Treasure of Saint-Lazare

by John Pearce

  At the first, a year after Lauren’s death, Eddie was a lost soul, unreceptive to friends or family. Margaux had said he was his own ghost, sliding around life and glancing off the things that once had given him joy.

  The second time was a year or two later, when Icky had to be in Paris on company business. They’d had dinner at Margaux’s home because she was recovering from surgery, and Icky was amazed at the difference in his friend. He was also amazed at Aurélie, whom he called “that astounding creature.”

  “If you get tired of her or she kicks you out, your job is to call me immediately,” he’d said the next day as he tried to persuade Eddie to take on a small investigation in Switzerland.

  “Wouldn’t work, Icky. All your friends would think she’s a raving pinko. Even the French right wing is to the left of what passes for progressive politics in the States these days. And your outfit lives in the days of John Foster Dulles. Or worse, W.”

  There wouldn’t be any time for jokes this trip, Eddie told himself as Icky turned the Corvette smoothly onto the toll road that would take them to the Beltway and then across the Potomac into Maryland.

  Icky set the cruise control. “Your call didn’t leave me much time, but I’ve lined up some people who may be able to help. My office deals with all sorts of hidden assets, and frankly right now we’re putting most of our energy into finding the sources of terrorist money. But there’s a woman in the old-money section who spends a third of her time on wartime stuff — and, believe it or not, some of the old Nazi loot has been turning up in the same places as terrorist money. She’s very interested in talking to you.”

  A half-hour later the Corvette nosed off the Beltway and into the parking lot of a large glass-walled building. It was identical to the buildings to its left and right and reminded Eddie unfavorably of the Mitterrand library in Paris.

  Icky swiped his access card at a gate separating the elevators from the entrance lobby. Outside the gate Eddie saw a Starbucks, a magazine stand, and a dry cleaner’s pickup station. A uniformed guard made a copy of his American passport and buzzed him through the gate, where Icky held an elevator door. He pressed the button for the fifth floor and when the car stopped he led Eddie through a door marked only “Export-Import.”

  Behind the door a guard welcomed them with, “Good morning, Mr. Crane. Is this your guest?”

  “It is. Eddie, we need to make another copy of your passport, if you don’t mind.”

  Security cleared, the guard pressed a button that opened a heavy metal door. Behind it, stairway rose to the floor above.

  “Import-export. What do the other tenants think you do?”

  “Oh, they know what we do. It just gives us a little deniability and them a little security, so everyone’s happy.”

  “And this is your kingdom?”

  “You could say that, in the sense that Napoleon’s brother was king of Naples.”

  They paused in a windowless anteroom at the top of the stairs as Icky passed his access card through a reader. A discreet chime sounded, an LED changed from red to green, and he opened the door to lead the way down a long beige hall completely free of decoration. Halfway to the end he turned into a reception room furnished with two gray steel desks. The back wall was lined with fireproof file cabinets, each of which had a combination dial in the center of its top drawer.

  “Eddie, this is Stella Marcos, my right hand.” Stella stood to greet them. She was a tiny Filipina, who without her tall heels would hardly have been five feet tall. She wore her jet-black hair in an elegant French twist echoing Margaux’s style.

  “Stella. Delighted,” he said.

  “It’s really Estrella, but no one could handle that.”

  Icky’s office was larger but no more elegant. His desk was T-shaped, with its own conference table, and was larger than Eddie had expected.

  “Where we came from you had to be a bird colonel to get this kind of setup.”

  “That’s still the way it is. But don’t confuse Washington with the outside world. Out there the colonel or the one-star really have serious responsibilities. Here we’re a dime a dozen. At least I’m not some general’s aide.”

  He turned serious. “Eddie, I know you have a real problem going, and I intend to help solve it. My initial information is that it may be more serious than you know — although I’m not sure how anything could be more serious than what you’ve been through.”

  “Do you think this is connected with the murder of my family?”

  “Too early to say. They may be totally separate crimes, but let’s just say we’ve found some evidence in looking at the missing painting that might lead back to someone who might have been a part of the murders. But it’s too early yet. We have miles to go.

  “When you called, I asked Carole Westin to start looking around. Her official job is dealing with the old lost assets, most of which are the property of Jews deported and murdered during the war. But like all of us, she’s been working mainly on finding terrorist money. Yesterday I asked her to put that on hold for a day or two and work on the painting and anything that might be related to it. Needless to say, she was very familiar with Hans Frank.

  “I’m pretty sure now that what I thought was going to be a freelance project for an old friend has turned into something that just might move one of our old cases forward. Let’s hope we can work together again on it.”

  Two minutes more of small talk, then Icky held up his hand and said, “Here she is now.”

  “Eddie, please meet Dr. Carole Westin, director of our recovered assets branch. Carole, this is Eddie Grant of Paris, my old company commander and the guy with the intriguing problem I told you about yesterday.”

