All that had happened since…it was like a dream.
She found herself repeating the lines:
If we shadows have offended
Think but this—and all is mended—
That you have but slumbered here,
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme
No more yielding, but a dream.
They walked into the hotel.
Michael went to the desk to get the room key.
“Hola! Ms. Bannister?”
This from a tall blond woman who’d apparently been seated in the hotel’s coffee shop.
“Ms. Bannister?”
The woman approached, with a large manila envelope clutched in her hands.
“Are you Ms. Nina Bannister?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Gertrude Henninger.”
The woman reminded Nina, surprisingly, of Margot Gavin. True, she wore an impeccably tailored business suit and not a Kandinsky abstract, and, true, her hair was straw blonde and not silver, and, true, it was well combed and not wildly displaced.
But she was at least as tall as Margot.
That was something, in itself.
“I must tell you, our office in Vienna has received a phone call only a little over an hour ago.”
Office in Vienna.
Interpol?
What actually was Interpol, anyway?
Whatever was going on, this woman had to represent the police in some way.
They were being arrested.
That was not so bad.
At least they were alive.
At least the Red Claw had let them live.
Or so it seemed.
The woman continued:
“Yes. The call came directly to our director, at her home. It was quite urgent.”
“I’m sorry…I don’t…”
“A great deal of money was involved…was transferred to us…but we were told you’d be arriving at this hotel shortly before eight o’clock. And that the trip should be planned by then. And the itinerary given to you.”
“The itinerary?”
“Yes. And that’s what I’ve brought here, to give to you.”
The international smuggling police were giving her an itinerary?
How many prisons was she going to?
“I’m sorry. I still don’t understand. Your office…”
“Yes. We are the largest in Austria. We have representatives in all major Austrian cities. I have the honor to be the president of our branch here in Graz. Here. Please accept my card. It’s written in English.”
She took the business card and read it:
Gertrude Henninger
Sales Representative
International Travel Bureau
“You’re a travel agent?”
Gertrude Henninger beamed:
“Yes! And we hope the trip we have laid out for you will be satisfactory!”
“The trip?”
“We’ve booked you for four days in Vienna. Then three in Salzburg. Two more in Innsbruck. And finally you come back here to Graz. The hotels are the best available. There are also opera performances. We had little time to prepare of course, but…”
“I can’t afford all of this.”
“Oh, it has all been prepaid!”
“By..”
A shake of the head.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know that. My director merely said that I was to tell you, it was a gift.”
“A gift.”
“Yes. You have a great admirer. But…I see that your young man friend is waiting for you.”
And Michael Gellert was, in fact, standing at the base of the stairway, room key in hand.
“Our office is on the Sackstrasse. After you have breakfasted, you might perhaps come by? We can talk more of the details!”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
And the woman turned and left.
Michael was waiting for her.
“Who was that?”
“A travel agent.”
“A what?”
“A travel agent.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“None of this makes sense. It’s more and more like we dreamed it. I don’t know what else to think. The castle last night, all those flames coming out of it, those terrified people being led out and herded into cattle carriers; Beckmeier, shouting and railing, the guards, the machine guns—and before that the tavern, and the charnel house, and the tunnel leading down to the lake…”
“…all of these things happened, Nina.”
“They couldn’t have. Look around us. Look at the people coming and going, doing business as usual. It’s as though it was all just a part of our imagination. No more yielding, but a dream.”
But the guns, she thought, as they climbed the stairs, had been no dream.
Nor had the paintings.
Where were the paintings now?
And where was Carol?
She walked up the stairs, a step behind Michael, looking down into the vine-enshrouded atrium below, as she did so, letting her palm—which was already becoming sweaty—run along the grillwork stair rail, and seeing her own door grow larger as she approached it.
He put the massive iron key with its equally massive key ring into the lock and turned it. There was a ‘clicking’ sound. He mashed down on the lever that functioned as a doorknob, and pushed open the door.
White light flooding through the wall-length windows bathed the unslept in bed, the giant armoire, the heavy, oaken desk.
And there, lying propped against the desk, was a painting.
“What is that?” she whispered, entering the room and stepping toward it.
Michael did not move from his place in the doorway.
“It’s a Monet,” he said, quietly. “An original, not a reproduction. One of the ‘Flower’ pictures, from his garden at Giverney.”
Nina approached it, then bent down and touched it, gently.
“One of the paintings that Carol made come alive in her presentation.”
“Yes. The same presentation I saw her give at the museum.”
Then something else caught Nina’s eye.
Two things, actually.
One was a letter lying on the desk itself, its corner barely touching the large mirror that sat atop the desk.
The other was a map of the world, which had been taped to the wall beside the mirror.
