The Icon Thief Read Online Free PDF Page A

sort of way, with a neat fauxhawk and an easy smile, and when Maddy went over to meet him, the warmth in her greeting wasentirely genuine. Although he wasn’t exactly her type, he was eager, ambitious, and a phone clerk at Sotheby’s.
    “I went to see the installation last year,” Tanya was saying a quarter of an hour later. “It’s in its own room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When you go inside, you see an antique wooden door set into a brick archway. At first, it looks like there’s nothing else there. But if you go closer to the door, you see light coming through a pair of eyeholes. And if you look inside—”
    “—you see a headless woman on a bed of dry grass,” Maddy said. They were seated together at a table in the garden, among the wisteria and tin deer. “She’s nude, and her face is missing or obscured. In one hand, she’s holding a lamp. There’s a forest with a moving waterfall in the background. Duchamp built the figure himself and covered it in calfskin. The illusion is perfect.”
    Tanya took a reddened sip of cranberry vodka. “And it felt like a betrayal. Duchamp’s entire career had been devoted to conceptual art. He appropriated existing icons or objects and used them for his own purposes. The readymades. The urinal. The shovel on the ceiling. But his final work was grindingly representational. It made people wonder if he’d been toying with them all along.”
    The phone clerk leaned back in his café chair. He was wearing a pale pink shirt with a semi-spread collar, the lapels of his suit as peaked as a devil’s ears. “So what’s it supposed to mean?”
    “Nobody knows,” Maddy said. “Duchamp worked on it in secret for at least twenty years, claiming all the while that he’d given up art for chess. It was revealed only after his death, when it was installed at the museum without a word of explanation. And this new study upsets theestablished chronology. Previously, the earliest known study for
Étant Donnés
dated from the late forties, but the evidence suggests that this picture was painted more than thirty years earlier.”
    “Although it’s hard to be sure,” Tanya said. “It was found in Budapest, wasn’t it?”
    The clerk hesitated, martini in hand. “Yes. I can’t give you the name of the seller, of course, but he’s a legitimate dealer with a long history with the firm. Apparently he was browsing in an antique store, looking for nothing in particular, when he saw the painting hanging by a rack of samovars. The owner said it had been part of a larger consignment, but he didn’t know where it was from—”
    “And nobody knows where it went.” Maddy glanced at the clerk. “Or almost no one.”
    The clerk smiled at her over the rim of his glass. “Even if I wanted to tell you, I don’t have access to that information.”
    “Come on,” Maddy said, suppressing an urge to strangle the clerk with his own pin-dot tie. “I know how the system works. There must be a copy of his passport or driver’s license on file.”
    The clerk shook his head. “No more than two people know the buyer’s identity. It isn’t even something that the auctioneer would need to be told. You know how it is. Nobody wants to be responsible for leaking the name—”
    “Of course.” Maddy paused. She sensed that the clerk wanted to tell her something, but there was no need to force the issue. A year ago, the failure of her gallery in Chelsea had been avidly dissected at Sotheby’s, creating a peculiar, illusory intimacy. It left perfect strangers withthe impression that they knew her, which made them more likely to reveal something of themselves.
    Finally, the clerk lowered his voice. “Listen. I’ve seen the bidder before. A few weeks ago, I was pulling a file at client services when I saw him talking to a girl at the front desk. He took a huge stack of Russian art catalogs, and before he left, he
tipped
her fifty bucks. Typical Russian.”
    “At least they tip well.” Maddy