The doorbell rang at 135 Rue Esseghem, a modest row house in Jette, a Brussels suburb. The concierge was occupied with a pair of Japanese tourists visiting the apartment, which had been home to the surrealist painter René Magritte and his wife, Georgette Berger, from 1930 until 1954, and was now a private museum. It was shortly after 10 a.m. on September 24, 2009. When she excused herself to answer the door, the concierge found two young men waiting at the threshold. One of them asked if visiting hours had begun; the other placed a pistol against her head and forced his way inside.
The armed men quickly rounded up both tourists and the three staff members on duty, leaving them kneeling in the museum’s small courtyard, where Magritte had hosted weekly gatherings for painters, musicians, and intellectuals. With the hostages out of their way, one of the thieves jumped the glass partition protecting the tiny museum’s centerpiece: Olympia, a 1948 portrait of the late artist’s wife, pictured nude with a seashell resting on her stomach. The painting measured 60 by 80 centimeters and was estimated to be worth 2 million euros. Belgian police arrived within minutes, summoned by an alarm triggered by the removal of the painting. But by that time, the thieves had returned to a getaway car that sped off toward the neighboring suburb of Laeken.
It was uncommon in those days for small museums to bother installing surveillance cameras, so police had to rely on sketches of the two suspects, who appeared to be in their 20s. Interpol described one suspect as short, of Asian descent, and an English speaker, while the other was described as a bit taller, of European or North African descent, and a French speaker. Brazen as it was, the robbery seemed to be the work of professionals—a daring, high-value heist carried out with speed and precision by men who knew how to handle weapons, how to deal effectively with hostages, and how quickly to expect a police response. They had also been clever about selecting their target. Magritte, whose surrealist paintings influenced the work of Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns, is a national treasure in Belgium, where a number of museums display his work. But the thieves had avoided larger, more secure metropolitan museums in favor of one exceptionally valuable painting from the artist’s former home, open only by appointment, leaving slim chance they would arrive to find it packed with more visitors than they could manage.
With little to go on, one of the first police officers to reach the crime scene called someone he knew could help: Lucas Verhaegen, a veteran officer with Belgium’s Federal Police force in a specialized unit called Section Art. Last August, when I met Verhaegen at police headquarters in central Brussels, he recalled the investigation from behind his tidy desk, next to a table piled high with old case files. He wore gray slacks, a short-sleeve button-up, and the scuffed black dress shoes favored by detectives and those who play them on TV. His face served as its own good-cop-bad-cop routine: friendly, disarming smile; penetrating blue eyes.
“They know very well what they must do when there is a theft,” Verhaegen said of Belgium’s local police. “But when it’s art theft, what we need is a very good description, a photo; a maximum of information, very quickly, because we know that a lot of stolen objects go abroad. In the first hour, sometimes it’s in another country.”
Verhaegen was 51 at the time of the Magritte heist and had been a cop for two decades. It was a childhood dream that he pursued only after earning degrees in agronomy and biochemistry, then working for a few years in the private sector. His law enforcement career began with a five-year stint on the local police force in Brussels, where he patrolled the central district of Belgium’s capital city. Next he worked as part of a special intervention unit that investigated organized crime and managed underworld informants; he specialized in Eastern Europe. When he joined Section Art in August 2005, Verhaegen’s years of particular experience proved surprisingly useful: Serbian gangs are heavily involved in trafficking stolen art and antiquities, Verhaegen told me, along with organized crime networks that can be traced to Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and elsewhere in the Balkans and Eastern Europe.
“Our borders are open,” Verhaegen said. “It’s very easy to do an important art theft here in Belgium and then the same night, or 15 hours later, they are in Croatia or in Albania. There they can sell [the art] to finance their own criminal activities: drugs, arms, prostitution.”