Several lines, and several circles, had been drawn with dark black marker on the map.
“What is it?” came the voice from behind her.
She looked for a time at the map, at the regions circled there, and the lines connecting them.
“Oh my God,” she found herself whispering. “Oh my God.”
“What?”
She shook her head, knowing even as she began, carefully, to open the envelope.
Knowing.
Seeing.
The real picture.
The picture beneath false picture.
She took out the letter, lay it gently on the desk, and, as Michael approached behind her, read aloud:
“Dear Nina,
I’m sorry to have been forced to deceive you. Both you and Michael, actually. You must believe I never thought anything last night would happen. But Michael was too smart. He found out that I had been ‘taken’ from Bay St. Lucy. He decided to come and rescue me. And you decided to come with him.
How brave. Of you both.
You deserve a reward.
You deserve many rewards.
Hopefully, you’ve been given a travel itinerary. It is not much, admittedly. But it is the closest I can come to the grand trip we planned together. I do hope you enjoy it, and that you think of me as you see the places you have only dreamed of before.
Michael can come with you, if he pleases. But I suspect he’ll wish to get on with his other affairs of business.
Michael.
How amusing he was.
As for myself
, my business is done.
It took four years, and such careful planning…
…such careful planning.
It began when I arrived in Chicago from Georgia.
I had to take a teaching job first, but then I was hired at the museum by the wonderful Margot Gavin.
Then I met you, Michael... Although I must tell you that I’d been told of you, and of your business, sometime before.
And, yes, I seduced you. In Pilsen.
For that, I hope you will forgive me.
But I knew that you dealt in stolen paintings.
That you would come to have access to the very paintings I so desperately wanted, needed—that this would happen someday I could only hope.
And it did.
I needed to know where all of the paintings that I needed were going to wind up.
You found out these things for me.
You began working for Beckmeier.
And Beckmeier was collecting—re-stealing, actually—all of works that had been taken from my family. And the families that lived near us.
I began carrying paintings for you. And then we began the operation in Bay St. Lucy.
You paid me very well, Michael.
Twenty thousand dollars a painting. Twenty paintings, total.
And with that money, I could hire to work for me the very guards Beckmeier thought, stupidly—such people are always stupid—were working for, and loyal to him.
Last night it all came together.
Four years work.
And during all of that time, I would have hurt no one.
All of Michael’s operatives have been released by now. They needed to experience what it must have been like, the burning of the ghettos. The things my people must have seen.
Just not the ovens.
No one deserves that, even thieves.
Even Beckmeier has not been harmed.
He can sit and look at the smoldering ruins of his palace.
But he has not been harmed.
The man I did shoot…well, I had no choice.
He was not working for the Red Claw, but for Beckmeier, who’d found out about the operation.
He would have blown you up the following morning after you had opened Elementals. And he would gladly have killed me the night before.
How Beckmeier found out where I was, I don’t know.
But I have my family’s paintings now.
Except for one.
The Monet.
That one is for you, Nina.
Dearest Nina, who took me in, and showed me Bay St. Lucy, and introduced me to Tom and Penelope—I wish I could be there for her shower, please give her all my best wishes—and the Bagattelli’s and Sergio’s Not By The Sea and, of course, magnificent Margot and her husband and Alanna and the Auberge—
––no, that painting, that Monet, is for you.
The papers proving ownership are in this envelope.
Please hang it in Elementals.
No one will steal it. I have placed a spell on it.
It will be safe. And it will keep Elementals safe.
And it will keep Bay St. Lucy safe.
And it will keep you safe.
Forever.
Now I must close. You have, of course, by now, looked at the map, and at the lines, and at the circles.
You have seen that there are at least two Georgias.
Who knows, there may be more.
There is one in the United States, near, I believe, Florida.
And there is another.
My Georgia. A part of Russia.
My Jewish family’s Georgia.
Nestled in the Caucasian Mountains.
A little ways east, and somewhat north, of Athens.
Athens, Greece, that is.
My Georgia, where I grew up, and helped raise sheep, and wandered in the mountains.
Where I will now go back and live.
But you will live with me, dear Nina.
My second mother.
And I will never forget you, not ever, not ever…
Your dearest…
(By the way, now it is time for you to hold the letter up to the mirror, and read my name, my real name…
…and see the real picture…)
Your dearest…
Carol Walker.”
And Nina did hold the letter up to the mirror.
So that the signature read:
Lorca Reklaw.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE: GEORGIA ON MY MIND
In the late afternoon, almost thirty hours after she’d left Austria, Lorca Reklaw arrived at the Manor.
She’d chosen to go by train not because of any fear of being discovered. There were no such fears now.
