de Bretagne just at the end of your street.”

  “Thank you, madame,” Valfierno said. “Your services, as always, are invaluable.”

  “Simply my way of welcoming you back where you belong.”

  “But wait a minute,” Julia said to Valfierno. “Why can’t I stay with you?”

  “Impossible,” Valfierno replied. “Our house will be much smaller than the one in Buenos Aires. Madame Charneau will make you extremely comfortable.”

  “Come with me, child.” Madame Charneau gathered up Julia’s bag. “You must be tired from your journey.”

  Julia stepped up to Émile and placed her hands on his chest in a gesture of appeal.

  “But you will come back for me,” she said, more a question than a statement.

  Émile pulled away and climbed back into the taxi, but Valfierno stepped forward and put a reassuring hand on Julia’s shoulder.

  “Tomorrow,” he said before turning and joining Émile in the backseat. “We begin our work tomorrow.”

  The taxi swung around in the small courtyard and drove off, leaving a black cloud of smoke spreading out on the cobblestones. Julia wondered if they intended to abandon her here. To reassure herself, she opened her hand and looked at Émile’s pocket watch.

  She smiled. Now they would have to come back.

  Chapter 12

  Thirteen acres of manicured flower gardens and expansive lawns graced what once had been a scrubby promontory of land nudging out into Rhode Island Sound. Maintaining the grounds—dotted with scores of statues that had been copied from the French palace at Versailles—was a job that consumed the services of five full-time and twelve part-time gardeners. Windcrest, the great house itself, with its stunted towers, mullioned windows, marble columns and pilasters, was an impressive if uneasy marriage of French Renaissance and Elizabethan styles. To keep it running, it required the services of no fewer than fifteen live-in house staff.

  Joshua Hart had spared no expense in creating the most imposing edifice in all of Newport. He had commissioned the great Boston architect Robert Peabody to design and build the Beaux Arts mansion ten years before in 1900; it had cost him almost two million dollars, twice as much as any of the other “cottages” that graced the shoreline.

  Inside the house, Hart’s middle-aged butler, Carter, and Tamo, a young Filipino houseboy, carried a wrapped frame down a set of narrow steps leading to a vast cellar. Hart had paid a small fortune to an expert craftsman to mount La Ninfa Sorprendida in an appropriately carved antique, gilded frame. The bulk of the man’s fee had secured his absolute discretion in the matter.

  “Careful there!” Hart bellowed from the foot of the stairs.

  Ellen Hart stood next to him. She was usually not invited into her husband’s domain, but he always insisted on her help whenever a new painting was added to his secret gallery. Indeed, these occasions were the only time she was permitted to share in the pleasures of his collection.

  As the two men reached the cellar, Hart took the frame from Tamo.

  “That’s all. Off you go,” he said, sending the young boy bounding back up the stairs. Of all his servants, only Carter was allowed to venture beyond this point.

  Ellen led the way through the vast basement—sealed at great cost against ground moisture—to a large door just beyond the entrance to a well-stocked wine cellar. From her pocket she took the key he had given her a few minutes earlier, placed it in the keyhole, and turned it. She pushed open the door and stepped inside, feeling for the electrical switches on the wall.

  “Just the top switch,” Hart said.

  She flicked the top switch and one bulb came on just inside the door, revealing a high-ceilinged room about thirty feet square. Rows of paintings, barely visible in the dim light, hung from the walls like spectral images.

  Within fifteen minutes, working in the semidarkness, Hart and Carter had unwrapped and mounted Manet’s La Ninfa Sorprendida. As soon as the job was finished, Carter withdrew without a word. Hart wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and became aware of his wife still standing by the door.

  “Thank you,” Hart said in a tone that was as dismissive as it was polite.

  Ellen nodded and left the room, pulling the door closed behind her.

  As soon as she was gone, Hart flicked on the remaining three switches in quick succession. A battery of strategically placed floodlights flared to life, illuminating his subterranean gallery. He stood as he always did, in trembling awe and silence as his eyes drank in his collection of masters. In truth, he would have been hard-pressed to name each of the paintings and their artists, with the exception, perhaps, of his most recent acquisitions. The important thing was possessing these works of art. They were his and his alone. Unsuspecting fools viewed reproductions, hastily mounted to cover empty spaces on walls in countless museums, but there was only one person in the world who could look at the genuine masterpiece, and that one person was Joshua Hart.

  After a moment, he turned away from the paintings and walked to the rear of the gallery where a small door was set into the wall. Removing a single key from his inside jacket pocket, he unlocked the door, turned the knob, and walked inside.

  * * *

  Ellen Hart slowly ascended the steps to the main level of the house. At the top, she stopped for a moment and looked back down to the dark cellar. Her husband would stay by himself in his cavernous lair for hours surrounded by the things he loved most.

