The Art Thief: A Novel

by Noah Charney

  Security Team Three wandered through the silent halls, vacuous and full with the void of darkness. The night was overcast and moonless. It appeared that the sky outside the windows had been blacked out, as well. No light shone in from any source. The only respite came in the thin, clear beams from the Maglites that flashed around the walls.

  There were so many paintings, each one unable to defend itself, a helpless lamb, vulnerable. With the electricity on, there was closed-circuit surveillance, external and internal alarms, locks on doors, iron gates that dropped at exit points for containment security. Without electricity, however, there were no defenses but locks on the doors outside, and frames bolted to walls. That wasn’t much. Museums don’t anticipate attack, so there were only the six overnight guards. They hadn’t even had time to reinforce, beyond computer firewalls, since last night’s incident. Now the guards couldn’t even see.

  Guards Stammers and Fox walked through the dwarfing rooms, as their flashlights beamed over works of art they feared they could not protect. Like shepherds in a blinding snowstorm. The wolves could be anywhere, and there were too many sheep to defend.

  Then they heard a sound.

  “Did you hear that?” Fox stopped moving.

  “Uh-huh.” They both drew guns.

  There it was again. A footfall, perhaps. The guards turned around, then paused.

  “I definitely heard that.” Stammers started toward the sound. It seemed to be coming from the next room.

  Fox followed. “That’s room nine again, isn’t it?”

  “Yup.”

  “Doesn’t it feel like we’ve done this before?”

  “Yup.”

  They walked slowly forward, guns held by bent arms, lights cast along the floor.

  “We can’t close the gates this time.”

  “I know.”

  They stopped. The black air around them was submarine. The room gaped.

  Then something ran out toward them.

  A figure charged out of room nine. It brushed past Stammers and Fox before they could react. They spun and heard a voice.

  “For fuck’s sake, it’s just us!”

  Toby Cohen emerged from room nine. He shined his flashlight up at his own face, night-vision goggles tipped up on his forehead.

  “Boo,” he said. Then he flashed to the figure that had run past, now standing in the room with them. It was Avery, also carrying night-vision goggles. “I want Avery to get the police. Something’s going down. I’m not going to take any chances. Let’s get her out the door.”

  They navigated through the cavernous rooms, until they reached one of the doors that led outside. What limited light there was leaked in through the glass front doors, locked and tight. Avery unlocked the door manually.

  “Just reach the nearest phone, and then let the police in. We’ll be inside and may not be able to hear you. And tell ’em to bring some lights, for Christ’s sake.” Cohen held the door open for Avery, and she set out into the night. He closed and locked the door behind her.

  “We’re locked in, boys. Let’s just hope there’s nothing to be scared of.”

  Across the Thames, several miles away, lay the St John’s Wood flat of Robert Grayson. In the black basement of the building, the calm was broken by a muffled footfall. Then another.

  The feet, clad in felt-wrapped shoes, crept along a corridor, and pushed open a metal door, soundlessly. Then a long, thin probe found a metal box mounted on the wall, and sank deep into its silvery keyhole. A minute later, the lock sprang, and the door rolled open. A thin-gloved hand fingered along the rows of fuses, until it found its victim.

  A bright crash of glass fell through the cracked skylight, and down onto Robert Grayson’s bedroom floor. It was followed by a black figure, who landed catlike on the ground, cushioned by muscled legs and skillful bend of knee. The alarm did not sound.

  Without impediment, the figure strode into the living room, where an anonymous Suprematist painting slept in its protective wooden crate, resting against the wall.

  A screwdriver flashed out of a holster strapped on hip, and the tight lid was unscrewed and removed. There, in the custom-made wooden box, sat the hideously ugly painting, lot 34. It was snug, surrounded by perfectly cut Styrofoam padding.

  The figure drew a long, thin scalpel and pressed it into the flesh of the canvas. The blade ran along the outside edge, just below the nails that locked the canvas, spread tight across the wooden stretcher that gave it form. The canvas peeled forward off its stretcher, like dry skin. It was carefully and loosely rolled, and placed in a black plastic tube that was slung over, and lashed tight, to back.

