Midnight in Madrid (10 page)
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 7, 4:23 P.M.
A
s a warm afternoon faded in the Spanish capital, Alex opened her laptop on a table on her small balcony at the Ritz. She had a soft drink on ice and had changed out of her “meeting” clothes into more comfortable duds: shorts and a T-shirt, an outfit that made perfect sense in terms of relaxation, but too casual to wander around the starchy old Ritz or even this very dressy neighborhood.
She settled into a comfortable cushioned chair. Five floors below traffic rumbled along the Paseo del Prado, though the crescent in front of the Ritz was quiet.
As the computer booted, Alex’s gaze drifted out across the city. Madrid had been the capital of the Iberian Peninsula since the middle of the sixteenth century. She gazed over the ancient city and felt a surge of excitement and fascination. It would be nice, she told herself, to come back here someday with time to burn, time to enjoy at her own pace the museums, nightclubs, and sporting events. She would love to watch Real Madrid, the city’s world-class soccer team play a game at Estadio Santiago Bernabeu or catch a bullfight at Las Ventas, the world’s most famous bullring. She would like to come back here someday with someone she loved.
And then her thoughts tripped a mental landmine, one of sadness and longing, one of still painfully missing her fiancé, Robert, who had died early that year. The memories set off a wave of bittersweet loneliness within her, one she fought almost every day for at least a few moments. She knew what had happened in Kiev, but she hadn’t fully accepted it.
Alex looked at her watch. She sighed.
She clicked into her secure email and looked for anything that might have come in during the last few hours. Predictably, several of the men who had been at the meeting at the embassy had already checked in with her. Pierre LeMaitre of the French National Police had been the first, followed by Rolland Fitzgerald of Scotland Yard and Maurice Essen of Interpol. None of them had anything new for her.
Floyd Connelly of US Customs, the pudgy old Orson Welles look-alike, had sent an empty email. Alex wondered what to make of it, other than the notion that the man was quickly emerging as a blustery old fool. Somewhere he had a secretary who did his job for him.
She was about to exit the email when another note popped up from Fitzgerald at Scotland Yard. He had a brief file touching on anti-US terrorist activities in Spain and attached it for Alex’s consideration.
It was filled with rumors and conjectures, as well as a shopping list of predictably Islamic names and addresses of mosques. Nothing substantial. Nothing specific. Just a maze of nasty implications floating around, waiting to make sense or waiting to have some sense made of them. Stuff like that could be a gold mine. Or it could send her a hundred eighty degrees in the wrong direction. She finished but then scanned again to see if she had missed anything.
She had. Almost.
She found an email from her occasional employer in New York, Joseph Collins, who financed mission work in Latin America. It had been Collins who had bankrolled her visit earlier in the year.
Alex wrote back, telling him she was in Madrid on a new assignment. And she would, she promised, keep him informed.
She moved on. Time passed.
Her fingers went to work on the keyboard, and she fired back a response to the Englishman Rolland Fitzgerald, thanking him. At least the man was thinking. Then again, so was Alex.
As recently as 2004, she recalled, the deadliest terrorist attack in Europe had occurred in Madrid: ten synchronized blasts on trains, nearly two hundred killed, fourteen hundred wounded. Al-Qaeda had been responsible.
The victims on that infamous day had not necessarily been Americans, but the Spanish government and any members of humanity who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it further occurred to her, just from the perspective of her own employer, the multitude of targets within Spain linked to the United States: embassies, consulates, USO clubs that had been targeted in the past, and naval bases at Gibraltar and Barcelona. Then there was the massive US naval installation for the Sixth Fleet at Rota on the other side of the bay from Cádiz, west of Gibraltar. The facility was a Spanish base, but with a massive US presence.
Her thoughts teemed. And then suddenly, she was mentally maxed out, very much on overload.
She glanced at her watch: 7:16 in the evening.
If it was a quarter past seven in Madrid, it was the same number of minutes after 1:00 p.m. in the eastern United States. She still had some telephone credit cards, so what good were they if she didn’t use them?
She needed someone to talk to, so she dialed a number in northern Virginia and got her friend Ben on the line.
They talked. A lot. Alex put her feet up onto the railing of the balcony and pushed, leaning back in her chair, then rocking slowly. Time flew.
Almost an hour later, she hung up the line, her spirits lifted temporarily. But during the call, the sky had darkened a little with some clouds that had rolled in from the Pyrenees to the far north. The late afternoon had long since made its transition to evening now and she could see the computer screen better. In the distance, across a rooftop, a neon Tio Pepe sign, an ad for the largest selling sherry in the country, glowed bright red across the rooftop of a commercial building.
A second surge of homesickness was upon her, as were thoughts about Robert. She knew it was best to get out of the hotel room.
She packed up her laptop and took it with her. She went to the same café as she had frequented the previous evening, sat at the same table, and felt better for being out, even when she flipped open the laptop and reviewed museum documents until 10:30. Then she surfed the web for relaxation a bit, had a final Carlos Primero, a distinguished Spanish brandy, and shut down her computer in favor of her iPod.
Eventually, it was midnight. She walked back to the hotel, alone on busy sidewalks in a very safe neighborhood. When she reached her room, she was exhausted.
She made no pass at any further work. She showered and went to bed. In her dreams, she was an innocent young girl again, laughing in the company of her beloved parents, playing in the warm surf of Southern California. The strong hands that picked her up and tossed her around in the water belonged to her late father.
She slept beautifully. Not everyone that night was as fortunate.
GENEVA, SEPTEMBER 8, 2:12 A.M.
