Priceless

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  She didn’t answer because she didn’t want to admit that he was right. But she was pleased it was such a lovely day, and to be reminded how beautiful the world is, and how many things there are to see. She squeezed Karol’s hand, thinking about life.

  Her future life.

  She saw them coming down here for breakfast, some of the last guests to arrive, because they’d spent the morning in bed.

  She saw them sitting in the café in the evening, the wind blowing snow against the black windows as they played Scrabble and argued over whether the word sexlet exists—meaning a small act of noncommittal sexual intercourse.

  She saw them trying to eat dinner, and a little girl with large black eyes running off across the restaurant. And of course Karol would go after her, because that’s how he was, and soon he’d be back with their daughter under his arm. The little girl squirming but laughing like crazy. All of them very happy.

  Her future life, seen in a flash, was the life of a very happy person.

  Zofia smiled.

  9

  Pissed that she looked like the Michelin Man, Joanna Banaszek went down the hall only to realize she had to pee. She glanced at the restroom door, thinking about the hindrance of her ski pants, suspenders, leggings, and briefs.

  She sighed and went into the restroom, peeled off all the layers, relieved herself, and got dressed again, puffing and panting.

  Then she washed her hands and went out. At exactly the moment she closed the door behind her, she saw a long, slender blade, more like a knitting needle than a knife, appear in the left hand of a tall, handsome man with green eyes whom she’d noticed in the café that morning.

  The man was gripping the blade so tightly that it stretched the skin across his knuckles. Then he took the blade and stuck it into the back of a smiling blonde with coal-black eyes who was holding her boyfriend’s hand while looking out the restaurant window.

  Purely on instinct, Joanna Banaszek threw herself at the man, knocked him over, and at the last moment changed the angle of the blade as it pierced Zofia Lorentz.

  10

  As Hermod came down the hotel stairs, he was ready to hunt them down. But just as a hunter doesn’t expect to walk out of the lodge and see a deer by the garden gate, he was equally surprised to see the entire foursome below.

  He couldn’t suddenly stop or even change the speed of his descent; as long as he kept going at a steady pace, he would safely blend into the background. He considered whether to eliminate Gmitruk first. That would increase his chance of survival and escape, but not of carrying out his assignment, in which the priority was clear: get rid of Lorentz; the other targets were secondary. So the only option was to carry out his assignment. Outside there was enough snow on the ground to risk a jump through any window, and the second floor was full of them.

  It only took a few seconds to decide—enough time to cover half the staircase from the landing to the hall. Then he crossed the remaining distance, smoothly reached into the top of his hiking boot, and pulled out the blade.

  When he stopped on the floor by the reception desk, he was two paces behind Lorentz and Boznański. Just then the receptionist picked up the ringing phone, while an Italian by the wall pointed out the site of the cableway disaster, and an old man playing foosball in the dayroom scored a goal. From the restroom an irritated woman in full mountain gear emerged. Then Lisa Tolgfors noticed him. Her eyes widened in horror, and her hand reached out toward Gmitruk, who was reading the weather forecast.

  Lorentz was smiling blissfully, admiring the view, when the blade struck from the side, aimed at both chambers of her heart. But just then Hermod felt a mighty blow, which twisted the blade, and he fell to the ground, landing painfully on his shattered right hand.

  All hell broke loose. The woman who’d pushed him started screaming something in Polish that he couldn’t understand. Lorentz fell to the floor, and the dismayed Boznański fell to his knees to see what was wrong. Lisa reached for Gmitruk, who turned around, and, from the gleam in his eyes, Hermod understood that some people should never be paid in advance.

  Hermod knew if he could overcome Gmitruk, he could get out of the hotel and be rid of them for good.

  He rolled across the floor to disorient the Pole, leaped to his feet by the wall, and pushed one of the Italians at Gmitruk. Gmitruk dodged the Italian but lost his balance, then Hermod ran at him, grabbed him by the back of the hair, and head-butted him in the face.

  Gmitruk’s nose spurted blood, but somehow he remained conscious.

