Midnight In Madrid

TWENTY-ONE

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 8, 7:15 A.M.

The next morning, Alex left her hotel and went for an early walk to get into the pace of the city. She had breakfast at a nearby café, opened her laptop there, and went to work as the city started to awaken around her.

In the background material that the curator, Rivera, had spoken of when he gave his introduction, someone had written an overview of art theft in the world of 2009.

“I say a prayer every time we hang a new show,” said one woman, the curator of a private gallery in London, setting the anxious tone of the material that followed.

“Historically, the most significant catalyst for art theft is war,” began the first section. It continued:

Conquering armies have claimed and redistributed artifacts of value since war began. World War II brought violence and destruction on a scale previously unseen. The confiscation by the Nazis of tens of thousands of artworks created by Jewish artists or belonging to prewar Jewish collectors prompted the drafting of the “Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict” in 1954. This was created to protect art, just as the Geneva Convention was created to protect civilians. Yet in 2003, professional thieves, working under the camouflage created by the invasion of Baghdad by US forces, looted the Iraq National Museum and other museums, libraries, and archaeological sites, making off with over 12,000 artifacts. Scholars worldwide have demanded that the authorities in Baghdad hold the thieves responsible according to the rules laid out in the aforementioned convention. Authorities caught an American scholar trying to smuggle pilfered statues into the States in June of 2007. From 1933 through the end of World War II, the Nazi regime maintained a policy of looting art for sale or for removal to museums in the Third Reich. Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, personally took charge of hundreds of valuable pieces, generally stolen from Jews and other victims of genocide. In 2006, title to the gilt painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, was restored to Maria Altmann, an heir of the prewar owner. Provenance in this case was easy to establish; Bloch-Bauer, the subject of the painting, was Altmann’s aunt. Altmann almost immediately sold the painting at auction, and it was resold to Ronald Lauder for $135 million. At the time of the latter sale this was the highest known price ever paid for a painting.

War could not only redistribute art but also destroy it, the report reminded Alex. Original paintings by Joan Miró and Roy Lichtenstein were destroyed during the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. And two generations earlier, ceremonial bells confiscated from Zen temples in Japan by the Japanese army were melted down for submarine propellers.

Clue: The Great Museum Caper-the popular board game came to mind; and she recalled the Pink Panther movies and eighties-era television, with images of sleek black-clad thieves slipping through skylights, dangling in comic splendor from grappling hooks, and avoiding alarm-triggering laser beams to snatch valuables. The images that she recalled glamorized theft and the cleverness of the crooks.

Could one hate a thief who looked like Cary Grant or George Clooney? Could a female really hate an art pilferer who had a six-pack like Brad Pitt or the sultry good looks of an Andy Garcia? But the real world of art crime, she knew, wasn’t quite that way.

She kept reading.

The thieves who had swiped Edmund Munch’s The Scream in Oslo a few years earlier were as subtle, sophisticated, and charming as a kick in the kneecap. They had held terrified museum guards at gunpoint and ripped the painting from the wall. These days, armed smash-and-grab was the technique du jour-because it worked.

Her pal Rizzo’s words echoed in her mind.

High-value small items, easily portable.

Lousy security systems.

Even if resell value were five percent, the rewards were well into six figures and the risk of apprehension low.

Looking at other notable instances of art theft worldwide, the report continued:

We see some of the same tactics used on television. In April 2003, a piece of artwork by Salvador Dalí was stolen from the Riker’s Island Correctional Facility in New York City during a fire drill and replaced with a forgery. In 2002, thieves dug an eighty-foot tunnel into the National Fine Arts Museum in Asuncion, Paraguay, escaping with a million dollars worth of paintings…

Yes, Interpol could be handy. But Alex knew this from playing Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego as a kid. The report continued:

Some objects will be stolen, protected, and stolen again. The value of an art object has a dual identity, one is a dollar figure, and one is a value that exists in the mind. Art thefts occur with motivations that range from high-minded to ludicrous. Some art thieves believe that they will appreciate the piece more than their victim, as in an unsolved case involving a Pablo Picasso drawing stolen from a yacht in Miami in August 2007, possibly related to a feud between rival collectors… High values stimulate greed, which stimulates theft. A seventeenth century cello built by Antonio Stradivari and estimated to be worth $3.5 million was stolen from the home of a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in April of this year. The thief was unable to sell the cello as police closed in and the cello was discovered leaning against a dumpster near a Korean restaurant in the same city. In 1973, Richard Nixon gave “goodwill” gifts of moon rocks encased in clear acrylic to 135 nations. Most of these rocks have been stolen, including the rock given to Malta, which was swiped in June 2007. The moon is a highly prized collectable. In 2002, some NASA student interns stole a six-hundred-pound safe containing 3.5 ounces of moon rocks worth millions of dollars and tried to sell them on eBay. Greed and possessiveness could lead to the dismantling of the moon into saleable parts. Art theft also comes in the form of fanatical obsessions and impulsiveness. A New Hampshire man was arrested last year after stealing a painting of a cat drinking out of a toilet from the bathroom of a veterinary clinic. There are framed artworks hanging unguarded in almost every restaurant bathroom in the country. An anonymous artist in Portland boasts that he has stolen dozens of rubber filters from the urinals of public bathrooms with the intent of making art from them. A Thomas Paquette painting stolen from a show at Colby College in 2001 was taken because the thief liked the painting. Paquette, quoted in the Morning Sentinel in 2001, said “It’s somewhat of a compliment for someone to risk going to jail for one of my paintings.”

Alex leaned back and sighed. Facts. She hungered for facts.

There was a harsh note in the file at the conclusion, a fact of sorts:

The “grandest” museum caper in the United States remained unsolved almost twenty years later. In 1990, thieves had stolen a dozen paintings from the Gardner Museum in Boston. The thieves were dressed as Boston police officers and swiped five works by Degas, four Vermeers, and two Rembrandts. The paintings were valued at over $100 million at the time of the theft.

Not a bad night’s work. Who said crime didn’t pay?

A reward of fifteen million dollars was posted and accomplished nothing. Almost two decades later, all the works were still missing. Not a trace of any of them had ever surfaced.

Poof! Bye, bye, baby! Into the thinnest of air they had all gone.

Here was perhaps the highest profile art theft in history. There was a massive reward and legions of investigators public and private had explored the case. Arguably, if that theft had eluded resolution, how was anyone to make any headway in the disappearance of a small stone carving from an outstanding but secondary museum in a secondary world capital?

She tried to draw conclusions and was left with only one. If one wanted to recover a piece of stolen art, the best way to recover it was not to allow it to be stolen in the first place. So many of these museums and galleys, she noted with a sigh, seemed particularly adept at locking the barn door after the horses had been stolen.

Recovering a piece?

Debatable at best.

Almost a fool’s assignment.