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Portrait of a Killing
A true story of power, art and crime in France

Chapter 3 : One Man's Bargain 
is Another Man's Sellout

I don't believe it, thought Eric Turquin.

The pleasant, pale, close-cropped good looks of the French-born Old Masters department chief for Sotheby's were crowned by a dark pompadour, and his small face usually bore an affable but sharply intelligent smile. It was frozen now, over the catalogue for Christie's July 5 sale.

There it was, the same Murillo that Suzanne de Canson had offered him at Monaco, France's playland principality on the Côte d'Azur, in June 1984. Turquin remembered that meeting, a strange and disappointing experience. It took place in a gigantic, crumbling, onetime luxury building, like something out of a Ridley Scott sci-fi picture, complete with a mossy arboretum under a massive, filthy skylight. The apartment was clean but somber, crammed with antiques. The couple who owned the place were clearly seeking a commission on the sale of the Murillo. De Canson looked like one of the pieces in their collection - old, but of no special distinction, wearing worn clothes and no makeup, let alone jewels, and calling herself a baroness.

He wanted the Murillo the moment she showed him a slide of it. But he was a careful professional, and the first step was to ensure that this bizarre little noblewoman was its real owner. He had checked the Catalogo Critico of Angulo Iñiguez before this rendezvous, and he was perfectly aware that the last known owner in this picture's provenance was a French baron. Adopting a friendly manner, he chatted with de Canson, searching for hard facts, trying to see if they could trust each other.

"Sotheby's has handled pictures belonging to me before," she said. She named three Old Masters, all offered at auction in 1981. "Unsuccessfully," she added.

Turquin recalled the pictures. He hadn't known they were hers. He silently wondered where she'd got them.

She told him: Her collection came from her father, a great art dealer, and one of the heirs to the Canson paper fortune.

Turquin was impressed. Every child in France carries a tablet of Canson drawing paper to school.

She bragged: "I was in the Resistance!" She was still a resister, in a way - why, she'd carried her Murillo out of France on a bus, under her arm, just before those dreadful Socialists won the presidential and legislative elections in 1981!

A lot of collectors became smugglers then, Turquin knew. In the 1981 presidential campaign the Socialist candidate, Francois Mitterrand, had pledged to enact a punitive tax on wealth, including artworks. On the night Mitterrand was elected, May 10, 1981, a flood of gold, jewels and paintings swept into Switzerland - just like in 1936, when the Leftist Popular Front's victory drove so much gold across the border overnight that the national Bank of France nearly foundered.

But as it happened, artworks were finally excluded from the Tax on Great Fortunes, on Mitterrand's order. (It was said in Paris that Mitterrand's protégé, Laurent Fabius, had lobbied for that decision. But a counter-rumor held that Fabius pushed for a tax on art, just to prove his Socialist virtue. His family's fortune had been built on dealing artworks.) The baroness de Canson had taken a huge risk for nothing.

"The Murillo is safe now," de Canson said mysteriously, "in a bank vault." No one else could get at it, she said, starting with those evil curators at the Louvre.

"They wrote to me," she confided, "they wanted to buy my picture. But my father told me, 'Don't ever sell to the Louvre!'"

Oh, no, thought Turquin.

The picture was hers, he no longer doubted that. She knew its history in detail, and she had direct access to it.

But the deal was dead, dead, dead. You couldn't take the Louvre's curators for amnesiacs! They wrote her a letter! They weren't going to forget a picture of this importance! Look what happened to Cleveland!

He tried to explain that to de Canson without annoying her. (One never annoys the client.) But the fact remained that she thought she'd done something heroic, and he was calling it, politely or not, a complete mistake.

The air was turning sour. Finally he offered her several options - none of them terrific, but as positive as the circumstances allowed him to be.

First, they could talk to Customs, and see if a deal to bring the picture back to France was possible. That was dangerous, because once the subject was opened, the power was all on the side of the State. Customs could punish her by demanding twice the value of the picture in fines, and confiscate it in the bargain.

The second option was costly but safer: She could pretend to buy her own picture in Switzerland, and import it back into France, paying a duty on its fraudulent price at the border. The picture wouldn't be subject to very intense scrutiny coming into France, so she might get away with it.

The best solution, albeit equally illegal, was to just smuggle the picture back, the same way she'd smuggled it out. Then, once the Murillo was on French territory, she would apply for an export permit. She'd probably get it, and there'd be no further obstacle to a sale.

One way or the other, he insisted, "You have to bring it back, as though it never left France."

"No," said de Canson. She wanted the painting sold abroad, and she wanted to be paid abroad, in Swiss francs.

