The Art Thief: A Novel

by Noah Charney

  “Is that right?” Grayson’s eyes flicked around the room.

  “That is correct.” There was a pause. “I’m not going to be coy, Mr. Grayson. We are prepared to pay you ten thousand pounds for the painting that you just bought.”

  “Ten thousand pounds?” Grayson smiled and leaned back. “You must be mad. Do you know how much I paid for it? Fifteen hundred. That makes it…I can’t even do the math, but that is many times the…”

  “We know. It is of particular interest to us, and money is little object. Do we have a deal?”

  “Thank you, gentlemen. I’m deeply moved. But the fact is that money is little object to me, as well, and my wife is going to love this painting. Good day.”

  Grayson brushed past the three men, and into the ever-growing crowd mingled in the lobby. The crowd closed up behind him, and the men watched through the field of bodies, as Grayson left the building. By the time they had reached the door, he had gone.

  Delacloche watched this interaction intently. She stood in the lobby, straining through the crowd in search of Jeffrey, the expert with whom she’d spoken on the telephone. She wanted to ask him why the White on White that was presented as lot 39 was different from the one in the catalogue. Surely he was in the lobby. But she could not find him, or perhaps he ensured that she did not find him.

  She spotted two former lovers among the pin-striped and French-cuffed. One mediocre, the other downright awful. The only two representatives of her brief forays into English lovers. Alas, the tentative and repressed make poor bedfellows. Her mental Rolodex flipped through faces, and the feel of hands. Rodrigo García and Marco del Basso blew all the others out of the water. She smiled to herself as she thought back. Those two could turn professional. Give me a Mediterranean any day.

  The Christie’s experts laughed and chatted with their clients, many of whom they’d known for many years, and with whom they had relationships outside the office. There were few enough collectors out there, particularly in any given area of interest. The best customers were repeat buyers, and the art alone could not ensure loyalty. Buyers wanted to buy from their friends, and it was part of the job of the Christie’s employees to make and keep friendships with their clients. For some it might be considered a burden. But others thrived on it. It allowed one to live a very wealthy and glamorous life vicariously. Christie’s experts might be invited to stay at the Tuscan villa of one client, eat at Taillevent with another, cruise on a private yacht in the Greek Islands, be given gifts of wine. It was all highly agreeable, particularly for those without a family, or for whom family life was not the blissful escape that it might be. For some, work was like a beautiful dream from which they did not wish to wake.

  Delacloche knew most of the staff in all of the twentieth-century departments at Christie’s in various countries. She’d encountered them in the past at sales, at exhibitions, and in academic settings. Everyone was a known commodity, and this walled world often became a hive of incest, both literal and intellectual. There was nothing quite so otherworldly as a scholarly convention among art historians. One brightly individualized character was one thing, but a room full of sixty, discussing and releasing their passions in alternation, was an event to behold.

  Delacloche had seen many such sights. She surprised herself that she’d never slept with anyone on the Christie’s staff. As far as she recalled. So she could not understand why no one was speaking with her. She stood in the middle of the lobby, as the insects buzzed around her in tones of gossip and praise, and wondered why.

  Grayson sat in the taxi on the way to his St John’s Wood flat. He did not see the black Land Rover that was following him back to his home.

  CHAPTER 14

  Explain this to me, from the beginning.”

  The next morning, fresh off her triumphant purchase, Elizabeth Van Der Mier, director of the National Gallery of Modern Art, sat on the edge of her desk, arms crossed, looking unamused and wearing a black suit. Her whitening-blond hair was tied taut behind her head with a black ribbon, and her red lipstick was painted on with less than usual care. Her eyes punctured the night security staff, who sat in her wood-and-glass office. Four guards, one technician, one head of staff.

