by Aaron Elkins
I had, as a matter of fact, done my homework, and I knew about the copies. But that didn't explain it. Anyway, I didn't like abandoning the idea that I'd already solved Peter's mysterious puzzle.
"Yes," I said, "but this wasn't just a copy; this was a forgery—an original pencil drawing, with the paper smoked and crisped to look old—all very expertly done." I shook my head firmly. "No, this was a painstaking fake, a forgery—done to mislead."
It was Robey, with his disconcerting tendency to wander abstractedly in and out of conversations, who replied as we turned left down a curving corridor. "I don't know about all that, but I think we can be pretty sure it's not in the show to mislead anyone. Don't you know about Bolzano, Chris?"
I did, of course; quite a bit, although I'd never met him. The venerable Claudio Bolzano was a celebrated art connoisseur, a welcome buyer at Sotheby and Christie's, with a vast collection ofOld Masters and moderns on the walls of his villa in Florence and on loan to the great public galleries of Europe. Why he should have anything to do with a forged Michelangelo I had no idea, and I said so.
"Because," Gadney said, "after the war he began to despair of ever recovering all that the Nazis had taken, and he replaced many of them with copies. In some cases he bought existing copies, some of them several hundred years old—"
"And very possibly painted as forgeries," I persisted.
"Originally, possibly so, but now openly acknowledged as copies. He also commissioned a number of modem copies, I believe. There were photographs available, of course, so it wasn't difficult. What he wanted, naturally, were good copies, as near to the originals as possible. And that's just what he has."
"All right, but I still don't get the point."
"Neither do I," murmured Robey, ambling along beside us, "when it comes right down to it."
"You don't?" Gadney said to both of us. He lifted his tweedy shoulders in a faint shrug as we stopped before a closed door. "I believe I do. It's simply that he wanted to be surrounded by his beloved art pieces. If he couldn't have the real ones, he wanted to have the next best thing. I think I can understand his motivation."
I wasn't sure that I did. Knowledgeable art collectors do not generally go out and buy copies of The Night Watch or View of Toledo, no matter how much they covet the originals. For a serious collector to surround himself with copies would be like a serious dog lover surrounding himself with the stuffed carcasses of his pets. Superficially they might look the same, but they aren't very satisfying in the long run.
"Well, Chris," Robey said, reaching for the door handle, "time for you to meet the rest of the team."
"Gird thy loins," I thought I heard Gadney mutter as we went in.
Chapter 5
Whatever else he might be, Mark Robey was a calm and orderly man who took things as they came. "I know the break-in is on everyone's mind," he announced dreamily, seated at the head of a folding table and gazing through the tall French doors at the bare trees and wintry courtyard behind Columbia House, "but let's just start with our agenda as Egad prepared it. Someone from OSI should be along in a while and we can talk about the break-in then. What's the first item, Egad?"
"Reception protocol," Gadney said promptly.
And so, under Robey's equable, absentminded leadership, we spent an hour on who should and who shouldn't be invited to the preview reception two weeks away, much as we might have done at the San Francisco County Museum under similar circumstances. There was little for me to contribute, so I spent the time sipping strong, fragrant German coffee and learning about my new colleagues.
There were two of them besides Robey and Gadney, and I would be lying if I didn't admit that one of them got most of my attention. This was a vibrant, extremely attractive woman of twenty-eight or twenty-nine who had something cogent or interesting—usually both—to say whenever she opened her mouth, which is not easy when the subject is reception protocol. She also had lovely, intelligent eyes that were as close to violet as eyes can be, glorious honey-colored hair, a healthy toothpaste-ad smile, and a pair of silver captain's bars on each blue-clad shoulder.
I had no ready stereotype for female air-force captains, but if I had, it wouldn't have been anything like Anne Greene. Robey had introduced her as having been lent by the Air Force to serve as "my adjutant and our intra-command liaison," and I had said, "Ah," as if I'd known what it meant.