Turquin's forced enthusiasm finally failed him. "Then you'll need a name in Switzerland," he said distractedly.

It was just a hint, but the meaning was clear enough. De Canson would have to pass the picture off as the property of someone who wasn't French.

He later claimed he hadn't said anything of the kind, but three people had heard him, and two of them were still alive. In any case, he swore, no one could have taken him seriously. A Swiss front would solve absolutely nothing - a public sale anywhere in the world was still utterly impossible. And he never imagined de Canson might take his throwaway advice.

But now it seemed that she had. According to Christie's catalogue, de Canson's picture had been the property of one Jeanne Chappuis of Geneva since 1979.

What, Turquin wondered, was going to happen when the Louvre saw this?

One morning later that month, Hubert Landais accepted a telephone call from a lawyer named Paul Lombard.  Lombard's voice was high-pitched and warm, like a Dixieland clarinet. He greeted Landais in the warm style of his native Marseilles: "My old friend Hubert!"

So you say, thought Landais.

He had dealt with Lombard for nearly a decade, through interminable multi-party negotiations over the gigantic Picasso heritage. Picasso had lived and died in France, and that was where tens of millions of dollars in estate taxes came due. In lieu of paying them, the artist's heirs had offered the State enough masterpieces to stock a museum in Paris, which the Socialist government was now completing, yet another jewel in the crown of the capitol, and another monument to the taste and power of François Mitterrand

The affair had been a turning point in Lombard's fortunes. Since his much-publicized involvement in the Picasso negotiations, his offices in Marseilles and Paris had built a rich business in defending artists' and collectors' heritages. The newspaper clips of those cases were prominently displayed in a binder at Lombard's Parisian bureau, just up the street from the Palace of Luxembourg.

"One of my clients has a little problem," said Lombard. "Madame Joelle Pesnel - she owns a Murillo that's supposed to be auctioned at London, by Christie's."

Landais concealed his surprise. Pesnel must be an important personality, if she could afford Lombard. A key ally of the Socialist Party in Marseille, Lombard was among the coterie of lawyers who dined often at the Elysée Palace, the President's official residence. His leonine profile, grave blue eyes and pouting lips were fixtures of the evening news. A prominent Parisian newsweekly called him the national "savior of hopeless causes."

Lombard was a particular friend of Landais's hierarchical superior, the Minister of Culture, Jack Lang - and Landais's relations with his Minister had never been anything but poisonous. Lang had excluded him, and by extension, the national museums, from the Ministry's "Saturday Morning Club," where Lang's favorites met to map their next moves and trade gossip. In return, Landais distrusted Lang so much that one day, when the Ministry called with the news that billions of francs would be poured into remaking the Louvre, Landais refused to believe it until he heard it on the radio.

Landais bluffed the lawyer. "The Murillo is coming home to France," he said coolly. "We'll talk about it when it's here."

Lombard deferred to him, but soon after, one of his associates, Marie-France Pestel-Debord, called back. Landais had met her, too, through the Picasso negotiations, and thought she grasped the details and the underlying issues of the affair better than her boss. So he was amazed when she made a crucial mistake.

"It's true the Murillo left France without an export permit," she protested. "But that was back in 1979, and since then it was owned by a Swiss woman, our client's grandmother. So our client has done nothing wrong. She only inherited the picture, she didn't smuggle it."

Landais reeled between jubilation and incredulity. Lombard's people ought to know better than to simply admit the Murillo was illegally exported.

"I don't care when it left," said Landais curtly. "It left the country fraudulently, and it is coming home, period."

He summoned Lombard, his client, and Duminy to a meeting in his office on June 28, at seven in the evening. In France, that is early enough to undertake negotiations, and late enough to suggest the business will end in time for dinner.

Over the following days, more than a few people were startled by Landais's direct interest in the Murillo; he handled every detail of the business himself. He personally phoned the Ministry of Culture and told Lang's budget officer that he wanted $600,000 to buy a Murillo. And he told Christie's exactly what value he wanted them to declare to Customs, when they brought the picture back to France. He was setting up what looked like a fair deal, at least on paper.

But Landais was acting out of a deep anger, like a small child who hurls himself at a bully. The Murillo was not just a picture to him, it was a chance to right a world gone wrong - to make a point to his hip young Minister who despised old canvases, and smug lawyers, and greedy auctioneers and owners, in one swift, sweet blow

The Louvre would surely never get another chance at a Murillo like this - not on the market, anyway. Lang's ministry allowed the National Museums only $6 million annually for acquisitions, a pittance in the current market. A year ago, the British Museum, an institution comparable to the Louvre, had been forced to turn down the fabulous Chatsworth collection of Old Master drawings, at $8.25 million, because that price would exhaust England's National Heritage Memorial Fund; the collection was then auctioned by Christie's for a staggering $31.5 million. Only the fabulously rich Getty Museum could pay the market's prices now without flinching.

