Priceless

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “If I understand this right,” said Anatol, “you’re suggesting that apart from the Raphael, which was known to everyone, somehow Hans Frank got ahold of Milewski’s collection of paintings too. Right?”

  “That’s it.”

  “And that he regarded the Raphael, along with the French paintings, as his most valuable treasure. Then hid that treasure. Maybe for the future, as a collection for his eyes only. Maybe as insurance, a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Americans, yeah?”

  “That would be logical.”

  Anatol became pensive.

  “OK,” he said. “This could be a long shot, but let’s suppose we’re on the trail of the mythical collection of the butcher of Poland, Hans Frank. Which he amassed by looting Polish museums and private collections. This collection includes the Raphael, the Count’s paintings, and who knows what else. And let’s suppose someone else believes we can find it. And let’s say the United States government is trying to eliminate us, using hired assassins, commandos, and allies, including Poland. So we must conclude that part of the ‘governor’s treasure’ is something that would do harm to the United States if revealed. A mega-dark secret. Let’s forget about the paintings for a while and focus on the secret. If it matters so much now, in 1945 it must have been super important. Hans Frank surely must have felt safe as he waited for the Americans in his villa in Bavaria. He was probably already making plans to sail first class to South America, where he’d make a new life for himself and decorate his home by hanging Raphael in the hall between Monet and Renoir. Right?”

  They nodded, and Zofia thought how expert Anatol had become at dropping names. They might make an intellectual out of him after all.

  “Yet it wasn’t he who hung up the Raphael, but he who was hung.”

  “In October 1946,” said Karol.

  “Why did they hang him? Couldn’t he have revealed that he knew their secret and where the paintings were stashed to save his own hide? Or did they eliminate him to cover up the secret? And if that were the case, why would they care now if we found these old paintings? In other words, we have to accept a different version of events. The Americans catch Frank, Frank says, I have your terrible secret, if you want it back, give me a flight to Argentina and a sack of gold. They say, You’re bluffing. Frank says, Go see for yourselves, I’ve hidden it in a secret place, here’s a map, the treasure’s marked with an X.”

  “I’ve got something to add,” said Karol. “As proof he’s not bluffing, he shows them an unknown Renoir, which in this way reaches America, gets sold on the black market, and ends up at Richmond’s place. Sound right?”

  It did. But they wanted Anatol to continue. So far his military interpretation was making sense.

  “They keep Frank under lock and key, take the map, and search for the treasure. They look, but fail to find it, so they think Frank’s lying, and they hang him on the double, rather than hand him over to Poland, so he won’t start telling the Soviets any American secrets. And then, just in case, they keep a finger on the pulse, even seventy years after the war, in case the secret were to surface, or be exposed by people capable of finding it . . .”

  “It makes sense,” replied Zofia, who suddenly felt a strong shiver of emotion, just as she’d felt as a child, reading adventure novels under the bedcovers—The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers.

  A thought flashed through her mind, but then she lost it. Something to do with . . . dammit! With Frank? With the Americans? Dammit!

  “It makes sense, it makes sense, but so what?” she snapped. “It’s the same thing again. It’s all speculation, and meanwhile they’re throwing grenades at us.”

  “Why are you stirring things up again?” said Karol, looking at her in surprise.

  “‘Why are you stirring things up again?’” she mimicked him. “If this theory is correct, then between 1945 and 1946, someone robbed Frank of his collection and the secret. And then they must have swallowed it, because once again it disappeared without trace—that’s becoming a theme in this story. It’s all making me nervous, and I need to think it over.”

  She got out of her sleeping bag, crawled across the pile of hay, and went out into the fresh air.

  12

  Outside it was dark and frosty, and a gust of wind hit her like a hard slap in the face. She remembered their hellish walk through the forest and almost went back into the warm shed, but instead she raised her jacket collar and forced herself to walk. She had to think without the others on her back. The whole thing was exhausting and stressful, and she couldn’t concentrate or think clearly.

  They were multiplying theories and getting excited about coincidences, but they were forgetting the most important thing—finding an honest thread they could follow that consisted of facts, not fantasies. Her style involved thinking, weighing pros and cons, devising alternative solutions, and choosing the right one.

  As she saw it, they had four tasks ahead of them.

  Task number one: to confirm whether or not Milewski really did own a collection of French Impressionists.

  Task number two: to find out whose hands it fell into, and how it could have ended up in Frank’s possession.

  Task number three: to confirm the hypothesis about Frank’s secret.

  Task number four: to find the Portrait of a Young Man.

  For the first task she had a solution; the third was the one she didn’t want to deal with, because at this stage it was fantasy. The second task worried her. Because if anyone in Poland ought to know, it was her. It was she who had to bend over backward to prove that a painting which had turned up at an auction in London or Hamburg had been looted in Poland. Quite often, for the sake of a piece of junk, an unremarkable landscape, she had spent months in the archives, looking for references, letters, or documents that would constitute credible proof of provenance in the eyes of a German court.

