Daniel Silva - The Rembrandt Affair

Gabriel peered at the tip of his left forefinger.

"What is it?" asked Chiara.

"Lead white, vermilion, and perhaps a touch of natural azurite."

"Flakes of paint?"

"And I can see fabric fibers as well."

"What kind of fabric?"

"Ticking, the kind of heavy cotton or linen that was used for mattress covers and sails in seventeenth-century Holland. Rembrandt used it to fashion his canvases."

"What does the presence of paint flakes and fibers on the landing mean?"

"If I'm correct, it means we're looking for a Rembrandt with a bullet hole in it."

Gabriel blew the material from his fingertip. They were heading westward along a two-lane road through the Polden Hills. Directly ahead, a bright orange sun hung low above the horizon suspended between two thin strata of cloud.

"You're suggesting Liddell fought back?"

Gabriel nodded. "The evidence was all there in his studio."

"Such as?"

"The broken glass and chemical residue, for starters."

"You think it was spilled during a physical struggle?"

"Unlikely. Liddell was smart enough to know not to get into a wrestling match with a well-armed thief. I think he used his solvent as a weapon."

"How?"

"Based on the residue on the floor, I'm guessing Liddell threw it in the thief's face. It would have burned his eyes badly and left him blinded for several seconds—enough time for Liddell to run. But he made one mistake. He took her with him."

"The Rembrandt?"

Gabriel nodded. "It's too big to hold with one hand, which means he would have had to grasp it by both vertical lengths of the stretcher." Gabriel demonstrated by gripping the steering wheel at the three o'clock and nine o'clock positions. "It must have been awkward trying to carry it down that narrow staircase, but Liddell almost made it. He was just a couple of steps from the landing when the first shot hit him. That shot exited the front of Liddell's neck and, if I'm correct, pierced the painting before entering the wall. Judging from the composition and color tone of the paint flakes, I'd say the bullet passed through the right side of her face."

"Can a bullet hole be repaired?"

"No problem. You'd be surprised at the idiotic things people do to paintings." Gabriel paused. "Or for paintings."

"What does that mean?"

"Christopher was a romantic. When we were in Venice together, he was always falling in love. And invariably he would end up with a broken heart."

"What does that have to do with the Rembrandt?"

"It's all in his restoration notes," Gabriel said. "They're a love letter. Christopher had finally fallen for a woman who wouldn't hurt him. He was obsessed with the girl in that painting. And I believe he died because he wouldn't let her go."

"There's just one thing I don't understand," Chiara said. "Why didn't the thief take any of the other paintings, like the Monet or the Cezanne?"

"Because he was a professional. He came there for the Rembrandt. And he left with it."

"So what do we do now?"

"Sometimes the best way to find a painting is to discover where it's been."

"Where do we start?"

"At the beginning," said Gabriel. "In Amsterdam."

If Maurice Durand were inclined toward introspection, which he was not, he might have concluded that the course of his life was determined the day he first heard the story of Vincenzo Peruggia.

A carpenter from northern Italy, Peruggia entered the Louvre on the afternoon of Sunday, August 20, 1911, and concealed himself in a storage closet. He emerged early the following morning dressed in a workman's white smock and strode into the Salon Carre. He knew the room well; several months earlier, he had helped to construct a special protective case over its most famous attraction, the Mona Lisa. Because it was a Monday, the day the Louvre was closed to the public, he had the salon to himself, and it took only a few seconds to lift Leonardo's small panel from the wall and carry it to a nearby stairwell. A few moments later, with the painting concealed beneath his smock, Peruggia walked past an unmanned guard post and struck out across the Louvre's vast center courtyard. And with that the world's most famous work of art vanished into the Paris morning.

Even more remarkable, twenty-four hours would elapse before anyone noticed the picture was missing. When the alert finally went out, the French police launched a massive if somewhat farcical search. Among their first suspects was an avant-garde painter named Pablo Picasso, who was arrested at his Montmartre apartment despite the fact he had been hundreds of miles from Paris at the time of the actual theft.

Eventually, the gendarmes managed to track down Peruggia but quickly cleared him of any suspicion. Had they bothered to look inside the large trunk in his bedroom, the search for the Mona Lisa would have ended. Instead, the painting remained hidden there for two years, until Peruggia foolishly tried to sell it to a well-known dealer in Florence. Peruggia was arrested but spent just seven months in jail. Years later, he was actually permitted to return to France. Oddly enough, the man who carried out the greatest art crime in history then opened a paint store in the Haute-Savoie and lived there quietly until his death.

Maurice Durand learned several important lessons from the strange case of Peruggia. He learned that stealing great paintings was not as difficult as one might think, that the authorities were largely indifferent to art crime, and that the penalties generally were light. But the story of Peruggia also whet Durand's appetite. Antique scientific instruments were his birthright—the shop had belonged to his father, and his grandfather before that—but art had always been his great passion. And while it was true there were worse places to spend one's day than the first arrondissement of Paris, the shop was not a particularly exciting way to earn a living. There were times when Durand felt a bit like the trinkets lining his little display window—polished and reasonably attractive but ultimately good for little more than gathering dust.

It was this combination of factors, twenty-five years earlier, that had compelled Durand to steal his first painting from the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg—a small still life by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin that hung in a corner rarely visited by guards or patrons. Using an old-fashioned razor, Durand sliced the painting from its frame and slipped it into his attache case. Later, during the train ride back to Paris, he attempted to recall his emotions at the moment of the crime and realized he had felt nothing other than contentment. It was then that Maurice Durand knew he possessed the qualities of a perfect thief.

Like Peruggia before him, Durand kept his trophy in his Paris apartment, not for two years but for two days. Unlike the Italian, Durand already had a buyer waiting, a disreputable collector who happened to be in the market for a Chardin and wasn't worried about messy details like provenance. Durand was well paid, the client was happy, and a career was born.

It was a career characterized by discipline. Durand never stole paintings to acquire ransom or reward money, only to provide inventory. At first he left the masterpieces to the dreamers and fools, focusing instead on midlevel paintings by quality artists or works that might reasonably be confused for pictures with no problem of provenance. And while Durand occasionally stole from small museums and galleries, he did most of his hunting in private villas and chateaux, which were poorly protected and filled to the roof with valuables.

From his base of operations in Paris he built a far-flung network of contacts, selling to dealers as far away as Hong Kong, New York, Dubai, and Tokyo. Gradually, he set his sights on bigger game—the museum-quality masterpieces valued at tens of millions, or in some cases hundreds of millions, of dollars. But he always operated by a simple rule. No painting was ever stolen unless a buyer was waiting, and he only did business with people he knew. Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear was now hanging in the palace of a Saudi sheikh who had a penchant for violence involving knives. The Caravaggio had found its way to a factory owner in Shanghai while the Picasso was in the hands of a Mexican billionaire with uncomfortably close ties to the country's drug cartels. All three paintings had one thing in common. They would never be seen again by the public.