The Heist Page 5

  6

  LAKE COMO, ITALY

  NEXT MORNING, RESIDENTS OF THE United Kingdom awoke to the news that one of their countrymen, the expatriate businessman James “Jack” Bradshaw, had been found brutally murdered at his villa overlooking Lake Como. The Italian authorities offered up robbery as a possible motive, despite the fact that they had no evidence that anything at all had been stolen. General Ferrari’s name did not appear in the coverage; nor was there any mention that Julian Isherwood, the noted London art dealer, had discovered the body. All of the newspapers struggled to find anyone who had a kind word to say about Bradshaw. The Times managed to dredge up an old colleague from the Foreign Office who described him as “a fine officer,” but otherwise it seemed Bradshaw’s life was deserving of no eulogy. The photograph that popped up on the BBC looked at least twenty years old. It showed a man who did not like to have his picture taken.

  There was another crucial fact missing from the coverage of Jack Bradshaw’s murder: Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli intelligence, had been quietly retained by the Art Squad to look into it. His investigation commenced at half past seven when he inserted a high-capacity flash drive into his notebook computer. Given to him by General Ferrari, the drive contained the contents of Jack Bradshaw’s personal computer. Most of the documents dealt with his business, the Meridian Global Consulting Group—a curious name, thought Gabriel, for Meridian appeared to have no other employees. The drive contained more than twenty thousand documents. In addition, there were several thousand telephone numbers and e-mail addresses that had to be checked out and cross-referenced. It was far too much material for Gabriel to review alone. He needed an assistant, a skilled researcher who knew something about criminal matters and, preferably, about Italian art.

  “Me?” asked Chiara incredulously.

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Are you sure you want me to answer that?”

  Gabriel made no reply. He could see there was something about the idea that appealed to Chiara. She was a natural solver of puzzles and problems.

  “It would be easier if I could run the phone numbers and e-mail addresses through the computers of King Saul Boulevard,” she said after a moment of thought.

  “Obviously,” replied Gabriel. “But the last thing I intend to do is tell the Office that I’m investigating a case for the Italians.”

  “They’ll find out eventually. They always do.”

  Gabriel copied Bradshaw’s files onto the hard drive of the notebook computer and kept the flash drive for himself. Then he packed a small overnight bag with two changes of clothing and two sets of identity while Chiara showered and dressed for work. He walked her to the ghetto and on the doorstep of the community center placed his hand on her abdomen one last time. Leaving, he couldn’t help but notice the young, good-looking Italian man drinking coffee at the kosher café. He rang General Ferrari at the palazzo in Rome. The general confirmed that the young Italian was an officer of the Carabinieri who specialized in personal protection.

  “Couldn’t you have found someone to watch my wife who didn’t look like a film star?”

  “Don’t tell me the great Gabriel Allon is jealous.”

  “Just make sure nothing happens to her. Do you hear me?”

  “I only have one eye,” replied the general, “but I still have both my ears, and they function quite well.”

  Like many Venetians, temporary or otherwise, Gabriel kept a car, a Volkswagen sedan, in a garage near the Piazzale Roma. He headed across the causeway to the mainland and then made his way to the autostrada. When the traffic thinned, he pressed his foot to the floor and watched the needle of the speedometer creep toward one hundred. For weeks he had strolled and floated through life at a crawl. Now, the rumble of an internal combustion engine was suddenly a guilty pleasure. He pushed the car to the limit and saw the flatlands of the Veneto sweep past his window in a satisfying green-and-tan blur.

  He sped westward, past Padua, Verona, and Bergamo, and arrived at the outskirts of Milan thirty minutes earlier than he had anticipated. From there, he headed north to Como; then he followed the winding shore of the lake until he arrived at the gate of Jack Bradshaw’s villa. Through its bars he could see an unmarked Carabinieri car parked in the forecourt. He rang the general in Rome, told him where he was, and then quickly severed the connection. Thirty seconds later, the gate swung open.

