Florian's Gate

by T. Davis Bunn

  “Mr. Henryk?” When the old man turned toward him, Jeffrey continued. “Gregor tells me you speak English. Your work is good. Very good.”

  The old man turned and bowed his head slightly. “Parlez-vous francais?”

  “Some,” Jeffrey replied in English. “A few words. From school, one long vacation a few years back, and now I have some business there.”

  The man switched to English. “I love France. I adore France.”

  “You’ve lived there?”

  “Ah, no. The closest I’ve ever come to France is copying a Frenchman’s brushstrokes,” the old man replied. “But it has always been my dream to go to Paris, to see the art. Yes, that has been the lifelong dream of this artist.”

  “If it’s so important, why not go? You have your freedom now. You can take the train.”

  Henryk faced Jeffrey straight on. “These eyes are still good,” he said. “These hands are still steady. But these legs, no; I could not manage on my own. For me the end of communism came ten years too late.”

  “Perhaps you can find someone to take you.”

  “My wife, yes, she would go. But her dream of Paris is a dream of luxury. Fine hotels. Famous shops. Wonderful food. Things that would require much money. And once seeing these things, my wife would not wish to ever return to the hardship of life in Poland.”

  The man went back to his painting. “Yes, I should like to see Paris before I die.” He dabbed at his easel, said casually, “I should also like to tell my secret.”

  “And what secret is that?”

  “If I tell you my story, will you make it possible for my wife and me to live in Paris?”

  Jeffrey laughed. “That depends on how good your story is.”

  “I have reason to believe,” Henryk said, “that a painting by Peter Paul Rubens hanging in the Vavel Castle Gallery is a forgery.”

  “And what makes you say that?”

  The old man turned slowly around. “Because I painted it.”

  Jeffrey worked at keeping a straight face. “Maybe we should go somewhere and talk.”

  “An excellent idea.” Swiftly the man packed up his brushes and paints and folded his easel. He walked over and set them down before another artist, exchanged a few words, returned to Jeffrey, said, “I am at your disposal.”

  At the man’s guidance they walked the half block to the Jama Michalika. Once they were seated, the man said, “This is a cafe by day and a cabaret by night. It gained a most positive reputation under the Communists by being closed down many times. They staged very strong political satire. How do you describe the way you clean metals?” he asked, making a dipping motion with his hand.

  “An acid bath?” Jeffrey guessed.

  “Exactly. They gave the Communists an acid bath. The Communists did not approve.”

  The room was decorated with dark hues; it had a warm and snug feeling despite its size, an atmosphere of intimacy despite the lofty stained-glass ceiling. The lighting was indirect, the framed drawings along the walls mostly savage caricatures, the numerous showcases full of Punch-and-Judy puppets depicting Communist politicians.

  When the waitress appeared, Jeffrey asked, “Coffee?”

  “No, a small glass of champagne, if you don’t mind. I want to get into the mood for Paris.”

  When the waitress left, Henryk continued. “Oh, Paris. You can’t imagine what magic that name holds for me. When I was a little boy, my father gave me an album filled with prints from the great French masters. I loved that book. I would spend hours studying each page. That book is why I wanted to become an artist. I too wanted to create something so beautiful, so moving. And to go to Paris . . . well, the dream started then.”

  “About the Rubens,” Jeffrey pressed.

  “Ah yes. In the late nineteen-thirties, as a young graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, I was hired by the curator of the Vavel Castle Museum. It was my job to inventory paintings, clean the frames, do occasional touch-up work. I was very good at that, you see. Very good. So I began to undertake more and more complex restorations for them. There is a real art to that. You can’t imagine. You have to be so careful about texture and color and lines and tension and brushstrokes. Your brush must move like the brush of the master.”

  The waitress returned, set down the two glasses of champagne, and departed. The old man raised his glass, inspected the golden bubbles for a moment, said, “To Paris.”

  “To a good story,” Jeffrey replied.