  She knew the fortunes of collections and the fates of the collectors, antiquarians, and art dealers who’d been active over the past 150 years. She knew their tastes, preferences, obsessions, and smuggling channels. She knew how paintings changed owners. In other words, if anyone was going to establish who could have bought the mythical collection from the dying Milewski, it could only be her.

  She knew she couldn’t go far from their shed, so she walked up and down the length of the lion house; there was occasional growling and movement from inside. She wasn’t afraid—in fact she found the presence of live creatures rather soothing.

  So she thought. She made a mental catalogue of collectors, collections, and individual works, dividing them into those that definitely had no connection with the case and those that might. She found it refreshing to perform this task without a notepad or computer. Just she alone and her knowledge.

  The physical effort, the fresh air, and delving deep into her memory for names, events, and figures put her mind into full gear, putting the pieces together ever faster.

  On the other side of the wall something growled, and she stepped back a pace. Then she noticed a small air vent in the wall. Cautiously, she pressed her face to the cold wood, and smelled a strong odor coming from inside. She peered through the vent: there on the other side was the large, glassy eye of a lion, just as interested in her as she was in him. A large yellow eye with a black pupil.

  It glanced at her, then vanished, as if the lion had dematerialized. Before she’d had time to wonder, she heard a sudden, tremendous roar—the shock of it made her jump backward and fall on her butt in a snowdrift.

  As the lion huffed in warning a couple of times and went about its business, Zofia remembered the thought that had escaped her earlier.

  A lion. The three musketeers. A family secret.

  She was right. She was the only person who could have come up with this. And not in the least because she was so well educated.

  13

  As he scarfed down the last buckwheat-filled piroshka, it crossed his mind that Polish food was crap. Day one piroshkies, day two
fermented rye soup, day three a piece of meat in horseradish sauce.

  But dipped in thick cream, the piroshkies weren’t the worst thing in the world.

  Hermod wiped his face with a patriotically red-and-white checked napkin and glanced at a text message. He’d been waiting for it. In the era of universal surveillance of everything and everyone under the guise of the fight against terrorism, you only had to know the right people who knew the right people to gain access to any piece of information. The problem was knowing what information to look for.

  He assumed the foursome would have to get personal documents. He assumed they had contacts in Russia. Lisa knew the underworld, Gmitruk knew the services, and Boznański knew the oligarchs who laundered their Mafia money in the antique stores.

  He assumed that somebody in Russia would get them IDs from one of the Baltic republics. A good European Union passport, no visas required, and the Baltics were the former USSR—as independent of Russia as Morocco was of France. In theory.

  He assumed it would be Latvia.

  So now he was sitting in a café in downtown Warsaw, waiting for the next message, which would tell him about flight reservations from Sweden made by “Latvian citizens.”

  He was pleased that after the Swedish fiasco the Americans had backed down and approached him to finish what he’d started. Because after he screwed up, they’d only had to deal with one corpse, that of a security guard. It had taken them a week to come to terms with Sweden to prevent an international scandal from erupting. He’d asked spitefully whether they were open to negotiation, because his previous contract had been terminated through no fault of his own. They’d replied that price was no object.

  He’d have agreed anyway. Because this had become personal.

  He acquainted himself with the details of the message. He thought for a while and realized it would be safer to go than wait for them here. The chance of them showing up was almost certain, but they really were unpredictable dopes.

  He paid, got into an ugly cab waiting in a socialist-realist square spattered with capitalist advertisements, and told the ugly driver to take him to the airport. On the way he wondered which weak points to exploit. Patriotism? Love? Loyalty? Avarice? The desire to survive at any cost? Fear? Fondness? Sentiment? Resentment?

  There were plenty to choose from.

  14

  He couldn’t force himself out of the bathtub. He’d been in there for two hours, thinking about how nothing was really happening in the world; everyone was just gearing up for Christmas, nothing more. And the only activity he could manage while in the tub was to turn the faucet with his foot to add some hot water whenever he felt it was getting cold.

  So he kept doing it, every ten minutes or so, promising himself each time that this was the last, lying here in the yucky tub in this lousy hotel in the port district of Gothenburg.

  He felt strangely safe. He wasn’t fearing an assassin’s bullet. He wasn’t wondering if the ice would break beneath his car. Or if the Swedish police were going to find them in the forest. Or if he was going to freeze to death in the Scandinavian wilderness. Or be spotted by the zookeepers when they came to dump lion shit and fetch fresh hay. Or be eaten by a lion. Or worrying that some hired thugs were going to fire from a passing car. Or that the Latvian passport wouldn’t let him register at the shabby hotel. Or that registering meant someone came for him right away. That they were already waiting at reception, just around the corner, holding a gun with a silencer. And there was no chance of anyone saving him at the last second. Because everyone, literally everyone, was his enemy.

  They’d spent two more days in the barn at the zoo in Kolmården. The zookeepers had come twice while the foursome lay buried in the farthest corner of the haystack.

  They had talked a lot, partly agreeing, partly arguing, but eventually they’d come to the conclusion that they were on their own and couldn’t count on anyone for help.

