The Cézanne Chase Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Praise

  Books by Thomas Swan

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Praise for the acclaimed art crime mysteries by Tom Swan featuring Inspector Jack Oxby

  The Cézanne Chase

  “A surprisingly sexy and dirty world where nothing is sacred—least of all, art….The beauty of The Cézanne Chase is in the technical details about fine art—great tips on conserving it, packing and shipping it, buying and selling it, and destroying it forever.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A virtual primer of the art world…The Cézanne Chase is also a marvelous travelogue that transports readers to dazzling museums and art capitals of the world. The dialogue and descriptive portraits of cities are first rate…It offers plenty of action and a plot that is terrifyingly plausible. And we won’t give away any more than that.”

  —The Bergen (NJ) Record

  “Read the first few pages of The Cézanne Chase and you know you’ve discovered a very good thing indeed. A thrilling novel of the unexpected, an intriguing, behind-the-scenes look at the high-risk world of international art.”

  —Book-of-the-Month-Club News

  “Readers will be drawn to the intrigue…steady action, looming suspense, and an appealing subject.”

  —Library Journal

  “Swan has created a page-turner…The stakes are high and so is the suspense…With quick, sure strokes our author leads us to a violent climax, [keeping] the action moving like the bursts from an AK-47.”

  —Bill Sweeney, KSRO Radio (CA)

  The Final Fabergé

  “Oxby is charming and disarmingly intelligent.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  The Da Vinci Deception

  “A grand old caper yarn of classic design, filled with tantalizing details of forging techniques and facts about da Vinci’s work….The Da Vinci Deception isn’t just good, it’s terrific.”

  —Book-of-the-Month Club News

  Books by Thomas Swan

  The Da Vinci Deception

  The Cézanne Chase

  The Final Fabergé

  Dedication

  For Barbara.

  And the grandchildren:

  Sara, Michael, Josh, Cameron, Casey, and Dylan.

  And as always, Steve.

  Chapter 1

  St. Petersburg, for all its frayed edges, has remained the jewel among Russian cities. The city and its people survived revolution, a nine-hundred-day siege in World War II in which nearly a million died, then a kind of benign neglect brought on by decades of Communist rule. It is a city of islands and bridges, built on the banks of the twisting Neva river. In spite of all, St. Petersburg’s important institutions have survived, as has the spirit of the natives, who affectionately call their city “Pete” as they did during the years when it was known as Petrograd or Leningrad. In spite of decades of adversity, the university, the libraries, and the museums have held together with remarkable tenacity.

  One museum in particular was enjoying a renaissance: the Hermitage. Catherine the Great decreed that the magnificent salons of the Winter Palace be made into its galleries. From Peter the Great until the Revolution, agents of the czars and empresses scoured the world for great art, until the royal collection bulged to eight thousand paintings and five times that many drawings. Four buildings compose the Hermitage, a giant sprawl in which there are a thousand rooms and 117 staircases.

  It was early morning. Pigeons scavenged on the broad sidewalks then separated as a young woman walked with a purposeful stride to a door leading to the administration offices. Ilena Petrov came early to the museum every morning. It was this show of dedication and her recent completion of studies in European art history that had helped bring recognition and a recent promotion. She had been appointed assistant curator for European art and sculpture of the period 1850 to 1917, a position of immense responsibility. The collection of paintings in the Hermitage from those years was among the world’s largest and, without question, of incalculable value.

  Ilena carried a heavy cloth sack, in which were books and notepads and a thermos filled with strong tea as well as a thick slice of plushka, a sugary cinnamon blackbread baked by her grandmother. From a window in the reception office she could see the rising sun that reflected brilliantly off the spire above Peter and Paul Cathedral in the historic fortress across the river.

  Each day, before the rest of the staff arrived, Ilena would go out into the long corridors and galleries, where she was alone in the silence. She went first to the Malachite Room to touch the carved figure of a cupid that had become her personal talisman then climbed the great Ambassador’s Staircase up to the galleries that held her favorite artists. In room 318 were, among others, the works of Pissaro and Cézanne. Ilena had united their art by placing their paintings on the same wall, aware that the two men had been close friends and aware, too, that Paul Cézanne had not forged many long-lasting relationships.

  Two windows in the small gallery room looked out to Palace Square and the Alexander Column, the pink granite of the ninety-foot high monument catching the early sun. Ilena entered slowly, her eyes taking in first a landscape by Corot then two village scenes by Pissarro. Beyond the doorway were two Cézannes. First was a landscape; next to it was a portrait of the artist titled Self-Portrait in a Beret.

