The Icon Thief (28 page)

“All of these artists were infatuated with communism,” Maddy said, trying to slow things down. “They were trying to start a revolution in the arts. It isn’t surprising that they’d also be interested in politics.”

“So what was in it for Lenin? Look at it from his perspective. He was an exile, without power, so he needed what every revolutionist needs. Organization. An infrastructure that can be used for conspiracy and subversion, a system that crosses national borders. As soon as he saw what these aspiring Rosicrucians had created, he knew it would be useful. So he sought them out.”

Maddy remembered something that Lermontov had said. One secret society could be built on the foundations of another, even if they had nothing in common. “But how did he even know they existed?”

“He heard about them in prison,” Ethan said. “Lenin spent years in Siberia, side by side with outlaws and thieves. The more I look at it, the more I’m convinced that these groups have been entwined from the very beginning. And without their help, Lenin never would have made it home.”

Going through his notes, Ethan found a map covered in dates. “You know the story, right? Lenin is in Switzerland, stranded by the war, but he’s allowed to travel through Germany to Russia on a sealed train. Germany hopes that he’ll create political unrest, ending the war on the eastern front. The plan is carried out by the general
staff without the knowledge of the Kaiser. And it works. A few months after Lenin comes to power, Russia withdraws from the war.”

“Wait,” Maddy said. “I’m not following you. You’re saying that the
Rosicrucians
had something to do with this?”

Ethan lit a cigarette. In the past, he had been circumspect about his smoking, but now he didn’t seem to care. “Look at the facts. Before his return is approved, Lenin is a minor revolutionist, a nonentity. Someone must have brought him to the attention of the general staff. Who was it? Nobody knows. But we do know that Aleister Crowley, who by now was deeply immersed in these groups, was in contact with Erich Ludendorff, the chief manager of the Kaiser’s war effort.”

“But this has nothing to do with the art world. Does anyone else even believe this?”

“Kaiser Wilhelm did. In his memoirs, he blames the war on a group called the Great Orient Lodge, and says that it held a conference in Switzerland in 1917. Well, the Ordo Templi Orientis arranged a conference that year at Monte Verità, where the communist problem was publicly debated. For the Rosicrucians, this was their big moment. They’d been hanging around the margins for decades, maybe centuries, and now they finally had a chance to change history.”

As Ethan paused to take a breath, Maddy took the opportunity to speak. “Okay. But there’s one problem. When they came to power, the Bolsheviks repressed all secret societies, including the Rosicrucians.”

“Yes, but it didn’t happen all at once. At first, there were hints of cooperation. Crowley even wrote a letter to
Trotsky, not long after the revolution, offering his help in ridding the earth of Christianity. But it didn’t last. Lenin outlawed all secret societies, and he also went after artists, which always seemed strange to me. Why was he so afraid of poets and painters?”

“It happens in every totalitarian regime. Paranoia flourishes in those conditions—”

“It wasn’t just paranoia. The Bolsheviks knew how powerful an alliance between artists and occultists could be, so they resolved to eliminate the Rosicrucians, first at home, then in the rest of the world.”

Maddy had an uneasy premonition of where this was headed. “So what did they do?”

“In Eastern Europe, they could suppress the Rosicrucians directly, but on the other side of the Iron Curtain, they had to adopt more indirect methods. It was a war of subversion and implication. Rumors of human sacrifice had been swirling around these groups for years, so it was easy enough to make them real. All it took was one murder. And the victim was the Black Dahlia.”

The wine was pulsing in her head. “I can’t take much more of this. I feel sick—”

“Listen to me,” Ethan said, speaking with a vehemence that startled her. “George Hodel, the doctor most sources agree was the Black Dahlia killer, was friends with Man Ray and other artists in the Arensberg Circle, but he also had connections with the Soviets. His parents were from Russia and Ukraine. He was a member of the Severance Club, a Bolshevik organization, and only a few months after the murder, he was in contact with the Soviet embassy in Washington.”

