The Last Best Friend

by George Sims

  On the 16th May, 1940 (the day after Holland surrendered), Reich Commissar Seyss-Inquart brought in his protégé, the art expert Dr Katejan Muehlmann with an organization called ‘Dienstelle Muehlmann’, to acquire pictures for the Nazis. Their principle was the axiom that all German works of art must return ‘heim ins Reich’ but, as you will understand, this repatriation was interpreted very liberally. In fact various organizations such as ‘Treuhand A.G.’, ‘The Adler Trading Company’ and ‘Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg’ competed with notorious individuals like Hans Posse, Dr Erhard Goepel and Karl Haberstock (who made a fortune selling pictures to Hitler) for Dutch art treasures. In one month (December 1940) ‘Dienstelle Muehlmann’ alone sent to Munich Pieter Breughel’s Carrying the Cross, a Rembrandt self-portrait, and two great Rubens portraits. Famous collections which suffered badly from Nazi depredations included those of Franz Lugt, Alfons Jaffe, Otto Lanz and the ‘Gondstikker Collection’ (some 1300 paintings) originally housed in the Kasteel Nijenrode.

  I am not posing as an authority on this subject—I spent most of the war hidden in a friend’s farm-house near Utrecht so I have little first-hand information of what happened in Amsterdam in 1940/41. And indeed the position there was so complicated by various factions—Ribbentrop had his own ‘art battalions’ while the ‘Shantung Handelsgesellschaft’ pillaged for Goring—that it would require a specialist art historian to untangle it. But I do know that at the end of the war some of the stolen paintings were found in the Schloss Neuschwanstein, a hill-top castle built by Mad Ludwig of Bavaria. Many more, together with the bulk of Nazi lootings of bullion, magnificent jewels and tapestries, were discovered in the Alt Aussee salt-mine. This, the main repository, was fortunately reached by the U.S. Third Army before it could be destroyed on Martin Bormann’s orders.

  You can therefore appreciate our feelings on discovering these drawings in the cellar all stamped on their mounts to show the Mannheimer provenance. Mr Weiss was particularly intrigued—I think I should say obsessed—with the puzzle they posed. Then from some papers put aside for waste disposal in the cellar he decided that probably the drawings and the other looted (?) material had been collected by a certain Captain L. K. Green of the Duke’s Own Hussars. We agreed to make inquiries: I would find out as much as possible about the actual disposal in Holland of the Amsterdam section of the Mannheimer collection, while Mr Weiss would track down the present whereabouts of Captain Green.

  Now I am wondering (well aware that this may sound absurd to you) if it could be that his inquiries were connected in any way with his death. You may dismiss this suggestion as being wild surmise: certainly it is ‘a shot in the dark’ and perhaps you can straight away allay my fears, but I have been deeply puzzled and disturbed. I do know that when I last saw Mr Weiss, just three weeks ago, he was in fine spirits as usual and appeared to be in good health. I am sure you will understand my writing to you about my concern—when I was in London Mr Weiss spoke about you and I got the impression that your friendship was a close one. Please tell me your opinion. If there is any doubt in your mind do you think I should write to the police or will you contact them? In any case I shall look forward to hearing from you…

  It was a warm day but Balfour shivered suddenly and his hands were cold. Reading Steiner’s letter, the conviction had grown in his mind that Sammy’s death might not have been an accident or suicide—that Sammy, probing around in murky events of 1945, had uncovered a secret which had led to his murder.

  Balfour pulled out the crumpled piece of paper which contained the rough chronology of events he had begun when he first returned from Corsica. Below the date when he had last seen Sammy he had added the day of the aborted auction at Eagle House and the names Knollys Green, Quarry, Leonard K. G. Cato and Victor Maddox. Now he drew a dotted line linking all the names—he no longer doubted that there was a connection. He was not equipped to solve the mystery as Sammy had been—he did not have Sammy’s chess-playing intellect or dozens of contacts in Jewish circles who might have useful information (he remembered that Sammy had once helped to track down a copy of the list of SS members—a book printed in an edition of fifteen copies, so rare that the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna had searched for one for years). What he did have was determination—the doggedness which had led to Max Weber paying him that left-handed compliment. He would try to find Patrick J. Quarry and see what he had to say about Leonard Knollys Green Cato, then he would pass on all his information to Superintendent Hanson.