Continental Europe’s first art theft unit was established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1796 and was focused not on stopping plunder but carrying it out on a scale unseen since the Romans took precious artifacts as spoils of war from Athens, Sicily, and Jerusalem. Napoleon’s repository for looted treasures was the Louvre, in Paris, where many of the works he acquired remain. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and again after the First World War, a patchwork of treaties gradually tried to regulate the looting, destruction, and trafficking of art and antiquities.
Modern art crime, like the arms trade, still thrives in the shadow of global conflict, which gives rise to criminal networks that make from the detritus of war immensely profitable commodities. “There are master thieves and master forgers, but they are in small supply,” said Jake Archer, a special agent with the FBI’s art crime team. “More so, it’s accurate to say that there are transnational organized crime groups that are treating these objects just as they would any other illicit chattel.”
Outside of agencies like Interpol, the practice of art crime investigation tends to reveal the national priorities, and even the national character, of the highly specialized local agencies tasked with enforcement. In Germany, for example, the roots of art crime investigation at the Bundeskriminalamt trace back to postwar efforts to recover pieces looted by the Nazis; in France, the Central Office for the Fight Against Trafficking of Cultural Goods investigates not only art theft and forgery but the counterfeiting of luxury items like Hermès ties or Louis Vuitton bags; and in Italy, where even the architectural landscape can qualify as protected cultural heritage, the mandate of a carabinieri commando force includes the investigation of crimes involving archaeological goods. (This is no small task, an officer from the carabinieri tells me: In 2017, they went looking for signs of looting at Greek and Roman archaeological sites in Calabria, in southern Italy, and ended up uncovering a transnational gang in possession of some 10,000 pilfered artifacts.)
Belgian police first established a Bureau of Art and Antiques in 1988. Thirteen years later, when Belgium reorganized its law enforcement agencies, the unit became part of the country’s federal police force and was renamed Section Art. Its team built and maintained a database of some 20,000 stolen objects and assisted local police departments throughout Belgium. In 2003, even as its staff began to dwindle, Section Art gained renewed prominence due to the increase in trafficking of illicit art and cultural goods which resulted from the U.S. invasion of Iraq. According to one investigation, as many as 130,000 items were ransacked by assorted criminals and opportunists, who sold them to Iraqi middlemen, who then resold them to foreign dealers.
Under such circumstances, it does not take long for an illicit supply chain to take shape: Because looted art and antiques lack the kind of documentation required for legitimate transport, professional smugglers are tasked with getting them into the hands of unwitting collectors, dealers, and auction houses. And because these smugglers specialize in shipping drugs for cartels, guns for arms dealers, and prostitutes or laborers for human traffickers, looters who start as amateurs soon gain professional experience through their association with this diverse array of criminal talent.
In time, organized crime syndicates were joined by another major player in this illicit market for looted Iraqi treasures: the extremist group known as the Islamic State, or ISIS. In Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State sought to shore up dwindling oil revenue by selling raided cultural antiquities, which were sometimes trafficked through Belgium, where the Islamic State had no fewer than three major terrorist cells. One of these cells was called the Zerkani network, with members based largely in Molenbeek, an impoverished neighborhood in Brussels that is more than 40 percent Muslim. The group’s leader, Khalid Zerkani, was so effective in radicalizing Molenbeek youths that some called him a “sorcerer” who enticed recruits to pick pockets and rob tourists in order to raise funds. Certain key members of this network were, according to Belgium’s federal prosecutor, Frédéric van Leeuw, members of Molenbeek street gangs who became radicalized while serving time in prison.
It was Van Leeuw who first told me about the theft of Magritte’s Olympia canvas. On a cloudy afternoon in January 2020, we met at his office in Brussels, where I was conducting research for a book. As part of my research, I’d asked the federal prosecutor to explain the challenges of linking terrorist organizations to their financial backers, which he agreed to do over tea. When I arrived at his eighth-floor office, overlooking the sprawling Belgian capital, he poured himself a cup while staring down at Molenbeek, which has been called by its own mayor “a fertile ground for terrorism.”