  Gabriel slipped the car into gear and eased slowly down the steep drive, toward the home of a man whose life had been summarized in a single hollow line. A fine officer . . . He was certain of only one thing, that Jack Bradshaw, retired diplomat, consultant to firms doing business in the Middle East, collector of Italian art, had been a liar by trade. He knew this because he was a liar as well. Therefore, as he stepped from his car, he felt a certain kinship with the man whose life he was about to ransack. He came not as an enemy but as a friend, the perfect implement for an unpleasant job. In death there are no secrets, he thought, crossing the forecourt. And if there was a secret hidden in the beautiful villa by the lake, he was going to find it.

  A Carabinieri officer in plain clothes waited in the entrance. He introduced himself as Lucca—no last name or rank, just Lucca—and offered Gabriel nothing but a pair of rubber gloves and plastic shoe covers. Gabriel was more than happy to put them on. The last thing he needed at this stage of his life was to leave his DNA at yet another Italian crime scene.

  “You have one hour,” the Carabinieri man said. “And I’ll be coming with you.”

  “I’ll take as long as I need,” replied Gabriel. “And you’re staying right here.”

  When the officer offered no response, Gabriel pulled on the gloves and shoe covers and entered the villa. The first thing he noticed was the blood. It was hard not to; the entire stone floor of the entrance foyer was black with it. He wondered why the murder had occurred here rather than in a more secluded section of the house. It was possible Bradshaw had confronted his killers after they broke into the residence, but there was no evidence of forcible entry on the door or at the gate. The more logical explanation was that Bradshaw had admitted his assailants. He had known them, thought Gabriel. And, foolishly, he had trusted them enough to let them into his home.

  From the entrance hall, Gabriel moved into the great room. It was elegantly furnished in silk-covered couches and chairs, and adorned with expensive tables, lamps, and trinkets of every kind. One wall was given over entirely to large windows that overlooked the lake; the others were hung with Italian Old Master paintings. Most were minor devotional pieces or portraits churned out by journeymen or followers of well-known painters from Venice and Florence. One, however, was a Roman architectural capriccio that clearly was the work of Giovanni Paolo Panini. Gabriel licked his gloved fingertip and dragged it across the surface. The Panini, like the other paintings displayed in the room, was sorely in need of a good cleaning.

  Gabriel wiped the surface grime onto the leg of his jeans and walked over to an antique writing desk. On it were two silver-framed photographs of Jack Bradshaw in happier times. In the first he was posed before the Great Pyramid of Giza, a boyish forelock falling across a face that was full of hope and promise. In the second the backdrop was the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. It had been snapped, Gabriel supposed, when Bradshaw was serving at the British embassy in Amman. He looked older, harder, perhaps wiser. The Middle East was like that. It turned hope to despair, idealists into Machiavellians.

  Gabriel opened the drawer of the writing table, found nothing of interest, then scrolled through the directory of missed calls on the telephone. One number, 6215845, appeared seven times—five times before Bradshaw’s death, and twice after. Gabriel lifted the receiver, pressed the autodial, and a few seconds later heard the distant tone of a telephone. After several rings came a series of clicks and rattles indicating that the person at the other end of the line had picked up the call and quickly hung up. Gabriel dialed the number again with the same r
esult. But when he tried the number a third time, a male voice came on the line and in Italian said, “This is Father Marco. How can I help you?”

  Gabriel gently replaced the receiver without speaking. Next to the phone was a message pad. He tore away the top page, jotted the phone number on the adjoining page, and slipped both into his coat pocket. Then he headed upstairs.

  Paintings lined the wide central corridor and covered the walls of two otherwise empty bedrooms. Bradshaw had used a third bedroom for storage. Several dozen paintings, some in frames, some on their stretchers, leaned against the walls like folding chairs after a catered affair. Most of the paintings were Italian in origin, but there were several works by German, Flemish, and Dutch artists as well. One, a genre painting of Dutch washerwomen working in a courtyard, probably by an imitator of Willem Kalf, appeared as though it had recently been restored. Gabriel wondered why Bradshaw had decided to have the painting cleaned while others in his collection, some more valuable, languished beneath coats of yellowed varnish—and why, having done so, he had left it leaning against a wall in a storage room.