  Climbing the rope that still hung through the shattered skylight, the figure disappeared into the night.

  CHAPTER 16

  The museum guards wandered from room to room. Although in pairs, they might have been alone, for the tangible night sky inside the museum was carved into visibility only by the thinnest knives of their flashlights.

  Cohen could feel the presence of the paintings around him, this hanging garden of cloth and wood and pigment and oil. He never understood the appeal of a mess of splotches or a black square, but he’d guard them with his life. And he never took the time to ask himself why. Perhaps because he feared that he could not come up with an answer, and that would plunge his life’s work into nothingness. “Avoid the void,” he had once heard someone say. If he allowed himself to think, well, that was not in the best interest of the working class. He knew that he was good at his job, and that was enough. He knew that he was valued by people far smarter than he, and that brought him some satisfaction. Why try to trick oneself into unhappiness, all in the name of thought? Did bodyguards have to love, and understand, the prime minister? No, they just knew that their job was to protect him at all costs. It was not for them, these existential conundrums. But, then, Cohen was not entirely sure that he knew what “existential” meant.

  The absence of light to his periphery was such that he could not even make out the walls. Whoever did this picked the right night, he thought. Overcast and moonless. A lonely soul bobbing up and down in a midnight sea, Cohen knew that ships were passing on either side, could feel them, but could not see. The sounds of this ocean mocked him, too, but did so with their silence. His ears awaited any sound, but none came to him, amiss or otherwise, to satisfy his hypothesis. This was an attack, he had been certain, a kidnapping. So why would the barbarians storm the castle for plunder, and then leave without a sound, without a coin to show for it? Was this yet another show of power? Twice in the same week. He engaged his night-vision goggles, and the black turned to green once more.

  Van Der Mier had insisted that defensive walls be erected to block hacker access to the computer systems. It was now impossible, they had been assured, for someone to gain entry without a proper series of computer codes. But there was no defense for technology against the removal of its electric lifeblood, just as the mightiest armies would crumble, if the sky were stripped of oxygen.

  It was such a simple way to disarm technology. Cohen felt embarrassed by his now-evident reliance on it. What if his night-vision should malfunction? He would be wading through an infinity of shadow, shadows cast without light, with only a spindly torch in hand, slashing through a jungle with a penknife, helpless to protect the inexplicable treasures that hung all around him, his only charge.

  He had once read that the blind compensate by honing their other senses, such as hearing, to monitor their surroundings. It was with this in mind that Cohen had ordered his guards to tread lightly and keep off the walkie-talkies. It was unclear what sound he hoped to hear. Would it not be better to hear nothing, rendering this a false alarm? Not for him. But what? The sound of canvas cut from frame in a distant room? The tread of muffled feet on the wooden floor at the other end of the gallery? The museum had been disarmed with such elegance. It seemed ludicrous to assume that the theft itself would be any less graceful.

  Cohen stopped for a moment. He stood in
the center of a gallery, switched off his night-vision, and looked around. He saw nothing, of course, but he looked. His eyes pored through the thick fog blackness, this abyss in which he floated, aware of his grounding only through the feel of feet on floor. A meditative calm permeated the air. The museum, tomblike, deprived the senses. He was buried alive, yet breathed above ground. But his mind did not play tricks. Deep inhalation. He did not see what was not there. He simply did not see.

  CHAPTER 17

  Sonorous rumbles rolled forth from the open mouth of the sleeping Jean-Paul Lesgourges. His several gold-capped teeth glinted off the only light in his curtain-drawn bedroom: a shimmery sliver that knifed between two patterned curtains, from the street lamp outside. The telephone at his bedside had been ringing for several minutes.

  By the third round of rings, Jean-Paul permitted one of his eyes to open and to stare down the villainous phone that chirped by his head. With his left eye still closed tight in hope of returning sleep, he extended his arm above his head, then down, then across, until it found the porcelain-white curve of the phone, which he dragged across the empty pillow beside him on his king-size bed. He eventually found his ear, beneath a hot tangle of sheet and pillowcase.

