Vanished Smile (23 page)

World War I swept the Mona Lisa caper off the front pages, still the story begged for more. Years later, a journalist for the Hearst flagship paper, the
New York Journal
, provided it.

FLOOR PLANS OF THE LOUVRE
These plans of the second (premier étage) and ground (rez-de-chaussée)
floors of the Louvre show the probable route of the thieves.
X
marks the spot where the missing doorknob was recovered.
Just beyond to the left and across the river is Gare d'Orsay.
(Courtesy of Art & Architecture Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints,
and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)

NEW YEAR'S
1914. Snow blanketed southern Europe, and icy blasts swept over the Mediterranean, sending a chill across the top of Africa. In the unseasonably bitter January, in a cafe in Casablanca, an elegant adventurer and a buccaneer journalist renewed their acquaintance. The chance of turning a dishonest penny had brought the Marques Eduardo de Valfierno to Casablanca. A rumor of war had brought Karl Decker.

Because of its strategic location at the entrance to the Mediterranean, Morocco had become a playing field where the major powers of Europe contended for influence and advantage. German gunboats were threatening French dominance, and Decker, a star reporter for William Randolph Hearst's
New York Journal
, had come itching for a new war to cover.

Decades before Rick's Place, Casablanca was an anything-goes town where the odds of a knife at the throat or a kiss on each cheek were fifty-fifty. A chance encounter with an old acquaintance, even one whom you might otherwise hold at arm's length, seemed a stroke of good fortune. Since one or both would be gone in a day or so and never be seen again, truth could be revealed without consequence.

The two men took a table on the cobblestone terrace of a pocket-size restaurant midway between the seaside and the city hall, the Arab quarter just behind them. They angled themselves with considerable care to catch the direct sun. For
added warmth, each cradled a snifter of Napoleon brandy. A French newspaper lay open on the table between them—
Le Matin
of January 4, 1914.

Through the years, their paths had crossed in other unruly, no-questions-asked places where opportunism flourished, danger was a constant, and crime paid handsomely. Decker knew the self-anointed marques as a confidence man with a taste for high life and fine art, and after the usual exchange of pleasantries, their conversation turned to the headlined story: MONA LISA RETURNS TO THE LOUVRE.

“You know I have always been deeply interested in art,” Eduardo de Valfierno began, speaking with the elegance and insouciance that was his trademark. “I have always felt that the man who made two great pictures bloom where there had been only one before was a benefactor of mankind.” He paused, allowing Decker time to appreciate the irony. “You understand, of course, Mona Lisa was not stolen to be sold. The painting only appeared to be the prize to Vincenzo Peruggia's elementary mind.”

At thirty-eight, Decker was a veteran of the rough-and-tumble newspaper wars of New York, and he considered his companion curiously. The Mona Lisa thief was in jail and the lost Leonardo was back in the Louvre, yet the marques seemed to be suggesting that the case was still not closed. With his leonine head raised to the sun, Valfierno exuded the well-being of a man who was immensely pleased with himself. They made a roguish pair—the journalist-adventurer on the beat of a frontpage story and the seasoned scam artist. Both were inveterate opportunists and exemplars of their professions.

Built like a battleship and sporting an extravagant mustache and a trademark fedora with a brim the width of Texas, Decker personified the swashbuckling correspondent who never allowed the facts to stand in the way of a good story.
Dubbed “a modern D'Artagnan” for his daring exploits in pursuit of front-page stories, he was as subtle as a banner headline and as inventive as his country. Decker's name made headlines almost as often as bylines. Like the Dumas musketeer, he dashed from escapade to exploit, breathlessly pursuing Hearst's “journalism of action”—rescuing a beautiful Cuban revolutionary from prison, embedding with the first landing force in the Spanish-American War, mapping an expedition to free the wrongfully accused Captain Alfred Dreyfus from Devil's Island.

The debonair marques, every inch the gentleman thief, had patrician manners and no morals. A born aristocrat, he was the scion of a prominent family in Latin America, but if presented with a choice between an honest occupation and a clever scam, he would not suffer a moment of indecision. He was courtly, charming, and compulsively crooked.

Valfierno had been operating beyond the law without interference on three continents for years. Occasionally, he was forced to leave a country sooner than planned, but there wasn't so much as a smudge on his record. His dossier was the only immaculate thing about him. The marques performed with blithe unscrupulousness. An amused contempt for what he called “the squirming hordes of saps in the world” and impeccable breeding gave him an aura of invincible superiority. Although he had worked many cons in his time, in these later years, he would not entertain any operation that promised less than a $50,000 profit, roughly $750,000 today.

If you believe there is honor among thieves, then you can believe that a bargain was struck on that wintry day in Casablanca. Assured that his part would not be made public in his lifetime, and safely beyond the law, the Marques Eduardo de Valfierno confessed to a deception that he boasted was unparalleled “in insolence and ingenuity.”

