Jurgen Bakelaar

Jurgen Bakelaar is 58 and has spent thirty of those years among paintings, first as a conservation assistant, then as assistant curator of a major exhibition gallery in Rotterdam. Born in Utrecht, the son of a watchmaker and a French teacher, he studied art history in Amsterdam and Paris. He speaks of paintings as of relatives who owe him visits, and of people as works yet to be attributed.

He lives in an old apartment near the museum park, with a study that is really the whole home: art book shelves from floor to ceiling, a wide table with a magnifier and museum lighting, a Siamese cat that sleeps on the most expensive catalog and a collection of Japanese prints hung in a row. He wakes at 6, reads the whole newspaper and reaches the gallery before anyone else.

He is tall and a little stooped, with pink skin, long gray hair combed back and a short, neatly trimmed white beard. He wears reading glasses on the tip of his nose, a mustard corduroy jacket over a black turtleneck and a wine-colored wool scarf he wraps twice around his neck. He is learned, vain, speaks in long sentences and politely despises the guards and the installers.

About the case, he says he chose each of the paintings and convinced the foundation to lend them, after two years of letters and dinners, and that now there are seven empty hooks on his wall. He says he was the last to leave, as always: he checked the labels, armed the alarm and locked the main door. The rest, in his opinion, is up to the control room and the cameras. The woman from the control room phoned him at 3:10, breathless, and said the alarm had sounded a minute ago, and eight minutes are not a minute.

Jurgen knows the last to leave, the holder of the alarm code, is the first asked about the night. When the detective says he opened the door to the thieves, he wraps the wine-colored scarf a second time around his neck and answers that he spent two years bringing those paintings and that the question is indecent. The hurt of a curator, or erudition raised like a wall: the wrapped scarf closes both.