  Chapter XVIII

  The sun was shining from a cloudless sky and Balfour took off his jacket as he strolled slowly through Regent’s Park. He took the circuitous outer path deliberately to kill time as he was anxious not to reach Camden Town before 2.15 p.m. He had spent most of the morning looking through the twenty-four volumes of The Trial of German Major War Criminals (Nuremberg), checking on references to looting, but had not been able to add to the information Steiner had given him. He had been more successful in tracking down Quarry’s address: Patrick F. was the only private subscriber named Quarry in the London phone-directory with an address in the Star Mews off Gloucester Avenue, NW1. Balfour had lived in Camden Town for eighteen months just after the war and knew the short row of small Victorian cottages which made up one side of the Mews.

  From Jermyn Street he had gone to a restaurant near Leicester Square but had found his plate of cold roast beef and salad completely tasteless—the suggestion of Sammy being a murder victim burned in him like a fever. Now, as he skirted Primrose Hill and dawdled along Fitzroy Road, he was barely aware of his route while his mind went on planning and re-planning a meeting with Mr Quarry. One of the main handicaps in following up Sammy’s trail of inquiry was that he did not know what other things Sammy had found in the boxes of rubbish at Eagle House—and his brain was not functioning really clearly, being clouded with obsessive ideas of revenge. With all this in mind it was going to be hard enough for him to find a reasonable-sounding excuse for calling in at Quarry’s house, so he wanted to avoid reaching there at lunch-time.

  Balfour put on his jacket as he turned out of Fitzroy Road into Gloucester Avenue, and nervously ran a smoothing hand over his hair. When he got to the corner of Star Mews he saw that the houses there were as small as he remembered them, probably built to provide the minimum living space required for ostlers or other workers employed at the Camden Town goods depot in the nineteenth century when the vast catacombs there swarmed with horse-drawn vehicles. Viewed up close, No. 7 Star Mews looked just like a doll’s house. The miniature window frames were thickly covered with glossy yellow paint and the cement between the bricks looked as if it had been touched up with whitewash. A canary in a gilt cage was carefully positioned in the window to be in the sun and it trilled away unceasingly as he rang the bell. His hands were sticky and his chest tight as though he had embarked on some illegal project.

  There was only a short pause before the yellow door swung open so that he could hear a loud Italian rendering of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and smell fried onion or garlic. A very tall athletic-looking man with a youthful face and lustrous grey hair filled the doorway, standing with his head lowered as if he was looking out from a manikin’s stage set. Balfour asked ‘Mr Quarry?’ and the man gave a pleasant grin and nodded before he turned away and shouted: ‘Concetta, turn it down a bit. A fractiony, per piacere.’ The music ceased abruptly and he called out: ‘Mille grazie.’ When he turned back he still had a friendly expression but there was a quizzical twist to it as if he half expected to be sold an encyclopedia.

  Balfour cleared his throat and began an apologetic approach to the genial giant: ‘Very sorry to bother you like this but I was hoping you could spare me a few minutes. My name’s Balfour. Just a couple of questions…Hope I’m not interrupting your lunch?’

  Quarry dismissed all this with a shrug, said ‘Finished’, and led the way into the tiny front room where the canary was singing away so loudly
it seemed impossible that all that noise could come from an ounce or two of feathers. Quarry’s casualness implied that the interview was not going to be of much importance or interest to him one way or the other. He collapsed into a chintz-covered armchair with a peculiar jack-knifing effect of his long legs and said: ‘Have a seat. I know, I’ve won the pools and you want to break it to me gently.’

  Balfour had been looking quickly round the room. The doll’s house impression was exaggerated by the numerous small ornaments, but he liked the primitive coloured cast of the Madonna on the mantelpiece, the climbing plants, and the very large white cyclamen on which the blooms looked like nuns’ coifs. The furniture and the carpet were inexpensive. If Quarry had been involved with Cato in looting, his share of the booty must have been small. But everything about the man, his old tweed sports coat and schoolboy flannel trousers which showed a healthy indifference to appearances, his open face, his manner, led Balfour to believe that Quarry was free of deviousness and guilt. He abandoned his half-formulated sentences and decided to play the situation by ear. He took out the photograph of the soldiers grouped round the armoured car and handed it over with one of his business cards. ‘No, not the pools I’m afraid. Simply wanted to ask you about this.’

