The Icon Thief (6 page)

“I thought we agreed,” Ethan said. “The buyer overpaid. It isn’t the model’s fault.”

“It takes two to overpay. If he paid eleven, someone else bid ten million nine hundred. The model is wrong. I want to know why.”

Reynard disappeared into the office. Parting ways with Ethan, who drifted off without a word, Maddy
headed back to her own desk. As she sat down at her computer, she was tempted to open her personal balance sheet, but instead, she called up the picture that she had taken of the Russian. Enlarging it, she focused on the symbol on his cufflink, which had caught her eye earlier as a possible clue. According to Tanya, however, a red circle could mean anything or nothing.

Closing the file, it occurred to her that there was one possible source whom she had yet to call. After a moment’s hesitation, she picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. At the sixth digit, she paused, knowing that this amounted to a confession that she had run out of options.

In the end, she replaced the receiver in its cradle and got back to work. She would not call Lermontov yet. Later, if the situation became more desperate, she could swallow her pride. But not today.

L
ooking out at the hedge, Ilya was astonished. The hedge was eight feet tall and perfectly maintained, its sides so smooth that they seemed permanent, like a geographical feature that had been sculpted by the elements. When he thought of the effort required to grow this infinite hedge and keep it from wandering even an inch out of line, he was awed and angered by the wealth it implied.

Ilya glanced at Zhenya, who was slumped in the driver’s seat, a toothpick wedged in the corner of his mouth. He had exchanged the tight shirt and silver medallion of the day before for a velvet tracksuit. Beneath the show of thug fashion, Ilya sensed that Zhenya was deeply uncomfortable in this Southampton neighborhood, ninety miles and a world away from Brighton Beach.

During the drive, he had been less subdued. “We all know about Budapest,” Zhenya had said, shouting to be heard over the music. “Tonight, when we meet the Armenians, I’ll have my eye on you,
keelyer
—”

Ilya had said nothing, knowing that any response would only be turned against him. Now, without warning, he got out of the parked car. “I’m going for a walk. Go around the house once and meet me at the beach.”

Closing the door, he headed for the wall of green. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Zhenya toss his toothpick aside and pull away from the curb. He waited as the station wagon, a concession to a low profile, eased itself into the deserted street. A moment later, it rounded the bend and was gone.

Once he was alone, Ilya went up to the hedge. Looking at the ground, he could see a flattened strip where the sidewalk had been. At some point, however, it had been torn up, allowing the lawn to run to the edge of the road. When he looked up, examining the places where the hedge grew less thickly, he found that he could make out what lay beyond. Aside from a few clumps of topiary and the white hexagon of a gazebo, he saw nothing but acre after acre of perfect grass.

Ilya headed for the main entrance, passing a sign that said
G
IN
L
ANE
. There was no gate, only a gravel driveway that curved sharply past the hedge, blocking his line of sight. He crossed to the other side of the street, hoping to get a better sense of the layout. As he reached the opposite curb, there was a splash of gravel, and a yellow jeep appeared on the driveway. Two men sat inside, wearing white polo shirts with red roundels embroidered on the left breast.

As the guards drove past, Ilya moved on. After thirty yards, the road curved and the shade trees vanished. To his left, the hedge continued as before. On his right, the houses disappeared, replaced by a pond trimmed with reeds and pitch pines. Ospreys floated on the calm surface of the water.

He arrived at the beach. At the end of the road, there was a small parking lot, but no sign of the station wagon.
Up ahead, the ocean was a pale expanse merging with the sky. The estate continued to the edge of the beach, and it was only here, he saw, that the hedge came to an end.

Ilya removed his shoes and stepped onto the sand, the grains warm between his toes. The sensation reminded him vaguely of something from his boyhood, a time when he had gone with his family to a place by the sea. He tried to cling to the memory, but it ran like water between his fingers and was lost.

Walking down the beach, he turned to regard the estate from the ocean side. Here, for the first time, he could see the house, which was twenty thousand square feet, its roof and siding shingled in cedar. It rambled as if its construction had been a huge improvisation, with many levels of gables and eaves.

