“Don’t say that to Ken Sobel. When did that theft take place?”
“In the 1990s. Duncan was sentenced in 2012, I believe.”
“What about this Casamassima guy?”
“He appears to be a thief of convenience. Like I said, the cemetery was in the neighborhood. I don’t think it’s likely that he’d travel upstate to steal. And even less likely that he’d bother replacing the stolen windows with fakes. Plus since the original case was solved and they were exposed, all eyes are on both of them.”
“Sometimes old habits are hard to break. How was the case solved?”
“I don’t know the ins and outs of the investigation but I do know that an FBI informant posed as a hired thief. Graveyard thefts are relatively common. Now if you want to go into actual art thefts, there are lots to choose from: mostly items taken from museums and homes. They also dwarf in size and scope our cemetery break-in.”
“Give me an example.”
“Let me pull up my notes.” Shuffling over the line. “Okay. Here goes. The most famous art theft in this area was paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.”
“Is that the one where they still have the empty picture frames hanging on the walls?”
“I’m impressed, Old Man. How’d you know that?”
“It’s called reading the paper. I also remember getting the notice over the lines when I was in LAPD. When did the Gardner theft take place?”
“That was also in the nineties. Thieves posed as police and tied up the guards and walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars of artwork: a Manet, a Vermeer, several works by Degas, and Rembrandt’s only known seascape. I don’t see this having any connection with our case.”
“I agree with you. Anything else that’s vaguely similar … a theft from an odd place?”
“I did find one theft that was more our scale. And it’s still unsolved. But it’s also very old.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Hold on … okay … here we go. It took place twenty-five years ago in Marylebone, Rhode Island, about an hour away from Greenbury. Four mosaics were taken from the iconography of St. Stephen’s, a Russian Orthodox church. The mosaics were fashioned after the ones at the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. Would you like to know about Ravenna, Italy?”
“First I’d like to know what an iconography is.”
“Oh, sure … you know that most churches are laid out like crosses.”
“Yeah, the transept, nave, and apse … I do crossword puzzles.”
“Okay. On the transept wall—that’s the wall that forms the shorter end of the cross—leading up to the nave where the priest leads the service, there are often images of the saints or the Madonna or Jesus. It can be statues, gold work, bas-relief, oil paintings, and in this case, they were mosaics. Would you like to hear about Ravenna now?”
“Sure.”
“Let me get my notes … here we go. Around 400 Common Era, there were essentially two parts to the Roman Empire—a western Rome that was under siege by the Ostrogoths and an eastern Rome that still had its territories in eastern Europe and the Levant. Justinian along with his general Belisarius recaptured and reunited a large part of the Roman Empire. But Justinian was also a religious autocrat and that resulted in a schism with the pope in Rome. So Justinian’s solution was to move the capital of the western Roman Empire to Ravenna, Italy. The city was influenced more by Venice—then a city-state—than by Rome. Venice, in turn, was way more influenced by Byzantine Christianity than Roman Christianity because Venice did its primary trade down the Adriatic to Greece and Turkey.
“At Ravenna, inside the Church of St. Vitale, there are these incredible mosaics done in Byzantine style, influenced by the masterpieces in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which he rebuilt as well. The tile work in Ravenna was commissioned by Justinian and his coruling wife, Theodora. Their faces are on the models in the mosaics and she is featured almost as much as Justinian was. And—point of information—neither one of the Roman rulers ever lived in Ravenna as its capital.
“There’s a point to all this rambling. A lot of art nouveau was influenced by the incredible tile work of this period. So it’s not uncommon that tile workers in the Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox churches at the turn of the twentieth century would model their works with Ravenna or Hagia Sophia in mind, only they’d throw in an art nouveau riff. These particular mosaic icons were the work of a Russian artisan named Nikolai Petroshkovich who had worked on all the Romanovs’ palaces—Peterhof, the Catherine Palace, the Hermitage—doing restorations. He immigrated to New York in 1910 when he saw which way the winds of discontent were blowing. The icono-graphy in the church was considered a prime example of art nouveau mosaic work done in the Byzantine style. And it was a major heartbreak to the church when it was stolen.”
A long pause.
McAdams said, “I’m done unless you want to know more history about Justinian and Theodora.”
“No, I’m fine for now. I’m just thinking …” A long pause. “We are interested in this case because … it took place around the same geographical area and a break-in involved a theft from an unusual place—a church and a graveyard—not a museum or the home of an art collector.”
“And they both involve art nouveau items.”
“Right … that’s good, McAdams. And the church case was never solved?”
“I haven’t found it on the Internet. I’ll delve a little further. What are you thinking?”
“It could be someone local who’s paying for stolen art. But if the cases are related, it’s someone who has been collecting for personal use over many years. We’re not talking museum thefts, we’re talking thefts that would go under the radar. Someone who started stealing in his twenties through forties and would now be between his fifties and seventies.”
“And still active.”
“Someone with champagne taste on a beer budget. Like an art historian, a curator, or maybe a professor.” Decker paused. “Maybe an art history prof at Littleton because it’s an art college. But first I have to rule out the family. And that will take a while.”
“Take all the time you want. Nothing is happening here.”
“McAdams, could you find out who the detectives were on the case? If they had a few local suspects in mind, they can tell us what roads to travel.”
“Well, whatever roads they traveled were bad ones because the case wasn’t solved. Besides, I didn’t find anything about the detectives on the Internet.”
“That’s why you need to call up Marylebone and get the names. Then I’ll call up the old-timers and pump them for info. I can relate better than you.”
“That’s for sure. You know if these guys are still alive, they must be like eighty.”
“Haven’t you heard, McAdams? Eighty is the new sixty.”
After walking through a sally port, Decker and Rina walked into a mirrored-wall gallery fronted by display cases filled with gems, jewelry, and objets d’art. A twig-thin blonde of forty was perusing the wares, her face and eyes registering indifference at the