The Art Thief: A Novel

by Noah Charney

  “So you’re saying that not even the museum is going to check? Even after my phone calls and suspicions…”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Geneviève, no one knows about your phone calls and suspicions. Unless you tell them.”

  “Right.” Delacloche paused. Her eyes scanned the room. “What did the seller think? I don’t think I ever heard who…”

  “You know I can’t tell you that. Come now. Some sellers are happy to let themselves be known, others I could slip you along the gossip chain. But some clients strictly request that their anonymity be maintained, and this is one. Only a few of us know.”

  Delacloche looked away, and Jackie, or was it Jenny, patted her on the padded shoulder and slipped away into the crowd.

  “Lot seventy-seven…”

  Oh shit, Cohen reasoned, as he engaged his night-vision goggles. The hallway blurred from black to chemical green.

  Let’s go.

  Cohen moved down the corridor, smooth until he crossed his left foot in front of his right, and stumbled. It had been a long while, and several centimeters on his stomach, since his training. Never anything quite so exciting as this.

  Stay on your feet, you wanker, he thought. I bet this sort of shit never happens to Dennis Ahearn at the Tate.

  “Control here, sir. Do you copy?” The sound in his ear made him jump back.

  “Shit, Avery. You almost gave me a heart attack. Yes, I copy. Help me out.”

  “You’ll have to take the stairs down five flights. The elevators would reveal your position.”

  “You’re going to make me walk down five flights, are you?”

  “I think it’s advisable, sir…”

  “Well, you’re right. And knock off that ‘sir’ shit. We’re on a first-name basis right now, goddamn it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cohen slipped along the hallway to the stairs, and carved his way down.

  “The movement ceased in the utility room forty seconds ago, sir. But as much as I can tell, the door is still open.”

  “Avery, how far into the system did this hacker cut? How come we can sense the motion but we’ve lost radio and video?”

  “They got through the communication walls, but the internal alarms and locks are controlled separately, and those seem intact. That means that they can’t take anything off the walls, unless…”

  “…unless they cut off electricity completely…”

  “…from the utility room.”

  Cohen slid down the final run of stairs, to the basement floor. The gray metal door, green in his night-vision, lurked before him, leading into the utility and storage sectors of the museum.

  He reached out to the handle and pulled.

  “It’s locked, Avery.”

  “They must have gotten in through another entrance. I’m unlocking it now, sir.”

  The tension in Cohen’s arm relaxed, as the door pulled open. He stepped inside, and cushioned the door shut behind him.

  “The utility room is around the corner. The door should be physically open, not just unlocked.”

  “Right.”

  Cohen cautiously stepped along the linoleum flooring, his vision a sea of bottle green and shadows. His shotgun was cocked and raised, breath came short and hot.

  “I don’t hear anything,” he whispered softly. No reply.

  He was only a few steps from the perpendicular corridor, and the utility room along its left arm. His shoulder brushed the wall as he pressed his back against it, inches from the corner.

  Gun first, he spun into the corridor.

  Nothing. Just the quiet dark and iridescent monochrome of his vision. But at the end of the hall, the door was cracked open.

  “I see it.”

  Cohen moved smoothly toward the door. He could hear nothing but his quick-cut breath, and felt only the heat of perspiration beneath his Kevlar vest. The shotgun’s weight felt good in his hands.

  The door grew as he approached. The room seethed beyond. He was now only a few steps away.

  “We’ve got movement in room nine, sir! Motion sensor has been tripped, and the laser wall in front of the paintings has been broken. They’re upstairs!”

  Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit, Cohen thought. They must’ve already been here. The utility room is just a diversion!

  He spun away from the door and ran down the hall, back toward the stairs.

  No more stealth now. They’re going for it.

  He charged up the back staircase.

  “Room nine, still motion in room nine!”

  “I’m almost there! Drop the security gates on both sides of the room. Drop ’em now!”

  Cohen burst through the door to the main floor of the museum, as he heard the heavy steel gates fall shut several rooms ahead.

  “Gates down, sir. The movement has stopped.”

  “Light! Give me light!”

  Cohen threw off his night-vision goggles, as the overhead lights flickered awake.

  He ran through room 7, room 8. There was the steel gate that blocked entrance to room 9. He approached the gate, shotgun first.

  “This is security,” Cohen bellowed. “Put your hands in the air and keep them there. Do not resist. Do not attempt any sudden movement.”

  He swung up to the gate, and looked inside.

  The room was empty.

  “Sir!”

  The sound came from behind him. Cohen spun around.

  Four security guards, guns in hand, approached.

  “Where the fuck have you lot been? What the fuck is going on?”

  CHAPTER 12

  The waiter had just brought two plates of the eponymous dish at Au Pied de Cochon, as Jean-Jacques Bizot arrived, hot-cheeked and breathless. Jean-Paul Lesgourges did not pause to look up from his plate, as his nimble knife and fork sliced, with surgical precision, into the crackly skin of the pig’s foot, pulling the knobby bones away from the succulent flesh.

  “Et bien?”

