The Heist Read online

  19

  AMSTERDAM

  FOR THE NEXT NINE DAYS, the art world spun smoothly on its gilded axis, blissfully unaware of the time bomb ticking in its midst. It lunched well, it drank late into the evening, it slid carelessly down the slopes of Aspen and St. Moritz on the last good snow of the season. Then, on the third Friday of April, it woke to the news that a calamity had struck the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam. Sunflowers, oil on canvas, 95 by 73 centimeters, was gone.

  The technique employed by the thieves did not match the sublime beauty of their target. They chose the bludgeon over the rapier, speed over stealth. The chief of Amsterdam’s police department would later call it the finest display of “smash and grab” he had ever seen, though he was careful not to release too many details, lest he make it easier for the next band of thieves to make off with another iconic and irreplaceable work of art. He was grateful for only one thing: the thieves did not use a razor to remove the canvas from its frame. In fact, he said, they had treated the painting with a tenderness that bordered on reverence. Many experts in the field of art security, however, saw the careful handling of the canvas as a troubling sign. For them, it suggested a commissioned theft carried out by highly competent professional criminals. One retired art sleuth from Scotland Yard was skeptical about the prospects for a successful recovery. In all likelihood, he said, Sunflowers was now hanging in the museum of the missing and would never be seen by the public again.

  The managing director of the Rijksmuseum went before the media to issue a plea for the painting’s safe return. And when that failed to move the thieves, he offered a substantial reward, which forced the Dutch police to waste countless hours chasing down hoaxes and false leads. The mayor of Amsterdam, an unrepentant radical, thought a demonstration was in order. Three days later, several hundred activists of every stripe converged on the Museumplein to demand that the thieves hand over the painting unharmed. They also called for the ethical treatment of animals, an end to global warming, the legalization of all recreational narcotics, the closure of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, and an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There were no arrests, and a good time was had by all, especially those who availed themselves of the free cannabis and condoms. Even the most liberal Dutch newspapers thought the protest was pointless. “If this is the best we can do,” editorialized one, “we should prepare ourselves for the day when the walls of our great museums are bare.”

  Behind the scenes, however, the Dutch police were engaged in a far more traditional effort to recover what was, arguably, van Gogh’s most famous work. They talked to their snitches, tapped the phones and e-mail accounts of known thieves, and kept a watch on galleries in Amsterdam and Rotterdam that were suspected of dealing in stolen goods. But when another week passed with no progress, they decided to open a conduit to their brethren in European law enforcement. The Belgians sent them on a wild goose chase to Lisbon, while the French did little more than wish them well. The most intriguing foreign lead came from General Cesare Ferrari of the Art Squad, who claimed to have heard a rumor that the Russian mafiya had engineered the theft. The Dutch made entreaties to the Kremlin for information. The Russians didn’t trouble themselves with a reply.

  By then, it was early May, and the Dutch police possessed not a single substantive lead on the painting’s whereabouts. Publicly, the chief vowed to redouble his efforts. Privately, he admitted that, short of divine intervention, the van Gogh was probably lost forever. Inside the museum, a black shroud was hung in the painting’s place. One British columnist sardonically implored the museum’s director to increase security. Otherwise, he quipped, the thieves would steal the shroud, too.

