Stealing the Mystic Lamb (26 page)

This emotionally charged response was just what the police had sought. In this letter, the ransomers inadvertently provided some clues.

In the last few lines of the letter, the ransomers revealed that the panel was hidden someplace where it would be in no danger of being discovered. It was not in the immediate possession of the ransomers. There was no true threat of the panel being destroyed after all. It was simply hidden and would remain hidden if no ransom were paid.

The police decided to stall further. They responded: “Confirming last proposition.”

In the ransomers’ next letter they expressed their confusion. Which “ last proposition” was being confirmed, theirs or the bishop’s? “Because we do not want to break negotiations due to a misunderstanding,” they wrote, “we hurry to ask you for a more explicit response.” This letter, like the others, went on at some length to chastise the bishop for not keeping his end of the bargain—even though the police had dropped the artifice that the bishop was involved in negotiations several letters earlier. The ransom letter ended with the promise of no more letters and an open offer: They would read the newspaper the first of every month, should the bishop decide to comply in the future.

After all their toying with the ransomers, the police were no nearer to solving the crime. If this were truly the last letter, then the panel would not be recovered. The police still had no leads.

But the ransomers could not keep away from their typewriter, failing even to follow through with the threat to cease writing. Letter 11 arrived on 8 September. The tone had changed. Gone was the politesse. The author of the letter no longer pretended to be the man who signed his name as D.U.A. at the end of each correspondence. The ransomers had finally realized that the bishop was not involved in the negotiations. They switched to speaking about the bishop in the third person as well, though they also referred to the police reading their letter in the third person—perhaps as a mark of disrespect.

Despite the bluster and new tactics, the police remained firm. They responded, “Letter received. Regret to have to maintain earlier proposition.”

There would be only two more letters.

The pretext of third-person address was discarded in the twelfth note, a tirade against the underhanded way that the criminals were being treated, by both the bishop and the authorities.

One wonders how the bishop would have been better off if the ransomers had kept the Saint John panel. This logical oversight aside, the letter’s author slipped up. For the first time, he used “I,” indicating, as the police had long suspected, that there was no criminal gang ransoming the panel. It was an individual criminal and, from the hurt tone of his letters, one who was lonely and thoroughly dismayed.

The last letter arrived on the first of October. With the flavor of a judicial proclamation, the ransomer claimed that the whole disaster was the fault of the bishop for not being a good sport and complying with the ransom demands:

The letter slips between “I” and “we,” likely indicating the author’s fatigue. The ransomer also shifts blame completely away from himself and onto the bishop. The repeated focus on the bishop, who had nothing to do with the negotiations, suggests that perhaps the ransomer knew the
bishop personally and somehow assumed that the bishop would “play ball,” fueling his disappointment.

The police had done a reasonable job in handling the ransom demands but were stringing along a fish that they could never reel in. The rest of the investigation would be pocked with oversights, bumblings, and inexplicable decisions.

Six weeks passed in silence. Then something happened that sounded to all involved so preposterously melodramatic that it could only appear in a work of fiction.

On 25 November 1934 at Holy Mary College in the town of Dendermonde near Ghent, at a meeting of the local chapter of the Catholic Political Party, the fifty-seven-year-old Arsène Goedertier collapsed from a heart attack. Carried to a nearby inn, he was given an injection by his friend and physician, Dr. Romain de Cock, and then taken to the home of his brother-in-law, the jeweler Ernest van den Durpel, accompanied by de Cock and a Benedictine priest who had attended the meeting. While being carried into the house on Vlasmarkt Street, Goedertier passed out once more, only to be revived by de Cock. As he stirred, dazed, Goedertier whispered, hoarse-throated, to his doctor, “Am I in any danger?”

Lying on what would be his deathbed, Goedertier refused a last confession from the priest Father Bornauw. Bornauw pressed the matter, but Goedertier waved him away, saying,“My conscience is at peace.” Goedertier instead summoned his lawyer, Georges de Vos. De Vos arrived and met with Goedertier in private for fifteen minutes, as van den Durpel’s children recalled when they were interviewed about the matter decades later.

Then Arsène Goedertier died.

When Georges de Vos emerged from the death chamber, he was pale. He said nothing to anyone present, not to the priest Father Bornauw, nor to the physician, nor to their host, Ernest van den Durpel. Nor to
the police. In fact, the dead man’s lawyer never went to the police, despite having vital information regarding a high-profile case of theft.

Only one month later did Georges de Vos reveal that, with his dying breath, Arsène Goedertier had admitted to being the thief of the stolen van Eyck panels. De Vos had leaned in close to hear the murmurs of his client. Goedertier said that he was the last person on earth to know the hiding place of the Judges panel. With gasping breaths, Goedertier whispered, “I alone know the location of
The Mystic Lamb
. . . my study, in the file marked
Mutualité
. . . armoire . . . key . . . ”

And then, with operatic timing, he died.

Who was Arsène Goedertier? The information that exists about him suggests that he was, in many ways, the least likely candidate to steal and ransom a national treasure from a cathedral.

