For right after that, they’d shelved the mercenaries and sent their own commandos to perform the dirty deed in a country that, though an ally, was neutral and not a member of NATO.
Of course it had all gone wrong. Very wrong.
So now Captain Patridge was sitting in a military Cessna, the sole passenger, on a flight from Wiesbaden to the Swedish air base at Malmen, in hopes of hushing the matter up before an international scandal erupted and also persuading the Swedes to help them catch the “group of dangerous terrorists urgently wanted by the North Atlantic Alliance.”
It shouldn’t be difficult. On this screwed-up, bloodthirsty continent they all had closets full of skeletons, and the Swedes were perhaps even more nervous than the Germans about anyone poking around in their dirty World War II secrets.
Patridge had a clear conscience following the events in New Rochelle, and there was no question of him doing anything more for Anatol Gmitruk, regardless of how highly he regarded him and how sorry he felt for the Pole.
In the present situation all the intelligence and special services of every NATO country were involved in the search, and neither he nor anyone else could help the fugitives. The entire foursome were dead men walking who’d extended their lives by only a few hours.
Nobody in their right mind would give them any assistance.
2
They knew they couldn’t stop in any place that might be connected with Lisa, as had been the case with Sten Borg’s house. No family, no friends, no credit cards, no registering at hotels or renting cars. As soon as they reached the mainland, they boarded a bus that took them to Norrköping, an ugly industrial city south of Stockholm, called in its day “Sweden’s Manchester,” in view of its textile industry.
They sat in the bus station waiting room and took all their cash out of their pockets. Kronas, zlotys, euros, and dollars. They had a few hundred dollars in various currencies, changed it all into Swedish kronas—nearly three thousand—and wondered what to do next.
They ended up going to a kebab stall where they drank some coffee from paper cups. They had chosen the stall because it was cheap, and though the coffee came from a vending machine, it tasted surprisingly good.
“We’ll have to rough it from now on with a tent and sleeping bags,” said Anatol.
“We’re going to sleep in a tent in the middle of December?” said Zofia. “In negative temperatures?”
“In a wooden tent,” replied Anatol.
“A stuga,” said Lisa.
“That’s right. At just about any Swedish campsite you can hire a stuga, meaning a wooden cottage. Inside are bunk beds, a stove with firewood, and a modestly equipped kitchen. And best of all, many of them are self-service, so you don’t have to register, especially at this time of year. And the owner only drops by once a week or two to clean the windowsills, replace the firewood, and collect the money.”
“Wooden cottages with wood-burning stoves and bunks?” Zofia still wasn’t sure.
“One—it’s anonymous. Two—it’s a warm roof overhead. And three—it’s cheap. We only have to buy a few prepaid cell phone cards for the internet, four sleeping bags, some warm clothes for Lisa, a few cans of food, and a supply of potatismos.”
“Of what?”
“Powdered mashed potato. It’s yummy—in my student days I spent three weeks traveling in Norway on that and ketchup.”
“All right,” said Karol. “We hole up in a cottage, then what? We spend the rest of our lives there, hiding from assassins and US special forces, plus whoever else joins the international conspiracy of art lovers wanting to finish us off?”
“It’ll give us some time to think,” replied Anatol. “I have my contacts; I’ll arrange some fake IDs for us and some cash so we can go back to Poland. Once we get there we’ll tell them what happened, and we’ll be safer.”
For a while they drank their coffee in silence.
“Are you sure?” asked Karol.
“Sure of what?”
“That we’ll be safer in Poland? What if we’re somehow a threat to our Beloved Greatest Ally and all of NATO? And we’ve been officially marked for execution? And when informed about it, our minister of defense saluted and said, ‘Yessir!’? Don’t you find it strange that instead of closing the operation, the prime minister urged us to keep looking?”
Anatol had no good answer for that.
3
They walked along the side of the road into Kolmården. Their destination was on the edge of town and definitely not by the sea. The information that Lisa had found online was so sparse that the place, called Älghuset—the “Elkhouse”—might not even exist anymore.
