Vanished Smile (6 page)

Reporters canvassed the opinions of art dealers and museum directors in France, England, and the United States. All gave the same answer. The painting was too famous to ever be sold on the art market for any price. No intelligent thief would take such a risk for a work he could never sell. But what if the thief did not intend to sell the painting?

An intriguing answer came from Joseph Reinach, a member of
les Amis du Louvre
. Paris in 1911 was both the incubator of a radical new art and a collectors’ market for masterworks. Acquisitiveness and its offspring, forgery, were unrestrained. American magnates with a lust for old masters were competing with museums to buy the best art of Europe—and they were winning so often that a group of wealthy Frenchmen had organized the Friends of the Louvre to stanch the flow.

In an interview in
Le Temps
, Reinach said:

Paris newspapers were highly partisan. So many were owned or operated by political groups that a distinction was drawn between “journals of opinion” and “journals of information.” On both left and right, there was a suspicion that the balance of power in Europe had upset Mona Lisa from her secure spot in the Louvre.

Germany under the militaristic Kaiser Wilhelm II was expanding its navy, challenging Britannia's rule of the waves, and playing political chess in the Mediterranean, threatening French control of Morocco. Since July i, when the German gunboat
Panther
reached the Moroccan port of Agadir, France and Germany had been edging toward war. It was a dangerous time for provocative games. The major European nations were bound by close alliances that compelled a collective response—Italy, Germany, and Austria in the Triple Alliance; France, Britain, and Russia in the Triple Entente. A threat to one was a threat to all.

Mona Lisa's disappearance was a conveniently timed distraction. “The news … has caused such a sensation that Parisians for the time being have forgotten the rumors of war,”
The New York Times
reported.

Opposition parties suspected that the government had faked the theft to divert attention from the war threat. The timing seemed too perfect to be coincidence. The story was monopolizing the headlines, allowing time for tempers to cool and war to be postponed. An American in Paris, well connected in art circles, wrote home to his son: “One ingenious French friend told me confidentially that Mona Lisa was not stolen but it was an arrangement to serve as a new sensation
for the public and press to divert attention from the German war scare and that the painting in time would turn up safe and sound.”

Every political persuasion had a scenario. Nationalists suspected that Kaiser Wilhelm and his government had abducted a national treasure to humiliate France. Pro-Germans countered that the devious French had faked the theft not to distract from the war threat but to rouse sentiment against the kaiser.

When police in Bordeaux arrested a young German who matched the description of Mona Lisa's suitor, Germany lodged an official protest. The suspect had not been anywhere near Paris on August 21, and he was released within twenty-four hours. By then a second police incident was ruffling Franco-German relations. Acting on a report from detectives in Cherbourg, Prefect Lépine cabled New York that Mona Lisa was arriving in the United States on the North German Lloyd liner
Kaiser Wilhelm II
.

Saturday, August 26

EVERYONE HAD A THEORY
, but no one had a clue.

Lépine was leaning toward the idea that a ring of expert art thieves was behind the abduction. The operation was too slick to be the work of a lovesick psychotic, a common crook, or any gang of amateurs, and it was too difficult for a single thief. Once Mona Lisa was removed from her frames, anyone could carry her easily, but with her double frames and protective glass, she weighed eighty-seven pounds (thirty-five kilograms).
^∗5
Only a
Goliath could have lifted her off the wall and maneuvered her to the stairway without accomplices.

Lépine appealed to the public for information on anyone seen in the vicinity of the Louvre on the morning of August 21. The response was overwhelming. Thousands sent letters or appeared in person at police precincts and newspaper offices to offer information, tips, or their own theories. If they had shown up in deerstalker hats and plaid cloaks, the desk sergeants and editors would not have been surprised.

Stories of brilliant amateur sleuths who solved cases that stumped the police were making detective fiction a popular new genre, and such favorite British series as Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown appeared regularly in French translation. When Mona Lisa vanished, everyone in France, it seemed, not just Alphonse Bertillon, became a Sherlock Holmes.

