Chapter 19
Emma
No funeral is held for Stella Claire Swanson. Her death is never mentioned in any of the papers in Paris that make it to the island by boat. I think back to our drug-fueled night with Sébastien and his boyfriend, how they had no idea she was dead. The Swansons haven’t told anyone about her demise.
I wonder if the lack of attention bothers her. All she’s said is, “That’s what you get for being an excellent shadow for so many years. To be fair, I’ve outlived anyone who would possibly care to celebrate me. The only ones left are the ones who despise me.”
We’re walking and talking now, going over the plans Stella hastily outlined yesterday, but still need way more clarification.
“I just don’t think we can possibly steal two paintings from the Orsay!” Colette declares, her voice pitched somewhere between panic and fascination.
“I have no doubt you can do it,” Stella replies with the casual confidence of someone suggesting we try a new restaurant, not commit grand larceny.
It’s exactly what she said yesterday when she laid out this portion of her plan, the part where we mastermind an intricate heist. “I have no doubt that any highly skilled woman could do it. Did you know that the majority of art heists in history have been done by men? And they nearly always make a grave mistake, yet many of them still often don’t get caught. You won’t make any mistakes.”
“There’s a reason women don’t steal art.
Women have always had more to lose,” I say, mentally tallying the potential downsides—prison, poverty, banishment from the country I’ve come to love.
Who will pay for my mother’s care if I get locked away?
But then again, if I don’t agree to Stella’s terms, how will I pay for my mother’s care moving forward even if I’m free?
Yes, Stella wants us to steal two paintings from the Musée d’Orsay, two paintings she claims are fakes, she just has to prove it. And if she can prove it, that’s how she’ll take down the Swanson empire and destroy her stepson.
It’s also how she will reveal the biggest fraud the art world has ever known.
It’s confusing. So damn confusing. We’ve had her repeat it many times for us and she does it again on today’s walk.
What Louis Swanson has allegedly done, according to Stella, is fairly brilliant and massively illegal, not to mention morally bankrupt.
His scheme exploits the fact that fine art from the “great” artists has become a commodity for both the ultra-wealthy and the world’s most cunning criminals.
I hadn’t known the extent of it until Stella laid it all out for us.
There is art that’s sold through auction houses in public-facing events, often used for rich people to compete with one another and burnish their image when they donate their $50 million purchase to a museum.
And then there’s the shadow playground, where the ultra-wealthy buy and sell art through trusts and shell companies.
The buyers and sellers have enormous flexibility in determining the value, making it perfect for money laundering, tax evasion, and using art as collateral in the trade of illegal goods.
“Say you want to buy fifty million dollars of automatic weapons for your unsanctioned militia,” Colette tries to explain.
“You can do it with a single Monet and cash never has to change hands; there is no bank record or paper trail. The art-crime business is estimated to be worth around six billion dollars. Most things that are bought and sold in it are small enough to fit in a carry-on suitcase because they’re tough for customs agents to spot, and they can easily be converted into cash.
” The black market for art is one of Colette’s personal fascinations.
According to Stella, this shadow art market is mostly controlled by the Swansons. It is an open secret, and they aren’t by any means the only ones operating in it. That part of it is not fraud per se. It’s underhanded capitalism for sure, but still within a legal gray area.
“But my stepson got too greedy, if you can imagine that,” Stella explains. “For the past five years he has been double-dipping. And I believe it has made him more than a billion dollars.”
“What do you mean by double-dipping?” Colette asks, though she has a better handle on it than Lucie and I do.
“Nearly every museum in the world has something donated by the Swanson family. Those donations are an incredible tax write-off for the family. Done well, they allow the company to avoid paying taxes altogether. Everything becomes profit for them. But Louis realized that the museums rarely check the authenticity of the paintings. Why would they? The Swanson family authenticates nearly everything. So he’s hired a small gang of incredible replicators to re-create the paintings he donates to the museum. ”
“But what happens with the real paintings?” I ask.
“The real paintings have been bought and sold in the shadow market.”
“Where are they?” I ask, struggling to process the scale of this fraud.