Since taking office in April 2014, Van Leeuw has been a driving force behind legislation imposing more severe punishments on former Islamic State fighters returning to Belgium, making him a prominent figure in Europe’s broader fight against extremism and terror. But prosecuting those responsible for financing terrorist acts, he said, has become increasingly difficult due to microfinancing, Bitcoin, and the growing ties between terror groups and other organized crime networks.
He used as an example a case which he’d been unable to prosecute: A thief had “stolen a painting [by] Magritte here in Brussels,” Van Leeuw said, and “tried to have some money from the insurance companies” in exchange for its return. Years later, when police learned that the man had been radicalized, Van Leeuw became convinced that the art-napping had been a means to finance terror. But, he emphasized, this was only a theory—one that could not be proven in court unless he was able to show that financing terrorism was, at the time of the heist, the end goal. The time for proving such things, by then, had passed.
Rescuing Magritte’s masterpiece was no small task for Section Art. Belgium’s elite unit, which launched with 17 officers, had been diminished by waves of retirements and years of budget cuts. When Verhaegen joined, he was one in a team of five; by the Olympia theft, Section Art consisted solely of Verhaegen and his partner.
“He has a fundamental understanding and appreciation of the art world; he possesses the investigative patience, the persistence, and savvy that is necessary to navigate both the domestic and international legal systems,” said the FBI’s Archer, who once collaborated with Verhaegen to recover seven paintings by the late Belgian surrealist Agnes Lorca, stolen long before from a fly-by-night gallery in Philadelphia. “He values teamwork, which is crucial on these complex matters. He has a big heart and cares for the victims and the pillaged works. And he enjoys a touch of eccentricity that is common among the few of us dedicated art crime investigators.” When Archer and his partner delivered the recovered paintings to Lorca’s daughter in Brussels, Verhaegen surprised his FBI colleagues with a special gift. “He grows his own grapes and makes his own wine,” Archer said. “We enjoyed the bottle thoroughly.”
Celebrations like these are likely to grow rarer in years to come. Despite being one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in the world, surpassed by drug trafficking, arms dealing, and human trafficking, among others, transnational art crime is viewed as a niche field by law enforcement agencies and is allocated fewer resources now than even a decade ago. For Verhaegen and his partner, as the last practitioners of their craft in Belgium, every phone call was important, whether it was from the FBI, Interpol, or local police. The high-profile Magritte heist raised the stakes: Recovering Olympia would be a chance to show their budget-slashing superiors why Section Art mattered.
While helping his colleagues at Interpol prepare an alert for the missing painting, Verhaegen also assisted local police in Jette by fielding and analyzing tips from a network of informants in the art world and the Brussels underworld. It didn’t take long to develop information suggesting the involvement of a well-known organized crime figure. But rather than the Balkans or Eastern Europe, this information led to a working-class enclave in the Laeken neighborhood of Brussels, and a 20-year-old local named Khalid el-Bakraoui—the thief Van Leeuw would tell me about years later—who was growing out of teenage delinquency and into a life of crime and violence; a homegrown gangster, raised by conservative, religious parents who had made a nice life in Laeken after his father emigrated from Morocco.
Because the heist involved guns and the threat of violence, a federal prosecutor granted investigators’ requests to employ “special techniques”—surveillance, wiretaps, and undercover operatives aimed at clarifying el-Bakraoui’s role and gathering evidence—but “because it was art theft,” Verhaegen said, his bosses considered the case low priority, which made it impossible to muster the necessary personnel and equipment. With few resources at their disposal, Verhaegen, his partner, and a small team of local police set up a low-budget sting operation: el-Bakraoui, who fit the physical description of one of the thieves, had made contact with Olympia’s insurance underwriter, offering them a chance to pay a “reward” of 50,000 euros for the painting’s safe return, rather than having to pay out the full 800,000-euro claim made by the museum.
