‘Lily, please. If I could have told you, I would have.’
‘When did you first know I might be connected to that thing?’
The breath went out of him. ‘At that shop on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. There was a ring from the Lutoslawski collection in that grab bag of stuff Langlois had placed in the window.’
The things in that silver tazza. Breaking bread into my soup, I nodded curtly. ‘So you used me, is that it?’
‘I didn’t know you then, or even if we’d ever meet again. It was business, Lily. What else was I to have done?’
Business … How many times is that excuse given? ‘Then after having said we must always be straight with each other, you admit you lied to me?’
He set his spoon down. ‘Can you ever forgive me?’
‘Arthur mentioned a secret compartment in that car of yours, a smuggler’s hideaway. I’ve not yet had a chance to ask my son where it is.’
Tommy caught up with me. I had even left my purse behind. ‘The compartment’s under the rubber mat in the trunk. You have to take the mat out first. There’s a spring release at the side of one of the rear lights. The left one. You push it in and the lid pops open. It’s an old rum runner’s trick, but lots of custom’s clerks search like crazy, so I always have a wad of cash handy.’
‘And the available space?’ I asked angrily.
‘Enough to hold several paintings in their frames. Lily, they didn’t just steal the tiara. The firm stands to go into bankruptcy unless we can recover the goods.’
‘Use a thief to catch a thief, eh, is that it? And what am I supposed to do if Jules tells the Sûreté I ran off with his fake and all those other bits and pieces of his father’s mistress?’
‘He won’t for that very reason. Come and meet Nicki. He’s not just anybody. He wants to tell you his side of it. At least do that before you make up your mind.’
It was sad to see a proud man in defeat, too old to fight a modern war, too young to die without caring. Even at the age of sixty-two, Alexis Nikolai Ivanovich was still extremely handsome. One automatically thought of kings at court and of men in uniform. My first sight of him, however, was through the mizzle down a forest lane that was flanked by fir trees. There were two greyhounds with him, and these had lifted their heads to stand sculpted at our approach.
Caught in that moment, Nicki was totally unaware that he was no longer alone. He wore the high black boots of a cavalry officer, the tucked-in, rough brown corduroy trousers, coarse linen shirt, and open leather jerkin of a peasant. No hat, no cape—I don’t think he ever cared much about the weather, certainly not in the years I was to know him.
His fist closed about a branch. He broke off a bit, crushed the needles, and brought them up to his nose, a man remembering. A pea cast out of its jar to roll uneasily on the floor of England.
The fens, the bogs, and the forests of Suffolk did little to ease the isolation but only served to give poignant reminders of home, of a place I’d never heard of—lands halfway between Biala Podlaska and Pinsk, to the east of the Bug. A place of forests and marshes, of mud, horses, and few if any roads. One of sleighs and sleigh bells in the frozen night of a river’s meandering.
Of wolf hunts that were terrifying.
Nicki had the warm grey eyes of a man who had lived and suffered much. They were widely spaced beneath a strong, wide brow and dark, wide eyebrows. The curly black hair was touched with iron grey and beaded by the rain. The beard and moustache had been carefully trimmed.
He wasn’t tall, nor short—of about my height. Yes, exactly it. Eye to eye, with slightly pinched cheeks, high cheekbones, a full, broad nose and half-hidden lips. A hand whose grasp, like the rest of him, betrayed an iron will.
I remember that he held my hand for what seemed an eternity. He had a lovely wife, not much younger than myself, and his third, I think. Six children, two sons who had been killed in the war, one who was in the RAF, two who were now at boarding school in England, and one who was still at home with them, a girl of five.
He didn’t speak English, only Russian, German, and French, in addition to his native Polish. Though I didn’t know it then, this was to be the first of several such meetings, but in the forest, in the rain as he gripped my hand, he looked right into me.
In silence, Tommy watched the two of us.
‘Now I know why he’s so taken with you, Madame de St-Germain. Please, a welcome to my humble estate. Was your journey tiring?’
