Priceless

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  She sighed.

  Milewski’s pavilion had been faithfully reproduced to scale. The recesses for the paintings and the coffer ceiling were perfect; the architects and builders had done an excellent job. But what did it matter, when the original place had emanated a genuine passion for art that bordered on madness, while everything here felt artificial? The room on Sveta Katarina was illuminated by the sky and the sea, but the one in Warsaw had a set of fluorescent lamps hidden behind fake windows.

  Lisa started at the thought that, despite the lack of paintings, that room had been a temple, the site of a cult. This one, though filled with works of art worth billions, was like a crypt. It stank of death; all the artists stuck behind bulletproof glass, so great, so proudly holding their palettes, so immortal, had been six feet under for the past hundred years.

  She glanced at her Claude. Then aged fifty, he’d refused to paint an ordinary portrait as requested by some Polish madman (curiously, this hadn’t been a problem for Renoir or van Gogh, hanging beside him) and had portrayed himself on his paint-stained artist’s stool, set against his cluttered studio. He had streaks of paint in his hair and in his luxuriant, already-graying beard, and his sad, weary gaze seemed to be asking, What the hell do I do all this for?

  This moment of artistic doubt was beautiful, and Lisa realized that her Claude had once again risen to the challenge—his self-portrait was unquestionably the best in the collection.

  She stood, cast her gaze over the rest of the corpses in oils and, hearing the footsteps of the first visitors coming from the passage, made for the exit. The door opened before she touched the handle; the two museum guards waiting outside had clearly not let her out of their sight for an instant.

  She was about to leave, when something inside, a sudden feeling, stopped her. She realized she would never come back, never enter this room again.

  And so she turned around once more to look at Tout le Monde, which was now being called the greatest painting in the history of art.

  Did it deserve that title?

  Yes, it probably did. It occurred to her that the crazy Count Milewski must have either been extremely rich or else a great magician to have managed to persuade the artists present in Paris in the late nineteenth century, some of them supposedly at odds with each other, to paint a combined self-portrait.

  It wasn’t actually a self-portrait in the strict sense of the word, more like a genre scene, a group of friends at a table set with bottles of wine in the garden of a country house, which must have been Monet’s house at Giverny. And it wasn’t a self-portrait, because the artists hadn’t painted themselves but each other. The question of who had painted whom was the big topic among art experts, and would continue to be for the next few years, but the professionals, including Lisa, were in agreement that nobody had done it at random. Perhaps they’d seen the Count’s commission as a challenge? Perhaps he’d turned it into a contest with a prize? Maybe a good deal of cash? Or perhaps they’d just enjoyed the game, and each man had done his best to paint a better portrait than the others?

  Either way, the portraits were brilliant, and the best without a doubt was of Aleksander Gierymski. The Polish painter was slightly set back from the rest as if offended or lost in thought, toying with a glass of wine and gazing as the summer sunlight filtering through the drink cast crimson glints on the tablecloth. In the foreground Renoir was sermonizing, van Gogh and Gauguin were clinking glasses, Pissarro was shuffling a deck of cards, and with the comical look of a man being cheated by his own dinner, Sisley was holding a fork and trying to spear a roast quail that was slipping off his plate.

  But even so, the gloomy Pole caught the eye, isolated, in a cloud of sorrow, toying with wine and light.

  Who had painted Gierymski? There were as many theories as there were scholars, but Lisa had no doubt.

  Her Claude.

  She left, passing the first visitors, sweaty after spending several hours in line on a stifling morning. Just as winter had come exceptionally early, so now it had decided to wait, and September in Warsaw was as hot as July.

  From the eager looks on the faces of the people hurrying into the gallery, anyone might suppose they were giving away free TVs in there, not showing a few blotches made of pigments mixed with oil.

  It wasn’t fair to say that the group of high school students making up for a day off with a Saturday museum tour were bored, though the group of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds gathered in the gallery was steeped in a strange lethargy, as if trying out a newly discovered form of hibernation that didn’t involve liquid nitrogen or cryogenic chambers. From the outside they looked like wax figures, and it crossed Karol’s mind that if they were transported to a room full of modern sculptures, people would be having their pictures taken with them.

  Yet the tour guide was undaunted and had lost none of her enthusiasm.

  “At your age you probably like mysteries,” she said, suspending her hesitant gaze on them. “So you’re sure to like the story of this particular room, which belongs to the Zofia Lorentz Foundation, named after the art historian who found the Raphael painting and the collection of Impressionists—I’m sure you read about it on the internet. And a few months after that historic find, the representatives of a major legal firm in Zurich approached the Polish authorities to say that an anonymous donor wished to give twenty-five million dollars to a special foundation designed to recover missing works of art on behalf of our country. And, believe it or not, there are still more than sixty thousand items missing . . .”

  Karol stopped listening when Lisa sat beside him. In a light linen suit she looked the personification of natural, Swedish elegance.

  “Twenty-five rocks, not a bad slice of dough,” she said. “So it’s a mystery the do-gooder had so much dinero.”

