The Forger

by Paul Watkins

  “I doubt that very much,” he replied. “Mind the step.”

  I dodged his booby trap.

  He stopped at the studio door and fished out his knot of keys. He bounced them in his hand until he found the one he wanted.

  It was stuffy in the atelier and strange to think of the old days with Balard and Marie-Claire.

  We mixed up some paints, setting the powder in small heaps on the wooden mixing boards and then stirring in turpentine with little sticks like chopsticks. I was always careful not to breathe the powder. Even the thought of the brilliant greens and reds sticking to my lungs was enough to make me wheeze.

  “I suppose we’d better get started,” said Pankratov. He had moved his chair out to the warehouse and now looked around for a place to plant himself.

  There was a sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.

  We both froze, just as we had the time before.

  I held the chopstick in my hand, poised in a puddle of cobalt blue. I heard the footsteps reach the third-floor landing and begin to climb the fourth. I kept waiting for them to stop and go into one of the rooms lower down. By the time they got to the fourth, I knew they were coming for us. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes.

  Pankratov’s trap came to life with a splintering crunch. A man cried out in pain and then a woman shrieked. There was a heavy thump as someone fell down to the fourth-floor landing. This was followed by the man swearing, loud and embarrassed, in German, and the woman running down the steps to help him, asking in a mixture of French and German if he was all right.

  When she spoke, I knew it was Valya.

  Pankratov stood with wide eyes fixed on the door.

  Quick footsteps were followed by a shape appearing behind the blurred glass pane. Then the door flew open.

  It was Valya all right. She stamped in, furious. She was dressed in a short brown moleskin jacket. She wore a dark blue skirt which came halfway down her calves and white socks and black shoes. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She had a suntan, which contrasted with the paleness of her artist’s model days. She looked prettier than I recalled. “You!” she shouted at Pankratov. “You idiot! You could have killed him!” She offered no explanation of where she had been or why she had left without telling Pankratov.

  “I’m all right,” said the man at the bottom of the stairs. He spoke French with a German accent. There was the sound of him getting to his feet and cautious treading as he made his way up the steps.

  Valya rested her fists against her hips. She turned to glare at me. “You still here?” she shouted. “I told you the war was coming. You should have listened to me.”

  I gave her the go-to-hell smile.

  The man appeared behind her. It was him—the man I’d seen at the Polidor bar. He wore a gray double-breasted suit, with a red, black and white Nazi Party pin in his lapel.

  Valya stepped aside to let him pass.

  He nodded hello to us.

  Pankratov ignored him. “Not one word,” he said to Valya. He started walking toward her. “Not one lousy word did I get from you while you were gone! I’ve been so goddamned worried I couldn’t think straight.” Pankratov wrapped his arms around her and squeezed her so tightly that I heard her back cracking. He closed his eyes and pressed his lips tightly together.

  Slowly, her arms reached up to his back. She patted him uncertainly, as if she lacked the strength for any more.

  Suddenly, I glimpsed her as a young girl, dodging the uneven moods of this man who might have led a more contented life if he’d been born without the genius he possessed. I understood better now how difficult it must have been to live in the shadow of a man like Pankratov. He was built for always moving on, leaving no attachments to tear up his heart with regret. I wondered how many people he had left behind in his life. Even his own artwork, when he felt himself become attached to that, was fed to the flames rather than become a weakness.

  The German and I glanced at each other awkwardly. He sidestepped the embracing couple and walked over to me with a confident stride. “Thomas Dietrich,” he said.

  “David Halifax,” I told him.

  He jerked his head over toward Pankratov. “His student?”

  “That’s right,” I replied.

  “Ah.” He looked around again. “Only you?”

  “There were others, but they went away when the war started.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said. Then, having reached the limits of his patience for small talk, he changed the subject. “I am with the East European Commission,” he said. “Perhaps you have heard of us.”

  I played dumb and told him no.

  “It’s just as well,” said Thomas Dietrich, “because the commission is now called the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. It’s all military now. In fact, it always was.” He tipped his head to one side and then back straight, as if fixing a crick in his neck. “I have come to speak with Mr. Pankratov. Alone, if you don’t mind.”

  Obediently, I went and fetched my coat.

  Valya and Pankratov were talking softly, but they stopped as I walked past.

  “Where are you going?” Pankratov asked me.

  “They want to talk to you,” I said. “I’ll wait at the café.”

  Pankratov looked at Valya. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “It’s all right, Daddy,” she said, giving him a reassuring smile. “It’s just a thing in private.”

  It was the first time I had heard her call him by anything other than his last name. I wondered if she was sincere, or if she was in fact the coldest-hearted thing in the world and was saying the one thing she knew he needed to hear and would do anything to hear again.

  I clumped slowly down to the street, sidestepping the broken stair.

  The soldiers were gone when I got to the Dimitri. They had left behind an ashtray full of cigarette butts, which the other customers were quickly grabbing up. On their table were the stacked plates to show how many drinks they’d had. Each drink came with a little dish, which had a green ring around it and the amount that the drink cost printed on the china. The glasses were taken away, but the dishes were left behind to accumulate for as long as the person stayed at the café. When they were ready to leave, the dishes were counted up to make the bill.

