Priceless

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “Where is that?” asked Zofia.

  “We have no idea,” said Borg. “We’ve done every possible analysis. The parquet, the clothes, the breed of dog, the child’s features. The best of the very best have examined it, but the only thing we’ve managed to establish, from the child’s clothes, is that it’s the 1940s, and from the lamp we know it’s Germany—probably; there’s no certainty.”

  He enlarged the image to show them that the lamp was decorated with two interlaced swastikas.

  “Hans Frank’s residence at the Royal Castle in Kraków?” suggested Zofia.

  “That was our first thought, but there were never any parquet floors like that at the Royal Castle, nor any lamps. If it’s a picture from the occupation period, it must be somewhere else.”

  “Now listen very carefully,” said Lisa. “You’re looking for the Raphael. We’re looking for the Collection. At some point in history, during the occupation or just after, the Raphael was part of the Collection. After that it went missing. Our setup and Zofia’s attempted assassination proves, I think, that someone believes this treasure can be found and that we’re the ones capable of finding it. We think it’s easier to look for a group of paintings than a single one. Help us find the Collection, and you’ll get your Raphael. Everyone wins.”

  “But that’s absurd!” exclaimed Zofia. “We have no idea what’s in this collection, we don’t know who the owner was, we don’t know its history. You can’t just look for ‘a group of paintings,’ that makes no sense. We have to have a starting point.”

  “The Count . . . ,” Lisa began.

  “No, Lisa, I’m serious. A starting point, not another unknown! ‘The Count’ isn’t enough. In the nineteenth century anyone who could afford a top hat called himself a count.”

  “Monet mentioned the Count a second time in his old age, when he was interviewed by a local newspaper in the 1920s,” Lisa continued, unfazed. “Asked about poverty, he replied, and I quote: ‘It was dreadful, humiliating, but even among the rich there’s the occasional oddball who loves art. For example, several times we were helped by an exotic count, an eccentric with his own island, and luckily his own fortune.’ To which the journalist asked, ‘Like in Dumas?’ And Monet replied, ‘Yes, exactly like—he had an island, a fortune, and a mystery.’”

  “Ever since we found that interview we’ve called him ‘the Count of Monet Cristo,’” said Borg, smiling.

  “There are several more comments like this made by various artists of the same era, all referring to the late nineteenth century. Sometimes they only mention ‘the Count’; other times they write about his generous purchases. Sometimes they wonder why he spends so much money on paintings that not even they think are worth it.”

  “And nothing is known about him except that he had an island?” asked Karol.

  “We also know that he had a wife or a mistress; he was head-over-heels in love with her.”

  “Do we know anything about her?”

  “Only that her name was Catarina. We know that from the journalist Théodore Duret who described an evening at the Monets’ house in Argenteuil . . .”

  “What did you say her name was?” Zofia’s tone was suddenly so different that everyone looked at her. She looked as if she’d seen a ghost. “What was her name?” she said again with emphasis, going up to Lisa.

  “Catarina.”

  “And why do you think she was the wife or mistress of the Count?”

  “As I said, from the description of a journalist, a friend of the Impressionists. He mentioned the Count, writing with mild exasperation that ‘the Count did not stop talking about his beloved Catarina, but he spent too much on their paintings for anyone to dare to interrupt him—’”

  Zofia gestured for Lisa to be quiet. Gripped by a sudden thought, she went up to Karol and grabbed his hands.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  “You can call me Karol,” he whispered in reply, leaning toward her.

  Then she let go of Karol’s hands and turned to Lisa and Borg.

  “I know why you haven’t found your Count of Monet Cristo,” she said. “Because you weren’t looking in the Third World. If we’re savages, then you’re dull colonials, incapable of perceiving culture of equal value among foreigners. You saw your wonderful Impressionists, but you didn’t see the greater whole.”

  “Can you be clearer?” asked Lisa.

  “You never supposed he might be a collector for whom these sacred cows of art were just the supplement to a national collection. Second-rate art that he bought not to move mountains, but because the Polish artists had asked him to help their French colleagues too. Because they were talented artists but never had any success.”