  Carole Westin appeared to be about 35, although Eddie thought he might be off by five years either way. She had hair nearly as black as Estrella’s and an olive complexion that would have marked her as Mediterranean, perhaps Italian, except that the name didn’t match. Maybe it was a husband’s name, but there was no wedding ring. She wore a beige shirtwaist dress that looked expensive, and gold earrings that matched a simple chain necklace. She reminded him of a picture of Margaux at the same age that had sat on his father’s desk.

  “I’m sorry to have dropped this on you on such short notice, but Icky may have told you this whole affair came up rather suddenly.”

  “I was sorry to hear of your friend’s death ….”

  “It was very hard on his daughter, but that is what led to my call. Maybe something useful will come out of it.”

  “Let’s go across the hall to a conference room and get out of Icky’s hair,” Carole said. “Excuse me, out of Thomas Jefferson’s powdered wig.” She looked at Icky with an impish half-smile.

  She sat down at the head of a steel conference table and signaled to Eddie to sit at her left. “Is there anything specific I can tell you now?” he asked.

  “May I just summarize what I know, then ask you to fill in any obvious blanks? Then I’ll tell you what we have found so far and see if that sparks any new ideas.” Eddie had no objection.

  “First, your recently deceased friend worked with your late father in the Allied Central Collection Point in Munich. As part of their work they interviewed Hans Frank just before he was hanged but he didn’t give them any useful information about the missing Raphael, other than to indicate it might have been shipped earlier than the other paintings.

  “Mr. Castor stayed in the Army a few months longer than your father, still in Munich, then was mustered out and returned to St. Louis. But soon he went back to Germany, where he settled in Frankfurt and opened an antiques business. He spent thirty years building it, plus or minus, then sold it to a German company and retired to Florida, where he lived for another thirty years until his recent untimely death. One of his acquaintances in Sarasota was his commanding officer in Munich, Lieutenant Colonel Albert Sommers.

  “Your father returned to the family business in New York State, married but it didn’t last, and after three years o
r so moved back to Paris, where he was very successful in selling much of the steel that went into rebuilding Europe. There he married your mother, whom he knew from his cloak-and-dagger days with Army intelligence. The family business was ultimately sold to another American steel firm that had no need for a second European CEO and he retired, but he had the good judgment to recognize that the domestic steel industry was on the skids and sold his stock in the acquiring company as soon as he legally could, a good decision since it went bankrupt a dozen years later. As a result you and your mother are among the wealthiest Americans in France or anywhere else. You have done a successful job of preserving your assets and hers during the current economic unpleasantness. I take it from your investment activities over the last eighteen months that you expect things to get worse.”

  “Much worse,” he replied.

  She paused to push a hank of shoulder-length hair behind her right ear.

  “Is that a fair summary of our starting point?”

  Eddie nodded and told her she seemed to have a good grasp of everything he’d known before Roy Castor’s death.

  “There are a couple of things we know that you may not yet have heard, and I’d like to get them onto the table early.” He nodded at her to continue.

  “First, Colonel Sommers is a more complicated character than he might appear on the surface.”

  “I suspected that,” Eddie said. “I interviewed him day before yesterday and he certainly wasn’t anxious to volunteer information. In fact, he lied.”

  Carole continued, “I’m not at all sure how pertinent any of this is to the case at hand, but Colonel Sommers is well known to my office as having been a mid-level thief during his time in Munich. Like too many GIs, he just couldn’t keep his hands off the material he was supposed to be preserving. He seemed to favor old religious silver. As far as we can tell he’s never overtly sold any of it, and we never were certain exactly what he took, so the Justice Department took a pass on him. The FBI did give him a once-over about ten years ago, but couldn’t find enough evidence to move forward and he was a pretty small fish.”

  Eddie interrupted her. “Roy’s daughter Jen and I found some of Roy’s files in a bank box yesterday and I’d say his behavior in Munich was consistent with what you just told me. For example, my father did a long report to Sommers about his interview with Hans Frank, and later sent the pink copy to Roy with a notation that the original wasn’t in the files where it should be. The clear implication was that Sommers had plucked it out for his own purposes. In it there’s a mention that Frank may have sent one painting separate from the others, which could have attracted his attention.”

  “That’s consistent with what we know. Many of the looters were enlisted men who just accidentally-on-purpose forgot to turn in everything they found and mailed a few pieces home, but he picked through everything and chose the pieces he wanted. It doesn’t appear he was particularly good at it, but he really abused his position. But as I said, nothing’s going to happen to him on the criminal front. It’s just been too long and he’s too old.”

  “I understand that, but he went out of his way to try to convince me he wasn’t interested in art and didn’t know much about it, but his dining room walls are hung with a half-dozen nice oil paintings. Not museum-quality by any means, but if he chose them he knows something about painting. On the surface it would make sense that the gold is the big target here, but the painting might also be important. Also, he knew about the safe deposit box where I found the Frank interview report but he didn’t mention it to me. Then the next day when we left the bank Jen and I were chased at very high speed by someone the police could never identify.”

