Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  "And what happened to them?"

  "Gone. A few were legitimately sold. Mostly, they were confiscated by the Nazis while we were away. When we came back, there was nothing—only some meaningless 'receipts.'"

  "But weren't any of them recovered?"

  "If you mean, were they returned to Austria, yes, some were. After the war, as you know, the Germans delivered a good many art objects to the Austrian government for return to the individual owners. However, it didn't always work out that way."

  He paused to lever himself down from the curb to cross a street. I almost offered him my arm but I knew he wouldn't like it. "I long ago gave up hope of seeing any of them again," he said and then gave me a wry smile. "It seems I was unable to satisfy the court's documentary criteria."

  He didn't have to say any more. Austria's approach to the restitution of artworks stolen by the Nazis from its citizens—most of them Jews, unlike Stetten—was notorious for foot-dragging, ineptitude, and outright meanness, right up there with Switzerland's similarly venal treatment of Holocaust victims' claims to wartime bank accounts. For 40 years after the war, Austria had stored the returned works of art in state museums and government storehouses, categorically refusing to consider any claims. Only in 1985, under scathing international pressure, did the Parliament pass legislation allowing previous owners or their heirs to file claims for their property.

  Even then, the "documentary criteria" were daunting. Claimants, who weren't allowed to view the works themselves, had to provide either exact descriptions or impeccable evidence, such as appraisals or sales records. After four decades, with most of the original owners dead, not many could meet the requirements. There were notorious cases in which claims were turned down because the estimated size of a painting—last seen in the 1940's—was off by a centimeter or two. As a result, only about ten percent of the holdings were ever returned; the rest were auctioned in 1996, with the proceeds finally going (grudgingly) to Holocaust-victim agencies.

  Not a pretty record, but Austria and Switzerland had hardly been the only ones. Even brave France, it was turning out, had plenty to be ashamed of, let alone Russia and the Eastern European countries. And it was by no means only wealthy collectors like Stetten who were being stiffed. Many of the claimants were poor, not rich, seeking not the return of a stately collection, but of a dining room commode that had been in the family 200 years, or a single portrait that had hung in the living room. Sons and daughters of people who had been gassed to death at Auschwitz or Dachau were routinely turned away because they could produce no death certificates for their parents. Wretched stuff; enough to shake anybody’s faith in humanity’s penchant for doing the right thing when there were profits to be made for doing anything but.

  By the time we reached the hotel my spirits were as low as his, so that I was more than ready to say goodnight. I freshened up in my suite and came back downstairs at 10:55, five minutes before I was due to meet Dulska. There was some kind of hassle going on in the lobby—hurried, snappish policemen, gesticulating clerks—but the Imperial's bar was far enough away from the traffic to be peaceful. I ordered a glass of barack, the pungent, apricot-flavored liquor that I'd never been quite certain that I liked, but which I order when I'm in Vienna anyway because I had it on my first visit, and sat down to wait for Dulska.

  At 11:10 he hadn't yet arrived. I assumed that he'd been worried about seeming a little too anxious and had decided to make me wait a little to prove he wasn't. But when he hadn't shown up by 11:25, I started to get itchy. Apparently he'd decided that we were going to meet in his suite after all, whether I liked it or not. At first I was annoyed, but it didn't take me long to conclude that, inasmuch as he was holding all the cards, all I could do was go along with him.

  I remembered the hotel manager saying that morning

  that he was in Suite 400, so I went through the lobby—tranquil enough now—and took the mirrored elevator to the fourth floor. When I came out my way was blocked by two policeman in summer uniforms—light-blue, open-necked shirts with red epaulets, green military caps and matching pants, and handguns in flap-covered holsters on their belts. One of them, tall and sinewy, stepped away from the corridor wall against which he'd been leaning and blocked my way.

  "Kann ich Ihnen helfen?"

  I told him that I was on my way to speak with Herr Dulska, the gentleman in Room 400.

