Daniel Silva - The Heist

Harper

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2014

Copyright © Daniel Silva 2014

Cover design layout © HarperCollins Publishers 2014

Cover photographs © Nik Keevil/Arcangel Images (man); Lorenzo Montezemolo/Getty Images (Venice scene); Joe Beynon/Plain Picture (staircase); Shutterstock.com(sky)

Daniel Silva asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Designed by Leah Carlson-Stanisic

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007552276

Version: 2015-01-07

As always, for my wife, Jamie, and

my children, Nicholas and Lily

Most stolen art is gone forever … The lone bit of good news is that the better the painting, the better the odds it will someday be found.

— EDWARD DOLNICK, THE RESCUE ARTIST

He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it; and who so breaketh a hedge, a serpent shall bite him.

— ECCLESIASTES 10:8

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

Part One: Chiaroscuro

Chapter 1: St. James’s, London

Chapter 2: Venice

Chapter 3: Venice

Chapter 4: Venice

Chapter 5: Venice

Chapter 6: Lake Como, Italy

Chapter 7: Lake Como, Italy

Chapter 8: Stockwell, London

Chapter 9: Stockwell, London

Chapter 10: Rue De Miromesnil, Paris

Chapter 11: Jardin Des Tuileries, Paris

Chapter 12: Montmartre, Paris

Part Two: Sunflowers

Chapter 13: San Remo, Italy

Chapter 14: Corsica

Chapter 15: Corsica

Chapter 16: Corsica

Chapter 17: Rue De Miromesnil, Paris

Chapter 18: Hyde Park, London

Chapter 19: Amsterdam

Chapter 20: Geneva

Chapter 21: Rue De Miromesnil, Paris

Chapter 22: ÎLe Saint-Louis, Paris

Chapter 23: Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris

Chapter 24: Chelles, France

Chapter 25: Geneva

Part Three: The Open Window

Chapter 26: King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv

Chapter 27: King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv

Chapter 28: Petah Tikva, Israel

Chapter 29: Jerusalem

Chapter 30: Narkiss Street, Jerusalem

Chapter 31: Jerusalem

Chapter 32: King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv

Chapter 33: Linz, Austria

Chapter 34: King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv

Chapter 35: Munich, Germany

Chapter 36: Linz, Austria

Chapter 37: The Attersee, Austria

Chapter 38: The Attersee, Austria

Chapter 39: The Attersee, Austria

Chapter 40: The Attersee, Austria

Chapter 41: The Attersee, Austria

Part Four: The Score

Chapter 42: London

Chapter 43: Chelsea, London

Chapter 44: London—Linz, Austria

Chapter 45: Linz, Austria

Chapter 46: Heathrow Airport, London

Chapter 47: Linz, Austria

Chapter 48: King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv

Chapter 49: The Attersee, Austria

Chapter 50: The Attersee, Austria

Chapter 51: The Attersee—Geneva

Chapter 52: Hotel Métropole, Geneva

Chapter 53: Geneva

Chapter 54: Tel Aviv—Haute-Savoie, France

Chapter 55: Haute-Savoie, France

Chapter 56: Annecy, France

Chapter 57: Annecy, France

Part Five: One Last Window

Chapter 58: Venice

Chapter 59: Venice

Chapter 60: Venice

Chapter 61: Lake Como, Italy

Chapter 62: Brienno, Italy

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also Written by Daniel Silva

About the Publisher

ON OCTOBER 18, 1969, CARAVAGGIO’S Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence vanished from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily. The Nativity , as it is commonly known, is one of Caravaggio’s last great masterworks, painted in 1609 while he was a fugitive from justice, wanted by papal authorities in Rome for killing a man during a swordfight. For more than four decades, the altarpiece has been the most sought-after stolen painting in the world, and yet its exact whereabouts, even its fate, have remained a mystery. Until now …

IT BEGAN WITH AN ACCIDENT, but then matters involving Julian Isherwood invariably did. In fact, his reputation for folly and misadventure was so indisputably established that London’s art world, had it known of the affair, which it did not, would have expected nothing less. Isherwood, declared one wit from the Old Masters department at Sotheby’s, was the patron saint of lost causes, a high-wire artist with a penchant for carefully planned schemes that ended in ruins, oftentimes through no fault of his own. Consequently, he was both admired and pitied, a rare trait for a man of his position. Julian Isherwood made life a bit less tedious. And for that, London’s smart set adored him.

His gallery stood at the far corner of the cobbled quadrangle known as Mason’s Yard, occupying three floors of a sagging Victorian warehouse once owned by Fortnum & Mason. On one side were the London offices of a minor Greek shipping company; on the other was a pub that catered to pretty office girls who rode motor scooters. Many years earlier, before the successive waves of Arab and Russian money had swamped London’s real estate market, the gallery had been located in stylish New Bond Street, or New Bondstrasse, as it was known in the trade. Then came the likes of Hermès, Burberry, Chanel, and Cartier, leaving Isherwood and others like him—independent dealers specializing in museum-quality Old Master paintings—no choice but to seek sanctuary in St. James’s.

It was not the first time Isherwood had been forced into exile. Born in Paris on the eve of World War II, the only child of the renowned art dealer Samuel Isakowitz, he had been carried over the Pyrenees after the German invasion and smuggled into Britain. His Parisian childhood and Jewish lineage were just two pieces of his tangled past that Isherwood kept secret from the rest of London’s notoriously backbiting art world. As far as anyone knew, he was English to the core—English as high tea and bad teeth, as he was fond of saying. He was the incomparable Julian Isherwood, Julie to his friends, Juicy Julian to his partners in the occasional crime of drink, and His Holiness to the art historians and curators who routinely made use of his infallible eye. He was loyal as the day was long, trusting to a fault, impeccably mannered, and had no real enemies, a singular achievement given that he had spent two lifetimes navigating the treacherous waters of the art world. Mainly, Isherwood was decent—decency being in short supply these days, in London or anywhere else.