  Bizot did not respond, as he had his hands full trying to squeeze between a mirrored column and the overpopulated table behind, brimming with well-mannered children and obnoxious aunts, in order to reach his seat. Lesgourges looked up from his pig’s foot with one eye, giggled silently, then resumed eating.

  “I ordered for you, because the kitchen wanted to close,” he said. Bizot did not respond, as he was attempting to pour himself over the armrest and into his seat.

  “Jean, you have the grace of a wounded armadillo. Eat your piggy.”

  Bizot, finally and firmly seated (he now noticed that he was wedged between and beneath the armrests), draped his napkin vertically down his chest and then horizontally across his stomach, took up knife and fork, and muttered in a puff of sweat, “Bonsoir.”

  “Bonsoir yourself,” Lesgourges replied, as he popped a curved knucklebone into his mouth, to suck it clean. “So you wanted to eat late, because you had some business. A week into your investigation, and only now you let me in on the fun. Et alors…”

  “A moment, Jean. Je mange, donc je suis. Stomach first, then mind.” Bizot began eating ravenously.

  “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be…eating without end…amen.” Lesgourges intoned solemnly, before he gestured to the waiter for more wine.

  In a matter of minutes, the brown-sugary skin and white meat of the pied de cochon had disappeared, and all that remained on Bizot’s once full plate was a scattering of tiny gun-metal gray bones that shone, like ink, against the white of the plate below. With a daintiness preposterous to his circumference, Bizot dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin-tented finger.

  “Are you going to tell me, or…”

  “I will.” Bizot set down his napkin and leaned back in his chair. “What do you want to know?”

  “You overstuffed chicken, don’t play coy with me. On the phone, you told me about the investigation at the Malevich Society, and you said that there was a puzzle that needed solving, and that you’d wait to tell me in person, beca
use it was more fun that way. Well, now I am here. And you have eaten…”

  “Right.” Bizot smiled just enough for the wings of his beard to rise and fall. “C-H-3-4-7.”

  “Quoi?”

  Bizot repeated. “C. H. Three. Four. Seven.”

  “That’s the puzzle?” Lesgourges looked disappointed.

  “That’s what was written on the wall behind the sliding-wall thingy that the stolen Malevich was hanging off when it was stolen.”

  Bizot fumbled through his trousers and emerged with a soft pack of cigarettes, bent and mangled. He drew one out between two stubby fingers. The end was broken and dangled by a sliver of rolling paper. Lesgourges started laughing. Bizot snapped off the broken end and lit his cigarette with a match from a book with the words “Crazy Horse” printed on it, in pink cursive.

  “Alors, qu’est-ce que tu en penses?”

  “I’m not sure what to think.” Lesgourges leaned back and snapped open his silver cigarette case. His fingers rolled across the humpbacks of the row of ten thin black-cased cigarettes, each ringed with a gold band. The smell of clove wafted up from the case, and a sweet film clung onto Lesgourges’ fingertips. He chose a cigarette and withdrew it. He conducted with his clove baton, as he spoke.

  “It’s not much to begin with, but the first thing that comes to mind is that it is a statement.”

  Bizot looked up from the cherry of his mutilated cigarette, then back down. “That’s what I thought, too.”

  Lesgourges finally stuck the cigarette between his horse lips and lit it from his own matchbook, identical to Bizot’s. “The thieves wanted the Malevich Society to know…”

  “…what?”

  “Bizot, that’s what I’m trying to work out. I’m thinking aloud. Silence et prépare-toi!” Lesgourges drew hard on his cigarette. The end smoked and crackled. He exhaled a sugarplum cloud. “The thieves wanted to tell the Malevich Society that, one: they were able to successfully steal a painting from the vaults; and, two: the perpetrators were called CH347.”

  Bizot stared for a moment, not at Lesgourges, but at the smoke dancing in front of him.

  “You’re a demi-idiot, Lesgourges,” Bizot confided. “Half of your statement makes sense, and the other half…not so much. I agree that this crime seems like an act of ability, of puissance, not of the need to either own the painting or to sell it on. If not a statement, then why would they leave us any clue to work with? If they wanted to melt away into the night, never to be seen again, why leave a calling card? You are correct. This is a statement. But CH347 sounds more like a dishwashing detergent than the name of a perpetrator.”

  “Perhaps it’s a palindrome?”

  “Quoi—743 HC?”

  “No, not a palindrome…qu’est-ce que je veux dire…an acronym.”

  Bizot twirled the cigarette in place in his mouth, using his pointer finger and thumb. “I was wrong, Jean. You are a full-fledged idiot.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question about whether it could be an acronym.”

  “No,” said Bizot. “I was just saying that, on general principles. I can’t think of any institution or terrorist group or…”

  “What about a flight number?” Lesgourges tried, and failed, repeatedly, to blow smoke rings.

  “Clove smoke is too thin,” remarked Bizot, “as I’ve told you.”

  “It’s too bad the same cannot be said for you,” replied Lesgourges. “As I’ve told you.”

  “Ha. Ha. But that’s not a bad idea. Except for the fact that it doesn’t make any sense at all to write a flight number on the wall from which you just stole a painting.”