  Hermod let the Pole go, jumped across the foosball table, and opened the window separating the dayroom from the Tatra National Park. Before he jumped, he turned around, stared into the furiously blazing eyes of his former lover Lisa Tolgfors, and blew her a kiss.

  Serves you right, he thought. Maybe in the next life you’ll pick your allies better.

  And he jumped.

  He landed in a snowdrift by the garbage cans, somersaulted, and ran off toward the mountains.

  11

  He tried to latch onto one thought—the avalanche conditions in the Tatras, which he’d read about before the cableway attack.

  He’d been taught a technique ad nauseam during training, a method for coping with interrogation, deceiving lie detectors, and withstanding torture—the milder kind, because nobody could withstand the tougher kind; everyone has a threshold, and everyone breaks.

  Special caution must be taken on slopes facing northeast, via north, to northwest. He kept repeating this, faster and faster, which allowed him to endure the horrific pain of his broken nose. He wanted to howl like a wild beast.

  Instead he kept whispering the mantra about slopes until he was finally able to steady himself and open his eyes.

  Before him was Lisa, tears running down her face, as she held his head in her hands.

  “Go get him, Snake,” she said. “Go get that son of a bitch.”

  Anatol forced himself to stand. His head was spinning. There was a huge pool of blood soaking into the carpet where he’d been kneeling.

  He looked around.

  He saw Karol carrying Zofia in his arms.

  And realized he had to get that bastard at any price.

  Reeling, he ran downstairs.

  12

  He couldn’t understand what had happened. Zofia was standing next to him, holding his hand, when suddenly she fell to the floor. She lay there in an unnatural position, pale and motionless, her eyes closed. Behind him was a commotion, people shouting, while he helplessly knelt at her side, paralyzed by the realization that something terrible and irreparable had happened.

  As he took her in his arms, he felt the warm, sticky blood flowing from a small hole in her back. Karol was shocked—how could there be so much blood?

  He didn’t want her to die. And certainly not like this.

  He picked her up and got to his feet. The blood pooled in his hands, dripping onto the floor as he carried her into the dayroom. People stepped aside in silence, as if making way for an ancient priest presenting a victim for sacrifice.

  In the dayroom he carefully laid her on a wide wooden bench by the wall. Above her hung a mountain landscape, possibly the Tatras. There were similar paintings hanging all around. He thought it an ironic twist of fate for Zofia to die surrounded by appallingly bad art.

  Suddenly a couple pushed through the crowd—a pretty blonde with thick glasses who worked for the hotel, and a friendly-looking man with red hair, holding a large first aid kit. They were calm as they tore off Zofia’s blood-soaked clothes, put a dressing on the wound, and bandaged it tightly. Zofia lost consciousness; her body lay torpid on the bench, looking lifeless. Karol fell to his knees in panic and searched her neck for a pulse—he prayed this wasn’t the end.

  Just then, Zofia opened her eyes.

  He smiled at her, but she didn’t have the strength to return his smile. She whispered something, too softly for him to understand. He leaned closer, touching his ear to her cold lips.
<
br />   “We were going to have a little girl, you know?”

  “We are going to have a little girl,” he said. “More than one. You just have to hold on a little longer; help is on the way.”

  She seemed too weak to listen, or maybe she was putting all her energy into scanning her surroundings; her gaze wandered the dayroom walls, across the kitsch mountain landscapes. Suddenly she stopped on one of them, and in her fading eyes a gleam of light appeared. He followed her gaze. The landscape showed a small mountain shelter seen from a bird’s-eye view, a wooden cottage in winter, safely nestled against a slope, hidden among the trees.

  “We’re going to have a little girl, and she’ll be just as much of a virago as you,” he whispered. “I have no idea how I’m going to cope with the two of you.”

  13

  He wasn’t escaping without a plan. Just like his previous Tatra operation, this one had been meticulously prepared too, because Hermod hated improvisation. Every detail had to be planned, every variable foreseen.

