The Icon Thief (14 page)

He went quickly inside, as if he were coming home. It was five minutes past nine.

“A
nzor Archvadze, meet Maddy Blume,” Griffin said, his shyness falling away as he assumed the role of art world insider. “Maddy works for the Reynard Art Fund. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”

“Pleased to meet you,” Archvadze said, taking her hand in a warm grip. Up close, he was not nearly as intimidating as his reputation had suggested. His voice was soft, with only the trace of an accent, and his demeanor retained something of the engineer he had once been. “We are very glad you could come.”

“Thank you,” Maddy said, her heart racing. “It’s been a really wonderful party.”

As she spoke, she saw a flicker of boredom in Archvadze’s expression, and knew that she had said the wrong thing. Before the oligarch could turn away, she added quickly, “I was admiring your trees. The conifers remind me of plantings I’ve seen at Alfonso Ossorio’s home. Have you been there?”

At the mention of trees, a light appeared in Archvadze’s eyes. “Yes, I have,” the oligarch said. “One of the saplings comes from Ossorio’s garden at the Creeks. You’re interested in trees?”

“I’m interested in Ossorio,” Maddy said. “My fund owns several of his paintings.”

“I’ve found that many artists are drawn to gardening, especially in such a town as this. The Japanese maple by the gazebo comes from a tree in the garden of Robert Dash, or so my gardener tells me. Of course, the provenance of older trees can be hard to establish—”

Maddy was about to respond when she saw something that drove all other thoughts away. Standing to one side was the bidder from the auction. Tonight, he was more fashionably dressed, but his neck still strained against his shirt collar, and when he raised his glass, she saw that his cufflinks were red heptagrams.

Archvadze followed her gaze. “If you admire the trees, you should thank my assistant, Zakaria Kostava. He is the one who arranges for their care. I have less time than I would like for such things.”

Kostava inclined his head politely, then turned aside. It wasn’t clear if he recognized her or not. “You seem to know your artists,” Maddy said to Archvadze. “I hear you’ve got quite a collection.”

Archvadze turned to his girlfriend. “Whatever she wants, I buy. That is all I know.”

Natalia smiled at this. She was two inches taller than Maddy, with violet eyes and a Persian profile. “Nonsense. You have excellent taste.”

“I have the taste of an old man,” Archvadze replied. “If you look at revolutionists, you see that they always have the most bourgeois tastes in art. Even Lenin was afraid of the avant-garde.”

“Lenin didn’t have your money,” Maddy said. “So what are you buying these days?”

Archvadze glanced at his assistant before responding. “Oh, I prefer something with a history. Art must be allowed to age before its quality can be known. It is the same way with trees, and, perhaps, with men. Natalia, of course, doesn’t agree with me. She only wants the latest thing—”

Natalia turned to Maddy, who felt the woman’s scrutiny as an almost physical tickling across her face, the cool appraisal of one alpha female toward another. “You know a great deal about this area. Were you born here?”

“No, I’m not a native,” Maddy said. For an uneasy second, in the oily light of the citronella, she wondered if the other woman could sense her underlying desperation. “I live in the city, but I’m really from Athens, Georgia.”

Natalia only pursed her lips, her interest snuffed out at once, but the oligarch seemed amused. “I’m Georgian, too,” Archvadze said, laughing quietly at his own joke. “I only hope your Georgia is as beautiful as mine—”

Before Maddy could respond, a woman in a scalloped blouse plucked Archvadze’s sleeve, saying that there was someone here he absolutely had to meet. Archvadze smiled distractedly at Maddy, saying that he was pleased to have made her acquaintance, and drifted off into the crowd. The others followed. Before Maddy knew it, the circle of guests had dissolved.

“He’s an intriguing character,” Griffin was saying. “Not nearly as rough as some of these other oligarchs. I suspect that he knows more about art than he claims. Or perhaps he only sees it as an investment.”

Watching as their host approached another group of attendees, Maddy felt as if an opportunity had been lost.
Fighting off her dissatisfaction, she told herself that she had really come for the good of the fund, and that a look at the art collection would mean that the night had not been wasted.

“I need to run to the ladies’ room,” Maddy said to Griffin. “You’ll wait for me?”