  Quarry shook his head, said, ‘Well I’ll be…’ then flicked on his infectious grin again: ‘What is this? Some kind of treasure hunt? Can anyone join in? You see there was another bloke round here with a print of this same photo. Couple of weeks ago, so he has the lead on you. You’re looking for the mysterious drawings too?’

  ‘Oh, he told you about the drawings?’

  ‘Yes. Nice little chap and he wrapped it up well at first. Very tactful he was but I definitely got the impression he thought my mob might have knocked them off. But I’ve nothing to hide. I’ll tell you exactly what I told him. Fair enough? Mind you, I don’t think you’ll be much the wiser.’

  ‘I’d be very interested even to know where and when the photograph was taken.’

  ‘That’s easy enough. Near Karlsruhe, April ’45. Yes that’s me, then Corporal, Acting Sergeant P. Quarry, Duke’s Own Hussars, half asleep in the background. It’s a bit of a joke really because I can see how you might think we were mixed up with all that Nazi loot. We were a reccy squadron. Reconnaissance, Military Intelligence. The nearest we got to the spot was Golling. Then we took a kind of Knight’s move, one step forward and a jump to the side. Radstadt and up we shot into the Schladminger Mountains. We were rushing round and round there like mad. Up above Tamsweg. Trying to find “The National Redoubt”. Remember all those rumours about the Wolf’s Lair? How the Nazis were going to hole up in the mountains below Berchtesgaden and fight on? Lot of cock it turned out to be. “The National Redoubt” was a dream or a nightmare, depends on which way you looked at it. But anyway in the last week of April and first of May that was our job. And boy could we move then! We’d dropped the cars and were using U.S. 3rd Army’s jeeps and half-tracks, liaising with them. We had no real fire power so if we hit anything big we shot off again like a fart in a colander. One day for instance we spotted the remnants of a SS Panzer Div HQ Column—just called in the 4th Armoured Shermans and they crucified it. But we never got to the salt-mines at Alt Aussee, and that’s the point, isn’t it? Leastways that’s where I heard the Nazis’ treasure-trove was buried. What I do know for a fact is that Alt Aussee was taken by the U.S. 80th Infantry Div, and they sewed it up really tight.’

  Quarry paused and held his head inclined to one side as though he was listening in case anyone was outside the door. ‘I’ll tell you one thing…’ He listened again. ‘Best days of my life. Our mob was in on the Salerno landing and we had nine months in Italy before we came back to the U.K. for regrouping to go to France. I met the wife in Sorrento so I can’t really complain about the Italian stint, but most of my active service was sweat, fright, or sheer bloody boredom. Those last two weeks in Austria though, whizzing round the mountains, absolute chaos, the war ending, something happening all the time, and yet no casualties—yes sir, those were the days.’

  While Quarry had been happily reminiscing he had turned the photograph over. ‘Hey!’ he said sharply. ‘This is the same photo the other chap showed me with all our names on the back. How come you’ve got it now?’

  Balfour hesitated; he was wondering what explanation Sammy Weiss had given for having the snapshot. ‘Well, it turned up in a lot at the auction sale with the suspect drawings and Mr Weiss bought it, then passed it on to me. I expect you know what dealers are like for selling among themselves, it’s rather like taking in each other’s washing…’

  Quarry interrupted him: ‘You may think I’ve acted like a bit of a Noddy talking so much. But, as I said, I’ve nothing to hide. And frankly I didn’t see why, still don’t, anyone should think there’s a connection between the photograph and the drawings…’ The sentence faded out on a note of doubt and his manner became slightly defensive: ‘The little bloke, why didn’t he tell you all this?’

  Balfour lied easily: ‘Well, I’ve bought the lot now, and if I want to give the drawings a provenance that’s my problem. Looks as if I shan’t be able to though.’

