The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa

by Martin Caparros

  “I know, Marqués, I can imagine. I have to say, you’ve done an extraordinary job. To tell you the truth, I didn’t believe you’d be able to pull it off.”

  It might have been true, or he might just have been sugaring the pill—it made no difference. Either way, I enjoyed it.

  “‘Extraordinary’ is the word. My congratulations, Marqués,” he said, and then a shadow passed across his face. Perhaps it was dawning on him that he was alone with the world’s most wanted thief. Or perhaps that he was one of the very few people who knew his identity. The shadow was not fear, I supposed—it was more likely being reminded of his own complicity. I took advantage of this to press a point:

  “You will remember, Colonel, the terms of our agreement.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He was getting exasperated. I reminded him that he had promised never to show La Joconde to anyone, ever.

  “Remember that if you do, the biggest risk is to yourself.”

  “Please—I know.”

  He had lost almost all patience, but he was swallowing his pride. There was no point in continuing to torment him. I took the leather case and flung it open with a gesture that, for the first time, I found too showy. Colonel Burton was speechless, his mouth hung open, his hands were clutched to his head like someone watching a disaster unfold.

  “You have no idea what this means.”

  “Indeed, Colonel?”

  “No, you don’t know. You simply don’t know.”

  I thought of saying that if I didn’t know, his constant repetition would be sure to teach me, but I don’t think I did. The Colonel gazed at the Mona Lisa without yet really being able to believe it. He stretched a hand out to touch it and then pulled it back quickly, almost scared.

  “Now I have her. She is all mine.”

  He believed this, as would, in the next weeks, the banker I paid a visit to in his country house, the oilman in his office, the steel magnate in his suite at the Waldorf, the Philadelphia aristocrat, and the big Chicago slaughterhouse baron. Each one of them took enormous pleasure in the belief that no one else could have what he now had. They thought they were unique, and my job was to make sure that they could think this. Not one of them doubted the authenticity of the painting I had delivered to him. No one wanted to ask me for too many details. They had all seen—there was no way not to—the story of the theft in the newspapers. They all admired my skill and sangfroid. Each of them was grateful to me—though not without some confused feelings—for having chosen him as the beneficiary of my scheme. They were all dying to tell someone what they had, but felt—and still feel, I hope—the virtue of resisting that temptation.

  What was certain was that I had won: I now had almost two million dollars. It was more than I could ever have dreamed. I entertained myself by thinking up things to do with such an unlikely fortune. I could buy two thousand five hundred of those new cars of Mr. Ford’s, a Swiss heiress, a castle with land in Lazio, in Italy, and a spotless reputation anywhere in the world. I was very rich. I had won. I was Valfierno.

  “And no one suspected anything? Really?”

  “Would you have suspected, Newspaperman?”

  He told me that Michelangelo’s own fame began with a fake, that he sculpted a statue in the classical style—a sleeping Cupid of extraordinary beauty—and buried it to give it the appearance of being ancient, and that he then sold the fake to Cardinal San Giorgio in Rome for two hundred ducats. The Cardinal was delighted by the statue until someone revealed the truth about it, whereupon he was mortally offended, humiliated for not having been able to distinguish between the supposedly real and the supposedly false, and threatened Michelangelo and forced him to return his money. He returned the statue, and because of his pride, lost the chance to own a Michelangelo Buonarotti that in time would prove to be much more valuable than an ancient Cupid and was a great deal more beautiful.

  After this, Michelangelo renounced all artifice and decided that true art lay in discovering what was natural and innate—in wresting from marble its very essence. But his Cupid secured him the reputation of being able to do what before only the ancients had achieved, and he had done it more for that glory than for the ducats.

  Valfierno told me that he, too, had done it for the glory—as well as the money. And that the problem—his problem—will be how to achieve that glory. How to have his secret glory recognized and yet still be secret, so that his creation is not ruined and all his glory lost.

  “No, I guess not. What about you?”

  “Never. I’ve already told you—I am completely gullible.”

  Valérie was the one loose part in his otherwise perfect machine. The security of his scheme rested on the fact that each one of his pawns knew only him and none of the others. In the case of Perugia and his friends, they didn’t even know his name.

  Valérie, on the other hand, knew quite a few things about him and also knew Perugia well. And while he hadn’t told her the details of his plan—while she didn’t know that the whole goal of the scheme had been the sale of the copies—she knew that he, the Marqués, had masterminded what Perugia and the two brothers had carried out.

  After the theft, Valérie had become insufferable. He had tried to avoid her, but even so, during the few times they had seen each other before he had left Paris she had demanded her share, saying that without her none of it would have been possible: “What did you think, Marqués”—this last word ringing with sarcasm—“that you could just push me aside so easily?”

  “It’s hard to believe, Marqués, that after all this time you really don’t know who you’re playing with.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing I haven’t already said. If you don’t pay me what you owe me I’ll break this whole thing wide open.”

  Valfierno offered her a considerable sum of money with two conditions: that she leave Paris and that she never—“and I mean never in your miserable life, you understand?”—see Vincenzo Perugia again. It really was a lot of money.