  “At 21:22 last night, we registered a lack of communication with the security personnel,” Cohen began, sifting his hand through his thinning hair. “We tried to radio in to them from the control room and received no response. We checked the closed-circuit TV monitors and could not find anyone. All the surveyed rooms and corridors appeared to be empty. We rewound the tape and found that the guards had been on video twenty-nine minutes earlier, but then disappeared abruptly from the screen. We later found that this was due to someone having tapped into our computers and looped the CC-TVs to broadcast the same recording of the empty rooms from earlier that night, on all monitors.

  “Apparently, at this same time, the missing guards had been told by radio that there was a disturbance on the third floor. The two separate patrol teams were given different instructions and sent to opposite parts of the third floor. They were addressed by a female voice that sounded like Ms. Avery, here. Avery noted that we had lost control of communications and video, but motion sensors were tripped in the utility room. I tried to phone the police, but the line was dead. Then I investigated, as I’ve told you.”

  Van Der Mier tapped her left arm with her right index finger and bit the inside of her left cheek.

  “What I don’t like…,” she began, “…where shall I begin? Someone broke into our computers. I don’t like that. But then it appears that no one ever entered the building, which is strange. What was the motion in the utility room, and in room nine?”

  “We investigated,” Cohen sighed, “but found nothing. It appears that, while we thought that we were still in control of the internal alarms, they were actually being manipulated electronically through our computer system, from the outside. The hacker was triggering motion alarms in both rooms. We’ve found no trace of actual intruders.”

  “The other thing I don’t like,” Van Der Mier continued, “is that there seems to be no rationale behind this attack. And it is an attack.”

  “Sometimes hackers will break in, just to show that they can,” Avery suggested cautiously.

  “That isn’t good enough, my dear. An encoded museum security system is not Mount Everest, and I will not believe that someone with rather too much time on his hands climbed it simply because it was there. There was forethought and malice in intentionally separating both security patrols, and luring Toby into the basement, before tripping the alarm on the main floor to chase him back up again. What further pisses me off is that a thief could have made off with a bundle of paintings last night, and whoever is behind this seems to want us to know as much, thanks to this show of power.”

  She paced militarily in front of her desk.

  “But a computer cannot carry paintings off the wall and out of the building. There must be a living, breathing human being in order to do that. And if the hacker can break into the system, then the hacker can put a person inside, and that is not going to happen.”

  She stopped and stood straight.

  “I want a complete overhaul of all the firewalls and codes, to block future access to our computers. Let us hope that this was an act of ability, a flexing of muscle, not an act of malevolent intent. But we will not allow this to happen again. None of you are to blame. You all acted appropriately. But I will caution you on one matter. Word of this must not circulate. The police are not to be involved. Nothing was stolen, and no one hurt. We can count our blessings for that. But we cannot afford the negative publicity that would come from such a breach in our defenses, nor do we wish to alert the criminal public to our vulnerability. We have just purchased a very important painting. Last night, during all of this mess, as a matter of fact. We will announce the acquisition at a press conference this afternoon. The painting will be the center of much positive publicity for the museum, and I have no wish to taint the expo
sure it will bring. So keep the events of last night silent. Thank you.”

  The anonymous Suprematist painting, lot 34, had just been delivered to the St John’s Wood flat of Mr. Robert Grayson. The raw-wood crate sat propped against his wallpapered hall, in the three-bedroom he occupied alone, for now. The luxury cars and bejeweled housewives of the neighborhood whirled by outside, as Grayson put on a Springsteen album.

  There was one other piece of what Grayson would consider “real” art on display in the flat. It was a Jasper Johns print of the American flag in an oversize driftwood frame, which gave it a rustic, Cape Cod, sea captain look, as he liked to describe it. The most widely sold print in history, he’d been told by the gallery owner. Other than that, his walls were sparsely populated with framed posters and photographs. A black-and-white of Ted Williams following through with his swing, as a catcher and umpire look on in awe. Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist with the letters M-O-M-A printed along the bottom. A long, horizontal poster of Boston, seen from the harbor at night, in a silvery metal frame. A quotation printed in white on black, in cursive, italicized letters, that read “Money and time are inextricably linked. You figure it out.”

