A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  "It was a birthday present from Bormann to Hitler on behalf of the German people," Anne explained, slipping into her standard lecture. "It was just a tea house, not any kind of special headquarters, and it cost ten million dollars by the time the road was completed. Hitler never liked it much; he preferred it down here. He went there exactly five times, which comes to two million dollars per cup of tea. Obligatory laughter, please."

  To get to the site of Hitler's celebrated home, the Berghof, we had to fight our way through tangled brush and small trees, and ignore an Eintritt Verboten sign that was there to ward off the random tourist who found his way up the unrestricted road to the Obersalzberg. Nothing was left but the massively walled garage, and most of that was below ground, impossible to find unless you knew exactly what you were looking for. The house, Anne explained, had been damaged by wartime bombing, but it had been the Bavarian government that had leveled it a few years later, for fear that it might become a shrine.

  Even now, it felt enough like a shrine—of sorts—to exude a dank, evil aura that made me want to get out of there. And, believe me, I'm not the kind of person given to making dopey statements like that.

  "Let's go," I said almost as soon as we'd found it.

  She shivered sympathetically. "It does the same thing to me. Usually I tell people we don't know where it is." How about some nice, hot Glühwein?"

  I agreed readily. We climbed down to the road and walked the fifty yards or so to the Gasthof Zum Turken, the only private German establishment on today's Obersalzberg. It was an old family hotel, she told me, that had been

  commandeered by the Nazis and converted into the headquarters for Hitler's elite, private Gestapo corps. The

  owner, an anti-Nazi who had objected and spoken his mind, had died for it in a concentration camp, but now the Zum Turken was

  back in the hands of the family with the blessings of the

  American military administration.

  "Ahh," I said, warmed by the first sip of the hot, spiced wine, "that's better." I stretched my legs, leaned back in the wooden chair, and looked appreciatively out at the stupendous Alpine view. "All right, this has been fascinating, and you've been very good, and now I'm ready to talk about art forgery."

  "That's good," she said promptly, "because I've been thinking that you might have things all wrong."

  I looked at her reprovingly. "Surely not."

  "Chris, you've been assuming that the fake is either from the Hallstatt cache, in which case just about anybody might have been behind it anytime over the last forty years, or else it's in the collection from Florence, in which case you're pretty sure that someone on our own staff must have had a hand in it."

  "That's true," I said. "What other possibilities are there?"

  "Well, what if the forgery is from the Florence collection, but it was already there before it ever left Bolzano's house?"

  I shook my head. "Peter would have seen it when he was there for the packing."

  "How can you be sure? You've been looking for it for a week and you haven't found it yet."

  "That's right, rub it in."

  "Don't be sensitive. You know what I mean."

  "Look, Bolzano's an extremely discriminating buyer. If there was a forgery in his collection—especially one that Peter could spot without scientific help—Bolzano would just about have to be aware of it too. Agreed?"

  Anne thoughtfully moved the rim of the glass back and forth across her mouth, inhaling the pungent aroma. "Probably."

  "Definitely. And why would he try to pass off a fake as the real thing? He's got enough genuine art to make his reputation ten times over without messing around with forgeries."

  "Well, I think there could be several reasons. Maybe he sold one of his originals a long time ago and replaced it with a fake that no one knows about— maybe he intends to try to sell it as the real thing himself someday."

  "Why? If he ever needs money, he's got plenty of real masterpieces to sell. Why take a chance with a forgery?"

  "I don't know why, Chris," she said exasperatedly. "I'm just guessing, like everybody else. All right, how about this: The forgery was bought by his father—I mean the older Bolzano's father—a long time ago, before there were all these fancy tests, and Bolzano—Claudio Bolzano—found out that his father'd been snookered, and he's ashamed to admit it. How's that?"

  "Well, I suppose that's—"

  "Or wait, wait! How about this?" She spilled a little wine in her enthusiasm and dabbed at the table with a napkin. "Maybe Bolzano was behind the storage-room break-in. Maybe the idea was that this fake—which everyone thinks is real—was going to be stolen along with everything else, and Bolzano was going to claim the insurance on it, but all the time he'd have the real one hidden away someplace where he could still enjoy it. Then Peter found out about it, and that's why he was killed."