Perhaps like every artist, he wanted his work to be appreciated. Maybe he was in a reflective mood, or maybe with so many frauds on his conscience, he was moved to come clean—if not to purge his soul, then to satisfy his ego. Valfierno was old for the game, although he showed no inclination to retire. Whatever his motive, the marques knew that Karl Decker would appreciate the beauty of an artful swindle. Defenses lowered and tongues loosened, conversation flowed freely. With the pride of an artist admiring his masterwork, Valfierno revealed how and why Mona Lisa had vanished.

THE MARQUéS HAD
a receptive audience in Karl Decker. A dozen years before, they had met in Buenos Aires, where Eduardo de Valfierno's legitimate name was so respected that it would open every door. Even though he was the youngest son in a society where the bulk of the inheritance went to the eldest, his patrimony offered unlimited opportunity. But he never used his true name, and he never revealed it in his various business ventures. Among his less nefarious interests, the marques was something of a connoisseur, and an opportune meeting with a French art restorer had led him into the highly fluid, often questionable fine-arts market.

Yves Chaudron was described as a pale wisp of a Frenchman, almost a skeleton in his skinniness. He had begun his professional life as a painter, but lacking any creative instinct, he had drifted into art restoration, then into the considerably more profitable field of art falsification. It was a natural progression and his true calling. Few, if any, forgers could imitate art with greater mastery. Given a painting to be copied, Chaudron
could capture the slightest quirks of the artist, duplicate the finest brushstrokes, and match even damaged colors. His skill was described as “the uncanny sort that breaks the heart of the collector.”

Chaudron became the marques's partner in crime and his alter ego. Valfierno was the front, Chaudron the talent. Together, they “enriched the Argentine” with the works of the popular nineteenth-century painter Bartolome Murillo. Like Picasso, Murillo was Andalusian, but beyond a shared nationality, the two were antithetical. Murillo painted sweet Madonnas, hated by Picasso, loved by Latin widows.

In those early days, the marques would start every morning with a stack of newspapers, circling each black cross that announced the death of a prosperous Argentinean. As a rule of thumb, the longer the obituary, the richer the deceased. Valfierno was, of course, the soul of tact when he approached a grieving widow. He would suggest that she buy a Murillo and donate it to the Church as a memorial to her dearly departed. It would be a rare and beautiful tribute. As fast as Chaudron could paint the fakes, Valfierno palmed them off. Soon they were turning out so many “genuine” Murillos that their operation became a factory.

Chaudron had learned a number of tricks from his restoration work, and in their Buenos Aires plant, electric fans whirled on the freshly varnished canvases, breaking the surfaces into thousands of tiny cracks. Vacuum cleaners operated in reverse, blowing clouds of dust on the varnish. Chaudron and his assistants added finely ground coffee to the dust, sprinkling the grains over the canvases to reproduce the flyspecks that often deface old works.

Although business was booming, the marques was always prowling for bigger game, and he began dabbling in finance. When a syndicate that he organized began to collapse, he left
Buenos Aires expeditiously, taking an estimated quarter million dollars in gold bullion with him. Chaudron followed soon after, leaving the Argentine with more Murillos than cattle.

Sometime later, Decker bumped into the pair again in Mexico. Although they were still working the Murillo market, they had a new and riskier operation. Instead of returning to the manufacture of paintings, they were selling the same celebrated work over and over to well-heeled tourists. The scam was transparent and successful. Buyers would be offered a famous Murillo that hung in a museum in Mexico City. Seeing it on the museum wall validated its authenticity. Buyers asked few questions, hoping ignorance would insulate them from whatever unsavory activity was involved, and they would return home to await delivery. In due course, the Murillo would arrive, along with a batch of newspaper clippings, all undated. A typical lead read: “Yesterday, an outrage occurred and a priceless Murillo was ripped from its frame. …” If a buyer returned to Mexico City and saw the original still in the museum, the marques would say that to avoid embarrassment, the museum was passing off a copy as the true work.

While the money was easy, painting and peddling the same canvas grew boring. Valfierno was soon looking for a new source of income to finance his indulgent lifestyle, and Chaudron had grown nostalgic for his native France. Filthy with money, the partners sailed for Paris, where they insinuated themselves easily into the carnival that was the Parisian art world. For a few unrestrained years in the afterglow of the Belle Époque, the passion for collecting rivaled the Renaissance. Corots, Millets, and even Titians were being sold in Paris every year, many of them fakes.

By 1911 the fleecing of American millionaires was a cottage industry in Europe. “All the great European fakers worked with an eye on the rich Americans. … The more fantastically untrue a story connected with a picture or work of art, the
more likely it was to find an eager buyer among the flocks of rich Americans who vied with each other in buying the bed Queen Elizabeth (or Empress Josephine, or Cleopatra—or all three) had slept in.”
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