  "Ein moment, bitte," he said with a nod, then spoke a few rapid words to his colleague, who went to an open doorway at the far end of the hall, hurrying back with a middle-aged officer whose spiffy uniform included a black tie and a green tunic but no sidearm. This, I was informed, was Polizeibezirkinspektor Pirchl, who wished to ask me a few questions.

  Pirchl, a squash-faced man with a watch-yourself-I'm-in-charge-here manner, looked me up and down with his hands clasped behind him. "Amerikaner?"

  I nodded and told him who I was. "And your 'business' with Herr Dulska?" he asked in German, with a heavy, caustic emphasis on "business."

  This man is not too taken with me, I thought. I couldn't tell whether it was just something that went with the job, or it was me in particular that he didn't like. Or maybe Amerikaners in general.

  I shrugged. "Not really, no." Not the world's greatest comeback, but what was there to say?

  Fortunately he didn't pursue it, but I didn't like the way he was looking at me. "Come with me, please," he said abruptly, turning on his heel and quick-marching me to the open door. Nope, I thought, it's me, personally.

  In the front room I could see men in uniform and

  civilian dress bustling around. "Walk only on the paper," Pirchl said at the door. "Put your hands in your pockets so you touch nothing." Then, with a quick look at me: "You don't mind looking at a dead body?"

  Christ, I thought, not another dead body.

  But it was, of course, and of course it was Dulska. He was in shirtsleeves, trousers, and socks, lying on his stomach on the floor of the bedroom, his arms caught under his body, his head twisted enough to one side for me to recognize him. I'd been right about his having more than enough blood. His white shirt was drenched from shoulders to belt with it, with more soaking blackly into the pale carpet around him, like dark wine into a sponge cake. There were only a few flecks of it on his face, but something pinkish and unsettling protruded from between his lips; after a moment I realized that it was a denture that had been displaced and lodged half-in, half-out of his mouth. I closed my eyes and turned away.

  Pirchl touched my elbow and motioned me back through the front room. "The paper, the paper," he snapped when I almost cut across a corner of carpet that hadn't been covered by the four-foot-wide strip of glossy brown paper.

  "So, is it the man?" he asked in the hallway, with a sort of careless impatience.

  "Uh . . . yes, it's him . . yes."

  One patronizing eyebrow lifted. "Do you need to sit down?"

  "No."

  It wasn't only that I didn't want to give him the satisfaction, either. Amazingly enough, as sordid, and pathetic, and ugly as the scene in there had been, I didn't feel the need to. The truth is, I wasn't feeling much of anything beyond disappointment and frustration: there went my lead to the paintings; there went my lead to Simeon's killer. But there had been no stomach-twisting lurch of disgust, no urge to retch, not even any queasiness to speak of after the first look at him.

  I guess you can get used to anything.

  * * *

  The Württemberg sitting room, where Stetten, Dulska, and I had met that morning, had been taken over as the police command post, and it was there that I was asked to go over in detail my business with Dulska. Even with the help of an interpreter it got a little dodgy when I tried to explain to Pirchl that whereas I was pretty sure that Dulska was a crook, I most certainly wasn't, and that my only purpose in agreeing to a late-night, private appointment with him had been to lead him on. Eventually Pirchl seemed to accept it, at least for the moment, but naturally that got e onto explaining about St
etten, the Velazquezes, Simeon, and all the rest of it, which took a long time and irritated him with me that much more. He was one of those people with a natural knack for making you feel that there were a hundred incredibly pressing, important things demanding his immediate attention, if only you weren't taking up his time with your trivial and pointless maunderings.

  Somewhere near 1 a.m., a policeman came in to report that the painting was nowhere to be found; not in Dulska's suite, and not in the hotel safe either. Hardly surprising, but depressing all the same. After that, it took another hour before they turned me loose. Pirchl told me that I would have to review and sign my statement at central police headquarters no later than noon that day. Once there, he said, I should expect to remain for a while because Polizeioberstleutenant Feuchtmüller would no doubt wish to speak with me about this matter, as would someone from the American consulate.

