The Great Thieves

 

My words have traveled far—all of the way to Australia, where a story of mine, “The Great Thieves,” was published at the end of August in StylusLit, Issue 16, September 2024.  The story’s set in Boston, so it’s well-traveled altogether.

 

This is a fictional account which draws on the real-life (bigger than life) occurrences of March 1990, when thirteen major works of art were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston's Fens—a lovely museum I’ve visited often, standing each time looking sadly at the empty frames waiting forlornly for their missing contents to return.  This account of “the single largest property theft in the world,” still unsolved over thirty years later, is purely fictional but in broad terms based fairly closely on what actually happened.

 

One of the characters in the story dwells on the subtleties of theft:  “Life is essentially all about theft, I’ve concluded.  What we steal from others; what we make of that.  Mireille stole this space, to improve it, transform it.  What my mother steals is to obliterate, lay waste to—like salting the earth behind a retreating army.  The theft of your paintings, who knows?  Only the thieves know what they’ve done with them, and why.  Diogenes, who I studied at Tufts, compares the little thief (Mireille, if you like, and each of us to some degree) to the great thieves—my mother, taking life and possibility away.  Whoever stole the art.  The ‘treasurers of the temple’—the crooks in charge, who have the power to ruin great segments of the population daily, just because they can.”

 

 

 

image:  Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum