by Paul Watkins
“Where are they going?” I asked Pankratov, forgetting that I was not to ask questions.
“No idea.” He was hunched down in his seat, arms folded across his chest.
“Well, where are we going?” asked Fleury. “Do you know that, at least?”
“You’ll know soon enough,” he said. “There’s the signal. Drive up. Come on. Drive up.”
I pulled the truck up to the base of the stairs, riding onto the curb, directed by hand signals from one of the shotgun men, who showed me his palms when it was time to stop.
Pankratov jumped out.
Fleury and I followed.
We went up the steps to the table, footsteps crunching on the yellowy gravel. There were two men ahead of us.
In the foyer of the Jeu de Paume, I saw men and women removing paintings from frames and stacking the empty frames to one side. They sized sheets against the paintings and tied them up with balls of string. The white balls unraveled across the floor. They worked quickly, without talking. The sheets were then marked with numbers in black laundry pen. The paintings were carried past us and down the steps to our van.
The man at the table glanced up at us when it came our turn. On his desk was a list of names of paintings and next to each name was a code number, the same numbers that were being written on the sheets. In another column was a letter. The paintings which had been sent down to our truck were all marked “Q.” The man took off his glasses and wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt. His jacket was hung over the back of his chair. Next to his left hand was a hammered brass ashtray that was filled with cigarette butts. Tiny bugs weaved around the lantern’s light. He took an envelope from a box. The envelope had the letter Q marked on the front and nothing else. He tore a sheet off his notepad, on which the paintings were listed by code number only. Then he handed the envelope and the sheet to Pankratov. “Head around the Place de la Concorde and get on the Champs-Elysées. Head for the Boulevard de la Grande Armée. That will get you on the main road out of Paris to the west. Once you are out of the city, open your instructions and follow them. When you get to your destination, check the paintings against the numbers. Make sure they all get delivered. When you get back to the city, return the list to me. All clear?”
“Clear,” said Pankratov.
A woman walked out of the Jeu de Paume and right over to us. She was the woman from the gallery opening. The one with the crowd gathered round her.
I couldn’t remember her name.
“Alexander,” she said to Pankratov, raising her chin slightly as she pronounced his name.
Then she glanced at Fleury. “Monsieur Fleury,” she said. “Under the circumstances, I suppose I should be glad to see you here.”
Fleury smiled weakly.
“But now that I have a better understanding of your methods,” she continued, “these are the only circumstances under which I would welcome your company.”
“The honor is to serve,” said Fleury grandly, returning her insult with one more subtle than her own.
“Madame Pontier,” said Pankratov. “This is David Halifax. He is one of the painters we will be using.”
“Ah,” said the woman. “You are the American.”
“Not any more,” I said, and shook her hand, which was strong and bony.
“We have high hopes for you,” she said, and turned and walked back into the building.
“Who was that?” I asked Pankratov.
“That woman owns you right now.” Pankratov’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “So think nice thoughts about her.”
“Well, I know what I’ll be thinking about her, anyway,” said Fleury.
When we reached the street, the last of the paintings was being loaded into our van. In the back were mountings where the bread bins had been. By the thin light of a bulb in the compartment I could see traces of flour in the gridded metal floor. I wondered what the owner of the truck would do without it.
I climbed behind the wheel and pulled out into the Place de la Concorde. The buildings that we passed loomed dark and empty. The trees along the Champs-Elysées were leafy and still. I saw no people in the streets.
It was cold in the truck, even with the three of us squashed in.
“That woman on the ramp,” said Pankratov, “is Emilia Pontier, curator of the Duarte Museum. She’s been put in charge of removing works from all the major galleries. She’s probably the only one who knows the locations of all the paintings. She made up the lists and code numbers, found locations, and contacted people who would hide the paintings. Right now, she’s probably the most important person in the French art world.”
Pankratov tore open the directions. He took out a sheet of paper and a stack of fuel ration coupons. He let the envelope fall to the floor. “Normandy,” he told us.
Again, I thought about that day in the streetcar. So much had happened since then, it was as if I’d robbed the memory from someone else’s life.
“Where in Normandy?” asked Fleury.
“To the Ardennes Abbey,” he said. “The ancestral home of the Count and Countess de Boinville.”
“De Boinville?” I asked.
“That’s right.” Pankratov nodded. “They offered to let us store some paintings there.”
“I didn’t know Marie-Claire was a countess!” said Fleury. “Why didn’t you tell us before?”
“She asked me not to. What difference would it have made, anyway?”
“It might have made a difference to Balard,” I said. I wondered where Balard was now, still alive or dead up in some muddy field in Belgium.
We drove out through the flat farmlands west of Paris, the long straight roads lined with hedges and crop fields neat and geometric. After the city, it was strange to have the horizon broad and open again and to see thick groves of trees. I saw a dull red tractor plowing a field. Mist clogged in the muddy furrows. A jumble of magpies and seagulls followed behind the hunched-down driver. A pipe jutted from his mouth.
There was no sign of war. No soldiers, tanks or guns.