  Zofia looked at the Swedes and laughed.

  “What snobs you are. If in your twenty years of searching it had just once occurred to you that there’s civilization behind the Iron Curtain too, you’d soon have discovered that his ‘beloved Catarina’ was not his wife, or his mistress, or his daughter, or any woman at all. But an island in the Mediterranean, belonging at the time to a crazy Polish aristocrat. Who in fact was not an aristocrat at all, but had so much money that they’d have called him a prince if he’d wanted them to. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?” she asked Karol.

  He looked at her for a while, squinting, and then burst out laughing.

  “Twenty years? You’ve spent twenty years looking for that lunatic?” He was about to say more, when Anatol interrupted him.

  “Quiet,” he said.

  They fell silent, and heard what Anatol had caught first—the rising noise of engines, quite high, like motorcycles.

  The laboratory had no windows, so they ran back into the study and gathered by the desk below the window. Through the swirling snow they could clearly see three rapidly approaching headlamps, only a couple of hundred feet away from Borg’s house.

  “What’s that?” asked Karol. “Snowmobiles? ATVs? Are you expecting visitors?”

  Suddenly something struck the window with great force. A normal window wouldn’t have withstood the impact, but this one was reinforced, burglar-proof. The can bounced off the window and struck the ice, bounced again, and exploded with a dazzling white flash all too familiar to Anatol. Zofia averted her gaze, and when she looked through the window seconds later, she saw an unusual scene. Instead of the flash, a pool of alarming, very bright fire was spreading, melting the sheet of snow and the layer of ice beneath it. In a second, the flames had dissolved the thick ice and sunk into the Baltic Sea. But still they went on burning, illuminating the ice from below, changing from white to pale green, then dark green, like fireworks jammed into a green glass bottle.

  “An incendiary grenade! We have to get out of here!” shouted Anatol, and pushed Zofia toward the exit. She ran without hesitation, the car keys in the pocket of her jeans.

  9

  Zofia and Karol raced down the stairs—their lives depended on it. Anatol mentally cursed that the wine and good food had made him drop his guard, leaving his gun in the jacket hanging by the door downstairs.

  “Get to the car! Now!” he shouted in Swedish at Borg and Lisa.

  But instead of escaping, they were messing with a wall opposite the window, where there must have been a secret closet behind the bookcase. Borg was urgently trying to save something hidden in there, while Lisa did her best to pull him away.

  “It’s not worth it!” she screamed in Swedish.

  “It’s worth everything!” he cried. “Everything! Nothing is worth more than beauty. If you don’t realize that, what the hell have you been doing with me all these years? What the hell, Ronia?”

  Anatol shook his head in disbelief. He grabbed Lisa and dragged her toward the stairs just as Borg managed to open the secret closet. First he took out something small, which he threw to Lisa. Then he reached deeper and pulled out a painting about three feet by two feet. It showed some children picking poppies in a field on a cloudy day, with a river, a small town, and
a dark sky in the background, all of it fuzzy, painted with short brushstrokes, techniques that even Anatol recognized as Impressionist.

  He was thinking fast—his military instinct switched on. He wanted to act, he wanted to save himself and the others and take them as far as he could. Staying in a wooden house being bombarded with incendiary grenades was suicide. But still Anatol’s brain mapped the poppies filling the lower half of the painting—masses of small red strokes, poppies that came to life thanks to the genius of Claude Monet. Flowers stirring in the wind, little flames anxiously watching the stormy sky.

  “Leave it! Please, Sten, I beg you!” screamed Lisa, struggling in Anatol’s grip.

  Borg rushed toward them, then there was a burst of gunfire. The window may have been burglar-proof, but it wasn’t bulletproof. A shower of glass sprayed across the study.

  Terrified, Borg fell to the floor and cowered behind the Monet, as if the canvas could save him. And by some miracle it did. The gunfire stopped, the study was full of holes, but neither the canvas nor Borg had been scratched. He adjusted his glasses and smiled impishly.

