The Smile of the Mona Lisa
A crime thriller set in Dresden
In mid-1994, housekeeper Roswitha Färber, who looked after Helmut Müller-Karsten after his wife passed away, finds the painter dead on the floor of his living room in the Dresden Artists’ House in Loschwitz.
Because the cause of death is recorded by the emergency doctor as “unexplained” and because of the disordered state of the famous painter’s home – pictures are strewn all over the floor, printing plates for the production of lithographs are destroyed and the walls are smeared with red paint (clearly an orgy of destruction had taken place here) – a post-mortem is carried out on the body.
However, the forensic pathologist has no option but to record a natural death due to exhaustion. The old man had fallen and broken the neck of his femur and had lain on the floor without sustenance for at least three days as his life ebbed slowly and agonisingly away.
His stepson, Thomas Vester, is suspected of faking a break-in and failing to take care of the dying man. But Vester is able to name witnesses who provide him with an alibi. Nothing is proven and the police have to release him.
Barneby Kern, the head of Dresden’s murder squad, is forced to pass the case over to the burglary unit.
Two months later there’s a break-in at the well-known Gallery Falconetti.
The gallery exhibits the work of all Dresden’s famous painters – including Müller-Karsten.
The artist specialised in likenesses of women, portraying them at every stage of life and in every format – from the tiniest scrap of paper (on which he might produce a biro sketch of a girl on the tram) to full-size oil paintings. These female portraits – from the mundane to the lascivious – are sought-after collector’s items. And each lithograph has a name, for example “Girl between Pitchers”, “The Queen of Sheba”, “The Smile of the Mona Lisa” and so on.
After taking stock, the gallery reveals that nothing has been stolen although a single lithograph entitled The Smile of the Mona Lisa – print number 4 of 25 –- has been wilfully damaged beyond repair.
The question is: “Who would break into a gallery in order to destroy a relatively inexpensive lithograph and ignore the hundreds of far more expensive pictures on the premises?”
Investigations by the burglary unit are slow.
On New Year’s Eve 1994, a man and his lover (who goes by the delightful name of Marlene Dietrich) are murdered after the man surprises an intruder in the act of stealing one of his pictures at his villa in the Weißer Hirsch district of Dresden. It’s another lithograph whose title is marked on the back in pencil: The Smile of the Mona Lisa.
It’s print number 3 of 25.
Eventually the investigation is handed over to Barneby Kern and his team.
Nothing is clear. How is the break-in at the gallery connected to the murder? How is it connected to the scene of devastation at the painter’s home and studio?
The investigations reveal that the murdered man, a journalist and Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Agency) “freelancer” by the name Dieter Schubert, who moved here from the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was a prominent collector with a rich hoard of paintings, nearly all of which came from the East and were acquired under “unusual” circumstances.
Schubert had been an acquaintance of Paul Douglas, the son of a World War II bomber pilot who had taken part in the bombing of Dresden.
Paul Douglas had worked as a British cultural attaché in East Germany and had had problems with the embassy’s security services. They wanted to know where he got the ancient and exquisite icons that he collected.
German unification solved the problem. Paul Douglas was recalled and returned to his parental home in Maidstone in the county of Kent before settling again in Dresden.
There he cultivated friendly and apparently neighbourly relations with Schubert and his lover Marlene Dietrich.
Vester is questioned again – in vain. Again the inquiries come to nothing and Hauptkommissar Barneby Kern eventually has to release him.
As in all Dresden murder investigations, the LKA forensics team, a crime scene unit of the Crime Bureau of the State of Saxony, the department ultimately responsible in such cases, is brought in.
Its people, under Hauptkommissar Rolf Mertens, establish a connection with a dubious character which throws everything into confusion:
Josef Gretschko, known simply as “Marshal” due to the similarity of his name to that of Andrei Grechko, Marshal of the Soviet Union, had been a major in the MfS* (Ministry for State Security), an OiBE* (officer with special duties) and had worked under Major Weißbach and Oberst Seidel (a Ministry for State Security colonel and the direct deputy of Oberst Schalck-Golodkowski) for KoKo, the commercial coordination unit of the East German Ministry for Foreign Trade. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gretschko had been in charge of an art and antiques operation known as Kunst & Antiquitäten GmbH, based in Mühlenbeck outside Berlin and with a branch in Zurich. Responsible for worldwide exports of art from the DDR, he had obviously been in contact with East Germany’s artists. During the dissolution of the DDR he found himself in charge of securing valuables and large sums of money (the assets of East Germany’s ruling party, the SED) and thereafter transformed himself into an international art dealer based primarily in Dresden. He continued to run the former Zurich branch of the DDR export office on his own account.
A pearly white Rolls Royce that has been seen parked outside Schubert’s house a number of times is traced back to Russian oil millionaire Piotr Sergeyevich Brudloff. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Brudloff had been the military attaché at the Soviet embassy in Berlin.
Another mysterious figure in this game of power and money is Brudloff’s driver and bodyguard Vladimir Vladimirovich Voronzov, a former captain in the army of the CIS* who had worked at headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst.
Piotr Sergeyevich Brudloff knew Schubert. But he also knows Paul Douglas. And it’s no surprise he’s listed in the customer file of Gallery Falconetti.
Another suspect is Giovanni Fuoli, a native Sicilian who runs Gallery Falconetti. Kern discovers that the gallery is being used by the Mafia for money laundering. Fuoli, commissioned by Piotr Sergeyevich Brudloff (an enthusiastic collector of Helmut Müller-Karsten’s paintings) to get hold of The Smile of the Mona Lisa at any cost, eventually hires the killer who murders Schubert and his lover with a pump action shotgun.
When Voronzov is found dead in his car on the Autobahn, having met Fuoli in the Luisenhof restaurant the previous afternoon, it becomes clear to Kern that what he’s dealing with here is a power struggle between two Mafiosi.