by Earl Merkel
“Oh, yeah,” the man muttered in a voice so deep it rattled windows, “the fireman.” An index finger like a broomstick pointed to three visitors’ chairs, arrayed in plumb before the desk. “Sit.” To Santori: “Ronnie, why don’t you leave these people with me for a few minutes?”
Santori left—a little too willingly, I thought. My own bottom was still an inch from the seat of the chair when Herndon began.
“Okay—I’ll talk, you listen. You can ask questions later,” Herndon said. He held up a thin sheaf of papers that I recognized as the fax Gil had sent the afternoon before.
“Chief Cieloczki, I appreciate you sending me your case notes. When you called yesterday, you told my SAC that you wanted the Reader’s Digest version of art crimes. From what you told her, you’re assuming your case may involve the theft of valuable, possibly museum-quality, artwork. Maybe, maybe not. Let’s look at that.”
“First off, I’m going to oversimplify. While there’s a lot of art and cultural artifacts being stolen these days, stealing art is not exactly the easiest way to make an illegal living. It happens because it’s been my experience people will steal damn near anything. But with artwork, you buy into a hell of a lot of headaches. I’ll get to some of them in a minute, but right now you should just know that it’s a pretty specialized crime. Most thieves avoid it. Fact one for you: there aren’t that many places you can go to with a really valuable painting and sell it.”
The FBI agent leaned back in his chair and locked his fingers behind his head. The movement pulled his suit jacket apart. I could see the big .40 caliber Glock riding high on Herndon’s belt, butt angled forward in the approved FBI position.
Herndon held his fingers up in a V for Victory.
“Fact two,” Herndon continued, “the value of this stuff is its authenticity. Say you have a painting you’re convinced is by one of the Old Dutch Masters. Or something by Mattise, or a Pissarro, whatever. You’ve got to be able to prove it’s the real McCoy. The key word is ‘prove.’ I’m talking authentication by reputable authorities as well as an ironclad, documented chain of ownership.”
“But people still get burned, right?” Bird asked, his tone carrying a hint of challenge.
“Oh, sure,” Herndon said. “Fake documentation and fake art go hand in hand. And believe me, there are enough fraudulent pieces out there—damn good fakes, the kind that even the experts get into arguments over—to fill up every museum in Europe. And there’d still be enough left over for a new wing on every museum east of the Mississippi. You ever hear of Elmyr de Hory?”
“Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” I said. “He pumped out hundreds, maybe thousands of fake Impressionists.”
Herndon eyed me closely, as if seeing me for the first time.
“I was starting to wonder if you spoke English,” he said, not smiling. “Elmyr did ‘em all—Gauguins, Chagalls, Cézannes, you name it. A lot of them are still hanging in museums, and the curators swear they’re genuine. Don’t get me wrong; what I’m saying is that in art, it’s a ‘buyer beware’ world.”
Herndon smiled wickedly.
“And that brings us to fact number three. It’s also ‘seller beware’ because there are people like me under every other bush,” he said. “You remember, back a few years, some guys climbed a ladder into a museum in Norway and left with a painting called The Scream? Every schoolkid in the world knows that painting. Sure, maybe they think the idea came from that Home Alone movie, when the kid puts on aftershave lotion. But they know what the painting looks like, right?”
He seemed to expect a response and waited until Gil nodded.
“So one day it up and disappears,” Herndon said. “Well, just about right away stories started going around about how it was being shopped to rich Arabs and software billionaires and even Colombian drug lords.”
“That was a load of bullshit, and we knew it,” he said. “The same kind of stories made the rounds thirty years ago when some goofs walked out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa. Both times, the thieves didn’t even try to sell the paintings to anybody. They’d have been arrested in a minute, and they knew it.