But it did: a few wooden cabins in a sparse forest, plunged in darkness because the solitary lamp by the gate emitted about as much light as a cell phone display. Which was—as they soon learned—a sign that they shouldn’t be counting on electricity. Or running water, or a toilet. But there was a manual pump and an outhouse. An elk’s antler nailed to the outhouse door provided a perverse explanation for the name of this resort. It didn’t look like a place where Swedish or Dutch tourists stayed. More like the kind where seasonal workers from Poland camped, two to a bunk, and Russians kept Slavonic whores brought all the way from the tundra for bored Swedish husbands.
“I didn’t know there were places like this in Sweden,” whispered Zofia.
Nobody answered. They all wanted to get inside, sit down, get comfortable, warm up, and put down the plastic bags full of mashed potato, sausages, and ketchup. As for the choice of food, Anatol had been adamant, and rightly so. After buying the camping equipment, they hardly had any money left.
The door was open, the key was in the lock on the other side, and on the table lay the instructions and a can for the money. The three bunk beds looked straight out of a gulag, and the kitchen had a cooker that consisted of a ring attached to a propane bottle, along with a few plates and forks, a pot, and a frying pan. But the worst part was the cold. It was incredibly icy inside, and the tiny stove against the wall looked as if it couldn’t even heat a small closet.
An hour later it wasn’t any more comfortable, but it was certainly warmer and more like home. The stove had quickly heated up the tiny space, the garish sleeping bags added color to the gray bunks, and the supper of mashed potatoes with roasted onions and fried sausages filled the cottage with delicious aromas.
Anatol was talking in a whisper on the phone, and Lisa and Zofia were sitting at the table drinking Finnish Lapin Kulta beer.
“We need to hold out for three days,” said Anatol. “Then a courier will come with documents.”
Karol, who’d made their dinner, seasoned the mashed potatoes with salt they’d swiped from McDonald’s.
“Aren’t you afraid our guys are playing on the same team as the ally?” he asked. “Only we don’t know it?”
“At this point we have to trust someone,” said Anatol, shrugging as he opened a bottle of beer.
“And this someone is going to be the Polish government?” replied Karol, but he quickly let it go. “Set the table, dinner is served.”
They raised the first toast to Sten Borg. Tears sprang to Lisa’s eyes, but she got a grip.
“Thank you,” she said. “But his memory deserves something more than a toast.”
The others gave her an inquiring look.
“The Count. Who is the Count?”
Zofia swallowed a piece of sausage before answering.
“The pseudo count. Though he was a real eccentric, madman, and misfit. A failed artist and politician. But with a mind for business. The guardian angel of painters, and at the same time their greatest curse. The greatest and most ill-fated collector in the history of Poland. And as it now appears, in the history of the world too.”
She broke off to take another bite but couldn’t do it. After several intense days and nights of interrupted sleep, she felt exhausted, and her body was fading.
“Tomorrow,” she muttered. Then she stood and sleepily
trailed off to her bunk.
4
The next morning started with an argument over who was going to get out of their sleeping bag and light the stove. Lisa and Zofia declared themselves tender little flowers whom the hairy male creatures should be looking after. To which Karol said screw that feminist talk, last night he’d made the supper, so why should he have to light the stove just because he had a dick? Anatol was their last hope, until he muttered from under his sleeping bag that having a military rank didn’t mean he was going to do all the dirty work—he’d done a lot yesterday.
“Maybe the youngest should do it?” said Lisa.
“I categorically refuse,” quipped Zofia.
Finally they drew lots. Karol lost and scrambled out of bed.
For breakfast they ate warm mashed potato spiced with vegetable pâté from a tube and ketchup. It looked awful but tasted delicious.
Zofia drank her coffee; on the one hand it felt wonderful to have the warm liquid flooding her body, but on the other there was less and less of it in the mug to keep her hands warm.
