Checkmate in Amber (3 page)

‘We have just received an interesting proposal,’ Roi began. His typing was as fast as a skilled stenographer’s. ‘Extremely interesting, in my opinion, and that is why I have convened this meeting. I have received a request, through the usual channels, from a collector called Vladimir Melentyev who wants us to acquire a canvas by the Russian painter Ilya Krylov, which is currently in Germany. The work is valued at about $35,000 and he is willing to pay us whatever we ask. We can name our own price, he made that very clear.’

‘Name our own price?’ exclaimed Rook, the Group’s financial expert.

‘I can assure you that he will not haggle with us over our fee.’

‘This smells a bit fishy to me,’ Cavalo commented. ‘Do the math, Rook. It seems to me that hiring us to do the job is going to cost this Vladimir a lot more than just buying the painting legally.’

‘The owner doesn’t want to sell it.’

‘OK, listen. At current exchange rates, $35,000 is about the same amount in euros. It seems to me that Krylov’s work doesn’t fetch a lot in the market nowadays.’

‘I don’t know anything about him,’ Donna admitted. ‘He must have been active after 1800.’

‘Exactly. He’s from the late 19th and early 20th century,’ I chipped in. ‘I know, because when I was preparing for my last trip, I read somewhere that Krylov had started his career as an icon painter and that most of his work, or at least his best-known work, is in the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg.’

‘LISTEN,’ Läufer shouted. ‘ACCORDING TO THE INTERNET, ILYA YEFIMOVICH KRYLOV (1844-1930) IS REGARDED AS THE OUTSTANDING REALIST PAINTER OF HIS GENERATION. BORN IN CHUGUYEV, HE STUDIED AT THE IMPERIAL ACADEMY OF ARTS IN SAINT PETERSBURG. A FINE DRAFTSMAN AND SKILLED COLORIST, HE WAS BEST-KNOWN FOR THE PARTICULAR SUBJECT MATTER OF HIS WORKS.’

‘Läufer, please,’ interjected Roi, taking advantage of a brief pause in the loudmouth’s pronouncements. ‘Write in lower case.’

‘I CAN’T. I’VE ALREADY TOLD YOU WHY. TO CONTINUE: HIS PROFOUNDLY MOVING PORTRAYALS OF THE COMMON PEOPLE REFLECTED HIS CRITICAL STANDPOINT TOWARDS THE TSARIST REGIME. HIS
BARGE HAULERS ON THE VETLUGA
(1870, STATE RUSSIAN MUSEUM, SAINT PETERSBURG), WHICH SHOWS THE BOATMEN HARNESSED UP LIKE BEASTS OF BURDEN, MADE HIM FAMOUS. HE PAINTED A SERIES OF WORKS REPRESENTING MAJOR HISTORICAL EVENTS AND ALSO PRODUCED A NUMBER OF CONTEMPLATIVE PORTRAITS OF CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN COMPOSERS AND ARTISTS. HIS WORK BECAME A REFERENCE POINT FOR THE SOCIALIST REALIST SCHOOL IN THE SOVIET UNION DURING THE MID-20TH CENTURY.’

‘For God’s sake! Are you incapable of sorting out that bloody keyboard?’

By way of an answer, a blood-red rose began to float its way up the white screen, with the simple inscription -
FOR DONNA
.

‘The point is this,’ Roi continued, blithely ignoring the bickering. ‘Melentyev wants a 1916 Krylov painting entitled
Muzhiks
, which is currently in the possession of a German industrialist called Helmut Hübner.’

‘Hübner?’ Rook asked. ‘Hübner the cookie tycoon?’

‘Exactly. Not to mention his breads and cakes.’

‘That guy’s one of the richest people in the whole of Germany. That’s right, isn’t it, Läufer? His corporations and subsidiaries are listed on Europe’s leading stock exchanges and, according to
Forbes
magazine, he’s worth several hundred million euros.’

In his now familiar style, Läufer channeled the well-known jingle from the TV commercials for Hübner’s best-selling cookies through our speakers.