T
he evening after meeting Colonel Tissot, Stanislaw had gone to his home and packed. He had a car at his disposal with a fraudulent registration. He would get into the car the next morning and begin to drive. The
autoroute
would take him down through France, and he would make Barcelona within a day. Driving was more arduous than flying, but driving gave him the temporary anonymity he wanted.
He had done enough research on his prey to know that in reality, Alexandra LaDuca was not about to cavort with a man she hardly knew. But the local police in Spain wouldn’t know that. A death is a death is a death in the police ledgers, and he would be long out of the country under another false identity before the dead woman’s body was even cold.
He planned an early getaway from Geneva the next morning. Thus, he was soundly asleep by midnight and resting very comfortably when his eyes inexplicably came open in the middle of the night.
Some sixth sense told him that he was not alone. He felt his heart start to pound, and he felt a sweat start to pour off him as he lay in his bedroom under the covers. He knew from his days as a mercenary soldier, sleeping in the field, that rolling over would accomplish nothing.
Instead, he slowly moved his arm. He moved it cautiously so his sheet would not rustle. And he moved in a way that brought his hand to the holster that held the pistol that he hung by his bedside every night. He hung it there for two reasons. Women found it an aphrodisiac when he was lucky enough to lure one back to his apartment. But the better reason was that of self-protection.
In terms of a home break-in during the dark of night, every second counted.
His hand found the holster. And the holster was empty.
He hadn’t failed to put the gun there. Its absence proved that he wasn’t alone. And its absence also told him that the enemy was waiting patiently for him to realize that the gun was gone, so that there would be a hideous panic in the moment of death.
In the dark, the full force of a lithe, powerful body came down on him, pinning him to the bed. Hands in latex gloves—hands that were like vices—pinned the upper part of his body. The hands were like steel. They clamped tightly.
Stanislaw let loose with a horrendous howl of profanity. He flailed and tried to fight his way forward, to escape the grip of the intruder.
Then there was a final sensation, that of a cool steel point pressing to the side of his neck, the point of something very sharp and very cold, like an ice pick.
A final kick, scream, and thrust and then Stanislaw felt the point of the pick penetrate his flesh, much like one feels a hypodermic needle. But this needle was several inches long. Pushed by a powerful hand, the blade shot upward into his jugular vein and slid onward through his head like a bolt of lightning.
When it went into his brain, a piercing blackness accompanied it. He shuddered a final time and was dead before the intruder withdrew the blade.
J
ohn Sun relaxed and withdrew from the sleeping area. Methodically, he placed the murder weapon in a zip-lock bag, the kind currently favored by airport security pests. He would later throw the pick into the Lake of Geneva. He went to the washroom and rinsed off his gloves but did not remove them. These days, in the era of DNA and micro-forensics, one could never be too careful. Get arrested in Switzerland, and he’d never see the light of day again. Even his government wouldn’t be able to get him out. Not that he was worried.
He returned to the dead man to make sure the dead man was a dead man. No movement, no pulse. Good. He breathed a little easier. He went to all the windows—there were only five in the apartment—and drew the blinds. Once again, one could never be too careful. Out of a sense of decency, he drew a cover over the dead man’s body. Like Colonel Tissot, the body would start to stink in about seven days and would draw investigators to the apartment. But by then, Sun would be long gone from the country and possibly even from Europe.
The apartment had a good audio setup in the living room, so he went to it and turned on some music. Most of the dead man’s music collection was not to John Sun’s tastes. But he did find some classical stuff, some Mahler and some Brahms, and he hooked up some restful, mournful stuff. He had killed two men today, partly out of retribution, partly because it had been his job. But it did set him in a mournful mood. No Verdi
Requiem
, so Mahler would have to do.
Then, for two hours, Sun prowled his second victim’s apartment. He found many items of interest, but the preeminent one was the file that the dead man had acquired less than twenty-four hours earlier.
Thoughtfully, he settled into a chair and read it, putting two and two together quickly.
Sun had a keen eye for attractive women, and his gaze settled almost immediately on the surveillance photographs of Alexandra LaDuca. This was the first time he had ever seen her, either in a photo or live, and it was the first time he had ever encountered her name. The file was clear as to what she was: an American agent who would be assigned to a case tangential to the late Pole, the late Colonel Tissot, and that star-crossed little statue that some busybodies had swiped from a Spanish museum, putting this whole skein of events in progress.
An American agent and a female one at that, as the pictures made clear. Interesting.
Alex LaDuca. Well, he had computer access and some very good backup people. He’d be able to find out more about this woman within a few hours, not the least of details being where and how to find her, if necessary.
He read the snippets about her background and then went back to the pictures.
The clearest photograph of Alexandra LaDuca was one week old. Color, shot from a surveillance camera in Barcelona. A trim woman in her late twenties, short dark hair, at ease on the streets of Barcelona, walking in a T-shirt, a short denim skirt, and sneakers, hardly the vision of a tough investigative agent. But appearances were frequently deceiving.
Another photo, taken from a greater distance, showed her on the beach in a red Nike swimsuit, and a third photo showed her at a café, sitting alone, reading a novel.
It was very strange, he pondered, where these back-channel paths sometimes led. He set the file aside near the door. He would take it with him. He then spent another hour prowling the apartment.
Around 4:00 a.m., he emerged from the lobby of Stanislaw’s building onto a quiet Geneva street. He walked two blocks, an American baseball cap down across his eyes just in case, and he found his car exactly where he had left it.
In another minute, he was gone, leaving the streets behind him quiet and lifeless.
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 8, 7:15 A.M.
T
he 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.