  ‘I see. There’s one more thing I said to the other chap so you might as well know it too. That cushy period I was talking about, there was a reason why it was so short for me quite apart from the war ending. On the 6th May, 1945, I was finished as far as the Duke’s Own were concerned. Kaput. Went through a windscreen when I crashed a jeep in a river. At Bretstein in the Rottenman Mountains. Went back to Salzburg the next day in a lorry with a broken arm and ankle. My demob number came up while I was still in hospital at Guildford, so I never saw the old Duke’s Own again.’

  Quarry paused but Balfour said nothing. Quarry grinned knowingly and handed back the photograph: ‘There’s the difference between you and the other chap. Jewish, isn’t he? When I told him that he was off again like a flash, looking for another trail. Did I know where he might contact anyone else who was in my mob? Where had they gone after Bretstein? Had to tell him that I haven’t heard of or seen any of them in the last twenty-one years. But by the way he went off from here I felt he’d soon be ferreting out Captain Green’s present address. Captain Leonard K. Green and yes, there was a Staff Sergeant Peter Bailey, Intelligence Corps, who was on our strength then. They were the brains of the outfit and they both spoke German like natives. If you could find either of them…’

  ‘Thanks very much. I’m grateful. But I won’t take up any more of your time.’ Balfour got up and in two steps was by the door to the passage. When he opened it he could hear a woman quietly singing a cheerful Italian song, and for a moment he looked round the little room again in which everything seemed to sparkle or shine, envying Quarry who had made his marriage a success instead of stalemate.

  As he walked to the end of Star Mews he was disturbed by how little factual evidence he had to give Superintendent Hanson. There was the letter from Steiner, that was important, and Mr Stanley Coote would have to confirm that a number of suspicious items has been included in the Eagle House sale and then withdrawn at the request of a certain relative of Colonel Knollys Green, so Leonard Cato could definitely be linked up with that. But the other connections, though they now seemed very likely in his own mind, were really tenuous and hard to substantiate. And when Hanson set out to prove them, how many dissembling intermediaries would there be?

  As he came to the end of Star Mews, Balfour looked up on hearing his name called out in an East London accent, contracted so that it was barely recognizable. ‘Borlf! Here, Borlf. We want you.’ It was a taunting tone and the command was uttered by the taller of Maddox’s youths, the one who had leant so hard on Balfour’s right arm; he now barred the exit to Gloucester Avenue but did so in a negligent manner, with his arms akimbo. He was dressed in a short-jacketed Italian-style dark blue suit, and with his expressionless face he looked like a dummy in a Carnaby Street window.

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bsp; ‘Come here, Borlf.’ The youth addressed him again like a dog. Anger was a thing to avoid. He could see that the blue Ford Galaxie was parked about fifty feet away in Gloucester Avenue, and Victor Maddox was sitting in the driver’s seat beckoning him contemptuously with a black-gloved hand. Losing his temper now would mean trying to fight three thugs and ‘Don’ the sadist, and would have a predictable conclusion. He needed to think clearly and run fast. Fortunately he was not off guard as he had been at Hyde Park Place—he knew both his opponents and the topography of Camden Town.

  Balfour sniffed, then, grinning widely, walked up close to the youth. He knew the grin must appear highly artificial for he was mentally trying to duplicate Stanley Laurel’s fatuous optimism, but it worked as the young man waited for him without taking his carefully posed hands from his hips. Apparently he accepted the fact that the dog ‘Borlf’ was coming back for more treatment. He began to move only when Balfour took one step more than was necessary for normal conversational purposes and hit him with jolting right and left jabs. They were short but damaging punches and the youth’s hands came round to clasp his modish jacket as he staggered forward, landing on one knee.

  Balfour looked past the fallen youth for a moment to the car where Maddox was halfway out on to the pavement, big beery face congested with anger, then whirled round and sped away, his heart pounding like some over-worked machine. His breathing was rapid and absurdly loud like a bellows but he did not feel really nervous, just keyed-up and excited as he would be at tackling a dangerous ski-run or a difficult dive. Before they could slap him around again they had to catch him and where he was going the Ford Galaxie could not follow. He turned left and went through a short row of parked cars. He stopped for a second and heard somebody sprinting after him—it would be the other youth, not Victor Maddox or ‘Don’. He heard his name again—this time shouted in a high, nervously belligerent voice, coupled with some indistinguishable threat.