by Aaron Elkins
The atmosphere was getting dicey. Adler was losing his patience; he'd begun to tap on the table with his fingernails. And I sensed that Schnittke was becoming irritated with me for failing to back him up. And I was getting nervous myself. The questions that he was raising were the right ones, the same ones that I would have brought up if I hadn't already known that none of it made any difference. What did the terms matter? Whatever they were, they weren't going to be fulfilled. The only important thing was to have those pictures out of the vault by three o'clock, and I was beginning to worry that Schnittke, with his spiky persistence, was going to get the whole deal called off.
"And just how did they get into the country with no papers?" Adler snapped. "It's hardly impossible to accomplish, Herr Schnittke. If you don't find the terms satisfactory, perhaps it would be better for all—"
If Stetten could have reached far enough to kick Schnittke under the table I was sure he would have. As it was, he made do with a look of dumb, imploring despair in my direction: Ben, have pity on me, don't let him screw things up!
"Okay, Mr. Adler," I said, "I think we'd better get on with it. We'll do it your way."
That earned a look of mute gratitude from Stetten and one of contempt from Schnittke, who folded his arms and stared pointedly at the wall. But he was beginning to irritate me too. It wasn't as if we'd come to Zurich under the impression that we were going to be dealing with a legitimate seller, after all. It was the mafia, and how else did he expect them to do business? They held all the cards (or so they thought) and they were the ones calling the shots.
Adler stood up. "Good, we understand each other. Shall I leave you to yourselves now? The guards will bring the pictures in two at a time, except for the larger ones. Simply tell them whenever you wish to see the next pair."
"By the way, there's one thing," I said. "Will you ask them not to return the pictures to the vault?" I'd like to have them left out."
Adler's eyes narrowed. "Left out where?"
"Just somewhere where I can look at them again. In the anteroom to the vault would be fine, and when they run out of room there you can just have them put them in the corridor, propped against the walls."
"Why?"
"So that it's possible to, um, re-evaluate them against each other."
"Re-evaluate them against each other?"
"Yes, that's right," I said with a flicker of condescension, always a good idea if you don't know what you're talking about. "If the need arises."
I got by with it too. After a moment's uncertainty he said "Very well" and snapped his fingers at the two guards, who were waiting in the corridor. "Bring in the first two."
A minute later, in they came, one bearing the now-familiar Condesa de Torrijos, last seen in Sykmund Dulska's sitting room at the Imperial, the other a stunningly beautiful Adoration of the Shepherds by Georges de La Tour, the great Caravaggesque master. Serene to the point of stillness and classically simple, with the marvelous light provided by a single candle shaded by the translucent fingers of a young shepherdess, it was the kind of thing that slowed your heart rate down simply to look at it. Except for the blurry photo in Stetten's father's records, I'd never even seen a reproduction of it before, and all I wanted to do now was sit there for twenty minutes or so and bask in its glow.
Not a chance. A little arithmetic will tell you that examining that many paintings in the time we had gave us about three minutes each, and that didn't provide for the time needed for the guards to carry them back and forth. Two minutes apiece was more like it.
We were, in other words, busy as beavers. At one point I barely managed to choke back a hysterical fit of laughter. I mean, there we were, confronted with rare, great works by Hals, Poussin, Van Dyck, Copley, Chardin, Tintoretto, Gainsborough, Goya, Ruisdael, Reynolds, you name 'em—and we were plowing through them, zip, zip, zip, like kids flipping through the T-shirt racks at Planet Hollywood.
Still, it was enough time for the purpose at hand. And my purpose was exactly the same as Stetten's: to determine if these really were the paintings from his father's collection. We had his scrupulously detailed catalogue, remember, so all it took was a cursory look at each picture and a quick comparison with the details in his list. If they matched, that was it, I checked it off and went on to the next one. Watteau? Check. Canaletto? Check. Peculiar work, and exhausting in its own way, but terrifically satisfying too. Every check mark I made meant another lost masterpiece coming back into the world. This must have been how those old MFA&A officers felt.