  “Are they good customers, Ivan?” I asked, taking a seat at the bar and nodding at the stack of saucers the Germans had left behind.

  Ivan puffed. “They don’t tip very well, but considering they could just as easily come in and take whatever they wanted, yes, they are good customers.” He nodded toward the atelier. “I saw Valya,” he said.

  “And the German,” I added.

  “Him too.” Ivan mopped imaginary blemishes on the bartop. “Is it bad?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I hope Pankratov can keep his temper,” said Ivan. “Usually, he can’t.”

  Pankratov didn’t appear for a couple of hours. I read all the papers at the Dimitri and drank too much Café National and switched to steamed milk to settle down my stomach. Just when I was starting to get worried, Pankratov walked into the café.

  “You’d better come on,” he told me. “They want to see you, too.”

  As we climbed the stairs, Pankratov told me what he knew. “This Rosenberg thing. It’s an organization specifically designed for stealing art. They have a list of the paintings they want, but of course half the stuff has been hidden. Now they’re scratching around trying to find people who know the locations.”

  “And they think you know something?”

  “Valya seems to have convinced this man Dietrich. She knows I had that part-time job at the Louvre. She doesn’t know any more than that. I think she’s just trying to impress him.”

  “But why would she drag you into this?” I spat. “Doesn’t she understand what kind of trouble she could get you into?”

  “She wouldn’t do anything to hurt me,” he said quietly. “She’s impressed by what this man has to offer. It
’s all champagne and caviar. She has a certain blindness about who he really is.”

  I stopped him there. “If you believe that, then you’re the one who’s blind. You’d better see her for who she is or it’s going to cost us more than just our jobs.”

  A look came over him that I had never seen before. He rolled his eyes around, as if he was about to faint. He pushed by me and kept walking up the stairs.

  I realized, then, that she could make him do anything, and I knew Pankratov would rather die inside the maze of her lies than face the truth.

  Dietrich and Valya were standing at the window, looking out over the city. They were holding hands and talking to each other in lowered voices. When Pankratov and I arrived at the door, they stopped holding hands and stepped apart.

  “Why don’t you and your father go outside for a while?” Dietrich asked her.

  Valya and Pankratov stood out on the hallway.

  Dietrich walked across the room and gently closed the door behind them. Then he turned to me and smiled.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked.

  “It’s what we can do for each other,” he said. “You and your friend Monsieur Fleury. Valya has told me all about him. You and he are just the kind of people we are looking for.”

  I listened to him explain the plan for the art museum in Linz.

  “One single European museum to house the best of European artists,” he said, “as a symbol of a united Europe. To create in artistic terms a European community of the arts, instead of this scattering of museums holding on to whatever mishmash of paintings they can scrape together.” He spoke fast and passionately. “The property of French citizens will not be touched. All we ask is that, for safekeeping, dealers and private collectors place their artwork under the protection of the French government. It will be put into storage at the château in Sourches. It will be more secure there than in their own homes.” As he made each point, he bent one finger back to count them off. “What’s happened is that people have panicked. They’ve stashed it away in half a million basements and barns all over the countryside. God knows how much of it is already damaged beyond repair.”

  “You’re not going to touch any of it?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “None that doesn’t belong to us,” he said. “We do intend to repatriate the German works of art that were looted from Germany by Napoleon during his campaigns against our country. They were stolen. Simple as that. Not bought or borrowed.” He began naming paintings. “Breughel’s Hay Harvest. Stolen by the French. Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Man. Stolen by the French. Dürer’s Portrait of Erasmus. Stolen. We are simply bringing them home. We have requested eighteen hundred paintings that rightfully belong to us. And do you know how many we have been able to find?” He didn’t wait for my guess. “Three hundred and fifty-nine!” He undid the top button of his shirt, as if it were choking him. “We’ll get them all in the end, of course. It’s just going to be more work than I had thought.”

  I imagined the paintings in their stone tomb at Ardennes Abbey, the darkness and the stillness of the air. “What’s this got to do with me?” I asked.

  “Nothing directly.” We were face to face now. Same height. Same color hair. “You are friends with Pankratov,” he said. “Valya told me he worked at the Louvre. He must know where some of those works have been put. All I ask of you is that you”— he paused while he chose the right word—“encourage him to remember. That’s all.” He held out his hand for me to shake.

  I didn’t reach out, but he kept his own hand there, the smile plastered lopsidedly against his face. Eventually, I held out my hand.

  He shook it. When I tried to let go, he kept his grip on me. “I’ve been given this task,” said Dietrich. “It is mine. Do you see?”

  I stopped trying to wrench my hand away. I stood there, trading his stare for my own. I’d been waiting a long time for the war to reach me—not in rumors or things I read about or glimpsed in the distance. I had waited for some evidence that came to me alone, to tell me I was part of it now. And here it was. In this man’s eyes I saw his vision of what the world would become, and all the horror it would take to make the vision real.