The public appeal produced few reliable clues but no shortage of cranks, nuts, and notoriety seekers. A University of London professor, whom the British press dismissed as an ornery iconoclast, railed that the stolen work was “one of the most actively evil pictures ever painted—the embodiment of all evil the painter could imagine put into the most attractive form he could devise.”

A Sorbonne psychology professor warned in
Le Temps
that the thief might be a sexual psychopath who would treat Mona Lisa with “sadistic violence and fetishistic tendresse,” take pleasure in “mutilating, stabbing and defiling” her, then return her when he was “through with her.”

In
Le Figaro
, a historical novelist named Maurice Strauss fingered the infamous art thief Adam Worth, who had stolen Gainsborough's
Duchess of Devonshire
in 1876. “He has taken up the game again at our expense. The theft of
la Joconde
bears his signature,” Strauss wrote. “There is only one man in the world who would have acted with such tranquil audacity
and so much dexterity. It was Worth.” The police were intrigued. Because the Gainsborough had eventually been recovered in America, U.S. customs officers increased security on the northern border, anticipating that Mona Lisa might be smuggled through Canada. There was one sticking point. Adam Worth had been dead for nine years.

Numerous letter writers claiming second sight recounted bizarre dreams that revealed where the painting was hidden.
Le Matin
enlisted two clairvoyants in the hunt and promised a reward “to anyone who by somnambulism, spiritualism or other occult means indicates the identity of the thief or the whereabouts of Mona Lisa.” Gazing into her crystal ball, Madame Elise prophesied that the seductress had come to no good end—Mona Lisa had been destroyed. Madame Albanda da Silva, after studying the position of the planets at the time of the theft, swore that the painting was still in the Louvre, and she described the abductor as looking strangely like a bird, with a voice like a crow's, dark hair as fine as feathers, and an ostrich neck.

Tips poured in from all parts of Europe. Sûreté detectives were in Belgium following a tip that Mona Lisa was concealed in a freight train passing through Namur, Liege, and Brussels, en route to Holland. In Leon, two foreigners were arrested after the lady was discovered in their luggage. The men protested their innocence. They were tourists who had bought a copy of the missing painting as a souvenir. In Italy, a valuable Mona Lisa copy, painted during Leonardo's lifetime, was stolen from a luxurious villa on Lake Como.

In Calais, a slight, edgy man with a black mustache waxed at the tips took the Channel packet to Dover. He arrived in London, carrying all his worldly goods in a small-to medium-sized white wooden case, twenty-four by thirty-five inches, and appeared without an appointment at the Bond Street showroom of Duveen Brothers.

At a time when European art dealers were earning fortunes building collections for American tycoons, none were more powerful or successful than the Duveens. Brothers Joseph and Henry had a third clandestine partner, Bernard Berenson. A connoisseur and cultural snob, Berenson was a tiny man with a “tremendous excess of the ‘I.’”
^∗6
In his ambition to cultivate elegance and wealth, he acquired a Brahmin wife, the villa I Tatti in Florence, and a secret paymaster. For thirty years, Berenson was on the Duveens’ books. The connoisseur and the dealers detested one another and made one another wealthy, profiting enormously from an alliance based on mutual greed and mistrust. As a team, no art brokers rivaled them. Duveen Brothers had offices in London, New York, and Paris. Profits were as high as 75 percent. In 1909 the Paris office alone realized $13 million (more than $290 million today).

Henry Duveen was in the Bond Street showroom when the stranger came in and insisted on seeing him alone and at once on “a very important matter.” Duveen was immediately wary. He did not like the look of the man.

“Will you give me your word of honor that you will never reveal what I am going to tell you?” the man asked.

“Of course, of course,” Duveen answered.

The dealer's brusqueness seemed to unnerve the man, and sidling closer, he whispered a warning. “If you don't, I and my friends will know how to deal with you. I have the
Gioconda
here in London. Will you buy it?”

The art broker was speechless. This stranger—“a seedy-looking foreigner,” in Duveen's eyes—was the man police on three continents were hunting.