Stetten started off strong but quickly wilted, so that I did most of the actual work with the catalogue while he drifted in and out of reveries, remembering some of the pictures and not remembering others. "Ah, the Copley," he would say about a portrait as if it were a relative he hadn't seen in a long time. "My brother Rolf used to call him the General—no, the Pirate." Or, dreamily, about a Fragonard: "My father promised he would build us such a swing set . . . but he never did. Or have I forgotten?"
Meanwhile I would be muttering: "Copley, check. Fragonard, check," and making the little marks in the catalogue. Should I have been more worried about forgery or some kind of double-dealing? I didn't think so. The idea that anyone could have faked 72 paintings of this quality, used age-appropriate materials, duplicated the frames, and matched every detail—every chip, scrape, marking, and imperfection, back and front—was beyond belief, an impossible task.
Schnittke, with little interest in the pictures as art, wandered in and out, stumping restlessly around the corridor munching an unlit cigar and cowing the guards with sheer force of personality into pretending that they didn't notice. Where Adler was I didn't know. At about two o'clock I got up to stretch and also to make sure that the paintings were really being left out of the vault. Alois and friends were due in one hour.
Adler had kept his word. Framed pictures now lined the anteroom to Adler's vault as well as either side of the corridor. Some had been left with their painted surfaces facing outward, not a good idea with people clomping around the place. I asked the guards to turn the wrong-facing ones in the corridor the other way to give them a little more protection and went into the anteroom to do the same for the ones there.
Having re-tilted the last of them carefully against the wall, I straightened up, brushing dust from my hands. As I did a marking on the back, one of the usual assemblage of scribbles, stamps, and symbols, seemed to snag, like a burr, in the surface of my mind. I knelt to look at it again, a stamped, dull-black ne-1 in Germanic lettering. It was one of the ERR's markings, which almost half of the paintings bore, so that I'd stopped paying attention to them during our hectic examination, but now . . .
I stood there looking at it, repeating it to myself: ne-1 . . . ne-1. . . , waiting for whatever my brain was trying to tell me to pop, and in a slow, osmotic way, like a photograph emerging in a developing tank, an idea vaguely began to take shape. What was it that Haftmann, the old Nazi registrar, had told me those markings meant? "A crude clerical notation," he'd said with disdain, "something to indicate the source of acquisition." The source of acquisition. I turned the painting around to look at its front again. It was the candlelit Adoration by Georges de La Tour, the second one we'd looked at today.
The idea jelled, took on firmer outlines. I went back to the conference room, where Stetten, barely noticing me, was dreaming over a Poussin depiction of ruined Roman arches, and got my MFA&A folder, which I'd brought along to with me to Zurich. In it were tucked the photographs that I'd taken of the Conde de Torrijos in Simeon's shop. Returning to the anteroom, I thumbed through them until I came to a photo of the painting's back. There, under the ERR, perfectly clear and unmistakable, was an ne-2.
"My God," I said under my breath. I knew, or thought I knew, or was afraid I knew, what those markings meant. Quickly I located its companion portrait, the Condesa de Torrijos, the one Dulska had tried to sell Stetten. If I remembered right, it was marked with an sr-4—and I now thought I knew what that meant too.
I closed my eyes for a second, took a deep breath and let it out, then turned the picture around again to look at the back. And there it was, my memory hadn't played me false: sr-4.
The source of acquisition, Haftmann had said, plain as could be. How much clearer did it have to be made for me? There it had been, staring me in the eye, and I'd been too trusting, or too stuck in a rut, or just too plain dumb to see it.
The ne's stood for Nussbaum, Eberhard, Jakob Nussbaum's art-dealer uncle. The sr stood for Sussman, Raoul, Eberhard's competitor-friend, who like Eberhard Nussbaum, had given paintings to the Paris gallery-owner Paul Cazeau for safeguarding from the Nazis. The numbers—1,2,4—were inventory numbers for the individual paintings. A crude clerical notation.
When I had so assuredly, reasonably convinced Jakob Nussbaum that the painting in Boston that he was claiming was merely a student-study of a Velazquez painting, and not the real thing, I'd been dead wrong. The Boston Velazquez, the Condé, was his uncle's picture all right. That's what the ne-2 meant.
