Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  "A telling point," he said amiably. "On the other hand, isn't it at least theoretically possible that Stetten now has the painting? That it was Stetten who had him killed for just that purpose? It would have saved him a million-and-a-quarter schillings; a great many people have been killed for less. Ah, I see from your expression that the possibility hadn't occurred to you."

  "Not until now, no." But even as I said it I realized that I wasn't telling the truth. It had occurred to me, all right; I'd just pushed it down to a subliminal level. I didn't like thinking that Stetten might be a murderer. "Alois, if you think he might really be involved, why haven't you talked to him?"

  "But we have. I had a discussion with him this morning. Charming man. We managed to put him on the 11:22 to Salzburg, only two hours after the train he intended to take."

  "And do you suspect him? I mean, really suspect him?"

  He shrugged. "Early days yet, friend Revere." He looked up with evident pleasure as the waiter set down our refilled goblets, then downed a healthy swallow and wiped foam from his upper lip. "Aahh." He was one of those people who made whatever he ate or drank look wonderful.

  "Let me ask you something, Alois," I said, sipping my own beer and still thinking about Stetten. "I can't help wondering about him. The guy is like something out of 1860. Is he really a count, do you know?"

  He pondered. "Let me answer that in two words. Yes and no."

  I smiled. "Well, I'm glad to have that cleared up."

  "Albrecht, Graf Stetten is a genuine count, a royal count in fact, a lineal descendant of the ruling Habsburgs, great-grand-nephew of Emperor Ferdinand I and Anna of Sardinia, grand-nephew of Felix Ludwig and Amalia of Saxe-Meiningen-Hohenlohe, and currently sixty-second in line for the throne of Austria."

  "I'm impressed."

  Alois went on: "The catch being, as may have occurred to you, that there is no throne of Austria." With a fresh glass in front of him and with his stomach full, he was feeling expansive too.

  "You know, I think I did notice that, yes. That's why I'm asking."

  Alois settled himself more solidly in his chair and cleared his throat, shifting visibly into professorial mode. "The controlling legislation in this matter is the Habsburg Law of 1919, subsequently written into the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, which banishes all members of the Habsburg family from Austrian territory unless they explicitly renounce dynastic pretensions and accept the status of loyal private citizens, which Stetten did many years ago. The upshot is that, although technically the term 'count' no longer has legal meaning, Stetten is entitled to use it if he wants to—as long as it's for amusement purposes only, so to speak."

  Having delivered himself of this explanation, he got out his pipe and pouch and started on his personal version of the pipe-lighter's lengthy ritual, using a brown, tobacco-cured thumb to press the stuff into the bowl of the pipe. "Now let me ask you something. This collection that Stetten's father put together—I gather it's quite good?"

  "It's a lot better than good."

  "But before this started, you hadn't heard of it?"

  "That's right."

  "Well, why not, if it's so extraordinary? I'd have thought it would be famous."

  "No," I said, "and it's really not that surprising. Look, if you don't count the collections in a handful of the world's top museums—the Met, the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Hermitage, the National Gallery, a few others, maybe—most Old Masters are in private hands, not public collections, and—I'm guessing now—I'd say that nobody but the owners has any idea where half of them are, and that's a conservative estimate. There's no law that says that dealings in the art market have to be made public, and a lot of sellers, let alone buyers, prefer to keep things private. Why would you want the whole world to know you have a million dollars worth of art hanging on your living room walls?"

  "Mm. All right, let's move on." He got the pipe into his mouth, in the process adding another sprinkling of tobacco shreds to his lapels, and noisily lit up, flaring a wooden match with his thumbnail, the way they do in old movies. "You know the way the art market works, Ben. In your opinion, just what was our man Dulska up to?"

  "Well, assuming that you're right and he'd been acting for the mafia in this, I guess he just figured he could do better on his own and that I could help him find—"

  "No, I don't mean about his calling you, I mean what was he doing in the first place? He certainly couldn't have anticipated making a deal of his own with you; you weren't even in the picture when he contacted Stetten. So just why did he come to Vienna?"