  Grayson was dressed in a collared green polo shirt with a small red polo player over the heart and khaki trousers. He held the endgame of a cigar in one hand and a glass tumbler in the other. He was wiggling to the music in an admirable, but failed, attempt at dancing.

  His mobile phone rang.

  “Hello? Oh, hiya, Charlie. Sure, sure. No problem. Yeah, so what’ve you got for me? I’ll be on the flight that arrives JFK at eleven tonight, New York time. Yeah, have him meet me there, yup. Well, I’ve got the meeting downtown at ten, and a lunch with Harry Hancock at Union Square Cafe, at one thirty. Of course, I’m ordering the tuna burger. We should meet up for dinner, though. I’m only going to spend the one night, before I come back out here. I know it’s crazy, but my workload is up my ass, and Manchester United are playing Liverpool, so I’d like to be back as soon as possible. You may say it’s not real football, but I am enlightened. You can go shove your 49ers up your…what’s that? No, that’s fine. That won’t be a problem. Gramercy Tavern at eight, sounds good. And I’ll be swinging by Barney Greengrass just before Sal takes me to the airport on the way back. I’m going to smuggle some smoked sable back across the Atlantic. It’s my only vice. That and cigars. And bourbon, yes. Well, so I have three vices. I’m sure you can think of some more, but that won’t be necessary, thank you very much. Right, then, Charlie. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon. I leave in a couple of hours. Right, bye-bye.”

  Grayson put down his mobile phone and crossed over to the wooden crate by the door. He knelt beside it and ran his fingers across the rough plywood.

  “Greetings, and welcome to members of the press and public.” Elizabeth Van Der Mier stood in all her tall, dark-suited glory, behind a lectern in the Michael Marlais Lecture Hall at the National Gallery of Modern Art. “We are very pleased to announce the purchase of the most important Suprematist painting by the brilliant Kasimir Malevich, the first and largest in his series of White on White masterworks. It will have pride of place in our museum’s permanent collection, but may first be seen in our upcoming special exhibition, entitled ‘What Is Not There: The Beauty and Eloquence of Minimalism.’ The painting will be unveiled at the opening of the exhibition. It is in the Conservation Department to be reframed, and then it will go on display as the centerpiece of the ‘What Is Not There: The Beauty and Eloquence of Minimalism’ show. Until then…”

  “Isn’t it just all white?” whispered one member of the press to another.

  “I think so,” came the reply. “So what’s the big fat deal, then?”

  “No idea, mate. But I’ve got an idea what I’d like to do with the bird up at the podium, eh?”

  “Too right. What’s she talking about, then?”

  “No clue, mate. Just take a photo, and let’s grab a pint.”

  A man at the back of the room smiled, unamused, as he overheard. He was wearing ironed-crisp, cuff-linked sleeves, beneath his well-cut suit.

  Elizabeth Van Der Mier looked out over heads, cameras, and notebooks, surveying her fiefdom. This had gone very well. All the right people were here. This would be all over the magazines, newspapers, and newscasts. The icing was an interview with her, scheduled for next week, to be featured in Time Out magazine. That would be seen by millions and ensure popular awareness of her exhibition, unusual for anything but the big-name monograph shows, or the Impressionists. People flock to shows called “Vermeer,” or “Manet’s Paris,” or “The Impressionists at Argenteuil,” but Russian art was too often overlooked. It could not be considered forgotten, because that would imply that someone had known of it, at some point. Now was its chance.

  She did not see Delacloche, who sat at the back of the lecture hall, waiting.

  Hours later, Robert Grayson sipped his bourbon, slung low in his business-class seat, thousands of feet above the Atlantic. He stared out the window into the spilled-ink sky, devoid of stars, obscured by a black-veil mist of impenetrable clouds. Before him, New York was bustling and bright-eyed. Behind him, London slept.