  Henryk sipped, then set down his glass and went on. “I had a very good boss, a fine man whose heart and soul were broken by the war. A man who dreamed of leaving Poland, much as he loved his country. He asked for my help. He knew he could trust me, and I knew in turn that he would take care of me, that my job would be secure, that I could stay with my art, and not be forced into the factories like so many of my generation.

  “You cannot imagine the displacement during and after the war. Displacement of everything. People, families, governments, and art. There was a tremendous stockpile of paintings just outside Warsaw in an old warehouse. The Nazis started the collection in their raids throughout much of Europe, and the Soviets inherited the collection when they marched into Warsaw in 1945. What was there in that warehouse, I cannot even begin to imagine. All of the great names. Treasure troves of jewelry. Tons of silver, literally tons. Crystal. Furniture. Eventually the Soviets loaded a convoy of lorries and hauled most of the treasures to Moscow.

  “One of the aparatchiks came up with the clever propaganda idea of rewarding Stalin’s new Polish allies with a few pieces of art from our own warehouse. Plans were made to disperse a portion of the collection to Poland, to Czechoslovakia, and to Hungary. And so one morning, May 19, 1950, a truck pulled into the castle courtyard and started unloading crate after wooden crate of these masterpieces. “You can imagine how we felt as we opened up these crates, unwrapped bales of tapestries, opened treasure chests, examined the cabinets and chests—so many that we could not even store them in the museum’s unused chambers. The mind boggles at what the Soviets must have taken with them back to Russia.

  “A few days later, the curator came into my workshop. It was a funny place for an atelier really, deep in the basements with just a little light through a grimy window set at street level. But I was left completely undisturbed, and I had room to work. Such space and freedom was an unknown gift for my generation. I counted myself blessed and rarely spoke about where I worked or what I did. That day, the curator said he had a special assignment for me. And a favor to ask.

  “He brought with him a flat wooden crate, about the size of this table. He set it in front of me, and with the tip of a screwdriver slowly loosened the edges and lifted the top. In one sweeping motion he drew out the Rubens. The Portrait of Isabel of Bourbon, painted in 1628. It was absolutely stunning. There was a tiny brass name plaque on the frame in the center, as if a Rubens really needed to be labeled. The curator asked, ‘Can you do this kind of work?’

  “ ‘Well, sir,’ I said. ‘A Rubens. It would be an honor, a challenge. But it does not look in such bad shape to me.’

  “The curator was sweating very heavily. ‘It is perfectly all right,’ he said to me. ‘It does not need to be repaired. It needs to be traded for my freedom.’

  “And so I began my work. First I had to find an old canvas, which I did by painting over a meaningless portrait that had sat in our cellars for several centuries. Millimeter by millimeter of painstaking effort, and four months later I was ready to bake and oil and smoke and in this way age our new work by the old master. Or so the world would think.

  “We placed my work in the original frame, tagged with the little brass plaque that said Rubens, and hung it with great ceremony. The delay was explained by the need for substantial restoration work.

  “Things were quite fluid and confused after the war. Our curator had thought it would be a matter of months before he could slip away to the West in some delegation, and there find a buyer for the original. Que
stions would not have been asked in the West. Even from within our Soviet-made cell we knew that there was such a place as a Swiss bank vault, where buyers could be brought to view a work, with absolute secrecy as to the seller’s identity. The forgery in Cracow would immediately be denounced, and the experts would cluck and say they suspected it all along, and would quietly blame the Soviets’ artistic judgment for having thought it a true Rubens in the first place.

  “But the curator was not permitted to leave. He knew too much about art, about what art the Soviets had stolen and what had been confiscated during the war and never returned. He was also a little too outspoken for the regime’s own good. And so they denied his application for a passport, and posted him to the art history museum in Kielce.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” Jeffrey said.