When she looked up, three expectant pairs of eyes were staring at her, waiting to hear her story.
5
“In the mid-nineteenth century, there were two brothers who were heirs to one of the Polish fortunes. They were refined and well educated at foreign schools. Hipolit was the sensible brother who became a doctor of law, then a wise politician and political commentator. Ignacy was . . . well, a restless spirit. He loved art, so he became a painter and spent five years at the academy in Munich, only to discover that a man may have taste but not necessarily talent. And as he wasn’t interested in being second-rate, he said to hell with it, went to Rome, and, to the dismay of the rest of the family, bought a noble title from the pope.
“In the 1870s, Monet, Renoir, Manet, and Sisley were sitting in the garden at Argenteuil, painting the light, drinking wine, suffering from poverty, and creating paintings that would change the history of art. Meanwhile, thirty-year-old Ignacy, now Count Korwin-Milewski, went back to Poland. A man who always refused to compromise.
“When he married, his bride was the widow of one of the richest landowners. She titled her correspondence with her better half, Count Ignacy, ‘the letters of a monster’ and called the file containing documents related to his demise ‘the death of a monster.’ Which says a lot about Milewski’s character.
“Whenever he made an investment, it was with bravado and dumb luck—when he bought land outside Kharkov, a salt mine was found there soon after, thanks to which he earned a cool million rubles on the resale. For comparison, the purchase of Matejko’s Stańczyk, a leading work of Polish art, cost him eight thousand rubles.
“When he built his residence in Wilno, it was modeled on the Palazzo Bevilacqua in Verona. When he traveled, it was on his private yacht, the Lithuania, followed by the publication in limited editions of his diaries from his voyages. When he decided it was time to have an ancestral home, he bought an island in the Adriatic, then bearing the name Santa Catarina, where he spent millions building a fabulous palace and park. When he had an affair, the escapade ended with gunshots at the Vienna train station and became the talk of Europe. Wherever he appeared, everyone took notice of this stout, powerful man with a shining bald head and long beard.
“He was a habitual liar, a megalomaniac, a hothead, a spitfire, and an extreme madman, who nowadays would probably be locked away and pumped full of drugs. But when he summarized his life by writing, ‘I had some minor credits to my name as well, such as forming the best art collection in Poland,’ he wasn’t lying. In fact that was the only true sentence he wrote.
“It’s goddamn freezing. Put some more wood in the stove, would you, Karol?” she broke off to ask, but Karol said it was her turn.
“My turn? I’m pretty sure stove duty lasts all day, Karol.”
He scowled.
“I know, life isn’t fair. Today you have a Ferrari, tomorrow you sleep in a shack and keep the fire going. Now where was I? Oh yes. Milewski wasn’t the type of patron who sits behind a desk. He wanted to be with the artists, to offer them advice, to fraternize, make friends, to live and breathe art.
“A nightmare, right? But a sweet one. There was a very noble method in Milewski’s madness. He would overpay so the artists wouldn’t have to give away their work for bread, so they’d have the opportunity to create great works. They loved him and were grateful to him for the princely fees and permanent one-man market he provided. They painted to his orders—but they also hated him, partly because he was a bully who, for instance, was capable of summoning a painter from Paris to the remote Polish countryside on a whim to correct a detail because the horse’s pasterns needed a touch more paint.
“So here’s the point, the moment when Milewski crossed paths with the Impressionists to swill absinthe with them and go down as the ‘Catarina Count’ in their letters and diaries. The Count’s favorite painter was Aleksander Gierymski, which testifies to his good taste. Gierymski was the most original of all the Polish artists; he discovered Impressionism at the same time as the painters on the Seine, though he’d never had the opportunity to see their experiments in Paris. He began to sketch his painting In the Gazebo not long after Monet painted Impression, Sunrise. It was a garden scene that plays with light and shade and has something in common with Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, although the technique applied by Gierymski . . .”
Anatol groaned.