The other person was Earl Flittner, a large, untidy civilian who was the show's technical director. With a small staff to assist him, he was responsible for physical details— exhibition layout, lighting, temperature and humidity, and so on—and for packing and unpacking. This may sound like semiskilled labor, but it isn't. It's esoteric, highly technical work. Crating and shipping thirty-five million dollars' worth of fragile, irreplaceable works of art is not the same thing as wrapping a box of brownies to send to Aunt Vivian. Moreover, the skill and taste of the technical director have made or broken many a show.
Flittner was one of the best, on loan from the National Gallery. I had met him a couple of years before when he had accompanied a show of High Renaissance wood sculpture to San Francisco, but he'd been surly and contentious from the start, and I had stayed out of his way. Now, when Robey introduced us, he said bluntly that he didn't remember me at all (which didn't make me like him a whole lot more), and he sat restlessly through the meeting, smoking cigarette after cigarette, not saying much, merely twisting his long mouth from time to time in a sour expression that sometimes seemed to indicate impatience with Robey's running of the meeting, sometimes dissatisfaction with the exhibition as a whole, and sometimes a universal and undiscriminating misanthropy.
We were still deep in the intricacies of protocol when the door opened and closed, snapping me out of a near-doze.
"Ah," Robey said, looking up from some woolgathering of his own, "come in. Let's see, I think some of you have met Major, uh ..."
"Gucci. Like the shoes."
"Did you say, er, 'Major'?" Gadney asked.
"That's right," Harry said with a smile. "I'm just lucky. They don't make me wear a monkey suit."
Gadney's surprise was understandable. Harry looked about as much like a major as I did a curator. He was wearing the same baggy, gray, shawl-collared cardigan he'd had on at the hospital, shapeless brown pants, and loafers that had never seen polish. With pennies in them. The bulky sweater made him look not bigger but smaller than he was, and shabby besides; and a slight stoop made him seem frail and scholarly. His short, gray-splotched beard was neatly trimmed at the neck but grew unchecked up his cheeks, giving him a gaunt, rabbinical air.
"I hadn't known one could have a beard in the army," Flittner muttered rudely to the tabletop.
"Sure," Harry said pleasantly, "if it's for medical reasons. I got shot in the face a couple of years ago in Athens and I couldn't shave for a while. I forgot to tell 'em when it healed, and they forgot to tell me to shave."
There was a thick silence as he shambled across the room. Even Flittner had the decency to look embarrassed.
Harry flopped down in the chair next to Robey. "No thanks," he replied to the offer of coffee. "I don't drink it. Wouldn't mind some of that mineral water, though."
Robey passed him a small green bottle of Appolinaris. Harry poured it into a glass and took a long drink while he looked from face to face around the table with sharp, smiling eyes.
"Hey, Chris, glad to see you up. How's the old schnozz?"
"The old schnozz is fine, thanks. The old head's still a little fuzzy."
He laughed, emptied the rest of the bottle into his glass, and wiped a drop of moisture from his beard with the back of a finger. "Well, let me set your minds at ease. First, as some of you know, we found the'truck they used. It was on base, in the pool lot behind the education center. The four missing crates were all in it." His eyes lit on me again. "What's so surprising, Chris?"
"I didn't realize they'd gotten away with anything."
"Oh yeah. None of the originals; only
four of the copies." He took out his bulging little notebook and snapped the rubber band off it, letting it roll up around his wrist. "Let's see ..." He began to read aloud: "One van Gogh—"
A corner of Flittner's unkempt mustache lifted in a faint sneer. "Van Gukh."
"Really?" Harry said.
"V'n Khakh" Gadney corrected mildly, eliciting a glare from Flittner. "I believe that's closer to the Dutch." With a finger, he delicately brushed at his own tidy, pale mustache.
"Well, thanks," Harry said brightly. "Thanks a lot. I'll remember that. Van Hah."
"Also a Cranach, a Vermeer, and a Poussin," Gadney said, pronouncing carefully, no doubt for Flittner's benefit. "All of them having considerable value, copies or not. Are any of them damaged?"
"We haven't looked at them yet, but the crates are all OK."
"Then don't worry about the paintings," Flittner said.
"What about the two men?" Anne Greene asked. "Have they been caught?"