  “Hardly anyone ever has. It is a small provincial town—for a man such as him, it was a Polish Siberia. He died soon after, never having exchanged the Rubens for his freedom. A few days after his death, I received a visit from my new curator, who warned me that a factory job at the Lenin Steelworks awaited anyone in our section who ever tried to escape.”

  Jeffrey had trouble getting out the words. “Where is the Rubens now?”

  The old man shrugged. “I imagine the curator hid it.”

  “Where?”

  Henryk reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin. “If I wanted to hide this coin, I could put it here, under the sugar bowl. But there is always the risk that someone will come by and move the bowl and find my coin.”

  He reached back into his pocket, pulled out a handful of change, and placed the single coin in along with the others. “But if I place my coin here, no one would pay it any attention. I would be the only one to know that it had any special value.”

  “It’s still in the museum,” Jeffrey breathed. “He put it in a crate with false markings and stored it somewhere in a cellar.”

  “It would not be questioned,” the old man said.

  “And you’ve found it,” Jeffrey pressed.

  Henryk looked Jeffrey square in the eye. “I would so very much like to see Paris before I die.”

  CHAPTER 20

  On the way to their first appointment the following day, they stopped at a crossroads where Jeffrey found himself staring at a soot-darkened entrance to an apartment house. A middle-aged man had pried open vast double doors and set down a chair. He had no teeth, so his chin almost met the tip of his nose. One shoulder looked sawn off, leaving a sharp slope that began at his neck and ended with his rib cage. He eyed the passersby with a narrowed squint, showing no reaction, following them in one direction, then taking hold of another with his rheumy eyes and following them back as far as he could see.

  When the light changed and they drove on, Jeffrey found he could not leave behind the image of that man’s slanted frame, nor the lines that had turned his face old far before his time. “I don’t understand how there can be so many people with such awful health problems. It’s like a trip back to the Dark Ages.”

  Katya’s voice took on the tone of the patient teacher. “Will you do something for me?”

  “Sure. Anything.”

  “Think of the times in your life when you had to have surgery.”

  “Okay. Do you want me to tell you?”

  “If you like.”

  “I had my tonsils and adenoids out when I was a kid. I broke my leg and it had to be set by surgery when I was fourteen. Let’s see, I had problems with my wisdom teeth and they finally decided to put me under to take them out. I think that’s all. Oh, and I tore a tendon in my shoulder playing touch football in college and they had to sew it back.”

  “Okay,” Katya said. “Now imagine that each one of these is a major calamity, a life-or-death risk.”

  “A torn tendon?”

  “What if there’s no doctor? Worse yet, what if the doctor says your shoulder’s not worth worrying about, go home and rest for a week. Or a month. Or six months. Then you can either apply for a pension or go back to work—it’s your choice, but whatever you do you’re going to have to live with the pain and weakness of a badly healed tendon for the rest of your life.”

  Katya shook her head. “In a place like this, the smallest splinter in a child’s hand can break a mother’s health with worry.”

  The Komenda Wojewodzka, or Cracow regional police headquarters, was on the main road running from town to the Nova Huta steelworks. From the gate it appeared to be a single ten-story high-rise. The driver pulled up in front of the main gates, spoke at length to Katya.

  “He says that there are three identical buildings erected behind each other, so that from the street they won’t seem so imposing,” she told Jeffrey. “And the rumor is that they go almost as far underground as they rise up.”

  “I’m afraid to ask what’s down there.”

  “Prison cells and interrogation rooms,” she said, staring out the window at the buildings. “Come on, let’s go before I lose my nerve.”

  Their documents were carefully searched by the guard before calling the name Gregor had printed on a card. They waited under the guard’s undisguised suspicion before a small officer with sad eyes and nervous gestures came up, shook hands, and ushered them through.

  “This gentleman is responsible for the children’s section,” Katya explained as they walked past the trio of the high-rises, and came to a vast paved lot filled with armed personnel carriers, riot buses with wire screens for windows, water cannons, bales of barbed wire, and mountains of crowd-control barriers.