Griffin drained his glass. “Actually, I’ll walk you there. It’s a vulgar impulse, I know, but I’d like to get a look at this man’s house. Afterward, we can talk about the Vered Gallery—”

Maddy stared blankly into the critic’s face, then remembered her cover story. Leaning forward, she kissed him on the cheek. “Business can wait for now. Why don’t you get me a drink and save me a place by the music? That way, when I get back, we’ll be able to talk in private.”

“Of course,” Griffin stammered, a blush flooding across his face. “I’ll be here.”

He gave her a smile and drifted off toward the bar. Maddy waited until he was gone, then turned and all but ran for the mansion. After hightailing it for a second, she glanced back at Archvadze, who was enduring another round of small talk. A man in a brown suit and glasses had approached the circle, a camera in one hand. He said something inaudible to the guests, who lined up obediently, with the oligarch standing in the middle. The flash left a green smudge on her retinas.

Passing through the main door of the house, Maddy found herself in an entrance hall that smelled sweetly of cedar. It had been furnished in a patrician grandfather style, with a richly patterned carpet. In the living room, a few guests were seated near the bay window. As they
glanced at her idly, wondering if she was anyone worth knowing, Maddy moved onward, keeping one eye on the walls.

What she found was disappointing. Above the mantelpiece hung a massive cityscape of Venice, which she recognized as one of thousands of identical oil paintings produced every year by factory cities in China. Reaching into her handbag, Maddy withdrew a digital camera and took a picture. The real collection, she told herself, had to be somewhere else.

She wandered into the dining room. The furniture was heavy and expensive, but the walls, again, were covered in postcard art, not far removed from Thomas Kinkade. Frustrated, she took another picture and moved into the sitting room, its hardwood floor covered in checked rugs, which shifted slightly beneath her feet. The art here was even worse. Without a trace of surprise, she saw that a Jack Vettriano had been given pride of place above the mantelpiece.

Feeling vaguely dissatisfied, Maddy did not notice, at first, that there was someone else in the room. Finally, she saw a man in a dark blue suit standing with his back to her. He was studying the painting above the fireplace with an almost humorous intensity. As she watched, he slid a camera from his pocket, took a step backward, and snapped a picture. When he turned around, Maddy saw who it was, and was unable to speak for a long moment.

“Hello, Maddy,” Ethan said, his face brightening. “What are you doing here?”

“T
his is ridiculous,” Powell said, looking out at the hedge wall. “How are we supposed to watch a house like this?”

They were parked on Gin Lane, within sight of the main entrance, observing the estate from an unmarked sedan. Through his window, which was rolled down, Powell could hear music from an unseen string quartet, rendered unreal by the distance, like fairy song. Above the hedge, there was a palpable glow, like the light flung onto an overcast sky by a city at night.

“I don’t know what you expected,” Wolfe said. There was an edge of irritation in her voice, perhaps because they had driven two hours to stare at a hedge. “All of these houses are like this.”

“I still can’t believe it.” Powell ran his eyes along the hedge, which reminded him of the defensive wall, a thousand years old, that encircled the town of his boyhood. “What does he have to hide?”

“It makes you wonder how much of this wealth is real,” Wolfe said. “Most of these mansions are mortgaged to the hilt. When the bottom falls out of the market, this will turn into a ghost town.”

It wasn’t the first time that Powell had heard her express these sentiments. “You think there will be a crash?”

“Read the signs. Too much debt, not enough capital investment. If I were you, I’d get ready for seven lean years.” Wolfe reached for a cup of lime gelatin. “I say we go inside. Tell security. We aren’t doing any good here.”

“We can’t,” Powell said. “If Sharkovsky learns that we’ve contacted Archvadze—”

“He’ll suspect that we have a wire. I know. But so far, this is all flipping pointless.”

Powell didn’t have a good response to this. They had been parked here for hours, dutifully noting each arrival, but had seen only the town cars and sport utility vehicles of the Hamptons elite.

Watching the guests from a distance, feeling disheveled from hours in the car, Powell had experienced a curious twinge of English guilt. It was easier to stake out a building in Brighton Beach, where domestic life often spilled out onto the streets. Here, the hedge formed a stark boundary between public and private space, as if the lives inside had nothing to do with the world beyond.

