My wife and I recently spent a few days in Boston and Brookline, Massachusetts. In Brookline, we ate our breakfasts at an Israeli-owned kosher restaurant, stocked up on kosher food at a Jewish grocery to take with us to Vermont, visited the Israel Bookshop, and at Kolbo, replaced a serving plate broken this past year. Brookline is a suburb located west of Boston. Although, technically, it is not part of Boston proper, it is considered a part of Greater Boston. It is where my wife Beth grew up.
She attended The Winsor School, a private, all-girls college preparatory school in Boston. The school is located in Boston’s Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood and is close to many educational and cultural institutions. One of those is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which we visited. The last time I saw the Gardner was over forty years ago. The museum is not far from where Beth went to school. Sometimes, after school, she would walk to the museum, where students were admitted free, then sit on the steps leading to the garden and do her homework. I can’t imagine a better place in which to do it.
For both of us, the Gardner’s outside had changed radically since our last visits, with good reason. Many of the changes enhance the building and museum’s security. A terrible theft occurred at the Gardner in March 1990. Two men, disguised as policemen, entered the museum in the early morning. They stole thirteen works of art worth $500 million dollars. Among the stolen works were Degas, Manet, Rembrandt, and Vermeer pieces. They have never been recovered, and no one has been charged with the crime. The FBI has been working on the case for decades but to no avail. The Museum is currently offeering a $10 million dollar reward for information leading to the lost art’s recovery.
The museum’s insides were much as I remembered them, a bit of jumble of art spread over multiple floors. It’s hard to think of a single person being able to collect so much of such quality. The only other museum I have visited of equal uniqueness and breadth was the collection at the Barnes Foundation when it was housed in suburban Philadelphia, a short walking distance from the home where Beth and I lived.
Whenever I read about a great work of art being stolen, I wonder about the thief or the person for whom the thief stole it. Consider the Vermeer looted from the Gardner; one would never be able to show it to anyone or display it in a public venue. The work is very famous and easily identifiable. What would be the motive for stealing it then, except, perhaps, some mental illness in which one desires something so much that they will go to any length to acquire it and, once they have done so, rest in their knowledge of having the thing and being able to view it whenever they want for as long as they wish. Who knows? Maybe the fact that no one else can see it is part of the pleasure. I’m baffled.
In thinking about the theft from the Gardner, I am reminded of a book I am reading by Margery Allingham titled The White Cottage Mystery. The book is one of her early works, published in 1928. It was written before she created her famous detective, Albert Campion. The book is written in a simple style in a classic detective story format. For example, not long after the murder is discovered, the suspects are identified and interviewed, one after the other, each in a separate chapter. Every suspect has good motivation for murdering the victim and ostensibly valid reasons for being eliminated from consideration.
Allingham was one of the “Four Queens of British Detective Fiction,” the others being Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh. An early work of Allingham’s, the book is not nearly as complex as her later novels but is nevertheless highly enjoyable. Of the Allingham books my wife has read, The Mystery of the White Cottage is her favorite. I am enjoying it.
The reason I bring the book up is that one of its key characters, a man named Latte Cellini, flees England for France, specifically Paris. There, we learn something mysterious about him. What I am referring to is recorded in Chapter 6, “The Explanation of M. le Gris.” It turns out that Cellini may be in the employ of a society of thieves headquartered in Paris. Let me share the description of the organization and what it does, and you will understand why I bring it up in the context of Beth and my visit to the Gardner. M. le Gris is speaking.
There has been for many years in this city the headquarters of a society of thieves. The police know of it, naturally, but always their hands have been tied…..This ‘society’ is composed of several American millionaires, one English nobleman, an Austrian whose name is famous all over the world, three Frenchmen, and one woman, whose names are so illustrious that even among friends it would be unwise to mention them. Besides–even we do not know the entire member roll.
Do you see where I’m headed with this? If not, this should tell you. Le Gris continues.
This society has one great peculiarity….It never steals anything that can be bought….The members are all collectors of rare jewellery and pictures. If the object desired by any one of them is on the market, then he is bound to buy it, paying whatever may be asked for it without question; but if, on the other hand, the treasure is not to be got by just means and he is still anxious to get it, he calls in the help of this society, and it is obtained for him.
So what happens? Le Gris concludes: Wherever it is…it is found and removed. Nothing can save it.
OK. I need to be clear. I am not saying this is what happened at the Gardner. I’m not figuring out anything that the FBI can’t figure out. But this is an example of where literature can cause us to think about reality differently. Just imagine. What if, somewhere in the world, a person wanted some specific works owned and displayed by a well-known museum that doesn’t want to sell them? The person who wants the art does want to steal and resell it for a profit. No. They want to hold them, look at them, keep them. But they are collectors, not professional thieves. They need experts in the art of theft. They find and hire them; the works are stolen and delivered. End of story. They are not marketed. They are owned once and forever, well, at least till death do them part. It’s such an intriguing thought, captured in fiction by Margery Allingham in 1928, maybe relevant, maybe not, to a theft that happened in Boston in March 1990.
All the best,
Gershon
Gershon Ben-Avraham 