by Aaron Elkins
"Yes?" I said in German. "Can I help you?"
"I certainly hope so," he said, looking up at me with mild, friendly eyes of milky blue. "I’m, ah, Stetten?"
I sighed. The Intrepid Traveler scores again.
* * *
Albrecht, Graf Stetten broke open a crusty roll, showering flakes onto the table cloth, and spread a delicately scalloped rondel of butter on a quarter of it. "I've asked my lawyer to meet us in half-an-hour," he said a little nervously, "because I thought that we—you and I—should have an understanding between ourselves before we meet with Mr. Dulska. Don’t you agree?"
I started getting nervous myself. Art collectors are a peculiar and finicky breed, and, when an "understanding" is mentioned before a meeting like this one, what’s likely to follow is something along the lines of: "Now if you determine that it’s authentic (or valuable, or what I’m looking for, or worth three times what the seller thinks), whatever you do, don’t let on. Just let me know by lifting your left eyebrow twice, while crossing your left leg over your right, and flexing the second joint of the fifth finger of your right hand. Discreetly, of course."
Once, if you can believe it, it happened the other way around. I was working with a passionate collector of Dutch realist landscapes and we were going to look at a purported van Ruisdael that she'd set her heart on, but just before we entered the dealer’s showroom she grabbed my sleeve and burst out: "If it’s not really a Ruisdael I don’t want to know! Don’t tell me!"
It was her money, so I shrugged and went along (you do that a lot when you work with art collectors), but I couldn’t help wondering what she was paying me for. I mean, if what you want is not to be told something, why not just hire some kid at five dollars an hour to do it, or rather not to do it? However, as it turned out, it was the real thing, so I could be honest, the dealer could make his sale, and the collector could get what she wanted. Everybody was happy.
Stetten’s "understanding" was almost as unusual. "If you believe it’s authentic I hope you'll simply come out and say so. If you believe it’s not, I hope you'll say so as well. I don’t want you to be coy, I don’t want you to ‘protect’ my interests. Honestly, I don't, Dr. Revere. No games, no prevarication; just your honest, objective judgement. Do you think we can agree on that?"
"Completely." I was much relieved.
"And if you see that I’m making a blunder of some kind, which I'm afraid is likely, I hope you’ll come out and say so too, and not worry about sparing my sensitivities."
"Agreed," I said, liking him more by the minute. "You must be quite excited about this. When was the last time you saw the picture?"
"On the tenth of December, 1942," he said without hesitation. "In Paris. We had an apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement, on avenue Floquet, just off the Champ de Mars. I was twenty-six years old."
He bit into his roll. We were in the Café Imperial on the ground floor of the hotel, surrounded by what passes for understated elegance in Vienna: mirrored walls, gorgeous, burled-wood wainscoting, heavy chandeliers, scurrying, whispering waiters in tuxedos. We had been served a breakfast of croissants, rolls, cold cuts, cheese, and coffee—and for Stetten a boiled egg. While I spread a roll of my own with kräuterkäse, the wake-up-your-taste-buds-in-a-hurry breakfast cheese they like here, I did some quick calculating. Twenty-six in 1942 . . . that made him 80 or 81 now, yet I had taken him for a man fifteen years younger, what with that glossy, pink-cheeked, healthy skin and those lively blue eyes. But now, looking again, I could see that his shirt collar was too roomy for a neck grown scrawny, that his gray-white hair and short-cropped, almost invisible white mustache, while carefully groomed, were listless and scant. And that the backs of his thin, elegant hands, those unforgiving betrayers of age, were knotted with dull purplish veins as thick as earthworms.
"Your family lived in Paris during the war, then?" I asked.
"Yes, my father was one of those who saw the German menace to Austria for the horror it was. In 1938, just before the anschluss, he gathered together his most beloved paintings, put the rest in storage here in Austria, and moved us—my mother, my brother Rolf, and me—to Paris."
