Empty Mansions

her attorney not to report the loss. She didn’t file an insurance claim or call the police, but the building manager reported the theft anyway, and an FBI agent marched right into Huguette’s hospital room for an amiable conversation. Wallace was shocked: The FBI had spent a full hour more with his client than he ever had.
    Twelve years later, in 2005, the FBI discovered that Huguette’s Degas pastel was hanging in Mission Hills, Kansas, at the home of the noted collector Henry Bloch, the “H” in the H&R Block tax preparation firm. He and his wife, Marion, had purchased the Degas ballerina unwittinglyfrom an art dealer in Manhattan. Soon after the painting had disappeared, a well-dressed man with a European accent had walked into a small gallery, saying the Degas ballerina had been in his family for many years. The gallery owner bought it, no questions asked. Then the Blochs were told of the painting and had it shipped to Kansas, after having a museum director friend look over the painting’s provenance.
    Huguette wanted the painting back, of course. Instead of demanding their money back from the dealer and returning the painting, the Blochs claimed that, even if the painting had been stolen, it was abandoned property, because Huguette had not tried to find it. Besides, the Blochs had promised to give their entire collection of Impressionists, after their deaths, to Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where Henry Bloch had been chairman of the board. The museum was adding a Bloch Building to honor its longtime benefactors. Huguette did not want to sue. Any publicity about a stolen Degas could bring her life into the open.
    To avoid any embarrassing public attention for either party, after years of discussions the attorneys agreed on an unusual solution. Huguette signed a deed giving the painting to the Kansas City museum. She, not America’s tax expert, would receive the charitable deduction for the $10 million painting. To assure the museum that Huguette, who was now 102, was able to make such a decision, Dr. Singman signed a second statement attesting to her competence.
    To make things tidy for the lawyers, the painting actually had to change hands. Outside the Bloch home on an October day in 2008, the Degas ballerina was the object of the following game of hot potato. The ballerina was taken down from the wall and handed to Huguette’s attorney, Wally Bock. Bock was escorted by a former FBI agent to the driveway, where the director of the museum, Marc Wilson, was waiting in a limousine.
    Bock handed the painting to the director of the museum, which was receiving it as a gift from Huguette.
    And the museum director walked the ballerina back into the Bloch home, where it went in the same spot, above the sofa, between a Seurat and a Toulouse-Lautrec. The museum’s executive committee had agreed to lend the painting to the Blochs. Although a stolen painting had beenfound on their wall, they got it back, for as long as they lived. The deal was so hush-hush that the museum’s curators, and most of the museum’s directors, didn’t know they now owned the Degas. The museum did agree that it would consider lending the painting, up to twice within the next twenty-five years, to Huguette’s favorite museum, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington.
    The effect for Huguette, of course, was that she no longer owned her ballerina. She asked the Kansas City museum to take a photograph, at full size, so she would have a print to remember her by.
TWO WILLS

 
    C HRIS S ATTLER CALLED attorney Bock with disturbing news: “Mrs. Clark’s condition seems to be deteriorating.” It was February 15, 2005, and Huguette’s cold had turned into pneumonia.
    The same day, Hadassah followed up with her own call to Bock, asking about the $5 million “owed on her gift.” She was referring to the $5 million she had not yet gotten from the sale of the Cézanne, the $5 million she was carrying around in an undated check. Huguette told Bock she wanted to give Hadassah the $5 million right away.
    Huguette, at age ninety-eight and with pneumonia, still hadn’t signed a will. This was the opening that her attorneys had been waiting forty years for.
    • • •
    When Huguette was young, she signed two wills, leaving everything to her mother. The last one had been signed in 1929, when she was Mrs. Gower.
    After Anna died, Huguette’s lawyers at Clark, Carr & Ellis, the old railroad firm, made a renewed push. In 1964,they sent