  "You mean you don't think he was working for the mafia?"

  "No, I do think he was working for the mafia. Let me put it this way, then. What were they up to?"

  "You've lost me."

  "You said the picture was worth five million dollars, nicht wahr?"

  I nodded.

  "So why would they be willing to let it go for one million—for a hundred thousand, when it came down to it? These are not people who are known for their generosity or their readiness to compromise. Damn." His pipe had gone out; he set about relighting it.

  "Well, Stetten was the legitimate owner; why would he agree to—"

  "But why deal with Stetten at all?" he said, narrowing his eyes against the acrid, self-generated fog spiraling around his head. "Why not sell it to somebody who'd pay what it's worth? After all, that's obviously what Dulska was trying to set up with you, so why bother going through the rigmarole with Stetten at all?"

  It was the same question that had occurred to me, and the best answer that I'd been able to come up with so far was that Dulska or his bosses had been afraid to offer it on the open market for fear that Stetten might hear about it, raise a stink, and perhaps bring the law down on them; the Old Master marketplace, private or not, can be an extremely gossipy world. And as for fencing it in the criminal market, selling it to a fence would have brought only five percent of value—ten at most; say $500,000. (Then again, Dulska wouldn't have had to sell it to a fence because according to Alois he was a fence, an international one, and as such, you'd have thought he'd have had sufficient contacts among the unscrupulous to get at least a couple of million dollars for the painting.)

  In other words, I didn't know.

  "Neither do I," Alois said.

  From the reflective way he said it, I thought he might have some ideas of his own, but if he did he didn't share them with me.

  We ordered a kännchen of coffee to round off the meal, and as Alois stirred a second spoonful of sugar into his cup he said casually: "So will you be going home now?"

  "Not yet, no. I really don't see how I can just take off and let things rest as they are. There are still a few things I can do on this side of the Pond."

  "Such as? I sincerely hope you're not thinking of doing a little independent police work of your own."

  "No, of course not."

  "And you're not working for Stetten any more, are you?"

  "No, I'm fired; as of this morning I'm on my own, but there really are some things I can do, and I'm afraid if I just go back home and forget about it, there'll never be any answers."

  "Oh, I don't know. We have a pretty competent police force here, and Pirchl's like a bulldog once he gets his teeth into something."

  I had no doubt of that, but Pirchl's job was finding out who killed Zykmund Dulska in the heart of Vienna. His interest in the murder of an elderly Boston pawnbroker was zilch. I knew Sergeant Cox was plugging away on it back home, but I had a growing conviction, strengthened by Dulska's death, that the answers were here in Europe, not in New England.

  I told Alois about my plans: fly to St. Petersburg the next day to talk to Yuri Minkov, then to Budapest to talk to Szarvas, the Hungarian art dealer who was claiming that the Boston Velazquez was really his, then back to Vienna to talk to Nussbaum, who claimed that the Boston Velazquez was his, and then, at some point, to the mine at Altaussee to learn whatever I could learn there.

  "I've heard of cold leads," Al
ois said with a chuckle, "but this is in a class of its own. You're researching the Second World War. What are you hoping you're going to find out?"

  "I don't know. Do you always know what you're looking for when you're asking questions?"

  "Hardly ever. Well, I wish you well. And I wish I could do something about your friend's murder."

  "It's not only Simeon," I said. "I'd still like to help Stetten if I can, and maybe I can head these claimants off at the start and save everybody a lot of trouble and expense. According to the director at CIAT, the one in Budapest is a crook, a shady art dealer who puts in claims like this all the time—and manages to win a fair proportion of them. Unfortunately, the courts don't always come up with the right decision."

  "I'm truly distressed to hear that. But look, what are you going to do if their claims are legitimate? What if these people, or the one here in Vienna at any rate, made a good-faith purchase somewhere along the way, not knowing the painting's history, and is the innocent victim of a theft himself? Wouldn't he have as good a case as Stetten?"

