Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Gabriel Allon #22) (77)

“The food was awful. And the decor!” She rolled her beautiful dark eyes.

“What about your dinner date?”

“Our conversation was cordial and businesslike. There was nothing romantic about the evening.”

“Why the fancy dress and Cartier watch?”

“They were a demonstration of his power to transform my life. The entire evening was a piece of performance art.”

“You were impressed by him?”

“Quite the opposite, actually. I thought he was a cross between Jay Gatsby and Bud Fox. He was pretending to be something he wasn’t.”

“And what was that?”

“A man of extraordinary wealth and sophistication. A Medici-like patron of the arts.”

“But Phillip was wealthy.”

“Not as wealthy as he claimed to be. And he didn’t know the first thing about art. Phillip gravitated toward the art world because that’s where the money was.”

“Why did he gravitate to you?”

“I was young and beautiful and talented, with an exotic name and Hispanic heritage. He said he was going to turn me into a billion-dollar global brand. He promised to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams.”

“Was any of it true?”

“Only the part about making me rich.”

Phillip acquired Magdalena’s paintings almost as quickly as she could finish them and deposited the money in an account at Masterpiece Art Ventures. The balance soon exceeded $2 million. She left her studio apartment in Alphabet City and settled into a brownstone on West Eleventh Street. Phillip retained ownership of the property but allowed her to live there rent-free. He visited often.

“To see your latest paintings?”

“No,” she answered. “To see me.”

“You were lovers?”

“Love had very little to do with what took place between us, Mr. Allon. It was a bit like our dinner at Le Cirque.”

“Awful?”

“Cordial and businesslike.”

Occasionally Phillip took her to a Broadway performance or a gallery opening. But for the most part he kept her hidden from view in the brownstone, where she spent her days painting, like Rumpelstiltskin’s daughter at her spinning wheel. He assured her that he was arranging a splashy exhibition of her work, one that would turn her into the hottest artist in New York. But when the promised exhibition never materialized, she accused Phillip of deceiving her.

“How did he react?”

“He took me to a loft in Hell’s Kitchen, just off Ninth Avenue.”

“What was in the loft?”

“Paintings.”

“Were any of them genuine?”

“No,” said Magdalena. “Not a single one.”



They were, however, works of breathtaking beauty and quality, executed by a forger of immense talent and technical skill. He had not copied existing paintings. Instead, he had cleverly imitated the style of an Old Master artist to create a picture that could be passed off as newly rediscovered. All of the canvases, stretchers, and frames were appropriate to their period and school, as were the pigments. Which meant that none of the paintings could ever be exposed as forgeries by a scientific evaluation.

“Did Phillip tell you the forger’s name that night?”

“Of course not. Phillip has never told me his name.”

“You don’t really expect us to believe that, do you?”

“Why would he tell me such a thing? Besides, the forger’s name wasn’t relevant to what Phillip wanted me to do.”

“Which was?”

“Sell the paintings, of course.”

“But why you?”

“Why not me? I was a trained art historian and a former drug dealer who knew how to walk into a room with a quarter-ounce of cocaine and walk out with the money. I was also the daughter of an art dealer from Seville.”

“A perfect point of entry for the European market.”

“And a perfect place to take a few forged paintings out for a test drive,” she added.

“But why would a wildly successful businessman like Phillip Somerset want to get mixed up in art fraud?”

“You tell me, Mr. Allon.”

“Because the businessman wasn’t so wildly successful after all.”

Magdalena nodded in agreement. “Masterpiece Art Ventures was a bust from the beginning. Even when art prices were soaring, Phillip was never able get the trading formula right. He needed some sure bets to show his investors a profit.”

“And you agreed to this scheme?”

“Not at first.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Another two million dollars in my account at Masterpiece Art Ventures.”

Magdalena returned to Seville a month later and took delivery of the first six paintings from New York. The shipping documents described them as Old Master works of minimal value, all produced by later followers or imitators of the masters themselves. But when Magdalena offered them for sale at her father’s gallery, she inflated the attributions to “circle of” or “workshop of,” which increased the value of the works substantially. Within a few weeks, all six paintings had been snatched up by her father’s wealthy Seville clientele. Magdalena gave him a 10 percent cut of the profits and transferred the rest of the money to Masterpiece Art Ventures through an account in Liechtenstein.