‘I WORKED FOR HIM ONCE. I GAVE HIM A NEGATIVE VALUATION OF A PIECE HE WANTED TO ACQUIRE: A FOLDED CRYSTAL VASE, BILLED AS BEING MADE BY THE
COMPAGNIE DES CRISTALLERIES DE BACCARAT
, BUT WHICH WAS IN FACT MADE AT THE SAINTE-ANNE GLASSWORKS.’

‘But the Sainte-Anne glassworks was the forerunner of the Baccarat crystalworks,’ Roi pointed out, puzzled. ‘Why did you give a negative valuation when the Sainte-Anne piece was much more valuable?’

‘BECAUSE HE WAS EXCLUSIVELY INTERESTED IN BACCARAT CRYSTAL PRODUCED BETWEEN 1861 AND 1875. I REMEMBER EVERY DETAIL. EVEN THOUGH I GAVE THE PIECE A MUCH HIGHER APPRAISAL VALUE, I HAD TO REJECT IT ON HIS BEHALF.’

‘So that means we’re dealing with a highly selective collector,’ remarked Cavalo. ‘A man who knows exactly what he wants and who has built up a large collection of carefully chosen works of art, including the Krylov canvas.’

‘Right - and that suggests he’ll have all his treasures very well protected,’ I added, pointedly. Roi might be the organizer, Donna and Cavalo the forgers, Rook the money-launderer and Läufer the computer geek, but I was the one who actually carried out the heists, the one who put her neck on the line every time, the superfit player who climbed in through the windows, sashayed along the rooftops, scaled the walls and cracked the alarm systems.

‘Relax, Peón,’ Roi consoled me. ‘You can be sure that everybody will do a thorough job, as always, and you’ll be fully briefed on all the obstacles every step of the way.’

‘The obstacles are never 100% predictable.’

‘PEÓN IS A CRYBABY.’

‘SHUT UP, LÄUFER. DON’T TYPE ANOTHER WORD UNTIL I TELL YOU TO DO SO,’ Roi cut in, sick and tired of the veteran hacker’s messing around. ‘I apologize, Peón. It won’t happen again. Now let’s get back to business, please.’ He keyed in various lines of white space, to give us all time to cool down, and then resumed: ‘I will track down all the relevant documentation on the painting and Läufer will do the research on Helmut Hübner. Any problem producing the counterfeit copy, Donna?’

‘None at all, but this time send me the reproductions with the highest possible resolution. I need to make the enlargements very big and very precise. You know the deal: find out everything you can about the stretcher, the materials used and Krylov’s particular painting techniques and idiosyncrasies. I also need the canvas’s complete history - everywhere it has been, how long it was in each place and under what conditions. And Krylov’s life story too, with all the details, however insignificant.’

‘I’m happy to take that on,’ Cavalo volunteered.

‘Right - that’s yours then,’ agreed Roi. ‘And don’t you worry, Donna, you will have everything within three days at the most. So that’s that. Läufer, have you got the backing track ready?’

Immediately, a circus-style drum roll filled my study. It always struck me as strange to imagine the same electronic fanfare emerging from six different computers in different cities in six different European countries.

‘Ladies and gentleman, today marks the official launch of Operation Krylov. As you know, from this moment on, all and any direct communication and personal encounters between Group members are strictly forbidden. All and any relevant news, information or comment must be passed through me and me alone, always using the Group encoder and the exclusively personal cipher and password with which I will provide each one of you, and which you are forbidden to share with anyone else. Bear in mind that apprehending the Chess Group would be the absolute highlight of any Interpol officer’s career. And don’t forget: maximum security is our best possible insurance. If one of us goes down, we all go down.’

CHAPTER THREE

I devoted the next few days to dealing with routine shop-related business: paying the cleaning lady what I owed her, responding in exhaustive detail to queries from my catalog clientele and registering for various auctions in November and December. And as usual, I took good care to spread the word around that I was due to be called away on another trip some day soon and at very short notice.