"You avoided the Nazis by moving to Paris?" I didn’t mean to say it, it just came out.
He smiled. "It may not have been the best choice."
As we ate he told me more. The family business had been founded four generations earlier, on confections and tobacco, but it had been Stetten’s grandfather Konrad who had really created the Stetten fortune with his invention of a cigarette-manufacturing machine in the 1890’s and his subsequent near-monopoly of cigarette-making in Austria-Hungary. Konrad had also been the one who had acquired the bulk of the family’s art collection, passing his love of art and of acquisition down to his son, Stetten’s father, an even more dedicated collector.
Having eaten lightly but steadily while telling me this, he now began using the back of a tiny egg spoon to crack the egg, methodically rotating the egg cup a few degrees at a time to get to a fresh surface. "For my father, you see, art was more important—more real in a way—than life. He lived for his family and his pictures, nothing else. When they took the pictures, they took his life, really."
He began to peel away bits of brown eggshell with buffed and manicured finger nails. On the little finger of his right hand was a gold signet ring with a crescent formed by a double-headed eagle; the same crest that I'd seen on his letterhead.
"They came while we were having our dinner," he said, then seemed to become absorbed in dislodging a particularly stubborn bit of membrane from the egg white.
"The Nazis?" I prompted softly.
He separated the membrane and wiped his hands with a napkin. "The Nazis, yes. Oskar—our man—came in during the fish. We could see that he was frightened. He was an old fellow, his voice was shaking. 'The Gestapo,' he told my father. Poor man, he could barely get the words out." Stetten looked up from his egg. "Of course, a person living in today's world . . . you can have no idea of the feelings such words could convey."
"I can imagine," I said humbly.
"Oh, my dear friend, I hope not. In any event, my father put down his fork. 'At this hour?' he said (and Stetten’s voice took on a deeper, weightier tone), exactly as if he had been informed that some thoughtless shopkeeper had come to present a bill at an inconvenient time. 'You may tell them that I will see them after dinner.'"
At last Stetten began to spoon up the egg in tiny mouthfuls; no salt, no pepper. "Oskar placed at my father's elbow a pewter salver on which there was a piece of paper. Later I learned that it was a search-and-seize order, but my father barely gave it a glance. 'Put them in the drawing room and make them comfortable,’ he said. 'You may offer them something to drink.' And poor Oskar did, though he could hardly walk. My mother wept through the rest of the dinner, but my father made us finish. . . . you know, they prepare boiled eggs to perfection here. I’m going to have another. Are you sure you wouldn’t like one?
I shook my head, my appetite long gone. "And they waited?"
"Oh, yes, they waited. I could hear them muttering—the lowest type of Bavarian accents, no breeding. I was able to catch glimpses of them from my chair—those perfectly cut uniforms, the swastikas, the beautiful boots. Probably the best clothes they'd ever owned. Even their cologne, I could smell. They were impatient, but yes, they waited. You see . . ." and he paused, as if deciding how to put something in the easiest way for me to understand, ". . . they recognized in my father someone superior to themselves. We Germanic peoples are very attuned to such nuances."
"And what happened?"
"Ah, the rest of the story isn't so inspiring. My father was arrested and the paintings were taken away."
"Simply taken? Not even a pretext of payment?"
"At that point it wasn’t necessary," he said matter-of-factly. "My father’s primary business partner had been classified as an enemy of the State, and that was all the pretext they needed."
"He was Jewish?"
"A member of the Resistance?"
"Florian? Hardly. No, he was a Mason. Ah, you didn’t know the Freemasons were 'enemies of the Reich' too? Oh, yes, the Nazis were very generous about bestowing such labels. Florian—poor, good-hearted Florian—died at Auschwitz, in the gas chambers."
"And . . . and your father?" I steeled myself, not sure I really wanted to hear the answer.
