The Lover's Portrait

by Jennifer S. Alderson

  “Have you found anything else in the last batch?” he asked, while Zelda hunted around the kitchen for clean glasses.

  As soon as they had arrived at Friedrich’s place, they’d started translating the twelve letters she hadn’t read yet, pausing occasionally to fill each other in on any interesting tidbits they’d come across. They’d started out working in Friedrich’s private abode on the third floor, but moved down to the roomier kitchen after his housemates had gone out for the night.

  Zelda was convinced the letters contained information somehow related to the claims on Irises and the location of Arjan van Heemsvliet’s vast collection. They must, she reckoned, otherwise why was someone willing to kill for them? But they had been reading for hours now, so far with no luck. These later letters hardly differed from his earlier ones; the art dealer barely mentioned his gallery or the war in any of them. If Arjan hadn’t dated his letters, she would have never guessed they were written during the German occupation of Amsterdam.

  To make matters worse, neither she nor Friedrich had found even a subtle reference to Arjan’s sexual preference. Although he referred to his manservant and personal assistant Gijs Mansveld in several of them, he never gave the slightest hint the man was more than an employee. The more Zelda read, the more frustrated she became. At this rate, they wouldn’t be able to prove Arjan was gay or being blackmailed without Gerard’s sworn testimony, meaning Karen’s lawyer would make mincemeat of them all.

  “I haven’t found out anything worth reporting, unfortunately,” she said, as she handed Friedrich a glass of juice, then took a sip of her own. “I don’t think he was being blackmailed at this point. And you? Has he mentioned his gallery or lover in that letter?” she asked, nodding at the aged paper in front of him as she sat back down at the kitchen table.

  They were translating the letters in chronological order. Luckily Zelda had the foresight to keep her translations of the first ten letters – written between November 1939 and March 1941 – in her backpack with the originals. Though she was tempted to start at the end and work backwards, in the hope of finding out more about this supposed blackmailer, Friedrich managed to convince her it would be better to read them in the order written, so they didn’t misinterpret something Arjan referred to later on.

  “No, as of December 1941 still no references to either.” Friedrich stared at the letter before him, a puzzled look on his face. “What I really find strange is that he’s barely mentioned the war in his letters.”

  “That’s been bothering me, too. What if Arjan wasn’t being blackmailed by the Germans, but working with them? That would explain why he didn’t seem to worry about the Nazis,” she wondered aloud. “Yet Gerard was so certain about the blackmail and his brother’s homosexuality he gave me the letters so they could be used as evidence against Karen’s claim.”

  Zelda prayed they found something soon, anything that substantiated what Gerard had told them about his brother. If only I’d recorded our conversation, as the museum’s professional researchers would have done, she chided herself again. Now that he was dead, it was her word against Karen’s. Huub was right; she screwed up the investigation and ultimately Rita’s claim by interviewing Gerard herself.

  “None of this makes sense,” Friedrich said, clearly exasperated. “But we haven’t read them all yet.”

  “Maybe the friends he writes about are a clue. If they are German officers or prominent members of the Nazi party, that might explain why he mentioned them.” Glancing back through her translations, Zelda knew she recognized some of the names Arjan mentioned in his letters, but couldn’t figure out why. Perhaps when they finish translating everything, she could compile a list of people he’d written about. That might help jog her memory. But for now, they had to push on.

  “We shouldn’t jump to conclusions before we’ve finished translating everything,” he reminded her.

  “You’re right, we don’t have a whole lot of choice but to keep reading,” she said, without a whole lot of conviction. It was two o’clock in the morning; all she really wanted to do was crawl back upstairs and crash out on Friedrich’s bed. Her eyes drooped shut just thinking about sleep but the thought of Gerard, literally frightened to death, jolted her back awake quicker than a shot of espresso ever could. She couldn’t go home, let alone sleep soundly, until they knew what piece of information his killer was really after.