  She approached the portrait then was suddenly jolted by an awareness that something was terribly wrong. Drawing closer, she saw that Cézanne’s face seemed to have been painted over. Now she could touch it and saw that the paint where the head had been was a jellied mass, sagging away from the canvas. It was the canvas she had seen, bleached to a ghostly white.

  Ilena screamed, a long, pitiful cry. She brought her hands to her face and stared in shock and disbelief. For minutes she stood, trembling, as if rooted to the spot in front of the canvas. Anger overwhelmed her. Who could be so cruel, she asked aloud. She backed away the
n turned and ran. Not until she had reached the head of the magnificent stairway did she stop. She sat on the top step, her body bent forward, her head lowered and resting on arms crossed over her legs.

  She began to weep.

  Chapter 2

  Christie’s salesrooms were on the second floor of the building on New York’s Park Avenue and 59th Street, space the two-hundred-year-old London-based auction house had occupied since coming to America in 1977. Christie’s, like its fierce competitor, Sotheby’s, was one of those places where an obscure painting could be given the imprimatur of greatness by dint of someone paying many times more than it was worth, and where art-world insiders set prices by helping to establish the reserve, the confidential minimum price agreed upon by the seller and the auction house below which the painting will not be sold. The presale price is higher than the reserve and is generally publicized in advance of the auction so that the auction house can encourage the bidders to accept the presale price as an arbitrary minimum.

  The auction at hand had been widely advertised in the media and through special mailings to known buyers and had attracted an overflow of the serious and curious. They were jammed into the square, high-ceilinged main gallery. An adjacent, smaller gallery was also filled to standing room an hour before the auction began. Serious bidders were in view of the auctioneer, but others, who wanted anonymity, were represented by a surrogate or a member of Christie’s staff, several of whom were positioned at a bank of telephones at the side of the auctioneer’s platform. Some of the more than two dozen reporters were more interested in the well-heeled socialites and occasional show-business celebrities who attended auctions for the excitement, as well as to occasionally add to their collections.

  Interest was focused on the Jacopo da Pontormo portrait titled Halberdier, a painting of a young man holding a staff and wearing a sword. The portrait until six months before the auction had been prominently displayed in New York’s Frick Collection where it had been for twenty years. It was always believed that Chauncey Devereau Stillman had placed it there on a permanent loan. The surprise decision to enter the painting at auction was a sad development for the Frick and a happy one for the Stillman Foundation.

  Jacopo da Pontormo was a reclusive painter who, so evidence indicated, had studied under Leonardo Da Vinci in the early years of the sixteenth century. Pontormo’s reputation, in need of a boost, had received one when the young man in the portrait was identified as Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence, a speculation that roused heated controversy among art historians and let loose a flood of contradictory stories in the press. The controversy proved helpful to Christie’s, which had mounted an energetic promotion to lift the presale price to $20 million.

  Standing room was five deep, and the air in the gallery had grown stale and hot. In what had become his accustomed position, Edwin Redpath Llewellyn sat at the end of a row at the front of the gallery, squeezed against the wall and fanning himself with a bidder’s paddle ...paddle number eighteen.

  Llewellyn attended auctions with the enthusiasm of a low-handicap golfer at St. Andrews. He knew how to bid, rarely making the mistake of entering the competition when he was unfamiliar with the artist, the painting, or those he was bidding against. He was dressed in his go-to-auction uniform: gray trousers, blue-and-white striped shirt, club tie, and a pocket handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket of his elegantly frayed blue blazer. In one hand was a catalogue that detailed every item in the evening’s sale, and cupped in the other was a pair of opera glasses. Llewellyn was an authentic connoisseur who understood fine art and could articulate his preferences and his prejudices. He was also rich, divorced, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After making several preliminary notes, he settled to watch the room fill, paying attention to the overflowing crowd as they took positions along the sides and across the back of the room. Llewellyn recognized some of the faces: Dupres, the wily one from Paris; Elton, the London barracuda; Takahawo of Tokyo.

  His small but powerful binoculars slowly panned across the rows of standees and stopped at a tall woman wearing a strand of pearls and a brightly colored handerchief placed carefully in the breast pocket of her tailored, pale gray suit. He caught her leafing through her catalogue, and then, suddenly, she raised her eyes and looked directly toward him. The binoculars had brought her so close it seemed Llewellyn could touch her. Blonde hair was combed back under a wide-brimmed hat that framed her face, and the bright lights made her pale skin seem nearly white and created soft shadows beneath her prominent cheekbones. The tip of her tongue moistened her lips, which parted into a smile, and at that moment he felt as if he had been caught peeking. He reacted with an embarrassed grin, then he extended two fingers upward and made a sort of friendly wave.

