Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  Like the drunk, I had been looking where there was light, and like him I hadn't found anything. Now I was down to my last few listings in the computer catalogue. I filled out the request slips and went to the desk.

  The librarian, with plenty of time to see me hobbling toward her, greeted me with an arch look. "Do you mean we still have something you haven't checked out, Dr. Revere?"

  "Amazingly enough, Valerie, yes. But this is the last batch, I promise."

  She raised her eyes toward the chandeliers. "God be praised. All right, it'll be about ten minutes."

  "Fine. I'm going to get a cup of coffee. You can leave the stuff at my table."

  "Assuming I can find room."

  The tall, tart-tongued Valerie Zwirn and I were old friends. I was a known quantity at the museum, having worked there first as associate curator and then as curator of northern European paintings for three years before concluding that museum administration wasn't for me. That had been a few years after concluding that entrepreneurship wasn't for me, and a few months before concluding that university teaching wasn't for me. Finding my life's work was proving a little elusive, but no one could say I hadn't been trying. And if nothing else, I was getting better, or at any rate faster, at deciding what wasn't for me: four years as a businessman, three years as a museum administrator, nine months as a professor. I call that progress.

  Trish, my ex-wife, probably wouldn't agree. She had married me when we were both graduate students at Boston University, she in sociology, I in art history, and when I stumbled on a way to (barely) keep body and soul together by selling Italian Renaissance art posters by mail—talk about niche-marketing—she had been all for it. Amazingly, the mail-order business took off to the extent that I had to drop out of school to run it, in partnership with two other young go-getters. But despite its amazing success it was all luck on my part; I was never quite sure of what I was doing right and never very happy at it. I kept trying to understand how I'd become a businessman, of all things. To be sure, it wasn’t a bad life, but it wasn't my life

  So, against Trish's judgment, I insisted on selling our interest in it for a ridiculously large amount of money (I’m still living, reasonably comfortably—well, quite comfortably—off my share of the income from the resulting investments) and went back to school at the age of 34 to complete my Ph. D., filled with enthusiasm for seventeenth-century painting and eager to embark on my life’s career as a curator, or so I thought. Six years and two jobs later, when I decided not to renew my teaching contract at Harvard, my ambitious, goal-directed, justifiably fed-up wife of eight years decided she'd had it. We separated last year and were divorced a few months later. I wasn't happy about it, but I didn't argue either. I mean, who could deny that she had a point?

  In the museum's second-floor restaurant I ordered coffee and a slice of hot apple pie with cheese to go with my pain pills and moped, hardly for the first time, about my state of mind since Trish had left. The fact was, I'd just about had it with her too, particularly after she'd become a "certified organizational development facilitator" and had started giving and taking "enabling workshops" one or sometimes two weekends a month. I know, I know, that doesn't sound so bad, but, you see, she brought the stuff home with her, and how long, after all, can you go on living in amiable companionship with someone who sits across the breakfast table from you and earnestly tells you that your problem—or rather, one of your problems—is that you have never had the courage to nourish your inner soil properly? And goes on from there, in all seriousness, to expound on the appropriate "fertilizers" and "nutrients" that are needed?

  So the time had come to part, and yet there was no arguing with the fact that I'd been in a black funk ever since. There had been a time when I'd been head over heels in love with Trish, and although that time had passed, nothing had ever replaced it, and the divorce had left me numbed and aimless. In the year and more since then, my relationship with Simeon—those chats, the occasional walks—had helped me over the roughest spots in a way that I hadn't really been aware of until after he was dead. I'd been under the impression that I'd been stopping in because he was the one who needed a friend, but now I wasn't so sure.

  In any case, there was no doubting that Simeon's death was the first thing in all that time that had really touched me, had moved me to any kind of meaningful action, if you could call my progress so far meaningful. I'd been getting lazy and reclusive, my eating habits had gone to hell (I'd put on twelve pounds in ten months), and I hadn't been able to regroup my resources enough or summon up enough energy to get my life going in any particular direction. I hadn't particularly wanted to, when it came down to it.