For insurers of fine art, such legally dubious arrangements are so routine that established “reward” rates are an open secret: as low as 3 percent of the insured value for items worth many millions of euros, and as high as 7 percent if the object is insured for 1 million euros or less. Market rates for ransom payments are not the only sign of the professionalization of art theft. In many of these art-nappings, when the thieves don’t have a way to contact the victim or the insurance company directly, they instead seek ransom payments through an intermediary in the murky world of art security.
One such private enterprise is the Art Loss Register, which maintains an expansive database of stolen art. Unlike those maintained by the Belgian police, Interpol, and the carabinieri in Italy, anyone can query the database, making it a resource for honest buyers hoping to avoid stolen art as well as a kind of hotline for those hoping to ransom stolen objects. In some cases, Verhaegen says, these private firms have gone as far as facilitating payments through shell corporations in the Maldives or Panama, making them difficult for police to trace. But even these efforts don’t guarantee a painting’s safe return, especially if it’s been stolen by thieves unfamiliar with this tangle of unwritten rules.
“What you have quite often in these museum thefts,” manager of International Art Fairs Will Korner tells me from the Art Loss Register headquarters in London, “is a high degree of planning in terms of the theft itself but very little planning, if any, as to what they will do with the object after they’ve stolen it.”
When art museums fall prey to men more used to robbing banks, the results can be unpredictable: Depending on the nerve of the thief, a painting as famous as Olympia might end up being ransomed, traded for drugs, or burned to ashes. So Verhaegen’s team set a trap: The insurance underwriter for the stolen Magritte agreed to pay the suspect 50,000 euros, but, they said, to ensure that the canvas was indeed Olympia, they demanded the transaction be facilitated by an expert—in actuality, an undercover police officer working as part of Verhaegen’s small team.
El-Bakraoui agreed to the meeting without hesitation, but when the day arrived, he canceled. A second meeting was arranged some days later, but he canceled that one too. With assistance from the special intervention unit, Verhaegen’s team might have been able to keep el-Bakraoui under surveillance and scope out the meeting place ahead of time, but lacking equipment and personnel, all they could do was wait for a call from a suspect who thought the police were onto him. In the end, the local police opted to recall the few officers they’d assigned to the case. Officially, the investigation remained open. But without officers working on it, the case went nowhere.
Two years after the robbery, late in 2011, a retired cop named Janpiet Callens walked into a Brussels police station and handed over the Olympia canvas.
“I was contacted by someone who wanted to return the painting,” Callens said to local media at the time. “The work was unsellable. They preferred a return to the owner over destroying it.”
Callens, then 62 years old, had taken his pension in 2009 and started a private consulting business. His role in recovering the stolen painting, barely two years into his retirement, made him an instant celebrity in certain art world circles. But his clients are mostly insurance companies, he says, and the work he does for them consists primarily of unglamorous tasks like investigating fraudulent claims and uncovering forgeries.
“When I retired they were very happy to have someone who knew the market,” Callens told me one hot afternoon in August, when I met him for a beer at a café in Brussels. Now 71, he possesses the countenance of a man very nearly at leisure and arrived wearing a mint-green polo shirt, buttoned to the top, with a fitness watch on one wrist and a Rolex Sea-Dweller on the other.
His ascent into the world of fine art and fine watches hardly happened overnight. Early in his career, Callens spent 15 years busting “prostitutes and pimps” as part of a vice squad. Longing for something more and no longer enamored with nightlife, he went to work as a kind of liaison for Interpol, he says, before returning to the ranks of the federal police in Belgium, where he joined a unit focused on financial crimes. Many of his cases there involved high-dollar thefts and fraud, including art, antiques, and collectibles.
One case, Callens told me, involved a pair of men who bought unsigned paintings in the style of middle-class artists, added their forged signatures, and sold them for 500 or 1,000 euros. In the beginning, they were cautious, selling just one or two paintings each month. But because the scam kept working, they eventually grew bold enough to bring 80 of these paintings to a Brussels auction house—which soon led Callens to their door.
