Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [104]
Searle had Mibus’s paintings and documents carted back to his office. They would be rich and substantial material for the trial, but Drewe would undoubtedly be a skilled liar on the stand, able to confabulate on the high wire without a net. Even under the most searing cross-examination, the detective couldn’t imagine Drewe being pressured or tricked into admitting any wrongdoing on his part, so the case had to be watertight.
Then Searle got a call from Rene Gimpel. The dealer told him about the fake 1938 Nicholson watercolor he’d bought. Searle retrieved it and asked Myatt to identify it.
“I didn’t paint that,” Myatt said.
Searle was dumbfounded. The work’s provenance had Drewe’s fingerprints all over it. Was there another forger involved?
Searle had spent most of his career undercover, in the shadows. Seldom had he put together a case from scratch. Four months into the investigation he had accumulated some forty paintings, each with its own attendant bundle of names, receipts, documents, and stamps. Organised Crime Unit staffers had begun to refer to his office as Aladdin’s Cave. Searle didn’t find that particularly funny. He feared the investigation was in danger of falling apart. He had witnesses and suspects in New York, Canada, France, and Sweden, but he still needed to interview dozens more in his own backyard. Moreover, he needed the cooperation of dealers and experts who had bought or authenticated pieces. They would all have to testify in open court. Some were cooperating, but others refused, saying it was bad for business. He was also running out of time. The longer he poked around, the more likely that news of his investigation would leak and Drewe would go underground and cover his tracks.
To make matters worse, he was now looking at the possibility that a second forger was involved. He begged his supervisors for reinforcements. He argued that in light of Drewe’s corruption of the archives, the case was a matter of national importance. The cultural patrimony was at stake.
Finally, Searle’s request was granted, and in January 1996 four members of the Organised Crime Unit made their way to Aladdin’s Cave. Among them was a career investigator named Miki Volpe,34 a “Geordie,” or native of northeast England, from the predominately working-class city of Newcastle. Volpe, who pronounces “father” as “fatha” and “have” as “hev” and was brought up in a family of musicians, had worked the rough side in the past. He’d gone after car thieves, murderers, Chinese white slavers, Serbian gold diggers, Russian credit-card scammers, and Croats peddling bargain weaponry. With patience and a good deal of muscle, he’d smashed the strongholds of London’s “snakehead” traffickersin human flesh and pulled smuggled immigrants out of run-down hotels to safety. On the Kidnap Squad he’d rescued two ransomed Frenchmen who had been tied up and left for dead in a cupboard.
Volpe had never heard the word provenance, but he knew how to build a case.
31
THE FOX
Miki Volpe took the early train from Essex, where he lived with his girlfriend, and got to the office in half an hour. Searle was waiting for him in a tiny exhibit room lined with shelves interrupted by a pair of windows, one of which looked out on the triangular Scotland Yard sign familiar to anyone who had ever watched a British cop show on television.
“Volpe” is Italian for “fox,” which was appropriate for someone who looked like he’d been prowling outside the henhouse. He had a head of curly hair, a stubbly beard, and a slight limp from knocking down doors over the years. He smoked a calabash pipe shaped like a question mark, a fitting prop for an experienced interrogator.
Volpe was immediately struck by the volume of material Searle had amassed: more than three thousand