  “Are you jealous, my love?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Am I being ridiculous?”

  In the end, Valérie accepted. She told him that all things considered it had been a good deal, and she proposed that they wrap it up with one last night together:

  “Don’t you worry, my love, there are no strings. It would be to seal our new alliance.”

  Valfierno refused her, and in so doing, believed that he had shown her something.

  Several days later, he received a postcard from Marseille. Valérie was writing to let him know that she had set up in an apartment in Canebière and that she was devoting herself to her little sailors. “I can’t tell you, Marqués, how far ahead I am now.” Valfierno wrote back to say that she should do whatever took her fancy, but that she was never under any circumstances to communicate with him again; that to her, he was now dead. He felt a little foolish on rereading this.

  “I can’t tell you, Marqués, how far ahead I am now.” Valfierno returned to that phrase over and over. Valérie was the key to his vulnerability; in some obscure way, he felt himself still to be in her hands. He tried to console himself, telling himself that she was what had prevented the whole operation from being simply a common robbery; that she was the element of risk that transformed the whole adventure into a work of art. But he was not convinced.

  Becker

  “IS THIS CHARLES BECKER?”

  “Yes, Becker here.”

  “I am the Marqués de Valfierno. I’d like to talk to you.”

  “What is this about?”

  “I have a story to tell you.”

  At first, I didn’t understand. He telephoned me at my office at the Chronicle and told me his name was Marquez and that he had a story to tell me that might interest me. The war had just ended, and San Francisco was teeming with soldiers, recently demobilized and out of work, looking to sell whatever they could, including the most unlikely tales. I got six or seven calls
like this every day and rejected most of them outright. But something in the way this man spoke made me pause; his voice wasn’t so much asking as commanding. He didn’t ask me if we could meet, like most of the other unfortunates, nor did he tell me he had the biggest scoop for me that I’d ever heard, as the typical smoke-and-mirror guys used to do. No, he simply told me that he had a story to tell me, and I asked him where and when would be convenient. As I hung up, it occurred to me that he also had a strange accent.

  “Marquez?”

  “That’ll do for now, but it’s Marqués, a title, not a name. I am Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno. How do you do?”

  It was impossible not to spot him. The bar at the Fillmore Hotel was humming with excitement, alcohol, girls in short hair and skirts, and men on the prowl dressed in garish ties. The piano was playing, but no one could hear it. The men and women flirted, yelled, shot each other looks, touched—all of them intent on making up for the years lost to fear and the trenches.

  At the end of the lounge, sitting in a black leather armchair as if none of this had anything to do with him, sheathed in an impeccable suit of cream-colored linen, was the slight figure of a man in his fifties with the majestic head of a statue, the mane silvering, an aquiline nose, graying, pointed beard, and very lively eyes.

  “You telephoned me.”

  “You are Charles Becker?”

  “I am.”

  “What will you have to drink?”

  “What have you got to tell me?”

  “Whiskey? Two ice cubes? Three?”

  The Marqués’s eyes never stopped moving. As if he wanted to be sure to see everything going on around him, or perhaps, as I was not to think until much later, as if he knew what was coming.

  “I can wonder about what I did, but not about what I’m going to do. Not because what I did is more important than what I might do, but because the past is infinitely malleable, whereas the future can only be what it is going to be.”

  “What?”

  “You understand perfectly well, Newspaperman.”

  He spent a while traveling. For him, those first months of 1912 would always be his happiest, if by happiness we mean the peace that comes from knowing you have done what you set out to do and have nothing else pressing. Or, to immerse yourself only in the present.

  Every so often he would read news accounts about Paris and the hunt for La Joconde; he took great pleasure in these. The police were baffled, and though they consulted all of the city’s psychics and witches and fortune-tellers, they were getting nowhere.

  The museum’s director was fired, the security procedures were changed. These were the gropings of the blind, and there were several. Embarrassment over the affair reached up as far as the government. Finally, they managed to apprehend a suspect. The press supplied the details: he was a poet of vaguely modern style, perhaps homosexual, by the name of Guillaume Apollinaire, who aroused suspicion when a friend of his who worked at the Louvre either sold him or gave him as a present a small Iberian statue, which he in turn had stolen from the museum. His accomplice—this word would sometimes appear in quotes—was a young Spanish painter by the name of Pablo Picasso. He was interrogated and then let go. The poet, Apollinaire, was held for a week; in the end he was released without charges.

  The newspapers kept on printing nonsense. What the reporters wanted to know more than anything was how the thief would be able to sell such a famous painting. Valfierno was like a child in his glee: he would enjoy these accounts hugely at first and then suddenly be irritated by their stupidity.

  And then the story stopped appearing in the newspapers. Sometime in the middle of 1912, the Louvre’s management gave up and filled in the space on the wall with a portrait by Raphael. Valfierno understood, even as they did not, that they were trying to forget.

