by Joseph Hone
No, she hadn’t faked anything with me in those first three years, I thought bitterly. Everything we’d done then had been genuine. Instead, two years ago, she’d started to drop me. When I asked her why all she would say was that I was ‘difficult’, or some other even vaguer criticism, as if to define it would be to expose the shallowness of her complaint.
Now I saw there was a reason. It was here in the second part of the passage I’d just read, in this ‘only person I don’t have to pretend with’. Well, surely this must be another man. But who? The only other man she ever went out with was her father.
Yes, her father, the Major. I’d had my suspicions there already – if only because Katie’s sudden lack of interest in me had exactly coincided with her father’s return home from his travels. Now in his mid seventies, he’d been an army officer, out in India originally, and then Germany, married and divorced a first wife, returned to England, retired early, bought the house and some land near Chipping Norton, in what became the riding school, and had then married Katie’s mother. Ten years later he’d baled out and started his wanderings, in Scandinavia, the Middle East, back to India. Katie never seemed very clear about where he’d been, or what he’d been up to, except to comment on his interest in anthropology, ancient tribes or some such. Two years ago, feeling his age, I suppose, he’d returned to England, arriving out of the blue, just after we’d got back from the summer school in Carrara.
All this I learnt in an offhand way from Katie, and, in an even more offhand manner, that he’d been involved with half a dozen other women during his marriage to Katie’s mother, who had died some years before I met Katie.
By the sound of him, I hadn’t liked him. When I met him, as I did several times where he’d come to live again up at the riding school, I liked him even less. The feeling was mutual and the reason was obvious. I was Katie’s lover, and he was jealous.
Short, with neatly cropped white hair, he had a broken nose, fierce blue eyes and tanned skin. He was dominant in an old-fashioned, British officer manner.
He was called Hector – and he often did just this, once expatiating to me for a whole half-hour in his crisply enunciated tones on the prehistory of the British race. I saw them one time. She’d met him in the car park of a pub on the road to Cheltenham, high up on the wolds, and they’d gone off with her dogs across the winter fields towards a rise in the land, an old hill fort or long barrow. He was talking animatedly, pointing out something to her, then climbing to the top of the mound, and gesticulating like a prophet, his hand roving round the big circle.
God knows what they were up to, but these meetings seemed innocent enough, at least in so far as his being ‘another man’ in her life.
But something disturbed me in their relationship, however, and that something, I felt, had taken Katie away from me, and now it seemed I was right. The evidence was here, in her journal, where he’d evoked her real self. Her father had died of a heart attack three months before, and although Katie had taken this in her usual unemotional way, it seemed to me now that her suicide had more to do with her father’s death than with me.
The hell with all these lousy Katie mysteries for the moment. I called Harry Broughton in Paris that evening and told him my mother had died and that I’d be taking the boat over to Paris for a break in a few days’ time, and that I’d see him when I got there. I didn’t tell him that Elsa was coming with me. That could wait. I packed my bag, took some canvasses, paints, an easel, Katie’s diary and the Modigliani nude.
On the uneventful voyage to France, to Le Havre and then up the Seine to Paris I saw I had a problem. If I was to keep any semblance of a natural order of things with Elsa, we were going to have to see him together. But Harry had met Katie several times and had two largish paintings of her in the big first-floor salon of his apartment in the house he owned in the Marais, a portrait and a nude, both of which he’d bought from me. So when Harry saw Elsa, and if Elsa saw the paintings of Katie, some awkward cats would be out of the bag.
Elsa, if she saw the pictures of her double on the wall, would really begin to wonder what the hell was going on. I had to tell Elsa about her resemblance to Katie before we met Harry, but I kept putting it off. There was comfort, and an excitement, in imagining Katie still alive in Elsa. I wanted first to talk to Harry alone, if I could. So I delayed matters, telling myself I’d explain everything to Elsa over a coffee on that first morning in Paris before we met him. In the event she stayed on the boat that morning, tired from the voyage over.