And the Condesa, the picture Dulska had brought with him to Vienna? That, clearly—well, relatively clearly—had been Raoul Sussman's "other half of the set," the "sister" that went with the Condé. There on the back to prove it was the sr-4—which also must have meant that the ERR had confiscated at least three other paintings of Sussman's. If it turned out, as well it might, that all these pictures had been taken from Paul Cazeau's Paris cellar, then we'd probably find sr-1,2, and 3 in there too.
The ne-1 on the painting by Georges de la Tour had me puzzled until I realized that Nussbaum had told me about that too . . . almost. His uncle, he said, had left a second picture with Cazeau, something by a Frenchman whose name was right there on the tip of his tongue: Lebrun? Delacroix? Le Nain?
Try La Tour.
Put together, it all sounded impossibly rococo, but the proof was in those Gothic black letters stamped on the backs. The probability, given the rest of the story, that these particular sets of initials, out of so many possible others, stood for something other than Eberhard Nussbaum and Raoul Sussman—the "sources of acquisition"—was wildly implausible, a billion-to-one chance.
There was only one possible conclusion. Those paintings had been confiscated in 1942 by the Nazis, all right, in Paris, all right—but from Paul Cazeau's basement hiding place under the Place Vendôme—and not from the elegant Stetten apartment on avenue Floquet (if there ever was an elegant Stetten apartment on avenue Floquet).
From the first, everything Stetten had told me had been a lie. Neither he nor his father had ever owned those paintings.
I know it sounds as if I'd been standing there cogitating for half an hour, but it had only been a matter of seconds. Most of it had come to me in the previous few minutes. The sr-4 had been the final piece of evidence needed to confirm it.
And confirm it it did. Stetten was a liar and a charlatan—maybe worse—trading on the miseries of others, and I was the credulous, self-important "expert" who had spent the last few weeks doing his damnedest to help him perpetrate exactly the kind of injustice I thought I was rectifying. I was furious with myself for having been used, and on top of that, for liking and rooting for him to boot. I felt confused, exploited, triumphant, and righteous, all at the same time. Also, I didn't feel real bright.
"What's the matter?" It was Schnittke, returning from one of his rambles down the corridor.
"Mr. Schnittke, how much do you know about these paintings?"
"Enough to know they're nothing but trouble," he said. "Albrecht is making a hell of a mistake."
"I couldn't agree with you more."
"What?" He peered at me. "I was under the impression you were all for it."
"Why would you think that?"
"Because Albrecht told me . . ." he let the words hang. We looked at one another.
"Albrecht lied," I said.
He came closer, squat, fat, and pouchy, but an imposing presence all the same. "If you know something about this that I don't, I would say now is the time to tell me."
"These aren't his paintings."
He took the cigar out of his mouth. "Nonsense."
"I'm telling you, they never belonged to him; he's made it all up. Stetten's in it with the mafia; he has to be. The whole thing is a sham. Everything. We've both been set up."
Schnittke glowered at me, his little goatee quivering. "Now you let me tell you something, young man. I've known and trusted Albrecht von Stetten for more than forty years, since before you were born. Don't you think I'd know if he were capable of doing what you're suggesting? It's ridiculous. Murder, fraud, outrageous lies—"
"Let me show you something," I said. I pointed out the ne-1 and sr-4 on the backs and briefly explained.
By the time I finished, a change had come over Schnittke. He looked like death warmed over, with his eyes sunk deeper than ever in their pouches and his purplish lips working. "No, it's impossible, there has to be another explanation for this."
"Can you think of one?"
He'd been glaring at the backs of the paintings, but now he raised his eyes to mine. "No, I can't," he said slowly, and from the way he jammed the cigar stub back in his mouth and clamped down on it I could see his mood had hardened. He didn't appreciate being made a dupe any more than I did.
"I'll get him in here," he said, turning abruptly on his heel and stalking out.
