by Aaron Elkins
"No, I can't. I have an eleven o'clock flight to St. Petersburg tomorrow morning, and I'll be there and in Budapest for the next few days, so Wednesday would be the earliest."
"Wednesday, then. And Dr. Revere? It seems to me that you'll be doing a great deal more than you bargained for. Would fifteen hundred dollars a day plus expenses be appropriate?"
I have to admit that I gave this a moment's consideration, but only a moment's, and in the end I came down on the side of right. It was Simeon I was doing this for, not Stetten—Simeon and myself—and I damn well ought to be the one paying for it, even if it scuttled my budget for the next six months, which it just about would. "Thanks very much," I said, "but these next few days are on me. If you like, we can go back to the old arrangement when I show up in Salzburg."
"Oh, but at least you'll let me take care of your expenses. I have an account with the Hotel Kempinski in Budapest. I can—"
"I appreciate it, sir, but I insist. I've already booked my room at the Duna."
"The Duna?" he said doubtfully. "Are you sure it's good? You have to be careful with hotels in Budapest."
"It'll be fine for me. I don't really need anything fancy."
"As you like," he said stiffly. I suppose I'd hurt his feelings. Well, I'd soothe them when I got to Salzburg in a few days.
Tomorrow, Russia.
Chapter 18
St. Petersburg was freezing, which should have come as no surprise. After all, there it sits on the Gulf of Finland, only 500 miles south of the Arctic Circle, under lowering, slate-colored skies for three out of every four days, and pierced through by broad, twisting canals that act as funnels for the bone-chilling winds whistling in off the gray water. It was 30 degrees Fahrenheit when I got there, and although it wasn't snowing at the moment, it looked as if it might start any second. This was only September 22, bear in mind, and the clothes I'd brought with me from Boston had been packed with central Europe in mind, not northern Russia.
So the first thing I did, after checking in at the Grand Hotel Europe—a real budget-buster, but the only place in St. Petersburg that had its own water purification system so that you could brush your teeth without worrying about an invasion of Giardia lamblia, the intestinal parasite that had laid me low in 1995—the first thing I did was to run over to the huge Gostinny Dvor shopping complex across the street to buy a coat by means of sign language. I came within a millimeter of getting one of the sleek, sexy, gangsterish leather jackets that were so popular here, but finally, standing in front of the mirror, I concluded somewhat sadly that it just wasn't me. I settled instead for a puffy, tan, hiplength parka with a detachable hood, very ordinary. I don't think that was really me either, but it was probably in the ballpark.
Then back to the hotel with its smiling, friendly staff, long, gleaming marble corridors, dark, plush curtains, and an all-around air of decadent, pre-Revolutionary opulence, as long as you didn't count the scowling security guards at the door and the high-tech metal detector you had to walk through to get into the place. I suppose at least part of the idea was to give guests a sense of security, but somehow it didn't work that way.
My flight from Vienna had been delayed, then canceled, so that I'd had to wait around the airport for five hours before getting a later one, and hadn't arrived in St. Petersburg until after seven, totally bushed. Now it was almost nine, too late to do much of anything (anything that I was interested in doing) but have a drink and something to eat, and go to bed.
This being another first night in another foreign country, bombarded with alien customs, accents, and smells, I was feeling lonesome and a little off-center again (with as much international hopping around as I do, you'd think I'd take to it more naturally, but no, I always have a spell or two of the heebie-jeebies, usually at night), I went down to the hotel bar—the site of pre-dinner drinks with Yuri and the rest of the crew a few years ago—found a table for one, and ordered a Baltika beer, which is pretty good and also comes in a squat, brown, Budweiserlike bottle that is comfortingly homelike.
The Grand Bar, living up to its name, had polished cherrywood wainscoting and Art Deco reliefs, a ten-foot-high, green-porcelain-tile stove at each end, and stained-glass-bordered windows looking out on the department stores and public buildings of Nevsky Prospect, which is St. Petersburg's answer to the Champs Élysées and just about as old, having been laid out in 1710. Not far from me a pianist in a tuxedo slumped at a grand piano like Oscar Levant, cigarette dangling from his mouth, casually riffing his way through sets of George Gershwin and Neil Diamond. Get rid of the porcelain stoves and change the view out the windows a little, and I might have been in one of the big hotel cocktail lounges on Fifth Avenue, an ambience that suited me fine.
The waitress brought my beer, poured a little, and set down a bowl of fat cashews to go with it (I should think so, with the beer at $7 a pop). The place was crowded, mostly with middle-aged, ruggedly good-looking men. Maybe it was the mood I was in, but a good third of them looked like mafiosi to me—slicked-back hair, black turtlenecks, Armani blazers, and with a svelte, showgirl-gorgeous twenty-year-old, sometimes two, at each table. Another third looked like would-be mafiosi—slicked-back hair, black turtlenecks, Armani blazers . . . but no showgirls. Most of the other people seemed to be German tourists, along with a sprinkling of Americans. The Germans were drinking beer and pretending not to stare at the mafiosi, the Americans were drinking cocktails and pretending not to stare at the showgirls.
Me, I was too tired to stare at anybody. Rather than finding a restaurant, I stayed where I was, treating myself to another beer and the Russian equivalent of tapas—black and red caviars, minced onion, chopped egg, and sour cream, and a stack of silver-dollar-sized blini to pile them on.
My meeting with Yuri was set for ten o'clock the next morning and I tried to outline in my mind the questions I needed to ask. Instead, my thoughts kept drifting back to Stetten: I was still having a hard time knowing what to make of him. The complete turn-around after Dulska's murder—"I'm out of here, don't call me, I'll call you" at nine o'clock in the morning, followed by "What's your plan, I'm all ears" at two o'clock in the afternoon was hard to fathom.
And I was puzzled about something else. According to Stetten, he'd been assiduously hunting down his pictures for decades. Wouldn't you think he'd have heard about the Turner that had been shown at the well-publicized Hermitage exhibition? I would. Wouldn't you think he'd already have known that the Lost Truck had carried other paintings besides his father's seventy-three? I would. So why had they come as surprises when I'd told him?
It wasn't that I didn't trust him; I was pretty sure he'd been leveling with me—but only as far as he'd gone. More and more I was getting the feeling that there were pieces missing, things going on behind the scenes that I wasn't being let in on.
Whatever it was, there was just something about it all that wouldn't hang together. And something—something—about Albrecht von Stetten and his quest that didn't quite compute.
* * *
The next morning things looked brighter, partly because I'd finally had a good, long night's sleep, and partly because the threat of snow had disappeared and the day had dawned warm and golden. I breakfasted in my room, then left my puffy new parka in the closet and walked down Nevsky Prospect and across the splendid Palace Square to the Hermitage, where I got in line with everybody else waiting to get in.
For my money, the Hermitage is the most beautiful museum in the world. I'm not talking about the collection, which is not shabby either, but about the building itself, or rather the five interconnected, eighteenth-century buildings that make it up, especially its centerpiece, the vast and beautiful Winter Palace. Except for some dismal interior rooms and courtyards that weren't often seen by strangers, it had been meticulously, ornately restored to what it must have looked like two centuries ago, with extravagant quantities of gilt, semi-precious stone, carved marble, and lavish stucco-work and molding. In a country not known for big spending o
n public works, it was amazing.
The problem, from my perspective anyway, is that the place itself is such a knockout that it keeps your eyes in a constant state of gogglement—'Holy cow, look at them there chandeliers!' 'Good gosh, will you look at that there ceiling!'—and overwhelms the art that you thought you were there to see. You can't help feeling like a muzhik fresh in from the country, with ox dung still on your boots. I can't, anyway, so that by the time I'd made it past the ticket booth and into the entrance hall with its fantastic grand marble staircase, and approached the regal, upright woman at the information desk, I would have been tugging my forelock, if I'd had a forelock.