  Having concluded this stimulating and productive bout of self-exploration I took the long way back to the library through my old domain, European Paintings, stopping for a few moments in front of the two fine, glowing Velazquezes in the Koch gallery to clear my mind and make myself remember that it was art I was researching, not yellowing old army documents.

  When I got back to my library table I found the new pile neatly stacked and waiting for me. With a sigh I settled slowly into my chair and opened the topmost volume.

  Two hours later, with my eyelids drooping and my reserves just about drained, I came upon my first clue, the first indication that maybe I was on the right track after all: a brief, tantalizing footnote—an aside, really—in a 1950 article in the College Art Journal by a one-time MFA&A officer. In writing about the post-war recovery of a large religious canvas painted by Velazquez, he noted: "For an even more intriguing story involving two other paintings by this artist, viz., The Count of Torrijos and The Countess of Torrijos, see RG 239, CIR 64."

  That, I knew, meant US Army Records Group 239, Consolidated Interrogation Report 64. Wide awake now, I scribbled the words and numbers on a slip of paper and went painfully to the desk once more.

  Valerie looked at it and shook her head. "Sorry, you've finally hit on something we don't have."

  "I know you don't, but the National Archives does. You can order Xeroxes from them. I'll pay the costs."

  "Oh, I think we can work something out for you," she said. "You're one of our best customers."

  * * *

  That was Friday. On Monday I was back at my table with a single quarter-inch-thick sheaf of photocopied papers in front of me. The resourceful Valerie Zwirn had even had them bound in an Acco binder. The typewritten label pasted on the front was oversized to accommodate the oversized title:

  Records Group 239. Records of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas. Consolidated Interrogation Report No. 64. Respondent, Dr. Erhard Haftmann, Chief Registrar, Altaussee Mine Repository, Altaussee, Austria. Interrogation Conducted at Special Interrogation Center, Altaussee, During the Period 10-21 June 1945. Subject: Truckload No. N30, Unaccounted for. (Appendix: Inventory of Contents.)

  It was the inventory I wanted to see first, so I flipped past the body of the report, turning directly to the appendix, which had been translated from the German records.

  And almost at once I found what I had been looking for:

  Velazquez, The Count of Torrijos. 94 cm. x 63 cm. No signature. "El Conde de Torrijos" inscribed at bottom. Repaired knife-cut(?), upper left, damage not considered significant. December 1942.

  Bingo. At long last, bingo. It was the same painting, all right, and it was the Americans and not the Russians who had found it after all, which meant that they had disposed of it and kept records, which meant that there would be at least the beginning of a trail leading forward, not back, from World War II; a place to start, maybe even people to talk . . . I paused in mid-self-congratulation. What was that in the title about something "unaccounted for"?

  But the title wasn't any clearer on the second reading than on the first. Uneasily I opened the report to start at the beginning. The interrogation had been conducted by a Captain Singer, and on page two it got down to the meat of it:

  Capt.
Singer: You said earlier that on April 19 one truckload failed to arrive with the convoy from Neuschwanstein?

  Dr. Haftmann: One consignment, yes.

  Capt. Singer: And how did this come about?

  Dr. Haftmann: It was a time of terrible confusion and disorder. I was expecting thirty-five consignments, but only thirty-four arrived. The convoy master could not explain.

  Capt. Singer: And of what did this consignment consist?

  Dr. Haftmann: Paintings, mostly acquired in Austria and France. It included a Giorgione, a Hals, several Velazquezes, some of the Venetian masters . . . Naturally I have the bill of lading and inventory that were prepared at the place of embarkation. (See appendix.) You understand, at the time of which we are speaking, order had completely broken down. It was a great tragedy, there was no one to exercise control."

  Capt. Singer: Please tell me the eventual outcome of this incident.