“All in all, there’s almost nothing trickier to sell than a stolen work of art. And I don’t mean just the famous ones, either. We live in the Information Age. Just about every piece of art you’d want to steal has been photographed and catalogued and cross-indexed. Hell’s bells, that’s the basis for the National Stolen Art File. If anything substantial goes on the market, the art newsgroups on the Internet go crazy. People talk about it; if it’s a piece that’s gone missing from somewhere, a lot of people know about it. It’s a thief’s nightmare!” He didn’t sound displeased at the thought.
“What about private collectors?” Bird asked.
“What about ‘em?” Herndon retorted. “Most of the stolen art that’s missing isn’t in a private collection—it’s at the bottom of some damn trunk or storage locker the thief’s hiding ‘em in. Look, there really aren’t all that many buyers out there. You need a customer who is rich enough to have a private art collection. He also has to be bent, and stupid enough to buy something hot. Really hot. So hot that anytime they show it to somebody, they run the risk of having a cop with a warrant knock on the front door.
“But okay—let’s say you could find somebody crooked enough and dumb enough to buy on that basis,” he conceded. “You can bet what they’re being offered are fakes. Pretty good fakes, maybe, but almost never the real article. See, it’s a better setup for a swindle than a sale. Who does the buyer get to authenticate the piece? Where can he go to get a second opinion? All the usual safeguards are off, which makes it all pretty dicey.”
“The chances of getting burned or busted are just too high for most of the low-lifes,” he smiled. “Particularly when, as you seem to be saying in your notes, there’s a number of art pieces involved.”
He held his hands palm up and moved them up and down as if weighing small trucks. “On one hand, only an idiot would buy stolen items in bulk; on the other, the more people you contact with a proposition, the better your chances somebody talks and you get caught.
“What I’m trying to tell you is that an art theft is a complicated thing to pull off successfully. It’s not like knocking off a convenience store or stealing a car. Even a really good car.”
Gil frowned. “But it happens,” he persisted.
Herndon nodded, in what for him must have been a magnanimous show of patience.
“Sure,” he said. “A few years back, a couple of goofs dressed like cops bluffed their way into a Boston museum and walked out with maybe three hundred million in Rembrandts, Degas and Vermeers. Disappeared without a trace. But you can’t sell stuff like this out of the back of a truck. Okay, there are crooked dealers out there who broker stolen art—but the vast majority of it was stolen a long time ago. Long enough for the dealer to put together a convincing chain of ownership.
“If you put together a decent provenance—one that is at least plausible—maybe you have a chance at some money. There are ways—a year ago, we caught a guy who was doctoring old museum catalogues and archival files. He was trying to establish fakes as ‘rediscovered’ authentics, but the concept is the same. Compile a really convincing provenance, and even places like Christie’s and Sotheby’s will give you a pedigree that can translate into big money.”
“Both those places have been stung with a tricked-up history on a painting,” I added. “Once in a blue moon, that is.”
“Yeah, but your case is different,” Herndon countered. “It’s more like somebody walking into the Treasury Building with a whole sack of counterfeit bills and asking for each one of them to be certified as genuine. That could happen, in theory. But I doubt it.”
Bird had been sitting deep in his chair, his legs crossed widely and his foot twitching like the tail of an irritated cat. Now he slapped his ankle and interrupted the agent.
“C’mon,” Bird said. “You keep telling us how hard it is. Are we just wa
sting everybody’s time here?”
Herndon looked at Bird with the expression of a man who suffered fools only occasionally, and never gladly.
“No, friend,” he said, after a long moment of studying the plainclothes policeman. “I’m saying there’s only one real market for this kind of stolen artwork. Here’s the fourth and final fact about stolen artwork in the real world. You try to sell it back to the owner or the insurance company, which usually comes to about the same thing.”
He turned to Gil.
“Look, try to think of it more as a kidnapping than a theft; the art thief’s leverage is that you either pay a ransom or he destroys the stuff. And he prices the ransom so that a buy-back is reasonable. It’s simple and more or less straightforward, and everybody wins but the cops.
“But in your case, if anything was stolen, there’s no owner left alive to buy it back. Even worse for the thief, a dead owner turns this into a murder—hell, two murders, right? That kicks everything up into another league altogether. No insurance company is going to make a deal in a murder case.”
