The Icon Thief (15 page)

“What about Sharkovsky? Was he questioned in connection with her disappearance?”

“It looks like they interviewed someone at the club, but it wasn’t him. There wasn’t enough evidence to dig further, so they let it die. Now, of course, they’re breathing down my neck. I need you and Wolfe to keep them in line.”

Powell pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I’m not sure if that’s the best use of my time. Or Wolfe’s, for that matter—”

“You know why Hoover loved the Mormons? They respect authority. Wolfe understands how the system works. If you’re smart, you’ll take a page from her book. I’ll see both of you in the morning.”

Barlow hung up. Powell pocketed his own phone. “How much of that did you hear?”

“Enough,” Wolfe said, her face in shadow. “Now that the police have a name, they aren’t going to hold off on the investigation.”

“We’ll give them something discreet to do in the meantime. Something that will keep them happy, but won’t blow our cover. If they want to put a tracker on Sharkovsky’s car, say—”

A second later, he remembered what he had seen in the instant before Barlow called. “Oh, fuck me,” Powell said. “I can’t believe this—”

The car’s tires sprayed gravel as he pulled into the street. Wolfe was flung sideways by the sudden movement, which sent empty gelatin cups flying. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“
The truck
.” Powell slammed a hand against the dashboard, hard enough to hurt. “The one with the garbage. Did you see it?”

“Yes, but—” Wolfe broke off, struck by the same realization. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Powell said. They reached the intersection at the end of the road. Even as he tried to decide which way to go, he feared that he had waited too long. The image of a truck danced before his eyes, the one that he had seen in the Assyrian boy’s bedroom, in a photo taken when the hood had still been adorned with the crest of the Russian empire. Sharkovsky, or one of his men, was here.

I
lya moved silently through the mansion. Lights had been left on throughout the house, a luminous backdrop for the party outside, but he had no fear of being seen. Security cameras had been installed on the mansion’s eaves, but the rooms themselves were unmonitored, allowing Archvadze to live in privacy. Only one door, the one that counted, was covered by a camera.

He passed a pair of women moving unsteadily across the carpeted floor, their bracelets softly clinking. Feeling their eyes glide across his suit and camera bag, pointedly ignoring him, he knew that they would not remember, or even register, his face. As indispensible as photographers were to the ecology of this world, it was in poor taste to even imply that you wanted your picture taken.

Once the women had gone, he took a flight of servants’ stairs to the second floor. Going to the end of the corridor, he entered the master bedroom. It was an airy room with a Palladian window, the tieback curtains drawn. A third of the floor was dominated by the bed, its posts nearly touching the ceiling. An antique vanity was flanked by two doors. One led to a bathroom; the other, to the study.

Ilya shut the door behind him, leaving it slightly ajar.
Heading for the bathroom, he passed the vanity, which testified to a woman’s presence. A second later, seeing the room reversed in the mirror, he noticed the nightstand. He turned. On the table by the bed, there was a hardcover novel, a lamp, and a cell phone plugged into its charger. He recognized it at once.

Placing his bag on the carpet, Ilya unzipped its main compartment and removed a pair of gloves and a surgical mask. He slipped the gloves onto both hands, his fingers groping in their cocoon of latex, and tied the mask around his face, keeping one ear tuned to sounds from outside.

From his inside pocket, he took a sealed plastic bag containing a cotton swab. Opening the bag, he fished out the swab and brushed it lightly across the surface of the phone. The residue dried instantly, leaving no visible trace. When he was done, he slid the swab back into its bag, which he resealed tightly and pocketed again. He replaced his gloves with a fresh pair, stuffing the used gloves and mask into a separate bag. The phone went back on the bedside table.

He headed for the study. Inside, all four walls were lined with books, leather-bound volumes that had been bought by the foot. A desk with a rolling Aeron chair stood in the middle of the room.

To his left, between two bookcases, there was a plain wooden door. Above the frame, a camera had been mounted to the wall, its convex lens trained on the area immediately before the doorway. Next to the doorknob, which locked with an ordinary key, there was a numeric keypad.