“Yes, I know I’m not giving an art history class!” said Zofia, and carried on.
“Just imagine: suddenly a crazy art lover arrives in Paris with a brilliant painter in tow, throwing money around, well acquainted with every style but also mentally unstable like all of them, a bit of a screwball, suffering from severe neurosis; in fact he died in a mental hospital at the age of fifty. There’s no chance they didn’t know the French crowd—the best proof is that first Gierymski painted his famous Paris Opera at Night, and only then did Monet and Pissarro get down to their own nocturnes.
“It was the end of the 1880s, they were all at the height of their creative powers, mature, sure of their craft. Manet and Degas were approaching sixty, Renoir and Monet were celebrating fifty, and Gierymski was ten years younger—the same age as those blazing a new trail, Gauguin and van Gogh, who had just moved from Holland to Paris. Milewski was forty-five. They were all birds of a feather. It’s very likely that Milewski bought paintings from the French just as he bought them from the Poles—because he liked them and wanted to help them, and for him these were just small sums of money. From Renoir he could take an intimate portrait of his lover, whom nobody was meant to know about. From Monet the black locomotive, which his other clients regarded as a dark oddity.
“But would our Count be satisfied with paintings pulled from the closet? No way. He had taste, and he was generous, but he demanded reciprocity, an appreciation of his person in an artistic way.”
Anatol asked if perhaps he wanted them to paint his portrait.
“You’re almost right, Major! But it wasn’t his own portrait, it was their self-portraits he wanted. Milewski commissioned self-portraits from the artists he cared about. For unknown reasons, all in the same format—five feet by three feet. He paid generously, but the paintings had to meet certain criteria: the figure had to be life-size, posing straight on, standing up, and with his palette in hand. We know this because several of these works have survived. Unfortunately the complete set, and the fate of Milewski’s collection, remains a mystery.
“And so somewhere, God knows where, there’s a collection of canvases five foot by three on which your Claude and your Pierre-Auguste portrayed themselves and others you’re so fond of removing from museums. Also known as the Impressionists, also known as the fathers of modern painting, and above all as the record holders on the art market, worth tens of millions of dollars.
“And I admit that if it were true, and we were to find this collection, the experts would claim it as their greatest achievement since
1874, when they ridiculed the Impressionists’ first exhibition. At the time they wrote in the papers that a preliminary sketch for wallpaper is a more consummate work than these paintings.”
“So where do you think this collection has gone?” asked Anatol.
“Well, that’s a very good question. But how am I supposed to know where it is? If—and I stress if—it exists at all.”
6
“It does exist,” said Lisa. “I’ve seen black-and-white photographs from before the war, a portrait of Monet by Renoir. Claude stands with his palette. But the scholars said it was fake, because nobody had ever seen such a portrait.”
Zofia thought for a while. “That would make sense. They all had commissions for self-portraits and decided to have some fun by painting each other. It wouldn’t be the first time—there’s another portrait of Monet painted by Renoir in the Musée d’Orsay.”
“But earlier you said it wasn’t possible for paintings of this kind to have failed to surface,” said Anatol. “You said they’re too valuable for someone to have kept them in hiding for a hundred years.”
“Right, but at the time I didn’t know Milewski was involved. A madman in the equation makes you think again, especially because he lives in a crazy world, attracting other lunatics. And so here we come to the second part of my lecture, namely the fate of Count Milewski’s collection. Well, so we don’t know what was actually in it, or what happened to it. If it had survived, nowadays it would be housed in a specially constructed museum, and every guidebook to Poland would start with—”
A phone rang. Anatol answered it.
“Gmitruk.”
That was the only word he said during the minute-long conversation. He listened intently, then hung up.
“At eight p.m. I have to be at the parking lot by the Tropicarium, less than a mile from here. A courier will give us documents and cash, and that should get us back to Poland.”
“The Tropicarium? Are you kidding?” said Zofia, pointing out the window, half-obscured by snow.
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