‘You go and see your friend Harry on your own. I’m sure you have things to talk about. I can meet him later, get myself together meanwhile and meet you back at the boat when you’re ready.’
‘Okay. Give me an hour or so and I’ll pick you up back here and we’ll go have some lunch.’
I took the Modi nude, left the boat and walked up onto the quay of the Port de Plaisance where we’d moored. Harry’s place, in the Marais, was just fifteen minutes away. I crossed over the Place, along the rue Saint Antoine, into the Marais, and along the rue des Rosiers in the heart of the old Jewish quarter. A big building, an abandoned red-brick hammam, the Turkish baths on one side, with Golden-berg’s famous deli on the other. I gazed at the tremendous display in the window – the tart, spicy smells wafting out the doorway on the summer air. Rye, pumpernickel, unleavened loaves, salads and olives, hot pastrami, pickled herrings, coleslaw, herb feta cheeses: all that was Jewish and foody in the crowded street of bearded men in skull caps or black homburgs, with old kosher women and young Hebrew heartbreakers. Widow’s weeds and miniskirts. The orthodox and unorthodox everywhere. I turned off the street and made for the old house on the Place du Marché St Catherine.
Harry was finishing a late breakfast when I arrived at his first-floor apartment. In his eighties, bare-chested, loosely swathed in a red silk dressing gown, white hair still thick. With his fierce old pugilist’s face he looked like a retired boxer. He’d boxed for Columbia before the war, where he’d graduated in art history, a study he’d sometimes regretted later. ‘Yeah,’ he used to say, in his laconic New Yorker manner. ‘I coulda made a better career as a middleweight. More money, and certainly less trouble, just to floor a man now and then, instead of fighting devious little shysters in the art business.’
He knew all the history in his field, and more than that: behind the bluff exterior, he had fine taste and an unerring feel for all that was best in a painting, in the arts, architecture, in life itself. He’d got a post with the Metropolitan Museum before the war. Then he was drafted, and when the allies went into France after D-Day he’d been among the first off the boats, as one of the US Army’s Monuments Officers, there with the troops to try to protect Europe’s cultural heritage from the general mayhem.
A man of many amiable parts, wearing his art learning so lightly he sometimes seemed quite naked of it – just a culture-struck GI who had stayed on in Paris after the war, living on his wits and his charm and the kindness of good women.
He had never left France, but had taken up with and married one good woman, Michele, now dead, with a son and a daughter I’d met years before, both of them now married and married abroad. I’d first met Harry in the early seventies at an exhibition of my paintings at a Left Bank gallery. He’d bought several canvases straightaway, and had compounded his enthusiasm for my work by taking me out afterwards, celebrating his purchases, in a little restaurant round the corner, La Tourelle. It was still there, and had been my regular canteen with Katie whenever we’d come to the city. Harry owned a lovely restored eighteenth-century house on the small square of St Catherine. He had his apartment and leased the other floors, with a fine Polish restaurant on the ground floor. It seemed almost a sideline of his that he had made his fortune in the ruck of the world’s art market, buying and selling, gathering his own fine collection in the process. Whenever I’d been with him he never seemed to be doing anything so vulgar as dealing. He was the old-style, cultured, American gentleman, interested
in beautiful things, browsing in antique shops, art galleries, the flea market, and something of a boulevardier after Michele died: theatres, the opera, cinemas, cafés, restaurants – enjoying the city and its people. I liked Harry. He was candid. He took risks. No cagey silences, lies of omission, scheming compromise, comfy wallowing in the grey areas, none of the conventional hypocrisies. He always played high odds, win or lose, like a Runyon gambler. He was a mulberry bush.
He was taking his breakfast in the big salon looking over the square, some of his pictures on the walls. The three marvellous canvases I remembered, the Utrillo street scene, Porte des Lilas, an early Soutine, Paysan, and a classic Renoir nude of a young woman, untitled. And my two paintings of Katie, away on another wall to the side.
Sitting down with a cup of coffee I told him about Elsa; how she was so like Katie – that she’d killed herself the week before, and how this other woman, who seemed Katie’s double, had turned up out of the blue at my mother’s funeral reception.