  He traveled. All of his destinations seemed to him to merge into one: the Carlton Hotel on the Côte d’Azur, the María Cristina in the north of Spain, the baths at Marienbad or Baden-Baden, the Select—or was it the Excelsior?—in Alexandria. The scenery changed, and the climate, and the language spoken by the staff, but the people were always more or less the same. The meals, the conversations, the occasional trysts, the gossip. In the end, he thought, we do not amount to much.

  He meandered. For the moment, he preferred not to return to America, and the thought of Argentina also still made him uneasy. But the rest of the world was his.

  He had no obligations and had never before fully realized the significance of that state, having heard the phrase repeated in error so often by others. He had no obligations. No home, no country, no family. Just a name and a mountain of cash; he was free to follow any whim at all. The sheer possibility was infinite; sometimes, in the middle of his pleasure, it seemed almost terrifying. There were too many possibilities, and above all they were unpredictable.

  He told himself there were certain things he had to decide. He had, for example, to come up with a place to live. But in order to decide that, he would also have to decide who to be. This he avoided, as he avoided reminding himself it was something he had to think about.

  For the time being, he pretended that the only question was to choose what it was he wanted to do. He wanted to do nothing but didn’t know how to go about it. After a few months, the usual ways of doing nothing were proving repetitive and rather boring. And whenever he thought of doing anything, it seemed so trivial compared to what he had just done. Trivial and unnecessary.

  The only thing that interested him was to entertain certain additions to his recent, perfect feat. “Something that is perfect”—he was told by an educated Russian woman whom he encountered at more than one spa—“is something that can’t be improved, something finished and perfectly complete.”

  “In that case, Madame, nothing is really perfect.”

  “No, Marqués, but sometimes we ought to pretend.”

  He still had La Joconde, or rather, Perugia still had her. He had known from the beginning that he didn’t want to keep her; he had only arranged her theft so that he could sell the copies, and any contact he had with her now could only complicate things. At some point, though he had no desire to do so, he knew that he had to come to a decision about what to do. From time to time he would write a brief note to the Italian telling him not to despair, that he had not forgotten him, that he would be back to see him. He knew that he would eventually have to see Perugia and do something—he couldn’t just leave the world’s most famous painting under some peasant’s bed, though there were nights when the absurdity of it seemed perfectly appropriate to him.

  He considered different options. The simplest, without doubt, was to get rid of her entirely: to destroy her. He had recently read Stefan Zweig’s account of Herostratus, who, wanting his name to endure at any cost, burned down one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, in 356 BC. The city elders condemned him to death and above all decreed that his name be forgotten forever. Yet now, in the twentieth century, Herostratus’s name was known while no one remembered who had been on that council of elders.

  But Herostratus had not been able to think of a better way to ensure his everlasting fame, whereas he—Valfierno—had already found a way to ensure his, though nobody knew it yet.

  He continued to think that burning the painting was indeed the best choice, and also the simplest. It would put an end to the whole affair: the Louvre’s painting would never reappear, his buyers would be happy, and eventually the theft would be forgotten. By burning La Joconde he would be destroying the only proof that the others were Chaudron’s copies.

  He liked to imagine that some day—decades, perhaps centuries in the future—the originals would start to appear: two, three, eventually six identical originals. Then this most celebrated painting would become a collection of identical paintings, indistinguishable one from another.

  But he thought the idea of just setting fire to the painting seemed a bit weak, a little gratuitous. Then he was struck by a br
illiant idea. He would collect the painting from Perugia and take it to a safe place. There, he would get a moving picture camera, which he would teach Chaudron to use. Together they would film a true work of art: the destruction by fire of the great painting. He imagined that old wood resisting the fire at first and then slowly catching, the colors changing, dripping, the smell of scorched oil paint, the wood now in flames, that gently smiling face dissolving into ashes, the eyes dissolving, that myth and all those centuries of nonsense dissolving, just because he, Eduardo de Valfierno, had known enough to show that they were nothing.

  They’d be able to sell that film for thousands, millions. Then they’d return one of the copies to the museum—that would be the real coup! True art: to present the copy as the original, cause them to put that lie on display, and know that millions of people would gape in sacred awe at a painting that wasn’t. Fools, believing in their foolishness! On, flock! To your trough! Sometimes he liked to tell himself that this is what he had actually done.

  But he didn’t do it, either this or anything else. His leisure was becoming unbearable, and the morning’s brandy was no longer able to liven him up enough in the face of another day like all the others. His breakfast brandy became two, sometimes three. One night he woke up sweating: he was terrified of ending up as Bonaglia again. He got up, lit a long, fat cigar, and sat with a drink in his hand. The real problem was not that he might go back to being him, he knew; it was the suspicion that he had never stopped being Quique Bonaglia.

  That night he thought of a thousand ways he might leave that man behind. As the dawn came, in the dim light, his guard down, he thought he would go back to Argentina one day to find Mariana de Baltiérrez; she was still so blond in his memories.

  He says—wonders, tells himself—that he is grown up now.

  The Marqués said nothing while the waiter put my whiskey beside me on the low table. Then he lifted his glass and murmured something in French. I returned his toast and asked him if we could start.