  On the opposite side of the center hall were Bradshaw’s bedroom and office. Gabriel quickly searched them with the thoroughness of a man who knew how to hide things. In the bedroom, concealed beneath a Gatsbyesque pile of colorful shirts, he found a wrinkled manila envelope stuffed with several thousand euros that had somehow escaped the attention of General Ferrari’s men. In the office, he found file folders swollen with business papers, along with an impressive collection of monographs and catalogues. He also discovered documentation suggesting that Meridian Global Consulting had rented a vault in the Geneva Freeport. He wondered whether the documents had escaped the attention of the general’s men, too.

  Gabriel slipped the Freeport documentation into his coat pocket and crossed the hallway to the room Bradshaw had used for storage. The three Dutch washerwomen were still toiling away in their cobblestone courtyard, oblivious to his presence. He crouched before the canvas and examined the brushwork carefully. It was quite obviously the work of an imitator, for it lacked any trace of confidence or spontaneity. Indeed, in Gabriel’s learned opinion, it had a paint-by-numbers quality to it, as if the artist had been staring at the original while he worked. Perhaps he had been.

  Gabriel headed downstairs and, under the watchful gaze of the Carabinieri man, retrieved a handheld ultraviolet lamp from his overnight bag. When trained on an Old Master canvas in a darkened room, the lamp would reveal the extent of the last restoration by making the retouching appear as black blotches. Typically, a Dutch Old Master painting from that period had suffered minor to moderate losses, which meant the retouching—or inpainting, as it was known in the trade—would appear as speckles of black.

  Gabriel returned to the room on the second floor of the villa, closed the door, and drew the blinds tightly. Then he switched on the ultraviolet lamp and pointed it toward the painting. The three Dutch washerwomen were no longer visible. The entire canvas was black as pitch.

  7

  LAKE COMO, ITALY

  AT A CHEMICAL SUPPLY COMPANY in an industrial quarter of Como, Gabriel purchased acetone, alcohol, distilled water, goggles, a glass beaker, and a protective mask. Next he stopped at an arts-and-crafts shop in the center of town where he picked up wooden dowels and a packet of cotton wool. Returning to the villa by the lake, he found the Carabinieri man waiting in the entrance with fresh gloves and shoe covers. This time, the Italian didn’t make any noises about a one-hour limit. He could see Gabriel was going to be a while.

  “You’re not going to contaminate anything, are you?”

  “Only my lungs,” replied Gabriel.

  Upstairs he removed the canvas from its frame, propped it on an armless chair, and illuminated its surface with as much light as he could find. Then he mixed equal amounts of acetone, alcohol, and distilled water in the beaker and fashioned a swab using a dowel and cotton wool. Working quickly, he removed the fresh varnish and inpainting from a small rectangle—about two inches by one inch—at the bottom left corner of the canvas. Restorers referred to the technique as “opening a window.” Usually, it was done to test the strength and effectiveness of a solvent solution. In this case, however, Gabriel was opening a window in order to strip away the surface layers of the painting to see what lay beneath. What he discovered were the lush folds of a crimson garment. Clearly, there was an intact painting beneath the three Dutch washerwomen working in a courtyard—a painting that, in Gabriel’s opinion, had been produced by a true Old Master of considerable talent.

  He quickly opened three more windows, one at the bottom right of the canvas and two more across the top. At the bottom right, he found additional fabric, darker and less distinct; but at the top right, the canvas was nearly black. At the top left, he found a tawny-colored Roman arch that looked as though it was part of an architectural background. The four open windows gave him a rough sense of how the figures were arrayed upon the canvas. More important, they told him that, in all likelihood, the painting was the work of an Italian rather than an artist from the Dutch or Flemish schools.

