Free Priceless by Robert K. Wittman Page A

only listening to the teacher—sometimes I learned more by tuning out and just staring at a wall ensemble. At the Barnes, I didn’t learn how to identify a fake or a forgery, but I trained my eye to discern a good painting from a bad one. I learned how to tell the difference between works by Renoir and Manet, or Gauguin and Cézanne—and more important, how to confidently explain in detail these differences and patterns. It’s not as hard as you might think, certainly not for a trained art historian or curator. But it’s not the kind of thing most police officers know. As I would learn years later, it’s not even the kind of thing most art thieves know.
    My Barnes experience couldn’t have come at a better time, personally or professionally. I remember walking through the second-floor gallery one day, depressed about the indictment, stressed about lawyer bills and the thought of leaving Donna and the kids for prison, when I came upon Renoir’s
Mussel Fishers at Berneval
. The painting stopped me. A young mother and children along a sienna seashore. Smiling sisters holding hands. A boy with a basket of mussels. An indigo sky. I moved closer. I cocked my head and followed a brushstroke out to sea. The painting felt warm, soothing. It evoked images of a quieter, simpler time, when playing on the shoreline coupled with picking mussels for a fresh dinner were enough to bring joie de vivre.
    Young kids and a mom at the shore. A family. My family.
    I found a bench, sat down, and exhaled.
    *    *    *
    T HE B ARNES CLASSES only deepened my interest and appreciation for art, and I couldn’t help but approach my art crime cases with new enthusiasm and perspective. While I was still enrolled at the Barnes, Bazin and I got a break on an old case, a 1988 heist from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Inside its ninety-foot rotunda, the Penn Museum showcases one of the nation’s foremost collections of Chinese antiquities. Late one winter evening, thieves lifted the Chinese exhibition’s most significant piece, a fifty-pound crystal ball from the Imperial Palace in Beijing, from its place of honor in the center of the rotunda. The perfect sphere, which projects a person’s image upside down, once belonged to the Dowager Empress Cixi, and is the second largest such orb in the world. Handcrafted during the nineteenth century, the crystal ball represented a triumph of skill and patience, a year’s worth of an artist’s labor with emery and garnet powder and water. The burglars who took the orb also swiped a five-thousand-year-old bronze statue of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. Museum officials figured it was the work of amateurs, but the pieces seemed to vanish without a trace.
    Now, three years later, a museum official was calling Bazin to say a former curator had spotted the Osiris statue for sale at one of the jumble of eclectic shops on Philadelphia’s South Street. We rushed over and pressed the proprietor for details. He told us that he’d bought the $500,000 bronze statue for $30 from “Al the Trash Picker,” a homeless man who trawled the streets with a shopping cart, looking for junk. We found Al and he quickly told us that he’d gotten the statue from a man named Larry, who happened to live a few blocks from the store. Bazin and I went to see “Larry.”
    Larry was a compact man with a South Philly attitude and a flimsy story. “I dunno, man, it just showed up in my mudroom a few years ago,” Larry offered, lamely suggesting that a friend probably dropped it off and forgot about it. We countered with the textbook good-cop, bad-cop routine. Bazin stomped, glowered, andthreatened to arrest him if he didn’t tell us “the truth.” When Bazin stormed out, I spoke softly to Larry, confiding that we wouldn’t charge him if he helped us out. When that didn’t work, I went out to tell Bazin.
    “Why did you walk out so quickly?” I said.
    He shrugged.