I’ve always been something of a loner, but I was getting dangerously close to that age when you start to wonder who on earth is going to be taking care of you when you get older. Every sudden change in perspective tends to begin with a deep sense of personal dissatisfaction. It certainly did in my case - I was starting to long for the friends I’d never made, the children I probably would never have and a love affair that would last just a little bit longer than a couple of nights in some hotel on the other side of the world. I was desperate for a sexual relationship that involved something more than just sex, a romance like the ones I saw in the TV movies. I was thirty-three years old, and the sum total of my emotional baggage amounted to my aunt, my old nanny and my father’s friend Roi - all of whom had turned fifty well before the end of the twentieth century.

But what else could I let myself get into, given the crazy life I was leading? Yet again, just like I always did, I decided that Day One of a new operation was not a good time to get into all this, so I put my heart on hold in the hope that one day, some day, I would be able to deal with it all without messing up my whole way of life.

It was September 10th, the Thursday afternoon that the first reports sent on by Roi began to arrive, and on Friday, after closing the store, I holed up in the study, ready to spend the entire weekend mulling over all the details of Operation Krylov. All that Prince Philibert really did was provide me with copies of the reports that he had received and those that he had found himself, to make sure that I was fully briefed before going into action. Rather sweetly, he thought all this would put my mind at rest - but in fact he couldn’t have been more mistaken. My take on it was that hacking into confidential files and classified databases while sitting comfortably in front of your desktop was a whole lot more relaxing than risking your neck - sometimes literally - when actually carrying out the damn robbery.

But Roi never tired of pointing out that the sophisticated investigative procedures of police forces all over the world nowadays made it much more likely that they’d get their hands on Läufer before they got anywhere near me - given the epidemic of computer crime mania which had swept through the law enforcement community. Our real enemy, Roi insisted, was Interpol’s Working Party on Information Technology Crime, closely associated with the FBI’s equally dangerous, but more distant National Infrastructure Protection Center, the NIPC.

Late on Sunday evening, I began to organize my part of the job. The photographs of Krylov’s painting had arrived mid-afternoon. I carefully studied them, and printed up a series of enlargements so as to get to know the canvas as well as possible. It was a heartfelt work, but far from upbeat: it showed three generations of impoverished muzhiks - an old man, two middle-aged men and three small children - sitting dismally around a shabby table and staring straight into the eyes of the spectator. The old man’s face reflected the wear and tear of the daily struggle for survival typical of a Russian peasant at the turn of the twentieth century. An empty cooking pot stood for hunger, and a chubby cat, much better fed than its human companions, had clearly gorged on the countless rats in the run-down shack, which was barely heated by the tiny fire flickering at the right of the picture.

The painting itself measured 45 by 63 inches, a slightly awkward size for me to carry. A further complication was that the canvas was attached to the stretcher by a very particular style of numbered nail, produced in Russia at the start of the twentieth century. Donna was desperately trying to get hold of a few in case any broke when I was detaching the canvas, for use when attaching the bogus copy. But apart from these two minor details, it didn’t look as if the work would be hard to handle, or to forge. A pigment analysis by electron microscope revealed that the colors used by Krylov were all produced industrially (his white, for example, was just standard titanium dioxide), as indicated by its very small particle size, compared to traditional pigments, which were ground by hand and, as a result, contained a much higher level of impurities. The canvas showed not even light cracking or flaking close to the frame, which was unusual in paintings over eighty years old. Cavalo’s notes explained that this was possibly due to Krylov priming his canvases with gesso and chalk, heavily diluted with water to maintain the elasticity of the modern machine-made fibers.

Donna worked with horsehair brushes which she had to make herself, as the ones she needed were unavailable on the market. She aged the horsehair by soaking it in vinegar for several days and then cut it into the shapes and sizes which matched the brushstrokes on the particular painting. And that wasn’t all, not by a long shot. She laid on the final layer of paint in her country villa in Tuscany, right next to the old fireplace which she stoked with unseasoned timber to produce the blackened smoke particles which had been absorbed by Krylov’s oils as he painted the muzhiks.

