Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  My scalp tingled. A mausoleum, I thought. Stetten's world, the world he'd cared about, had stopped for all time on March 13, 1938. Anschluss day.

  Given this line of thinking, it was almost spooky to see a smiling, healthy, living Stetten come into the room, cheeks aglow and thin, graceful hand extended in greeting. He was wearing a crushed-velvet burgundy smoking jacket and a beautifully arranged ascot with a black pearl tiepin, God bless him, and he looked just great.

  "There you are, Ben! May I call you Ben? I feel we've been through enough by now."

  "Of course. I wish you would."

  "And I'm Albrecht."

  That was a relief because until now I'd been avoiding calling him anything. I'd tried "Count" a couple of times, with all good intentions, but it just wouldn't make it out of my egalitarian American mouth. I guess my name isn't Revere for nothing.

  "Come out onto the terrace, we'll have some tea and talk. Georg!" he called, pointing to a set of French doors that led onto the slate-tiled terrace. "Tee, bitte."

  Georg responded with what looked to me like a for-God's-sake-will-this-person-never-stop-bothering-me eyebrow shrug before he went grumbling to do his master's bidding. This, I thought, is not a man who is happy in his work. But if Stetten found anything disagreeable in the performance, or even noticed it, he gave no sign. I supposed it was an old relationship, worn into deep ruts like a long-standing marriage that's turned sour but is too ingrained and familiar for the parties to do anything about.

  Once out on the terrace, under an awning, I saw that Stetten's apartment wasn't as badly situated as I'd thought. True, the building entrance was on grubby Rainerstrasse, but the rear, where the terrace was, looked down on the Mirabell Gardens from a perfect distance, close enough to provide a fine view of the intricate, elegant hedges and flower beds, but far enough away to mitigate the effects of the third-rate garden statuary. (Yes, even the artists of the Baroque era could produce crappy art on occasion, a thought that should give hope to us all.) Beyond the gardens the view continued over the river and the roofs of the Old Town to the looming fortress, and further on to the rolling green hills of the Salzach Valley. And from here, the noises of the street were no more than a remote rumbling. No, not bad at all.

  When we had settled into a couple of padded wrought-iron chairs and Georg had left us alone after bringing out hot tea, cookies, and finger sandwiches, Stetten poured the tea and leaned forward expectantly. "Now, then, my dear friend, how did it go? I'm all ears."

  "Albrecht, let me ask you something first. Did you tell anybody at all that I was going to Budapest?"

  "Tell anybody? No."

  "Not your attorney?"

  "Leo? No. Why do you ask?"

  "Not Georg?"

  "Georg? Of course not. What's the matter?"

  "Who else besides Georg and Leo knew that you were negotiating for one of your paintings?"

  "No one at all," he said, beginning to get jittery. "Who would I tell? Now what's the matter? Tell me."

  I told him. Delicately, because I knew that he upset easily, but there was no way to make what had happened anything but frightening: Yuri's warning, Szarvas's murder, my near-murder—especially when added to what had gone before: the deaths of Simeon and Dulska.

  It shook him up, all right. Under normal circumstances, Stetten was a pink-and-white-complexioned old guy with a healthy-looking rosy spot on each cheek. But as I gave him the details I could see the color leaving his face. The area around his lips turned a sickly blue-white. In a way, I was relieved to see it. No one could fake a reaction like that; Stetten couldn't have known anything about what had happened in Budapest.

  Still, I was nagged by the feeling that he knew something more than what he'd told me. "Albrecht, I need you to tell me the truth. I need to know what's going on."

  He looked honestly confused. "You need me—?"

  "Did you know Dulska worked for the mafia?"

  His eyelids whirred. "Dulska?"

  "Yes. You had no idea that it was really the mafia you were dealing with? Please, be honest. A lot of people have died."

  "Ben, I give you my word, I had no idea. Are you sure about this?"

  "Positive."

  "The mafia . . ." He shook his head, then asked suddenly: "But then— who killed him?"

  "His bosses, probably."

  "But why?"

  "He tried to set up a deal with me on the side, cutting you out of the picture—and, more importantly, cutting the mafia out of the picture. That's why the police think they killed him, and I agree with them."

  "A deal with you?" he asked slowly. "For my painting?"

  "For all your paintings."

  "All—!"

  "Whether he could really pull that off or not I don't know, Albrecht. But I'm guessing he could."

  His fingers went nervously to his trim, white mustache while he pondered this. "But if that's so, it would mean that the mafia has them all, wouldn't it?"

  "Yes. Albrecht, do you have any idea at all why Szarvas might have been killed?"

  "No, I've never even heard of—I promise you, no. Ben, why didn't you tell me that Dulska was trying to arrange a deal with you?"

  "I couldn't. You left the next morning. There wasn't time."

  Okay, not exactly truthful. I could have told him easily enough when we were at the opera but I hadn't, for fear that he might foul things up before they came to a head. However, I thought I'd better not say this. I didn't want him to start suspecting me of something.