Stetten finished his egg and wiped his mouth. "My father was taken to a holding center near the Gare de l’Est," he said, and as he did something shivery moved along my spine. To hear him talk about these things in that pleasant, neutral voice somehow made them all the more horrible. "There he was held for four days, at the end of which time he was found beaten to death, the unfortunate victim of unknown assailants. The commandant, who expressed his profound regret, refused us permission to see his body. Much later I learned that during those four days my father had steadfastly refused to sign an instrument legally ceding the paintings to the Third Reich."
Not a pause in the entire ugly recital, not the minutest variation in tone, not even a subtle hint of irony at phrases like "profound regret" or "legally ceding." There was nothing at all to show what he might be feeling other than an unnatural (or was it natural?) erectness of posture "As for the rest of my family-"
"Sir," I interrupted, "it’s really not necessary-"
"No, it’s all right, I’d like you to know. It’s been such a long time since I’ve talked about these things."
So, fascinated and appalled, I listened. Two days after the report of the senior Stetten’s death, the same two Gestapo officers, accompanied this time by a pair of French policemen, came to the apartment and escorted Frau Stetten to ERR headquarters in the plush Hotel Commodore on boulevard Haussmann, keeping her for a day and a night. There, using persuasions that she would never speak of to her son, they convinced her to sign the same "legal" document that had unsuccessfully been offered to her husband.
With the Nazi version of due process satisfied, the Stettens were then shipped back to Austria, where more legalisms ensued. The family’s cigarette factory and other holdings were ceded to the State for the duration of the war, and the 200-year-old family residences near Melk, Austria and Csorna, Hungary, were signed away as German officers’ quarters, while the Stettens were permitted to keep the top floor of their townhouse on the outskirts of Vienna for themselves.
Albrecht and his brother Rolf were quickly drafted and sent to the Eastern front. Rolf died of blood poisoning at Stalingrad. Albrecht was bayoneted in the throat in the first action he saw, and was reassigned as a stretcher-bearer. When he later suffered a ruptured lung during a mortar attack near Smolensk he was hospitalized for three months, dismissed from the army, and sent back to Vienna, where he found his mother, once a celebrated society beauty, disheveled, emaciated, and drifting in and out of sanity. A few months later she dashed blindly out into the street in her nightgown during an early-morning bombing. Running after her, Stetten was terribly injured yet again, lying for two days in the rubble before they got to him, his pelvis crushed by falling masonry. His mother’s body was never identified. The end of the war found him in a filthy, overcrowded hospital ward, physically wrecked, emotionally numbed, and the sole remaining member of his noble family, the last of the long line of Stettens. He was 29.
There isn’t too much you can say after a story like that, so I just picked mechanically at my food, sunk in what was getting to be a familiar feeling: a half-thankful, half-ashamed sense of unearned and fantastic good fortune—of having, in a world of misery on every side, simply been born at the right time and in the right place.
Amazingly, Stetten's eyes twinkled. "Oh, dear, now I’ve gone and depressed you. I think we'd better change the subject." He gave the table a brisk double-tap to announce a shift in mood and looked around us. "Let me see . . . have you noticed anything extraordinary about this breakfast room?" He asked it as brightly as if he’d spent the last twenty minutes describing his summer in the Alps.
I let out my breath and shook my head, more than ready to talk about something else.
He gestured at the other tables, each with a single person or a quiet couple at it, using their knives and forks in the concise, delicate European manner, like surgeons excising a gall bladder. "We’re all sitting down and being served, like gentlemen and ladies. Isn't it nice? We might be back in the last century. This, my friend, may be the only first-class hotel in Vienna, perhaps in the world, that hasn’t succumbed to the crass grotesquerie of the breakfast buffet. Where else can you go at this time of the morning without having to witness hordes of brutish, bulging, gluttons piling their plates with food?" He dabbed his almost-invisible mustache with his napkin and made a droll, mock-horrified face. "And then going grimly back for more, like drowsy, sated lions returning to the bloody carcass, because it’s still there."
He smiled cheerfully at me. "And what's your opinion about it, Dr. Revere?"
