The Icon Thief (5 page)

Zhenya opened the door. Inside, the office was spacious and dark, the walls covered with more pictures of trucks. In one corner stood a stack of unopened vodka cartons. The shelves were crammed with toys, dolls, and other tchotchkes, giving the room the atmosphere of a junk shop.

Behind the desk, his face illuminated by a computer screen, sat Valentin Sharkovsky. He was a compact man with the build of a former wrestler, which was exactly what he had been many years ago. His shirt, unfastened at the throat, displayed a tuft of gray chest hair and a chunky crucifix.

Sharkovsky rose gingerly from his chair. Watching his careful movements, Ilya saw the usual ailments of an aging athlete. The hand that the old man extended was all knuckles, but its grip was strong. “Flight was good?”

“Same as ever,” Ilya said, ending the handshake first. As they moved to sit down, a tall man in his thirties, his hair dirty blond, limped into the room. His name, Ilya knew, was Misha. He, too, wore his hair in a ponytail, but unlike Zhenya’s, it was gathered securely at the nape of his neck. The two younger men remained standing as Ilya spoke again. “Vasylenko sends his regards.”

Sharkovsky sat heavily behind his desk. “It is good to hear of him. How is London?”

“Damp,” Ilya said. He disliked small talk, and the men
standing behind his chair put him on his guard. He found that he could keep an eye on them in the glass of the largest picture, which displayed a line of the club’s dancing girls. The two men were watching him closely as well, less out of hostility, it seemed, than curiosity, as if he were a member of some exotic species.

Sharkovsky straightened out the drift of papers on the desk, squaring the invoices and pay slips into neater piles. “Excuse the mess. It never ends. You know the restaurant business?”

“I’ve worked with Vasylenko at his club,” Ilya said. “But he runs most of it himself.”

“As he should. It teaches you something about the world. The most constant thing in life, I find, is loss of inventory. Shrinkage. Each month, it costs me five percent. A bartender sells shots out of his own bottle. A line cook leaves with two steaks in his pocket. You know what a night porter is?”

Another man might have thought that Sharkovsky was rambling, but Ilya knew that a
vor
never spoke without good reason. “He mops the floor, takes out the garbage, scrubs the ovens—”

“And he does it all alone.” Sharkovsky stuffed the invoices into the top drawer of his desk, which he left open. “He stays for hours after the club is closed, and because he is by himself, he can do what he likes. If he finds a purse that a woman has dropped, he keeps it. Perhaps he even steals. And I overlook these things. Why? Because he does work that no other man would do. Like you.”

The old man’s eyes fell on Ilya’s face. “When such a man does his job well, he is left alone. But if something goes wrong, it becomes harder for us to look the other
way.” He paused. “You came here to recover something. Yet you were the one who lost it in the first place. Why?”

Ilya, who had been expecting the question, was quick with his reply. “I was careless.”

“I see. Which makes some of us wonder what happened in Budapest. The only other man who knows, it seems, is dead. And it would have been easy for you to return with empty hands, saying that the item you were sent to find was gone, when in fact you cut a deal of your own.”

Sharkovsky reached into the open drawer. When his hand reappeared, it was holding a gun. Seeing it, Ilya’s first impulse was to glance at the floor, which was carpeted. If it had been tile, he would have been more concerned.

The old man leveled the pistol at Ilya. “Carelessness may be an accident, but it may also be intentional. The Chekists have eyes in many places. It would not surprise me if they, too, had a hand in this. And it is not only because you are a
zhid
. Though I have never found it easy to trust such men, knowing that their loyalties were divided from the beginning—”

Ilya did not drop his eyes, but the word echoed through his brain, with all of its hateful associations. For a moment, he was no longer the Scythian, but a Jewish boy brawling in a schoolyard, books and papers spilled across the ground. “If you think I’m a Chekist, you should kill me now.”

“But there is something that I want from you first,” Sharkovsky said. “Something that you need to show me. I won’t tell you what it is. You have one chance. And if you guess wrong—”

Sharkovsky struck the pistol once against the surface of the desk, making a hard rap.