  There were some in London who found the column in poor taste, but for the most part the art world shrugged its collective shoulders and carried on. The important Old Master auctions were fast approaching, and by all accounts the season would be the most lucrative in years. There were paintings to see, clients to entertain, and bidding strategies to devise. Julian Isherwood was a blur of activity. On the Wednesday of that week, he was spotted in the saleroom at Bonhams pawing an Italianate river landscape attributed to the circle of Agostino Buonamico. The next day he was lunching well at the Dorchester with an expatriate Turk of seemingly limitless means. Then, on the Friday, he stayed after hours at Christie’s to perform due diligence on an eighteenth-century John the Baptist from the Bolognese School. As a result, the bar at Green’s was filled to capacity by the time he arrived. He paused to have a private word with Jeremy Crabbe before settling into his usual table, with his usual bottle of Sancerre. Tubby Oliver Dimbleby was flirting shamelessly with Amanda Clifton, the delectable new head of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art department. He pressed one of his gold-plated business cards into her palm, blew a kiss to Simon Mendenhall, and then walked over to Isherwood’s table. “Darling Julie,” he said as he plopped into the empty chair. “Tell me something absolutely scandalous. A naughty rumor. A bit of malicious gossip. Something I can dine out on for the rest of the week.” Isherwood smiled, poured two inches of wine into Oliver’s empty glass, and proceeded to make his evening.

  “Paris? Really?”

  Isherwood gave a conspiratorial nod.

  “Says who?”

  “I couldn’t possibly say.”

  “Come on, petal. It’s me you’re talking to. I have more dirty secrets than MI6.”

  “Which is why I’m not going to breathe another word about it.”

  Dimbleby appeared genuinely hurt, which, until that moment, Isherwood wouldn’t have thought possible.

  “My source is connected to the Paris art scene. That’s as far as I can go.”

  “Well, that’s a revelation. I thought you were going to tell me he was a sous-chef at Maxim’s.”

  Isherwood said nothing.

  “Is he in the biz, or is he a consumer of the arts?”

  “Biz.”

  “Dealer?”

  “Use your imagination.”

  “And he’s actually seen the van Gogh?”

  “My source would never be caught dead in the same room as a stolen painting,” Isherwood replied with just the right hint of righteous indignation. “But he has it on good authority that several disreputable dealers and collectors have been shown Polaroid photographs.”

  “I didn’t know they still existed.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Polaroid cameras.”

  “Apparently so.”

  “Why use a Polaroid?”

  “They leave no digital footprints that can be traced by the police.”

  “Good to know,” said Dimbleby, with a glance at Amanda Clifton’s backside. “So who’s flogging it?”

  “According to the rumor mill, he’s an Englishman without a name.”

  “An Englishman? What a cad.”

  “Shocking,” agreed Isherwood.

  “How much is he asking?”

  “Ten million.”

  “For a bloody van Gogh? That’s a steal.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It won’t last long, not at that price. Somebody’s going to snatch it up and lock it away forever.”

  “My source thinks our Englishman might actually have a bidding war on his hands.”

  “Which is why,” Dimbleby said, his tone suddenly serious, “you have no choice but to go to the police.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have to protect my source.”

  “You’re professionally obligated to tell the police. Morally, too.”

  “I do love it when you lecture me about morality, Oliver.”

  “No need to get personal, Julie. I was just trying to do you a favor.”

  “Like sending me on an all-expenses-paid trip to Lake Como?”

  “Are we going to have this conversation again?”

  “I still have nightmares about his body hanging from that bloody chandelier. It looked
like something painted by . . .”

  Isherwood’s voice trailed off. Dimbleby frowned thoughtfully.

  “By whom?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Did they ever find out who killed him?”

  “Who?”

  “Jack Bradshaw, you dolt.”

  “I believe it was the butler.”

  Dimbleby smiled.

  “Now remember, Oliver, everything I’ve told you about the van Gogh being in Paris is entre nous.”

  “It shall never pass my lips.”

  “Swear to me, Oliver.”

  “You have my solemn word,” said Dimbleby. Then, after finishing his drink, he told everyone in the room.

  By lunchtime the following day, it was all anyone at Wilton’s was talking about. From there, it made its way over to the National Gallery, the Tate, and lastly to the Courtauld Gallery, which was still smarting over the theft of van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear. Simon Mendenhall told everyone at Christie’s; Amanda Clifton did the same at Sotheby’s. Even the normally taciturn Jeremy Crabbe couldn’t keep his own counsel. He put it all in a chatty e-mail to someone at the New York office of Bonhams, and before long it was rattling round the galleries of Midtown and the Upper East Side. Nicholas Lovegrove, art consultant to the vastly rich, whispered it into the ear of a reporter at the New York Times, but the reporter had already heard it from someone else. She rang the chief of the Dutch police, who’d heard it, too.