  Just then an incendiary grenade flew inside, bounced off the wooden floor, and exploded. Burning thermite clung to everything in its path—the floor, walls, desk, bookshelf full of albums, the Monet Ronia had stolen in Zurich, and Sten Borg, the art lover, missing masterpiece hunter, Lisa’s first lover, and owner of a twelve-acre island.

  The pound of thermite contained in the grenade was burning at a temperature of four thousand degrees. Enough for the thin canvas with the red poppies to cease to exist in a flash. And the same thing happened to Borg’s skin, but it wasn’t enough to kill him.

  Anatol dragged the screaming Lisa down the stairs to run from the hellish temperature and flames. But most of all to get away from the ghastly, inhuman screaming as Borg’s body boiled, burned, and dissolved.

  The power of art is tremendous. The image of the field of red poppies would remain with Anatol for the rest of his life.

  10

  Karol and Zofia had no idea what was happening inside the house. They were running across the snow-coated ice between Borg’s little island and Ornö when they heard the unearthly howl of the burning Borg. They knew for sure it was him, yet there was something inhuman in the dying man’s roar, as if it sprang from the oldest part of the brain, which would never be reconciled to the fact that we try to be something more than just animals fighting for survival.

  Karol was feeling exactly like an animal fighting for survival. He didn’t care if someone had been left behind howling in pain. He just wanted to get as far away as possible, where he’d be safe. He dragged the bewildered Zofia behind him.

  “Hurry up!” he urged when she started to resist.

  “Karol, can’t you hear? They need help.”

  “There’s no way to help someone who’s screaming like that. Hurry up!”

  He yanked at her, lost his balance, fell, and banged his knee on the ice. Pain flooded his body, all the way up to his throat, where it prompted a nasty sense of nausea. He thought he was going to vomit.

  “Get up! Get to the car!” screamed Anatol, one hand holding a gun, the other pulling Lisa forward. She was still in deep shock.

  Zofia helped Karol to his feet, and the four of them ran toward the forest. It was still snowing. At the first tree Anatol stopped, propped the hysterical Lisa against a tree stump, grabbed her throat, and slapped her hard across the face. Then he shouted something in Swedish while pointing at the house and the flames bursting out of it.

  For a few seconds Lisa stared at Anatol with hatred, then nodded, and together they set off for the car. Just then some ATVs emerged from behind the island, and bursts of machine-gun fire rang out. They were saved by the fact that Skalkaren is tiny, but not quite so tiny—the distance was too great, and the gunmen were firing blind. Nevertheless, a couple bullets hit the branches of the trees behind them, kicking up a cloud of snow.

  “Into the dark, under the cover of the trees,” said Anatol. “They won’t be able to ride in there after us.”

  They leaped forward to get as far as they could from the open space and the fire, which was blazing ever more fiercely, putting them on display like targets at a firing range. Behind them, the ATV engines roared, but soon fell silent when the assassins realized the fugitives were out of range.

  There was another burst of gunfire. Another rattle, and more snow showered on their heads. The assassins must have dismounted their ATVs and come after them on foot, but they couldn’t hear any shouting or calling. Whoever they were, they were professionals.

  “This way,” said Anatol, heading to the right, and after a few paces they emerged onto the path where the Ferrari was parked, covered in snow.

  “Keys!” shouted Anatol.

  “I’ve driven in winter rallies,” panted Karol, leaning against the hood. His leg hurt bad, every step like a hammer striking his kneecap.

  Anatol nodded and opened the rear door. He pushed Lisa inside and got in after her.

  “I hope you’ve got winter tires,” muttered Zofia, buckling in the passenger seat.

  Some use they’d be, thought Karol, if we can’t get out of this snowdrift. He took a deep breath, turned the key in the ignition, and, as soon as the engine’s twelve cylinders burbled to life, drove off in reverse. The car tore out of the snowdrift, and the rush of air blew the loose snow off the windshield and hood—across which a row of small bullet holes suddenly appeared—ping, ping, ping, ping. He quickly looked over his shoulder and maneuvered as far as he could in reverse. There was too little space to turn around, and they needed to get away as fast as possible. Also, like this he could use front-wheel drive, and in these conditions that was always safer. He could hardly see and was driving mostly on intuition, remembering that in this spot the road ran more or less straight, only turning a gentle curve on both sides where the summer cottages started.

