Priceless

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “But it is a Nazi symbol . . . ,” said someone in the room.

  “But only since the 1930s! Long before that they were symbols of the sun and of good luck in many parts of the world, among the pagan Slavs too. Before the war, the highlanders often marked their buildings with a swastika, known as a ‘crooked cross.’ It was meant to bring good luck and scare away evil spirits. Mountaineers and people who loved the Tatras also used it. Do you realize what this means?”

  Lisa looked at him closely. “The swastika on the piece of amber found in the thermos flask has nothing to do with the Nazis or the Amber Room.”

  “Exactly! It must be a clue, a sign indicating an old place, somewhere around here. This building is out of the question because it’s too new, built just before the war, when the swastika was already less common. It has to be an old, Tatra-region building. Think, think, I have to think.”

  Jaromir came back with a folder full of old photographs showing the construction of the hotel, its grand opening, and various special events; there were also pictures of Nazis observing the mountains from the viewing terrace. Karol didn’t look closely, he just kept showing them to Zofia, certain she was the only one who could spot something.

  And she did.

  She didn’t have to say anything; he could see it in her eyes.

  The photograph showed about a dozen men in a small wooden room. They looked serious, and were holding a large sheet of paper with a drawing of a skier and a sign that could be deciphered as “Carpathian Ski Club.” She pointed at one of the men.

  “Grandfather,” she whispered.

  Among the rest, Karol recognized two other heroes of the story: Karol Estreicher and Henryk Aszkenazy. But the thing that caught his eye was a chandelier hanging above; dating from the 1930s, it had candles stuck into large pieces of amber and was entirely decorated with the Slavic symbols of the sun and good luck—swastikas.

  “Do you know where this is?” he asked Jaromir.

  “Probably at the old shelter.”

  “There’s an old shelter here?”

  “There was. It burned down near the end of the war, but if you know where to look, you can find the ruins—old cellars in the forest.”

  “Do you know where to look?”

  “Of course.”

  Karol glanced at Zofia.

  “Go. I promise not to die for another fifteen minutes.”

  17

  Hermod had found his skis, buried in the snow beneath a marked tree, and felt safe. There was still an hour’s climb separating him from the ridge, along a fairly steep slope, then a pleasant descent in soft, powdery snow, and if it all went to plan, this evening he’d be getting off the plane in Stockholm.

  It was a perfect mountain day. No wind and plenty of sunshine. No sign of pursuit. And no wonder—they’d probably only had time to dress the wounds and remove the corpse.

  He took a deep breath, tossed the skis onto his shoulder, and walked on. It wasn’t too hard to cut a trail, because there was old snow under the fresh layer, firm enough for his feet to get a grip. Maybe it wouldn’t even take an hour to get where he was going.

  18

  You’d have to know this place to find it, especially in winter. The spot where the shelter had stood was now overgrown with forest in a small clearing.

  When Jaromir pointed at this spot in the snow, Lisa and Karol felt resigned to failure again. It was hopeless. Even if something had once been hidden here, it must have decayed decades ago. The bitter thought crossed Karol’s mind that here the entire truth about Polish efforts to protect its national treasures was exposed. Right up to the outbreak of war there’d been nobody to do the job properly—although by then the French, for example, had already removed their collections from the Louvre, packed them up beautifully, and hidden them in a château on the Loire—and when someone finally did get around to it, they hid it all in a wooden shelter and set it on fire.

  “Is there anything there?” asked Karol.

  “Despite appearances, yes,” replied Jaromir. “Three years ago I did some digging here. I spent my whole vacation clearing the rubble, in the hope of finding some old skis or some kind of relic. The building must have had a floor space of three hundred to five hundred feet, but it wasn’t built on an ordinary foundation. The ground here is solid limestone, and the cellars are carved out of the rock, topped with a stone vault. The wooden shelter stood on top of that.”

  “So did you find anything?”