  The Dutchman called his counterpart in Paris, who didn’t think much of it. Nevertheless, the French police began looking for a well-built Englishman of early middle age with blond hair, blue-tinted eyeglasses, and a faint cockney accent. They found several, though none turned out to be an art thief. Among those swept up in the dragnet was the British home secretary’s nephew, whose accent was posh London but hardly cockney. The home secretary called the French interior minister to complain, and the nephew was quietly released.

  There was one aspect of the rumor, however, that was unassailably true: Sunflowers, oil on canvas, 95 by 73 centimeters, was indeed in Paris. It had arrived there the morning after its disappearance, in the trunk of a Mercedes sedan. It went first to Antiquités Scientifiques, where, rolled in protective glassine paper, it spent two restful nights in a climate-controlled cabinet. Then it was carried by hand to the Office safe flat overlooking the Pont Marie. Gabriel quickly returned the painting to a new stretcher and propped it on an easel in the makeshift studio he had prepared in the spare bedroom. That evening, when Chiara was cooking, he sealed the door with tape to avoid any contamination of the surface. And when they slept, the painting slept next to them, bathed in the yellow glow of the streetlamps along the Seine.

  The next morning he went to a small gallery near the Luxembourg Gardens where, posing as a German, he purchased a Paris streetscape by a third-tier Impressionist who used the same type of canvas as van Gogh. Returning to the flat, he stripped away the painting using a powerful solution of solvent and then removed the canvas from its stretcher. After trimming the canvas to the proper dimensions, he attached it to the same type of stretcher on which he placed Sunflowers, a stretcher measuring 95 by 73 centimeters. Next he covered the canvas with a fresh coat of ground. Twelve hours later, when the ground had dried, he prepared his palette with chrome yellow and yellow ocher, and began to paint.

  He worked as van Gogh had worked, swiftly, wet-in-wet, and with a touch of madness. At times he felt as though van Gogh were standing at his shoulder, pipe in hand, guiding his every brushstroke. At others, he could see him in his studio in the Yellow House in Arles, racing to capture the beauty of the sunflowers on his canvas before they wilted and died. It was August 1888 when van Gogh produced his first studies of sunflowers in Arles; he hung them upstairs in the spare bedroom, into which Paul Gauguin, with many misgivings, settled in late October. The domineering Gauguin and the supplicant Vincent painted together for the remainder of the autumn, often working side by side in the fields around Arles, but they were prone to violent quarrels about God and art. One occurred on the afternoon of December 23. After confronting Gauguin with a razor, Vincent went to the brothel on the rue du Bout d’Aeles and sliced off a portion of his left ear. Two weeks later, following his discharge from the hospital, he returned to the Yellow House, alone and bandaged, and produced three startling repetitions of the sunflowers he had painted for Gauguin’s room. Until recently, one of those paintings had hung in the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam.

  Van Gogh had probably painted the Amsterdam Sunflowers in a matter of hours, just as he had painted its predecessor the previous August. Gabriel, however, required three days to produce what he would later refer to as the Paris version. With the addition of van Gogh’s distinctive signature to the vase, the forgery was identical to the original in every way but one: it had no craquelure, the fine network of surface cracking that appears in paintings over time. To induce craquelure quickly, Gabriel removed the canvas from its stretcher and baked it in a 350-degree oven for thirty minutes. Then, when the canvas had cooled, he held it taut between both hands and dragged it over the edge of the dining room table, first horizontally, then vertically. The result was the appearance of instant craquelure. He returned the canvas to its stretcher, covered it in a coat of varnish, and placed it next to the original. Chiara could not tell one from the other. Neither could Maurice Durand.

