Midnight In Madrid

detonators and the ability to strike at Western infidels. You are also buying my silence and good will. I have been in business for a long time. There must be a reason, and the reason is that my first dissatisfied customer will return and kill me. So I don’t expect you to become one. My price is high, but I deliver with discretion and safety for the buyer. So do we do business or do I ask you to leave?”

Jean-Claude glared at him. Then he nodded, peeled off a wad of money, and paid.

TWENTY-FOUR

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 8, AFTERNOON AND EVENING

From the National Police Headquarters, Alex walked back to the Ritz, relaxed for an hour, and then fired up her laptop again. She was trying to get an overall feel of art theft, a grip on it and the people who commit it. There was no way to approach a case without having a feel for it.

Hours passed. She had a light dinner delivered to her room. She felt stale, almost unproductive. She had learned a lot this day but wasn’t sure she had made any real progress or yet had an angle on the case. After her dinner, she prowled through more odds and ends about art theft and art thieves.

Item: The original of a Norman Rockwell reproduction titled Russian Schoolroom was found in the collection of the American movie mogul Steven Spielberg in 2007. Spielberg had paid about $200,000 for the 16 x 37 canvas in a legitimate purchase and then had alerted the FBI immediately when he learned of its questionable provenance. Item: Art thieves-as professional criminals-do a simple risk-versus-reward evaluation. They know that even if they receive only a fraction of the work’s market value, the cash gained was at low risk of death or injury. And museums and private collectors are an easy touch. Item: Nor had anyone seen any trace of the biggest art theft in European history. In February of 2008, a gang swiped four paintings worth an estimated $163 million from the E.G. Buehrle Collection in Zurich, Switzerland. They took works by Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh. “These paintings were extremely valuable on the open market, but they never went onto the open market,” said a Swiss detective at the time. “So they’re priceless but they’re also worthless.” Item: Some thieves often try to ransom the art back to the museum or the insurance company. Usually, an insurance company would rather get art back at a fraction of its original price than pay the owner its insured value. Ransoming art to an insurance company through an intermediary adds ten to twenty percent to the market value, which often turns into quite a lot of money. Item: Art thieves rarely face justice. A work of art does not require a title document in order to be transferred from one owner to another, so a stolen object easily enters the legitimate stream of commerce. Even if the original thief can be identified, there is also a statute of limitations on prosecution for theft.

And a final item, having its numbing effect on Alex:

Even if a stolen work is recovered, the original owners may not get it back. Art stolen from a Los Angeles mansion in 2003 and sold in Sweden remained with its Swedish purchasers. Even though the thief was caught, the Swedish government refused to return the paintings, claiming that according to Swedish law, the auction buyers had purchased the paintings in good faith. Laws governing art theft were a maze of contradictions from one country to the next, often offering the trained investigator little more than frustration.

Alex leaned back and took stock. Whoever had pilfered The Pieta of Malta from the museum in Madrid was not to be mistaken for a high-society, tuxedo-wearing, Thomas Crown Affair style thief.

She stared at her computer screen, a picture of confusion and doubt. Maybe it was time to return to America. She could opt out of this Pieta of Malta case very easily.

Maybe she should, she told herself.

She closed out of her laptop, drew a breath, and watched evening settle in across the city.

TWENTY-FIVE

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 8, EVENING

The Iberia flight from Geneva to Madrid glided into its landing trajectory at 10:15 that evening. In a business- class seat by a window, John Sun gazed out the window and watched the lights of the city stretch out below him. Then the plane descended from its path in the purple sky, and as the 727 banked, the traveler picked up the lead- in lights that beckoned the aircraft into Aeropuerto Barajas, one of Europe’s busiest and most modern facilities.

There was much on his mind. In one capacity or another, he had presided over three deaths in Switzerland. Now he was just as happy to be out of the country. The farther and faster he got away from the place, the better he would feel. The business of death, the back-alley enforcement of his nation’s interests, was never an attractive business. He was experienced in it and efficient at it, but that didn’t mean he was wedded to it or even liked it. In fact, in ways that he couldn’t even explain to himself, it always unsettled him. Then again, the world was a cruel, nasty place, and all other rules of life followed from that one.

So what else could he do?

His mind was flooded with thoughts like these as the soil of Spain rose to meet his arriving flight. He glanced downward through his window and saw that the flight was above the grassy terrain leading to the runway.

Then the grass was replaced by a stream of runway lights and then a blur of numbered panels, white on gray-black asphalt. Then came the welcome thump and bump of the tires. There followed the roar of the brakes and the lifting of the wing flaps, and then the deceleration on the runway.

Sun had actually been hoping to go home to his special lady, but at least he had had a few hours in Switzerland to pick up a piece of jewelry for her, a beautiful diamond and gold bracelet. This he carried with him, though it was the least of his concerns right now. There were others to deal with first and an assignment that started to appear open-ended. So be it. Life had its strange twists and turns. Even the cultural icon of his grandfather’s generation, Confucius, would not have disagreed with that.

The plane rolled smoothly to a halt. It taxied to a gate.

John Sun was traveling light as always. He passed easily through immigration. He spoke fluent Spanish with the agents while also keeping an eye on the uniformed Spanish police who patrolled the airport with automatic weapons. He also easily spotted the plainclothes people. In his peripheral view, he also checked the surveillance cameras, both the obvious ones and the hidden ones. It was almost a game to him to find them without looking directly at them.

Then he passed through customs with equal ease. A trio of uniformed customs officers, two men and a woman, waved him through to the concourse.

Now he was officially in Spain.

TWENTY-SIX

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 9, MORNING

The Museo de Arqueologico is perhaps Madrid’s finest museum, after the immense Prado. The museum stands like a mid-nineteenth-century fortress on the Calle Serrano, not far from the Ritz and not far from the American Embassy. Founded by Queen Isabel II in 1867, the building houses archeological treasures excavated from Spanish soil from prehistoric times to the present. Key attractions have for years included religious art from countless centuries, including seventh-century votive crowns from Toledo, ceramics from the ancient civilization at El Argar, a carved ivory crucifix that had been carved for King Fernando I and Queen Sancha in 1063, which included within it a space for a sliver of wood from the True Cross and an extensive collection of Roman mosaics and Islamic pottery. It was by no coincidence that The Pieta of Malta had been on display here.