  “Oui?”

  The voice on the other end of the line came fast and sleepless. “CH is the abbreviation for Chronicles.”

  It was Bizot.

  Lesgourges mumbled, “Who is this?”

  “C’est moi, Bizot! Tu sais bien que c’est moi, putain!”

  Lesgourges rolled onto his back. “Of course it’s you, Jean. Who else calls me at…dear God…four in the morning. Now, what the hell do you want, so I can go back to sleep. I was dreaming of…”

  “CH is the abbreviation for Chronicles.”

  Lesgourges was silent.

  Bizot continued, “It’s a book in the Bible.”

  “Oh, right. Sans blague?”

  “No, I’m not kidding, Lesgourges. I think that this may refer to a biblical quotation.”

  “How the hell did you come up with that? I thought we’d decided it was a palindrome for…”

  “I spoke with Geneviève Delacloche.”

  “Qui?”

  “The one with the beaux seins, the Malevich Society…”

  “Oh yes.” Lesgourges yawned. “You mentioned her.”

  “Look, I’ll tell you all about it, in person. Do you have a Bible?”

  “What kind of a Catholic are you, Bizot, living in a house without a Bible? You should be ashamed of yourself. Were you raised by wolves?”

  “So I can come over and use yours?”

  “Oh, I don’t have one. You’ll have to steal one from a hotel. I think they have them in the bedside drawers…”

  “I’m not going to check in to a hotel at four in the morning so I can steal a Bible. Don’t you have the internet at your house?”

  “Don’t tell me that you’re in so desperate a state that you’re volunteering to sleep with the enemy?”

  “As long as I’m not touching a computer myself, I can sleep at night. Feel no evil. You can do the touching.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that, but okay. Come over, Bizot. How long will you be?”

  “Three seconds. I’m on my mobile phone outside your apartment.”

  The police arrived at the museum before the creeping dawn. Thirteen minutes after Avery had left, six police cars screeched to a halt around the museum, and the building was surrounded. The police entered with large halogen flashlights and panned through the rooms, now blue in earliest morning. Beams of light danced across the walls, over paintings still bolted in place. The guards were found, and each gallery on every floor was carefully scanned for missing works.

  Nothing had been taken from the galleries. Cohen began to feel ashamed, and he was almost relieved when a broken window was discovered in the basement.

  Lesgourges stirred the hot milk and dropped in purple-black pellets of Angelina’s Chocolat Africain, dissolving the milk to a thick walnut richness. Then he slid the mug to Bizot, who sat on a stool in the glass-and-steel modern kitchen of Lesgourges’ sleek apartment in the Sixteenth Arrondissement of 4 AM Paris.

  “So I was interviewing this Delacloche about the case,” began Bizot, “and I told her my idea about the writing on the wall turning the theft into a statement…”

  “…my idea…”

  “My idea,” Bizot resumed, “and she thought that it was brilliant…so I asked her what sort of a statement the theft of this particular painting might make. And she told me a bit about it. Do you know about it, Jean?”

  “I know…no, I guess I don’t really know about Malevich.”

  “Mmm, comme c’est bon.” Bizot sipped his cocoa. “Well, I’ll enlighten you. It turns out that the reason the painting in question is all white is that it is meant as the negation of the icon. Malevich felt it to be spiritual, a better approximation of God than any formal image. Malevich thought that no formal image would do justice to portray God, so he chose an abstract one that suggested the idea of God to him. It removed things like iconography, which require specialized knowledge on the part of the viewer, in order to be understood. It’s open to anyone. Malevich hung the painting in the corner to the upper left as you enter the gallery where it was exhibited. This replicated the place in a Russian home where an icon would hang. Instead of Mary and the baby Jesus, you get an all-white painting. Do you follow?”