  She would not miss him.

  Chapter 13

  On the morning following their arrival in Paris, Valfierno and Émile drove into the cour de Rohan in an open Panhard-Levassor motorcar to find Julia waiting for them outside Madame Charneau’s boardinghouse. Without a word, she climbed into the backseat and returned Émile’s pocket watch. He took it from her without comment. An amused Valfierno drove out onto boulevard Saint-Germain and turned right onto rue du Bac. As he crossed the Seine over the Pont Royal, he gave Émile and Julia a sketchy outline of what he wanted them to do. He pulled up to the archways leading to the place du Carrousel—one of a number of entrances to the Louvre Museum—and Émile and Julia climbed out.

  “Remember,” Valfierno told them, “you are newlyweds. Wander about. Get a feel for the place.”

  They pressed him for more detailed instructions, but he told them that he just wanted them to stroll around and observe.

  “Pay particular attention to the Denon wing,” Valfierno added as he shifted gears, “but above all enjoy yourselves. You’re young! You’re supposed to be in love! It’s Paris!”

>   Émile watched the car pull away and wished he were in it.

  “Well,” Julia said, taking Émile’s arm with evident relish, “shall we?”

  * * *

  Beneath the high, arched ceiling of the long Grande Galerie in the Denon wing, a pair of maintenance workers clad in long white blouses struggled to attach a wooden glass-fronted box to the wall. Nearby, two gentlemen stood in the center of the hall observing. One of them, a distinguished-looking white-haired man dressed in a finely tailored Italian suit, was none other than the museum director, Monsieur Montand. Next to him stood Police Inspector Alphonse Carnot of the Sûreté. Middle-aged and portly, he wore a suit that had not improved in appearance since he purchased it from a charity shop on the place de la Bastille many years ago.

  “I tell you, Monsieur Montand,” said Inspector Carnot with evident pride, “these new shadow boxes are the latest in security. They’ll put an end to these anarchists and their defacements.”

  Inspector Carnot was getting to the point in his career where he would have to distinguish himself soon if he hoped for further advancement. He had always suspected that his height—more precisely his lack thereof—had held him back. His bulk and his low center of gravity gave him the appearance of a child’s spinning top, but the inspector took himself very seriously indeed. Following an incident in which one of these new self-styled anarchists had spit on a Raphael, he had been called in to suggest improvements in museum security. He had persuaded the director to place the more prominent paintings in wooden shadow boxes where they would be protected behind a sheet of glass. He was convinced that his part in this innovation would be an important step toward his much sought after promotion.

  “Patrons are already complaining that the glass is much too reflective,” said Montand, peering at the inspector through his thin-framed spectacles. “They come to see great art, not their own faces.”

  “Better to be reflecting their faces than dripping with anarchist spittle, eh, Monsieur Director?”

  Farther down the Grande Galerie, Julia and Émile strolled arm in arm through a typical weekday crowd of bourgeois couples. Most of the gentlemen seemed vaguely bored, while the ladies appeared more interested in each other’s fashions than the artwork on display. A few copyists had set up their easels along the gallery, and sprinkled here and there, a military officer bedecked in medals shared a laugh with the newly acquired demimondaine on his arm.

  “This place is much larger than I thought it would be,” Julia commented.

  “It’s the greatest museum in the world,” said Émile. “What else would you expect?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied with a shrug. “I’ve been to some museums in New York, which are also pretty big.”

  “There’s no comparison,” said Émile. “Look at all these masterpieces.”

  Julia stopped to consider a Botticelli Madonna hanging on the wall next to a Fra Diamante Madonna.

  “Half of them seem to be of the same thing, a mother and her baby. Where are the flowers?”

  Émile’s response to this question was an attempt to shrug her off, but she wouldn’t let go of his arm.

  “So,” she continued, “do you have family in Paris?”

  “Oh, yes,” replied Émile. “I have a huge family: uncles, aunts, grandparents, nieces, nephews. Too many to count. They’re all filthy rich and keep inviting me to live with them on their country estates.”

  “An orphan, huh?” Julia said, glancing at yet another Madonna and Child. “So how did the marquis get stuck with you?”

  “Look.” Émile stopped and finally untangled himself from her arm. “We’re supposed to be observing. Getting ideas. Not carrying on useless conversation.”

  “But we still have to look the part, don’t we?” She rethreaded her arm through his and rested her head against his shoulder.

  The piercing crash of breaking glass shattered the serenity of the gallery. Everyone’s attention turned to the two maintenance men who had just dropped the shadow box they had been attempting to install.

  One of the men, tall and thin, with a sharp, hawklike face, glared at the other, a barrel of a man with eyes far too small for his broad face.

  “Idiota!” the tall man snarled in Italian before reverting to French. “Look what you’ve done.”

