Gauguin Connection, The (10 page)

Colin started shifting in his chair. “Yes?”

“Don’t get bored. The details here are important,” I said. “The same Degas was mysteriously found by a private investigator in May of 2009. A newspaper article stated that the owner, Monsieur Villines, was delighted when his private investigator tracked the Degas down in France. The journalist wrote that Monsieur Villines had had tears in his eyes when he said that for months he sat with it in his villa in the south of France, overwhelmed by having it back. The article continued by saying that even though the owner was delighted at the artwork’s recovery, his dire financial situation caused by the international financial crisis called for him to sell it at an auction. The auction was held in late November.”

“Wait.” Colin held up both hands and closed his eyes. I assumed he was going through the facts he had just heard. I saw the exact moment all the pieces fell into place. His eye shot open. “How was it possible for this Monsieur
Villines to have his Degas returned in May when it was shipped to him three months later?”

“A very good question. One that I don’t have an answer to. I found the same with the Klimt and Modigliani. The discovery dates and shipping dates don’t make sense.” I glanced at my notepad, thinking of the other connections. That was when Colin noticed my notepad. I didn’t even have a chance to stop him from taking it, he snatched it so quickly. Thief.

“What have we here? Your notes?”

“I will tell you everything that’s written down. Please give it back to me.” I reached for it, but he pulled it farther away from me without taking his eyes off my notes. He turned the pages and slowly perused each page, squinting every so often.

“You might have to interpret some of it. Wait. What’s this?” He placed the notepad on the table, still holding it in his possession. He pointed at the first page with my attempts to make sense of the Russian murderer’s last words.

“Manny’s going to kill me.” I closed my eyes and sighed. “If you ever tell anyone else this, I will give Manny all five of those addresses and a very detailed description of everything I know about you.”

“Understood.”

He listened intently as I explained the girl’s murder and
rantings of the Russian before he killed himself. Colin stared at the page for a long time. “You speak Russian. A woman of many talents.”

My eyes widened. “You studied the page and that’s all you have to say?”

“Well, it’s the only thing that makes sense.” He shrugged at the notepad. “The daffodils and the all-powerful red is muddled nonsense.”

“What if it isn’t? What if it’s key to understanding all of this?” I tapped on the notepad.

“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. He turned the page, found nothing of interest and turned to the third page, the page with all the different pieces of this puzzle listed in a circle. His eyes widened. “Explain, please. Especially the stolen Eurocorps weapons.”

I gave him the short version of how the events had led to the discovery of the missing Eurocorps weapons and its tenuous connection to the EDA. “And they still don’t know the exact number of weapons stolen.”

Colin whistled softly. “This is even worse than I’d thought.”

“I’ve told you all that I know. Tell me what exactly you suspected.”

“I didn’t quite manage to make sense of the deaths, except that they were somehow connected. I was also convinced that the EDA was involved. I never suspected Eurocorps. I thought this was simply an official of the EDA with his finger in an art fraud pie.”

“I don’t understand what you are saying. Please use normal English.”

“But I was.” He tilted his head. “You’re not very good with euphemisms, are you?”

“No.” For the sake of speeding up our conversation, I admitted this weakness. I didn’t like doing it.

“Okay. Normal English.” There was no verbal or non-verbal censure. He simply accepted this particular oddity of mine, the same way he did not show any judgement of my episode during our first meeting. “I thought that some EDA official, someone quite high up, was involved in art fraud. I thought that he was using his power, influence and connections to ship the pieces. Somehow he—”

“How do you know it’s a man?” I interrupted him.

“Gross assumption. It could be a woman, but I doubt it. This is mostly a man’s game.”

“A game?”

“A gentlemen’s game. Art crimes are almost exclusively non-violent. It is rather about outwitting the system, the fraud detection systems, the investigators, the security in the homes, galleries and museums where the pieces are. It’s about beating the authentication processes. And, of course, the money. But it’s not about violence. That is why the deaths of some, let’s just call them friends, caught my attention. We all have an incredible love for the arts. Some have an equally strong love for money, but very few, if any, are in it for violence. The power comes from the outwitting.”

“Interesting.” I had never spoken to a criminal before. To have a first-hand insight into the workings of their minds captivated my interest. “But look at this page. You say this alleged EDA official was shipping the art. There is no line drawn between the shipping and the dead artists. I haven’t found any connection.”

“But you have lines between the girl and the weapons, the girl and the dead artists, and the forgeries and the ships.” He stopped suddenly. “Tell me about the forgeries and the ships. How are they connected?”

“I searched the shipping database for any links to the mysteriously discovered artworks and got three connections I told you about. The Degas, Klimt and Modigliani.”

“What other connections did you search for?”

“I entered all the art listed on Interpol’s website, but didn’t get any other hits. That was when you overheard me.”

“You were angry with me.” There was a smile in his voice.

“You started this whole shipping search disaster. It feels like I have wasted this whole weekend searching through the shipping database for nothing.”

“Not nothing. You got three art connections.”

“Yes,” I almost shouted. “Only three. It’s nothing to be proud of. I need more search parameters. I need more connections.”

Colin leaned back in his chair and rested his head against the high back. He closed his eyes and for a moment I thought he might be falling asleep. His eyes flew open. “What about the girl? Have you entered her name?”

“We don’t know her name yet.”

He rolled his eyes. “Sometimes the police are so embarrassingly incompetent. I’ll bet you a thousand pounds that I’ll have her name by tomorrow.”

