“The real paintings have been bought and sold in the shadow market.”
“Where are they?” I ask, struggling to process the scale of this fraud.
“Stored in climate-controlled chambers and bunkers. Kept in palaces in the Middle East and hidden within safes. They’re often used as collateral in massive illegal transactions involving the buying and selling of weapons, as Colette said, but also for political bribery, drug trafficking, dodgy real estate transactions, or just to store wealth for Russian robber barons. The Swansons have long sold these criminals their art and then washed their hands of what happened with it next. Louis didn’t. He injected himself deeper into the black market and offered to move those paintings around, to aid with buying and reselling them between the criminals, helping them to put the art up as collateral, all for a very high fee.
“And with the forgeries in the museums, he could offer some of the most expensive paintings in the world to these kinds of buyers, making the fees even higher. And when it’s time for the painting to be properly sold back on the public market, Louis asks for his donation back from the museum so no one will ever be the wiser about fakes hanging on the walls of the world’s most revered institutions for years while criminals traded the real ones between themselves. Plus, he got a tax write-off on the donations.”
“But don’t you only get a write-off if you donate a painting to a museum’s collection forever?” Colette asks.
“It is a short-term donation,” Stella says. “So he doesn’t get to write off the entire amount of the painting, just a fraction, but it’s still often a million or so. Louis structured a scheme that is more like a lease. He created the model himself.”
“And you knew about this?” Lucie asks.
“I wasn’t supposed to.” Her tone suggests this knowledge has been a burden. “Maxwell found out about it a few years ago. He tried to stop it, but he was too late.”
“How did Maxwell feel about it?”
“He hated it. But in the end he was terrified of his son and then he died. You know Louis was the only one in the roomwhen he passed,” she says quietly. It’s not quite an accusation, but close enough.
“Do you think he killed him?” Lucie gasps.
“I wouldn’t put it past the little bastard, but I have absolutely no proof.”
“But why do it at all?” Colette asks in disbelief. “You’re billionaires.”
“Louis is terribly overleveraged. He has two ex-wives to keep happy and quiet, and about a dozen failed subsidiaries. On paper Swanson is flush. In reality, not so much. Plus, in the end, he saw an opportunity and he took it. That’s the Swanson way.”
So here is what she wants us to do. She wants us to steal two masterpieces from the Orsay museum. A Van Gogh and a Renoir. She then wants to take them to experts to prove they are fakes, to blow the whistle on the Swansons’ fraud and her stepson.
“I have people willing to examine the paintings and call out the forgeries, but they need access to the paintings to make sure I’m right before going public,” Stella says. “They’ll do a material analysis using X-ray fluorescence to identify pigments and their chemical composition and conduct infrared tests to reveal underlying sketches and changes.” Her knowledge of this science is breathtaking.
“And they can’t do any of this under normal circumstances without going through the family,” Colette correctly guesses.
“Exactly. No one will ever go up against the Swanson family unless they know they will be one hundred percent correct. But there are vested interests from many parties in taking them down. You don’t become what they’ve become without making a world of enemies.”
“An art heist!” Lucie is a bit overexcited about the idea.
“Have you ever thought about how to do it, Emma?” Stella asks as we approach the medieval Vieux Château perched dramatically above the sea. She settles onto the stone wall overlooking the crumbling structure. “I know you have,” she prods me.
Every artist or art lover has thought at some point about how they would steal a painting from a famous museum. If they tell you they haven’t, they’re lying.
I think about it almost every time I walk into the Orsay. In reality, a heist would be nothing like what you see in the movies with the scuttling through secret tunnels, breaking through skylights, setting off smoke bombs.
Some art thieves will cut a painting out of its canvas with a penknife, roll it up in a coat, and simply walk out with it.
One famous thief explained in detail exactly how he did it. He would take the painting off the wall, turn it over, and place it face-down on a display case or the floor. He used his Swiss Army knife to manipulate the clips or nails on the back until the frame was detached, then he would put it back on the wall. Empty frames, the man said, were his calling card.
But we don’t want to leave behind an empty frame. We don’t want anyone to know the paintings are gone. We simply want to borrow them and buy some time to have them checked out. We’ll need a decoy for the decoys.
“If I was going to take something off the wall, I would be careful to replace it with a very good reproduction,” I say.
“Replace the fakes with fakes,” Stella agrees.
I look at her pointedly. “And that’s why you chose me.”
“You’re a very gifted painter, Emma,” she says.
“A forger, you mean. I’m very gifted at copying what other people have done.”
