Buck Thompson didn’t look like a master art thief. He looked more like a stevedore. Six feet tall, with a full beard and scars on his knuckles, he was a portly man with wide ears, each now sprouting hair like a werewolf as he grew older. He tended to flannel, work boots, and Carhartt jackets. He was the last person someone would suspect of being an art thief. Drugstore or gas station? Sure, that would fit, because he had, in fact, robbed both at one time or another. But he was smart, his intelligence hidden beneath the flannel.
He’d lucked into a piece of art that was worth over one hundred million dollars, and was now trying to figure out how to translate the canvas into money. And had come upon a wild scheme that just might work.
To the man in front of him, examining a seascape painting, he said, “Can you do it? Can you camouflage the painting to look like a Caravaggio?”
“Yeah, I can do it, but anyone who looks closely will see it’s a forgery.”
“That’s the point. It’s supposed to be a copy. Hell, there are twelve known in existence. The man who owns one is the guy that’s going to assume this forgery for display. Nobody’s going to inspect it—unless it has glaring deficiencies. Can you do that? Using the original as a guide?”
“Why does he want two?”
“He doesn’t. We’re going to confuse this one with the other one he owns. That’s all.”
The old man in front of him looked more like a janitor than a painter, but that was also expected. His name was Miles Turtledove, and he’d been a wizard at armored car robberies in his youth, right up until he wasn’t. He’d been remanded to Attica prison for thirty years, which is where Buck had met him, and where Miles had learned he had a talent for painting. A unique talent. Miles could duplicate any painting on earth, and if he used the exact same materials—canvas, wood, type of paint, whatever—it was hard to discern who was the imitator and who was the master.
Miles had never used his talent for ill-gotten gains before, mainly because he didn’t need to. He’d become somewhat of a local celebrity in New York with his works, because of both his bad-boy past and his skill. Want your own Mona Lisa? He could give it to you, right down to the shadows. Everyone knew it was a fake, but it was so close to the real thing that it gained him a following. He’d become a little bit of his own celebrity, with moneyed people in Manhattan clamoring for one of his creations. Since his parole from prison he’d made a lot of cash off his skill, but this was the first time he’d been asked to use it for a crime.
Not that he really cared. With the amount of money involved, it would be worth the risk.
Buck continued, “The main thing is that he has to be able to strip off the stuff you’re doing to the original painting. He has to be able to get the painting underneath. Nobody cares about your skill on this one. Can you do it?”
Miles turned around and said, “How the hell would I know? You came up with this. Yeah, I can paint over the rice paper, and yeah, it’ll look pretty good, but I can’t promise it won’t damage what’s underneath.”
He pointed a brush at Buck, saying, “If you believe this is going to be something like The Thomas Crown Affair, where someone just hoses the painting down, revealing what’s underneath, things don’t work that way.”
Truthfully, Buck did think that. In fact, the movie had given him the idea, but he had no expertise in painting whatsoever.
He said, “As long as it can be removed. That’s the main thing. He can do his own restoration when it’s done.”
Miles chuckled and said, “Well, I’m using a weak oil-based paint as the core, and a water-based paint on the layer, but truthfully, this painting should have been restored before I even started.”
Known as Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, it was the master’s only known seascape, and had been prominently displayed at a place called the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum until March 18, 1990. On that night, thirteen works of art were stolen in what would become the largest art heist in world history, valued at over half a billion dollars. None of the works were ever recovered, and most of the men suspected of involvement had died—some violently, others by natural causes.
Buck’s ex-wife was the cousin of a friend of a man who’d apparently been involved, and when that cousin had died seven years ago, he’d been asked to clean out the barn on the outskirts of Boston to help out the family, cataloguing everything and placing the things of value in storage. He’d grumbled, because ordinary labor was anathema to him—especially when he wasn’t getting paid—but his ex-wife had promised a relief from two months’ alimony, and so he’d agreed. Then he’d found the rolled-up canvas.
He immediately knew what he held, as the Gardner Museum heist was literal lore in Boston’s local crime scene. He’d ransacked the place at that point, but none of the other paintings were found. That didn’t really matter to Buck, as the painting he held was worth over one hundred million dollars. The problem was how to unload it because everyone knew it had been stolen.
He’d done some research and found that that was the biggest obstacle. As soon as such a painting became available, with the requisite hooks out for buyers, invariably the only one who bit was law enforcement.
In the end, there was just no way to sell a stolen masterwork unless you were hired by the person who wanted it. Putting little teasers out into the art world, hoping to get someone interested, it invited all the wrong sorts of interested. History was replete with spectacular heists that had netted absolutely nothing but a jail sentence. He was sure that was the reason none of the Gardner paintings had ever surfaced. Since finding the canvas seven years ago, he’d studied up on the phenomenon, and had learned that hard truth.
Paintings were different from other thefts of value, such as gold statues or
famous jewels. For those, the gold could be melted down or the jewels broken up—at a steep loss from the cultural value, but a value, nonetheless. For art? What are you going to break up and sell? The paint? You had to have someone willing to buy the painting, and no collector would touch a piece of art outside the system—especially if he knew it was stolen from a brazen heist.
The latest he’d read about was a 2007 daylight robbery in the Jules-Chéret Fine Arts Museum of Nice, France, where gunmen walked away with over one hundred million in art. Three years later, they were desperate to offload the treasure but could find no buyers. There was only one who showed interest, a Russian member of organized crime, and they’d eagerly attempted to sell. He turned out to be an FBI agent, the paintings were recovered, ...
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