“I don’t bet and I have no use for pounds. In case you haven’t noticed, you’re in France. We use euros.”

“Pounds, euros, it’s all the same to me,” he said dismissively. One of his homes was in England, so I supposed it really was all the same to him. I saw his mind working, most likely on a strategy to ascertain the murdered girl’s identity. “What about the Russian who killed her?”

“I don’t even want to know how you know this.” The fact that he knew so much about the investigation and my involvement was jarring. “Manny told me that they had identified the Russian as a tourist who had entered Europe, but he never gave me the guy’s name. It will be here somewhere. Just a moment.”

I turned to the EDA computer and started searching through the case file to see if the Russian’s name was there.

“Is that an EDA computer?”

“Yes,” I answered absently.

“With full access?”

“Not full, but enough for now.” I located the page with information on the Russian and perused it. Then a thought struck me and I turned sharply to Colin. “You are at no time to work on, switch on, open or even touch this computer. Have I made myself clear?”

“As a bell.”

“Excuse me?”

“You made yourself clear.”

I turned back to the computer, knowing that I had made myself clear, but that Colin most likely was not going to heed the limits. My attention was drawn away from this concern to the second paragraph on the page. “Here. It says that he had three different identities on him, but after liaising with Russia, they got his real identity.”

“Russia liaised? That’s a surprise.”

“Russia is not all bad.”

Colin made a rude sound. “Not in my experience. If they liaised, it was only to create the image of goodwill and co-operation.”

“Do you want to argue about this or hear the murderer’s name?” I was hard pushed to not start a political debate. I had a soft spot for Russia. It was a country rich with history and culture. True, it had a tumultuous past and present, but the people at heart were wonderfully generous. It was the elite few who were corrupt to the core.

“Who was he?”

“Nikolay Chulkov. He also travelled under two other identities.”

“Put his name in the shipping search.”

I did that and waited. Nothing. I sighed despondently.

“What about his other identities? Try them.”

The next identity didn’t give any result, but the third, Sergey Kruchenykh, was going to help us draw another line between the boxes on my notepad page.

“I can’t believe it worked.” I felt like I had just won a Nobel
prize and smiled brilliantly at Colin. “We have another connection.”

He was also smiling. “Follow that link.”

“Okay, here it is. He was working on the ship
Trojka
in October 2007. The ship left the port of St Petersburg and stopped in Gdansk, Poland before it continued on.”

“How many ships did he work on?”

“He was only on that one voyage.”

“Isn’t that a bit strange?”

“I certainly think so. Why would anyone work on a ship only once?”

“Maybe he suffered from sea sickness and had to give up his new career.” Colin smiled and I assumed he was being witty.

“Maybe. But I think it is unlikely.”

Colin sobered. “Of course. Draw a line.”

“What? Oh. Yes.” I paged back until I found all the items listed and drew a line between the ‘Russian murderer’ box and the ‘ships’ box. “What’s next?”

I accessed the personnel records on the EDA computer and ran the names of the permanent staff against the manifests. The people who cooperated with the EDA were not listed and it would be nigh-on impossible to find those thousands of names. With Colin’s help we got as many names as possible from Eurocorps’ website and did the same. With no results. I grunted in frustration and slumped in my chair.

Colin stared at the notepad in front of me for a while and then tapped on one of the boxes with a long finger. “What about the non-existent private investigators?”

“Let’s see.” I entered each of the eight private investigators’ names, but none of them resulted in anything. “If there is a connection between the Russian murderer and the ships, then there must be some kind of connection between the ships and the girl.”

“We need to know who she is,” Colin stated quietly. “What do you know about her?”

“She was most likely an artist, a painter. The coroner put her in her early twenties, in good health when she was murdered.”

“Once we have her identity, I’m convinced it will lead us to the ships and the Russians.”

“What is your problem with the Russians?” I couldn’t tolerate his hateful tone any more.

“Don’t get me started. They are a bunch of ruthless criminals.”

“I have an idiom for this!” I felt enormously proud of myself. “You are the pot calling the kettle black.”

Colin surprised me by laughing. “Brilliant. Of course, I would not consider myself as ruthless.”

“But you would consider yourself a criminal?”

“I admit to nothing.” There was still a smile in his voice, but he was serious.

“Since we are talking about your crimes—”

“We are not.”

“—I have a few questions for you,” I continued without acknowledging his denial. “How did you know those artworks were forgeries?”

“Aw, Jenny. If I tell you that, I might as well hand a written statement in at the police station.” He sighed. A moment passed while I just stared at him. He sighed again. “There are certain methods used when forging an artwork. Sometimes it was a hint of a method I know about that made me suspicious. Sometimes it was the signature of a forger I knew. Forgers are sometimes better artists than the artists themselves. It takes incredible skill to copy a piece of art so that it not only resembles it in appearance but also in age and chemical composition. Forgers often are required to have an extensive knowledge of art as well as geography, history and chemistry.”

“And you know all this?”

Colin took a deep, deciding breath. “Yes. I’m considered to be one of the best.”

I considered his tone of voice and studied his face to see if he was being truthful or sarcastic. I settled on the former. “Do you forge artworks?”

“I think I have trusted you with enough incriminating details for one day, Jenny.” His use of this version of my name was an obvious ploy to vex me enough to discontinue any further questioning. It almost worked.

“I will respect it for today. But only because I realise the risk you are taking by trusting me. Not because you are disrespecting me by not calling me by my true name.”