“They couldn’t stop,” Callens said. “Because money, money, money.”
In the end, the men received a light punishment, Callens said, because judges and lawyers think of art theft and forgery as crimes that only affect rich people. This, he told me, is a mistake—these are greedy criminals, not romantics, and society coddles them at its peril. Fortunately for Callens, he is now in the private sector, where he is no longer bound by the strictures and protocols that apply to police officers.
“I have more freedom now,” Callens told me. “I’m not so restricted. I can go over the line.”
Take the Magritte case, he said. In the months after the robbery, Callens told me, he heard that the thieves had not yet managed to unload the Olympia canvas, so he enlisted the help of an informant from his days on the police force, who told him the following: The Olympia robbery had been carried out on behalf of a Magritte-obsessed collector who walked away from the deal due to the intense media coverage. The stickup men—whose identity Callens said he never knew—understood its value and had tried on a few occasions to sell the painting before deciding to work with the insurance company directly.
“Two times it was presented to undercover policemen,” Callens said, referring to Section Art’s attempted sting operation. “But in both cases, they understood and knew they were policemen.”
Some two years after the robbery took place, Callens said he asked his informant to relay a message to the person in possession of the Olympia canvas: “It’s famous, nobody will buy it because it’s in the press, it’s on databases,” Callens recalled saying. “So, if you want, I can make a mediation with the insurers.” In the end, 50,000 euros bought it back for the insurance company, which paid him his “standard fee”—one that he declined to disclose.
He also didn’t mention one relevant fact about his association with the Magritte case: In late 2009, not long before he left the police force, taking his pension two years ahead of schedule, Callens was among the officers tasked with investigating the Olympia robbery, with access to all the information in the case file.
In 2013, nearly two years after Olympia’s recovery, thieves broke into the Van Buuren Museum, yet another private home preserved for its cultural significance. Built in 1928 by the Dutch banker David van Buuren and his wife, Alice, the red brick building in a municipality south of Brussels called Uccle is filled with paintings, sculptures, and a piano that once belonged to Erik Satie. In a reception room where the Van Buurens had once greeted esteemed guests like Christian Dior, Jacques Prévert, and Magritte, the walls were adorned with James Ensor’s Shrimps and Shells, and The Thinker by Kees van Dongen. In a little more than two minutes, a couple hours before sunrise on July 16, the intruders escaped with these paintings, plus 10 other works. Neighbors saw as many as four men leaving the crime scene in a BMW; one said he heard them speaking French.
In the years since the Magritte heist, Verhaegen’s only other colleague in the art crime unit had retired—he was now Section Art in its entirety. With a small team of Uccle police, he chased down leads and worked informants, to no avail.
A few weeks after the Van Buuren robbery, police in Uccle received a visit from the retired cop turned consultant Janpiet Callens. If they brought him into the fold, he claimed, he could help them solve the case and recover the missing paintings. But the architects of the Olympia heist remained at large years after Callens delivered the painting, and Uccle police didn’t take him up on his offer. (Multiple requests for comment went unanswered by representatives of the Uccle police department.) According to Verhaegen, officials are often hesitant to work with private detectives and consultants in the art world because, he says, they “stimulate just that type of theft and illicit markets.” They have been known to aggressively seek out the identity of victims from the police, then hold back information that might aid criminal investigators.
Around this time, Callens told me, he was contacted by an “unknown person” regarding the Van Dongen painting. Acting on behalf of the insurer, Callens says he met with this individual and proposed a “[finder’s] fee” of 10 percent of the painting’s value. Callens later received an SMS message saying the amount was insufficient, and says he had no further contact.