  “Aren’t you afraid there are cameras and microphones all over the place?”

  Lisa sarcastically covered her mouth and looked around in fear.

  “Surely you don’t think someone will make a connection with the mysterious missing Locomotive, my Claude,” she whispered. “And with you. And with me. No . . .”

  For a while they sat in silence.

  “I don’t believe you only got twenty-five rocks for it,” said Karol.

  “Want your share?”

  “No, I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “I had my . . . obligements?” Lisa wasn’t sure of the right word.

  “Obligations.”

  “Exactly. Our joint obligations in fact.”

  He nodded. Suddenly a strange thought passed through his mind.

  “Do you realize that this is now the most tightly guarded place in Europe?”

  She smiled her most beautiful smile.

  “Just like in a fairy tale, the anonymous donor imposed two conditions on Poland before it would get the money,” the guide continued. “First, it could not be used to buy back works of art from antique dealers or receivers of stolen goods. It could only be spent on tracking down the lost works or on lawyers, thanks to which Poland is regaining its property through the courts. And second, each work must be displayed with a sign that says it was recovered thanks to the Zofia Lorentz Foundation, as here, for instance, next to this portrait of Frédéric Chopin’s sister Izabela. The origin of this painting is intriguing, and so is the story of how it was found. It was thought to have been irretrievably destroyed, until in an East German movie from the 1970s . . .”

  Lisa laughed and kissed Karol on the cheek.

  “My dear, I have something to tell you,” she said in Polish so fluent that it would put most Poles to shame. “I’m not saying this will happen, but if one fine day you were to feel bored with administration, teaching, and everything you now regard as right and proper, if you ever wanted to recover something with a bang, to do some stealing, get into trouble again, wander the world in search of adventure, et cetera . . .”

  He frowned. “Lisa, have mercy. The poor woman only gave birth three days ago. I’m not going to tell
her what you just said, I value my life too much. Besides, can you really imagine—”

  She put a finger to his lips. “You know where to find me. Goodbye!”

  She waved and quickly walked off toward the entrance hall. Karol gazed after her, thinking that he and Zofia wouldn’t be in the mood for adventures for a long time, if ever; only the sound of his own name, spoken by the guide, awoke him from his reverie.

  “. . . Karol Boznański, the art historian, once a famous dealer throughout Europe, now head of the special department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that recovers missing works of art for Poland, like Indiana Jones on a state salary. You’re extremely lucky that he happens to be here today and has agreed to meet with you.”

  None of the teenagers’ faces implied that they felt the least bit fortunate. But for Karol this wasn’t the first time—he knew that behind those masks were usually great kids, and that once he told them a few adventure stories they’d follow him around like sheep. He hadn’t even gotten a chance to start before he heard a question from somewhere at the back of the group.

  “So if not the Raphael, then what?”

  “Sorry?” The guide hadn’t understood, but Karol had.

  “You’re asking what treasure we should be looking for now? The list is pretty long, from El Dorado via sunken Portuguese ships to the Amber Room. But I’d rather tell you about an old Polish priest I met ten years ago, not long before he died. He wasn’t just a priest or just a scholar, he was the translator of the most enigmatic text known to man—the Copper Scroll. To cut a long story short, just after the war, about ten miles outside Jerusalem some shepherd boys found some Hebrew manuscripts dating back two thousand years. A lot to read, above all biblical texts. But of all these texts one wasn’t written on papyrus but was carved in copper instead. Why? Because its content was special. There were no theological treatises or dissertations in it, but, get this, a long list of places where gold had been hidden.”

  “Did they find any?”

  He was reminded of New York. How she’d barked at him that he should regard art as an expression of the inner beauty that we carry inside us, that he should go and see the kids in the museums to whom this beauty shows new paths. And it occurred to him that he should say something about this beauty, or about how a nation with no past and no memory is a nation with no future and no hope, but instead he decided to choose the same thing as usual. Adventure.

  “No way. They couldn’t even read the whole thing, because, as the old priest explained to me, our knowledge of Hebrew is made possible by biblical texts. Which means that we don’t know any other ancient Hebrew words apart from the ones in the Holy Scriptures. You see? Perhaps the author of the Copper Scroll described exactly where and how to find a whole sea of gold, but as he used different words from the ones in the Bible, we have no way to understand it. The old priest told me another interesting thing. He said there’s something very strange about the scroll. Why the hell go to the trouble of carving in copper clues like ‘a hundred paces to the left of the blacksmith’s well,’ when in a few years that description might be out of date? What he figured was that the entire text is a key, a code, designed to show the way not to just any gold, but to some real treasure. The unbelievable kind. The kind that starts with a capital T.”

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  This was meant to be a pleasant break between crime novels, an easy escape into the world of art and adventure. Or so I thought as I sat down to work on this novel. Three months later I still hadn’t written a word, because it turned out that a trip into the world of art is in fact an expedition into a wild, unexplored jungle. Although I met with specialists, read books, and watched movies, and although I could have written a doctoral thesis on the theft of art during the Second World War instead of a novel, even so I still felt completely ignorant, because every answer only led to several more questions.

