Priceless

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  Anatol turned, sighed, and straightened the quilt on the sleeping Swede.

  6

  Karol wasn’t asleep on the leather couch—he wasn’t even in his study. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for something to happen. For instance, she comes down to the kitchen for a glass of water, he brings in the dirty glasses. She pours herself a glass of water, he puts down the glasses on the counter. Instead of going back to their rooms, they just stand there, looking at each other, and the atmosphere is full of sexual tension.

  And then the obvious happens.

  It was actually quite hard to decide which was more embarrassing: his fantasizing or his loitering by the stairs, waiting for Zofia, that nasty, stubborn, spiteful, black-eyed witch, who happened to be the love of his life, though she probably didn’t know it.

  Feeling pained, he quietly went back to his study and curled up under a blanket on the leather couch; at that very moment Zofia unglued her burning ear from the door.

  7

  Late next morning, they had a cup of coffee, gathered up their things, and went out into the crisp December air. The sky was clear, and the sunshine twinkled on the frost that coated everything in a thin layer of white. They headed for the barn with Karol leading the way, Lisa and Anatol looking around, and Zofia bringing up the rear.

  “It’s twelve hundred miles,” said Lisa, as they stopped outside the crumbling barn door. “I’m not going by tractor.”

  Karol opened the squeaky door with a tug. The sun lit up farming equipment baring its rusty teeth, bales of hay, and a few saddles on stands, all amid tiny particles of dust that swirled to the roof. Long, silver, and quite shiny, the hood of Karol’s car wasn’t just glowing—it was glistening like a huge drop of mercury.

  On many occasions Zofia had ridiculed his fancy car and laughed at the impression it made on people. But she had to admit that this was its best unveiling ever. The rear of the car was hidden in the shadows, so it seemed to consist of nothing more than an immense hood, bulging at the edges. The closed headlamps made it look as if the car were asleep, a living creature rather than a manufactured object. Karol pressed the remote and its eyes opened, peering at them from either side of the emblem of a rearing horse. If Sergio Pininfarina could have seen how magnificent his brainchild looked in that barn, he’d have been moved to tears.

  Anatol went into the barn, walked around the car, and looked at Karol with amazement.

  “A Ferrari station wagon? With five doors? Is this a joke?”

  Karol unlocked the door with the remote.

  “We wouldn’t all fit in the coupe. Get in, I’ll tell you about it on the way.”

  “Follow this road for two hundred and sixty-four miles,” said the GPS once they reached the highway.

  Karol stepped on the gas, and the car smoothly accelerated from sixty to ninety in two point five seconds, pressing them back into their seats.

  “Oh my God,” whispered Anatol in the passenger seat.

  Lisa and Zofia swapped knowing glances.

  “They’re all morons,” muttered Lisa. “Morons.”

  “You’re exceeding the designated speed,” said the GPS, once again interrupting Karol’s lecture. They hadn’t even gone sixty miles.

  “Please mute that, or I’ll toss her out the window,” said Zofia from the back.

  “So the sultan . . . ?” said Anatol, bringing Karol back to the thread of his story.

  “Yes, the sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, one of the richest men on earth. In the mid-1990s, Sergio Pininfarina, Ferrari’s chief designer, who’s sadly no longer with us, was handed an envelope from the sultan. Inside was a check for a few million dollars and a note that said, ‘Build me a Ferrari that’s big enough for my family. Respectfully yours, Hassanal Bolkiah.’ That must have been a tough one to sort out, because in the mid-1990s the sultan had two wives and ten children, so he needed a bus rather than a Ferrari. But the commission was understood as a Ferrari with lots of space inside. And a small series of special cars was made as a variation on the 456 GT model. A Ferrari in front, a Ferrari in the middle, and at the back, God knows, a bit of a Nissan.”

  “But altogether,” asked Anatol, stroking the leather trim on the dashboard, “it’s a Ferrari? The engine and so on?”

  “A V12, five point five liters, 436 horsepower, zero to sixty in five seconds. Then another sixty in seven more. And this sound.”

  Karol accelerated, the engine gurgled, and a white needle on the left gauge jumped briskly before stopping at 120 miles per hour.

  “You’re exceeding the designated speed.”

  “Christ, Karol, don’t you know how to switch her off?”

  “How fast can it go?”

  “Honestly? At a hundred and fifty I chicken out. And that’s on Polish roads.”

  “But this is the highway,” said Zofia.

  “But it’s Polish.”

  “Are you trying to say you bought this car from the sultan of Brunei?”

  “It’s complicated. The sultan divorced one of his wives, who left for Great Britain with this Ferrari. There she sold it to an aristocrat, a distant cousin of the royal family, who got in touch with me because he knew I was friendly with a Polish artist he greatly admired and for whom he had an unusual request.”

  “Continue on this road for one hundred and sixteen miles.”

  “I met the artist, then a man of over seventy, and he agreed to paint a picture at the aristocrat’s request. All he put on the canvas in acrylic paint was a number: five million, six hundred and seven thousand, two hundred and sixty.”

  Anatol frowned. “Why?”