  As soon as he left the hotel, he dropped the idea of escaping to nearby Zakopane. Too many people had seen him. Instead he chose—just like Roman Kłosowicz over seventy years ago—the Slovak route. First he planned to go uphill along the inactive ski trail, then through the forest as high as possible toward the ridge. On the far side of the forest, he’d hidden a pair of extremely light skis that he’d use to zoom down the slope on the Slovak side, where at the bottom of Silent Valley waited a small Suzuki jeep, marked “TANAP,” as the Tatra National Park was called on that side.

  So far, it was all going to plan. Despite the deep snow, Hermod was quickly covering the distance, following the signs along the ski route.

  14

  The scene was like a painting, a variation on Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson—a group of silent people standing in a semicircle around the bench. Karol knelt beside Zofia, holding her hands in his, folded as if to pray. Behind them stood the blonde woman and the red-haired man, still holding the first aid kit.

  “Look for a shovel,” whispered Zofia.

  “What?”

  “If you want to bury me, look for a shovel. Otherwise, look at this landscape.”

  He looked at it. He immersed himself in it, analyzing it inch by inch with reverence worthy of a Vermeer. And the longer he looked, the more something began to bother him.

  The painting had skewed proportions, it was absurdly tall, about twenty by sixty inches. The cottage was in the lower part of the painting, with a slope topped by rising peaks—it really did look like this area around Kalatówki. The sky was clear with only a few clouds; the sun must have been behind the artist, judging by the shelter’s shadow along the snow and the bright-yellow glint in one of the windows.

  The hotel was standing on a bald clearing, but dense forest grew behind and in front of it, pushing its way into the image like the dark-green tongues of strange creatures. The trees were shaped like spheres, nestled close together, as if copied from a child’s drawing. The odd thing about it was that it seemed somehow familiar. Very familiar.

  A nagging thought appeared at the back of his mind—such an odd one that he pushed it away as fast as possible. He had no desire to tumble into the abyss of madness. But the more he pushed the thought away, the more it bothered him.

  “May I borrow a phone?” he asked the nice red-haired man who’d dressed Zofia’s wound. The man glanced at Karol’s bloodstained hands, then passed him his phone.

  Karol searched in the browser and soon found what he was looking for.

  “Look at this,” he said to Lisa, handing her the phone.

  Lisa saw a black-and-white reproduction of Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man on the screen.

  “So?” she said.

  “Look out the window.”

  She looked out the dayroom window at a still-splendid winter day.

  “Not here, the window in the painting.”

  She looked. Most of the Portrait of a Young Man was filled, obviously, by the young man. But to the right of his smiling face Raphael had painted the corner of a window and a piece of landscape beyond it. The tall, rectangular landscape consisted mainly of sky, with the towers of a city looming out of the mist below; in the foreground a thick, leafy forest pushed its way into the scene like two dark-green tongues of strange creatures. The trees were shaped like spheres, nestled close together, as if copied from a child’s drawing.

  “He’s here somewhere,” mumbled Zofia. “You’ve got to find him.”

  He wanted to tell her not to be silly, but her black eyes flashed in a way that told him to go up to the wall and remove the painting. On the back was a signature: HA45.

  Extremely easy to decipher: Henryk Aszkenazy, 1945.

  He glanced at the redhead.

  “Do you know this place?” asked Karol, handing back the phone.

  The man smiled.

  “Better than anyone, and so does my wife,” he said, pointing at the pretty blonde.

  15

  The snow was helping him stay conscious. Every few minutes he rolled a soft snowball and pressed it to his shattered face to relieve the pain. He kept going like that until the snowball melted, then tossed the bloodstained lump and made a new one. After thirty minutes, he was able to gather his thoughts.

  But it didn’t make him feel any better. He felt weak, and he was still losing blood. He was weaponless and pursuing a fit, trained killer who was certainly armed. Anatol had no plan and little strength—he would most likely die here in the mountains. Either of exhaustion, or blood loss, or at the hands of a killer.

  But he couldn’t give up, because it was his only chance of redemption. He’d rather die in the mountains than go back to the shelter and learn that Zofia had paid with her life for his betrayal. That the price for Sylwia’s life was the life of an innocent woman. As if in a trance, he stared at Hermod’s footprints on the trail and forced himself onward.