  Gabriel opened a fifth window a few inches below the Roman arch and discovered a balding male pate. Expanding it, he found the bridge of a nose and an eye that was staring directly toward the viewer. Next he opened a window a few inches to the right and found the pale, luminous forehead of a young female. He expanded that window, too, and found a pair of downward-cast eyes. A long nose emerged next, followed by a pair of small red lips and a delicate chin. Then, after another minute of work, Gabriel saw the outstretched hand of a child. A man, a woman, a child . . . Gabriel studied the hand of the child—specifically, the way the thumb and forefinger were touching the chin of the woman. The pose was familiar to him. So was the brushwork.

  He crossed the hall to Jack Bradshaw’s office, switched on the computer, and went to the Web site of the Art Loss Register, the world’s largest private database of stolen, missing, and looted artwork. After a few keystrokes, a photograph of a painting appeared on the screen—the same painting that was now propped on a chair in the room across the hall. Beneath the photo was a brief description:

  The Holy Family, oil on canvas, Parmigianino (1503–1540), stolen from a restoration lab at the historic Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, July 31, 2004.

  The Art Squad had been searching for the missing painting for more than a decade. And now Gabriel had found it, in the villa of a dead Englishman, hidden beneath a copy of a Dutch painting by Willem Kalf. He started to dial General Ferrari’s number but stopped. Where there was one, he thought, there would surely be others. He rose from the dead man’s desk and started looking.

  Gabriel discovered two additional paintings in the storeroom that, when subjected to ultraviolet light, were totally black. One was a Dutch School coastal scene reminiscent of the work of Simon de Vlieger; the other was a vase of flowers that appeared to be a copy of a painting by the Viennese artist Johann Baptist Drechsler. Gabriel began opening windows.

  Dip, twirl, discard . . .

  A swollen tree against a cloud-streaked sky, the folds of a skirt spread across a meadow, the naked flank of a corpulent woman . . .

  Dip, twirl, discard . . .

  A patch of blue-green background, a floral blouse, a wide, sleepy eye above a rose-colored cheek . . .

  Gabriel recognized both paintings. He sat down at the computer and returned to the Web site of the Art Loss Register. After a few keystrokes, a photograph of a painting appeared on the screen:

  Young Women in the Country, oil on canvas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), 16.4 x 20 inches, missing since March 13, 1981, from the Musée de Bagnols-sur-Cèze, Gard, France. Estimated current value: unknown.

  More keystrokes, another painting, another story of loss:

  Portrait of a Woman, oil on canvas, Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), 32.6 x 21.6 inches, missing since February 18, 1997, from the Galleria Ricci Oddi, Piacenza, Italy. Estimated current value: $4 million.


  Gabriel placed the Renoir and the Klimt next to the Parmigianino, snapped a photograph with his mobile phone, and quickly forwarded it to the palazzo. General Ferrari rang him back thirty seconds later. Help was on the way.

  Gabriel carried the three paintings downstairs and propped them on one of the couches in the great room. Parmigianino, Renoir, Klimt . . . Three missing paintings by three prominent artists, all concealed beneath copies of lesser works. Even so, the copies had been of extremely high quality. They were the work of a master forger, thought Gabriel. Perhaps even a restorer. But why go to the trouble of commissioning a copy in order to conceal a stolen work? Clearly, Jack Bradshaw was connected to a sophisticated network that dealt in stolen and smuggled art. Where there were three, thought Gabriel, looking at the paintings, there would be more. Many more.

  He picked up one of the photographs of a youthful Jack Bradshaw. His curriculum vitae read like something from a lost age. Educated at Eton and Oxford, fluent in Arabic and Persian, he had been sent into the world to do the bidding of a once-mighty empire that had fallen into terminal decline. Perhaps he had been an ordinary diplomat, an issuer of visas, a stamper of passports, a writer of thoughtful cables that no one bothered to read. Or perhaps he had been something else entirely. Gabriel knew a man in London who could put flesh on the bones of Jack Bradshaw’s dubiously thin résumé. The truth would not come without a price. In the espionage business, truth rarely did.

  Gabriel set aside the photograph and used his mobile phone to book a seat on the morning flight to Heathrow. Then he picked up the slip of paper on which he’d written the number from the dialing directory of Bradshaw’s phone.

  6215845 . . .