  She glared determinedly at the pile of unread letters in the center of the table. Only five more to go. Zelda grabbed the topmost letter and picked up her pen.

  FORTY

  “Scheisse, that’s it!” Friedrich cried out as he slapped the table top, jolting Zelda out of her daze. She had fallen into a trance while copiously translating one of the longer letters word for word, virtually unaware of what she was writing down. “What is it?”

  Her friend’s face shone, lit up with excitement. “Listen to this,” he said. “May 7, 1942. My dearest Gerard, blah, blah, blah. Something horrible happened in March that I thought I could deal with on my own. But it’s all gone wrong and now that Gijs is dead, I have no one left to turn to for guidance.” Friedrich noticed her eyebrows furrowing. “Arjan also writes that Gijs Mansveld had died from a bronchial infection in February,” he explained.

  Zelda nodded in understanding, waiting for the bombshell.

  “So, anyway, Arjan says he needs some advice,” Friedrich scanned his translation, looking for where he’d left off. “Oh yeah… a Nazi colonel has been blackmailing me for weeks.”

  “So Gerard wasn’t lying!” she shouted triumphantly, relieved the old man hadn’t unintentionally set them on the wrong track. In the last few hours she’d almost convinced herself he’d mingled family gossip with what Arjan had actually written.

  Friedrich’s head bobbed vigorously up and down. “He found me out one night during a raid. I thought I was being clever, sneaking out of Grote Geerts through the back door while the Germans were breaking down the front.” Friedrich looked up from his translation. “Grote Geerts was a gay bar in Amsterdam on the Zeedijk, close to Central Station. It opened in 1927 and closed in 1984. I googled it,” Friedrich nodded towards his laptop, open on the kitchen table. She’d been in such a stupor she hadn’t even noticed he’d gone up to his room to get it.

  “Holy shit,” she yelled.

  “Shhh, my housemates are asleep,” Friedrich cringed, well aware it was four in the morning. The other five residents had stumbled up the stairs shortly after the bars closed a few hours earlier.

  “Sorry, it’s just, now that we can prove Arjan was gay and being blackmailed...” her voice trailed off and she froze in mid-cheer. “Wait a second, a gay bar? I though the Nazis made homosexuality a crime. How could gay bars have operated here during the war?”

  “According to this letter, Arjan was in Grote Geerts when it was raided on March 21, 1941. Maybe it was an underground bar, like a speakeasy during the American prohibition?”

  She nodded slowly. “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Let me finish reading you this letter, it gets even better.”

  “Oh, of course,” Zelda, slap happy from the lack of sleep, rested her chin on her knuckles and smiled serenely up at her friend.

  “When Arjan ran outside, he passed a man on the street walking his dog. He wrote: For only a split second did our eyes meet, yet I recognized him instantly: Colonel Oswald Drechsler of the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste,” Friedrich read aloud before clarifying, “Or, as it was more commonly known in the Netherlands, the Kultuurkamer. It was the Nazi’s Ministry of Culture – they were in charge of making sure any artwork exhibited in public places upheld the national-socialistic ideals regarding art and culture. I googled that, too.”

  “Jeez, that is bad luck,” she murmured.

  Friedrich ignored her. “This next paragraph is intriguing: With much trepidation I opened my gallery the next day, unsure if it was better to flee the city or act normally. I couldn’t just leave my artwork behind, too man
y people were relying on me to be cautious and survive the war. And I risked everything for one night of companionship. The fates are punishing me and all who trusted me!”

  “Too many people? Who could he be referring to?”