Closing her eyes, Maddy rested her head on her knees. “You’re making this up—”

“Hear me out. Hodel lived in Pasadena, which at the time was the headquarters of the Theosophical movement, the home of the sole remaining lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and the center of the Arensberg Circle. If the Soviets wanted to strike at the heart of the Rosicrucian establishment, it had to be there.”

“But why would the Black Dahlia murder cast suspicion on the Rosicrucians?”

Ethan rifled through a stack of crime scene photographs. “Look at the style of the killing. Elizabeth Short’s body is posed after the fashion of the Vehmgericht, who cut their victims in half. It evokes the faceless woman in the grass that Duchamp had painted thirty years before. And it worked. The police focused on a possible occult connection from the earliest stages of the investigation. Within a year, the lodges were closed, and the circle of artists was dissolved.”

In the darkened study, Maddy could not see Ethan’s face. “So what happened to the Rosicrucians?”

Ethan inverted the bottle over his glass, draining the last few drops. “They’ve spread across the globe, mostly as a criminal enterprise, but maybe, in some strange way, they’re trying to finish the revolution that their predecessors began. And that’s why they went after Archvadze. He’s an interloper, like Arensberg, except richer and better organized. He wanted to start a revolution in Georgia, so he decided to explore the roots of the one revolution that had already succeeded in that part of the world. And his best source was Duchamp, who had put the group’s
secrets in his art, including one message so important that it could only be revealed after his death.”

“But why would this be useful to Archvadze? What could the study have to tell him?”

“Maybe it’s the key to solving
Étant Donnés
. In his notes, Duchamp implies that the installation is a sort of chess problem, and that the viewer’s task is to find the solution. Perhaps it’s only fully visible in Philadelphia, when you’re standing before the installation itself. And if Archvadze was close to an answer, it explains why the study was stolen. These men protect their secrets.”

As she listened, her hands growing cold, Maddy found herself thinking of her failed gallery in Chelsea. She had always sensed that there was an order to the art world that she would never be allowed to understand, a door that would remain closed forever, and as she thought now of the thief at the mansion, she knew for the first time why his face had haunted her. It was the face of a man who had seen into that secret world. And now Ethan had the same look in his eyes.

But the image of her dead gallery refused to go away. She reminded herself that she had been wrong about these things before, and that to make the same mistake here would mean humiliation or worse. She took a breath. “Before we go further, we need to be sure. I can ask Lermontov—”

Even before she finished, Ethan was already shaking his head. “No. That’s something else we need to talk about.” He dug through his notes, emerging with a computer printout. “When you told me that Lermontov was trading in Rosicrucian art, I went through the database to look at transactions in which he had been involved, hoping to get
a sense of which artists were relevant. I didn’t find anything useful. But I noticed something strange.”

He handed her the printout, which turned out to be a list of art deals. “There’s a pattern in these transactions. For many of these works, the listed seller doesn’t appear in any other transaction except the ones involving Lermontov. Often they’re dead businessmen with no record of having invested elsewhere in art, or collectors for whom no independent evidence exists at all. You understand? The names are fake. He’s covering up the real source of these paintings.”

Maddy’s forehead continued to pound. “But we’ve always said that provenance data is notoriously unreliable. The database isn’t perfect.”

“I know. And I might have dismissed this if it only applied to one or two transactions, but there are scores of them. The odds against this being a coincidence are astronomical. No. He’s getting pieces from somewhere outside the traditional art market. I think it’s a secret network of collectors, like Archvadze, who want to trade art with hidden meanings without there being a record of it. His involvement isn’t just theoretical. He knows the names of these collectors.”

Maddy shook her head. She was about to repeat her objections when, looking down, she saw a piece of paper that had been uncovered when Ethan removed the list of transactions.

She recognized it at once. It was a page from her notes. And in the margin was drawn a hand clutching a rose.

Maddy stared at the page. “Where did you get this? I told you it was missing.”

Ethan looked away, his lips stained red by the wine. “I’m sorry. I took the spare key from your office. I didn’t mean to worry you—”

Maddy rose slowly to her feet. “You’re the one who broke into my house? But why?”

“I wanted to see if you were working for Lermontov. I wasn’t sure if you were telling me the whole truth, so I looked at your notes to see if you were hiding something. I must have taken that page by accident.” His voice was flat. “But I never meant for you to find out.”