‘Now wait a moment, Ben. You’re going too fast. Rewind. What the hell’s been going on?’
So I told Harry in more detail what had been going on for the past week, told him all I knew and all I didn’t know.
‘Okay, but why haven’t you told this Elsa she looks just like Katie? It’s quite a coincidence, but it happens. They say everyone has a double somewhere in the world. It’s not an offence. So why hide it from her?’
‘Seems more than a coincidence. It means something.’
‘Bullshit! You’re running that Jewish, Irish, Italian thing again. You look worried. You been up to something fishy?’
‘No, but someone has. My father, and maybe Elsa … and her father. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘You have doubts about this Elsa?’
I nodded. ‘I don’t know why. I always thought I was good at fathoming women.’
‘In your paintings, yes. Reality’s a different matter.’
‘Thanks.’
I went over to one of the tall windows and gazed over the small cobbled square, the old market place, café chairs to one side, benches, some elderly women sitting in the sun, a youth in a reversed baseball cap, T-shirt and baggy trousers skimming round the square on roller blades, mobile phone in hand.
I moved about the room, on edge. ‘It’s not just Elsa I’m puzzled about.’ I rolled a cigarette. ‘There’s quite a lot else. The parcel I have here.’ I pointed to the Modigliani nude, bubble-wrapped, where I’d put it on the sofa.
‘A canvas – one of yours?’
‘No, I’ll show you later. Since Elsa’s not here, I want to show you something else, maybe more important, that she doesn’t know about, but you might – tracing looted art, paintings and so on, that was another thing of yours, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, many of the top Nazis were at it. We had to track the stuff down, all over, after the war. Why?’
‘What do you make of this?’ I handed him my father’s art inventory. ‘It turned up in a secret drawer in my father’s bedroom. List of old paintings, bibles and things, which he wrote out years ago.’
Harry ran his eye quickly down the columns, then studied it more carefully. He looked up at me with surprise, almost alarm. ‘What d’ya mean “old paintings and things”? Half these pictures are Renaissance masterpieces. This one particularly. The “Czartoryski Raphael: Portrait of a Young Man”. Goddamnit, I know about these things all right. That Raphael was looted from the Czartoryski Palace outside Krakow early in the war by Dr Hans Frank and his SS friends. Frank was boss of the “General Government” in Poland, the southern section where they moved all the Polish Jews before they shipped them off to Auschwitz. Before Dr Frank shipped them off. Upwards of two million of them. Frank was one of the worst, a real cultured shit. Dürer, Goethe, Beethoven. Dr Hans Frank? You couldn’t get worse. At least they strung him up after Nuremberg.’
‘And the Raphael? Did they get that, too?’
‘No, that’s the point.’ Harry stood up quickly, waving the paper about. ‘None of the stuff on this list, so far as I know, ever turned up after the war, or since. All these things were looted from Jews, museums, churches and private art collections in Poland. Then, early ’45, when they knew the game was up, with the Russians moving in from the east, they shipped most of the stuff out of Krakow into Austria and hid it in castle cellars, caves and salt mines. We found much of it, but not all of it … and not this stuff.’ He waved the inventory again, over with me by the window now, breathing quickly. ‘Jesus, Ben – this list, why, this is all Frank’s stuff and more, that was never found!’ He scanned the list again. ‘Raphael’s greatest portrait … the Dürer drawings … the Wroclaw Chalice … the Poznan Bible? Priceless!’
‘So the only thing we don’t know is how my father came to have a list of them.’
‘No. That’s a sticker.’
‘I’ll give you one reason – my father must have been involved in the looting of all these things, and so was Elsa Bergen’s father, Joseph Bergen. He opened an antiques shop in Dublin, like his family had in Vienna before the war. What did he sell from a private room in the back of the shop? Churchy things, altar chalices, reliquaries, old bibles – and no doubt great Renaissance paintings as well.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘I’m not. You can see from the numbers after some of the objects on the list the year when they were sold and for how much. See? “49.50,000” and “52.100,000” and so on. Dollars or pounds. Many small fortunes back then.’