  Friedrich shrugged. “Then he tells his brother that Drechsler came to his shop the next day and demanded artwork in exchange for his silence. If Arjan didn’t comply, Drechsler promised to report Arjan to the Gestapo as a ‘repeat offender’ homosexual. His home and gallery would have been seized and he would have been sent to a work camp in Germany. He even taunted Arjan, telling him he could always volunteer for castration to reduce his sentence. The bottom line is that he either gives the Nazi what he wants, or the colonel will make sure Arjan gets arrested and emasculated. That first night, Drechsler took several pieces from Galerie Van Heemsvliet, calling it his ‘initial fee’. Since then he’d returned weekly, demanding more and more paintings each time as payment for his continued silence. And Arjan’s supply of artwork was rapidly dwindling. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep the Nazi happy for much longer.”

  “Drechsler really sounds like a sick fucker,” she said, disturbed by what the German officer was threatening to do to the art dealer, “but Friedrich, this means we know why our thief wants these letters so badly. They must have known someone else had taken possession of Arjan’s art collection during the war and hidden it somewhere in the city, but not who or where. If Galerie Van Heemsvliet’s inventory really is worth millions of dollars, then finding Drechsler’s name would definitely be worth killing for.” She sprung out of her chair and began pacing back and forth, reenergized by their findings, or rather Friedrich’s.

  “But what about Irises? Why wasn’t it hidden away with the rest of the paintings? And how does Rita’s father fit into all of this? He wasn’t the blackmailer,” Friedrich pondered, excited by his discovery, yet more cautious than Zelda at this God awful hour.

  “Arjan said too many people were relying on him to survive the war. Maybe he was hiding art for Jewish friends?”

  “Rita’s father wasn’t Jewish. Or gay, or a gypsy, or a Jehovah’s witness, or a communist or even a political dissident,” Friedrich countered.

  “He did have to leave Amsterdam in a hurry and was looking for someone to store his collection with,” she yawned again, not bothering to hide her gaping mouth behind her hand. She turned towards the window behind her. Through a tear in the curtains, she could see the sun was starting to color the morning clouds in pinkish-grey hues. They’d now officially been up all night reading and translating.

  She spun around suddenly, as a new realization popped into her head. “Friedrich, do you know what else this means? Karen can’t be Arjan’s granddaughter. If he did have a wife and child on the way, the colonel wouldn’t have had a reason to blackmail him anymore.”

  “Or that is exactly what happened and we are about to read about it.”

  Both looked to the two remaining letters on the table.

  “I can translate those faster than you,” he said. “Why don’t I do that while you re-read our translations? Perhaps we missed something.”

  Zelda smiled and nodded wearily; frankly relieved by his offer. Friedrich was three times as fast as she was under normal circumstances, but thanks to the sleep deprivation her productivity level had dipped to an all-time low.

  Over the course of the next hour, she read and re-read all twenty of the translated letters until her eyes crossed, yet found nothing new. The shock of the robberies and Gerard’s death was catching up fast, making it extremely difficult to concentrate on the text before her.

  She glanced at her friend, bent over the kitchen table as he read, his forehead furrowed in concentration. Simply knowing Arjan was really being blackmailed, and by whom, lifted a huge weight off her shoulders, but they still didn’t have any idea as to who was behind the robberies and Gerard’s death.

  Zelda felt her mind drifting away from the letters as she considered the possible suspects. She could cross Bernice Dijkstra off the list immediately. As project manager she had never been involved in researching any of the pieces in the Stolen Objects collection, only organizing the physical exhibition and publicizing it. More importantly, she’d never openly favored Karen O’Neil or Rita Brouwer during any of their meetings together, but repeatedly demanded that the researchers assigned by the Restitution Committee be allowed to fully investigate both claims before awarding Irises to either party.

  On the other hand, as senior curator for the Jewish Historical Museum, Huub Konijn had enjoyed unlimited access to all of the unclaimed artwork since it had been moved to his museum’s depots ten years earlier. Despite his earlier outrage, it was entirely possible that, while investigating Irises provenance or even during his preparations for the Carl Willink exhibition he’d mentioned, he stumbled upon the existence of Arjan van Heemsvliet’s collection and figured out it was still hidden somewhere in Amsterdam. What if the documents Karen O’Neil presented with her claim had provided the final clue to its whereabouts?