  “No, everything must have been removed after the fire. Not even any coal in the coal store.”

  Karol frowned.

  “Why do you think it was a coal store?”

  “The walls were coated with pitch.”

  If there’s anything a space for storing coal doesn’t need, it’s for the walls to be coated with pitch. Quite another matter if you want to preserve something from damp conditions.

  “Is it possible to go inside?”

  The snow sparkled beautifully in the sunshine filtering through the branches of the snow-covered spruces; it was hard to believe that in this fairy-tale scene there could be a burned-out ruin lying underneath.

  “Sure. Snow isn’t reinforced concrete.”

  Jaromir took a folding snow shovel from his backpack, thought for a moment, then began to dig in a corner of the clearing. Soon he’d scooped enough snow for them to slide down into the old cellars.

  “I had to make this hole because the proper entrance was buried under the rubble,” said Jaromir, brushing off the snow.

  They were standing in a narrow corridor; the sunlight pouring through the hole in the snow allowed them to see that indeed the walls were carved out of limestone, decorated with pickax marks, and the ceiling was built of stones. They peered down a limestone tunnel, into impenetrable darkness.

  “Where’s the coalhole?” said Karol. He had no time to waste; he wanted to be with Zofia when the emergency rescue team arrived, or when . . . No, he refused to consider that.

  Jaromir pulled out a flashlight and led them through a surprisingly long network of cellars that must have stretched beneath the entire shelter, maybe even farther. Finally they entered an empty space about ten feet square; here the walls were not gray, as elsewhere, but clumsily coated in a thick layer of pitch, which reflected the light like solidified lava. It was like being in an infernal hall of mirrors.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jaromir. “Even if someone did keep something in here, they must have removed it ages ago.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Lisa, as she walked around the space, touching and tapping the walls. She stopped, knocked lightly, then banged her fist against the black wall. A dull echo.

  They exchanged glances.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”

  Karol took a deep breath, stepped back into the cellar corridor, thought of Zofia, gathered speed, and with all his might rammed his shoulder into the wall, which turned out to be made of old planks. Karol crashed inside a small storeroom, raising a huge cloud of dust. He started to sneeze and cough like mad.

  Finally he managed to calm down, the dust settled, and his eyes grew sufficiently accustomed to the dark for him to make out the shapes hidden in the gloom.

  The first shape he recognized was a black letter “R” painted on a metal box lying on the floor.

  19

  His self-confidence was his undoing. When he made his plan, there was one important variable that he failed to take into account: namely that the person pursuing him might know these mountains incredibly well. Not from a guidebook, a map, or satellite images, but from experience, because he’d spent so many summers and winters here, learning to hike, climb, and ski, and at the same time getting to know all the shortcuts and trails.

  So when Hermod saw Anatol emerging from the forest, he felt a shudder of fear. Not because he could be killed, but because he could be caught and locked up for the rest of his life in a Polish jail. In a country where the hotel bathrooms were outside th
e rooms, the prisons must be like a cross between the gulag and an African mine. But then he realized Gmitruk didn’t have a unit of armed commandos behind him, ready to shoot.

  He realized instead that his ex-girlfriend’s lover, a zombie who could barely stand upright with a bloody pancake of a face, had come here alone.

  Polish romantic fantasy really is enchanting, he thought, and smiled.

  20

  Karol knelt beside the box, his head spinning from emotion. Jaromir and Lisa followed him through the hole, and the flashlight lit up the darkness. He looked around. The small space was packed with cylinders sealed with a coating of pitch, resembling rolled-up rugs. It was just as Zofia had described—a space the size of a broom closet was large enough to hide arguably the most valuable treasures in the history of art.

  He ran a finger over the layer of pitch sealing the gaps in the box marked “R.” He didn’t have much of an idea how to get it open. Suddenly Jaromir handed him a large army knife that looked like a tool for gutting a bear.

