Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  Guess which one.

  Under the circumstances, I thought I’d just as well keep it to myself.

  Chapter 12

  Sykmund Dulska, the art dealer who wanted only to do the right thing, brought to mind a spiteful bullfrog. He was one of those uncomfortably swollen people who seem to have too much blood in their bodies, a spongy, fat-faced man with goggling eyes that wouldn't stop jumping around. At the door he greeted us effusively in English, the only language all four of us understood, and bowed us toward a table on which coffee, tea, and enough fruit, bread, and rolls to feed the Chicago Bulls had been meticulously arranged on linen so white it hurt to look at it. His Czech accent—or as Sergeant Cox might point out, what I took to be a Czech accent—was heavy, his voice a liquorish gargle that didn't go with all the fluttering.

  Stetten responded for the three of us. "Thank you very much," he said civilly enough, although I could see that he was about as taken with Dulska as I was, "but perhaps we might see the picture?"

  Dulska leaped heavily to obey. "Of course, of course, certainly, Excellenz. At once."

  At the far end of the room, illuminated by northern light streaming through the opened velour drapery of a ceiling-high window, was an easel covered with a dark cloth. Dulska lumbered to it and dramatically snatched the cloth away, watching Stetten as if he expected him to gasp or clutch his chest.

  All he got out of him, however, was a quiet "Well, well," followed by thirty seconds of studying it at room’s length with the gentlest of smiles on his face, his head cocked to one side, hands clasped atop the walking stick. I didn’t have a clue as to what he was thinking, and I was sure that Dulska didn’t either.

  Unlike the picture in Simeon’s shop, this one was still in its frame, and even from twenty feet away I could see that it—the frame—wasn't authentic. Gilded and elaborate as it was, it was of a type that hadn’t come into existence until the nineteenth century, long after Velazquez’s day, and not in Spain but in Germany at that, where it was produced for foreign, mostly English, consumption. That wasn’t necessarily a bad sign—old frames often got replaced when they developed rot or were damaged—but you couldn’t call it a good sign either. The important question in this case was: Was this the same frame that had been on Stetten’s father's painting in 1942? I couldn’t imagine him remembering, but I thought I ought to ask anyway.

  "Do you recognize the frame?"

  He smiled. "Let's have a closer look. It's handsome, isn't it?"

  Well, it was time to do what he had asked and be honest. "Yes, extremely handsome, but I’m afraid—"

  "—that it's not original," he finished for me. "Yes, I know. According to my father it was made in Munich only in the last century, but with great attention to detail, if not to historical accuracy."

  What did you know about that? Maybe his memory had something going for it after all.

  "I forget the name of the maker," he said. "Kantner, Kastner . . . now wait a second, there used to be . . ." He went around the easel to the rear of the picture. "Yes, here it is."

  I looked at the small, dulled brass plate nailed to the back of the frame: Anton Kantmann in München, it said. "Bogengasse 9." Stetten's 55-year-old recollection was on target.

  He came back to the front and, frowning, ran his hand over the carved grape leaves at the lower right corner. "Also, there should be a—ah, here. You see where this sprig has been broken off and regilded? My father told me I did that when I was a child. It seems I hit it with a toy hammer. I have no memory of doing it. Well."

  He stepped back from the painting and nodded at me, which I took to indicate that (a) I was now expected to do my thing, and (b) whatever I said wasn’t going to make much difference because he'd already made up his mind. Had he reached his decision wholly on the basis of the frame? That seemed a little naïve, to put it mildly. And he’d barely given the picture itself a glance.

  While Dulska stood fidgeting to one side, Stetten stood smiling to the other, and a scowling Schnittke chewed on his cigar, I took a good look at the painting, front and back. Stetten didn’t take long to get restless. "What do you think, Dr. Revere? Can you give us the benefit of your opinion? Would you like more time?"