He sat down in the sand, angling himself so that he could continue to observe the mansion. With the hedge gone, a dune planted with beach grass was all that separated the main house from the rest of the world. Across the dune ran a snow fence, its slats tilted at awkward angles, less for protection than to keep the sand from drifting. Otherwise, the house was completely exposed.

Waffled tire tracks were visible in the sand by his feet. In the distance, he saw a couple of teenagers in a luxury shooting brake. They had paused half a mile away, the hatch raised, their torsos muscular and brown. As he watched them drive farther up the beach, a plan began to form in his mind.

He heard the crunch of footsteps behind him on the sand. “So what do you think?”

As Zhenya sat down, Ilya said, “In my opinion, it probably can’t be done. It’s easier to steal from a
museum than from a house like this. Museums don’t pay for the art themselves, so they don’t keep track of it. Private collectors are more careful, because they understand the cost of capital.”

Zhenya seemed confused, as if he didn’t understand the cost of capital, either. “So you’re having second thoughts?”

Ilya overheard a sneer in his voice. Working with this man, he thought, was like sharing a bed with a wolf cub. Zhenya, like all enforcers, wanted to become a
vor
, without understanding what such a life truly entailed. When Ilya tried to imagine him growing into a man like Vasylenko, it seemed impossible.

A second later, it occurred to him that wisdom came from a lifetime of mistakes, and that Vasylenko, as a young man, might have been no less of a fool. Looking at Zhenya’s pockmarked face, Ilya reminded himself that the material here was not entirely unpromising. Zhenya had spent a year in jail without turning state’s evidence, an American jail, to be sure, but nothing to be dismissed out of hand. Which was to say that there was more to him than his ponytail.

Ilya turned back to the mansion on the beach. “We’re sure that the painting is here?”

Zhenya sifted a handful of sand between his fingers. “Our eye on the inside says yes. If it isn’t here now, it will arrive in time for the party. One hundred and fifty guests. Easy for us to get inside.”

Ilya pictured the party, the glamour and money bright in the moonlight. “Security?”

“Six men. They will be focusing on the lawn. The house will be wide open. Twenty cameras on the grounds
outside the house, but inside, except one covering the vault, no cameras at all.”

Ilya considered this. The sun had grown low in the sky. If they were going to make it back in time for the exchange, they had to leave soon, but he didn’t want to go just yet. He mentally retraced the journey that the painting had taken since Budapest. Instead of traveling the usual road, it had vanished for more than a year, and now it had resurfaced here, behind the endless hedge. But not for long. Because for all its protection by land, it was exposed from the sea.

“All right,” Ilya finally said. “I’ll do it. But I’m going to need a few things—”

W
hen Maddy entered Reynard’s office, he was on the phone, the shades drawn. As she took a seat, her attention was caught by what he was saying: “Well, the rate of return for dishonesty should be the same everywhere—”

The door opened again as Ethan came inside, carrying a laptop and a quad pad. Closing the door, he sat down across from Maddy. He seemed tired, although the exhaustion betrayed itself only as an additional level of opacity in his eyes, as if an internal screensaver had engaged.

On the phone, Reynard’s tone shifted slightly. “Well, yes, we have checks in place to catch bad data. If a gallery enters false information into our database, it’ll stand out like a sore thumb. Our algorithms are designed to flag any anomalies in an artist’s price history. Sometimes it’s an investment opportunity. Sometimes it’s an honest mistake. And sometimes, more rarely, it’s deliberate fraud.”

A few seconds later, he managed to end the call, thanking the investor effusively for his time. Hanging up, he raised the window shade, allowing a rectangle of
sunlight to fall across the Cindy Sherman centerfold above his desk. The photo, which depicted the artist lying on a linoleum floor, a scrap of newspaper in one hand, had always troubled Maddy, although she would have found it hard to explain why. Reynard sat down again. “So what have you got for me?”

After exchanging looks with Ethan, Maddy took the lead. She had already decided to save her most promising item for last. “A tip from Tel Aviv. The phone bidder at the auction was the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They own the finished version of
Étant Donnés
, and are planning an anniversary show for next year. Obtaining the study would have been a major coup.”