  Karol glanced at the knife, at the box, at the rolls leaning against the walls, and at a single small casket the size of a shoebox, also carefully sealed with tar, perhaps most carefully of all.

  “Come on,” Lisa urged. “Let’s get it over with.”

  Karol nodded, cut through the protective layer of pitch, and from each side very gently pried the lid off the box marked “R,” enough for the nails to rise half an inch. Then he peeked inside to make sure he wasn’t damaging the contents. Jaromir handed Lisa the flashlight, and helped Karol finish the job.

  Inside lay something wrapped in linen.

  Under the cloth was something wrapped in grease paper, like an enormous sandwich prepared by a caring mother for her child before a long journey.

  He removed one layer, then a second, and a third. He knew the next one was the last. And for that reason he couldn’t force himself to uncover it. He simply wasn’t ready for this—he was afraid his heart would give out.

  He frowned when he heard a strange, growing rumble; for some reason it made him think of an earthquake. But no, it was a helicopter.

  The mountain rescue team! They’d come for Zofia.

  He sighed, which brought on another fit of coughing, and once it was over, in one decisive tug he pulled off the last layer of paper.

  And came face to face with the Young Man. The Renaissance dandy smiled at him in a carefree, flirtatious way, as if to say Peekaboo!

  “Jesus, man,” wheezed Karol. “If you only knew . . .”

  “That’s odd,” said Jaromir.

  The Young Man made absolutely no impression on him.

  “What’s odd?” he asked.

  “That’s not the mountain rescue helicopter, I know that sound. It’s something else, a transport or military helicopter.”

  Karol looked at Lisa. That did not bode well.

  21

  The two men stood a dozen yards apart on the steep, snow-covered slope. They were some thirty yards away from the wall of forest below, and a few hundred from the ridge above. The afternoon sun was staining the snow orange, and their figures cast long shadows that seemed to have no end.

  “Surrender,” Anatol tried to say, but he only made muffled noises and spat pink bubbles of bloody saliva.

  Hermod burst out laughing. “Seeing we’re linked by an exceptional woman, some business interests, and the fact that we’re both trained killers, I’ll give you a choice. As one friend to another. You can choose to be shot, strangled, or beaten to death. Of course I prefer the last option, as I’d like to finish what I started. Anyhow, your death, your choice.”

  Anatol was trying to move his lips. The pain was so intense that he fell to his knees.

  “You’ll die,” he whispered at last; Hermod only caught his words because perfect late-afternoon silence reigned in the mountains.

  “I think not,” he replied, and laughed. “So are you going to choose, or is it up to me?”

  As the sun came close to the ridge, the light shifted from orange to crimson.

  22

  Before they left, he used the knife to rip the layer of pitch from the small casket, opened it, and took out an ordinary leather briefcase. He tossed it to Lisa, tucked the Raphael under his arm, and they ran to the exit, then sprinted across the snow to Kalatówki. The rest of the treasure would have to wait.

  A huge military helicopter was flying over the forest from the direction of Zakopane; they recognized the red-and-white checkerboard of the Polish Air Force on its side.

  “All the preservationists would skin you alive,” panted Lisa in her odd Polish.

  “Relax. He’s survived for five hundred years; a short run won’t do him any harm.”

  Outside the hotel there was a mountain rescue ambulance, a green Land Rover Defender. The paramedics were cautiously descending the steps, carrying a stretcher with a body on it, covered by an orange blanket. Karol raced ahead and reached the Land Rover just as they were loading the stretcher.

  “Are you alive?” he said to Zofia, leaning over the face protruding from under the blanket, so pale it almost looked transparent.

  With no strength to reply, she smiled faintly.

  “Look.” He raised up the board with Raphael’s painting to let her see it properly. “We’ve got the son of a bitch.”

  For a while she gazed at the Young Man, then turned to look at Karol and whispered, “I’d rather have you.”