  No, I didn’t need any more time. I’d barely needed the ten minutes I’d taken. For three days I’d been poring over photographs and descriptions of the Condesa de Torrijos, not only at the museum in Boston, but by way of the Internet and of a quick run down to New York to the unparalleled art library at the Frick Museum. I was reasonably sure that I’d seen everything that had gotten into print about it in the last hundred years, and a lot that hadn’t made it into print as well. Besides that, I had the formidable advantage, as Stetten had pointed out, of having examined its companion portrait, El Conde, only a few weeks earlier.

  Stetten had mentioned one criterion: the frame. I had a hundred of them burned into my mind, and every one of them quickly told me that the sober, gloved matron in black with the mantilla, the fan, and the wonderfully rendered jeweled cross dangling from one wrist was the real thing, another authentic and beautiful Velazquez. And I, like Stetten, was equally sure that it was the companion painting to his father’s Count of Torrijos, stripped from the wall of their Paris apartment in 1942, its last known whereabouts the back of a renegade German truck that had disappeared into an Alpine spring blizzard in April, 1945.

  This was clear not only from the matching size, treatment, and condition of the two pictures, but from the back of the Condesa's canvas, on which the various symbols and markings were almost exactly the same as those on the back of the one in Simeon’s shop, which meant that the two had shared a common history, as you might expect in a pair of portraits made as a set and then passed down through generations of art-loving collectors. There were only a few differences. Instead of Osuna 127/6, this one said Osuna 126/6, which was obviously the number assigned to it at the 1843 "Osuna sale" mentioned in the catalogue raisonné entry on the Count of Torrijos. And instead of the ne-2 that had been stamped on the first painting, there was now an sr-4, but neither symbol meant anything to me beyond the fact that it had been applied by the Germans; the angular Gothic lettering gave that away. The ERR was there too, although there was no German inventory tag.

  Otherwise, the backs of the two pictures were near-duplicates. The possibility that some forger or crook had faked these markings wasn't quite nil, but it was close. Where would he have gotten the information to reproduce them so exactly? The backs of paintings weren't described in catalogues raisonnés, and even the meticulous German records hadn't mentioned them, let alone illustrated them.

  So I was pretty certain that this was it, but when you’re a thousand-dollar-a-day expert, you can’t just look at something for ten minutes and deliver your verdict. If you do, people feel as if they’re not getting their money’s worth, which sounds silly, but I understand where the feeling comes from. I can remember bubbe's complaining that traveling by air was for crazy people; not because it was dangerous but because it wasn’t worth the extra cost compared to going by train, because on a train at least you spend some time, but on an airplane you’re there before you know it.

  Same thing.

  So I started running on about pentimenti and glazes, about the marvelously adroit, feathery brush strokes and the sure-handed blending, about the lack of a signature (again, a good sign in this case) and the plain but superbly done background, and so on and so forth, until I noticed that Stetten, while observing me with a certain fondness, had stopped paying attention. I finished my sentence, whatever it was, grinned, and reached to shake his hand.

  "Congratulations, sir, I think you've found your father's—that is, your—painting."

  I had forgotten about Dulska, but now he uttered a relieved grunt and brought his fat-fingered hands together. "Well, well, gentlemen, I’m glad that’s been settled so readily. Now perhaps you’ll join me in a cup of coffee and we can come to terms."

  Here’s where it gets interesting, I t
hought. For a guy who was just doing the right thing, who wanted no more than a finder’s fee to cover his own costs, who had no personal stake in the matter, he was awfully keen to wrap things up.

  At the table, he fussed over us, or rather over Stetten. ("Croissant, Excellenz? Rolls, Excellenz? I can personally recommend the gooseberry preserves, Excellenz.") But under that unctuous toadying I thought I could detect a man who didn't have much use for Albrecht, Graf Stetten and his kind. And not much for me either.

  Stetten accepted coffee and a croissant from Dulska but made no move to consume them. Schnittke and I were left to pour our own coffee. I sat next to Dulska. Stetten and Schnittke sat across from us.

  "You mentioned terms, Mr. Dulska," Schnittke said. He had an unpleasantly blunt way of speaking, with an odd, flat way of sounding his vowels that rang a bell, that reminded me of someone I knew, but that I couldn't quite place. Everything he said sounded like a challenge.

