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This is the twenty-first century. How can that be?”
    Interpol and UNESCO listed art theft as the fourth-largest black market in the world (after drugs, money-laundering, and weapons). But what did that mean? After I’d been following Czegledi’s career for several years, one point was clear: don’t look at the Hollywood versions of an art thief—the Myth. This is a bigger game, with more players, and the legitimate business of art is directly implicated. A lot of the crimes are hidden in the open. Stealing art is just the beginning. Then the art is laundered up into the legitimate market, into private collections, into the world’s most renowned museums. In 2007, this was happening all over the world, and there was only this little group of lawyers who gathered in conference rooms, darkly bemused by the size and scope of the mess. Part of the Problem was that it had been allowed to become so big that it was everyone’s problem and, therefore, no one’s.
    That year I went with Czegledi to see first hand what those rooms of lawyers were like. We travelled to an International Council of Museums conference in Cairo. There was a bonus: Egypt was one of the oldest civilizations in the world, had had its cultural heritage pillaged for thousands of years—every colonial power of note had stolen from Egypt—and was where the first recorded trial of an art thief took place. Egypt was the ultimate source country.

3.
    EGYPT
    â€œThey shouted, ‘Look over here! The loot is inside us! Rob me!’”
RICK ST. HILAIRE
    O N THE hot sand an Egyptian teenager in a dirty T-shirt runs after me with a tray of sunglasses. “Shades! You buy shades!” The Sphinx sits behind him. Dozens of air-conditioned buses are parked in the open sun, and around them hundreds of figures holler for camel rides and photo ops. It all feels insignificant compared to the giant stone triangles that rise, alien-like, out of the desert: the only remaining of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
    Most tourists to Egypt come home with pictures of themselves standing in front of Khufu’s pyramid—the Great Pyramid. When it was completed, in 2560 BCE , it was the tallest structure on earth. It remained the tallest until the Eiffel Tower was built over four thousand years later. Astronauts can see it from orbit. The pyramid was supposed to allow Khufu to live longer than everyone else, in the afterlife. He spent two decades creating his get-out-of-jail-free card, with the help of thousands of labourers who lived in worker-camps on site. When Khufu died he was sealed inside his pyramid with his earthly possessions for what was supposed to be eternity. Now it is a tourist site, and Bonnie Czegledi and I are part of a large crowd standing in front of it.
    This afternoon two guards in dusty blue uniforms stand outside the entrance of Khufu’s pyramid. Up close, I can see the entrance is not so much a door as a dark crack in the tilting wall of ancient limestone that vanishes into the sunlight. The guards are stone-faced as well. Bad news, they tell the latest busload of tourists: cameras are not allowed. The guards collect dozens of them before allowing people to step into the darkness and crawl up a very narrow, hot passageway that leads into the centre of the ancient skyscraper. “This looks uncomfortable,” Czegledi says.
    The tunnel is so small that sometimes we’re forced onto our hands and knees. One line of tourists crawls up, another line clambers down. When the space isn’t wide enough for both lines, there’s a bottleneck of sweat, khaki shorts, and sandy running shoes—extreme claustrophobia. And just when I think I can’t take it anymore, the tunnel opens into an almost perfectly square room with smooth black stone walls and a dim light hanging in the corner.
    No sunlight penetrates here. It is eerily quiet. At the far end of the room rests a tomb, open and empty,