Herndon paused. He picked up the fax of Cieloczki’s case notes.
“But that’s all kind of academic, isn’t it? See, from what it says here, there was no insurance taken out on any artwork.”
He selected one of the sheets and held it out for us to see. It was gray with neatly balanced lines of type that nearly filled the page. I recognized the letterhead of TransNational Mutual. The firefighter had pored over the lengthy breakdown the insurance company had provided on the coverages Levinstein carried on his home, business, cars, personal property.
Gil looked up at the FBI agent. Herndon’s own eyes looked back from under arched eyebrows, an expression that both mocked and encouraged.
“Am I speaking too fast here? We’re talking possibly millions of dollars of art, stolen from a guy that this says damn well knew to insure everything else he owned,” Herndon said, and for the first time Gil heard something different in the FBI agent’s voice. “Is it just me? Doesn’t that say something to the three of you?”
“You don’t think there was any artwork to begin with,” Bird said.
“Oh, no,” Herndon protested, in a patronizing tone that made Bird’s teeth grind. “We have to assume there was artwork, or this remains a motiveless crime—so I think there was artwork. I just don’t think there was any insurance issued on it.
“And that leads me to one of two possibilities. One, the guy didn’t take out any coverage, for whatever reason—say, he had bought it hot and knew it. But given the man’s lack of previous criminal record, I consider that a long shot. Two, there is no insurance—but your dead collector thought there was. That’s the only way a careful, apparently honest guy like this”—again, Herndon tapped on the sheet listing Levinstein’s coverages—“could sleep at night.”
He paused to let the implications sink in.
“And if that’s the case,” Herndon added, mildly for him, “don’t you people want to go home and look into exactly why he would think so?”
Chapter 16
“Welcome to our own little United Nations,” said Phil Sozcka. “Mother Russia is just a few blocks ahead.”
He was sitting in the middle of the backseat, leaning forward with an arm draped over either edge of the front bucket seats where Terry Posson and I sat. On the car radio, the Cubs were dropping the second game of a doubleheader to St. Louis; it seemed an apt metaphor for the day so far.
Sozcka had taken off the curiously comical checkerboard-banded hat issued by the Chicago Police Department, and his razor-cut blond head was on a swivel from side to side as he cheerfully surveyed the bustle of unruly commerce and sidewalk diplomacy through which we were passing.
Sozcka was somewhere between his late 30s and mid-40s with an unlined open face and pale blue eyes. High on each cheek, a bloom of broken capillaries gave him a look of perpetual embarrassment. His hands were broad and blunt. If I looked hard enough, I could see a faint indentation around the third finger of his left hand.
I had linked up with Terry after the session at FBI headquarters in the South Loop. On our ride north along Lake Shore Drive she had been polite but terse, responding in monosyllables when I tried to make conversation. But she had not attempted to throw me out of her car, either; it was what I considered a distinct improvement in the relationship.
Inside the aged brownstone that served as the district police center, Phil Sozcka had been volunteered to us by his shift commander. The commander had accepted without comment that a material witness in an arson investigation was believed to be living in his district at an address on Devon Avenue.
He glanced briefly at the warrant, and examined Terry’s ID with only slightly more interest. But when he looked at my newly-issued card, his brow furrowed.
“Davey. Davey.” He studied my face, then looked at the card again. “You have any relatives on the job? Here in the city, I mean.”
“No,” I said. “Not for a long time.”
He started to shrug. Then I saw a light come on behind his eyes, and his expression flattened. He checked his duty roster, suddenly all business. When he spoke, his voice was frosty and distant.
“There are no detectives available at the moment, Mister Davey,” he said, punching hard on the title. “But if your witness is hanging out up there with Russians, you’ll want somebody who’s a Russian speaker.” Then he had waved over the uniformed officer sitting at a desk on the far side of the squad room and spoke to him in low tones.