As far as studying the painting’s current location was concerned, I had to bury myself in the endless, long-winded and indigestible reports which Läufer had supplied. His idea of what constituted useful information was completely cock-eyed. Any document that included the Hübner surname, even just in a footnote or as an afterthought, had been thrown onto my pile of homework. Seeing that there wasn’t a password protection or security cipher in the known universe that could stop Läufer from barging his way in, my desktop had started to fill up with interminable memoranda, internal company mail, cookie and bread production data, executive roll-calls, invoicing by subsidiaries, workforce reduction programs, old stock exchange listings and a whole lot more besides. In fact, that moron had almost choked up my entire hard disk.

But every cloud has a silver lining, thankfully: a message from Läufer suddenly dropped into my in-box SHOUTING that the Trojan horse he had planted in Helmut Hübner’s personal computer had just gone live. It was a sophisticated Back Orifice malware program, which gave him free and undetected remote access to the tycoon’s computer - so long as it was switched on, of course. Given that Hübner never switched his system off, Läufer had no trouble at all laying his hands on the art collector’s most precious secrets.

The Krylov painting was kept in Castle Kunst on the banks of Lake Constance, in the state of Baden-Württemberg in southwest Germany. A significant part of Hübner’s
Pinakothek
had been moved to the castle in 1985 to be hung in its galleries, shortly after the impresario’s ambitious reconstruction project was completed, transforming the fourteenth-century military fortress into a comfortable place to live. From then on, Hübner spent at least three months of the year there, usually in April, May and June, before moving south to his estate in Mallorca until Christmas.

Läufer lost no time in sending me a series of excellent shots of the castle, taken with a telephoto lens from a range of vantage points. The first thing which struck me was that the castle was actually built
on
the lake itself and connected to the shore by a timber bridge, over thirty feet long. The medieval builder’s scheme was an imaginative and effective one, as the lake’s waters formed a natural protective moat and the bridge could be withdrawn or destroyed when under serious assault. The stone walls were built on a hexagonal plan, and incorporated two watchtowers and four circular flanking towers, projecting outwards and pierced with pointed arrow slits, which offered archers a good field of fire. The main defensive wall was just over 39 feet high and was topped by overhanging battlements to help defend against enemy attacks using scaling ladders.

The detailed site plans and drawings arrived a little later, because it took Läufer a while to find out the name of the architect who had been in charge of the restoration works. The castle’s basic structure and primitive military feel had not been interfered with, apart from a small swimming pool looking out onto the lake and a parking area around the old well. Most of the construction work took place inside the central keep, which was restored to its original function as the living quarters of the lord and castellan. Built on a square floor plan with solid ten-foot-thick walls, the keep had a cellar and five storeys. The ground floor housed the kitchen and the servants’ accommodation, and the next three the main living quarters, with its bedrooms, dining rooms and living rooms. There was also a library and even a private chapel. The top floor served as Hübner’s art gallery, and was reached either by a spiral staircase which wound its way up around the inside of the tower’s main wall or by a small central lift which rose up through the wooden floors.

As for Hübner’s staff at Kunst, Läufer had identified them by finding records of their wage slips in the bank account of one of Hübner’s many corporations. Herr and Frau Seitenberg - he the butler and she the housekeeper - looked after the castle throughout the year, and had their home on the ground floor of the keep. Hübner’s nearest neighbors were two enormous Rottweilers whose doghouse was at the foot of the west wall. Every morning, an old gardener came in from the village along with the cleaning lady - as Läufer had personally verified when carrying out on-site surveillance. The assumption was that, during the three months a year that Hübner stayed at the castle, staff numbers were significantly higher, but their wages didn’t appear in the castle’s official accounts.