"No," Harry said, "and to be honest we don't have a clue. Obviously, they got on base without any problem, so it looks like they had forged IDs."
Robey smiled. "Maybe that's what you ought to try, Chris."
"Not at all," Gadney said primly. "I'll have a proper card for him before the day is out."
"Why did they want to get on the base in the first place?" I asked Harry. "And why leave the truck there? Why didn't they just drive away with it?"
It was Anne who answered. "Maybe you don't understand the layout here yet, Dr. Norgren. Columbia House fronts on the street, but it forms part of the perimeter of Tempelhof. The only way to get a truck around to the back of the building, where the storage room is, is to drive onto the base."
"That's exactly right," Harry said, "and that's exactly what they did. They got hold of a beer truck authorized to deliver on base, drove it around to the courtyard behind this building, knocked out the outside guard with what we think was an electronic stun gun, then chloroformed him, and finally cut through the door with some kind of laser tool. The back door's down in the stairwell, so there wasn't anybody to see."
"Stun gun, laser tool," Robey said in his vague, musing way. "Seems like pretty up-to-date technology. They must be professionals."
"Oh yeah, for sure." Harry drank some more mineral water, tossing it into his mouth like a slug of whiskey. "When Chris scared them off, they didn't dare go tearing back out through the gate in a Schultheiss beer truck. So they left it in a protected corner of the lot, with the paintings, and as far as we know they just walked out the gate." He held out his hands, palms up. "That's all we know."
"You have no idea who might be behind this?" Gadney asked.
Harry shook his head. "As my British pals like to say, we're pursuing our inquiries. We're in touch with Interpol—they keep a file of international art thieves: MOs, connections, and so on. So far, nothing."
Flittner, slumped gracelessly in his chair, sighed gustily, shaking out a match he'd used to light still another cigarette. The first two fingers of his left hand were the color of tobacco. "You don't need Interpol," he mumbled into his chest. "It was an inside job."
The rest of us looked at him.
"It stands to reason, doesn't it?" he growled, as if we were arguing with him. "They knew just where the paintings were stored, didn't they? They were scheduled to be in the storage room for less than twenty-four hours, but they knew anyway. And they knew exactly where the storage room was, and that it had a back door, and how to get to the back door. That's not exactly public knowledge. It's somebody in the damn army."
Gadney shook his head. "No, I'm afraid I can't agree with that, Earl. If it was, er, an inside job, they'd never have bothered with the copies."
Robey, staring at the ceiling, hands clasped behind his neck, drifted hack into the conversation. "That's an interesting point, Earl. They couldn't very well have been insiders, could they?" He turned thoughtful eyes on Harry. "Or professionals either. Pros wouldn't fool around with the fakes, would they? Not with the real things sitting right there."
Anne shook her head. "That isn't necessarily so. Everything was still packed up. How could they tell what was in each crate? And," she said, turning to Flittner, "the copies were all at the back of the room near the outside door, isn't that right?"
"So?"
"Well, then, they probably just started nearest the back door; that would be the easiest way. I imagine they were going to take everything. There weren't that many crates."
"That could very well be," Gadney said approvingly. "In any case, it strongly supports my position that inside knowledge was not involved. After all, the acquisition number of each painting is clearly stenciled on its crate. Surely anyone connected with the show would be familiar with the numbering system, and would never have touched the reproductions."
I put in my two cents' worth. "I don't think that's necessarily true, either. From what I saw of the storage room, it was stuffed to bursting with crates. Even if those guys understood the numbering, there wasn't enough room to walk around looking for the right stencils. If I'd been stealing them, I'd have done what Anne said—start near the back door and keep going till I had them all. It would have been faster than trying to pick and choose."
This not only made sense to me but gave me the chance to agree with Anne.
"I still say it was an inside job," grumbled Flittner through a dense cloud of smoke pouring from mouth, nostrils, and—so it seemed—ears.
"And I," Gadney said, seizing the gauntlet, "say it was not."
To display the depth of his conviction, he placed his cup in its saucer with an audaciously audible clink. He and Flittner, I had noticed earlier, rarely missed an opportunity to differ. This was one of the few times Gadney had held his own.