They looked at each other across the darkened room. A wordless anger was gathering in her body, mingled with something even worse, which was disappointment. She opened her mouth to speak, then stopped herself. In a flash, she understood that anything she said would only bind them closer together.

Turning aside, she went onto the landing, her footsteps loud on the stairs. She kept an ear tuned to the study, wondering what she would do if he called for her, but heard nothing. Sensing that it was too late to stop, she went into the entryway. A second later, she was on the street, walking away, if only to prove to herself that she still could. Her hands were shaking with rage.

Maddy went blindly up the sidewalk. For a moment, she expected to see the man who had been following her standing outside, but there was no one. There was only the street, one that she knew all too well, the street of missed opportunity, when the evening’s fantasies had collapsed into the reality of a solitary walk home. No one was watching. She was alone.

“G
entlemen, we have a warrant,” Barlow said. As Powell entered the briefing room, he found it packed with members of the tactical unit. Taking a handout from the stack by the door, he looked for a few square feet of space in which to stand, and finally squeezed into the corner next to Wolfe.

Barlow stood before a slideshow presentation, stripped down to a tie and shirtsleeves. “As most of you know, we’ve been building this case for weeks. Normally, we’d wait for the buyer to take delivery, but because one sorry fuck forgot how to sew a battery pack into his coat pocket, we’re moving up the timeline.”

There was mild laughter, most of it directed at Kandinsky, who sat in the far corner, his face red. “Until now, the details could not be revealed, except to a few of you,” Barlow continued. “Now that you’re being asked to execute this warrant, it’s only fair that you hear the full story.”

Touching a key on his laptop, he advanced the slideshow to the mug shot of an Armenian male. “This is Arshak Gasparyan, an aspiring gangster from Sheepshead Bay,” Barlow said. “He was on the verge of a weapons
deal with Sharkovsky when he vanished, along with three of his cronies. A few days later, they were found at a construction site in Gowanus, minus their faces and fingerprints. Which left our man with a shipment of guns and no buyer.”

Barlow went to the next slide. “This is Garegin Solomonyan, a more experienced gun runner from Gravesend. In recent weeks, we’ve intercepted and recorded a series of conversations between him and Sharkovsky. The conversations are usually in code, so it’s taken us a while to put together a picture of the deal. At this point, though, it looks like our
vor
is storing a crate of rocket launchers and something like a thousand grenades on the club’s ground floor.”

There was an appreciative murmur as Barlow advanced to a plan of the Club Marat. “The club stands in a line of restaurants on the boardwalk, with a row of housing projects to the rear. There are two floors and three entrances, one on the street, one on the alley, one on the boards. Teams of five men will cover each door. Sharkovsky will have watchers posted, so we’ll keep well back until the signal is given. Powell and Wolfe will be our eyes on the inside.”

Powell felt the room briefly scrutinize his face as Barlow brought up a list of names. “Once we’re in, we grab Sharkovsky, secure the merchandise, and turn up the lights. It’s the weekend, so the club will be packed. We lock down the doors, run every name, and scoop up the guys we need. You each have the list, so you know we’re looking at twelve to fourteen extractions. Disarm them, cuff them, get them in the van. We’re also looking for computers, paper files, and cameras.”

Barlow paused like a preacher surveying his congregation at a particularly dramatic moment. “If we get our man, he’s looking at a life sentence for arms trafficking conspiracy, interstate firearms trafficking, and illegal transfer and possession. I can’t speak for all of you, but that’s good enough for me. Direct any questions to your unit commander. We move in twenty.”

The meeting broke up. Powell waited until the conference room was clear before approaching Barlow, who gave him a wolfish grin. “Good work on the dead girl. Your report just crossed my desk.”

“Not that it mattered,” Powell said. “We were moving against Sharkovsky anyway.”

“Never tell anyone that your work is unnecessary. If you don’t watch out, they’ll start to believe you.” Barlow headed for the door. “Either we have accessory after the fact for a death that isn’t even in our jurisdiction, or we have a thousand grenades and a life sentence. Which would you prefer?”