The proper people at various borders had been paid off; the paintings had gone before her, and were back where they belonged.
No, she’d gone home by train simply because it was something she had savored doing for the four years she’d been away. Papa would still be there, still recognize her; she knew that. But the old Orient Express, subdivided as it now was into fours…the train itself, its routes, its magical city names…held the same fascination for her as it always did, and she wanted to reward herself with the moments that only it could offer.
Going over the Fischbacher Alps just before darkness, the villages in twilight far below…and the bells of the wine carts rattling by…
And the sleeper. The sound of the whistle at midnight, the clacking of the wheels…
…morning, looking out over the Hungarian plains…
Thirty hours. Nothing at all, a blissful time…
…and now here she was at home. A car met her at the small station. The driver, newly hired, had never seen her before. No matter.
The forests remained well tended; two sections, she could see, were ready for cutting.
Sheep surrounded the car as it made the final turn to the house itself.
And Mitja, her aunt, stood at the door as the car pulled up.
Mitja, beaming, beautiful and radiant as always, tall and stately and muscular as a drover’s horse…Mitja would not have run the few yards to the car, for running did not befit the manor’s mistress now…but she covered the distance quickly and was able to lift Lorca in her arms as effortlessly as she always had done. Looking up…for Lorca’s face was well above hers now, suspended in air as it was…looking up, the magnificent Mitja said simply:
“Achai Hym.”
Welcome home.
“Acai Hym, Mitja.”
She was set gently on the ground again, and the two women entered the manor house.
It was as she remembered it. The men, hardly noticing her arrival, sat smoking in the corner of the Great Room, which, of course, was not cluttered with the superfluous chairs that had been placed in it by the Chicago museum’s miniaturist. There was always activity, servants running here and there, carrying dishes, finishing the last day’s cleaning.
They sat together in the parlor, golden sun pouring through the latticed windows.
“Did the paintings arrive, Mitja?”
A nod.
“Yesterday. Twenty large wooden cases. Forty-eight paintings. You did it.”
“Yes.”
“All of Mossad could not…all of the people we hired…none of them could find these paintings, and get them back for us.”
“And they were all taken to the right places?”
“Yes. All of the men helped. Even on wagons, some of the pictures were carried. But every family has its treasures back. Seven paintings of ours. Look. I hung Monet’s flowers over the mantelpiece. Like I was told it used to be before the Nazis came.”
“I saw it when I came in. It’s beautiful. Look at the way the light makes it shimmer and radiate.”
“Yes.”
“There is one special painting though that I did not send with the others.”
“The one you have with you there? In the brown wrapping paper?”
“Yes. This one. Special to Papa.”
“No. Fourteen inches square.”
“Shall we take it up to him now?”
“Is he awake?”
“I think so. We told him last night that you would be arriving this morning.”
“All right.”
“He held on. There were times we did not think, Lorca, that he would survive the sickness. But he would not die. Not until he saw you again.”
“Let us go up to him.”
And, with the painting between them, they ascended the staircase.
The old man lay in bed, seemingly sleeping. A few rays of light filtered through the small window beside the bed.
He was not sleeping, though, and when Lorca entered the room, his face blossomed. She could hear the cracked voice, as he tried to raise himself.
“Lorca?”
“Yes, Papa; I’m home.”
“Oh, Lorca…mein Haserlchen!”
My little rabbit.
“Yes, Papa,” said Lorca, bending over him and lifting him, so that his back was against the bedstead:
She unwrapped the painting, Durer’s Hase, and held it before him.
He beamed, nodding, then crying, unable to speak.
Finally she said:
“Both of your little rabbits are home.”
And she simply sat for a time, until the old man went to sleep.
EPILOGUE
Margot Gavin could remember the day perfectly.
She would never forget it.
She could, in fact, remember everything about the conversation. Down to the last word, the last gesture.
How strange!
It was almost nightfall, late December, and the light in Bay St. Lucy had changed. It was a pure winter illumination now, spread over the whole town.
She could remember walking into Elementals, hoping to see her best friend Nina Bannister at the cash register and, instead, spying her deeper in the store, staring up at a painting.
“Nina! You’re back!”
And Nina was back, of course.
Back from what was certainly the trip of her life, it being practically the only trip of her life.
Margot had half-lived it herself; getting Facebook pictures every day (and even a few post cards, Nina remaining one of the few beings of the twenty-first century who still sent such things).
Pictures, in whatever form they’d arrived, of the great castle on the mountain overlooking Salzburg; of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna; of the basement of The Franziskaner Church, the dark green leaden coffins—at least fifty of them—holding the remains of Hapsburg emperors; of the Prater, the great amusement park…
Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5) Page 23