  The National Gallery of Modern Art crouched like a great white moth on the south side of the river Thames. Swaddled in concrete and steel and glass, the London night bore a soft misty rain that ran like gauze over the hard surfaces. Dim yellow lights suffused from the ground around, casting shadows up along the walls. The windows yawned the darkness inside, as the paintings slept in silence. The illuminant sign on the front lawn of the museum hummed noiselessly.

  Then all the lights went out.

  CHAPTER 15

  Are you fucking kidding me!?”

  Toby Cohen screamed inside the control room of the museum, as Avery struck useless keys and threw her gaze across a matrix of empty screens, barely perceptible in the absolute, interior, windowless darkness.

  “What the fuck is fucking going on in this fucking place!?”

  “Sir, we’ve lost all power, including backup generators.”

  “I can see that, Avery, goddamn it. Where are you, anyway?”

  “One moment, sir.”

  Avery fumbled through the palpable black of the room, then clicked on a concentrated beam of white light.

  “Here, sir.” She handed Cohen a Maglite and clicked one on for herself. For the second time in one week, Cohen threw open the black steel cabinets and pulled out armaments. I’m getting too old for this, he thought.

  “After we’ve just fixed the goddamned computer system so that it’s hacker proof, something still goes wrong. Well this bloody technology can just…”

  “That’s the point, sir. This is not a computer failure, and this is not a hack. The new computer defense system is invulnerable. Except for one thing. It needs electricity.”

  “They knocked out the power to the whole building?”

  “That’s the only way that the computers could be neutralized. And they’d have to cut the emergency generator, too. The whole area could be black, for all we know.”

  “So somebody realized they couldn’t break through our front door, so they walked around it.”

  “It’s the Gordian knot, sir.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck what it is, but no one is going to steal from this museum while I’m on duty.”

  “Are you sure they’re going to steal something? Maybe it’s a show of power, like the last time.”

  “Why else would they be wanking us about, for Christ’s sake!? Get me the boys on the radio.”

  “The communications are routed through the computers, sir. But we do have manual walkie-talkies now.” Avery swung her light until she found what she was looking for. She clicked on the walkie-talkie with a hiss, and she pressed the button along its side. “Control to Security Teams Two and Three. Do you copy?”

  There was a long pause. Cohen stopped moving and listened, breath paused.

  “This is Security Three, we copy.
” Cohen and Avery exhaled, as the harsh, static voice came through.

  “Security Two here—we copy, over.”

  Cohen grabbed the walkie-talkie from Avery. “This is Toby. Now what’s going on?”

  “Security Three here. We were on the second floor, making rounds, when the lights went off, all of a sudden-like. I’ll be honest. I can’t see a bloody thing.”

  “Don’t you fucking curse at me, Stammers! Let’s keep things clean here, for fuck’s sake. Security Two, where are you?”

  “Boss, we’re on the ground floor, and we heard an explosion before the lights went out. It was muffled, though, so we can’t tell where it’s coming from. Felt like it was a big one.”

  “What do you mean that it felt like a big one?”

  “The floor shook.”

  “The floor shook—that’s just great.”

  “What should we do now?”

  “All right. Security Two, stay on the ground floor. Security Three, stay on the second floor. Avery and I will cover the first floor. I’ll be on the night-vision goggles, but we only have the two pairs up here, so you’ll have to use your Maglites. I want you to stay quiet and listen. We can’t see shit, but we can hear it.”

  Cohen clipped the walkie-talkie to his belt. He placed a handgun, through the dark, into Avery’s hand.

  “Sir, I’m not trained to…”

  “Shut up. We have to contact the police.”

  “But, sir…”

  “Something’s happening, Avery. Right now.”

  “I know. But…”

  “Don’t give me any buts, I…”

  “…the panic button is electric, and so are the phone and radios. Our mobile phones are in our lockers in the basement. We can’t reach the police. We’re trapped in here.”

  “Then we’ll have to break out.”