But this time, Landais would set the price. And it wouldn't be near so high as the market was getting used to.

On the evening of June 28, he had Rosenberg beside him when Duminy, Lombard, Pestel-Debord, and Pesnel filed into his long, dark office. Duminy must have noticed that Rosenberg gave no sign of knowing Pesnel. She'd told Christie's that they had met to discuss the Murillo last February, and that Rosenberg gave tacit approval for its sale in London. Another little Pesnel invention, it seemed. Another reason for Duminy not to trust her.

If anyone got hurt in these negotiations, Duminy was determined that it not be Christie's. He wanted the company's advance money back, with legal interest, and he wanted Landais to let them go back to business as usual. Pesnel was the major obstacle to those goals. He didn't like her, for all sorts of reasons. She was a handsome woman in her early forties, but a little too pale and big-haired and platinum-dyed for his conservative taste.

Worse, she was being difficult. She didn't seem to realize that her picture was now simply unsaleable. There was absolutely no alternative but to sell it to Landais. Duminy had already tried to explain that to her. He needed her assent, of course; unless she agreed to sell the Murillo, the Louvre couldn't buy it.

But incredibly, Pesnel had balked.

All she wanted to know was when she would get the money. She seemednto think dealing with the Louvre would be like hustling pictures at the flea market - a few minutes of brisk bargaining, and then cash and canvas swiftly changing hands. "Madame," the exasperated Duminy had explained, "this will all take months."

Landais looked severely at his visitors and said in a last-warning voice: "You're bringing the Murillo back to Paris. I want it here." 

The room was silent.

Duminy was pleased, but a little surprised. Pesnel's lawyers should already be protesting. The strict legal fact, after all, was that Landais had no statutory right to demand the Murillo's return. His expectation of being obeyed was due solely and entirely to the certainty that if thwarted, he would retaliate as harshly as he could.  But that was Christie's problem, not Pesnel's. So why weren't her counsellors reacting?

Duminy rushed to score a point for Christie's. Landais couldn't expect the company to pay for moving the picture yet again, he pleaded. "We have acted in good faith all along," he claimed. Of course Madame Pesnel couldn't afford to ship the picture, either. It wasn't like dropping a postcard in the mail; special containers and handling procedures were required. Getting the Murillo to Paris would cost someone about $10,000.

"I don't know how it left France," said Landais, "and I don't want to know how it comes back."

He wasted no more time. "I'll pay $600,000 for the picture," said Landais. "I think that's a fair price."

Lombard agreed that it was perfectly fair.

It wasn't what Pnsel could get on the market, though, and Landais knew it. Once again, Lombard ought to be protesting - if only as a matter of principle - against what was happening to his client. Instead, as Lombard later admitted, "I was as much the Louvre's lawyer as I was Pesnel's."

No one asked Pesnel for her opinion, and she didn't volunteer it.

"Can you offer us assurances," Duminy asked, "that when the Murillo lands in France, Customs won't seize it at the airport?"

He was really asking Landais to promise that he wouldn't double-cross them. What worried Duminy was that Customs has the power to seize any artworks that might constitute evidence in a smuggling case, and then to legally "confiscate" them, and turn them over to the National Museums. The practice was so common that every five years, Customs held an exhibition of hundreds of artworks they'd collected at the border. If Landais tipped them to seize the Murillo, Christie's and Pesnel would have to go to court to get it back, which would take years. In the meanwhile, Christie's would be out $80,000.

"I won't tell Customs what to do, one way or the other," said Landais with a straight face.

It was a great gag, but he couldn't tell them the punchline. They thought Customs was his biggest weapon, but the truth was that he couldn't afford to tell Customs anything about this business. Their administration might well consider it a violation of their rights that Landais cut a deal for contraband behind their backs, instead of asking them to handle the affair as the law required him to.

Duminy returned to his office after the meeting ended, and prepared a message for Gregory Martin.  Christie's had stubbornly held open the option of a sale for Pesnel. Now Duminy telexed King Street: "The Murillo Portrait of Man should be withdrawn from sale." He was too tired to explain himself. He added only: "Letter follows."

This mess is nearly over, he thought.

He was wrong.

Click here to read Chapter 4.

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