  Afterward, Karol was never sure if she’d really said that—he couldn’t have heard her whisper over the roar of the Land Rover’s engine and the rumble of the landing helicopter—or if he’d simply imagined what he wanted her last words to be.

  Either way, what happened next occurred at lightning speed, and although subsequently he tried to recreate that brief scene in his mind over and over—as did all the witnesses—he was never able to confirm who was really to blame. When asked whose fault it had been in one of the subsequent interviews, he couldn’t stop himself from saying “Poland.” And that was probably closest to the truth.

  23

  Lisa was thinking of Zofia; also, in spite of everything, of Anatol, but she was also mindful of the fact that if the cavalry got their hands on the leather briefcase, they’d never cease to be hunted like animals. Besides, she was curious to know what historical event from several decades ago could matter enough to drive the world’s greatest superpower into hysterics.

  She ran into the hotel and tossed the briefcase on a wooden table in the buffet; a stone bear holding up the mantelpiece seemed to be watching her urgent movements with interest. She opened the case and took out a wad of yellowed sheets of paper.

  She was expecting to see German, but to her amazement they were all in English, and many had the stamp of the US Department of State. Most of them were marked Top Secret.

  She ran an eye over each document, picking out the most important words.

  . . . in connection with the forecast rise in racial tensions in Europe . . .

  . . . code name “Bad Seeds” . . .

  . . . preemptive intelligence operation . . .

  . . . diplomacy will in this case not suffice . . .

  . . . permanent access to information . . .

  . . . the potential involvement of the United States . . .

  . . . unprecedented development on a scale of global conflict . . .

  . . . costs should not play a role . . .

  . . . fifty specially trained agents . . .

  . . . from the youngest years . . .

  . . . to control events in Europe . . .

  . . . Germany appears to play a key role . . .

  . . . replacement with puppets of an entire family in Landshut . . .

  . . . we shall guarantee the means and practical skills that will allow for rapid promotion within the structures of power . . .

  Finally she understood the significance of this unassuming wad of yellow sheets.

  “It’s impossible,” she croaked in Swedish. “I
can’t believe it.”

  For a short while the weight of the truth she’d discovered, and her sense of responsibility for it, paralyzed her. She had no idea what to do. She looked around, and just then Jaromir came into the buffet with his backpack full of treasures and a well-meaning smile. And suddenly she was filled with irrational certainty that this very man and his backpack were going to save her. She remembered how Karol had borrowed the redhead’s phone to search for a reproduction of the Raphael on the internet.

  “Phone,” she said, holding out a hand.

  He pulled out a cell phone in a solid case and handed it to Lisa.

  She knew this model—she’d used one before, mainly because of one extremely useful function. Any photograph taken on it was immediately sent via the internet to the owner’s computer. For Lisa it was also an extra safety valve—she’d set the phone to allow her to purge its contents at the press of a button in case of danger, though of course by then the photos were safely stored in her computer.

  She went into the settings, chose all the essential options and the highest possible resolution, and began to photograph eight pages at a time.

  Then military boots thundered up the stairs.

  24

  Impatient, Hermod shrugged, stuck his skis in the snow, and headed toward Anatol to shorten his suffering. He was whistling the tune from The Bridge on the River Kwai, which for some reason came to mind. It seemed appropriate to the scene.

  When Anatol reached into his pocket, Hermod stopped whistling and froze. But when he saw what the Polish commando was holding in his trembling hand, he smiled again. What a joke, he thought. Good thing I’m retiring after this.

  “Fireworks?” he mocked. “Really?”

  Anatol grimaced, which his injuries made hard to interpret. Then he struck the firecracker against the coarse edge of a matchbox and threw it in Hermod’s direction.

  It didn’t even reach him; it landed six feet ahead, and when it exploded with a loud bang, the fountain of snow that it raised seemed pitiful.

  Hermod waited until the echoes of thunder had bounced off all the peaks surrounding the valley and fallen silent.