Phil Sozcka was the kind of cop Chicago had always bred. He was built solid, though wider at the bottom than at the top, and exquisitely schooled in the lore of the neighborhoods he patrolled. Now, as we motored along the busy avenue, Sozcka talked and Terry and I listened.
Chicago has always been a city of neighborhoods, making the metropolis a patchwork quilt of ethnicity. We were driving east down Devon, one of the places where, Sozcka noted, the seams of this quilt traditionally overlapped.
Over the years, Devon Avenue has always been a bellwether for the various waves of immigration that have flowed through the city. Particularly where it runs through the North Chicago neighborhood of West Rogers Park, its buildings and storefronts reflect the accents and attitudes of the more recent seasoning of the melting pot.
In the section immediately east of the Chicago River’s North Branch, the street has long featured a population that boasts the single largest concentration of Jews in the city.
But as you continue east, the influence of its more recent arrivals also makes Devon Avenue the place to purchase a sari or rent a videotape of New Delhi’s latest cinematic triumph. Around the corner from a Pakistani grocery are the offices of the Assyrian National Council. The Croatian Cultural Center draws strong participation from its share of the area’s residents, and what was until a few years ago the historic 1920s-era Temple Mizpah is now as well-attended as the Korean Presbyterian Church.
The latest addition to this multicultural mix is told in the windows of the groceries and doctor’s offices on Devon: the offerings for both supermarket specials and medical specialties advertise in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Hindi, Korean—and, most recently, in Cyrillic script, disorienting in its dyslectic mix of recognizable and backward-facing letters.
For the Russians who live here, migration had mirrored the state of diplomacy as it had evolved between the two countries. A trickle that began in the late 1970s as part of the Cold War’s earliest thaw swelled into a steady stream during the détente of the ‘80s. The Soviet government, seeking to limit the potential embarrassment this modern exodus posed, issued passports listing their nationality as “Jewish” rather than “Russian.” It was a technicality not minded in the least by the majority of these eager emigrants, regardless of their actual religious affiliations. By the time the Berlin Wall became just another pile of rubble celebrating failed Soviet imperial aspirations, the rivulet had swollen to become a torrent of Russians.
Througho
ut the ‘90s, newly arriving Russians of all beliefs—or lack thereof—followed the linguistic and cultural path of least resistance that led to Devon. Each successive influx had brought along its own unique blend of hopes and paranoia, optimism and anxieties, expectation and experience. But Russia is an ancient country, a culture that has left certain indelible imprints in generations of its sons and daughters. Among the more pervasive of these, reinforced under both Czar and Commissar, was a certain mistrust of anyone who carried a badge. It was a skepticism born of often-bitter experience, as deep-seated as it was well deserved.
Sozcka, pleased at the opportunity to simultaneously escape his desk in the 8th District records room and to display his knowledge of local lore, kept up a running commentary as Terry inched around various traffic hazards. Cars and trucks—many of them dappled with rusty reminders of the recent winter’s road salt—lined the curbs like the levies of a river. Occasionally she edged around a truck, double-parked as strong-looking men in work clothes pulled boxes from open tailgates.
“In the last census, they counted like fifty thousand-plus native Russians living inside a quarter-mile radius of where we are right now,” Sozcka said. “There’s more now. Some of them are doctors, lawyers, engineers—or they were, in the old country.”
He thrust a thick finger at the windshield. “There’s a guy who works in that tearoom, over on the corner, who was a professor of Slavic Literature at the University of Kiev. Now he’s serving seed cakes and petit-fours to other émigrés while he learns English. You also have a lot of your first-generation, hard-working, babushka-wearing, green-card-carrying immigrant straight out of Minsk. Then you have kids who came here to avoid getting drafted into the Russian Army.”
“So you got all kinds,” Terry said, concentrating on the traffic.
“Good folk, most of ‘em,” Sozcka said. “But I’d be willing to bet a few of our new arrivals know what the inside of a Russian jail looks like. Not because they were political prisoners, either.”