  Carole asked him to go through the story of what had happened since Jen had turned up at his door. She questioned him especially closely about the attack at the Hôtel Chopin, and asked him to repeat his description of the attackers, then she laid two photos on the desk before him. One was black and white, poorly focused, and showed a tall man dressed in 40s style standing between two French policemen, each of them holding an arm. It had been cropped so that only half of each policeman was in the frame, but it was clear they had their man firmly under control. The other appeared to be a frame from the same surveillance video Thom had shown him.

  “We’re really interested in this guy,” Carole said, tapping her index finger on the surveillance clip. “We’re pretty sure he was in the group that tried to kidnap Mr. Castor, and we think he may have been the man who cut up the French hotel clerk so badly. “Our embassy asked the Paris police for the mug shots, but they only got two of the three Germans so we had to make do with our own — this is from the camera in the long-term parking lot at Sarasota airport, and it shows this man stealing the car that hit Mr. Castor.

  “Here’s one of a man with almost the same name taken sixty years ago, from our own files. Obviously they aren’t the same person, but you can see more than a superficial resemblance.”

  Superficial? Eddie thought the resemblance was uncanny.

  “Who is this? They could be brothers.”

  “We think they’re father and son, the Krafts,” Carole said. Both are named Eric, the son with an h.

  “What’s most interesting is that the photo of the father was taken in 1947 when he was released from Santé Prison after he’d served two years for collaborating with the Germans. At the time he told a wild story about how he’d brought a truckload of gold and a valuable old painting to Paris on behalf of Hans Frank, who was a relative — his mother’s side, I believe, but that’s murky. But there was no evidence of either the gold or the painting, so the police put him down as a windbag. As soon as he got out of jail he hightailed it for Germany, where he went to work for the Stasi. Later he surfaced in Frankfurt, where he died in the eighties.”

  Eddie caught his breath. “What then?”

  “We aren’t sure. He was in the shipping business and probably was involved in some undercover work on behalf of Stasi. Frankfurt was on its way to becoming a huge financial center, so there would have been a lot of opportunities for industrial espionage. But the agency just didn’t have the resources to chase every East German spook, so he fell off the radar.”

  “Let me fill in some of the blanks,” Eddie said. “One of the things he did was marry Jen Wetzmuller’s mother, Gutrud, who was Roy Castor’s office manager and maybe his sometime lover. She died in 1980, but Jen remembers that he had an unpleasant son who looked just like him.”

  “Ugh. The two of them must have been a pair.”

  “No doubt about that. It means that there may have been something to the father’s tale about the painting and the gold, or at least the son is convinced of it. But why now? Why is this coming to life this year, and not next year or fifteen years ago? And what has the son been doing all this time? And could Al Sommers have heard the father’s story?”

  Carole said, “The price of gold could have something to do with it. It’s more than tripled in the last four years, which would make it very attractive to someone with a cash-flow problem. And young Erich may have found a lead, or met somebody who thinks he can find the treasure. Or he might have found someone who could sell the gold. It would have swastika markings cast into it, so all banks and legitimate gold dealers would recognize it as wartime loot, unless of course he can find someone to melt it down for him, which wouldn’t be easy, or sell it to someone who didn’t care. He was pretty young when the wall fell, so he wasn’t ever an official Stasi agent, but since then it appears he’s been hanging out with some of the more disreputable Stasi alumni, including some with terrorist connections. That, by the way, is the intersection of your case and my usual work.”

  Eddie thought for a minute before responding. “And it may have something to do with Sommers’s health. Jen told me he was in really good shape until a year ago, but now he’s in a wheelchair and on oxygen part of the time. He might have decided it’s now or never.”

  “There’s something else that’s bothering us.” Car
ole pointed again to the second photo on the table.

  “We’ve enhanced the parking-lot shot, which was pretty good to begin with. Here’s a blowup of the man you see at the door.”

  The photo was clear. It showed a man in his 40s, with short brown hair, wearing a brown jacket that looked like leather.

  “We know the men Philippe’s people arrested were German, so we started looking for this one among the pictures TSA takes at immigration checkpoints.”

  “Did you find him?”

  “No, which bothered us. The Sarasota police found out that three men arrived in Tampa via Amtrak a couple of days before Mr. Castor was killed, then took a cab to Sarasota, where they slipped away.

  “Imagine our surprise when we found out this German had arrived in Atlanta from Frankfurt and gone through immigration as a U.S. citizen, with a valid U.S. passport.”

  “How could that be?”

  “You have to keep in mind that TSA’s facial recognition software is very good, but it’s not yet perfect. It picked out this face from among a group of passports issued to naturalized citizens almost ten years ago, so there’s still a little bit of doubt about the identification, but I doubt he’ll want to try renewing it.”

  “That’s a surprise. I’d think the pre-naturalization checks would have turned up his background.”

  “That should have happened, except that he had a legend that seems to have been years in the making. You’re looking at citizen Erich Wetzmuller, who was vouched for by his loving sister, Jennifer Gutrud Wetzmuller.”

  Eddie stood up to get a closer look at the pictures. “Merde!” he said softly. Then, “that would explain some things.”