"Yuri Minkov," I said, expecting to have repeat it a few times, but apparently she was expecting me because she got on the telephone at once, and a minute later a slight, scholarly young man—not Yuri—came up politely. Murmuring something in Russian, he gestured with a pair of taped, horn-rimmed glasses for me to follow him to an elevator that took us up to the second floor. There I was quickly walked through a string of dazzling galleries—one of them, if I remembered correctly, being the White Dining Room, where the Bolsheviks had barged in and seized power from the provisional government in 1917—to a handsome, balconied, wood-paneled library that I didn't remember seeing on my earlier visit.
In the anteroom just beside it was an inconspicuous door. The young man bowed me through and removed himself, leaving me in a cluttered room with books and old-fashioned library catalogue drawers scattered over a library table at which a couple of elderly women with rubber finger-thimbles mumblingly counted through mounds of catalogue cards, rubber-banding them into packets of fifty or so. Wedged into one cramped corner was a wooden desk, and at it was a large-featured, rather fierce-looking woman of fifty in a stark, classically cut, black skirt-suit, very erect, with penetrating dark eyes and striking, ruler-straight black eyebrows that almost but not quite met over a nose like the prow of a ship. Quite handsome, really, if you went in for the Greek-Fury type.
"You are Dr. Benjamin Revere?" she asked in English, not flatteringly.
"Yes."
She looked me over as if she doubted it. "I was expecting to meet with older man."
"And I was expecting to meet with Yuri Minkov."
"That is impossible. Assistant Deputy Curator Minkov has been called away to other duties. My name is Curator Dr. Mrs. Galina Kuznetsova. I, myself, will tell you everything you would like to know."
Permit me to doubt, I thought with sinking heart. It was clear that, between the time I'd telephoned Yuri and now, the heavy hand of Russian officialdom had come down. I just hoped he wasn't in big trouble on my account.
"You may sit," she said.
I looked around, but I didn't see where. The only spare seat was a low stool at the table where the two women were mumbling over the cards. I suppose Curator Dr. Mrs. Kuznetsova intended for me to drag it over to her desk and then sit, or rather squat, more or less at her feet. I did not care for this scenario; I'd gotten over my muzhik phase back in the entrance hall.
"Not much room," I said.
"My office is too small for so many people," she said. "Here we don't have grand offices such as in your American museums and universities."
I made a try at being agreeable. "Obviously, you've never seen the non-tenure-track cubicles at Harvard," I said with a smile.
No response.
"Perhaps there's someplace else we could meet?" I didn't want to offend her—that is, I couldn't afford to offend her—but I was not going to get talked into cowering before her on that stool.
Mrs. Kuznetsova didn't like the idea, but what could she say, that there was no room anywhere in the colossal complex of the Hermitage for two people to get together? "Perhaps outside in garden," she allowed, rising from her chair. "We will not be having so many more days like this one, and St. Petersburg is one of most beautiful cities in world, don't you agree?"
* * *
As we walked to the elevator through the spectacular Malachite Room, I made an innocuous, appreciative remark about it.
"Yes, is very beautiful," she agreed, and I thought maybe I'd scored a point.
She openly studied me a little more, and then, when we got on the elevator, she asked with blunt curiosity: "What is your ethnic?"
"Russian, actually. My grandparents were born in Russia."
"Yes?" she said with interest. Another point scored. "What place in Russia?"
"Pinsk."
"Byelorussia," she muttered with disdain. It looked as if Pinsk had lost me whatever gains I'd made. "And what was family name?" She uttered a short laugh. "Not Revere."
"No, Rawidowicz, but that was too much for the officer who made out the passenger manifest on the way to Ellis Island. He liked Revere better."
"Like great hero, Paul Revere."
"That's right."
Mrs. Kuznetsova sniffed. "One should not change one's name. One should be proud of heritage." And then, even more ominously: "Rawidowicz—to me it sounds Polish."
But by the time we emerged from the building a few moments later, she had apparently decided that we were more or less kinsmen anyway, despite the Polish-sounding name and the dubious Pinsk connection.
"You will call me Galina," she commanded.