“Stored in climate-controlled chambers and bunkers. Kept in palaces in the Middle East and hidden within safes. They’re often used as collateral in massive illegal transactions involving the buying and selling of weapons, as Colette said, but also for political bribery, drug trafficking, dodgy real estate transactions, or just to store wealth for Russian robber barons.
The Swansons have long sold these criminals their art and then washed their hands of what happened with it next.
Louis didn’t. He injected himself deeper into the black market and offered to move those paintings around, to aid with buying and reselling them between the criminals, helping them to put the art up as collateral, all for a very high fee.
“And with the forgeries in the museums, he could offer some of the most expensive paintings in the world to these kinds of buyers, making the fees even higher. And when it’s time for the painting to be properly sold back on the public market, Louis asks for his donation back from the museum so no one will ever be the wiser about fakes hanging on the walls of the world’s most revered institutions for years while criminals traded the real ones between themselves.
Plus, he got a tax write-off on the donations. ”
“But don’t you only get a write-off if you donate a painting to a museum’s collection forever?” Colette asks.
“It is a short-term donation,” Stella says. “So he doesn’t get to write off the entire amount of the painting, just a fraction, but it’s still often a million or so. Louis structured a scheme that is more like a lease. He created the model himself.”
“And you knew about this?” Lucie asks.
“I wasn’t supposed to.” Her tone suggests this knowledge has been a burden. “Maxwell found out about it a few years ago. He tried to stop it, but he was too late.”
“How did Maxwell feel about it?”
“He hated it. But in the end he was terrified of his son and then he died. You know Louis was the only one in the room when he passed,” she says quietly. It’s not quite an accusation, but close enough.
“Do you think he killed him?” Lucie gasps.
“I wouldn’t put it past the little bastard, but I have absolutely no proof.”
“But why do it at all?” Colette asks in disbelief. “You’re billionaires.”
“Louis is terribly overleveraged. He has two ex-wives to keep happy and quiet, and about a dozen failed subsidiaries. On paper Swanson is flush. In reality, not so much. Plus, in the end, he saw an opportunity and he took it. That’s the Swanson way.”
So here is what she wants us to do. She wants us to steal two masterpieces from the Orsay museum. A Van Gogh and a Renoir. She then wants to take them to experts to prove they are fakes, to blow the whistle on the Swansons’ fraud and her stepson.
“I have people willing to examine the paintings and call out the forgeries, but they need access to the paintings to make sure I’m right before going public,” Stella says.
“They’ll do a material analysis using X-ray fluorescence to identify pigments and their chemical composition and conduct infrared tests to reveal underlying sketches and changes.
” Her knowledge of this science is breathtaking.
“And they can’t do any of this under normal circumstances without going through the family,” Colette correctly guesses.
“Exactly. No one will ever go up against the Swanson family unless they know they will be one hundred percent correct. But there are vested interests from many parties in taking them down. You don’t become what they’ve become without making a world of enemies.”
“An art heist!” Lucie is a bit overexcited about the idea.
“Have you ever thought about how to do it, Emma?” Stella asks as we approach the medieval Vieux Chateau perched dramatically above the sea. She settles onto the stone wall overlooking the crumbling structure. “I know you have,” she prods me.
Every artist or art lover has thought at some point about how they would steal a painting from a famous museum. If they tell you they haven’t, they’re lying.
I think about it almost every time I walk into the Orsay. In reality, a heist would be nothing like what you see in the movies with the scuttling through secret tunnels, breaking through skylights, setting off smoke bombs.
Some art thieves will cut a painting out of its canvas with a penknife, roll it up in a coat, and simply walk out with it.
One famous thief explained in detail exactly how he did it.
He would take the painting off the wall, turn it over, and place it face-down on a display case or the floor.
He used his Swiss Army knife to manipulate the clips or nails on the back until the frame was detached, then he would put it back on the wall.
Empty frames, the man said, were his calling card.
But we don’t want to leave behind an empty frame. We don’t want anyone to know the paintings are gone. We simply want to borrow them and buy some time to have them checked out. We’ll need a decoy for the decoys.