‘But only about half of the items have numbers after them, and not the Raphael.’
‘That’s because they didn’t get around to selling the rest, or didn’t need to. The rest is still hidden somewhere.’
Silence. The sun moved up over the houses on the other side of the square, shining directly into the room, illuminating the nude of Katie on the far wall. I wandered over and looked at it. I used to phone her most early evenings, from the box outside my local pub near Chipping Norton: and even if I didn’t get through, I knew she’d always be back at the house, having fed the horses and about to feed her dogs, so I could usually be sure to reach her later on the phone.
I found it difficult to grasp the fact now, that Katie wasn’t available anymore at the end of a telephone.
I turned. ‘I could do with a drink, Harry.’
‘Sure, it’s in the kitchen. What do you want? I’ll join you. I’ve some good vodka in the fridge, the real thing, the Polish restaurant downstairs gets it for me.’
A few minutes later, glasses in hand, Harry raised his shot of cold vodka and tossed it back. ‘Looted, sold, and some of it still hidden somewhere – yes, that could figure.’
‘So my father and Elsa’s must have been into some big Nazi art-looting business during the war. With Dr Frank and his pals. Must have been Nazis themselves.’
‘Wait a minute, Ben, your father was a Jew. Sent to Auschwitz. He couldn’t have been involved in any of this.’
‘We’ll come to that. But after the war these Nazis took gold out, maybe paintings, to support themselves.’
‘Yes, to South America, most of them. Frank had a number of other Nazi friends in on the art-looting game then – including his SS sidekick in Krakow, Helmuth Pfaffenroth – another one of the worst, an obsessional Jew killer, couldn’t get ‘em into the gas showers quick enough.’
‘All good friends of Dr Frank’s. Among them my father, and Elsa’s, who went to Ireland, where Elsa’s father flogged all these paintings for the two of them in Dublin. Bergen was a Nazi, my father was involved with him and their clients were big crooks as well, and what they didn’t sell is still hidden somewhere. That’s the long and the short of it.’
Harry shook his head. ‘Ben, it’s only a theory about your father and Bergen. No real proof – just like your suspicions about Elsa. Why haven’t you told her about this list?’
‘I told you. There’s something not quite straight about her. Why did her father tell he
r she had to meet me just before he died without telling her why? Well, maybe he did tell her why and she isn’t telling me. Maybe she hopes we’ll become chums, accomplices, lovers – whatever – and I’ll lead her to the hidden loot.’
Harry frowned. ‘Hardly lovers. You told me she liked women.’
‘One woman.’
‘Ben, you’re suggesting far too big a business altogether.’
‘Am I? You said the stuff on this list was priceless. Worth millions now, in the hands of some crooked dealers, or maybe some of the old Nazis, still looking for the stuff. That’s big business surely?’
‘I doubt it. No one could sell any of those paintings, the illuminated bibles or the Dürer drawings on the open market. They’re all far too well known.’
‘A private market, then. That happens – some crazy millionaire keeping the pictures in a secret room …’
‘No, Ben, that’s a fantasy, got up by idle journalists.’
‘May I?’ I went and got another shot of vodka. I was annoyed with Harry. He’d changed tack completely, putting up obstacles to all my theories, which he continued to do when I returned.
‘Whatever about your father or Elsa being involved, if you’re right and the rest of this hoard is still hidden somewhere, and there are old or new Nazis looking for it – I’d keep out of it, Ben. I remember Dr Frank and his sort. Gave evidence against some of them at Nuremberg. With Nazis, old or new, you’d be playing with fire.’
‘Yes, like Katie.’ I drank the vodka.
‘I don’t follow?’
‘Burning herself alive in that car.’ I turned to Harry. ‘When I saw Elsa, I thought this was the chance to make things right, all that I’d lost with Katie.’
Harry shook his head. ‘You’re the one who’s difficult to fathom, Ben. Not your new girlfriend. For God’s sake, you can’t repeat the –’