“Well, what do you say? What figure will you give me?” the man demanded.

The Duveens had not become wealthy by being scrupulous. In the business of buying and selling art, a dubious provenance was no deterrence, but Henry Duveen wanted no part in such a sensational, highly publicized affair as the Mona Lisa heist. He did the first thing he could think of. He laughed as if he did not believe the story and walked away.

The stranger, dismissed so rudely in London, crossed the Channel again and made his way from Calais to northern Italy, where the American millionaire collector J. Pierpont Morgan was vacationing.

AMERICAN PORTS WERE ON HIGH ALERT
. Customs officers, Pinkerton detectives, and Treasury Department agents were boarding every incoming ship that had made a port of call in France. In New York Harbor, they had searched the
Oceanic
, arriving from Southampton via Cherbourg with seven hundred passengers, and the
Provence
, which had departed from Le Havre.

Kaiser Wilhelm II
was due to arrive in New York shortly. It had set out from Bremen, also making stops at Southampton and Cherbourg. Two suspects were listed on the ship's manifest. One was a New Yorker who embarked in Cherbourg, accompanied by a small, dark man. They were carrying two framed canvases with a wooden panel painting sequestered between them. French police had boarded the ship. The small man turned out to be a porter; the other was an American artist from the West Side of Manhattan. Although the paintings appeared to be his own compositions, the artist remained under suspicion.

The second suspect was a wealthy American dealer and
collector. His presence in Paris when the picture was stolen might have been coincidental, but he was a close student of Mona Lisa, and French police had kept him under surveillance since the theft.

When the
Kaiser Wilhelm II
docked in New York, customs officers went over the ship from stem to stern and inspected every piece of luggage. There was no trace of either Mona Lisa or the suspicious dealer-collector, but the investigation raised a new alarm in France: Was Mona Lisa smiling on an American millionaire?

ONCE THE FEAR WAS VOICED
, sentiment deepened that such a vanishing act could only have been conjured by an American collector with the bravura, the wealth, the sense of entitlement, and the near-religious conviction that everything had a price.

The New York Times
was soon reporting: “The belief is very general that the Florentine masterpiece is now in America. So certain is the press that
la Joconde
has gone to America, that articles are appearing … discussing the steps the French government would have to take to regain the national treasure if it had been smuggled across the ocean to America.”

When Parisians said
“Cherchez I'Américain”
—Find the American—J. P. Morgan was the American they thought of first. If anyone had the aura of
droit du seigneur
to claim Mona Lisa for himself, it was Morgan. He was the gold standard of American millionaires. In the East Room of his mansion on Madison Avenue in New York (now the Morgan Library), a sixteenth-century Flemish tapestry hangs over the fireplace. The tapestry is called
The Triumph of Avarice
.

Morgan's own triumphs were legendary. Unlike most American tycoons, he did not have a Horatio Alger biography. Born to wealth and educated in Europe, Morgan had inherited millions, which he multiplied many times until he had more money than the U.S. Mint. Morgan was a one-man Federal Reserve before there was a Fed. When a national depression loomed, he bailed out the government, staving off a financial collapse. Ten years later, he did it again, and he still had ample funds to indulge his passion for collecting. Everything about him was impressive—his ambition, his art, his fortune, his physical size, his enormous eggplant nose (he suffered from a condition called rhinophyma), even the black cigars he chomped.

In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, making money was an open game with few rules, and there was no income tax to cut into fortunes. For every J. P. Morgan or Andréw Mellon, raised in wealth and well educated, there were two or more self-made millionaires. H. E. Huntington started as a logroller. P. A. B. Widener was a butcher from Philadelphia. Samuel H. Kress made his fortune in the five-and-dime. Frick and Carnegie were coal men. The diffident bachelor Benjamin Altman parlayed a pushcart into a fashionable Fifth Avenue emporium. Each had his eccentricities. Altman never liked to buy a painting unless he could pronounce the artist's name. He had a weakness for Renaissance madonnas.