Callens’s website describes his services as offering “guidance through the wilderness of police and private databases.” While Belgian law prohibits police officers from working as private detectives for at least five years after retirement, and Callens returned Olympia just two years after leaving the force, he stays within the red tape by identifying as a consultant and, he says, contracting recognized detectives when needed. When I asked, via email, whether he hired a detective in the Magritte case, he responded, “This was [not] necessary in this case. I have not conducted a proactive investigation.” However, he had previously described to me the lengths he’d taken to track down Olympia: “I contacted one of my informants from my former [unit] and said, ‘Look, you can’t do anything with it. It’s [known], it’s famous. Nobody will buy it because it’s in the press....’ ”
Verhaegen, a stickler for the rules, avoided such gray areas, but in early 2014 his personal stakes in the Van Buuren case ratcheted up even further when he was told that his unit would soon be shut down completely due to budget cuts. If he could bring in the thieves on such a high-profile case, he thought, he might be able to save the department. With few resources and a ticking clock, Verhaegen rededicated himself to the thin evidence he had to go on, and a gnawing hunch: He had felt from the beginning that the robbery was related to the 2009 Magritte heist. Nearly two years into the investigation, he finally found evidence that seemed to confirm this. In March 2015, police received information that Khalid el-Bakraoui—the man who had been a prime suspect in Verhaegen’s Olympia case, and who authorities believed was the recipient of the 50,000 euro payout arranged by Callens—was trying to make contact with the insurance company responsible for the Van Buuren Museum’s policy.
In the years since his last brush with Section Art, el-Bakraoui had been busy. About one month after the Magritte heist, he’d grabbed a Kalashnikov rifle and robbed a Brussels bank along with two accomplices. Two weeks later, after carjacking an Audi S3, el-Bakraoui was detained by police who found him in a warehouse filled with stolen cars. Somehow, he evaded charges until September 2011, when he was convicted of criminal conspiracy, armed robbery, and possession of stolen cars and weapons. His prison sentence began around the time Olympia was recovered, and he was paroled, with an electronic monitor, two months before the Van Buuren Museum heist took place.
El-Bakraoui’s believed involvement in the case offered hope for the art crime unit. Because he was already making inquiries about ransoming paintings from the Van Buuren robbery, bringing him in would simply be a matter of securing the insurance company’s cooperation.
Once again, the insurance underwriter agreed to refer el-Bakraoui to an independent expert who was, in reality, an undercover police officer. But an anonymously sourced article soon appeared in the national press stating that the police had made contact with the suspects in the robbery. This was seen as a warning, according to a member of the investigation: Someone with inside knowledge was sending a message to the art-nappers to let them know that the police were onto them. Following the article’s release, el-Bakraoui went dark and once again slipped away. Verhaegen would not hear his name again until March 2016, when it was on the lips of everyone in Belgium.
In June 2015, authorities in Gaziantep, Turkey, detained Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, Khalid’s older brother, on the suspicion that he was planning to enter Syria to fight for the Islamic State. But instead of extraditing him to Belgium, where he would have been incarcerated for violating the terms of his parole, Turkish authorities, at his request, sent him only as far as the Netherlands, and he returned to Brussels on his own. Ibrahim was, like his brother, already associating with men with known terrorist links. In 2010, he had been involved in what the mayor of Brussels then called a run-of-the-mill crime, an attempted robbery of a Western Union. Armed with a Kalashnikov, Ibrahim shot a police officer in the leg before escaping with his colleagues to a home in Laeken. Police caught up with them there the next morning, and el-Bakraoui was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He served less than half of his sentence, during which time his radicalization only accelerated, before being paroled in October 2014.
Seven months after his brother’s parole, in May 2015, Khalid el-Bakraoui was arrested for meeting with a known criminal, which was a violation of the terms of his own parole. But because he was otherwise in accordance with the conditions of his release, the judge set him free. In August, after he once again violated the terms of his parole, Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest, but he evaded capture by using the alias Ibrahim Maaroufi. In September, he rented an apartment 40 miles south of Brussels, which was used as a safe house by Abdelhamid Abaaoud and other Islamic State militants as they plotted and carried out terror attacks in Paris in November 2015, killing 130 people.