  "Yes, he would, but in any case, his claim isn't legitimate; neither of them is. Both of them are claiming that the Nazis confiscated the painting directly from them in the 1940's, which is impossible."

  "No; at least one of them has to be lying."

  "They're both lying, Alois, or if they're not, then at the very least they've got the wrong painting in mind; that can happen too after fifty-plus years. But this one was taken from Stetten's apartment by the Germans in 1942, along with seventy-two others."

  "That's possible." He looked at me shrewdly. "It's also possible that Stetten is lying."

  I poured us both some more coffee from the kännchen, remembering Stetten's calm, straightforward narration of the night the Gestapo came, and of the terrible events that had followed. "I don't think so."

  "Well, it's up to you," Alois said. "Personally, I think you ought to go back home, or at least stay clear of Vienna—of Austria—for a while. You get on Pirchl's nerves, I'm afraid."

  "Yeah, well, he doesn't do anything for mine either."

  "Yes, but you can't haul him in for questioning any time you feel like it."

  "What's he got against me, anyway? As far as I can tell he just doesn't like my looks."

  "Well, that happens to be true, he thinks you look too American. But be fair, there's a little more than that. You did, after all, come to a foreign city and make a clandestine midnight appointment—"

  "Eleven o'clock, not midnight."

  "—with a known mafia operative to discuss dealing in contraband art of enormous value."

  "But I explained all that to him—about twenty times."

  "And struck him as glib and overly facile, with an answer for everything."

  "Of course I had an answer for everything, why wouldn't I have an answer for everything? I was telling the truth."

  Alois smiled. "I don't think you quite understand the way a policeman's mind works."

  He'd started to worry me. I put down my cup and leaned across the table. "Alois, surely he can't think that I . . what? Murdered Dulska? . . . and then hopped on the elevator and came back up there with the body lying on the carpet and the place crawling with cops? I'd have been out of my mind."

  "No, I'm sure he doesn't believe you're a murderer, but he does seem to think it's possible that you may be, shall we say, 'involved' in some way."

  "That's absolutely crazy!"

  "Actually, it isn't. Put yourself in his place. You say that, aside from the Turner in the exhibition at St. Petersburg, these two Velazquezes are the first paintings from the truck to surface since the war."

  "As far as I know, yes."

  "Two paintings only. Coming to light in two different manners, on two different continents, with two entirely different casts of characters."

  "Yes. . . ."

  "Except for one person: you. You've wound up smack, kerplunk, at the center of things both times. You, and only you."

  "Well, yes, but . . . I think it's . . ."

  "To what, a person of Pirchl's mode of thinking would ask, do we attribute this? Mere innocent coincidence or—" His expressive eyebrows went up and down. "—or a meaningful and perhaps sinister confluence of events? It makes one wonder, nein?"

  "Alois, you're really making me nervous here. Do you think I'm involved?"

  "I do not," he said promptly, for which I was grateful, "but it's Pirchl you have to worry about, and you'd be better off in Boston, where you wouldn’t be so much on his mind."

  "No, I'm not going back. I made it sound firm, which it was.

  "Well, it's your funeral," he said cheerfully. "You'd better let me know where you'll be and I'll pass it on to the inspector. And if you turn up anything useful or need me for anything . . ." He gave me his card, first scrawling his home number on it, and pushed himself to his feet. "Well, back to saving humanity from itself. Good luck, Ben. Keep in touch."

  I sat there a few minutes longer, finishing the strong, good Austrian coffee and thinking over what he'd said about sinister confluences of events.

  It made you wonder, ja.

  Chapter 17

  When I got back to my room the amber telephone-message light was flashing. Pirchl on my case already? Just what I needed to make my day complete.

  But the recorded message wasn't from the police. "Dr. Revere? Stetten here. I'm sorry about the bother this morning, I'm sure you understand. Well, then. You said something about locating my other paintings, I believe? I'm extremely interested to hear what you have in mind. You have my number, yes? Call when you are able. I'm anxious to—well, please call."