  “We have to find the Raphael and discover its secret before they find us. It’s our only chance. Not for fortune and prosperity, but for survival,” Zofia had said, summing up their discussion perfectly. Then she’d suggested they split up and go to Croatia and Ukraine.

  And that was when the quarreling began. Anatol had to keep calming them down, because on the other side of the partition the lions could sense the tension and were getting restless. So they had argued in whispers, because Zofia’s plan seemed to push them into deeper trouble, and carried risk, instead of bringing them closer to a happy ending. It took her hours to explain why all this was essential.

  “We can assume they’ve been looking for it for decades. If we’re to have any chance at all, we must approach it from the other side. Imagine a small town where a terrible crime was committed many years ago. And now you have to conduct an inquiry to find the culprit. You say, Let’s get a magnifying glass and examine every inch of the crime scene. But I say, That’s pointless; they’ve already done that. I say, Let’s find out who moved to this town in the past fifty years and why. A long shot? Perhaps.”

  She carried on persuading them, and they finally agreed. They had a plan, now all they needed—just a small detail—was the money and documents to put it into action.

  On the third day Vasily responded. The documents and cash were coming on a Russian freighter sailing from Kaliningrad to Oxelösund, thirty miles from their hideout. In theory that was too far to walk through the winter forest, but in practice it was hard to come up with a different solution. Traveling as a foursome made no sense; the only reasonable alternative was to send Lisa. With her local knowledge, she alone had a chance of reaching the port, using nothing but side roads and the goodness of the Swedish country folk, willing to give her rides in their run-down Volvos.

  And she had gone.

  Twelve hours later they’d lost hope of her returning. Either she’d been caught or killed, or else she’d fled, assuming she could manage better on her own.

  Thirteen hours later Lisa pulled up in a rental car packed with food from McDonald’s.

  That was a memorable feast.

  In Jönköping they’d returned the car, rented two others from different companies, and driven to Gothenburg as two Latvian couples: Einars Jakovlevs and Daina Tutins, in other words Anatol and Lisa; and Andris Bastiks and Iveta Pimenovs, in other words Karol and Zofia. They had bought plane tickets online for their onward journey, then each of them had gone to stay at a different hotel until their departure.

  He got out of the tub and decided at slight risk to go downstairs for the one-star breakfast, consisting of scrambled eggs, frankfurters, and yellow cheese.

  On his way to the hotel dining room he stopped in the hall by a small desk with an antediluvian computer for guests.

  They couldn’t check their email accounts or log on to social media, obviously, but he sat down to check on something that had been bothering him for several days.

  He found the fundraising site, and on it the page for Sylwia Seredyńska, the woman who had said on the radio that nothing can heal the heart like love, supported by the right amount of money. The page gave details of her illness, and the information that the collection had fifty-seven days left; anyone who donated more than fifty dollars would get a specially made mug with thanks. Of the target two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, so far fourteen thousand eight hundred had been raised.

  His first instinct was to make a transfer of five hundred zlotys, maybe even a thousand, but then he remembered he had to be discreet in hiding, and that excluded logging on to his bank account.

  So he decided to take care of it later, took another glance at the happy woman in the picture, who was cuddling up to a nondescript guy on the pier in Sopot, and went to breakfast.

  15

  At the same time, Hermod was already in Gothenburg; he’d failed to catch a direct flight, but a connection in Berlin had proved sufficient. Now he was sitting in a hotel café.

  Opposite him sat someone else, in the process of making a difficult deci
sion. The person was hesitating, weighing pros and cons, making difficult moral choices, and feeling torn over the most difficult decision they would ever have to make.

  In reality, this person had made the decision long ago, the one that was best for them, and now they were just trying to rationalize it to mitigate their shame.

  Hermod knew it—he was probably a better psychologist than assassin. So he didn’t hurry the person. Instead he drank his coffee, waiting for the moral farce to run its course; then he’d move to a more aesthetically pleasing location where he could prepare to take care of business once and for all.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sveta Katarina, Croatia, and Lviv, Ukraine

  1

  They were sitting in the Seven Piggies restaurant in Lviv, enjoying—quite deservedly—the best Ukrainian food in the city. Zofia was lost in thought, Karol was surrounded by plates of food—unable to decide, he’d ordered a little of everything. He nodded to the waiter and ordered some vodka too.

  She gave him a look.

  “In our situation we need to stay sober at all times.”

  “Have some food, have a drink, loosen up a bit.”

  He got on with his meal. The pork was soft and delicious. He was trying to chew it properly, carefully rolling it across his tongue to relish the flavor.

  “What sort of meat is it? Just out of curiosity.”

  “It’s not just any old meat. This, my dear, is the most exquisite piglet on earth.”

  “So how’s it different from any other pork?”

  “The same way veal is different from beef, or lamb from mutton. It’s a suckling pig, still being fed on its mother’s milk.”

  “So when did they murder it?”

  He clenched his teeth.

  “You’re eating a baby.”