The Brodsky Affair: Murder is a Dying Art Read Free

easels stood Vermeer’s work, The Concert , plus Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. He had arranged, with immense precision and detail, for these and other valuable works to be stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, USA, in March 1990. The Vermeer heist had been designed to lead investigators to a possible collusion between the Mafia and the IRA, precisely as he had intended. Petrovitch also oversaw other periodic thefts across the globe under Berezin’s instructions.
    The next two trophies gave him exquisite delight, not unlike the rush a snorted line of coke could conjure. Looking at them, his facial muscles involuntarily twitched.
    Mounted next to one easel stood a little known preliminary pencil sketch by Picasso, entitled Odalisque. It was a Cubist depiction of his long-term mistress, Geneviêve Laporte. Its former owner, a prominent private collector, had eighteen months previously told Berezin to ‘fuck off’ and called him ‘a one-legged joke’ when he had attempted to buy it.
    Berezin had seethed.
    This is what he had to put up with all his life. But now, circumstances had changed, and the tables had turned. With quiet confidence, he took his time planning.  The results were as he had wished for.
    That collector hadn’t reported the theft the next morning, as he’d been discovered dead in bed. His right foot had been messily hacked off, and a later post-mortem revealed the presence of large quantities of methanol in his body, ingested several hours after the mutilation.
    Put on view next to the adjacent easel, opened on the sixteenth page, stood a sketchbook. It was the crown jewel in his collection; thirty-two drawings, again by Picasso, and valued at $15 million. The sketchbook represented the easiest heist he had attempted. Presented in the Picasso Museum in Paris, the sketchbook had been on view in an unlocked glass display case… there one minute, gone the next.
    Berezin remained unfulfilled. Art had always drawn him like a magnet. Ownership of the finest works consumed him. It added to his prestige and his self-perception as a man of high culture. Ownership, brought to him with his misshapen form, a sense of peace he could not find elsewhere. Great art did not judge or laugh at him. It displayed a beauty that he lacked. It was the only element in his life that offered him glimpses of tranquility, and a map towards higher states of being. He regarded critics, dealers and gallery owners as oslayobs , or donkey-fuckers, who knew nothing of life’s finer aspects.
    Using Petrovitch, he went to elaborate lengths to present an acceptable and respected image. But as a plunderer and thief, he had other secret dimensions to his world.
    The only person who got close to his hidden exploits was Laura Lenee, and her theft of paintings by Godlevsky. She made the mistake of being identifiable. The Federal Office responsible for art thefts, the Rosokhrankultural, had recently sent photographs of her around the worldwide art market and law enforcement agencies. No such record existed of him. In the past, he’d been chased, shot at, wounded, but had always avoided detection. That had become his maxim.
    There was one wealthy collector brought to his notice by a senior researcher.  Alexsandr Molotov, head of the Russian Diamond and Oil group of companies. A well-known hoarder, the report revealed he owned several, now very important Russian paintings by renowned Russian artists believed to be Shiskin, Ropin, Aivazovsky, and possibly Brodsky. What right had this fat shark to own anything of importance, a know-nothing who only cared about names? It was time to alter the status quo. The thought of acquiring this collection again caused his facial muscle to twitch.
    It was at times like this that he understood his darker side, accepted it, and had now begun to enjoy it. He was elevating art from those who didn’t deserve it. If they died in the process, so be it.
    He reached for the phone