  Stetten's thin voice was animated and cheerful, about as different from the tone of his flustered call of the morning as a voice can be. Whatever else you said about him, the old guy sure could change moods in a hurry. In the short time I'd been in Vienna I'd seen him go from affable patrician, to imperious Monseigneur, to terrified old codger, with a few stops in between. And now, presto-chango, here he was, airily dismissing the morning's "bother." I just hoped my recuperative powers would be that good when I was in my eighties.

  When I called his number I got a busy signal, so instead I set about trying to get the telephone number of Szarvas, the shady Hungarian art dealer that Christie had told me about, but coping with the Hungarian information operator was miles beyond me, as I thought it might be, so I went down to the long-distance booths in the lobby where I could get some help from the clerk manning them. With her assistance I got through to the art gallery in Budapest on the first try, and although Szarvas himself, the man I wanted to talk to, didn't speak English, an assistant did. I explained what I wanted to talk about, and he said fine, come on over, and gave me the name of what he assured me was a superior hotel practically next door to the gallery. I told him I'd be there on the morning of the following Tuesday.

  I had the concierge rearrange my flight schedule to let me stop off for a night in Budapest on the way back from Russia, then put in another telephone call to the other claimant, the one in Vienna, Mr. Nussbaum, but for the second time got no answer. Then, back in my room I tried Stetten again.

  This time he picked it up. "Dr. Revere? Ah, I was hoping it was you. How are things in Vienna?"

  "About as well as could be expected," I said, not knowing what else to answer. "I understand the police spoke to you this morning."

  "Yes, yes," he said off-handedly. "There wasn't much I could tell them. Well, then, tell me, what do you have in mind? You mentioned a plan to find my other paintings?"

  I sank into the armchair beside the phone. "Well, I don't know that I'd go so far as to call it a plan, but I've been thinking about a few things that might be useful. First of all, there's the other painting from the Lost Truck that's already shown up—"

  "Yes, the other Velazquez, the one in Boston."

  "No, I don't mean that one, I mean the one that turned up a few years ago in the Hermitage exhibition."

  "Hermitage exhibition
!" he exclaimed. "But I knew nothing about this. Which one was it?"

  "It was a Turner seascape."

  "A what? A Turner, you said?" The excitement left his voice. "No, I don't believe we had any Turners. I'm sure we didn't. Father never had faith in the English school. I'm afraid that's no help at all."

  "Not necessarily. The Nazis took seventy-some-odd paintings from you—"

  "They took seventy-three."

  "—but there were a hundred and six on the truck. So some of them came from elsewhere."

  "Elsewhere?"

  "Other collections."

  "Did they really?"

  "You mean you didn't know that?"

  "No, I didn't. But how does it matter? Why would I be interested in someone else's pictures?"

  "Because by talking to the people at the Hermitage I might be able to establish a trail back to the truck itself, to the rest of the paintings—including yours—and then, with a little luck, follow it forward again to wherever they are now."

  "Ah," he said after a moment, "I think see what you're driving at."

  "There are some other possibilities too." I told him that I intended to visit the Altaussee salt mine, and that other claimants to the Boston Velazquez had popped up in Budapest and Vienna and that I planned to try and see them too.

  "Yes, Leo told me others had come forward. I was concerned, but he says there's nothing to be worried about; our case is very, very strong. Do you . . . you do agree, don't you?"

  "I'm sure Mr. Schnittke's right," I said reassuringly, not that I thought there was ever nothing to be worried about in a case like this, "but all the same, I don't see how it can hurt to talk to them, and it might do some good."

  "By all means, see what you can do with them; I leave it to you. Now listen, are you done in Vienna for the moment? Why don't you come to Salzburg for a day or two? We can talk all this over more thoroughly. And there's something I want very much to show you."

  So I wasn't canned after all; that was nice. "Sure, all right."

  "Can you make it tomorrow? Or even this evening? There's a flight every hour."