  “Things will work out somehow,” he said aloud like a real Pole, ready to quote the recklessly optimistic line from the famous national epic: “My nephew and I will lead the way, and things will work out somehow.”

  Moving his jaw prompted such a jolt of pain that he fell to his knees; it took him a while to recover before he could go on.

  16

  “Think, Lisa, you’re the goddamned thief!” shouted Karol. They were leaning over the painting, staring at the wooden cottage against the mountains. “Isn’t this what it’s all about? To find the hidden treasure. And here”—he pointed at the painting lying on the restaurant table—“kind Mr. Aszkenazy has left you a clue to make it easier. So for God’s sake find it.”

  Lisa cast him an angry look. She was thinking as fast as she could, partly because she could feel Zofia gazing at her as she fought for every second of consciousness.

  “We’re assuming it was here that Hans Frank hid the collection, right?” she said, speaking English, as she usually did in tense moments when her Polish wasn’t adequate.

  “Yes,” said Karol.

  “But Aszkenazy took it out and hid it in a different place, also here. That’s logical. So we must assume that the first hiding place was solid and carefully prepared, but the second was improvised. Are there any cellars here?” she asked Jaromir, the redhead.

  “We call them bunkers,” he replied. “They’re underneath the ski storage level. But they have bare concrete walls and floors, I’d bet a million dollars there aren’t any secret passages in there.”

  “No point looking there,” said Karol. “It might have been the original hiding place, but that’s irrelevant here. The question is, where was it moved to?”

  “Frank’s apartment?” asked Lisa.

  “Number 17 on the second floor,” replied Jaromir. “The only one with a bathtub, very popular.”

  “That’s out too,” said Karol. “Aszkenazy would never have hidden the collection in a hotel room, too big a risk. It would only take some minor repair for someone to stumble on it. Besides, I don’t think he h
ad time for that—bricking up a double wall, plastering, and painting.”

  Clearly Henryk Aszkenazy wasn’t a fool. He’d foreseen that sooner or later he might have an accident. Perhaps he’d even committed suicide to avoid having the secret tortured out of him. That’s why he’d sent the postcard to Olga Bortnik, and why he’d painted this landscape, or had it painted, intentionally leaving clues. He believed it would only take Robert Lorentz one glance to recognize the detail copied from Raphael’s painting, but then what? Lorentz wouldn’t have known whether to dig around the hotel, or search the local caves, or demolish the walls between the rooms.

  “There has to be another clue in here,” said Lisa.

  “Yeah, a clue for a few people who were in the know back then. People alive before the war, who had a different way of thinking and referencing events or ideas.”

  “Perhaps I should dig out the old photos,” said Jaromir.

  Karol was about to say he’d go with him, but he glanced at Zofia and realized she had to see them. She knew the most about the Raphael, rooted in this business by family ties. The assassin had attacked Zofia because he knew that without her they would never find it.

  “Where’s the goddamn emergency rescue?” he barked at Jaromir, frustrated.

  “It’s coming, it’s coming. Shall I get the photos?”

  He nodded, and as soon as Jaromir left the room he jumped to Zofia’s side.

  “Swastika,” she struggled to say, as soon as Karol reached her.

  “Yes, yes of course,” he said too eagerly, unsure of her mental state.

  “I’m not crazy. Don’t . . . write me off. The lamps . . .”

  He looked up. There were four wrought-iron chandeliers, decorated with zodiac signs, four symbols on each. There were more than just astrological signs here. The other spaces on the chandeliers were occupied by swastikas, woven into an ornate pattern.

  Suddenly he understood. He leaped to his feet, pushed the foosball table away from the wall, and ripped up a piece of the flooring, under which was a fine mosaic parquet. The others stared as if he’d gone crazy.

  “Look!” he said to Lisa. “You remember the photograph at Borg’s? The child on the mosaic-patterned parquet under a chandelier with swastikas? The Monet and the Raphael on the wall? That was here! We’re morons; we thought the swastika was a Nazi symbol.”