  The auction began. Eighteen unimportant paintings were put up in the first twenty minutes, each one selling quickly as the auctioneer repeated the bids in a singsong chant accompanied by “do I hear more,” then finally announcing the paddle number of the winning bidder. Then came the Pontormo. Llewellyn served on the museums’s acquisition committee and joined the majority who opposed any effort to acquire the large portrait. His reason was arbitrary. Old Masters bored him, and the young man in the portrait looked inbred and arrogant; and besides, it didn’t matter how he or his committee felt about the Pontormo. Gerald Bontannomo, Director of the Metropolitan, listened to but rarely accepted advice on major acquisitions.

  The bidding opened at $20 million. Even to Llewellyn, who showed a practiced nonchalance toward money, it was a vastly unreasonable sum. Within two minutes it was more unreasonable. By twenty-eight million there were three bidders, at thirty, there were two. The Getty Museum’s representative was in the room competing against an anonymous telephone bidder.

  Quickly the bidding rose to thirty-five million. At $35.2 million it was over, and the Getty Museum was the new owner; Halberdier would remain in the United States. A dozen more unimportant works were hammered down, including an inferior painting by Pieter Brueghel that mildly interested Llewellyn as a purely speculative play. It was a game. If he could sneak by with a low bid, he would take it, wait a year and then sell it. He stopped raising his paddle when the bidding reached and stopped at a half million dollars, and he heard the auctioneer quietly call pass. It was a no-sale, the painting had been “bought-in.” Obvious to Llewellyn and a few others, the reserve had not been met, and Christie’s had entered and accepted its own bid. How much didn’t matter, as no money would trade hands. The gallery thinned to a hard core of dealers and agents looking for a bargain.

  Llewellyn remained seated while he made notes in the catalogue. This had become a ritual, and he had accumulated several dozen catalogues filled with prices paid for important works, along with his observations on the bidding strategies of the top dealers. When he got to his feet there were but a half dozen lingerers, including the blonde in the gray suit.

  As he walked near her she said with a slightly accented voice, “I’m sorry you did not get the Brueghel.”

  Llewellyn stopped. He stood an even six feet, yet she was about as tall as he. “I was looking for a bargain. It sold two years ago for nearly as much.”

  “Are you Mr. Llewellyn?” she asked.

  “I am. But I don’t believe I know your name.” He said it in a way that suggested it was possible they had met before.

  “I am Astrid Haraldsen, and I apologize if I seem to be—” she made a gesture as if searching for the right word—“if I am being forward.”

  Llewellyn smiled—a warm smile emphasized by brown eyes that were happy, too. He looked distinguished in his blue blazer and shock of gray hair. He was deeply tanned, the result of a week with old friends on Jupiter Island in Florida.

  “Do you come to these things regularly?”

  “I am beginning to. But mostly I go to the smaller auctions.”

  “Do you collect?” Llewellyn was enjoying the fact he had been picked from the crowd.

  �
�It’s too expensive.” She looked down to the catalogue she had been rolling and unrolling. “I am a designer. Of interiors,” she added quickly. “I look for special items for my clients.”

  “There wasn’t much here today. Awful stuff, I thought.” Then he said, “The Doyle Galleries would have better choices for you.”

  Her eyes came up to his for the first time. “I wanted to meet you.”

  “How nice.” He smiled a little shyly. “How very nice.”

  For the instant when she looked directly into his eyes he felt as if she possessed an inner power, a nearly hypnotic influence. Certainly he felt sexually aroused. But her eyes strayed off and those feelings subsided.

  Llewellyn guessed correctly. She was Scandinavian. Probably resolute, too. “Do you have a card?”

  In fact she had several cards in her hand, ready to pass them on if asked. “I have a presentation of my work. I would like to show it to you.”

  He looked at her card on which she had written the Westbury Hotel. “I like your address, we’re practically neighbors.”

  She smiled, “I’m looking for a sublease. The hotel is very expensive.”

  By this time Llewellyn had made a more complete evaluation of Astrid Haraldsen. Her suit was silk, probably a Giorgio Armani; the salmon-colored blouse had expensive detailing; and her shoes were in the three-hundred-dollar range. She used makeup effectively, highlighting her cheeks and making her lips appear fuller. She hadn’t fussed with eye liner and mascara, preferring only to accent the full brows that arched over the pale blue eyes he had noted when he first trained his binoculars on her. She had a good nose, which meant it wasn’t a bad one, and probably in Llewellyn’s mind not her best feature. Her perfume, Shalimar he thought, was one he liked.

  After an awkward pause, he said, “Now that we’ve met, what can I do for you?”

  “Help me to get an assignment. Perhaps a friend, or your own apartment.” She hesitated briefly, then said quietly, “Because I am new and need references, I will not charge a fee.”