  "Why, yes," Dulska said. He looked from one of us to the other and sucked in a nervous breath of air that puffed out his pigeon-breast. Beads of perspiration had come out on his forehead. "Yes. I believe that, ah, mm, one million American dollars, that is to say, ten million Austrian schillings, would be fair, yes?"

  If he was talking to me, the answer was no. I thought a million dollars was outrageous. Not as a price for the picture, no. But as a finder’s fee?

  Stetten was taken aback too. "Why, why . . ."

  "Impossible," Schnittke said curtly. "Out of the question. If that is the sort of figure you have in mind, we may as well all go home right now."

  That launched Dulska into an excited, rambling harangue that had him picking at his already untidy collar and stuttering with earnestness. Surely we understood that he had gone to great trouble and expense in this matter. He was asking only what he himself had paid, expressed as a percentage of the amount he had given for the total lot in which the painting had been found—plus a small, indeed a ridiculously small commission to reimburse him for his expenses since then, and a reasonable adjustment for inflation. And surely the count could see that the painting would bring far, far more than a million dollars on the open market.

  "Maybe so," said an unimpressed Schnittke, "but Count Stetten is not interested in the picture in order to place it on the market."

  "No, indeed, far from it," Stetten put in.

  No, of course not, Dulska replied, that went without saying, that was understood; it had been a mere figure of speech. But the count must realize that there had been certain essential monetary considerations, that one did not cross the Czech and Austrian borders with a such a painting without ensuring beforehand that its way would be, shall we say, smoothed? That was not cheap.

  Schnittke, cigar wedged in the corner of his mouth, merely looked at him without comment. Stetten glanced nervously at me for help but I didn't see how I could guide him on this. Was it worth a million dollars? Yes, at a million dollars it was a bargain. On the other hand, why should he have to fork over a million bucks for his own painting? Besides, who knew if he had a million dollars to fork over? All I could do was shrug. He was going to have to decide this one on his own.

  Stetten licked his lips and opened his mouth to speak, but Schnittke tapped his wrist and leaned over to say something lawyerly in his ear. They whispered together for a few seconds and Stetten, looking nervous, nodded.

  It was Schnittke who spoke. "We are prepared to go as high as one hundred thousand dollars," he said, taking the cigar out of his mouth for the first time. One million schillings."

  "One hundred—" Dulska’s lips went in and out like a guppy’s. "No, really, you must be reasonable. If I wanted to sell the picture, I could ask five times as much, ten times as much, surely you see that, but I want no profit, I seek only to do the right thing."

  There it was again. This guy wanted nothing more from life than to do the right thing. "Five hundred thousand," he blurted. "I'm sorry, I cannot take anything less."

  "If that's your position," Schnittke said, gathering together some papers that he had come in with and beginning to slip them into an attaché case, "there's nothing more to discuss. Go ahead and sell it, and good luck with it."

  Pretty heavy-handed, but it struck me as the right approach to take with someone like Dulska. Schnittke knew—we all knew—that for whatever reason, and many came to mind, Dulska couldn't sell it at market value. If he could have, he would have, and the four of us wouldn't have been sitting there haggling over a finder's fee.

  Dulska's turn again. "Perhaps I could . . . wait a moment . . ." He scribbled a few calculations, probably sham, on some hotel note paper. "Yes, it might be possible. I believe that I could accept three hundred thousand dollars if it were—"

  Schnittke made a restless motion with his hand. "We're wasting our time. Albrecht, let's get out of here. If you want my opinion, this fellow—"

  Stetten held up his hand. "One moment, Leo. Mr. Dulska, I'm afraid you may have been misinformed as to my resources. I'm not a rich man. I can't pretend that I am other than eager to have this picture, and if I had a million dollars I would gladly—yes, Leo, don't look at me like that; I would."

  Schnittke grumbled something under his breath and chewed on his stogie some more, staring at the table. I wasn't sure, but it seemed to me that the cigar, which he'd never lit, was an inch shorter than it had been when we started. He ate the damn things.

  Stetten continued: "While you've been speaking, Mr. Dulska, I've been thinking of just how much money I can raise without turning myself into a pauper."