Pankratov stared out the window, steaming up the glass with his breath and then wiping away the condensation again. He unbuttoned one of his pockets, pulled out an apple and munched at it.
“Where is this abbey?” asked Fleury.
“Near Caen,” said Pankratov.
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “Just hang them on the wall?”
“Actually,” explained Pankratov, “we’re going to put them in the wall. If France falls, some German magistrate is going to be living in the abbey and the last thing he’ll want is for his new house to be damaged. The paintings will be behind a few feet of plaster and paint and he’ll never know they’re there.”
By afternoon, we were approaching Normandy. The roads became sunken and narrow. Sometimes, all we could see was a tunnel of thick bushes closing over us. Pankratov said this was bocage country. The roads were below the level of the fields because they were hundreds of years old. Over the centuries, the level of the fields had risen with each successive crop, while the road level stayed the same. I beeped the horn every time we came to a bend in the road, in case there was a car coming the other way, but after a while, I gave up slowing down. Once in a while, over the sound of our own roaring engine, we heard the gooselike honking of another horn and I jammed on the brakes. The only vehicles we passed were two milk trucks and a tractor. Once we had to stop to let a herd of black and white cows cross the road, pestered on by a boy who slapped their muddy flanks with a stick.
We had long since run out of conversation. Now we lived alone in our thoughts.
A fine rain was falling as we passed through Caen. The wipers jolted drunkenly across the windshield. In the distance I could see the thin spike of a cathedral spire, jutting from a cloak of fog. We tanked up for the third time in a place called St. Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe, using the fuel ration coupons. By then, we were only a few miles away. I had been driving for over ten hours. At the gas station, I could smell fuel
around the pumps and the reek of grease and rubber from the repair shop. Next to the gas station was a bar café run by the same man who pumped our gas. His once blue overalls were bleached the color of cigar smoke.
We went into the café, where the owner served us our Café National in heavy cream-colored mugs with a green stripe around the top. He refused to take our money. “If you don’t drink it, the Germans will, and I’ll throw it away before I give it to them. Besides, they probably have real coffee, anyway.” Then he went on to tell us that he had killed a bunch of Germans in the Great War. “And now they’re coming back for more,” he said. “I must have let a few of them get away last time.”
Pankratov sipped at his coffee. “Better hope they don’t remember your face.” Then he walked outside to stretch his legs.
The morning papers arrived while Fleury and I were sitting there. Large black headlines in La Nation announced the invasion of Belgium and attacks on French airfields up north. The Germans had used dive-bombers to break French strongholds along the Meuse River. The French Seventh Army, under General Giraud, was withdrawing toward the Dutch coast.
The café man stood looking out the window, as if he expected the German tanks to come rolling down the road at any minute. “We’ll stop them,” he said. “They’ll hit the main French lines tomorrow and then we’ll stop them.”
The Germans were already through the main French lines. That much was clear from the newspaper, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
The first turn to the right out of St. Germain took us on a small and arcing road out to the converted abbey, a small fortress of buildings with high walls around it and a huge wooden gate at the entrance. The entrance was set back into the abbey itself, and we had to drive down a narrow alley flanked by high stone walls. The stone was pale and sandy and looked rough, as if it would take the skin from my palms if I ran my hand across it.
There was a small door set into the gate, which opened when I pulled the car up to it. A short man in a heavy wool coat stood in the doorway.
Pankratov got out.
The two men talked for a while.
Fleury and I sat in the truck.
“For a while,” said Fleury, “I actually believed none of this would ever happen.”
Before I could tell him that he hadn’t been the only one, the gates were opened and Pankratov waved us in.
I pulled the van into a large courtyard, which had a fountain in the middle and plants growing in stone pots set against the walls. The courtyard was paved in loose stone, which crackled under the van’s tires. The windows of the abbey were tall and arched. There was a great silence to the place.
The man in the heavy coat had been joined by another. Both men were stocky, with broad foreheads and slightly flattened noses. They looked to be related. They wore waistcoats and had no collars on their shirts. Their thick hair was gray with dust. One had a mustache, which was so caked in grime that it looked as if it had been carved out of chalk and glued to his face. The men shook our hands but didn’t smile. They looked very tired. The man with the mustache introduced himself as Tessel and the other man, who wore the heavy coat, as Cristot.
I knew those weren’t their real names. They were small towns further along the road to Bayeux. I’d seen them on the map.
On Tessel’s orders, I backed the truck up to the main entranceway and we all began to unload the paintings, stacking them against the side of the truck and up against the side of the house.
I counted forty paintings, the largest of which was about two feet by three feet and the smallest maybe only one foot by eight inches.
“Where are the de Boinvilles?” asked Fleury.
“The Count and Countess,” said Tessel, clearly irritated by Fleury’s familiar tone concerning their local nobility, “have gone off to Caen for a few days. They said they didn’t want to know exactly what it was we were hiding. The less they know, the better.”
We moved the paintings inside. In the front hallway was a stained-glass window. It bled watery greens and blues across white sheets that covered the canvases. We carried the paintings up a staircase made of reddish-amber mahogany.