"What's my opinion?" I said, laughing. "My opinion is that if I could speak English like that, I’d be a happy man."
That made him laugh too. "You must remember that I’ve been at it longer than you have. My first visit to London was in 1930, many years before you were born. I was educated at Cambridge."
With the somber mood broken, we had a last cup of coffee and went out to the handsome lobby to find Leo Schnittke, Stetten's attorney. Stetten used an old-fashioned silver-headed walking stick. Not so much as a cane, like Simeon’s, but as a sartorial accessory; like the rest of his costume, dapper as could be but a couple of generations out of date.
Was there an element of phoniness in all this fin-de-siècle folderol? Was it too good to be true, could there be a con job going on here, as Alex suspected? I admit that I gave it some thought. Stetten was simply too perfect a count; a casting director’s dream in speech, deportment, dress, and manners. In the end, however, I decided not. For one thing, he was just too good at it; it came too naturally. I couldn’t believe he was playing a part. Besides, although he had been trying to be amusing (and succeeding) when he was going on about breakfast buffets, I sensed that behind the clever words he was speaking from the heart. If he’d had his way, we would have been back in the last century, and the peasants would have been where they belonged, huddled around their hearths eating blood sausage and boiled cabbage and not bellying up to Eggs Benedict at fancy buffet tables all over the world. The Count of Stetten, I was pretty certain, was a genuine, deep-dyed member of his caste, a blue-blooded dinosaur who had yet to resign himself to the rise of the plebeians—especially when they encroached upon the sensibilities of the more refined.
Leo Schnittke, waiting for us near the marble-columned main staircase wasn't much younger than Stetten, a portly man with worldweary, disillusioned eyes set in blue-black sacs, heavy, drooping jowls, and a wispy, near-colorless goatee that made him look like a venerable sage on a twelfth-century Chinese vase. Or would have, if not for the well-chewed stump of an stubby, unlit cigar in his mouth and an undisguised expression of testiness, impatience, and general superiority on his pouchy face.
"'Tag," he said shortly, bowing stiffly when Stetten introduced us, but pointedly leaving his hand in his pocket and not extending it, which was unusual in this part of the world, where males shook hands at every conceivable opportunity. He also didn't bother taking the cigar out of his mouth. I wondered if he was miffed at not having been invited to breakfast with us.
"So where is this Dulska?" he asked Stetten in German.
"I don't know, but we'll soon find out."
At the reception desk, Stetten's bona fides as genuine aristocracy were persuasively confirmed. When at first the young clerk haughtily began to explain that he wasn’t at liberty to give out the room numbers of guests, he was hissed aside by the scandalized day manager (in full-dress morning coat, I'm happy to say). Herr Stumpf apologized profusely on the hotel’s behalf, and after expressing his great pleasure in seeing
the count again after so long an absence and hoping that the count was well, that the count was entirely satisfied with his suite, and that the count would let him know the instant he required anything, however minor, he informed us that although Herr Dulska was registered in Suite 400, he had engaged the private Württemberg sitting room for the morning, a most charming room, and was awaiting us there. We would find it on the mezzanine, should the count and his friends care to take the elevator to that floor.
Stetten accepted these servilities courteously but absent-mindedly, musing aloud as we walked to the elevator. "There was a time when I used to stay here three or four times every month, but that was before . . . well, before." He fingered a veined, honey-colored marble wall affectionately, almost proprietorially. "Did you know that it was the Emperor Franz Joseph himself who dedicated this hotel? My grandfather attended the reception. Afterwards, it was the only hotel in Vienna at which His Majesty would stay. Other monarchs shared his preference. It was Edward VII's favorite hotel as well. And Victor Emmanuel III's'—I was at a private dinner in his honor here."
"Mm," I said. A scrap of information that I’d picked up somewhere went floating through my mind: as Führer, Adolf Hitler had a favorite Viennese hotel too, at which he also invariably stayed.