  Dulska watched him expectantly. Schnittke continued to emit disapproving sounds from somewhere down around his belt.

  "I am prepared to pay you a finder's fee of one-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand dollars, no more."

  "But, Excellenz—"

  "And even that may take me a few days. I'm afraid I can do no better, Mr. Dulska. I hope you can see your way to accepting it."

  Schnittke shook his head in sad disapproval but said nothing. Was it a routine they'd worked out between them, a sort of good-cop bad-cop attack to put Dulska on the spot? Maybe, but Stetten didn't strike me as the devious type. On the other hand, Schnittke did. And he was a lawyer.

  Planned or not, it worked. Dulska, his head down, nodded. "Very well," he said, sounding as if he were choking on a fish bone.

  That surprised me. A hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand dollars was only about half the price that the painting would be likely to bring on the black market. Apparently Dulska not only couldn't sell it on the open market, which was understandable because it was Stetten's painting after all, but he couldn't even unload it illicitly at a decent cut-rate price. Why not?

  "Very good, thank you," Stetten said. He sounded calm and self-possessed, but I could see that his hands were trembling. "Leo, if you would work with Mr. Dulska to prepare the necessary papers—Dr. Revere, did you say something?"

  Not exactly. I’d meant to issue a sober word of caution, but it had come out as an unprofessional squawk. I was flabbergasted; I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  I took a sip of cold coffee while I collected my thoughts and settled down. "I was only thinking," I said with admirable calm, "that it may be a bit early to finalize things. There are a few important questions to resolve."

  "Questions?" Dulska said peevishly. Apparently he felt that at the price he was getting we weren't entitled to any questions.

  "Questions of provenance," I said.

  Stetten's white eyebrows went halfway up his forehead. He had his Velazquez within his grasp at long last, and he was terrified that I might rock the boat. "Provenance? But—but, my dear friend, the provenance is impeccable; it can be verified from the mid-eighteenth century, from, from 1765, to the day my father bought it in 1912. I don't . . . I have documentary . . ." He flapped his hands uncertainly.

  "Sir, who owned it in 1765 isn't the issue you have to worry about. What I'm talking about is its provenance since your father bought it."r />
  "Since . . .? But what possible difference can that make? It was stolen from our home in 1942. Surely you don't doubt . . . you don't doubt—" For the first time he looked like a man in his ninth decade, befuddled and petulant.

  "No, of course not," I said as gently as I could, "but who’s owned it since then? Where’s it been for the last fifty years? How many times has it changed hands? How do we know someone else—someone other than Mr. Dulska, I mean—doesn’t have title to it?"

  "Yes, but you don't seem to want to understand." By now petulance had gained the upper hand, stiffening his spine a little. "The painting was taken from us by Hitler's thugs. Who has or has not possessed it since that time has no relevance."

  Until then I hadn't been able to decide for certain how savvy Stetten was or wasn't when it came to the way the art market worked. Now I knew. He was a babe in the woods.

  "Well, I'm afraid you're wrong there," I said reasonably. "If someone, somewhere along the line since then, bought it in good faith—that is, not knowing that it was stolen property—he'd be able to assert a legally valid claim to it too, especially if whoever he'd bought if from had also come by it in good faith."

  "But surely his claim wouldn't take precedence over mine."

  "I'm sorry, but you can't be sure of that. Ever since the war, the courts have had people fighting out just this kind of case. On the face of it, you'd have to say that both claims would be valid. Sometimes the decision goes one way, sometimes the other."

  Dulska uttered what he must have thought was a reassuring laugh. "Ha. Ha. Gentlemen, gentlemen, I can give you my word that there is no such problem here, none whatever."

  "That's fair enough," Stetten said. "If we have your assurance—-"

  Schnittke, who had been listening keenly but saying nothing for the last few minutes, interrupted him. "No, Albrecht, Revere makes an important point. He's right to be concerned." I actually got an approving little nod from him, and then he turned to the sweating art dealer. "What about the provenance then, Dulska? Our art expert is right. We'll need more than your word."