  Dr. Haftmann: There was no eventual outcome. The consignment never arrived. I had neither the authority nor the means to hunt for it. It disappeared, that is all. A casualty of the war. If you had any idea of the tremendous, the enormous, difficulties . . .

  I put down the report. Obviously the codeine wasn't doing my mind any good because it had taken me all this time to finally figure out what I was reading about. This was the celebrated Lost Truck, the single truckload of masterpieces that had somehow gone astray between its wartime storage point in Mad Ludwig's Neuschwanstein Castle and its destination, the vast, bombproof underground caverns of the Altaussee salt mine high in the Austrian Alps. In the art world it was a famous story. The Nazis, reeling and near defeat, had frantically worked to hide their stolen treasures from the invading Allies. Truck convoys loaded with the cultural wealth of the Western world had poured into the mine compound in an unending stream, adding their loads to what was already the most phenomenal hoard of art ever gathered in one place.

  But with Russian troops encroaching from the east and the British and Americans closing in from the south, the vaunted efficiency of the Nazis had broken down, giving way to tumult and disarray. Records were lost, objects miscatalogued. Frustration and confusion had run high.

  In the commotion, some time during the afternoon of April 19, 1945, one truck, its driver, and its priceless payload had vanished in a snowstorm. Without a trace.

  "Unaccounted for."

  It hadn't taken long for it to become the object of articles and conjectures by journalists, conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, victims' rights groups, charlatans. "The legendary Lost Truck," it was endlessly, tiresomely called, and for a decade or two, before it dropped from the popular imagination, rumors of its treasures being glimpsed in Prague, or Tokyo, or Moscow, or Berlin frequently turned up, briefly making the newspapers before petering out to nothing.

  In fact, only one of the pieces had ever been seen again. In 1995 the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, in a celebrated (and temporary) burst of Soviet openness, had put on an exhibition of a small portion of the art that had been seized by them in 1945 and had lain in secret storage ever since, unknown to all but a very few government officials. (Even the director of the Hermitage had been kept in the dark.) I had been working at the Museum of Fine Arts at the time and had gone with a planeload of American curators to St. Petersburg to see the show. One of the fifty paintings, a brilliant, near-abstract oil by J.M.W. Turner of a colossal storm at sea, had been quickly recognized as part of the Lost Truck's payload, but the Russians had denied all knowledge of any lost truck, refusing to provide any further information at all. And so, along with everything else, this marvelous work had gone back underground when the exhibition closed, never to be seen again.

  And now this: El Conde de Torrijos, only the second object ever to surface from the truck. A Velazquez, no less. As an art historian I couldn't have been more excited.

  But as a detective I'd struck out. I still had no idea of how the painting had found its way to Simeon's shop, or why, or who the Russian was who had brought it in, or where it had been since April 19, 1945. What's more, I had run out of places to look; the Lost Truck was as lost as it ever was.

  And as for being an avenging angel, I was a complete bust.

  Chapter 7

  Or maybe I wasn't. The more I thought about it after I got home, the more I thought that maybe I wasn't, maybe I had come up with something after all.

  If nothing else, I now knew that the only two paintings from the Lost Truck that had ever been seen again both had Russian connections. Didn't that make it a pretty good bet that the entire shipment had fallen into Soviet hands in 1945? And if that were so, then wasn't it possible that, by finding out more about one of them, I might come up with something useful about the other? If, for example, I could discover how that Turner had found its way to the Hermitage and where it had been all these years, then I'd have at least a start to put me on the track of the Velazquez. And as it happened, I thought I had a way I could do that.

