Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  I stared at him. The tone was so strange, the remark so peculiar….

  Oh, jeez, I thought, I think I made a—

  Not taking his eyes from me, he stepped back a few paces, placed his hand on the barred door, and called into the corridor: "Adler! You'd better come in here. We have a serious problem."

  Have your ever noticed that when your mind is confused and buzzing away in twenty different directions, sometimes you have a kind of heightened perception, becoming aware of odd, totally irrelevant details? So it was then. As I looked at Schnittke's hand on the bars, I noticed something that had gotten by me before. Leo Schnittke's reluctance to shake hands had nothing to with formality or fastidiousness. The reason he kept his right hand in his pocket most of the time was because it was disfigured; where the thumb and forefinger should have were nothing but two knuckly stubs.

  Chapter 36

  Adler came in unbuttoning his double-breasted suit jacket. Christ, I thought, the guy's going to pull out a gun.

  Which he did, not certain of whom he ought to be pointing it at until Schnittke gestured in my direction. The pistol, a compact, shiny, nickel-plated thing that could have passed for a kitschy cigarette-lighter came around and leveled on my chest.

  "Hey, hey, take it easy now," I said, palms outward in front of me, as if to stop the bullets. "Don't get excited, we can—"

  "Shut up, keep your hands away from your sides and back up against the wall," he said and looked once more to Schnittke for further instructions.

  "Schutzmann!" I yelled. Guard.

  "Shout away," said Schnittke calmly. "The guards are gone. We're all alone."

  "Leo, you can't kill him!" an agitated Stetten suddenly cried. "How would you . . .how would we explain the body?"

  "What body? The vault is still open, isn't it? There's plenty of room in there."

  "You'll . . . you'll have to kill me too," Stetten bravely piped.

  Schnittke looked at him the way you'd look at a cockroach in the tuna salad. "That can easily be arranged."

  Stetten did what any sensible person would have done. He shut up instantly, shrank into a corner, and became as unnoticeable as possible.

  I found my voice again, or something like it. "The police know I'm, I'm here," I stammered. "They, they'll be here in twenty minutes." Talk about a lame ploy. I knew it was true, but if I'd been Schnittke I wouldn't have believed a word of it.

  "Is that so? Well, that's a risk we'll have to take. Shoot him, Adler."

  Adler hesitated. "I—"

  "Don't do it!" I croaked. "You don't want to kill anybody! The police really are coming, they know all about this, they know who's here with me, they know everything—"

  "Shoot him," Schnittke said again while I was babbling.

  "There'll be blood," Adler said. "It might make a mess." He threw a glance at the open vault. "Wouldn't it be better to get him in—"

  Maybe it was hearing my blood discussed in terms of its mess-making qualities, but with that glance, and with my heart in my mouth, I went for him. Adler was six feet from me—two steps—but I didn’t think he really wanted to shoot me and I was counting on his hesitating long enough for me to get there. And if not, what did I have to lose?

  Anyway, I guessed wrong. He spun back toward me and without a millisecond's hesitation he pulled the trigger. The gun made a flat popping sound. I didn't know whether he'd hit me or not, but I plowed on into him, head down, and butted him backwards into one of the stand-up viewing tables. The rim caught him hard on the edge of the hip—a spot I knew from experience to be excruciatingly sensitive. With a yelp—"Ai!" —he flinched and doubled over sideways. The gun flew from his hand and went bumping over the carpeted floor. I saw Schnittke going after it, but an overweight man in his seventies is no match for me, especially when I'm scared out of my wits.

  I got to it with three feet to spare and kicked it out of reach while Schnittke tripped over his feet and fell. By a lucky break the gun went skittering out into the corridor. Without hesitation I followed right after it. With Schnittke on his knees, Adler still doubled over, and Stetten covering his head with his hands in the corner, I had time to pull the heavy, barred door closed behind me. It swung slowly, smoothly on its giant hinges, emitting a deep, solid, satisfying clook when the lock engaged.

  All of us breathing hard, we took a moment to re-evaluate the altered situation. From my point of view it had a lot going for it. They were inside, I was outside. They were locked in, I was free. They were weaponless, I had the gun out here with me.