  “A year earlier the aristocrat had lost his only daughter, not yet eleven years old, because of a stupid bicycle accident. He’d been there when they tried to revive her. And at the moment when the doctor stated the time of death. The aristocrat was utterly destroyed, and somehow that statement of the time of her death caused him to develop a sort of mathematical obsession—he kept multiplying and dividing the minutes and hours. Until finally he calculated that number, five million, six hundred and seven thousand, two hundred and sixty, which was the number of minutes in his daughter’s life, from the moment of her birth as noted in the hospital records, right through to the official time of death. To him it was a magical number, the number of the universe. To cut a long story short, the artist didn’t want any money for his work, and I got the car. I wasn’t sure if that was fair to him, but I didn’t argue.”

  “Who was the artist?” asked Anatol.

  “Roman Opałka,” muttered Lisa from the back with her eyes closed.

  “That’s right,” said Karol. “He’s the only man who could have been commissioned for something like that. He began his ‘From One to Infinity’ project in 1965. In the top left corner of the first canvas, he painted the figure one, then two, then three. By the time he’d reached the bottom right corner he was at, I don’t remember, somewhere around thirty thousand. And then he started the next canvas, painting several hundred figures a day like that for the next forty-five years. At first it might have been eccentricity, but after thirty-six years of daily, consistent, Sisyphean work, he’d produced the most brilliant expression of transience in the history of art. Or at least that’s what I think.”

  “So do I,” mumbled Lisa.

  “Me too,” said Zofia, raising a hand.

  “And do you know what the best thing is?” asked Karol. “The very last number Opałka ever painted was five million, six hundred and seven thousand, two hundred and fifty-nine. So he never reached the number he’d painted for the British aristocrat who was mourning the death of his daughter. There’s a sort of fate in that, somehow it symbolizes death, doesn’t it? As if by breaking his ritual and painting that number ahead of time, he determined his own end. I hope this car isn’t cursed . . .”

  “You’re exceeding the designated speed.”

  “Just in case, would you please listen to the lady and slow down? And for God’s sak
e, switch on the radio, before she forces me to shoot myself.”

  “Watch what you say,” replied Karol, switching on the radio. “That lady’s my girlfriend.”

  They crossed the border into Germany, and Anatol got behind the wheel. The look on his face implied that whatever moments of joy and excitement he’d experienced in his forty years paled in comparison to this.

  Each sat immersed in his or her own thoughts. They were still within range of the Polish radio, which was running a program about raising money for all sorts of purposes on crowdfunding sites. There’d already been an item about some screwballs who were collecting to build a Slavic pagan temple, and now it had moved on to serious topics, with a woman named Sylwia raising cash for some medical treatment.

  Just as sad as it is dull and obvious, thought Zofia.

  “Find some German rock and roll, can’t you?” she said, leaning forward between the seats.

  “Just a second,” said Anatol. “This is an interesting topic.”

  Zofia exchanged glances with Karol. She thought maybe Anatol was sick or the topic was close to his heart. Sylwia twittered on blithely, not at all like someone with a terminal illness. Heart cancer, difficult treatment, American scientists, innovative equipment, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—the words alternated with crackling as the signal weakened the farther they got from the border.

  “. . . when I was first diagnosed, I was sure I didn’t want to spend my final years or months begging, going around borrowing from my family and friends, knowing I could never repay them, and might even leave them in debt . . .”

  “So what made you decide on fundraising via the internet?” asked the journalist.

  “One day I came upon a girl with a one-year-old outside a store. She was asking for formula and diapers for the kid. She didn’t look like a beggar or someone on the fringe. So I talked to her, and she said they were having a tough time, but she actually found it easier to ask strangers for help than her own family. And it’s the same for me.”

  “Forgive me if this question is too personal, but what prompted you to change your mind about going in for treatment?”

  The woman laughed like a teenager in love, not a middle-aged person with one foot in the grave.

  “What could be the best motivation to get medical treatment for the heart? Love, of course! Before the diagnosis I was just drifting along from day to day, but now I’m alive. I’m not blaming anyone; it just turned out that way. We’d gotten used to drifting along as if we were happy, playing it safe and never seeking more. But now I’m alive, truly alive, for someone and because of someone—now every breath I take tastes good. And it’s much easier to fight for life than for just drifting along.”

  “Watch out!” Karol lurched forward and grabbed the wheel, steering the Ferrari back into their lane, narrowly avoiding a truck with Belarussian plates.

  They missed the truck by inches.

  “Jesus, I’m so sorry,” said Anatol.

  “Maybe we should switch back?” Karol said.

  “Let’s change the station,” said Zofia.

  And so Sylwia gave way to Rammstein: “I can’t live without you, but with you I’m lonely too.”

  It took a few hours to cross through Germany and Denmark, and by the time they approached the Danish straits, it was dark. On the left shone downtown Copenhagen, on the right they passed Kastrup Airport, and ahead there was nothing but Øresund, the strait between them and the Swedish border. A silver American Airlines Boeing flew just overhead, then down they went into the tunnel, which would take them across the first stretch, some twenty-five feet underwater.