  Chapter Ten

  WHEN I GOT HOME, I found Fleury sitting outside the door to my apartment. At his feet was a basket of food, some of which he had unpacked and was eating. He gnawed at a piece of sausage and held a bottle of champagne in his other hand. He rolled his head to face me, groggy with pleasure. “Mr. Halifax,” he drawled. “So good of you to come.”

  “Explain this,” I said. I was in no mood to trade jokes with him. I was angry at Pankratov for his blindness about Valya, and angry at my own helplessness in front of Dietrich.

  “We’re going to a party,” said Fleury, his words sloppy from drink, “and the people who invited us have also sent a gift.” He waved his hand crookedly over the basket, like an arthritic magician performing some kind of trick. “All that you see here.”

  I thought he was joking. He must have spent a fortune on some black market deal. One glance at the contents of the basket—chocolate, gourmet cheese, two bottles of good wine, another bottle of champagne—and I knew he had done something illegal to get them. It didn’t surprise me that he’d gotten his hands on the stuff. The opportunity must have presented itself, I thought, and he was unable to resist the temptation. That was just part of Fleury’s character, and there was no point getting angry about it. But I did mind him being drunk and useless just when things were starting to get serious. I jammed the key into the lock and opened my door.

  Fleury, who had been leaning against the door, fell with a tweed-muffled thump into my apartment. Champagne ran out of the bottle and over his hands, until he realized what was happening, then yelped and yanked the bottle upright, spilling even more.

  I stepped over him and walked into the kitchen. I shucked off my jacket and hung it on the chair in the kitchen, the same as I always did. Then I turned on the tap and washed my face.

  Fleury climbed to his feet and brought in the basket of food. He set it on the kitchen table. “You really ought to partake,” he said.

  “What did you do?” I asked. I turned off the tap and dried my face with a dish towel. “What kind of deal did you work this time?”

  “No deal at all,” he replied, raising his eyebrows. “It was a gift, as I said.”

  “All right,” I said, to play along. “Who’s it from?”

  He rummaged in the basket and pulled out a card, which he then handed to me.

  The card was from Dietrich. On one side was his name and Paris address and phone number, printed in blue ink. The other side had a handwritten note: “6:00 P.M. German Embassy. Formal. Car will collect you.” I felt myself stop breathing for a moment.

  “I don’t even know who he is,” said Fleury.

  “I do,” I told him. “Christ, this man moves fast. I only met the guy an hour ago. I don’t think we should be going to any German Embassy party.”

  “I thought we were supposed to collaborate,” Fleury said smugly. He handed me the champagne bottle. “Look at this.”

  Printed over the Veuve Clicquot label was a stamp in German and French. It read: “Reserved for the German Armed Forces. Purchase or resale forbidden.”

  The anger that was dammed inside my chest now flooded through my body. I held the bottle over the sink and flipped it upside down. The champagne poured away, hissing.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” shouted Fleury.

  I took the other bottle of champagne and wrenched off the little wire cage over the cork.

  “Have you gone completely mad?” Fleury grabbed the bottle out of my hands and held it to his chest. “If you want to prove a point, why don’t you just start singing the Marseillaise in the middle of this embassy function tonight? That’ll get their attention. But not this.” He held his hand out at my sink, where the last brassy bubbles of champagne were crackling on the white ceramic. “Oh, why did you have to go and do that?” />
  I went downstairs and across the road to the pay phone at the Dimitri. Shutting myself in the little box with the folding glass door, I put in a call to Pankratov.

  It rang for a long time. Then there was a lot of scraping on the line and distant cursing. “Hello? What? Hello?”

  “It’s me,” I said. I explained about the invitation at the embassy and the basket of food.

  “Oh, yes,” said Pankratov. “I got one, too, and an invitation to the party.”

  “Are you sure that’s the right thing?”

  “I called Tombeau as soon as the invitation arrived. I told him about it. Tombeau said he wants me to stay out of the way, but you’re to go see what they want, and then get in touch with Tombeau tomorrow to let him know what you’ve learned.”

  I thought about Pankratov’s short fuse, and it seemed to me that keeping him in the background might not be such a bad idea. “Are you going to eat the food they sent?” I asked.

  “Look, David,” said Pankratov, finally lowering his voice, “I heard a story once about Alexander the Great. He was traveling through the desert with thousands of his men and they had no water and were dying of thirst. Then one of Alexander’s men found one almost dried-up puddle and scooped out a helmetful of water. He brought it to Alexander. Right there, in front of his troops, Alexander lifted the helmet above his head and poured the water onto the sand. And they all loved him for it, because he wouldn’t drink while his men were thirsty. But do you think he really had no water? Of course he did. He just didn’t drink it in front of his men. So here’s what I think. If we’d been given the food in front of a lot of hungry Parisians, then it would be smart to throw it away and make sure everybody saw us doing so. But if no one’s there to see it, you haven’t got much of a gesture to make, have you?”

  After I hung up the phone, I went back up to see Fleury. He was still sitting at my kitchen table. He had the empty champagne bottle laid flat on the bare wood table and was rolling it back and forth under his palm. He stared at the bottle, as if hypnotized by it.

  “Pankratov says you should go ahead and stuff your face,” I told him.