I remember thinking then that his French was very good, very Parisian. Hands in the pockets of my overcoat, I shook my head. ‘Only strange. In France, there are so few signs of the war. In London, and in every little station I passed through, there were posters, regulations, arrows pointing to the air-raid shelters, men in helmets, people carrying their gas masks, antiaircraft guns in the parks.’
‘Yet in London, the restaurants and theatres have reopened, and some of the evacuees have begun to trickle back to their homes in the city. This is a war that has only just begun, madame. The worst is yet to come. You’re very lucky to be out of France. If I were you, I’d let Tom get you and the children to Montana. That would be by far the wisest choice. Distant from the madness that has yet to come.’
Even though Poland had been savaged.
We began to walk back towards the house, which was perhaps a half-mile from us. The dogs ran on ahead. Tommy moved so as to put me between him and Nicki and make me feel at one with them. This gesture he was to repeat so many times, yet each time I always felt as if I, too, was special, a bond between them.
It was then, I think, that I first realized that what must have begun as a business relationship had somehow changed. Oh, for sure, Nicki would insist that the insurance he had paid for should cover his losses. There would be no question of this, no matter what, yet for all their differences, the two of them had drawn a lot closer.
Tommy genuinely liked him, and he wanted me to like Nicki, too.
‘You mustn’t be angry with Thomas, madame. What he did may seem inexcusable. The tiara of the Empress Eugénie is only a small part of the tremendous traffic in great works of art this war has already caused. The Nazis are systematically plundering my country. Day by day, trainloads of priceless pieces come into the depot they’ve set up in Kraków. Some lie out in the rain, there are so many.’
Can a brave man stand and cry before a woman he has only just met? That one did, nor would he turn away. ‘Schiller,’ he said, as we started out again. ‘The Obersturmführer Johann Schiller of the SS, the Schutzstaffel. In 1938, the Nazis sent art experts to my country. We thought not to trust them, and we didn’t, but …’
Nicki paused to pluck a last wild aster that was half-hidden among the dense grasses at the side of the lane. Droplets of rain clung too it. ‘For you,’ he said, and shaking them off, fixed it through the buttonhole of my collar.
‘But I, like others, Lily, had to greet these strangers. Two art historians travelled with this Schiller, one a Polish higher-up in the government and supposedly working on a book. My family had many beautiful things. Perhaps I was vain, perhaps a little naive, but I showed them through our house and tried to learn from them what I could so as to warn the others.’
‘That’s when Nicki got in touch with his insurance agents, a London firm, so we came into it as we had in the past when backing that agency,’ said Tommy.
‘The Nazis have their spies, Lily. Here in England, as well as in France. Often they work through a fifth column. Poles who would do their bidding, though there weren’t so many of them; Frenchmen and Englishmen who are still too willing to sell out their countries. They tracked the treasures I had had shipped to London and had them stolen.’
‘Nicki’s certain this Schiller was behind it, Lily. Apparently, the Reichsmarschall Göring has an eye for Raphael, Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci, and a lot of others.’
‘Icons also, and of great value, madame. Those from the Byzantines of the early twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Ho
ly Mother with Child, Our Lady of Light. Icons by Theophanes the Greek, others by Rublyov, my paintings by Jan Polack, and other great Polish artists. The Hellenistic terra-cottas from the third century B.C., the Roman and Etruscan glasses. Schiller, madame.’
A hardness crept in to Nicki’s voice that I was to hear again and again. ‘Not in uniform, so of course he claimed he wasn’t of the SS but of an insurance firm my family had once used. Thirty-two years old, blond, arrogant, tall, and extremely handsome. The blue-eyed Teuton with a scar down the left cheek that he wears with pride.’
‘A Schmiss, a duelling scar,’ said Tommy. ‘Apparently, Schiller fences with some of the Prussian nobility, but he’s solidly of the Sicherheitsdienst.’
‘The Security Service of the Nazi Party, their SS and their Gestapo,’ said Nicki. ‘Has your husband ever had contact with this man?’
‘Schiller?’ I managed. What did I know of the SS and the Gestapo? I shrugged. I think I said something lame like, ‘Jules, he doesn’t tell me everything. I’m just a wife.’