  “He’s a professional carrying out contracts for whoever pays the most,” explained Anatol, talking about Zofia’s mystery assassin. “It makes no difference who the target is—a jealous wife, a greedy corporation, or the Russian government. Only two things matter to a guy like that: the target and the paycheck. We’ve screened his business card and the recordings from the airport the day we flew over, and we’ve put them through our allies’ databases. Jasper Leong doesn’t exist. And I don’t just mean the name and address on the business card. His face doesn’t exist either, nor his fingerprints. He’s a shadow.”

  “A shadow?” Zofia heard her own voice coming from far away.

  “Yes. I know it sounds like something out of a B movie. But believe me, shadows are for real. Usually they’re people who have worked for one of several countries known for being uncompromising in their actions—the US, Israel, France. Usually after some particularly nasty operation, the government gets rid of them in the process of erasing all the evidence and rewards them by purging the files, which means they can start a new life. Some take advantage of that by getting a house by the sea in Mexico and spending the rest of their days fishing. Others sell their knowledge and skills. The former employers turn a blind eye to that, because sometimes they need to use someone from outside the system.”

  Zofia was quiet for a while.

  “Are you really trying to tell me that there are professional killers with no face or fingerprints, who have a stack of passports and a sniper rifle and sell their services to Russian businessmen and American presidents? What is this? The 1960s? The Day of the Jackal? Do I look like General de Gaulle?”

  Anatol frowned. “I’m sorry.”

  “And you’re saying this shadow is after me?”

  “I’m truly sorry.”

  “It’s an important clue,” muttered Lisa.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it seems to be you he’s after,” replied Karol. “Not me, not the major, and not the Princess of the North. For some reason he seems fixated on you.”

  Zofia felt so tired. “Why on earth would someone want to murder a civil servant from an unimportant country?”

  “To stop you from recovering the Raphael,” said Karol.

  “You’re nuts! Not so long ago you were trying to convince me that only a dumb Polish patriot could care about some old painting.”

  “And I haven’t changed my mind, but it certainly looks like that’s why they’re after you. Like in Conan Doyle: if you eliminate all the wrong solutions, the remaining ones must be true, however improbable. Let’s go through it in order. How did this whole thing start?”

  “We were given the photos and the information that the Young Man was at Richmond’s house, and that any attempt at recovering it in a legal way would provoke a scandal, cause the Americans to deny everything, and the Young Man would vanish again.”

  “Exactly. Somebody made sure that this information reached Poland. What reaction was he expecting? A theft, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so eager to prove that the picture would vanish if we tried to get it back legally. He could assume the Polish authorities would choose the people who were best suited for such an operation. They know about art, they know about the problem of restitution, they know the business. And they’re capable of stealing something. In short, the mystery man was expecting us. Maybe not all of us, but I’d bet he wrote the name Dr. Zofia Lorentz at the top of his list. Which made it easy to trace our movements, as proved by Mr. Hong Kong on the plane. I think we can assume that our top secret operation wasn’t secret at all.”

  They agreed.

  “Last night I was wondering what was the point of getting us mixed up in a failed break-in,” said Karol.

  “If someone wanted to eliminate me, why not just shoot me when I go for a run by the river at night? Easy.”

  “Exactly. And the only answer that holds water is that they wanted to implicate us in the theft of a fake Raphael so we wouldn’t find the real one.”

  “You must have swapped your brains for dog shit,” said Lisa.

  I couldn’t have put it better, thought Zofia.

  Karol shut up while the trucks ahead of him tried to overtake each other.

  “What would have happened if it had all gone the way they planned? Lisa would have been trapped naked in the strong room, Zofia would have been
shot dead trying to escape the scene of a crime, if I were lucky I’d have had a show trial, and as for the major, it probably would have depended how long a reach his friends in NATO have. We’d all have been eliminated, the scandal would have been worldwide, and the Polish government would have been a laughingstock for commissioning the theft of a cheap copy. And I’m sure nobody in Warsaw would even think of whispering the name Raphael in the corridors of power for many, many years. The painting would have been forgotten, unmentionable, and unattainable. And those with a motive to look for it would either be dead, like Zofia, or thrown in jail, like me and Lisa. It’s logical.”

  “Logical,” replied Zofia. “Except that each answer prompts a string of questions. Including the two most important. One: Why is someone so sure I’m the person capable of finding the Raphael?”

  She was answered with silence.

  “And two: Why is someone so eager to stop us from finding it?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that too. There are two possibilities. The first is that we’re dealing with a powerful, insane collector who wants to sit in his strong room, gazing at the Young Man with his dick in one hand and a box of Kleenex in the other.”

  “The typical collector,” said Zofia. “What’s the other possibility?”

  “The Raphael isn’t just some old painting but something far more important and more valuable. Except that we don’t know why. But we hope the Swedish expert will know.”

  The car emerged from the tunnel and onto a five-mile bridge, the last straight stretch before entering Sweden. On either side lay the black waters of the strait, and it felt as if the bridge were levitating in a void, not between two European countries but between two planets, suspended in a cosmic vacuum.

  When she woke up it was day, and the car had stopped in an empty parking lot outside a large shopping mall. The Christmas decorations made it obvious that the holidays were less than two weeks away.