Ilya remained where he was. At this angle, he could not be seen. Opening his camera case, he removed the penlight that he had assembled the day before.
He unscrewed the base of the flashlight, allowing one of the batteries to slide out, and reversed it. Earlier, he had inverted the battery out of concern that the light would accidentally switch on in his bag.

Screwing the base back on, he entered the study. He took one step, then another, until he could see the black hemisphere of the camera’s lens, while keeping his body out of its viewing range. Then he extended his arm, aiming the penlight toward the camera, and pressed the switch.

A red dot, not quite as focused as the beam from a commercial laser, appeared on the lens. He knew that the camera’s sensor, which was at least as sensitive as the retina of the human eye, would be burned out at once. At most, the camera would have registered a fleeting image of his hand with the flashlight, creeping into the frame a second before it went dark.

To be on the safe side, he continued to burn out the sensor until a thin wisp of smoke drifted up from the camera’s housing. Then he switched off the flashlight. Now that the camera had been disabled, he estimated that several minutes would pass before a guard came to inspect it.

Ilya closed and locked the door of the study. Kneeling, he opened his camera case and removed the items inside. He slipped the penlight into his pocket, while the revolver went into the holster inside his waistband. Everything else he laid out on the carpet: a combination drill and jigsaw, a compass, a roll of tape, a magnet, a pair of pliers, and a large envelope made of vinyl wallpaper.

He looked up at the door of the vault, which was featureless and smooth, and allowed himself to picture what lay beyond it. Taking the compass in one hand and the drill in the other, he got to work.

“A
fter Christian Rosencreutz died, the location of his tomb was lost,” Maddy said, a sip of champagne going pleasantly to her head. “A hundred and twenty years later, the Rosicrucians found a secret door in the wall of their ancestral castle. Inside, there was a room lit by an artificial sun, along with an inscription that read:
While living, I made this compact copy of the universe, my grave
.”

“Too bad it’s only an allegory,” Ethan said. “There’s no evidence that Rosencreutz ever existed, much less built a tomb for himself—”

“That isn’t the point,” Maddy said, feigning indignation. For all her own doubts about this line of reasoning, she wanted him to play along. “The Rosicrucians believed it. And it influenced Duchamp.”

Ethan set aside a vodka and tonic. They were seated together on a living room sofa, across from another couple by the bay window, the woman’s legs crossed to show off the red soles of her shoes. “Duchamp inspires all kinds of wild notions. If all you’ve done is turn him into a Rosicrucian, you aren’t trying hard enough. Have you heard of his connection to the Black Dahlia?”

Maddy regarded him with amusement. She had been hoping to entertain him with her theory about the Rosicrucians, but now it seemed that he had done her one better. “I can’t say that I have.”

“If you read enough about Duchamp, especially online, it’s bound to come up eventually. You know the story, right? A woman named Elizabeth Short was found dead in a field in Los Angeles, cut in half at the waist. The two halves of her body were ten inches apart, and her hands were bent over her head, like this—” Ethan arched his arms like a ballet dancer in the fifth position. “The killer was never found. But more than one critic has noticed that the crime scene photographs, with a naked body lying in the grass, look surprisingly similar to a certain work of art.”

Maddy finished her champagne. “So Marcel Duchamp killed the Black Dahlia?”

“Unfortunately, he was out of the country at the time. But several enterprising critics have speculated that he knew the killer’s identity. The prime suspect in the case is a doctor named George Hodel, an art collector and friend of Man Ray, Duchamp’s closest collaborator. And the first study for the installation was once thought to have been executed only a few months after the murder.”

“Or so everyone used to believe. But the new study pushes the date back at least three decades, when it was displayed at the Section d’Or. Which is more than thirty years too soon.”

“But for the true paranoid, there’s a deeper order at work. Section d’Or is the golden section, the ratio of the height of the body to the height of the navel. Which is precisely where Elizabeth Short was cut in half.”

Although his voice was grave, she saw a playful gleam in his eye. “Are you serious?”

“Not really. But it’s no more far-fetched than any other theory. Duchamp’s art doesn’t have a hidden message. It’s about process, like a game of chess. He was a chess master, you know, and in chess, dogmatists get slaughtered. His critics would do well to keep this in mind.”

She was surprised to hear him speak so passionately. “I didn’t know you were a fan.”