  By now a little color had returned to his face. Those cheery pink disks weren't back, but at least he no longer looked like a corpse. He picked up a tiny shrimp-and-mayonnaise sandwich and absent-mindedly put it in his mouth; I doubt if he knew he was chewing anything.

  "The mafia . . ." he murmured again. I could practically hear the cogs whirring in his head. On the whole, I believed what he'd told me, but I was still dogged with a hunch that he was holding something back, that the whole mess somehow made more sense to him than it did to me. It was as if he knew enough about what was happening and why to be good and scared, but not enough to know what was really going on.

  "Albrecht, is there anything else that I ought to know? Please. I'm doing my best to help you, but I feel as if I'm all alone in the dark."

  He looked as bewildered as I was. "I don't know anything. I don't understand what's happening either." He began to reach for the teapot, but his hand was trembling and he pretended that he'd only been flexing his fingers. "Will you pour?"

  I poured us each a second cup of Earl Grey from a beautiful little nineteenth-century pot decorated in French cloisonné enamel into equally old, almost equally precious cups of acorn-and-oak-leaf Staffordshire china. The pot was dented, the cups and saucers as chipped as cafeteria tableware. Old money.

  He held his cup in both hands and sipped; I could see the strength flow back into him.

  "Albrecht, how well do you know Leo Schnittke?"

  He looked up sharply. "You suspect Leo of being in league with them?"

  I shrugged.

  Stetten put the teacup down with a hand that had steadied. "Leo Schnittke has been my attorney since 1958. For forty years I've trusted him with my accounts, with my properties, with every business transaction in which I've been involved. He has never let me down. He is a little blunt sometimes, that's true, but he's a man of tremendous integrity. I would willingly entrust him with my life. I trust him as much as anyone I've ever known—as much as I trust you."

  Whom you've known for all of five days, I thought. Still, I had the feeling that his assessment of Schnittke was on-target: a tough, crusty lawyer, but a straight one, and loyal to his client.

  "And Georg?" I said, first making sure we were out of earshot. "Would you entrust him with your life?"

  He smiled a little. "As a matter of fact, yes. Don't be misled by his manner. Georg is from Leipzig, a distant cousin on my mother's side. It was I who got him, his father, and his sister out of East Germany in
1971. He's been with me ever since. He would never betray me, never. Besides, he knows nothing of this."

  If that was true, if the bad guys weren't getting their information about where I was and what I was doing from Stetten, or Schnittke, or Georg, then that meant that they had to be getting it from me, that they were literally trailing me around from place to place, which was pretty much what I'd surmised anyway. What I didn't know was why I should be that important to them.

  "Ben, what you've told me is terrible. I don't want to put you in any more danger. I think you should—"

  "No, I want to continue. It's not only for you, Albrecht. I want to get to the bottom of this if I can. The man who was killed in Boston—he was a friend—I could have prevented it. . . ."

  "I understand," he said gently. "And will you get to the bottom of it?"

  "I don't know. I have two more leads to follow up. Tomorrow I'm going to go out to the Altaussee salt mine to see if I can learn something. Would you like to come along? It can't be much more than a couple of hours' drive."

  He shuddered. "No!"

  I could sympathize with that. "And then, assuming I can get hold of this other claimant in Vienna, I'll want to talk with him."

  "Truthfully, it's hard for me to see how that can be of any help."

  "Well, I just don't want to leave anything unexplored. But that's basically my affair, not yours. I certainly don't expect you to be paying my—"

  He held up his hand. "No, I don't want to hear that. We've been through this once already. Anything you do is also in my interest, and I will pay for your valuable time and your invaluable assistance. This time I insist. Believe me, I can afford it."

  "Okay. Thank you, I appreciate it."

  "No, it's you who are doing me the favor. I don't think you can have any idea what it means to me to think that after so long a time we may be getting close to my father's paintings—that they've survived all these years."

  "Don't get your hopes up too much, Albrecht. If the mafia really does have them, I don't have to tell you that they're not going to give them to you because you ask them in a nice way. And if they don't have them—" I hesitated, then decided I'd better say what I'd been reluctant to put into words. "—then for all we know, they might be lost, or destroyed, or stored away and forgotten in somebody's attic in Omaha or Stuttgart. A lot of the war loot didn't make it through, you know."

  He smiled. "If they can be found," he said simply, "I know you'll find them, Ben."

  He was so optimistic, so transparently trusting, that it made me feel a little anxious, even guilty. Finding them was only the first step, I told him, treading lightly. Even if we were lucky enough to locate some or all of them, he would be facing an uphill battle from there. Look at all the claimants that had come forward for the Boston Velazquez alone. How many would there be for seventy-three equally valuable masterpieces? As in everything involving big money, there would be a horde of charlatans disputing Stetten's claims and willing to go to court about it, just as Szarvas had been. How did he expect to prove that the paintings were really his? What about those "documentary criteria"? Did he have sales slips for any of them?

  No, no sales slips, he said—rather airily, I thought.

  Insurance records?

  Well, no, not to speak of.

  Restorers' bills?

  Sorry, none of those either.