Harry had been listening alertly, his hand tugging at his beard or sometimes at his hair, his black eyes jumping from speaker to speaker. "Well, well," he said, "that's really interesting. I'm glad to have your ideas."
"Ha, ha," Flittner commented.
"No, I mean it," Harry said.
"I have another idea," Gadney ventured.
Predictably, Flittner sneered. Or maybe he didn't. Some people have srnile lines permanently implanted on their faces, and some have frown lines. Flittner had sneer lines, as if he'd done it too often and now his mouth was permanently set.
"Yeah?" Harry said to Gadney with interest. "What?"
"I wonder if it's occurred to anyone that the Heinrich-Schliemann-Gründung might have had a hand in this?"
I leaned inquisitively toward him. "The . .."
He didn't hear me, but Anne, sitting next to me, did. She leaned over, close enough so that I smelled her scent: citrus and citrus blossoms, faint but ravishing. "Die Heinrich-Schliemann-Gründung. It means—"
"Ich spreche deutsch," I said crisply, cutting her off in midsentence and midsmile. Her clear eyes widened momentarily, but she wasn't any more surprised than I was. What, I wondered, did I have to be curt about? And why would I want to put off a sensational-looking, single female (no ring, anyway) who was trying to be friendly? I had no idea.
Anyway, die Heinrich-Schliemann-Gründung obviously meant the Heinrich Schliemann Foundation—whatever that meant.
"Heinrich Schliemann?" I asked Gadney.
Anne had another try. "He was a German archaeologist—"
Incredibly, I did it again. "I know who Heinrich Schliemann was," I snapped, regretting it instantly; and I'm sorry to say that it sounded as snotty as it looks.
This time she drew stiffly back. "Of course you'd know, Dr. Norgren," she said, coolly polite. "Forgive me; that was silly of me."
"No," I said, "not at all." I meant to be contrite, but it's hard to say "Not at all" without a touch of the regal. Hard for me, anyway. It was the sort of thing Peter said frequentiy. "That is," I bumbled on, "I know who Schliemann was, but I don't have the foggiest" —I sounded more like Peter with every word— "idea what he could have to do with ..."
I hesitated invitin
gly, but she had been twice burned, and she wasn't having any more, and who could blame her? It was Robey who responded.
"Hm?" he said. "What? Schliemann?" He slowly tamped tobacco into a blackened pipe. "Well, you know how he had all that trouble with the Turkish government, a hundred years back or so, about his excavations at Troy? How they wouldn't let him take his finds out of Turkey and back to Germany?"
I nodded.
"Well, this group named themselves after him because they don't want to see Germany 'cheated' again. They say that whatever the Nazis took during the war shouldn't have been given back, and they're talking about a formal claim—a suit on behalf of the German people—on the three paintings from the Hallstatt cave. They don't see why Bolzano should get them back."
"Incredible," I said, the first sensible comment I'd made in a while.
"What's so incredible about it?" Flittner said abruptly. "The rules of war. How much art would be in the Louvre if Napoleon hadn't raped the rest of Europe? To the victors belong the spoils. What's the difference in this case?"
Gadney rifted his eyes and tossed his head minutely, as if he had borne this sort of thing more times than any human being should have to. But he sat in stoic silence.
"I think there is a difference," I began, ready to have my first real say, and arranging my thoughts on this venerable issue, but Anne got there before me, and much more pithily.
"They weren't the victors," she said simply.
'Exactly," Flittner said, as bitterly as if he'd signed the surrender himself. "We're the victors, so we make the rules."
"Well," Robey said, his Archaic smile shining gently forth, "let's enjoy it while we can. How often do the good guys get to make the rules?"
That appeared to be a reasonable end to an unpromising avenue, and while Robey went through the pipe smoker's slow voluptuous, lighting-up ritual, the rest of us held our peace.
"Anyway, Chris," he finally said behind a slowly twisting web of blue smoke, "this Schliemann group spends its time writing nasty letters to us and to the press—'The Plundered Past is an insult to the German people, nothing but American propaganda'—that kind of thing. They don't get any support, thank God."