Ilya allowed a second to pass. He was aware that this was nothing but theater, but reminded himself not to underestimate this man, who had cleared a space for business in this city through the force of his personality alone.

Undoing the clasps of his satchel, he removed a sheet of paper and set it on the desk. On the page was the image of a man’s face, downloaded twelve hours ago from an art world website. The man held an auction paddle in one hand, his arm extended, exposing two inches of shirtsleeve.

“I came here for this man,” Ilya said. “And I know that you can tell me where he is.”

Sharkovsky regarded the picture for a wordless moment. Then he spoke quietly to the others. “Leave us alone, please.”

Zhenya and Misha exchanged looks, then filed out of the office. As soon as they were gone, Sharkovsky lowered the pistol. Both it and the photo went into the open drawer of his desk. Taking a bottle from the same drawer, he poured a glass for himself. He did not offer any to Ilya. “When I implied that you were a Chekist, you grew angry. Do you hate them?”

Ilya knew that the reference to state intelligence was far from an accident. To call a thief a Chekist, even in passing, was to accuse him of the lowest kind of treachery, and it served only as a reminder of how far he had fallen. “Any man who values his freedom must hate the secret services.”

“Spoken like a true thief.” Sharkovsky stood and went
to the corner where the boxes of vodka were stacked. He turned back the rug, revealing a safe, which he opened with a twist of the handle.

Ilya studied the safe’s contents. Most of the weapons were expensive pistols, plated in nickel and chrome, but he knew better than to trust a pistol that he had not maintained himself. As he examined the guns, he remembered their earlier exchange.
Zhid
. It had left him with a germ of anger, a seed that might grow unchecked if neglected for too long. He was careful to seem harmless, but he was not. He did not forget. And he did not easily forgive.

He picked out a revolver. A working gun. He held it up so that Sharkovsky could see.

“A careful man’s choice,” Sharkovsky said, closing the safe. His eyes flicked again across Ilya’s face, their scrutiny cool and detached. “Good. But we’ll soon find out how careful you really are—”

“W
e aren’t trying to beat the market,” Reynard said, his voice audible in the hallway outside the conference room. “If there’s any confusion on that point, we can end this meeting right now.”

Hearing these words, Maddy smiled as she headed inside, waving at the receptionist in the fund’s pristine lobby. In contrast to the rest of the Fuller Building, which was a monument to Art Deco, the Reynard Art Fund had decorated its leased space in a style meant to evoke the white cube of contemporary galleries, resulting, at least to her eyes, in a sense of timeless sterility.

Inside the conference room, Reynard was seated at the head of a long steel table, next to Ethan Usher, one of the fund’s quantitative research associates. Reynard’s tieless collar bloomed from his sweater like a hothouse flower, his clothing studiously rumpled, while Ethan was decked out in quant casual, his math camp shirt tucked neatly into a pair of khakis. At the other end of the table sat two pension fund investors in identical pin-striped suits. As Maddy drew closer, something in their wary faces told her that the meeting was not going well.

When she reached the conference table, Reynard
broke off, favoring her with one of his celebrated smiles. “Glad you could join us. Gentlemen, this is Maddy Blume, our associate head of gallery relations.”

Maddy shook hands with the visitors. “Don’t worry about the title. I’m not sure what it means, either—”

She sat next to Ethan, who acknowledged her presence with a nod. Although he had been at the fund longer than she had, Ethan was a year younger, with a smooth forehead, green eyes, and sandy hair that always seemed two inches too long. Under the math shirt, his body was fit and trim, but there was a studied quality to his physique, as if it were the product of much solitary exercise. With his pale, impassive face, he struck her as something of an android, as if he were nothing but an extension of the machines that he understood so well.

Maddy turned her attention to Reynard, who offered a more interesting view. He was an improbably attractive man in his early forties, casually outfitted in sneakers and jeans, as if he were so used to wealth that he no longer felt the need to dress up in its presence. For all its informality, his appearance was carefully calibrated. Because it would be years before the fund could show any returns, its greatest asset, in the meantime, was his ability to sell himself. And at the moment, she thought, he was doing a rather indifferent job of it.