‘But has the lieutenant ever visited your house?’
‘The château?’ I shook my head. ‘Jules is very jealous of his family’s estate and very protective of the works of art and other things his father left him. Please, you must remember that, in France before the Great War, there was no income tax, so his father, he could buy lots of lovely things and did.’
‘Then you’ve no idea how your husband came by that fake?’
Nicki had done the asking; Tommy the waiting. Me, I was caught between the two of them as I shook my head, so it was then that I mentioned that last weekend with Jules and of how my husband and my sister had brought their friends: the Vuittons, Louis and Dominique, my Nefertiti; Dmitry Alexandrov, the Russian student of electrical engineering; Marcel Clairmont, also.
Nicki glanced shrewdly at Tommy as we reached the house, a half-timbered, canted, ramshackle place dating from the mid-seventeenth century. Standing in the rain, they detained me a moment more.
‘Was your husband completely fooled, Lily? Tricked by the Vuittons?’ asked Tommy. ‘I don’t know of them and neither does Nicki, so anything you can tell us would be useful.’
‘Or was it this young Russian?’ asked Nicki. ‘Someone must have sold it to your husband, who couldn’t have looked too closely and was far too anxious to lay his hands on it.’
A fake he had then discovered and hidden away with the rest of that stuff. ‘If I knew I would gladly tell you, but I simply don’t.’
We went indoors to shake off the wetness and hang our things in the great hall beside a roaring fire. There were several of Nicki’s compatriots—the place was a refuge for them. Nicki’s wife was circulating, now a touch here, now a word there.
The tiara sat on a little table all by itself. I remember that they both stood back a little as I looked at the thing. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ I said, ‘even if it is a fake.’
Neat vodka, ice-cold and in small, clear glasses, was offered, and I took one and quickly downed it as the others did. ‘Why not try it on?’ asked Nicki’s wife. She had such a lovely, all-encompassing smile, warm yet shrewd, a toughness, too, I was to learn much later. The thick mass of red hair was worn loose, yet stunning, the sea green eyes the most beautiful I had ever seen.
Katyana Lutoslawski handed that thing to me and I turned it this way and that, felt the emeralds, knew that all eyes were on me as she said softly in the most beautiful French, ‘Please put it on for us. Don’t be ashamed to wear it even if it is a fake.’
How could I have known then what I know now? I put the tiara on. They all oohed and aahed. The men bowed. Someone proposed a toast and the partying began.
I don’t remember when it was that Nicki and Tommy told us of the last wolf hunt they’d been on. I do remember reliving it as if I’d been there.
They have a way of hunting wolves in eastern Poland that must be unique. In the depths of winter, the snows lie deep. The frost is so cruel, it snaps the branches and makes them creak as the moon gives shadows of silver to the ribbons of ice that are the rivers.
A freshly killed pig is drawn behind the sleigh, and the wolves come to this if not to the scent of the terrified horses. They snap at the pig, dash ahead to nip at the forelegs and tendons of the horses. One man controls the reins, the other shoots. Both are bundled in furs, and they race through the forest, laughing, shouting, drunk on vodka and excitement, the sleigh bells jangling.
‘It’s a way of taking wolves,’ said Nicki, the nostalgia all too clear. ‘We share with them the thrill of the hunt.’
I remember touching the base of my throat. Somehow the top buttons of my blouse had come undone. I was thirsty. I was hot. ‘Does the sleigh never turn over?’ I asked.
Nicki held me with a look. ‘What if it did? Would it not be better to die like that than to live like this?’
We telephoned the children at their suppertime. I was most conscious of the need to reassure them. Marie-Christine gave wet kisses and tears to the telephone. Jean-Guy was very brave and told me not to worry, that he had been given a puppy to look after and that he was being allowed to take it for walks.
‘On my own, maman. I don’t get lost anymore.’
I let Tommy speak to them. It was he who told Jean-Guy to be careful and not to wander far from the house. He was to keep an eye on his little sister and to tell Arthur if anything was not as it should be. ‘Your mother will be home tomorrow.’
