Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Gabriel Allon #22) (76)

They had placed her in a straight-backed chair in the great room’s main seating area. Her feet were flat upon the terra-cotta tiles of the floor; her hands were cuffed behind her back. General Ferrari was seated directly opposite, with Rossetti at his side and a tripod-mounted video camera over his shoulder. Gabriel was contemplating the L-shaped tear, 15 by 23 centimeters, in the lower left corner of Portrait of an Unknown Woman.

“Why would you do that?” he asked.

“Turn down a chance to show my work at the tender age of twenty-one? Because I had no interest in being the most famous female artist in Spain.”

“Spain was too small for a talent like yours?”

“I thought so at the time.”

“Where did you go?”

She arrived in New York in the autumn of 2005 and settled into a one-room apartment on Avenue C, in the Alphabet City section of Lower Manhattan. The apartment was soon filled with newly completed paintings, none of which she was able to sell. The money she had brought with her from Spain quickly ran out. Her father sent what he could, but it was never enough.

A year after her arrival in New York, she could no longer afford painting supplies and was facing eviction. She found work waiting tables at El Pote Espa?ol in Murray Hill and at Katz’s Delicatessen on East Houston Street. Before long she was working sixty hours a week, which left her too exhausted to paint.

Depressed, she started drinking too much and discovered she had a taste for cocaine. She fell into a relationship with her dealer, a handsome Dominican of Spanish descent named Hector Martínez, and was soon acting as a courier and delivery girl in his network. Many of her regular customers were Wall Street traders who were making fortunes selling derivatives and mortgage-backed securities, the complex investment instruments that in three years’ time would leave the global economy on the brink of collapse.

“And then, of course, there were the rock musicians, screenwriters, Broadway producers, painters, sculptors, and gallery owners. As strange as it might sound, being a cocaine dealer in New York was a good career move. Anyone who was anyone was using. And everyone knew my name.”

The money she earned dealing drugs allowed Magdalena to stop waiting tables and resume painting. She gave one of her canvases to a Chelsea art dealer with a thousand-dollar-a-week cocaine habit. Rather than keep the painting for himself, the dealer sold it to a client for $50,000. He gave half of the proceeds to Magdalena, but refused to divulge the buyer’s name.

“Did he tell you why?” asked Gabriel.

“He said the client insisted on anonymity. But he was also concerned I would cut him out of the picture.”

“Why would he suspect a thing like that?”

“I was the daughter of an art dealer. I knew how the business worked.”

The Chelsea art dealer bought two more canvases from Magdalena and immediately sold both works to the same anonymous client. The dealer then informed Magdalena that the anonymous client was a wealthy investor who admired her work greatly and was interested in becoming her patron.

“But only if I stopped dealing cocaine.”

“I assume you agreed.”

“I dropped my pager down a sewer on West Twenty-Fifth Street and never made another delivery.”

And her new patron, she continued, lived up to his end of the deal. Indeed, during the summer of 2008, he purchased four additional paintings through the auspices of the same Chelsea gallery. Magdalena earned more than $100,000 from the sales. Fearful of losing her patron’s financial support, she made no attempt to discover his identity. But on a frigid morning in mid-December, she was awakened by a phone call from a woman claiming to be her patron’s secretary.

“She wanted to know whether I was free for dinner that evening. When I said that I was, she said a limousine would collect me at my apartment at four p.m.”

“Why so early?”

“My anonymous patron was planning to take me to Le Cirque. He wanted to make certain that I had something appropriate to wear.”

The limousine arrived as promised and delivered Magdalena to Bergdorf Goodman, where a personal shopper named Clarissa selected $20,000 worth of clothing and jewelry, including a gold Cartier wristwatch. Then she escorted Magdalena to the store’s exclusive hair salon for a cut and blow-dry.

Le Cirque was located a few blocks away, in the Palace Hotel. Magdalena arrived at eight o’clock and was immediately shown to a table in the center of the iconic dining room. In her mind she had sketched an image of her patron as a well-preserved blazer-wearing septuagenarian from Park Avenue. But the man who awaited her was tall and blond and forty-five at most. Rising, he offered Magdalena his hand and at long last introduced himself.

His name, he said, was Phillip Somerset.





48

Villa dei Fiori




Admittedly, it was the last name in the world that Gabriel had expected to come out of Magdalena Navarro’s mouth. An experienced interrogator, he offered no expression of surprise or incredulity. Instead, he turned to General Ferrari and Luca Rossetti, to whom the name meant nothing, and recited a redacted version of Phillip Somerset’s curriculum vitae. Former bond trader at Lehman Brothers. Founder and chief executive officer of Masterpiece Art Ventures, an art-based hedge fund that routinely returned profits of 25 percent to its investors. It was clear the general suspected there was more to the story. Nevertheless, he permitted Gabriel to resume questioning the suspect. He began by asking Magdalena to describe her evening at what was once Manhattan’s most celebrated restaurant.