It was slightly more difficult to identify the firm which installed the security system, but it eventually turned out to be the White Knight Company, an old acquaintance of mine whose outdated working methods didn’t lose me any sleep at all. A couple of days later, Läufer supplied me with the layout of the whole alarm set-up, including all its series and model reference numbers.

The checkered history of the Krylov painting, researched by Roi, was quite a bit more interesting. From the various references and comments in specialized journals, art history books and the archives of various gallery owners and collectors that were friends of his, we knew that the painting was kept in the State Russian Museum in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) for over twenty years, until it was looted and taken to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in October 1941, during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Nazis had formed two special commando units to carry out the systematic looting of art treasures: the
Sonderkommando Künsberg
, under the command of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, and the
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg
, controlled by Alfred Rosenberg, the
Reichsminister
for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Both units were charged with ensuring that the works of art, including those in the museums of Leningrad and Moscow, were kept ‘out of danger’ - a rescue operation which of course required their removal to Germany.

In the early months of 1945, when the Red Army was closing in on Königsberg in one of the bloodiest offensives of the Second World War, an expeditionary force loaded with looted treasures abandoned the threatened city and headed for Thuringia, whose governor was the much-feared
Gauleiter
³
Fritz Sauckel, responsible for the Weimar-Buchenwald concentration camp, and later condemned to death at the Nuremberg Trials and hanged. Shortly before his execution, this General Plenipotentiary for the Deployment of Labor claimed that these works of art appropriated in the closing stages of the war had left Weimar in April 1945, headed for Switzerland. But this was never confirmed and nothing more was ever heard of them.

It was more than strange that, twenty years later, a canvas entitled
Muzhiks
, painted by a Russian painter called Ilya Krylov, suddenly reappeared in the modest catalog of artworks owned by a former Nazi bigwig who had been transformed into a more than respectable bakery magnate - a certain Helmut Hübner. Pretty incredible, right? In Thuringia, or perhaps in Switzerland, the painting had found its way through unknown channels into Hübner’s hands - although it was even more horrifying to discover that the multimillionaire manufacturer of the world’s most famous cookies, not to mention oh-so-sensitive art collector, turned out to be a sanitized ex-Nazi.

Donna now had all the information she needed at her disposal. She set herself to work and produced a canvas which was so perfect that the rest of us could only gape in admiration. We all received two scanned photographs, completely indistinguishable, and she asked us to pick out the original. All of us failed dismally - all of us except for Läufer. But even he eventually had to admit that, far from using his impressive knowledge as a specialist in artwork authentication, he had simply flipped a coin for it after downing a good few beers.

Donna began her career as a professional painter when she was twenty years old and, judging by the reviews of her work, was naturally blessed with magnificent skills in draftsmanship and the use of color. But she soon discovered that, in the real world, she was just one more wannabe in a whole mess of wannabes, and that she would never become one of the Old Masters. She faced up to the bitter fact that her name would not live on through the centuries draped in glory, that there were no more Sistine Chapels left to paint and no more papal art patrons like Julius II and Leo X. Even the smallest jobs attracted thousands of desperate candidates, scrapping like piranhas.

So Donna gave her life plan a serious make-over and set off in a better-paid direction. Inspired by her idol Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, she moved into forgery. Michelangelo, wrote his good friend and biographer Giorgio Vasari, “also counterfeited drawings by various old maestros in a masterly manner; he handled them and aged them with smoke and other materials, staining them in such a way that they looked old, and making them indistinguishable from the originals.” On one well-known occasion, he sculpted a
Cupid
, buried it for a time to age it, and then arranged for it to be discovered during archaeological excavations. It was sold to a cardinal as an antique and Michelangelo received thirty gold ducats for it. Donna’s working methods were much less colorful: her studio was a sophisticated laboratory equipped with ultraviolet and infrared cameras, state-of-the-art microscopes and all the other instruments she used to analyze the chemical composition and physical properties of all the pigments, varnishes, canvases and gemstones that she required. But the appliance of science had also made her a whole lot richer than Michelangelo ever was.