“For me, it’s less about the art than about the man. Duchamp belonged to no school or movement, lived in poverty for years, and spent his life trying to meet his own standards of intellectual purity. A movement of one. I admire that. Which is why I can’t buy any of these theories.”

“But isn’t that what you do for a living?” Maddy asked teasingly. “You reduce art to parameters in a pricing model. How is that different from what these conspiracy theorists have done?”

“It’s completely different,” Ethan said, his tone light and undefensive. “I deal in verifiable facts. If I enter bad data, the model will break. But if I want to connect Duchamp to the Rosicrucians or the Black Dahlia, as long as I’m clever enough, I can prove anything. It isn’t fair to him, that’s all.”

As Ethan spoke, Maddy studied him, her gaze slowed and prolonged by the wine. In his suit and tie, he was oddly attractive. His face was as smooth as a doll’s, but his eyes were quick, and they seemed to catch on her own. “So how did you get in here, anyway? Did you sneak past security?”

Ethan seemed genuinely surprised by the suggestion.
“Why would I do that? I called Natalia Onegina’s publicist, dropped the name of the fund, and asked to be put on the guest list. It wasn’t so hard. Of course, it would have been easier if I’d been an attractive woman—”

Maddy blushed, although she wasn’t sure if it was because of the implied compliment or because this approach had failed to occur to her. “But how did you find out about the party?”

“I had my ear to the ground,” Ethan said. “You aren’t the only one with connections.”

She saw again that she had underestimated him. “Does Reynard know you’re here?”

“Not yet.” Ethan gave her what was evidently meant as a cryptic smile. “I’m not sure he would approve, at least not before the fact. Later, if I bring him something useful, I’m sure he’ll agree that it was necessary.”

“But we may not have anything to show him. You’ve seen the art here. There’s nothing you couldn’t buy on a Carnival Cruise. For all we know, the real collection could be in storage. Or in a free port—”

“Or maybe it’s in a part of the house we haven’t seen yet.” Ethan leaned forward, as if to confide a secret. “A few days ago, I found a profile of this house in an architectural journal. I was hoping to find pictures of the art on the walls, but it didn’t have anything useful—”

“Where did you find a profile? I looked everywhere, and couldn’t find a thing.”

“Archvadze wasn’t mentioned by name. I did a search for the previous owner, and found a profile that ran two months after the house was sold, probably just after Archvadze redecorated. But here’s the important part. All the photos in the article were taken on the ground floor.”

Maddy saw where this was going. “And there was nothing from the second floor?”

“Nope.” There was something amused and provocative in his eyes. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Maddy, studying his face, realized that she was thinking of something that had nothing do with the art collection. An unmistakable feeling had been gathering over the past few minutes, in the part of her brain where bad ideas arose, and as she looked at Ethan, it only grew stronger.

An instant before the feeling was fully formed, she pushed it away. It was absurd. But the only way to remove it entirely was to replace it with another reckless idea, as one peg might be driven out by another.

“Come on,” Maddy said, rising from the sofa. “Let’s see what we can find upstairs.”

S
tanding before the door in the study, Ilya ran his compass along the frame, watching the needle closely. When it passed across a point one foot above the knob, the needle trembled. He ran it over the spot a second time to make sure, and saw the same fluctuation. To be safe, he swept the compass all around the door, checking for a backup switch, and found nothing.

The camera case that had contained his equipment lay at his feet, empty. Picking up the bag, he slipped it over his right hand, which was clutching the cordless drill. The bag was large enough to cover both his hand and the drill itself, forming a sort of shapeless mitt. Squeezing the trigger, he activated the drill, boring a tiny hole in the base of the bag, which allowed the tip of the bit to emerge. Then he zipped the mouth of the bag over his wrist.

With the makeshift silencer snugly enveloping his hand, Ilya drilled a pilot hole in the door, next to where the compass had fluctuated. It took only a few seconds before the tip of the drill penetrated to the other side of the wood, allowing the bit to turn freely. Ilya withdrew it and removed his hand from the camera case, replacing
the bit with a jigsaw attachment. Then he pulled the bag over the drill again, poking the tip of the saw through the hole that he had cut in the base.