  “It’s not my fault if my hands sweat,” replied the heavyset man holding out his small pudgy hands as evidence.

  The museum director and Inspector Carnot approached the workers.

  “What on earth do you think you’re playing at?” Montand demanded.

  The men removed their caps and the taller one hunched his shoulders in an attempt to make himself appear smaller.

  “I am sorry, Monsieur Director. It was an accident.”

  “It was incompetence!” bellowed Montand.

  “If my gendarmes displayed such incompetence,” chimed in Inspector Carnot, “I would fire them immediately.”

  “The box is heavy, monsieur,” said the tall man. “Next time we’ll be more careful.”

  “Too heavy for you, is it?” said Montand, glancing briefly at the inspector to make sure he was making an impression. “Well, it won’t be the only thing that’s too heavy, because time will be hanging heavy on your hands from now on. You’re both fired.”

  The stout maintenance man looked shocked. His tall companion took on an indignant expression. “But it was an accident,” he said.

  “Where are you from?” Inspector Carnot asked, his nose twitching as if he were sniffing the man out. “Are you even French?”

  “No, signore. I am Italian.”

  “Italian,” Carnot said with a dismissive snort. “That would explain it.”

  The Italian straightened himself up to his full height.

  “You French are all the same,” he began deliberately. “You steal the greatest art in the world then display it as if it were your own.”

  “Careful what you say to an officer of the law!” warned Carnot, his face turning red.

  “The two of you have five minutes to get out of my museum,” Montand declared. “I’ll find someone competent to clean up this mess. Your final week’s pay will cover the damages.”

  As Inspector Carnot and Montand stalked away, the stockier worker screwed up his cap in his hand and quietly said to the retreating figures, “But I’m French…”

  Nearby, Émile pulled Julia away from the scene.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  * * *

  The finely tipped paintbrush applied highlights to the bosom of the gently smiling woman. Another brush added texture to the surface of a lake in the distance behind her; another added lines to a winding road snaking back to an outcrop of jagged rocks. One brushed a thick swirl of greenish-brown paint to the crown of hair plastered tightly against the top of the woman’s head. Yet another stroke gently washed a translucent quality onto the skin of her hands, one resting on top of the other. Another shadowed the side of her long, thin nose, and yet another rendered shading to the lips in an attempt to convey just the right smile.

  A group of art students sat with their brushes, paints, and easels in the Salon Carré in front of La Joconde, The Portrait of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. The painting sat within the confines of a shadow box, its glass window reflecting the forms of the students and the milling crowds behind them. The students’ canvases—in varying degrees of completion—were of different sizes, none exactly the same dimensions as the modest panel on the wall. At seventy-seven by fifty-three centimeters, the original looked quite small placed, as it was, between Correggio’s Mystical Marriage and Titian’s Allegory of Alfonso d’Avalos. The shadow box it sat in made it appear even smaller.

  Copying was permitted—even encouraged—as long as the dimensions differed from the original Leonardo masterpiece. The art instructor, his face almost completely obscured by a thick, graying, tobacco-stained beard, floated behind his students in a billowing smock, making various sighs of appro
val or grunts of displeasure.

  Behind the amateurs stood a thickly massed group of museum patrons intently focused on the woman in the painting, their hushed comments revealing an almost religious awe. Émile and Julia slipped in behind the crowd, Julia craning her neck over people’s heads for a better view.

  “What are they looking at?” asked Julia.

  A few of the patrons glanced back at her, disapproval on their faces.

  “La Joconde, of course,” Émile replied. “What else would it be?”

  “And how do you know all this?” Julia challenged him.

  “The marquis would bring me here as a child,” he replied, “and I paid attention.”

  “So what’s so special about this one?” she demanded.

  Émile gave her a look halfway between pity and disgust. “It’s only one of the greatest paintings in history,” he said.

  “Is there anything in this museum that isn’t great?” she asked sarcastically.

  Émile shushed her.

  “And if it’s so popular,” Julia continued, lowering her voice to a whisper, “why doesn’t the marquis copy it and sell it to someone?”

  Émile grabbed her roughly by her arm and pulled her back away from the crowd.

  “Keep your voice down!” he said sternly.

  “Well, why doesn’t he?”

  “Are you insane? La Joconde is the most famous painting in the world. No one would ever be insane enough to buy it.”

  Julia shrugged as Émile walked away. She looked back to the painting. “I don’t even see what all the fuss is about,” she said to no one in particular. “She’s not even all that pretty.”

  * * *

  A little while later, Julia and Émile emerged from the museum and walked along the quai du Louvre.

  “It’s such a lovely day,” enthused Julia. “Let’s go down the steps and walk beside the river.”

  A stone stairway led down near the Pont des Arts to a wide cobblestone embankment almost at water level.