Arsène Théodore Victor Léopold Goedertier was a stockbroker, overweight and short with a thick, curly, waxed moustache, pince-nez glasses, a receding hairline, and oversized elven ears that seemed too low on his head. Born on 23 December 1876 in the town of Lede near Ghent, he was one of twelve children of a primary school headmaster. After his father, Emile, resigned from his post over a school funding controversy, he was offered a post as sacristan at the local church of Saint Gertrude in the village of Wetteren, just outside of Ghent. When Arsène’s mother passed away in 1896, young Arsène became the organist at Saint Gertrude, where he eventually succeeded his father in the role of sacristan, from 1911 to 1919. He said, rather enigmatically, “the biggest mistake my father made was turning me into a sacristan.”

Arsène Goedertier was an artist of minor distinction, having studied at both the Royal Academy of Art in Dendermonde and the art academy in his hometown of Wetteren, of which he would later become managing director. One of his portraits has hung in the town hall of Wetteren since 1913. His favorite subject to paint was church interiors.

He began his studies in Berlare, where he was a schoolmate of Honoré Coppieters, the man who would become bishop of Ghent. In addition to acting as sacristan, Goedertier worked as a clerk in the suburb of Wetteren
from 1911 to 1919, avoiding military service because of an ocular defect that made it impossible for him to see in low-light conditions. He worked as a stockbroker from 1919 onwards, a regular face in the financial circles and power-lunch cafés of downtown Ghent. Always an active member of Catholic political and social groups, he also taught drawing and weaving at the Professional School of Kalken, and was an accomplished amateur tailor. He enjoyed puzzles, particularly those involving mechanics. His creativity extended into design. He created blueprints for a new airplane model, which he took to the Bréguet factory in Paris, although the company did not purchase his design.

Goedertier also owned an extensive collection of detective and spy novels. The investigators would conclude that Goedertier’s library contained useful information, because his entire book collection would be confiscated by one of the magistrates taking on the case, Joseph van Ginderachter. The library included the complete works of the author Maurice LeBlanc, whose recurring character was a gentleman thief called Arsène Lupin, with whom Arsène Goedertier may have felt a kinship. According to his wife, Goedertier spoke frequently and with a great deal of fascination about the Judges theft.

On 3 November 1915, Arsène Goedertier married the Paris-born Julienne Minne, heiress to a knitting goods company. They had one son, Adhémar, or Dédé for short. Dédé was born in 1922 and would live only to age fourteen. The child was plagued with health problems, including a chronic eye disease that made it difficult for him to see in the dark, an illness he likely inherited from his father, and signs of mental illness. Dédé received his confirmation at Saint Bavo Cathedral, anointed by Bishop Coppieters. When the young Dédé eventually died on 2 May 1936, two years after the theft, he was babbling incoherently, repeating the words
police
and
thieves
over and over.

Goedertier was a man of great activity—professional, social, and charitable. In 1909, he cofounded a Christian National Health Service in Belgium, called
De Eendracht
. He later founded two more Catholic charitable organizations:
De Volskmacht
, in 1920, and
Davidsfonds
, of which
he became president in 1932. His colleagues spoke of his desire to gain political importance within Catholic organizations. He was a regular at political gatherings, Catholic events, and parties held at the Episcopal Palace adjoining Saint Bavo’s Cathedral.

After the First World War, Goedertier and his wife established a brokerage office, housed in a former Dominican convent in downtown Ghent, from which they profited considerably in a short period of time. They lived in a spacious home in Wetteren, complete with unusual amenities such as central heating, servants, two telephone lines, and, most luxurious of all, a gleaming white Chevrolet automobile.

In 1928, Goedertier founded an organization called Plantexel, short for the Société de Plantation et d’Exploitation de l’Elaeis au Kasai. The goal of this business was to establish coffee and palm oil plantations in the Congo. Plantexel declared bankruptcy a few days before Goedertier’s death. Had the theft been an attempt to save his company? This does not seem plausible, as it came to police attention that Goedertier died a wealthy man. His bank account was found to contain 3 million francs—three times more than the ransom he seemed to have demanded.

The mysteries continue. Since 1930, Goedertier had been in possession of a fake passport, containing his photograph but registered under the name “van Damme.” He clearly had secrets, but of what nature—and what had he really told de Vos, his secular confessor, on his deathbed? De Vos was sole witness to the confession, and therefore no one can vouch for what he claims to have heard. Did it happen as he said? And why did he speak to no one, not even the police, upon leaving Goedertier’s deathbed, instead driving to Goedertier’s home in Wetteren, eight miles southeast of Ghent?

De Vos was let into the home by Goedertier’s wife, Julienne. He checked the location that Goedertier had indicated with his last breath. In the study, in the top right-hand drawer of Goedertier’s desk, in a file labeled
Mutualité
, De Vos found carbon copies of every one of the ransom notes, all signed “D.U.A.” The folder contained no other information, but it did hold a final, undelivered handwritten letter. The letter goes on for several rambling pages, an unedited stream of thought, full of cross-outs
and incomplete sentences. It was written on Plantexel letterhead paper, much of it incoherent and with an odd syntax in the original French, in a leaning cursive script: