“We’ve got the best zoo in Sweden here,” said Lisa. “There are lions, gorillas, bears, and olifanties. Two big ones.”
“Two big what?”
“Two big olifanties.”
“Look,” said Karol. “What matters is that in a few hours we’ll be in a cab to the airport. So finish your story about Milewski.”
7
“Now, unfortunately for our Count, this is the sad part of the story. Until the end of the nineteenth century his life was rosy, but his tasteful and unique collection was way ahead of its time. What would now be considered the greatest art collection in the world didn’t stir much emotion at the time. People wanted nudes and hunting scenes, not nocturnal landscapes or water lilies.
“It grieved him most when he arrived in his favorite Polish city, wanting to donate the collection, build a museum for it there, and provide money for the museum’s upkeep. The city council laughed at the madman, and he couldn’t bear the humiliation. He swore he’d spite everyone and withdraw with his paintings. And that’s what he did. Not yet sixty, he isolated himself from the world; it may have had something to do with Gierymski’s mental illness and premature death. He stopped showing the collection and stopped talking about it, so nobody knew what was really in it. Finally he retreated to his island.
“His luck abandoned him too. The First World War considerably reduced his property. Everything that had been on the territory of the newly founded USSR was gone. His bank accounts had lost value. The end of the monarchy and the start of the nation-states buried all Milewski’s ideas of a world built around the aristocracy. His hate-filled wife endlessly took him to court, and his former lovers blackmailed him. Suddenly he’d become an embattled old man with no means of support, fading away on his beloved island, which had changed from a refuge to a prison.
“In 1922 Milewski had a stroke. Opportunistic thieves stripped him of the remains of his property before he died. In theory, that was when the collection should have surfaced, appearing in dozens of antique stores all over the map, but nothing like that happened . . .”
8
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Anatol.
They looked at him in surprise.
“It’s been bothering me. They only had to give me the address, and I’d have made it. But they spent too long explaining where it is, the exact spot, how to recognize the courier, and what kind of documents we’ll receive.”
“That’s nice,” said Karol. “Finally someone cares about us.”
“No. Someone wants to get a fix on us. The conversation went on too long, and I bet they know exactly where we are now. I’m sorry, friends, but the Polish Republic is not on our side. Pack up your sleeping bags and let’s go. Now.”
Anatol’s tone left no room for questions. Zofia cast an anxious glance at the harsh winter outside, and it crossed her mind that it might be better to get caught and see what happened; after all, they were in the middle of the civilized world. Then she remembered that not so long ago they’d had grenades thrown at them here.
A few minutes later they were marching uphill through the snow, climbing a small, wooded rise. Among the trees the sharp wind was less biting, but even so their teeth chattered. Their jackets were only suitable for crossing the short distance from the gas station parking lot to the store, not for this. They weren’t prepared for a long walk, not to mention sleeping outside in the Swedish winter.
They had stopped at the top of the rise, just a few hundred yards from their stuga, when through the noise of the wind they heard a sound, at first a gentle whirr, then the deafening clatter of propellers. A Swedish police helicopter flew overhead, then hovered above the stuga. They couldn’t see the ropes that must have been thrown down, only the black silhouettes of the police officers descending them.
“Just as I said,” confirmed Anatol. “Poland is no longer our ally. Nobody is. We’re a target for the entire Western world. Let’s get out of here. Fast.”
“But go where?” cried Zofia. “Into the forest? Either they’ll find us or we’ll freeze to death. It’s pointless.”
“I have an idea. Let’s get moving; we’ll warm up on the march. Chop, chop.”
Zofia had never been so aware of her body. She could feel every tendon, bone, and muscle. Every bit of her shivering and begging for salvation from inevitably freezing to death.
“I can’t cope,” she said to herself. Karol heard her. He hugged her tight and helped her make the next steps.
“It’s all right. Anatol’s a professional. He knows what he’s doing.”
She could sense that Karol didn’t believe his own words—she was even less convinced. The question was, did Anatol believe it, or was he lying to himself?
And then they came to a high chicken-wire fence.
“This is the boundary of the zoo,” said Anatol. “I worked here when I was in college.”
“Doing what?” asked Karol.
“Don’t ask.” Anatol started moving along the fence, and they followed. “I spent a few months here with my girlfriend. I stayed within the zoo grounds, and she slept in a tent in the forest. In Sweden you have the right to camp anywhere in nature, whether it’s public or private land. So she camped in the forest, and every day I snuck out to see her. You know what it’s like when you’re young; you can’t bear a day without seeing each other.” This last remark sounded bitter. “I could either go around the fence—the grounds are more than half a square mile, one of the biggest zoos in Europe—or find an alternative route.”
Anatol stopped and looked at them, smiling.
“Incredible. The route still exists. Praise the Swedes for not interfering with nature.”
And then in three swift moves, he climbed the leaning stump of a massive, split pine, crossed to the branch of the neighboring tree growing on the other side of the fence, and jumped to the snowy ground.
Anatol walked along as if on home ground, and although fifteen years had passed, he was finding his way around superbly. They had a hard time keeping up with him as he strode across the zoo, which was nothing like any other zoo Zofia had ever seen. Instead of enclosures built next to each other and cages standing in rows, there was just a large empty space, occasionally bisected by a pathway; it didn’t look like a park, but more like the urban woods that are a feature of some Western cities, a vast green space suitably tended to give the townies somewhere to commune with nature in comfort.
Zofia was just hoping they were in the pedestrian area between the animal enclosures.
She lost that hope when she saw an empty gondola suspended overhead. It meant that normally people traveled in the gondola, admiring the lions and “olifanties” romping below, where they were now walking.
“You said this wasn’t a lion enclosure!” she screamed at Anatol, over the wind.
She grabbed him by the jacket and pointed at the gondola.
“I didn’t want to worry you.”
“You didn’t want to worry us? Just throw us to some ravening beasts?
“Calm down; they’re all locked up in winter. They’re lions, not snow leopards.”
“Sure. Lions, no big deal. I’m going back.”
Zofia turned, shivering so badly that she had a hard time keeping her balance. Anatol grabbed her by the arm and spun her around. If not for his grip, she would have fallen.
“Where are you going to go? The forest? The sea? Or to find yourself on the wrong end of an incendiary grenade? Come on.”
“But where are we going?” she asked tearfully, no trace of defiance left.
“To the place where your ravening beasts are locked up. They’re African animals, so they have to provide tropical conditions for them.”
In less than five minutes they reached a high fence and a row of wooden bungalows used as homes for the animals. As they looked around, behind one of the doors, like a stable entrance, something moved, and the wall boards creaked.
“Luckily nothing has changed,” said Anatol, pleased with him
self.
They passed the bungalows and came to a smaller hut the size of a cowshed. The side door into a utility room was unlocked, and soon they were standing side by side in a small, mysterious space.
“They’ll never find us in here,” he said with satisfaction. “We’ll be safe and warm. We just have to remember to hide outside between eight and ten in the morning.”
“Why?” asked Zofia, still trying to come to grips with their new reality.
“That’s when they change the hay.”
Their new home was divided into three parts. The central part was a corridor, leading outside at one end through the door they’d entered. At the other end was a locked door with bars, which led into the cages for overwintering animals. On one side of the corridor, bales of fresh hay rose to the ceiling. The other housed old, dirty hay.
Anatol had found them a new home in the lions’ dung heap.
9
Vasily Topilin was gazing into the sad eyes of Vladimir Putin again. He was on the night shift with absolutely nothing to do. In theory they could call at any moment with an order for some kind of infiltration, but that had only happened to him once. The security services were just as idle as all the other public services in the world; despite appearances, the spies liked to finish work at five p.m. and lounge in front of the TV with a beer.
Nevertheless, mainly to be able to say that the FSB never sleeps, every department had its night shift. Vasily was twiddling his thumbs on his stretch of the corridor, and a little farther down, in Internal Security, Julia was feeling bored too. And when people are bored, sometimes they come up with crazy ideas.
They’d been flirting by email and text, innocently at first, but it became spicier as the night wore on, leading toward the inevitable moment when they’d “accidentally” cross paths in the empty employee kitchen and pounce on each other. There would have been nothing wrong with that, except Julia was married, and her husband was good friends with Vasily.
So after replying to a naughty text about Julia’s bra, Vasily looked deep into Vladimir Putin’s sad, pale eyes and said, “What would you do in my place, Volodya? Tell me.”
Then the phone rang. Unknown number. Vasily swallowed, convinced Julia had decided to take their flirtation to the next level. He hesitated, but then he thought, Come on, chatting on the phone isn’t a crime.
Just in case, he placed the photograph of Putin face down.
“Yes?”
“It’s me. I need your help. And this time I really will repay you. Promise.”
10
Lisa gave them a brief summary of her conversation with Vasily without revealing anything about him. All they knew was that he was “a Russian.”
“We’ll have Latvish documents,” she said in her inimitable Polish.
“Latvian, that makes sense,” said Anatol. “Your guy must be in the Lubyanka—the FSB has been known to use its Russian influences in the former Soviet republics to get fake documents. The Baltic states are best because you only need an ID card to move around within the European Union without a problem. And Latvia is the most Russified of the three. Will we have ID cards or passports?”
Lisa shrugged.
“So what now?” asked Zofia.
“Now I take your picture,” said Lisa, grabbing her phone. “Then we wait. If all goes well, two days, no longer.”
Zofia looked around in horror. Two days in a dung heap. Out of this world.
11
They did their best to get comfortable. Anatol went on a hunting trip and came back without any lion steaks but with his pockets full of Daim candy bars and a few bottles of frozen mineral water.
“I cleaned out the vending machine at the kiddies’ playground,” he said, and handed out their supper.
They ate the candy, then dug themselves a den in the farthest corner so that if anyone suddenly appeared, they’d have to search the hay thoroughly to find them. It was soft and cozy in the den, and the smell of lion shit stopped bothering them.
Lisa and Anatol zipped their sleeping bags together into one to create more heat and got inside.
Zofia and Karol didn’t have the courage to give it a try and instead rested against each other, each in their own sleeping bag.
“Do we know the fate of the paintings from Milewski’s collection? Was there ever a catalogue or a list?” asked Anatol.
“We don’t even know how many there were,” said Zofia. “Certainly no less than two hundred, but I’ve also heard it was more like two hundred and fifty or three hundred paintings. Milewski bought them directly from the painters and kept them at various residences, in Wilno, Vienna, and on Santa Catarina. As I said, even in the case of the French Impressionists, the written sources on what they painted and to whom they sold them are limited because they mainly painted, drank, and fornicated, so there wasn’t much time for bookkeeping. And on top of that, in Poland everything went up in smoke. The Germans burned the archives as a way of further destroying the national memory.”
She broke off when they heard a tapping sound from the other side of the wall, followed by fierce growling.
“As you said earlier, only a few paintings from the Count’s collection have survived, mainly the self-portraits by Polish painters,” said Karol. “Only because a hundred years ago he gifted them to various lovers to pay them off, and the lovers sold them at the nearest antique store. But as for the rest . . . Of course I’d like to believe the rest exists, the greatest artistic treasure trove of all time, but a dealer’s instinct tells me it’s not very likely. Mostly because, in contrast with the Young Man, these paintings are sellable.”
“What are you driving at?” asked Zofia.
“The Raphael would have to be sold in great secrecy, only on the black market. An unknown collection of Impressionists wouldn’t—on the contrary, revealing its existence would stir such worldwide hysteria that every painting would instantly be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. There’s no point keeping a collection like that in hiding.”
“Go on.”
“So we have the following possibilities. One: no such collection exists.”
“The most likely,” said Zofia.
Lisa and Anatol nodded.
“Two: the collection does exist. It changed owners at some point between 1922 and 1945. Someone bought it from Milewski, directly or through a middleman. Then the Germans stole it, then the Americans or the Russians. And now the paintings are lying in a museum basement in Moscow or Fort Knox. Or in a private collection.”
“I don’t think so,” said Zofia. “In a private collection they’d have gone through three generations, and I can’t believe at least one family member wouldn’t try to cash in. The Russians stored various stolen treasures for years, but now they actually display them. Why would they hide something that nobody’s looking for? The Americans are another story.”
“There’s a third possibility too,” said Karol. “That the collection was hidden and never found. It could have been put there by Milewski himself, walled up somewhere on his island. He was crazy and maybe didn’t want to give the vultures the satisfaction.”
“Or maybe it’s at his country mansion.”
“It could have been hidden by an antique dealer before the war . . .”
“. . . and burned up in a Warsaw cellar . . .”
“Zofia! Give it a rest with the doom and gloom.”
She shrugged.
“And finally one of the Germans could have gotten his paws on it during the war, hidden it away, and not lived to dig it back up.”
“But why wouldn’t he have boasted about it during the war? Don’t forget that Hans Frank, Goering, and the others flaunted their loot—they hung those paintings up in their residences and left plenty of evidence in official documents, letters, and diaries.”
“But those were Old Masters! Not Impressionists,” said Karol. “And certainly not Gauguin or van Gogh. Maybe they weren’t quite as eccentric for the top brass as Picasso, Chagall, or Klee, but n
o way could paintings like those be categorized as realistic, classical painting. Officially they were ‘degenerate art,’ and no Nazi bigwig in his right mind would boast about finding them tasteful or interesting.”
“So which of the leading Nazis do you suspect of wanting to possess these French paintings?” asked Zofia, once again knowing the answer.
“Himmler, perhaps?” said Anatol.
She looked at him in surprise with a mild sense of déjà vu; hadn’t someone been asking her about Himmler recently? Of course, the SS chief had come up in her conversation in the plane to New York with the man who’d tried to kill her.
“Why Himmler?” she asked.
“I once read in a magazine that he hunted treasure worldwide. What if he found ours too, and hid it somewhere?”
Zofia sighed. “Could we please stick to the historical facts and not get our ideas from popular science journals? I realize Himmler stirs the imagination because he was an unlikely madman in a smart black SS uniform and round glasses; the murderer responsible for the concentration camps who believed in the occult and sent research parties to Tibet. And was famous for saying that if Hitler ordered him to shoot his own mother, he’d have done it with pleasure. But being the real-life baddie out of an American superhero comic strip doesn’t make him an art thief.”
“Apparently he bargained with the Allies, and that’s why they got rid of him in somewhat mysterious circumstances,” said Anatol, refusing to give up. “That would fit—the idea that he had a major secret he tried to exploit in the negotiations.”
“For God’s sake,” said Zofia. “That’s like something out of a YA adventure novel.”
Karol decided to come to her relief.
“If we’re talking about a collection located in Poland, then there’s only one great art lover and connoisseur,” he said.
“Governor Hans Frank.”
“That’s right.”
We’re right back where we started, thought Zofia, and felt discouraged. Governor Frank had gotten his hands on the Raphael and hidden it somewhere, God knows where. Governor Frank had gotten his hands on the illusory collection of French Impressionists and hidden it somewhere, God knows where. So now they knew more, but in fact once again they had no leads, no point of departure. Or else they had one, but weren’t able to perceive it. She tried putting it all together, but in her warm sleeping bag, in the soft, enveloping hay, she felt sleepy, and her thoughts were fading.
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