He watched as a jeep rolled down the driveway and signaled for a turn. As it passed, he caught a glimpse of the men inside, a pair of guards in white polo shirts. He wondered if Archvadze imported any of his muscle from home. In Russia, an entrepreneur needed protection to survive, usually in the form of corrupt cops and roofs from the local gangs. Even in his adopted country, the oligarch would not have been likely to change his ways, at least not entirely.

“I’m not even sure we can trust Archvadze,” Powell said now, keeping his eye on the jeep. “You can’t make a
fortune in the Russian auto industry without reaching an understanding with organized crime. Privatization has always been funded by the underworld. So has politics.”

Wolfe peeled back the lid from her cup of gelatin. “With all due respect, I’m not sure that I buy the government connection. These gangs hate the Chekists. They swear never to cooperate with the military or police, and if a gangster is revealed as a traitor or informant, he’s exiled or put to death—”

“Which doesn’t mean that they can’t serve the state’s interests in other ways,” Powell said. “Take another example. Until a few years ago, a Delta jet flew from New York to Moscow five times a week with a hundred million dollars in its cargo hold. No one tried to steal it, because it was going to the mob. They would steal oil from Siberia, sell it on the spot market, then place a currency order in New York. When the cash arrived, it was used to pay off members of the Duma.”

Wolfe popped a green spoonful into her mouth. “So what’s your point, exactly?”

“My point is that it wasn’t just the Russians who decided to look the other way. The bank earned a commission on every transaction. The Treasury Department earned ninety-six cents from every dollar that left the country. They’ll only take action if we can prove that it’s in their best interests to do so. The connection between money laundering and terrorism is what finally shut down the money plane. And another way to bring down the system—”

“—is to connect it to domestic crime,” Wolfe said. “All right. But what makes you so sure that Sharkovsky is involved?”

“Experience. No
vor
works in isolation. If the money plane is out of commission, they’ll find something else to take its place. The connections are there. It’s only a matter of seeing them.”

“It’s also a matter of funding. And at the moment, it’s a hard sell.” Finishing the gelatin, Wolfe tossed the empty cup into the backseat, where it joined several others. “Why are you so interested in the foreign angle, anyway?”

“My father’s influence, I suppose,” Powell said. “He was a member of the civil service, a diplomat, with the most orderly mind I’ve ever seen. He spent most of his life chasing these connections.”

He expected her to ask him what his father had done, but she only took a sip of cocoa. “He sounds like a remarkable man.”

Powell looked through the windshield at the estate. “Yes. You might say he was.”

“I’m sorry,” Wolfe said, with what sounded like genuine sympathy. “I didn’t know he had passed away.”

“He hasn’t.” Powell turned aside. “Not exactly. But he hasn’t been entirely well.”

In the silence that followed, he had time to remember how insidious his father’s decline had been, passing invisibly from harmless, even comical mistakes, like neglecting to turn off the cold water tap, to aimless wandering far into the night, opening drawers and rummaging in closets. In the end, a man exquisitely attuned to ideas had disintegrated to the point where he would repeatedly grope at patterns on the carpet, thinking that there was something on the floor.

Powell was still brooding over this when a pickup truck emerged from the service entrance, loaded with
plump bags of garbage. It pulled into the road, then turned left, moving away from where the sedan was parked. Something about it caught his eye, but before he could reach for his binoculars, his phone rang.

It was Barlow. “There’s a fax for you on my desk. They’ve identified your dead girl.”

Even before the agent had finished speaking, Powell had his notepad out, glad for the distraction. “What do we know?”

There was a theatrical rustle of papers. “Her name is Karina Baranova. She was born in Kargopol and emigrated to the city ten years ago. Unmarried. No record. According to her file, she taught ballet in Brooklyn Heights. And guess where she worked on the weekends?”

Powell knew that this flood of information would make it impossible for the police to ignore the case any longer. “The Club Marat.”

“You’re one smart Indian—you know that? She danced in their floor show. When she vanished two years ago, she was reported missing by the ballet academy. Your analysis of the weather records was what narrowed it down. I suppose I should congratulate you for that—”