  By this time I didn't give a damn who might want to speak with me, or why, or when. My head could have been stuffed with cotton batting (and felt as if it were) for all the good it was doing me. I was practically ready to weep with exhaustion. Aside from its having been an extremely long, strange day, I'd been awake all of the previous night on the flight to Vienna, which meant I hadn't slept in about 40 hours, except for a bit of uneasy snoozing in the museum. And with a raging case of jet lag on top of that, my circadian rhythms were still slogging along on Boston time, six whopping hours out of whack. Besides, it had been less than four weeks since I'd had my ribs broken and I had yet to come around to feeling a hundred percent whole again, even before all this.

  I mean, poor me.

  Chapter 14

  I have a hazy recollection of stumbling into my room, kicking off my shoes, and falling into bed, but that's about it. My brain had shut down. All the same, utterly zonked or not, I popped wide awake at a little before three a.m., having slept one hour, with a jumpy feeling in my muscles and a hollow feeling in my stomach that told me I was finished sleeping for the night whether my brain liked it or not. The hollow feeling wasn't from hunger. I was jet-lagged, at loose ends, lonesome, and even a little homesick—which is to say about normal for the first night in a foreign country, when you're all alone, and it's three o'clock in the morning, and you can't sleep because your biological clock doesn't know what time it is. And that's without a new murder thrown in.

  What I needed was the sound of a friendly voice, but it was coming home to me with increasing clarity that my list of friends was pretty short, especially with Simeon gone, and that it didn't extend to anyone who would have been pleased with a three a.m. telephone call. So I got up, took a shower, which got the coating of grime off but didn't do much else, switched into a pair of pajama bottoms, and flopped into an armchair to smoke one of my bimonthly cigars and mope.

  Give Alex a call to let her know how things were going? No, not at this time of the morning. Besides, I didn't really have anything to tell her. Sure, all sorts of exciting things had happened, but so what? Stetten's Velazquez was gone and I wasn't any closer to learning anything even vaguely linked to Simeon's murder. The truth was, I suddenly and contritely realized, that I'd hardly thought about Simeon all day, or so it seemed to me now. The brutal death of that good old man had been shoved aside by golden visions of buried Goyas and Gainsboroughs and pipe dreams of glory: Lost Masterpieces Discovered by Famed Boston Art Cop.

  Shit. I sat there awhile longer, penitent and ashamed, weary of the now-soggy cigar—as bad as Schnittke's—but smoking it down to a disgusting black stub anyway as a kind of self-punishment. It was a full half-hour before I realized that I had my times mixed up—it was only 9:30 p.m. back in Boston. (I told you, my brain had shut down.) I picked up the phone and dialed before I could change my mind.

  * * *

  The muffled sounds of chewing told me that she'd answered before she was quite ready. Then a gulped swallow. "Hello?"

  "Alex, hi, this is Ben Revere. I'm still in Vienna. I—"

  "Ben, hello! This is amazing, I was just having some pickled herring and thinking of you."

  What is there to say to that? "That's nice," I said. "I think." Whatever it meant, I was cheered. Not only was she thinking of me, she sounded glad to hear from me.

  "No, I mean I was sitting around noshing and reading the Globe, and here was this article about the Velazquez on page two."

  "Which Velazquez?"

  "Simeon's, the one here in Boston. It mentions you too, but the main thing is, your friend the count isn't the only one who's saying it's his. All kinds of other people are claiming that it really belongs to them."

  "That's not too surprising. The shysters come crawling out of the woodwork on something like this. But possibly, some of them are telling the truth."

  "How can that be? I thought it belonged to your friend the count."

  "What is this with my friend the count?"

  "Well, does it or doesn't it?"

  "It does, but it might also belong to someone else—somebody, say, who bought it after the war, thinking it was on the up and up, and owned it for maybe ten or fifteen years, and then had it stolen from him. Well, he'd have a legitimate claim too. It'd be complicated; nobody would really be at fault, and he'd have been every bit as genuinely ripped off as Stetten."

