The Mistress(53)
He went into the office while waiting for the police to look at the security tapes from the night before, and all he saw was static. They had been able to cripple the cameras and disable them, so that they had recorded nothing of the robbery. The tapes were blank. They had stopped functioning an hour after he left, and were blank for nearly two hours. It had apparently taken them that long to remove all twelve paintings. He felt like he was in shock as two inspectors walked in, and he spoke to them in the office after they surveyed the scene. Theo was badly shaken. He hadn’t called his mother yet, and didn’t know what to say or how to tell her. And he wanted more information from the police before he said anything. Maybe there were known art thieves in the area, and they would have an idea who had done it.
The two inspectors had been dispatched from Nice, and were part of a high-end robbery detail that patrolled the entire coast where there were homes that were robbed most frequently, and jewels, art, and large amounts of money were stolen, and sometimes hostages were taken. One of the inspectors was older with gray hair, the other was in his late thirties, and both appeared to be experienced. They asked for the approximate value of what was missing, and if the paintings were by varied artists.
“No, only one. My father, Lorenzo Luca. All the paintings here are in my mother’s private collection, and the value of the twelve that are gone is in the vicinity of a hundred million dollars.” They didn’t appear to be surprised, and were accustomed to robberies in those amounts from major villas along the coast in Cap-Ferrat, Cap d’Antibes, Cannes, and the other wealthier communities. St. Tropez was in a different district, in the Var, and Monaco was a separate country and had its own police force. “Have there been any other major art thefts recently? Could this have been done by a gang you know of?” Many of the truly dangerous professionals were Eastern European, and the police knew all of them, but they said none had been operative in the past few months, not since the previous winter. This was the first big robbery they’d had in a while.
The area was closed off, and police lines were set up. And a team of technicians and experts arrived half an hour later to take fingerprints, and examine the alarm system and cameras. Theo dispatched another of the sous-chefs to call everyone listed in the reservation book for that night, and cancel them, and say there had been an accident and the restaurant was closed.
It was noon before the two inspectors in charge had something to tell Theo. There were no prints. The alarm had been electronically disabled, possibly from another location by remote control, and the cameras along with it. All their high-tech devices had been crippled for the duration of the robbery and restored when it was over.
“The only good news,” the older inspector said to him, “is that these people knew what they were doing, and they’re not liable to damage the paintings or destroy them. We will contact all our informants. Someone is going to try to sell these paintings on the stolen-art market, or possibly sell them back to you at a higher price.”
“Or sequester them,” Theo said, looking as though he were about to cry. There was a market for stolen paintings sold to unscrupulous collectors who were anxious to acquire work at any price, knowing they could never show them, but simply have the thrill of owning them, and with his father’s work so rarely on the market, they qualified for that kind of buyer. Some people would do anything to own them, even if they remained a secret forever. Some of the paintings stolen by the Nazis had disappeared that way.
“We’d like to bring Interpol into it. And I have a call in to the art detail in Paris. I’d like one of them to come down. I can assure you we’re going to do everything we can to find your paintings for you, or as many as we can locate and reclaim. Time is of the essence, we have to move quickly, before they’re shipped out of the country to Russia, South America, Asia. As long as they stay in Europe, we have a better chance of tracking them down. We’ll need photographs of the work to put on the Internet throughout Europe.” It was one of the most important art thefts of recent times. There had been a comparable one two years before. There were more jewel thefts, since they were simpler to break down into loose stones. Art was much harder to sell and transport, and was too easily identified. “We’ll stay on this, I can assure you. You need to put security guards on the house.” And Theo wanted them on his mother’s house too.
He still had to call their insurance company, and his mother. The inspector gave him the case number for the insurance company, and they were still swarming all over the house when he went into the office to call his mother, which he dreaded, but it couldn’t be avoided. And just as he was about to, he thought of something. Vladimir the night before. He went back to find the inspector, who confirmed that the back door had been tampered with. And they were running criminal checks on all the employees. They hadn’t ruled out the possibility that it was an inside job, that one of their employees had tipped someone off and sold the information about the security system to them. Fatima was crying while her sons were being interrogated. She was horrified to think that someone could think they had committed a crime, and a police officer was trying to explain to her that all the employees would be investigated, not just her sons.
“This might sound crazy,” Theo said to the senior inspector quietly. “Vladimir Stanislas was here last night, with four Russian men. He wanted to buy one of the paintings, and I told him it wasn’t for sale. He bought one from my mother a year ago, at a very high price, which was also not for sale initially, and then she accepted his offer. But I knew she wouldn’t sell the one he was inquiring about this time. He left in a rage. I just wanted to mention it, in case there is some sort of tie-in. You might want to talk to him. His yacht is usually off Antibes. It’s probably there now. And possibly someone like him would be willing to buy a work that’s not for sale normally.”