Two days—that’s all the time I was away.
Nicki’s friends and associates were mostly fellow cavalry officers. I remember that there was a major with a snow-white moustache, a ready laugh and an eye for the ladies. The hands, too.
I remember that the talk was of the war, of a savagery I couldn’t have imagined.
We went up to bed early. We excused ourselves—they’d talk and drink all night. They’d scheme and do so all over again, just itching to get back at the Nazis and the Russians.
Tommy built up the fire. There was no furniture in that timber-ceilinged room, other than a single chair and a heap of fox furs and wolf skins. Wrapped in my lover’s arms, glowing with the warmth of alcohol, animal skins, and that fire, we experienced sex at its most pleasurable, and in the morning my children were gone.
‘You’re going home just like you did back then,’ said Dr. Laurier. ‘Your children had been taken from you.’
‘Yes, but because of me, they’re now gone forever.’
‘Lily, let me come with you. I want to. I think I need to.’
It’s Oradour-sur-Glane all over again for her. ‘You wouldn’t last a minute.’
‘Must you be so harsh? It’s not in your heart to be unkind.’
‘Oh? Hey, écoute-moi, ma chère doctoresse, I’ve a Luger and some other things stashed in that house. Me, I’m heading for it and when I have that gun, I’m going to make them feel how it really was for us.’
‘I still think I should come with you.’
‘It’s impossible. I’m sorry. You haven’t an inkling of what’s involved.’
The land before us is grey with snow. Fir-clad hills flank the mountain to spill down into a valley through which a stream flows. On the other side, the valley wall rises through a turf-covered, rocky slope to a low stone wall. Marius Cadieux is the typical Jura peasant. Proud, lean, wiry, wizened, weather-beaten, and suspicious, but able to grin about it. A man of about sixty-five or seventy—it’s hard to tell—but just being with him makes the past seem all that much closer.
‘I can breathe the air of France,’ I tell him.
‘Ice fog more likely,’ he quips. ‘If we’re to go over, madame, we had better leave now.’
‘How far is it?’
‘Only a few kilometres. There’s a road on the other side at Derrière-le-Mont—Behind-the-Mountain. My son has the sawmill. He’ll help us. I’ll get him to take you to the train.’
‘So, it’s good-bye, Doctor.’
I reach out to shake her hand. The win
d is from the north and it stings my eyes. ‘Please contact me,’ she says. ‘Telephone the clinic and let me know the moment you get there.’
She’s so innocent really, a lot like Michèle but much older, and again I have to tell her, ‘Don’t go back. Not for at least a fortnight. Ring up Zimmermann if you must, but don’t, for any reason, let him know where you’re staying.’
‘I have my other patients, Lily. If I’m not going with you, then I have to go back.’
How many times was I to hear people say to me that they had to go back, how many times was I never to see them again?
‘Please don’t. Please just listen carefully. Dupuis wouldn’t be so anxious were it not for the crimes he committed. He and the Obersturmführer Schiller always worked together, and what the one didn’t know, the other did. Both would kill you without hesitation.’
‘Then why go after them?’
‘Because Schiller can’t possibly be there and the others never worked that way with Dupuis, so I’ll have him all to myself.’
‘Telephone the clinic. Let us know how you get on. Promise me you’ll keep in touch. The war’s over, Lily. It’s time to let things lie. It’s time for the healing to take place.’
She’s so earnest, I know she’s grown very fond of me—a mistake one must never make if one is to survive.
‘Send that cable to Dr. André de Verville as I’ve asked you to.’
‘What about that firm in London? They were going to get back to us today.’
She can’t bring herself to let go. Another mistake one must never make. I look back at her. ‘Forget about them. Ah, mon Dieu, Doctor, don’t be such an idiot. Go into hiding for a little like I’ve asked you to. Give me a chance to settle everything.’
We reach the stone wall. I’m all out of breath from such a climb. Cadieux says, ‘Are you ill or something?’
I shake my head. ‘Just tired.’
She’s still standing there watching us. Not a wave, not a last gesture of farewell. Just a lonely woman on a hillside with the mountains all around her.
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