Page 124 of Portrait of an Unknown Woman

“Were any of them genuine?”

“No,” said Magdalena. “Not a single one.”

They were, however, works of breathtaking beauty and quality, executed by a forger of immense talent and technical skill. He had not copied existing paintings. Instead, he had cleverly imitated the style of an Old Master artist to create a picture that could be passed off as newly rediscovered. All of the canvases, stretchers, and frames were appropriate to their period and school, as were the pigments. Which meant that none of the paintings could ever be exposed as forgeries by a scientific evaluation.

“Did Phillip tell you the forger’s name that night?”

“Of course not. Phillip has never told me his name.”

“You don’t really expect us to believe that, do you?”

“Why would he tell me such a thing? Besides, the forger’s name wasn’t relevant to what Phillip wanted me to do.”

“Which was?”

“Sell the paintings, of course.”

“But why you?”

“Whynotme? I was a trained art historian and a former drugdealer who knew how to walk into a room with a quarter-ounce of cocaine and walk out with the money. I was also the daughter of an art dealer from Seville.”

“A perfect point of entry for the European market.”

“And a perfect place to take a few forged paintings out for a test drive,” she added.

“But why would a wildly successful businessman like Phillip Somerset want to get mixed up in art fraud?”

“You tell me, Mr. Allon.”

“Because the businessman wasn’t so wildly successful after all.”

Magdalena nodded in agreement. “Masterpiece Art Ventures was a bust from the beginning. Even when art prices were soaring, Phillip was never able get the trading formula right. He needed some sure bets to show his investors a profit.”

“And you agreed to this scheme?”

“Not at first.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Another two million dollars in my account at Masterpiece Art Ventures.”

Magdalena returned to Seville a month later and took delivery of the first six paintings from New York. The shipping documents described them as Old Master works of minimal value, all produced by later followers or imitators of the masters themselves. But when Magdalena offered them for sale at her father’s gallery, she inflated the attributions to “circle of” or “workshop of,” which increased the value of the works substantially. Within a few weeks, all six paintings had been snatched up by her father’s wealthy Seville clientele. Magdalena gave him a 10 percent cut of the profits and transferred the rest of the money to Masterpiece Art Ventures through an account in Liechtenstein.

“How much?”

“A million and a half.” Magdalena shrugged. “Chump change.”

After the initial test run, the paintings began arriving from New York at a steady clip. There were too many to sell through the gallery, so Magdalena established herself as a Madrid-based runner. She sold one of the canvases—a biblical scene purportedly by the Venetian painter Andrea Celesti—to Spain’s most prominent Old Master dealer, who in turn sold it to a museum in the American Midwest.

“Where it hangs to this day.”

But Phillip soon discovered that it was far easier for Magdalena to simplysellthe paintings back to Masterpiece Art Ventures—at wildly inflated prices, with no actual money changing hands. He then moved the works in and out of Masterpiece’s portfolio through private phantom sales of his own, using an array of corporate shell entities. Each time a painting supposedly changed hands, it increased in value.

“By the end of 2010, Masterpiece Art Ventures claimed to control more than four hundred million dollars’ worth of art. But a significant percentage of those paintings were worthless fakes, the value of which had been artificially inflated with fictitious sales.”

But Phillip was not content with the scale of the operation, she continued. He wanted to show explosive growth in the value of Masterpiece’s portfolio and higher earnings for his investors. Meeting that goal required the introduction of additional paintings to the market. Until then they had limited themselves primarily to middle-tier works, but Phillip was eager to raise the stakes. The current distribution network wouldn’t do; he wanted a premier gallery in a major art world hub. Magdalena found such a gallery in Paris, on the rue la Boétie.

“Galerie Georges Fleury.”