Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Gabriel Allon #22) (94)
As instructed, the kid headed straight for the database: insurance records, tax documents, personnel files, a dispatch log with a year’s worth of pickups and deliveries, a master list of the paintings stored in a secure, climate-controlled warehouse on East Ninety-First Street near York Avenue. There were 789 paintings in all. Each entry included the name of the work, the artist, the support, the dimensions, the date of execution, the estimated value, the current owner, and the painting’s exact location in the warehouse, by floor and rack number.
Six hundred and fifteen of the paintings were said to be owned directly by Masterpiece Art Ventures—which also happened to own Chelsea Fine Arts Storage. The remaining works were controlled by corporate shell companies with the sort of three-letter uppercase abbreviations beloved by asset concealers and kleptocrats the world over. The most recent arrival was Dana? and the Shower of Gold, purportedly by Orazio Gentileschi. The stated value of the work was $30 million, which was approximately $30 million more than what it was actually worth. As yet, the work was uninsured.
The warehouse also contained sixteen canvases by a once promising Spanish artist named Magdalena Navarro. At three fifteen that afternoon—following an incriminating luncheon with one Phillip Somerset, founder and CEO of Masterpiece Art Ventures—she returned to the Pierre Hotel. Upstairs in her suite she immediately surrendered her phone to Gabriel. He gave her a list of 789 paintings, and they went to work.
They fell into a predictable if altogether depressing rhythm. Magdalena would cast her eye down the list and call out when she spotted a painting she knew to be a forgery. Then, with Sarah and Evelyn Buchanan taking careful notes, she would recite the date and circumstances by which the work had found its way into the inventory of Masterpiece Art Ventures. The overwhelming majority of the canvases had been acquired through phantom sales conducted within Magdalena’s distribution network, which meant no actual money had changed hands. But several had been routed through reputable dealers to provide Phillip with plausible deniability in the event the authenticity of the works was ever called into question.
Notably absent from the directory was Sir Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman, oil on canvas, 115 by 92 centimeters, which Masterpiece had recently purchased from Isherwood Fine Arts. According to the dispatch logs, the painting was moved to Sotheby’s in New York in mid-April.
“A week after the bombing in Paris,” Gabriel pointed out.
“Phillip must have unloaded it,” replied Magdalena. “Which means some unsuspecting collector is now the proud owner of a worthless painting.”
“I’ll have a word with Sotheby’s tomorrow morning.”
“A quiet word,” cautioned Sarah.
“Somehow,” said Gabriel with a glance at Evelyn, “I don’t think that’s going to be an option.”
By 5:00 p.m. they had twice scoured the list from top to bottom. The final tally was a breathtaking 227 forgeries with a declared valuation of more than $300 million, or 25 percent of Masterpiece’s purported assets under management. When combined with the rest of the evidence that Gabriel and Magdalena had acquired in New York—including a recording of an attempt by Phillip Somerset to obtain an art-backed loan from JPMorgan Chase using a forged painting as collateral—it was irrefutable proof that Masterpiece Art Ventures was a criminal enterprise run by one of the greatest financial con artists in history.
At the conclusion of the review, Evelyn rang her editor at Vanity Fair’s Fulton Street headquarters and told him to expect her finished draft no later than 9:00 p.m. Then she sat down at her laptop and began to write.
“At some point,” she informed Gabriel, “I’ll have to ask Phillip for a comment.”
Fortunately, they knew how to reach him. According to Proteus, his phone was presently near the corner of Fifth Avenue and East Seventy-Fourth Street, 134 feet above sea level. There were six missed calls, three new voice mails, and twenty-two unread text messages. The camera was staring at the ceiling. The microphone was listening to nothing at all. The damn thing was just sitting there, thought Gabriel. Like a paperweight with a digital pulse.
61
Sutton Place
Leonard Silk was well acquainted with the dark side of human nature. His clients, all of whom were sufficiently wealthy to afford his services, were a rogues’ gallery of fraudsters, schemers, scammers, larcenists, embezzlers, insider traders, philanderers, and sexual deviants of every stripe. Silk never sat in judgment of them, for Silk was not without sin himself. He dwelled in a proverbial house of glass. He did not make a habit of throwing stones.
Silk’s fall from grace had occurred in the late 1980s while he was serving in the CIA’s station in Bogotá. Recently divorced, his personal finances under duress, he had entered into a lucrative partnership with the Medellín cocaine cartel. Silk had supplied the drug lords with valuable intelligence on DEA and Colombian efforts to penetrate their organization. In return, the drug lords had supplied Silk with money—$20 million in cash, all of it derived from selling cocaine in the country he was sworn to defend.
Somehow Silk managed to extricate himself from the relationship with both his ill-gotten fortune and his life, and retired from the Agency just days before the attacks of 9/11. He used a portion of the funds to purchase a luxury Sutton Place apartment. And in the winter of 2002, while his old colleagues were fighting the opening battle of the global war on terrorism, Silk went into business as a security consultant and private investigator. In a deliberate play on words, he called his one-man firm Integrity Security Solutions.