Chapter 35
He knows the jig's up, he can sense it, was my first thought when Stetten came in, leaning on his walking stick and looking scared and frail in his neat blue blazer and gray trousers. Well, Schnittke's scowl would have been enough to scare me too, and I suppose I didn't look any too cordial either. Now don't start feeling sorry for him, I told myself.
"Is something wrong?" he asked. "Shouldn't we be—"
I pointed sternly to the sr-4 on the back of the Velazquez. "What does this stand for, Albrecht?"
He squinted at it. "This?" he said wonderingly. "The sr-4? I don't know."
I supposed that much was true. "But I do. It was put on by the Nazis in 1942."
"But—you mean after it was taken from my father? What significance—how could I—"
"It was never taken from your father," I said as Schnittke looked on silently. "Your father never owned it—or any of them. This was all bogus from the beginning—the haggling with Dulska over the price, the 'surprise' telephone call from Adler—"
"I don't understand!" Stetten cried. "How can you say such things? My father's old catalogue—it's right there in the conference room—"
"It isn't your father's catalogue, and it isn't old."
"It isn't . . . But you've seen it!" He appealed to Schnittke. "He said himself he'd never seen anything so detailed—ask him!" His eyes were watering. "Benjamin, my dear friend—"
"No, I'm not your dear friend. That's all over."
"Benjamin, I'm eighty-one years old, don't . . . where else would I get such precise, complete information? You saw for yourself, it's accurate in every detail."
His voice had dissolved into the plaintive old man's quaver that I'd heard a few times before. I couldn't tell how much of it was real and how much was put-on, an attempt to wring some sympathy out of us. A day before it would have gotten to me; now it didn't. Well, it did, but I wasn't about to let it gain the upper hand.
"Of course it's accurate in every detail," I said, trying with certainty of speech to make it seem as if I wasn't really about to launch a series of guesses, which I was. "Why wouldn't it be? Since you—or rather your pals in the mafia—had the paintings all along, all you had to do was take some fuzzy photographs of them and type up the descriptions—not too difficult, since they were right there in front of whoever was doing it. Make the descriptions look old, put them in a broken-down loose-leaf binder—and, presto, there's your 'father's' catalogue, with more detail—more 'proof of ownership'—than anybody, even the real owners, could possibly come up with."
"But—but to what end? To sell them to myself? If I already
had them? Ha-ha, why would I go to such lengths?"
Schnittke looked keenly at me. "Yes, why?"
"Okay," I said a little nervously, because I was working this out as I went along and this was the trickiest part, "I think the whole thing was a mafia scheme to get title to the paintings. As long as they were still officially loot, the only way they could be sold was through the black market, where they'd bring only a tiny fraction of their real value."
Stetten glanced nervously at Schnittke. "Leo, let me assure you—"
"Shut up," Schnittke said in a tone he wouldn't have used before with Stetten. "You were saying?" he said to me. "' . . . where they'd bring only a tiny fraction of their real value. . . ?'"
"But if someone like Stetten could somehow be legitimized as the lawful owner," I said, "he could sell them openly later, at full market value, for hundreds of millions of dollars. That's what the posturing and pretending, the fake haggling, was all designed to do—to make it look as if he was getting his own paintings back. A year or two from now they'd be sold at full price, Stetten would be paid whatever they were giving him for being their front man, and three hundred million dollars or so would go straight to the mafia."
"And the ten million dollars that he was paying to them?"
"More sham. There never was any ten million dollars." I looked at Stetten. "Albrecht, am I right?"
Stetten, his veined hands tight on the knob of his stick, stared rigidly at the floor and shook his head; he wasn't going to answer. I knew I was right.
"Then why bring you into it?" Schnittke asked me in a queerly tense, quiet tone. "What did they need you for? All you could do was cause them trouble."
"I was a pawn," I said, "the same as you. I'm a known expert, I've worked with the police, I have a clean reputation. They'd be way ahead if he could fox me into supporting his claim, or—even better—personally authenticating it."
Schnittke nodded. "Yes, and so he did," he said with the ghost of a smile. "But in the end you turned the tables, didn't you? Oh, you've caused a great deal of trouble."