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The Axel Files: Finding Lunia: Woman With A Fan

In my business, you meet all kinds of people; some, let’s call them civilians, are ordinary, what the politicians call “folks;” then there are the characters, the peculiar sorts, people with strange peccadilloes: what an old friend of mine might call, “people who scare the horses.” Some, let's call them “the desperate:” come to me because they find themselves in a situation, sometimes of their own making and other times… well… let’s just say, imposed upon them. In each case, they have secrets: something they’d like to hide from the authorities and me, things like felonies, misdemeanours, mishaps, or misunderstandings. These cases are always about one of two things: money or women, but sometimes neither money nor women come in the form you'd expect, which brings me to the case of "Finding Lunia."

It all started one day when Jacob Lerner, a young Aussie artist nicknamed Garbo, walked into my office carrying a painting. Not just any canvas, but a masterpiece he claimed he’d found in the trash in a Montmartre back alley. If the artwork was the original, it was one of five masterpieces stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris on a warm Spring night in 2010 by the renowned second-story burglar, L’Araignée, The Spider.

The painting is a Modigliani portrait of Lunia Czechowska, one of five expressionist masterpieces stolen by L’Araignée and supposedly dumped in the trash by a nervous associate who was supposed to hold onto the canvases for safekeeping, not that anyone in their right mind believed someone would throw one hundred million dollars worth of art into the trash. Usually, I am hired to find some lost, stolen or misappropriated object, but in this case, the item found me, or so my Aussie client claimed. If you believe the story that played out in a Paris courtroom in 2017, then it would make sense to believe the story told to me by Jacob Lerner. All I had to do was prove the painting wasn’t a forgery. The trouble is twenty percent of the canvases in the world’s most prestigious museums are fakes, and Modigliani is one of the most frequently forged artists. Money and women: this case involves both, but not necessarily in the ways you’d expect.

Axel Webb, Private Investigator