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only remaining expression of a culture. Art thieves steal more than beautiful objects; they steal memories and identities. They steal history.
    Americans, in particular, are said to be uncultured when it comes to high art, more likely to go to a ballpark than a museum. But as I tell my foreign colleagues, the statistics belie that stereotype. Americans visit museums on a scale eclipsing sports. In 2007, more peoplevisited the Smithsonian Institution museums in Washington (24.2 million) than attended a game played by the National Basketball Association (21.8 million), the National Hockey League (21.2 million), or the National Football League (17 million). In Chicago, eight million people visit the city’s museums every year. That’s more than one season’s attendance for the Bears, Cubs, White Sox, and Bulls combined.
    As the agenda inched toward my presentation, I realized that I could place each of the speakers into one of three boxes—academic, lawyer, or diplomat. The academics spouted the statistics and theory diagrams. The lawyers offered deathly dull, law review-style histories of international treaties related to art theft. The diplomats were completely useless. They seemed harmless enough, encouraging genteel cooperation. Yet they seemed to have two true goals. One: offend no one. Two: craft a bland statement for submission to a U.N. committee. In other words, no action.
    Where was the passion?
    We love art because it strikes a visceral chord in everyone, from the eight-year-old kid to the octogenarian. The simple act of putting paint on canvas or transforming iron into sculpture, whether by a French master or a first-grader, is a marvel of the human mind and creates a universal connection. All art elicits emotion. All art makes you feel.
    This is why, when a work of art is stolen or an ancient city is stripped of its artifacts and its soul, we feel violated.
    As I waited for the Interpol chief to wrap up so I could begin my presentation, I looked out across the room at all the dignitaries. The heavy snow was now piled as high as the windows. I began to daydream.
How
, I wondered,
did the son of a Baltimore orphan and a Japanese clerk wind up here, as his country’s top art crime sleuth?

PROVENANCE

C HAPTER 3
T HE M AKING OF AN A GENT
    Baltimore, 1963
.
    “J AP !” I’d heard it before, but the slur from the large white woman with an armful of groceries hit me with such force, I stumbled. I squeezed my mother’s hand and dropped my eyes to the sidewalk. As the woman brushed past, she hissed again.
    “Nip!”
    I was seven years old.
    My mother, Yachiyo Akaishi Wittman, did not flinch. She kept her gaze level and her face taut, and I knew that she expected me to do the same. She was thirty-eight years old and, as far as I knew, the only Japanese woman in our working-class neighborhood of two-story brick starter homes. We were newcomers, having moved from my mother’s native Tokyo to my father’s Baltimore a few years earlier. My parents had met in Japan during the last months of the Korean War, while Dad was stationed at the Tachikawa U.S. air base, where Mom was a clerk. They married in 1953 and my older brother, Bill, was born the same year. I was born in Tokyo two years later. We inherited my mom’s almond eyes and thin build, and my father’s Caucasian complexion and wide smile.
    Mom didn’t speak English well, and this isolated her, slowingher assimilation in the United States. She remained mystified by basic American customs, such as the birthday cake. But she certainly recognized and understood the racial slurs. With memories of World War II still raw, we had neighbors who’d fought in the Pacific or lost family there. During the war my American dad and my Japanese mom’s brothers had served in opposing armies. Dad dodged kamikazes driving a landing craft that ferried Marines to Pacific beaches; one of Mom’s older brothers died fighting Americans in the Philippines.
    My parents sent my brother