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“The whole thing’s her fault. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” said Drewe, adding that Palmer was under pressure to keep the association alive. “She’s no scholar, and she has a terrible reputation.”

In their excitement, the three men were talking loudly, and one of the staffers came over and asked them to keep their voices down. They went outside, and Drewe presented Bartos with the official report from Art Research, along with an invoice for £1,140.

For all that he was overjoyed by the results, Bartos considered this an excessive sum.

“It’s the standard hourly fee,” Drewe said politely.

The report included several provenance documents, but Bartos was surprised to see that some of the research concerned another, unrelated Giacometti. Why should he have to pay for that? He offered Drewe £400, which Drewe promptly accepted. They walked to an ATM, and once Bartos handed the cash over, Drewe signed the invoice and left.

Bartos felt like celebrating. He was staying with an old friend in London, an investment banker with a good art collection, so he stopped at a pay phone and invited him out to dinner. The banker told him that someone named Jonathan Searle had called from Scotland Yard asking to speak to Bartos, and that he better get back to him right away.

Two hours later Bartos was sitting at the Yard with Searle and Volpe. The detectives didn’t pull any punches. Why was Bartos looking at forged provenances? “We know the painting’s a fake, and you know it’s a fake,” Volpe said. “And we know you’ve been trying to get it authenticated by Palmer.”

“What are you talking about?” Bartos shouted. “I’ve spent a lot of money on this painting. I’m out thousands of dollars, and I can’t sell the damn thing because of this woman. I came here to get to the bottom of it.”

Bartos pulled a stack of notes, receipts, and faxes out of his briefcase, along with the original invoice from Sheila Maskell, the runner who had sold him the work. The two cops glanced through the material and realized that Bartos had been duped like all the others.

Searle walked him through the evidence and showed him the catalog Wendy Fish had found. “This is the original O’Hana catalog, Armand,” he said. “Yours is a forgery.” He assured Bartos that if he cooperated and agreed to testify in court, they could put Drewe away. Bartos might even get his money back.

The dealer was shattered. He had spent nearly a year trying to defend the work’s authenticity. While he still considered it the best Giacometti painting he’d ever seen—forgery or not—he had to face facts.

He had been scammed.

Searle and Volpe now had a strong case against Drewe. Searle was pretty sure that the professor had figured out from Goudsmid that he was a suspect. He was probably hiding or destroying evidence right now. It was possible, though, that in his arrogance he might save everything, believing he could talk his way out of it. He might even relish the challenge. In any case, it was time to “spin” Drewe’s home. If there was anyone who could shake him up, it was Miki Volpe.

32

DREWE DESCENDING

They came for Drewe early the next morning. The long-awaited bust was less than optimal for Volpe: up at 5:00 A.M. after a late night, then the drive to the train station for a somnambular trip into the city to meet up at 6:00 on the dot with his sleep-deprived team, and finally, crammed into the Zed car with a single cup of hot tea in his gut, the run past the Hampstead Heath windmill to Drewe’s doorstep in Reigate, burial place of Samuel Palmer, a visionary painter whose style had been crudely mimicked in the 1970s by the avid forger Tom Keating. For insurance, Searle and the rest of the team would be making a simultaneous surprise visit to the home of Drewe’s mother and stepfather in Burgess Hill.

A little after 7:00 A.M. on Wednesday, April 3, 1996, Volpe, Dick Ellis, and four other plainclothes officers pulled into the driveway of Drewe’s suburban nook on Washington Close. It was common knowledge at the Yard that con men could turn nasty when they were cornered,