“Not bad,” Reynard said. “But it still doesn’t give me the Russian. What else?”

Ethan held up his laptop. “I’ve compiled a spreadsheet of oligarchs from Russia or its former satellites. Cutoff is a billion dollars. I’ve managed to eliminate roughly half of the names. For example, given the agent’s evident inexperience, it’s possible that the buyer is new to the market—”

Reynard shook his head. “The agent was clumsy, but that doesn’t mean that the buyer is a virgin.” He gestured at the laptop screen, on which the photo of the Russian was displayed in a smaller window. “Come on. The two of you were hired to make connections like this. Anything else?”

“There’s another possibility that I should mention,” Maddy said, deciding to show her hand. Her source had been a girl from the client services desk, the one whom the Russian had tipped fifty dollars. After prying her name from the phone clerk, Maddy had taken her out,
and the girl had let something slip after her second martini: “I have a source who says he isn’t Russian at all.”

Reynard seemed struck by this. “Which means that all of our assumptions are wrong. That’s always a useful point of departure—”

Ethan studied the spreadsheet. “Technically, it could mean that he isn’t a Russian, but comes from a former satellite state. Which leaves Vagit Alekperov from Azerbaijan, German Khan from Ukraine—”

“—and Anzor Archvadze from Georgia,” Maddy finished. “I’ve looked into them already. Each one is a distinct possibility.”

“Three names,” Reynard said. “All right, we’re getting closer. But now what?”

The question was directed at Ethan, who didn’t reply. Maddy saw that he was frowning at her snapshot of the bidder. Sensing an opening, she took it. “I think we need to approach them directly.”

“We’ve been over this,” Reynard replied. “We can’t act without more information.”

“Information will only take us so far.” Maddy halfway expected Ethan to object, but instead, he began typing rapidly, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. She turned back to Reynard, determined not to let this opportunity slip away. “We need to leverage our contacts. I know that I’ve said this before, but this business isn’t built on information alone. It’s built on reputation.”

As she spoke, she watched the fund manager closely, knowing that this argument cut to the heart of why he had entered the art game in the first place. Years of trading derivatives had left him craving something more fundamental, a satisfaction greater than money itself could
provide, and she knew that he valued nothing, not even returns, above his own evolving legacy. “So what do you recommend?”

“Only what you’ve always told me,” Maddy said. “Reputation leads to information, so we work the social angle. I don’t care how private these guys are. You don’t buy a painting like this without telling someone about it. I can get into the right events, the right benefits. With the fund’s full support—”

“Actually, that won’t be necessary,” Ethan said abruptly. “I know who the buyer is.”

The others turned to stare at him. “What are you talking about?” Reynard asked at last.

“Anzor Archvadze.” Ethan swung his laptop around. “Georgian industrialist. Made a fortune in auto parts and aluminum. Lived in Moscow, but went into exile after the Rose Revolution. Owns a big estate in the Hamptons.”

Maddy looked at the headshot that he had opened. It wasn’t the man from the auction. Archvadze was older, a wiry figure with a graying crew cut, his eyes set far apart. “And what makes you so sure it was him?”

Ethan called up the picture of the bidder. “The symbol on his agent’s cufflinks.”

“I’ve checked this out already,” Maddy said, assuming that Ethan was simply showing off. “A red circle can mean any number of things.”

“Except that it isn’t a red circle.” With a tap of the keyboard, Ethan switched to an enhanced copy of the photo, sharpening and enlarging the design on the cufflink. At this level of resolution, it was clear that it was not, in fact, a circle. “It’s a heptagram. A star with seven points.”

“A heptagram.” Reynard bent forward to study the image. “What does that mean?”

“Well, let’s see.” Ethan brought up a search engine query. “It’s an occult symbol. It was the seal of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a society associated with Aleister Crowley. It appears on the Navajo flag, and—” He pointed at the screen. “And it’s the roundel of the Georgian Air Force.”

“Georgia.” Reynard sat back, evidently impressed. “So let’s say that Archvadze is our buyer. He sends an associate to bid in his place, a former member of the air force with a thing for military nostalgia. It’s possible. A little neat, maybe, but possible. Has he been a player in the market before?”