  “Want a cookie?” Lesgourges’ attention was directed to a packet of madeleines that he was struggling to open. When he did, he dipped one of the firm almond cakes into his cocoa. “This is going to be good. Like Proust, but more chocolaty.”

  “Jean, were you listening to anything I just said?”

  “Sure. White, God, chocolate. You should really try this.”

  “It does look good, come to think of it.” Bizot dunked himself a madeleine.

  “I’m not sure I follow you.” Lesgourges was dressed in his baby-blue pajamas, wrinkled with sleep, his little remaining hair a protruding shelf, perpendicular to his head.

  “If the theft is a statement, then it must be a statement either for, or against, something. If the painting negates icons, then it goes against the church doctrine. So maybe…”

  “I see. So CH347 could refer to a passage in the Bible, from the book of…”

  “Chronicles.”

  “Bizot, how did you think of which book it referred to? That’s brilliant. So unlike you.”

  “Actually, I had help with that part. I couldn’t figure it out, but Delacloche suggested…”

  “Did you call her at this time of night?”

  “No, we spoke on the phone many hours ago. She’d been away on business, just returned. I was going to call you, but then I fell asleep. And then I was hungry, so I got a kebab behind St. Michel.”

  “The stand near the movie theater?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. It’s very good, although it usually needs salt.”

  They sat in the kitchen in silence.

  Eventually Lesgourges spoke. “Shall we look for a Bible on the internet?”

  “I suppose we should. We are godless men, aren’t we?”

  “Only if you believe that God has anything to do with the Bible. The computer’s in the other room.”

  Lesgourges sat before his computer, navigating inexpertly by mouse, with Bizot standing a safe distance back, arms crossed.

  Bizot grumbled. “I don’t like anything…”

  “…new. I know. This isn’t new,” said Lesgourges. “Computers have been around since before you were born.”

  “Don’t confuse me with the facts. I don’t like them. I don’t like anything smarter than I am.”

  “But you like me.”

  “Well…just do the typing, Lesgourges.”

  “Right.”

  The screen glowed the only light in the room, bathing the two men in a preposterous neon whiteness. They were reversed silhouettes, white on black. Bizot’s eyes lazily wa
ndered the bookshelves. A thin film of dust caked most exposed horizontal surfaces.

  “Do you own any literature?” Bizot asked.

  “Of course.”

  “These all sound like self-help books. I mean, Life Is a Straight Line by Macarena Plaza, How to Find Things Very Interesting by Alen Balde, How to Find Everything So Great, also by Alen Balde…mon Dieu…Manual on Welsh Sexual Techniques by Davyth Nelson…”

  “It’s not self-help. I got them in the philosophy section.” Lesgourges clicked away on the computer screen.

  Bizot picked a book off the shelf. “What It’s All Aboot: Live Your Life the Canadian Way, Eh by Andrew Hammond…”

  “Will you stop fiddling? Here, I’ve logged on to the internet. What are we looking for?”

  “What we need,” said Bizot, “is a Bible…uh…what’s it called when everything’s linked up, you know, so you can look up one word and find all the examples…”

  “A dictionary?” Lesgourges looked confused.

  “No, not a dictionary. You know, where it lists…”

  “A thesaurus?”

  “No! Have you ever heard of a Bible thesaurus? What’s the…we need a dictionary to look up the word for dictionary…ah! That’s it. A concordance.”

  “Oh, right.”

  On the table next to the computer sat a framed black-and-white photograph of Lesgourges, with a full head of hair, his arms slung around a young woman. The photo frame was dustless.

  Lesgourges manipulated the keyboard with one hyperextended finger at a time.

  “Now what do we do?” asked Bizot. “We can just type in a passage name and number, and it will find it for us?”

  “We’ll never need to open a book again. What shall I enter?”

  “Delacloche suggested that CH could be the abbreviation for the book of Chronicles. But 347 sounds like too many numbers for a chapter or verse. We should try all the combinations, and see if any of the passages make sense. Try,” Bizot considered, “Chronicles, chapter 3, verse 4.” Lesgourges typed, and the screen stirred to action.