Just four months later, the el-Bakraoui brothers carried out their own terror attacks in Brussels: On the morning of March 22, 2016, Ibrahim blew himself up in the departure hall at Zaventem airport; just over an hour later, Khalid blew himself up while riding inside a train pulling out of Maelbeek station. The explosions killed 32 bystanders.
“I saw it,” Verhaegen says. “We have here the same guy. So I made a report for our direction and commander in chief, and their comments were very laconic. Just: ‘Okay, it’s not proof that they used that money for their terrorist activities.’ ”
Belgian law enforcement were widely criticized for allowing the el-Bakraoui brothers to evade detection when both men were on parole and, at various times, under surveillance. But it was only in the aftermath of the Brussels terror attacks, Van Leeuw tells me, that a clear portrait of the brothers and their radicalization emerged. Verhaegen, meanwhile, feels that even now there is a reluctance to accept all that has transpired. In an email, he expresses bafflement over my conversation with Belgium’s federal prosecutor.
“When I reported the facts to our direction in 2016,” Verhaegen wrote, “the direction refused to accept this link. And the investigators of terrorism never asked for information about the stolen artifacts.”
In 2016, Section Art was formally dissolved, and Verhaegen was assigned to another unit. But art crime cases kept coming in, and local police kept sending their files to Verhaegen’s boss asking for help. So, after seven months, Verhaegen was given permission to work solely on art crime cases, albeit without a formal unit. He shares a small office with one younger colleague. In preparation for retirement, Verhaegen is training her to use the database of stolen art.
His colleagues sometimes tease Verhaegen about how much money he stands to make as a freelance consultant, but he tells me he isn’t interested in that. “All that money,” he says. “I’m happy without it.” He wants to spend his retirement working as a volunteer tour guide in Overijse, the village where he was born. Months later, when I tell this to Archer at the FBI, he laughs.
“A local docent,” he says. “As I said, a touch of eccentricity.”
In the meantime, Verhaegen still has crimes to solve and thieves to catch, preferring to busy himself with open cases rather than closed ones.
“Everyone makes his choice,” he tells me. Callens, meanwhile, seems content to spend his retirement courting the moneyed private clients who Verhaegen will be happy to ignore.
Instead of dwelling on what his efforts might have accomplished a decade ago, Verhaegen remains focused on what they can do now. These days, he says, he’s worried less about high-end art thefts than collectibles, like coins and stamps, which have recently become a target for suspects with known links to the Islamic State. “Every day I go through Maelbeek station,” he tells me. “Every day I’m thinking about that bomb attack. It [could] happen tomorrow. Or this evening.”
Before leaving Brussels, I too pass through Maelbeek Station, on my way to a multi-faith cemetery in Schaerbeek. When I arrive, a series of signs guide me to the grave of René Magritte and Georgette Berger, where I find a handsome tomb, adorned with a fresh bouquet of flowers. In pursuit of the same men Verhaegen once chased, I walk a short distance to a plot of land reserved for Muslim graves. The most modest of these have no headstones and are marked only with small metal plates inscribed with the names of the dead. Somewhere among them are the remains of Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, buried under a false name so that his grave may not become a site of pilgrimage for other jihadists. His brother Khalid may be buried nearby, but I can’t be sure. Like the masterpieces stolen from Uccle’s Van Buuren Museum, the whereabouts of his remains are unknown.
— An Intimate View of a Young Queen Elizabeth II
— The Sacklers Launched OxyContin. Everyone Knows It Now.
— Exclusive Excerpt: An Icy Death at the Bottom of the World
— Lolita, Blake Bailey, and Me
— Kate Middleton and the Future of the Monarchy
— The Occasional Terror of Dating in the Digital Age
— The 13 Best Face Oils for Healthy, Balanced Skin
— From the Archive: Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse”
— Sign up for the “Royal Watch” newsletter to receive all the chatter from Kensington Palace and beyond.