  “I never would have imagined it was possible,” the Frenchman said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That anyone could be as good as Yves Morel.” He traced his fingertip gently over Gabriel’s impasto brushwork. “It’s as if Vincent painted it himself.”

  “That’s the goal, Maurice.”

  “But not so easy to achieve, even for a professional restorer.” Durand leaned a little closer to the canvas. “What technique did you use to produce your craquelure?”

  Gabriel told him.

  “The van Meegeren method. Very effective, so long as you don’t burn the painting.” Durand turned his gaze from Gabriel’s forgery to van Gogh’s original.

  “Don’t get any ideas, Maurice. It’s going back to Amsterdam as soon as we’re done with it.”

  “Do you know how much I could get for it?”

  “Ten million.”

  “Twenty at least.”

  “But you didn’t steal it, Maurice. It was stolen by an Englishman with blond hair and tinted eyeglasses.”

  “An acquaintance of mine thinks he’s actually met him.”

  “I hope you didn’t disabuse him of that notion.”

  “Not at all,” replied Durand. “The dirty side of the trade believes your friend has the painting and that he’s already negotiating with several potential buyers. It won’t be long before you-know-who throws his hat into the ring.”

  “Perhaps he needs a bit of encouragement.”

  “What kind?”

  “Fair warning before the gavel comes down. Do you think you can manage that, Maurice?”

  Durand smiled. “With a single phone call.”

  20

  GENEVA

  THERE WAS ONE ASPECT OF the affair that had been gnawing at Gabriel from the beginning: Jack Bradshaw’s secret rooms in the Geneva Freeport. As a rule, a businessman utilized the unique services of the Freeport because he wanted to avoid taxation or because he was hiding something. Gabriel suspected Bradshaw’s motives fell into the second category. But how to get inside without a court order and a police escort? The Freeport wasn’t the sort of place one could break into with a lock pick and a confident smile. Gabriel would need an ally, someone with the power to quietly open any door in Switzerland. He knew such a man. A bargain would have to be struck, a secret deal made. It would be complicated, but then matters involving Switzerland generally were.

  The initial contact was brief and unpromising. Gabriel rang the man at his office in Bern and gave him a wholly incomplete account of what he needed and why. The man from Bern was understandably unimpressed
, though he sounded intrigued.

  “Where are you now?” he asked.

  “Siberia.”

  “How quickly can you be in Geneva?”

  “I can be on the next train.”

  “I didn’t realize there was a train from Siberia.”

  “It actually runs through Paris.”

  “Send up a flare when you get into town. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I can’t come all the way to Geneva without assurances.”

  “If you want assurances, call a Swiss banker. But if you want to have a look inside those rooms, you’re going to have to do it my way. And don’t even think about going anywhere near the Freeport without me,” the man from Bern added. “If you do, you’re going to be in Switzerland for a very long time.”

  Gabriel would have preferred better odds before making the trip, but now seemed as good a time as any. With the copy of the van Gogh complete, the Paris end of the operation was little more than a waiting game. He could spend the day staring at the telephone, or he could use the lull in activity more productively. In the end, Chiara made the decision for him. He locked the two paintings in the bedroom closet, hurried over to the Gare de Lyon, and boarded the nine o’clock TGV. It arrived in Geneva a few minutes after noon. Gabriel rang the man in Bern from a pay phone in the ticket hall.

  “Where are you?” the man asked.

  Gabriel answered truthfully.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The train station was in a section of Geneva that looked like a gritty quartier of a French city. Gabriel walked to the lake and crossed the Pont du Mont-Blanc, to the South Bank. He dawdled over pizza in the Jardin Anglais and then walked through the shadowed streets of the sixteenth-century Old City. By four o’clock the air was cool with the coming evening. Footsore, tired of waiting, Gabriel rang the man from Bern a third time but received no answer. Ten minutes later, while walking past the banks and exclusive shops of the rue du Rhône, he rang him again. This time, the man picked up.