"And you will call me Ben," I replied in kind.
Chapter 19
Not that I'd admit it to her, but Galina was right about St. Petersburg's being one of the world's great places—a rarity, a venerable, grand-scale city that is all of a piece. Almost every building in the inner city is Russian Baroque, having been built between 1700 and 1800, on broad, generously laid-out boulevards, so that when you're out in the street it's easy to imagine yourself as a tiny figure in wig and breeches in one of those eighteenth-century "bird's-eye" architectural paintings. The whole thing is all the more impressive in that this city, so European and cosmopolitan in its ambience, had been constructed out of whole cloth—literally from nothing, like Brasilia—in freezing boglands more than a thousand miles from anything resembling a European city at that time.
It had been pounded to bits during the long, horrific siege of Leningrad in World War II, of course, but the Soviets had done a good job of rebuilding in the Fifties. It was starting to look just a little tacky around the edges again, but show me a city that doesn't look tacky around the edges. The trick is not to look at the edges.
She was right about the weather too. The sun was shining and the temperature was pushing sixty. In the public garden that ran along the river Neva between the Hermitage and the Admiralty, we weren't the only people taking advantage of the last of the good weather. People sat on benches with eyes closed and pale faces turned up to the sun, pairs of chatting women pushed baby carriages, amateur artists with easels and paint cases daubed away at their renderings of the Winter Palace or the Neva.
While we strolled, stopping now and then to watch one of the painters at work, I told her why I was there and what I hoped to learn. It was obvious almost at once that I wasn't going to have any success getting across to her what anything in the Hermitage could possibly have to do with the death of an old man in Boston, so I switched my rationale to Stetten's case, figuring that would make more sense to her. In retrospect, it was not a smart move. After listening for five minutes, walking with her head down and her arms folded on her chest, like a man, she interrupted with a burst of impatience.
"What is it exactly that you wish from me?"
Telling Yuri would have been easy. Telling Galina wasn't so simple. I mean, I couldn't very well say: "Inasmuch as you folks exhibited one of the missing paintings from the Lost Truck a few years ago, I was wondering if you might—with no attempt at deception, of course—also happen to have the rest of them hidden away in the basement at the moment, despite all your denials over the years?" No, I didn't think that would go over very well.
"I have a list of Mr. Stetten's pictures with me," I said carefully. At least I was smart enough not to use Stetten's title with Galina.
I know a fire-breathing Bolshevik when I see one. "I was hoping that you might look at it and tell me if you have any idea at all where any of them are or what might have happened to them."
She stopped walking. "And why should I know such a thing?"
"Well, the Turner seascape in your 1995 exhibition was from the same German shipment, so I, um, thought—"
She started walking again. "I have no interest in helping Germans recover their art collections. It is true, yes, we admit it freely, that certain art materials seized by Soviet government in Great Patriotic War are still in keeping, but these we regard as legal exports, rightful compensation for unparalleled German atrocities."
That was the current government line, all right. In 1997 both houses of parliament had passed a bill nationalizing all works of art brought back to the Soviet Union by its armies. Boris Yeltsin, feeling the sting of world condemnation, had vetoed it, whereupon the parliament, not so worried about world opinion, promptly overrode his veto, making it law.
"Mr. Stetten is Austrian," I said, "not German."
"Oh. Austrian, not German. I see. I beg your pardon, such a very great difference. And in the war, what did this not-German do? A courageous leader of the Resistance, no doubt? He killed many Nazis, of course?"
"Galina, Stetten was no Nazi; far from it. They murdered his father, they stole his house, his collection." That was the best I could do. In point of fact, Stetten had told me that he'd fought on the Eastern front as a conscript in the Austrian army. If he'd killed anybody at all, it would have been Russians.
My reply was brushed aside. "The Austrians, the Germans, they are the same race, the same people; the Hun. Everything they put their fingers on they destroyed or else they took away. Do you know how many of our art pieces are still missing, even now? Two hundred thousand of them that the Germans stole from us, so why are you coming to me about Russian people stealing art?"