  "I suppose so," she said dubiously, "but that sounds like lawyer-talk to me. As far as I'm concerned, what matters is who it was stolen from in the first place. Hey, it's the middle of the night over there. What are you doing up?"

  "Well—"

  "Let me get my coffee. Then I want to hear what you've been up to." In a few seconds she picked up the phone again. "Okay, I'm back."

  "Coffee with pickled herring?" I said.

  "Coffee after pickled herring."

  "Who eats pickled herring at nine-thirty anyway? It's unnatural." As if I were a position to criticize weird eating habits.

  Alex laughed and I got a sudden, clear image of her big-mouthed, scoop-nosed, streaky-haired beauty, and her long, strong legs and big hands, and the way she threw back her head and let go when she laughed, with a honk like Julia Child's. What was really odd about this was that, until now, I'd always thought my taste in women ran to the small-boned and delicate. Live and learn. What are you wearing right now, I wanted to ask, is your hair still in a ponytail? But of course I didn't.

  "Aahh," she said, gulping coffee. "So tell me: how did it go?"

  "Not real well, I'm afraid."

  "Well, on a scale of one to ten."

  "On a scale of one to ten? Ohh, mm . . . minus-two-hundred-and-fifty, I'd say. The dealer's dead and the painting's disappeared." I figured I might as well get it all out at once. "Oh, and the Vienna police suspect me of something, but I'm not sure what."

  I heard her cup come down on a table with a whack. "The—are you serious?"

  And so I told her all about it, and it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd imagined. "Ben," she said with gratifying concern, "this is really getting—I mean, that makes three people that have been killed just since this began, do you realize that?"

  "It's been pretty hard not to notice, but I still have a few apples in my basket. I'm not ready to give up yet."

  "Listen, Ben, I don't know how to say this—I know that I'm the one that's been pushing you all along to get involved in this, but now . . . people getting murdered all over the place, and you in trouble with the police . . . I'm starting to think you were right. This is police work. Maybe you should just leave it to them and come home, don't you think?"

  "Not a chance," I said resolutely.

  Okay, I was posturing a little, but it wasn't just swagger. I'd meant everything I'd ever said about Simeon. I had a date in St. Petersburg and I damn well intended to keep it. And somewhere along the way another idea had belatedly occurred to me. The Altaussee mine was still a working salt mine, but a tourist attraction as well, with its own historical museum. They were bound to have some World War II records—maybe there was even somebody still around who had worked there at the time—s
o there might well be something of interest there. Certainly, it was worth the day or two it would take me to get there and back from Vienna after I returned from St. Petersburg.

  There was a barely audible cluck of the tongue from Alex's end after I told her this, and then a sigh. "You'll promise to be careful, though?" Then, as if regretting having shown too much concern. "It'd be a real pain to have you on my conscience."

  "Don't give it a thought. I know exactly what I'm doing, sort of."

  "I can't tell you how reassuring that is. Oh, before I forget—have you talked to Sergeant Cox lately? Has he told you who that dead body is, that they found in the pipe?"

  "Who it is? No, have they identified it?"

  "Yes, he says that it's someone named Dmitri Korolenko, and that he was a courier for the Moscow mafia. Simeon had him pegged right. Apparently he flew into Boston from Moscow only one day before he . . . before it happened. "

  "So it's true." I leaned back in my chair, musing. "A professional courier for the Moscow mafia really did come all the way to Boston to pawn a five-million-dollar painting for one hundred bucks."

  "Yes, but why?"

  Indeed. The old question again.

  Chapter 15

  I don't remember getting back into bed after talking to Alex but I must have, because that's where I was the next time I woke up, at 8:50 a.m. It took me four or five foggy seconds to realize that what had jarred me awake was the trill of the telephone on the table at the far side of the big bed, and then at least that much time again to reach it, having to fight my way through the billows of an oversized down comforter that must have decimated the central European goose population.