Read Online The Rembrandt Affair by Daniel Silva - Free Book Online Page B

first heard the story of Vincenzo Peruggia.
    A carpenter from northern Italy, Peruggia entered the Louvre on the afternoon of Sunday, August 20, 1911, and concealed himself in a storage closet. He emerged early the following morning dressed in a workman’s white smock and strode into the Salon Carré. He knew the room well; several months earlier, he had helped to construct a special protective case over its most famous attraction, the Mona Lisa. Because it was a Monday, the day the Louvre was closed to the public, he had the salon to himself, and it took only a few seconds to lift Leonardo’s small panel from the wall and carry it to a nearby stairwell. A few moments later, with the painting concealed beneath his smock, Peruggia walked past an unmanned guard post and struck out across the Louvre’s vast center courtyard. And with that the world’s most famous work of art vanished into the Paris morning.
    Even more remarkable, twenty-four hours would elapse before anyone noticed the picture was missing. When the alert finally went out, the French police launched a massive if somewhat farcical search. Among their first suspects was an avant-garde painter named Pablo Picasso, who was arrested at his Montmartre apartment despite the fact he had been hundreds of miles from Paris at the time of the actual theft.
    Eventually, the gendarmes managed to track down Peruggia but quickly cleared him of any suspicion. Had they bothered to look inside the large trunk in his bedroom, the search for the Mona Lisa would have ended. Instead, the painting remained hidden there for two years, until Peruggia foolishly tried to sell it to a well-known dealer in Florence. Peruggia was arrested but spent just seven months in jail. Years later, he was actually permitted to return to France. Oddly enough, the man who carried out the greatest art crime in history then opened a paint store in the Haute-Savoie and lived there quietly until his death.
    Maurice Durand learned several important lessons from the strange case of Peruggia. He learned that stealing great paintings was not as difficult as one might think, that the authorities were largely indifferent to art crime, and that the penalties generally were light. But the story of Peruggia also whet Durand’s appetite. Antique scientific instruments were his birthright—the shop had belonged to his father, and his grandfather before that—but art had always been his great passion. And while it was true there were worse places to spend one’s day than the first arrondissement of Paris, the shop was not a particularly exciting way to earn a living. There were times when Durand felt a bit like the trinkets lining his little display window—polished and reasonably attractive but ultimately good for little more than gathering dust.
    It was this combination of factors, twenty-five years earlier, that had compelled Durand to steal his first painting from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg—a small still life by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin that hung in a corner rarely visited by guards or patrons. Using an old-fashioned razor, Durand sliced the painting from its frame and slipped it into his attaché case. Later, during the train ride back to Paris, he attempted to recall his emotions at the moment of the crime and realized he had felt nothing other than contentment. It was then that Maurice Durand knew he possessed the qualities of a perfect thief.
    Like Peruggia before him, Durand kept his trophy in his Paris apartment, not for two years but for two days. Unlike the Italian, Durand already had a buyer waiting, a disreputable collector who happened to be in the market for a Chardin and wasn’t worried about messy details like provenance. Durand was well paid, the client was happy, and a career was born.
    It was a career characterized by discipline. Durand never stole paintings to acquire ransom or reward money, only to provide inventory. At first he left the masterpieces to the dreamers and