  I had listened open-mouthed, my glass held motionless. "Boy, you really get into this, don't you?"

  She laughed. "You think it sounds improbable?"

  "Just a little, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be true. But there are a few things that rule Bolzano out, I think."

  "Like what?"

  "In the first place, and most important, Bolzano very willingly OK'd the analysis of the paintings; never hesitated. Why would he do that if he had something to hide? And he gave me the micropattern on the copies without my having to ask twice for it."

  "Yes, that's true."

  "And Peter himself said Bolzano didn't know about the forgery; don't forget that."

  "Mm. Well, what about the son, Lorenzo? Maybe he's trying to cheat his father. Maybe he sold off a real painting years ago and kept the money, and replaced it with a copy so his father wouldn't notice. Maybe—"

  "I don't think so. Oh, it wouldn't amaze me to find out he was trying to put one over on il padrone—there's a lot of tension between them—but if he had a guilty secret to hide, he'd hardly let it be shown in a public exhibition, would he? Too risky by far."

  Anne nodded gloomily and finished her wine. "Yes, you're right. Back to square one."

  "Back? I've never been off it."

  Anne had a lunch meeting at the Zum Turken with a Bavarian state official to talk about an upcoming German-American friendship week, and I rose to go when he came in. But the middle-aged, jovial Herr Wecker was so gregarious and agreeable that I stayed to join them.

  "Will you take your friend to see the night-shooting, Captain?" Herr Wecker asked, blotting his mouth with care after finishing his plate of roast beef and potatoes.

  "I thought I would, yes," Anne said over the last of her wurst. "The weather's lovely."

  "The night-shooting?" I asked.

  "Yes," he said, and laughed. "An old ceremony, quite famous. There is gun-shooting at midnight to welcome the Christ Child. It is done at several locations around Berchtesgaden."

  "They welcome the Christ Child by shooting?"

  He chuckled again. "That's correct—it was done in your country, too, until this century. A very ancient custom. You are interested to know more?"

  I nodded.

  Herr Wecker pursed his lips while he pared the apple he had ordered for dessert. "In olden times, the farmers used to make noises with pots and pans to keep away the evil spirits. Later this noise becomes an expression of joy to praise the Christ Child, and later yet the pots and pans are replaced by pistols. No one who comes here at Christmas should think of missing this. The Berchtesgadener Weihnachtschutzen."

  "It sounds quite interesting," I said politely.

  "It is, actually," Anne said with a smile. "They fire beautiful old black-powder pistols, and they dress in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century hunting costumes. They even hold a session up here on the mountain. We could drive to it in five minutes, or there's a trail through the forest if you're in the mood for walking."

  Herr Wecker nodded while he meticulously quartered the apple and cored the segments. "Everyone shoots on signal from the leader. The flashes are so b
right you would think it is daytime. You almost cannot look. It is marvelous." He carefully inspected the apple pieces. "Don't forget about your kidneys."

  "Pardon me?" Anne and I said at the same time.

  "It will be very cold at midnight. You must protect your kidneys adequately."

  "Ah," I said, "we shall." I should have realized what he meant. From an American perspective, Europeans expend an exorbitant amount of energy figuring out how to protect their kidneys. That doesn't include the English, who spend their time worrying about their livers.

  Herr Wecker ate his apple quarters with wonderful delicacy, holding them with two fingers in front of his mouth and reaching for them with his lips, as if they were juicy mangoes that might splatter his neat green Bavarian-style suit. When he finished the last one, he wiped his hands thoroughly on the cloth napkin, grasped my forearm, and delivered a final inducement. "The noise is so great you will believe you are going deaf."

  Anne looked at her watch, then drained her coffee, sighed, and stood up. "Christmas Eve or not, Herr Wecker and I still have an afternoon's planning ahead of us. I'll see you for a late dinner, Chris, if you don't mind waiting. And we can skip the Weihnachtschutzen if you're not in the mood."