  I had a really tough time with this book. I must thank my wife, Marta, and my daughter, Maja, for tolerating my sulking for all those months. You’re great. I hope my son, Karol, is too small to remember me throwing objects out of frustration (it’s all right; it was only the remote control).

  Thank you to everyone who helped me on this journey. Many of these excellent, extremely patient people are employed in the public sector (in both civilian and military roles), and they were all nervous about the idea of appearing in the pages of a thriller in any shape or form. And so I owe them my sincere, heartfelt thanks, but unfortunately I must do so anonymously. Janusz Miliszkiewicz kindly introduced me to the world of art dealers—a number of romantic illusions died in the process. I have never met Włodzimierz Kalicki in person, but his articles in Gazeta Wyborcza were my most important source at the start of my work. A big thank you to my first readers, Marta, Marcin Mastalerz, and Wojtek Miłoszewski, for all their comments, which I argued against like mad but which definitely improved this story. And thank you, Wojtek, for prompting the idea for the secret that’s key to the plot.

  My friends Karolina and Jaromir Radziejewski work at Kalatówki as guides to the past and present of that unusual place. If you have enjoyed the mountain scenes in this book, I advise you to go to the hotel and find this friendly couple at four thousand feet above sea level. There’s a chance they’ll be there—somewhere near the foosball table or the big windows that offer a view of the mountains.

  American novelists always thank their editors, whom they regard as the most important people for their work. I know they’re not just being polite, and I hereby bow low before Filip Modrzejewski, who has accompanied me on my literary adventures for many years.

  I’d like to apologize to my readers for any unconscious mistakes I’ve made, and for the entirely conscious misrepresentations that suited my purpose. Anyone who would like to know the academic truth behind the mysteries touched on in this novel should start with Lynn H. Nicholas’s The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War.

  And finally, I truly believe that Raphael Santi’s Portrait of a Young Man is somewhere out there. I hope it will find its way back to Poland, and that when it does, we shall finally meet at the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków.

  So long for now,

  Z. M.

  Warsaw—Kalatówki, 2012–2013

  AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

  Ever since this book was published, first in Poland and then in other countries, publishers and readers alike have been asking me, “But which parts of this story are true and which are made up?” I reply in the words of the great French author Alexandre Dumas that “history is but the nail on which the picture hangs.” In this novel the number of genuine nails is unusually large—Raphael, the lost painting (which is still missing), the wartime theft of works of art, the artists, the Nazi politicians—but everything else is pure fiction. I emphasize this fact to stop my American readers from scouring the history books for evidence of the Great Secret that the heroes of the book investigate. The Secret is fiction, but it does reflect my view—one worth stressing constantly in present times—that in politics the aim should never justify the means, because the results of such actions are always lamentable.

  My thanks are due to those without whom this book would not have appeared in the United States. On that side of the pond they are the following wonderful, warm, and supportive people: my agent Adam Chromy; my editors, Gabriella Page-Fort, Liza Darnton, and Jonathan Starke; and everyone else at AmazonCrossing. And on this side of the water, that impatient, sarcastic, cranky, British virago, Antonia Lloyd-Jones—the brilliant translator and dearest friend without whom my international career would not exist.

  Thank you all very much.

  Z.

  THE CHESHIRE YOUNG MAN

  A CONVERSATION WITH PROFESSOR KATARZYNA BONDA FROM THE CONSERVATION DEPARTMENT AT THE CZARTORYSKI MUSEUM IN KRAKÓW, HEAD OF THE TEAM RESPONSIBLE FOR RECONSTRUCTION OF RAPHAEL SANTI’S DESTROYED PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN

  Have you ever been fa
ced with a greater challenge in your professional career?

  Never. Nor has any other conservator.

  Exactly how many pieces were there?

  Several hundred large ones, and in total, including the tiniest splinters, almost two thousand. Once we had numbered all of them and laid them out on tables, we found that the tables had a total length of 260 feet.

  Why did you number each splinter?

  A three-dimensional image of each piece was downloaded onto a computer to an accuracy of one thousandth of an inch. This was possible thanks to the application of the most modern equipment used in medical diagnostics.

  So you did a CT scan of all the splinters?

  A CT scan and an MRI. That wasn’t the hardest part of the task by any means. After that we had to find an IT firm that could write a program for us capable of putting the three-dimensional jigsaw pieces together. I’m pleased to say that we found one here in Poland—without those wonderful guys, the whole task would have been impossible. And when after several weeks of calculations, and endless attempts and mistakes, we gained a three-dimensional image of the assembled whole, and once we knew exactly where each splinter should go, we got down to work.

  What stage are you at now?

  We’re assembling the picture from the top down. We have completed about one-quarter, which means we’ve already put the Young Man’s face together. It took us two months.

  Is there anything missing?

  Amazingly, we have managed to recover almost every element of the picture, and thanks to the fact that the accident happened on snow, the pieces were in a better state than if for example the painting had been crushed on concrete. Unfortunately, some small fragments must have driven off with the car that destroyed it.