  “Maybe the thieves were worried that they would forget on which flight they were planning to escape.” Lesgourges leaned over the menu. “Do you want dessert?”

  “I will check to see if there is a flight of that number. There may be some connection, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. How about mousse au chocolat?”

  “Hmmm.” Lesgourges turned to address the waiter. “Deux tartes Tatin, s’il vous plaît.” The waiter shuffled off. “You prefer tarte Tatin. What other options are there?”

  “There was a crème caramel and a…”

  “No,” interrupted Lesgourges, “I meant other options for the CH347.”

  “Right. Well, there’s a chocolate cake…”

  “Salaud! Je vais te frapper!” Bizot dodged Lesgourges’ halfhearted attempts at stabbing him with a fork, his face turning bright red with laughter. Bizot’s beard flopped up and down with his breathless expulsions, his upper body mobile while his lower half remained wedged between the arms of his chair.

  “Calm down, Lesgourges.” Bizot regained his composure. “…We need to sort this out, but it’s best to think on a full stomach.”

  “How much fuller do you think your stomach could be?”

  “We haven’t had dessert yet.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Elizabeth Van Der Mier got up to leave as the auction wound to its close. Christie’s employees delicately attended to her, careful not to overstep, but present and helpful as needed. She disappeared with her entourage, which included two other museum representatives who had been lurking along the periphery of the room.

  It was much like a James Bond film, Delacloche had always thought. The auction room full of high rollers, dressed for it, with wingmen stationed, and millions at stake. The prices had always struck her as outrageous, but to such an extent that they became inconceivable. This was toy money to these people who had it, and for those who did not, it was beyond comprehension. To drop hundreds of thousands of pounds on a whim, on a piece of wall decoration…so why was she in the industry? She loved the art, but also the world that rotated round it. She loved it all.

  Van Der Mier was out of the building by the time the graying gentleman who’d bought the ugly Suprematist work left the auction room. Delacloche waited a moment, then followed. The majority of the audience had gone and, although the seats were mostly full, the periphery was nearly vacant. Many of the paintings that had decorated the walls had been taken down to be stored, packed, or picked up by purchasers.

  The graying gentleman approached the cashier.

  “Good afternoon, sir. Paddle?”

  “Well, I really shouldn’t. We’ve only just met.”

  “May I have your paddle number?”

  “Oh. Certainly.” The gentleman slid his paddle across to the elegant, pearled young woman behind the desk. She opened a file and withdrew a form, which she prepared to fill out.

  “Mr. Robert Grayson?”

  “That’s right.” His accent was American, but not offensively so.

  “Lot thirty-four, anonymous Suprematist painting?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How would you like to pay for your purchase, sir?”

  “I think cash, if that’s acceptable.”

  “Of course, sir.” She began to fill in the form, glancing up briefly at Grayson, then down at his left hand. “That’s fifteen-hundred for the hammer price, plus seventeen-point-five percent commission for purchases under fifty-thousand, makes it a total of seventeen hundred sixty-two pounds and twenty-five pence. It is a very lovely piece, sir.”

  “Thank you, darling. It’s an acquired taste, I’ll admit, and I seem to have acquired it. It will go well with my curtains.”

  “Yes, quite.” She laughed, unsure if it was a joke.

  “Now, I’d like to have you bring me the painting. When should I expect it?”

  “Whenever you need it, sir, it will be there.”

  “I can be home tomorrow, Thursday, between nine and noon.”

  “That will be fine, sir. Just fill out this form.”

  Transaction completed, Grayson turned from the cashier with a wink, and he descended the grand staircase. The lobby sprawled out below, mingled with people conversing and admiring, congratulating and reading. The rack of catalogues of upcoming sales stood to the left of the stairs, small-linked gold chains locked between book and rac
k. There was the television, displaying the action in the auction room. There were books for sale, and the registration desk, where was seated yet another graceful woman, hair pulled back and clipped. That was affectionately described as the “husband-catching” position for Christie’s employees to hold—a chance to meet the influx of wealthy, and often single, gentlemen bidders, whose social standing, education, and tastes were self-evident from their presence at auction. But Grayson didn’t know this.

  He alighted onto the lobby floor, and his eye was drawn to one of the upcoming sales catalogues: Important Nineteenth-Century Decorative Arts. He approached it, when his path was barred.

  “Mr. Grayson?”

  “Yes. Do I know you?” There were three gentlemen in nearly identical dark suits standing before him.

  “No, sir. We are fellow collectors and art lovers, like yourself. We’ve seen you here before.”

  “Is that so? Find anything you like today?”

  “We did, as a matter of fact. We did make a purchase. As a matter of fact, that was something we wished to speak with you about.”

  “Oh?”

  “We wanted to congratulate you on your purchase of lot thirty-four. It’s a very handsome piece.”

  “Well, I…thank you. I think it’s something of an acquired taste, but I seem to have…”

  “The fact is, that we were rather hoping for the chance to bid on it ourselves, but we were out of the room when it came up.”

  “Bad luck. Did you receive a phone call?”

  “The fact is, sir, that we represent someone who would very much like the piece you just bought. He is prepared to offer you significantly more than you paid.”