  "Not in the mood?" I said. "I wouldn't miss it."

  "Gut," said Herr Wecker with approval. "You will enjoy it wonderfully."

  He would have been surprised to know that the prospect of being blinded and deafened by gunfire held no appeal whatsoever. But the idea of a wintry Alpine walk with Anne under a black velvet sky glittering with stars was another thing.

  I spent most of the afternoon in shameless indolence while Anne and Wecker slaved over their planning. I wandered along piney, deserted trails, my mind contentedly emptied by the sparkling air and the stunning views of mountains, forests, and snowfields through the trees.

  At about four I checked into the General Walker, the rambling U.S. military hotel that had originally been constructed as a "people's guest house," where the crowds who made the pilgrimage to the Obersalzberg could spend a full day and night within a few hundred yards of their glorious führer for a single mark. From my room I called Jessick in Berlin.

  "Did Kohler get in to look at the paintings?"

  "Yes, sir, he came and went already. He said to tell you that—wait a minute, he left a note. ..." Paper rustled near the telephone. " 'Piero della Francesca,' " he read slowly, " 'was originally painted in tempera. Restored at least four times, three in tempera, once in oils. Never extensively. No reason to doubt attribution.' He said if you call him he'll explain what he did."

  So that was that, and I can't say I was surprised. Now I was down to the three paintings from the cache: the Vermeer, the Titian, and the Rubens. That should have made me feel that I was getting closer, but it worried me. None of them was really a credible fake, if it makes any sense to put it that way. I still had some checking to do on them in London, but I had a stomach-sinking conviction that they would all turn out to be the real thing; that I'd been pursuing something that wasn't there.

  And where would that leave me? Would it mean that Peter had been wrong, that perhaps he'd spotted what I had on the Piero, and had jumped to a false conclusion? Unlikely. Or maybe the forgery was there, all right, staring me in the face, but I was too dense to see it. Or did it mean that there had never been a forgery in the first place; that Peter, with all his oddly cagey talk, had been trying to tell me something else? But what? And if there were no forgery, why had he been so elaborately murdered? Whew.

  "Hey," Jessick said, "—er, sir—how's Berchtesgaden? Boy, I love it down there at Christmas."

  "It's beautiful. And Conrad, 'hey' is fine."

  "Yes, sir. Are you going to the shooting? It's fantastic."

  "I think so. Conrad, has Harry Gucci tried to reach me there? I've been trying to get him since yesterday."

  "Uh-uh. He's supposed to be back here tomorrow, but."

  "Good. Will you ask him to give me a call? No, tomorrow's Christmas; you won't be in the office, will you?"

  "Gee, I'd be glad to," he said sadly, "but I won't be here. It's Christmas."

  "Oh, is it? Well, merry Christmas, Conrad."

  "Thanks. Uh, sir ... ? Remember when you asked me, where was Colonel Robey the day before the meeting, and I said Heidelberg?"

  My ears pricked up like a dog's. "What about it?"

  "Well, was it important?"

  "Kind of, yes."

  "Well—it wasn't exactly true. He was in Frankfurt; that is, Sachsenhausen, right across the river."

  "Oh," I said without expression, "how do you happen to know that?"

  "I guess you're wondering how I come to know that."

  "Now that you mention it, yes."

  "Well, I got his airline tickets for him. I know this guy at Lufthansa and I can get a good deal, so I usually get him his tickets whenever he goes."

  "Whenever he goes? To Frankfurt?"

  "Yes, sir, uh ..."

  "Conrad, it really is important. If you know some more about this, I need to know."

  "It's kind of personal," he said uneasily. "I don't feel right about—".

  "Let's hear it, Conrad!" Jessick was the only person in Berlin on whom the Norgren command presence had any effect.

  "Yes, sir. He's got a girlfriend in Sachsenhausen."

  "A girlfriend?'

  "Well, a lady friend. He goes to see her whenever he gets a chance." He seemed to interpret my silence as disapproval. "It's not as if he's got a wife somewhere, sir. He got divorced, like, five years ago."

  "Why so secret, then?"