  As soon as the cottages loomed out of the darkness, he slowed down, realizing that they’d gained a minimal advantage, and now he could turn around. And then he saw a point of light far away at the end of the road—a sign that the attackers had gotten back to their ATVs and come in pursuit. It didn’t look good. He turned the steering wheel slightly to the left, then hard to the right, while hitting the brake. The car smoothly turned 180 degrees on the snow, retaining some of its impetus; by the time the car was facing the opposite way, Karol was in second gear. He released the clutch, the engine wailed, and the wheels began to spin. The rear skidded a little, but the Ferrari dutifully raced forward. He switched on the high beams, but the light merely reflected off the wall of thickly falling snow.

  “Not bad,” said Anatol. “But we don’t have a chance against them on these roads.”

  “I know. So let’s look for a straight shot,” replied Karol, and turned right, into the courtyard of an enormous holiday home.

  “Have you gone crazy?” cried Zofia. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Darling,” he said, “it’s time I started going straight.”

  He drove across a patch of snow, which in summer would have been a well-tended lawn, and drove onto a charming jetty extending into the sea, so well designed that it looked like a small pier. The wooden boards rumbled. Zofia gripped the door tight as Karol drove straight toward a pergola decorating the end of the pier. The thin posts of a low fence snapped. Karol stepped hard on the gas to raise the front of the car, and soon he was soaring above the frozen Baltic Sea, hoping against hope that the ice would withstand the impact.

  The ice held out. It made an ominous cracking sound, fountains of snow spurted into the air, and the Ferrari went into a long, uncontrolled skid, spinning on its axis.

  “At the first opportunity, turn around,” said the GPS in an inhumanly calm, metallic tone.

  “No way, baby,” replied Karol, countering the skid with short turns of the steering wheel until he’d brought the car straight. As soon as he could, he stepped on the gas and the Ferra
ri shot off with a joyful roar, as if it had been waiting years for this moment.

  “They’re behind us,” said Anatol, glancing through the rear window.

  “Good luck to them. I’ve never heard of ATVs that can go one eighty.”

  Lisa said something in Swedish.

  “What’d she say?” Zofia asked Anatol.

  “Watch out for rocks. Lots of rocks,” Lisa translated for herself, and leaned into the gap between the seats. “Give me that nagging bitch,” she said, pointing at the GPS. “I’ve done a lot of sailing here.”

  Zofia yanked the GPS off the console and handed it to Lisa.

  Karol mildly registered what was going on around him. Ninety-nine percent of his concentration was now in his narrowed eyes as they tried to penetrate the snowstorm illuminated by the headlights. The snow wasn’t falling thickly enough for them to hide. But it was dense enough for visibility to reach no further than three hundred feet ahead. Which meant that if the rock wall of an island suddenly appeared in their vision, they’d have a few seconds to say goodbye to their loved ones and dreams of a long, happy life. So he was focusing as hard as he could: their only chance of survival was to spot the obstacles before the obstacles spotted them.

  The speedometer was showing 155 miles per hour.

  “I think we’re losing them,” said Anatol.

  Karol glanced in the rearview mirror, and indeed, the three yellow spots of light seemed to be farther away. But as soon as his eyes returned forward, he saw a huge rock sticking out of the ice up ahead. He gently turned the steering wheel, praying the car wouldn’t skid. Of course it did—they were on ice, after all. The rear fishtailed slightly, and the powerful Ferrari began to slide sideways toward the rock, at a rate of 125 miles per hour. It’ll hit on the right side, thought Karol, Lisa and Zofia will be killed on the spot, and so will we, if we’re lucky.

  He turned the steering wheel gently to the right, released the accelerator, downshifted, then let more air into the throttle—probably the fastest maneuver he’d ever made. The car fishtailed again, and its heavy rear end flew in the opposite direction and missed the protruding rock by inches, causing a rush of air that blew up the snow.