  “Tell him I hope he won’t be offended, but this is the strangest place I’ve ever been to look at antiques.”

  The man laughed, and the atmosphere lightened considerably. “He says that they heard of Gregor through the state orphanages where they sometimes take kids.”

  “I thought it was supposed to be a secret.”

  “It is,” the officer reassured him through Katya. “Not all of them know how Gregor gets his money, and those who do wouldn’t dare endanger this income. For many of the village orphanages, Gregor’s money is the difference between providing homes to needy children and catastrophe. They told me because they trust me. They know my first concern is for the children.”

  At the far corner of the back lot stood a yellow cottage. Beside it was a small fenced-in lawn with a rusty slide and swing. He ushered them through the door and into the front office, its desk spilling papers, the air smelling of cheap disinfectant. They sat at the small conference table and accepted his offer of tea. He left and returned swiftly bearing the customary steaming glasses.

  The police officer did not mince words. “It is impossible for an outsider to comprehend how crime is increasing,” Katya translated. “The criminal mind senses the growing lack of authority and leaps at the opportunity.”

  “A lot of people have talked about this power vacuum,” Jeffrey said.

  “It is on everybody’s mind,” the officer agreed. “The new government is trying to rebuild a democratic process and at the same time dismantle the Communist power structure. You cannot imagine the problems this is causing. All laws passed under the Communists are now being questioned, which means that nobody is really sure what the laws will be tomorrow.

  “The police situation is even worse. I was originally placed in the children’s division, which other policemen call the nursery and say it’s not real police work, because I refused to join the Communist party. Now they have to replace most of the officers, all at the same time, with untrained people. Why? Because only party members could rise through the ranks.

  “To make matters worse, there is a tremendous budget crisis. The government is basically broke. Our own police budget has been cut thirty percent in two months, while in this same two-month period, prices have almost doubled. And so with an exploding crime problem, our hands are being chained. This week, for example, the Cracow police did not have enough money to buy petrol for their cars. All but the emergency police had to do their beats o
n foot. No Cracow police car has radio. At the same time, the criminals are driving around in stolen Mercedes with car radios and telephones, and more and more of them are getting away.”

  “What about the kids?” Jeffrey asked.

  The officer blew out his cheeks. “Families are being hit hard by rising prices and unemployment. The pressures are breaking some of them apart. We see a lot of young children being either kicked out or running away. The mafia groups are using young children for a lot of their thefts because sentences are lighter and the children will basically work for food and a place to sleep.”

  “That’s what you call them? Mafia?” Jeffrey interrupted.

  The officer smiled and replied through Katya, “Too much American TV. Organized gangs are mafia. Police officers are called Smurfs. Detectives like me are Kojaks.”

  The smile disappeared. “At the same time that the government has a money crunch, housing and living costs have skyrocketed. This has hit orphanages, hospitals, foster homes, everything that relies on state money. Last month, orphanages in the Cracow area had to cut down on the amount of food each child could have.”

  He leaned across the table, his eyes boring into Jeffrey. “One thing I want you to understand. There are police, good men, who have gone on the take. I can’t blame them anymore. They have families to take care of, and they’ve seen their salaries cut by thirty, sometimes even fifty percent. But I want you to know that every cent I will get from this is going to our children. They have cut my budget to almost nothing. I don’t have enough to buy clothes for the ones in rags, or feed them.”

  “I believe you,” Jeffrey said solemnly.

  The detective led them back through a pair of locked doors, down a hall opening into bunk-rooms and a kitchen-lounge. Jeffrey looked through wire-mesh windows and saw a number of children dressed in a variety of oversized, patched clothing. They looked extremely young.

  As they walked, the officer continued. “There’s a Russian mafia operating in Poland these days. They steal cars mostly—Mercedes, Volkswagens, BMWs, Audis are the favorites. We know some of the tactics now; any racket this big is bound to give some clues away over the months.”