  "Well, she's not exactiy divorced yet herself, and I guess he doesn't like—"

  "OK, Conrad, thanks for telling me. Don't worry, this won't make any problem for Mark, and I won't tell him you told me. And Conrad? Call over to Harry's office right now, will you? Leave a message for him to call me whenever he gets in."

  If nothing else, at least I knew where Robey's mind was all the time.

  A late dinner with Anne in the hotel dining room, and then coffee and vintage port (at fifty cents a glass) in the grand bar, where big, relaxed Americans, still in their ski outfits, sprawled in comfortable chairs at the foot of imposing columns made of Hitler's favorite pink Utersberg marble.

  Anne poured more coffee for both of us from a ceramic pitcher and leaned back to sip. "So where do you go from here?"

  "As far as the forgery goes, you mean?" I shook my head dejectedly. "I don't know. We may have to run all of them through a lab yet, but the show'll be over before that ever gets done."

  "But you've already said you're sure the pictures are all the right age. How can a laboratory tell you any more than that? If you can't tell if something is really by Vermeer, how can an X-ray machine?"

  "It can, as a matter of fact—if the operator knows what he's looking for. For example, Vermeer worked without drawing in the outlines first. Nobody knew that until we looked at one with an X-ray machine. That means that any old Vermeers with a drawing under the paint aren't really Vermeers." I took a long swallow of the velvety wine and licked the sweet stickiness from my lips. "Titian also worked without outlining, which was no secret from his contemporaries—but why would anyone faking a Titian a hundred or two hundred years ago bother doing it the hard way? There was no such thing as an X-ray. No one else could possibly know what was or wasn't under the surface."

  She nodded. "I see. An X ray actually shows you the way an artist worked."

  "And not only X rays. A good lab will put a painting through a mass spectrometric analysis—"

  "Yoicks! What?"

  "Don't ask me to explain it; I wasn't even sure I could say it. But it isolates chemicals, which can tell you interesting things." There was a long pause while I tried to think of an interesting thing. "Well, Dürer, for instance. For a while he was using copper blue under the impression that it was ultramarine. Even careful forgers didn't know that— and still don't—so their failure to make the same mistake pro
ves the forgery. Clever, what?"

  "Very. You think that might be the case with our Dürer?"

  "No, I'm sure it's real. I'm down to the Vermeer, the Titian, and the Rubens now. And if they check out ..."

  "Don't look so glum. If Peter said there's a forgery, there is. And you'll find it, my good man. I have complete confidence."

  "Good, I'm glad one of us does."

  She stood up and held out her hand for my glass. "I think you can stand one more round of cheer before we face the shooting. And I'll buy."

  "You will? I'm already more cheerful."

  Chapter 16

  Midnight on the Obersalzberg.

  There is a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Return of the Hunters, in which three muffled men breast a snowy hill. Before them stretches a great plain rising to grotesque, jagged peaks in the far distance. Below are everyday people engaged in everyday activities on the plain, and snug houses with smoke coming from the chimneys, and yet the effect is—and this was certainly Brueghel's intention—of man dwarfed and trivialized by an awesome and indifferent Nature.

  That was very much the feeling on the mountain. No moon, but starlight reflected from the snow made it bright enough to see across the valley to the mountains of Austria: ghostly blue-white snowfields; black, dense clumps of forest; monumental crests and ridges—everything windless, silent, sweeping, immense. For a while it was enough to subdue the crowds that had gathered in shivering little clumps, but after a time the Class VI vodka, gurgling steadily from flasks and bottles, had created a hum of conversation and laughter among the American military spectators.

  There were German spectators too, and they and the milling shooters had been at their schnapps, so the mood was pretty lively all around. Most people had brought flashlights, the beams of which bounced playfully from group to group.

  By the time the shooting began, things were starting to get rowdy. The way it was supposed to work was that the senior marksman would give the order, and the others would then fire in rapid sequence, sounding like a string of Chinese firecrackers. They would then load up again, ceremoniously knocking their powder into the pistol barrels with little wooden hammers, and await the next signal to fire.