Midnight In Madrid

TWENTY-FOUR

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 8, AFTERNOON AND EVENING

From the National Police Headquarters, Alex walked back to the Ritz, relaxed for an hour, and then fired up her laptop again. She was trying to get an overall feel of art theft, a grip on it and the people who commit it. There was no way to approach a case without having a feel for it.

Hours passed. She had a light dinner delivered to her room. She felt stale, almost unproductive. She had learned a lot this day but wasn’t sure she had made any real progress or yet had an angle on the case. After her dinner, she prowled through more odds and ends about art theft and art thieves.

Item: The original of a Norman Rockwell reproduction titled Russian Schoolroom was found in the collection of the American movie mogul Steven Spielberg in 2007. Spielberg had paid about $200,000 for the 16 x 37 canvas in a legitimate purchase and then had alerted the FBI immediately when he learned of its questionable provenance. Item: Art thieves-as professional criminals-do a simple risk-versus-reward evaluation. They know that even if they receive only a fraction of the work’s market value, the cash gained was at low risk of death or injury. And museums and private collectors are an easy touch. Item: Nor had anyone seen any trace of the biggest art theft in European history. In February of 2008, a gang swiped four paintings worth an estimated $163 million from the E.G. Buehrle Collection in Zurich, Switzerland. They took works by Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh. “These paintings were extremely valuable on the open market, but they never went onto the open market,” said a Swiss detective at the time. “So they’re priceless but they’re also worthless.” Item: Some thieves often try to ransom the art back to the museum or the insurance company. Usually, an insurance company would rather get art back at a fraction of its original price than pay the owner its insured value. Ransoming art to an insurance company through an intermediary adds ten to twenty percent to the market value, which often turns into quite a lot of money. Item: Art thieves rarely face justice. A work of art does not require a title document in order to be transferred from one owner to another, so a stolen object easily enters the legitimate stream of commerce. Even if the original thief can be identified, there is also a statute of limitations on prosecution for theft.

And a final item, having its numbing effect on Alex:

Even if a stolen work is recovered, the original owners may not get it back. Art stolen from a Los Angeles mansion in 2003 and sold in Sweden remained with its Swedish purchasers. Even though the thief was caught, the Swedish government refused to return the paintings, claiming that according to Swedish law, the auction buyers had purchased the paintings in good faith. Laws governing art theft were a maze of contradictions from one country to the next, often offering the trained investigator little more than frustration.

Alex leaned back and took stock. Whoever had pilfered The Pietà of Malta from the museum in Madrid was not to be mistaken for a high-society, tuxedo-wearing, Thomas Crown Affair style thief.

She stared at her computer screen, a picture of confusion and doubt. Maybe it was time to return to America. She could opt out of this Pietà of Malta case very easily.

Maybe she should, she told herself.

She closed out of her laptop, drew a breath, and watched evening settle in across the city.