  He'd been holding back a smile, but now it broke brightly through. All right, I thought, what have you got up your sleeve? I put down the little triangle of egg salad and toast that I'd just picked up from the broken Staffordshire serving plate (broken, not merely chipped; a two-inch-long crescent had cracked off the rim). "You're not going to sit there and tell me you can identify all of them by means of scratches on the frames, or marks on the back, or something else that you remember from fifty years ago, are you? Because—"

  At that the smile erupted into a ripple of laughter that made him toss his head back. "My dear friend, I have a confession to make. My memory isn't really very good at all. And it's not improving with age."

  "You could have fooled me. You remembered the name of the frame-maker, you remembered that brass plate on the back—"

  He held up his hand to stop me. "I want to show you something. I think it's time for you to see it. I'll be right back." At the door he looked playfully back. "Don't go away now."

  Chapter 24

  I made good use of the couple of minutes Stetten was gone, wolfing down two one-bite egg-salad sandwiches, two of smoked salmon and cream cheese, and three dried-cherry cookies. Buying clothes and catching the flight to Salzburg had precluded any chance to get lunch, and I'd been talking too much until now to dig in. When he returned I was standing at the terrace's balustrade contentedly playing a fixed, tripod-mounted telescope over the town. The Salzburg Landestheater was on the edge of the gardens, not very far away, and the lens was strong enough to let me see what the current production was: Wer hat Angst vor Virginia Woolf? If the play translated as well as the title, I thought, it'd be a great show.

  When Stetten returned he had with him a zippered loose-leaf binder, which he placed on the flat stone railing that topped the balustrade, then carefully opened. The pebbled leather binder, once probably a pliant black, was ashy-gray, cracked and rotting, and the pages it contained were yellow and humpy with age and intermittent moisture, the corners curling, the loose-leaf-holes frayed. Mostly, they were covered with the faded, uneven printing of an old manual typewriter that had punched pinholes in the letters here and there, but there were some black-and-white photographs too.

  Stetten flipped pages until he found the one he was searching for. "How well do you read German?"

  "A lot better than I speak it."

  "Look at this, then." He tapped the page just below its middle. I took the binder from him and read the paragraph he indicated:

  Frame. 106 cm. x 76 cm. Manufactured by Anton Kantmann, Bogengasse 9, Munich, probably between 1870 and 1885 (maker's plate on reverse). The style is not appropriate for the picture, being an imitation of sixteenth-century naturalistic Siennese frames, with many fantastically carved birds and animals, and therefore pre-dating Velazquez by some fifty years in its design. Aside from natural deterioration, the only damage is the fracturing of a small leaf at the lower right corner . . . .

  It went on in this vein for another ten lines, a meticulous description of everything that could possibly be said about the frame on the Velazquez that Sykmund Dulska had brought to Vienna. I glanced up, puzzled. "Albrecht, what is this? What am I looking at here?"

  "Please, examine the rest first. Take your time. More tea?"

  I took his advice, sitting down with another cup of tea and going through the binder, if not painstakingly (there were 245 densely worded pages), then carefully enough to understand just what it was that I was holding in my hands: nothing less than a detailed, comprehensive set of descriptions of the paintings—fronts, backs, and frames—that had been looted from Stetten's Paris apartment, each of them diligently researched and scrupulously annotated. A catalogue to end all catalogues.

  Sitting there leafing through the thing I became aware in a way that I hadn't been before of just what a fabulous collection I was dealing with. Hals, Poussin, Goya, Van Dyck, de la Tour, Gainsborough, Copley, David . . . My God, what would it be worth now? Two hundred million, three hundred million dollars? Maybe more, if the general quality approached that of the two I'd seen for myself so far. Incredible to think, assuming they still existed, that these wonderful pictures had been hidden away for over fifty years. And even more incredible—hardly conceivable—to think that I, of all the people in the world, might be the one to track them down and maybe bring them to light.

  Or was I just spinning a wishful fairy tale for Stetten's benefit and my own? I wasn't sure myself.

  The format was the same for each picture: a full-page, decent-quality, black-and-white photograph, followed by three, four, or five pages of rigorously researched, painstakingly
annotated narrative: measurements, materials, condition, description, and critical interpretation, all put down in exacting, sometimes excruciating, detail.

  And the proprietary markings on the backs were set down as well; symbols other than numbers or letters were carefully drawn by hand. Sometimes the meanings were listed as 'unknown,' but many had detailed attributions assigned to them, sometimes several possible attributions. Some had lengthy explanatory notes that tracked them back two hundred years and more. The only markings not referred to were the rubber-stamped letters and numbers that the Nazis had put on them, which showed that the notations had been prepared before 1942. Altogether, it was as exhaustive a compendium of information on the paintings as you could hope for, more even than an art museum would have in its records.

  "Okay, I've looked at it," I said, looking up at him and brushing crumbs of leather off my lap. "I'm impressed. Now tell me what this is and where it came from."

  He spoke with his back to me, leaning against the railing and gazing across the rooftops toward the distant hills. "These are my father's records, a lifelong labor of love. They were made in the Twenties and Thirties. I found them after the war at the family house in Melk, in the cellars, under the rubble. Wonderfully thorough, aren't they?"