I tried to imagine Marie-Claire in this place, drifting down the stairs in some long gown, but I couldn’t do it. To me, she belonged and would always belong in the smoky air of the Dimitri, or bundled in a coat and sketching the hostile face of Valya.
There were tapestries on the walls, showing knights on horseback, stags and hounds. The place smelled of old fires and polish. We set the paintings down in the dining room, in the center of which was a huge table of the same wood as the stairs. It must have been built in the room, because it would never have fitted through the door. The silver candlesticks and the salt dish had been placed on the sideboard. Overshadowing all the beauty in the room was a large and ragged hole that had been dug into the wall, through the paint and mortar and stones, exposing a narrow area in between.
A housepainter’s cloth had been set on the floor to catch falling debris. Two sledgehammers lay crossed on top of the stones that had been removed. Cracks radiated out from the hole all across the wall, and I wondered how these two men who had made the hole would ever be able to repair it in a way that no one would notice. Even with the cloth set out, there was dust everywhere in the room.
Cristot climbed over the pile of rubble and stood in the gap between the walls. “We figure there’s enough room in here for all of them. You can grab a screwdriver or whatever you want and start taking the paintings off those frames.” He gestured to the table, where a canvas bag sagged open, loaded with tools. “Then we can roll them up and stash them. It shouldn’t take too long.”
“Wait a minute,” said Pankratov.
“What’s the matter?” asked Tessel. He pulled a red handkerchief out of his pocket and began smoothing the dust from his mustache.
“You can’t roll these up,” Pankratov told them.
“We’ll be careful,” said Cristot. “Now come on.” He snapped his fingers and held his hands out for the first painting.
“First of all”—Pankratov dug his hand into the canvas bag and hauled out a paint-spattered iron file—“you can’t just gouge a canvas off its stretcher with one of these. And secondly, if you want to take an old painting off its stretcher, you need to place it on a wooden roller, which you turn only six inches a month. This is a job for specialists. Nobody’s taking these paintings off their stretchers.”
It seemed to grow very hot and quiet in the room. The floating dust was clogging up my lungs.
Tessel turned to Cristot. “I told you we never should have gotten involved.”
“You’re the one who talked me into it,” said Cristot.
“I have two children and a wife at home…”
“And I’m their godfather, for Christ’s sake!” Cristot interrupted. “Don’t you lecture me, Jean-Paul.”
“Oh, and there you go using my real name!”
“It was only your first name.”
“Well, thanks a lot, anyway. And here I am risking my life with you of all people for a bunch of paintings that I’ve never seen and don’t care about.” His voice rose with indignation as he turned his attention to Pankratov. “I don’t care about your damned museums and…”
He was going on like this when Pankratov lifted up one of the paintings, set it on the table, and with one flip of his hand, undid the bow that held the string in place. He swept away the white sheet wrapping. The painting came into view.
It was a Vermeer. I knew that at once. The Lacemaker—La dentellière. It was a small painting, made on canvas laid over wood. It showed a young woman, maybe nineteen or twenty years old, in a yellow dress with a broad white collar. The woman’s hair was braided at the back and curls hung down by her ears. She was hunched over her work, and it was hard to make out what she was doing. Something with pins and tiny spools of thread. Red and white silk spilled out, almost like liquid, from a soft case beside her. She looked tired and busy and the
faint cheerfulness on her face seemed strained. Every time I had gone to the Louvre, I had sought out this painting just to look once more at the smile on that woman’s face. Each time I saw it, the smile seemed less and less sincere, as if she were stuck in some purgatory of a job that she knew would make her blind, as many lacemakers went blind. By now, I felt I knew her from some place beyond the confines of that canvas.
To see the painting there in front of us, robbed of its beautiful pale wood frame, beyond the safety of the Louvre, shocked us into silence. We just stared at it.
A long time passed before Cristot sighed noisily. “Oh,” he said, the way all Frenchmen say “oh,” deep-voiced and long.
“Are they all like that?” asked Tessel. The red handkerchief dangled from his hand.
“Just give me the paintings,” said Cristot. “We’ll find a way to get them in.”
We began handing them across the pile. Cristot took each one and shuffled away out of sight, sidestepping down the gap. We heard the rustling of his movements, like a giant rat living in the space between.
It took an hour for the gap to be filled up, by which time it was dark outside.
We sat down for a break. Fleury brought in his satchel and passed out the food and wine. Pankratov went downstairs to the kitchen and brought back cold ham and bread, some Camembert, and three bottles without labels filled with what looked like muddy water.
Tessel took out a small, hook-bladed knife and carved the wax top off the bottle. Then he drew out the cork with a corkscrew attached to the other end of the knife. He ran the bottle under his nose, sniffed once and then took a short sip. He swished it around in his mouth and then swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
I saw on his face the first smile I’d noticed all day. “Calvados,” he said. “Premier distillation.” He curled his lips around the words, as if they tasted of the drink itself.
We ate the ham and bread and the chalky-rinded cheese and drank the hard Calvados cider, passing the bottle around.
A plane droned overhead. We all stopped until the sound had faded away, as if the machine might sense our breathing while it scudded through the clouds.