  When I'd been in St. Petersburg for the exhibition in 1995, I'd gotten to know Yuri Minkov, one of the younger assistant curators and an all-around good egg. He, I, and fifteen others from half a dozen countries had made a highly convivial night of it over caviar, piroshki, and vodka at the old Metropole restaurant. We'd sat across from each other, and although his English wasn't much better than my Russian, we both knew enough German and French for us to get on well enough, especially after the fourth round of vodka. Yuri was one of Russia's lively new breed of art curators, born twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War and a devoted fan of Hootie and the Blowfish. For Yuri the Nazis were schoolbook history, about as relevant as the invasion of the Mongol hordes in 1237. As far as he was concerned, Russia was long overdue to return its cache of wartime art booty to the families and institutions it had originally been looted from—even the Germans—and let the past be the past. This was not the view of the government or of his museum superiors, however, and when the show closed the paintings had vanished again with very little having been revealed about them.

  But I'd been impressed with Yuri's attitude, and with his openness in front of a patently disapproving senior curator. And so I hoped that he'd be willing to talk to me now, especially if he understood why I was asking questions.

  Given the eight-hour time difference between Boston and St. Petersburg and the fact that Yuri had no telephone at home, I had to wait until the next morning to call him at the museum. It took me three tries to get through to the Hermitage, followed by fifteen minutes of yelling "angleeskee" into the telephone and getting cut off twice in the process before I was connected with someone who could speak English and then, finally, with Yuri. Making clear what I wanted was tricky, not only because neither of us was speaking our native language, but because I thought it likely that our conversation was being monitored and I didn't want to be too explicit. About a year after the 1995 exhibit I'd heard that he'd been reprimanded for expressing views contrary to official policy, and I didn't want to get him in trouble again.

  All the same, I think I was able to get through to him what it was that I was after, and he responded with enthusiasm to the idea of seeing me and maybe even showing me a few pieces I hadn't seen before when I got there. Unfortunately, I told him, that wouldn't be for another three weeks, which was how long it took to get a Russian visa; not necessarily a bad thing in my case, because the doctor had told me it would be another three or four weeks before I became a reasonably mobile human being again.

  "Ve itt lawts piroshkis!" Yuri said, treating me to his limited but vigorous store of English. "Ve trinkh lawts vwawdka!"

  "Da, tovaritch. Dosvidanya," I said, returning the compliment and pretty much exhausting my Russian repertoire.

  When I replaced the receiver I realized that I'd done it at almost normal speed, without even a wince.

  I had begun to mend.

  * * *

  "May I speak to Ben Revere, please?" The voice was female, assertive, unfamiliar. I thought it might be someone f
rom the travel agency that was handling my trip to Russia.

  "Speaking."

  "Mr. Revere, this is Alexandra Porter." A vaguely peremptory rise at the end, as if I were expected to know the name.

  "Yes?"

  "I'm Simeon Pawlovsky's niece? Or his grandniece, to be technical."

  "Oh . . . yes, hello." It had been over a week since Simeon's death. The murder had been heavily on my mind since then, but I hadn't done anything about it since calling Yuri a couple of days earlier. In the first place, I was in no condition to do anything. In the second place, until I went off to Russia, what was there to do?

  "I believe we would have met last week. At least Uncle Simeon told me you'd be coming to dinner with us. He did invite you, didn't he?"

  "Oh, yes, that's right, he did. I . . . I was looking forward to it." It wasn't only that I didn't have the nerve to tell her I'd turned her uncle down cold, but after what had happened, what would have been the point? Also, I didn't have the nerve.

  "I'm sorry about your uncle," I said. "I liked him a lot." That much was true, anyway.

  "Yes, he felt the same about you." Her manner was direct, her voice a little too loud. A junior executive on the rise, wanting to make sure she was taken seriously, I thought. I guessed that she was in her mid-twenties, probably fairly attractive, and not lacking for self-esteem. "Look," she said," the reason I'm calling is that I'd like very much to talk to you about him. Do you suppose we might get together?"

  "Well . . . okay, sure." Not the most civil response in the world, but aside from feeling too lousy for socializing, I wasn't feeling any too keen on assertive women, attractive or otherwise. I mean, I'm all for self-affirmation and so forth, but Trish had had enough of the stuff to last me the rest of my natural life and then some.