Stolen Masterpiece Tracker by Thomas McShane & Dary Matera

Author:Thomas McShane & Dary Matera [McShane, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781569804131
Publisher: Barricade Books

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THE GUNSLINGERS TAKE THE GUNSLINGER

I WAS BUSY doing research at the Frick Museum’s library one afternoon when a beautiful woman with an angelic face and chestnut hair sat down at my table. When I could tear my eyes away from her, I stole a few glances at what she was perusing, searching for a conversation point. She spread open a large book that displayed a reproduction of a painting by Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio, a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian pre-Baroque artist who lived a rowdy life. A hotheaded gambler and carouser, Caravaggio carried a sword and a dagger, which he used to literally cut a swath through Rome.

Before his time was up, Caravaggio had built a criminal record nearly as impressive as his masterful Catholic-themed religious paintings, stunning creations that focused on human movement and realism.

Among art connoisseurs, the woman’s action was the equivalent of dropping a sensually scented pair of black panties. I broke the ice and found that we had a lot in common. We were both attorneys interested in ancient art, although I was more G-man than lawyer. She knew about the headline-making stolen paintings I’d tracked, and seemed fascinated with my melding masterpieces with master thieves.

Aside from being a classy knockout in a Faye Dunaway The Eyes of Laura Mars way she was a French Canadian from Montreal with an accent that made my heart flutter. This was in 1978 before the Fogg Museum caper soured me on our neighbors to the north.

We met again a few days later at the bar inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After that, our busy careers got in the way of the budding springtime romance, and we drifted apart.

She called a month later, but unfortunately had business, not pleasure, on her mind. She lived in a nice apartment building on York Avenue and Seventy-second Street in Manhattan. In her soft French accent, she told me that there was a great deal of suspicious activity going on in and around a unit down the hall from her. Strange men kept passing her doorway late at night carrying paintings wrapped in brown paper.

Most people would have said “packages,” but this lady knew her stuff and identified them as paintings. By the way they were gingerly transported, she suspected they were extremely valuable.

It was certainly worth checking—if only to drop by her place in the process. Those caddish thoughts were soon cast aside as my bloodhound nature took over. Everything she described screamed of a major heist.

I had a friend, Tommy Hagen, who knew her part of town inside out. He ran a lumberyard near Coney Island, the once-glorious City of Lights amusement park that was badly showing its age prior to yet another much needed renovation. Tommy furnished the wood needed to made backroom gambling tables, among other nefarious things, and through that had wired himself into everything shady going on in the area—mob activities, prostitution, drugs, and crap games.

“What do you know about the building on Seventy-second Street?” I asked.

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