  The curator’s tragic personal history was another reason for him to remain under suspicion, as far as she was concerned. Not only was most of his family murdered by the Nazis, the Dutch government did nothing to help him or his sister when they’d returned to Amsterdam and discovered that their possessions had been seized and sold off, ultimately leaving them penniless and homeless. He had every reason to feel betrayed and perhaps even seek revenge. How far would Huub go to re-write history? Would finding Arjan’s collection somehow make up for his suffering?

  Then there was Karen O’Neil, Arjan’s supposed granddaughter and sole heir. How did her relatives get a hold of his inventory books and those bills of sale? They didn’t appear to be fake. In fact, the list of paintings compiled by Rita’s mother was almost identical to the Verbeet collection listed in Arjan’s ledgers. To her chagrin, Zelda recognized that Rita’s documents helped to confirm they hadn’t been fabricated.

  But if Oswald Drechsler did blackmail Arjan out of his extensive art collection, what did the Nazi do with it? It was as if all three hundred and twenty-seven canvases had disappeared from the face of the earth. Well, three hundred and twenty-six; Irises had resurfaced, though she still couldn’t figure out why. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, automatically closing her eyes. She was vaguely aware of her head sliding down towards the pile of translations on the kitchen table before falling into a deep sleep.

  FORTY-ONE

  June 23, 1942

  Arjan held down the stencil with one hand as he sloshed black paint over the side of the oak crate with the other, choking as the harsh fumes burned his nostrils and throat.

  For the last four days and nights, he and Philip Verbeet had taken turns packing up the paintings and digging out the root cellar. His wrists ached from tightening the screws onto the lids and his back from shoveling. Yet it was the overpowering stench emitting from the cheap house paint they were using to stencil numbers onto each crate that was the hardest to take. They didn’t dare open a window lest the smell drew someone’s attention, and the fumes were suffocating him.

  He covered his mouth with a handkerchief to dampen the noise as another cough racked his body. After his choking fit subsided, he turned to his inventory ledger and placed a small check mark next to the Monet, Renoir and Redon belonging to his old friend Frans Keizer.

  Holding the handkerchief to his nose, he glanced around the room, frowning as he counted the paintings still stacked up on the left wall of the shed. Sixty-five paintings to fit into forty-five crates. And there were still the ten paintings hanging in his gallery to consider. It would be a tight squeeze.

  Despite their hard work, there was so much more to do. Yet his body was shutting down from pure exhaustion. He had no choice but to go home soon and get a few hours’ sleep.

  Arjan swatted at his pants leg, trying in vain to get the powdered lime out of its dark fabric before going back outside. He didn’t want to give the police any reason to stop
and question him. He’d spilled some onto his legs while carrying three heavy buckets of the chalk-like substance down into the root cellar, placed there to help absorb extra moisture while the paintings were hidden away.

  Once he was satisfied his pants wouldn’t be a source of concern, he pulled on his waistcoat and jacket before opening his pocket watch, the same one his father had given to him for his eighteenth birthday, the day he became a man. He sighed in dismay when he saw it was after midnight.

  “I’m ready to leave,” he called down to his cohort, currently spreading the last layer of plaster onto the walls of the newly enlarged cellar. In two days the plaster would be dry enough that they could begin shifting the filled crates, now stacked up in towers to his right, down below. If they picked up the paintings from his gallery tomorrow evening, they’d have a full day to crate up the rest.

  But now, he had to go home, wash the filth and grime out of his clothes and body, then get some rest. After he’d started packing, that is. Philip brought his suitcases around this morning, the portrait of his oldest daughter the only painting tucked inside. Once they’d finished up in the shed, they would take the train down South together, before parting ways in Venlo. His contact at the resistance group had warned him not to bring more than his two smallest suitcases. But that would be enough, it would have to be.