“Art lags behind other investments because of one fatal flaw,” Reynard was saying. “It’s beautiful. People buy art for reasons that are entirely irrational from the perspective of a disinterested investor. As a result, they’re willing to pay a premium, which reduces their financial return by an average, we’ve found, of one percent per year. So why invest? It isn’t because art provides outsized
returns. It’s because it can diversify and reduce risk in a larger portfolio.”

“But we assume,” the older of the two visitors said, “that you’re looking for ways to increase returns as well.”

“Of course. When I entered this business, I was an options trader. I didn’t know the first thing about art, but I saw an opportunity to make the market more transparent. Our original intention was to track art transactions, which are notoriously opaque, and sell the data. Along the way, we discovered two things. First, the database was useful only if it was collaborative and free, so instead of keeping it private, we opened it up to the world. Second, we had information here that would give us an edge if we ever wanted to invest for ourselves. The size curve, for example—”

“It’s a simplified illustration, but it gives you a sense of how we think,” Ethan said. Taking a brochure, he opened it to a diagram of a straight line rising smoothly across the page. “Large paintings are generally worth more than small paintings by the same artist. Size equals prestige. A large Picasso sells for more than a small Picasso, so if you plot a painting’s area against its price, you get a smooth line, with value increasing steadily with size.”

“Although it falls off,” Reynard interjected, “once the area exceeds the dimensions of a Park Avenue elevator.”

Ethan pointed to an outlier on the graph. “And sometimes you see kinks in the curve. A Picasso sells for less than its position on the curve would indicate. Why? Maybe it’s a bad painting, or damaged, or a forgery. Maybe the information is faulty. Or maybe it’s a genuine bargain. And that’s where we come in.”

As the investors studied the graph, Maddy saw that
they seemed unconvinced. Glancing again at their pinstripes, which reminded her that these were not imaginative men, she tried to redirect the conversation. “The approach is new, but the principle isn’t. Pension funds have been investing in art for years. Instead of depending on the opinions of critics, though, we prefer to take a more systematic approach.”

Reynard, seeing where she was going, quickly took up the thread. “Which only means that we’re applying modern portfolio theory to the oldest asset class of all. Every sale is a source of information. We can identify drivers of investor behavior that no one else has ever noticed. If a painting is stolen, for example, prices for the artist’s other works tend to increase—”

“Although it’s the opposite, we’ve found, when the artist dies,” Maddy said. “People assume that prices will go up after an artist’s death, but that isn’t true. Death locks in the oeuvre, making it impossible for new works to raise the estimation of existing pieces. As long as an artist is still alive, he has a chance to shape the story. Once he dies, though, the chance is gone.”

“Except,” Ethan said, deadpan as his eyes briefly lit on her own, “for Duchamp.”

Maddy smiled, although she knew that the joke had been at her expense. After a few more questions, the visitors stood, saying that they would be in touch before the end of the month. As they walked the investors to the elevator bay, Maddy had trouble reading their expressions, which were more cordial than before, but remote. Reynard, by contrast, seemed assured that the meeting had been a success, and beamed broadly as he sent the visitors downstairs.

The smile lasted until the elevator doors closed. As soon as they were alone, Reynard turned to the others. “I’ll update the tracker. We can lower the chance of an investment to thirty percent.”

“Thirty percent,” Ethan said glumly. “That puts us under our target for the quarter.”

“A year from now, we’ll be turning money away.” Reynard headed for his private office. “As for the Russian, I’m making him a top priority. There are only twenty major buyers in the market at any time. If we can find out who he is and forecast his tastes, we can buy up the art he wants before he even knows it himself. And just so you take it seriously, there’s a bonus involved. Ten thousand in deferred comp to whoever gets me his name first. Spread the word.”

Maddy’s face did not move, but on the inside, she felt a subtle tectonic shift. A year ago, after the failure of her gallery, a wave of debt had entered her life. Ten thousand dollars, while not enough to cancel her liabilities entirely, would buy her the time she needed to pay them off for good. “I’m on it.”

Reynard paused at his office door. “One last thing. We need to fix our pricing model. We went in with a maximum of five million, and it sold for eleven. That’s way outside the margin of error.”