  "All right, Revere," Schnittke said, getting heavily to his feet, "you'd better listen to me before you do anything foolish." He came up to the bars; I moved a prudent step back. "There's a lot of money to be made from this; plenty for everybody. It's not to late to—"

  "You killed Simeon Pawlovsky," I said.

  "—come in with—who the hell is Simeon Pawlovsky?"

  "Just an old pawnbroker," I said. "You wouldn't remember."

  "The old Jew in Boston? That wasn't me, that was Shaposhkin."

  "Well, I guess you'll just have to do," I said as the door at the end of the corridor swung open. Through it came the cavalry: Polizeioberstleutnant Alois McGuffey Feuchtmüller and three uniformed Swiss cops.

  "Very nice," said Alois, looking at the paintings lined up along the walls. "Any trouble?

  "Piece of cake," I said. "I've even got them locked up for you."

  He shambled up to the bars, looked curiously at the three men on the other side, and did a double-take when he saw Schnittke. "Fancy meeting you here, Herr Loitzl."

  "Loitzl?" I exclaimed. "His name's not Schnittke?"

  Alois shook his head happily. "This is Klaus Loitzl, an old acquaintance of mine."

  Schnittke glared at him and Alois broke into a slow smile. "I must say, you look very much at home in there."

  * * *

  There followed another long, wearying afternoon spent at another European police station—I was starting to think of them as my homes away from home—but this one produced tangible results, not so much from my interrogation, or from the close-mouthed Schnittke's, as from Stetten's. Trusting more in the ability of the police to protect him from the mafia than in the ability of the mafia to protect him from the police (other than by killing him), he was positively garrulous—"singing like a meadowlark" was the way Alois put it—spilling every bean he was capable of spilling: names, places, and facts, all of great interest to Alois.

  Generally speaking, the conclusions I'd reached were on the mark. Stetten was supposed to get title to the paintings so that they could be sold on the world market for the astronomical prices they would command there. His own motive, unsurprisingly, had been money. He was a count, all right, but a poor one, not a rich one. The wealthy family, the cigarette empire—those things were true, but according to him the Stetten properties had been confiscated first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets, and then by the Republic of Austria on the grounds that they had been legally sold to the Nazis (which Stetten denied). According to Alois, the story might well be true. In any event, Stetten had nothing, and he bore a grudge against everyone. For his play-acting he was to receive $100,000, which struck me as a pretty paltry payoff, considering the sums involved.

  The story about the Nazis calling on his father at dinnertime, and what followed, was true—except that it had happened to other people; a Jewish banking family he knew of. Stetten had lifted it whole-hog. The stories about his wartime service and his mother's death in a bombing raid he claimed to be accurate.

  And he continued to maintain that he'd had no part in the killings, not even knowing about them until after the fact. All he knew about were the paintings, and there he simply followed the instructions given to him by Schnittke/Loitzl.

  I was inclined to believe it. There had been so much puzzlingly inconsistent behavior: sudden changes of mind and mood, switches of direction, self-assurance some of the time, dithering indecision at other times. Now it was underst
andable. He'd been taking orders, not giving them. His decisions were being made for him. He'd say one thing to me, reacting on the spur of the moment, and would then be reversed by Schnittke, at which point he would have to reverse himself to me. It all made sense.

  Even Schnittke cum Loitzl made sense once Alois explained it to me. Schnittke was indeed the Viennese mafia chief Klaus Loitzl and not a lawyer at all. He'd known Stetten for five weeks, not forty years. Interestingly, his name wasn't Loitzl either, although he'd been using it for a half-century. He was, in fact, a one-time Red Army sergeant named Pavel Ilich Petrochenko, who had been captured in Austria by the Germans in 1945 and turned loose a few days later, when the war ended. There were already stories drifting back from Russia about the horrible treatment being received by soldiers who had been un-Russian enough to let themselves be captured, so he'd decided not to return.

  He'd found a place for himself in Vienna, making himself useful to the bureaucrats in the Russian-occupied sector of the city for the next ten years. When the occupation forces left in 1955 he had gone to East Berlin, where he'd begun his rise in the thriving world of the black market. And in 1989, when the Wall came down, he'd returned to Vienna as an established underworld figure, one of the Old Guard. Few people had any idea that he was actually a Russian from—

  "Odessa," I said.

  Alois looked at me, surprised.

  "The accent," I said. "I knew it sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. He sounded like my Uncle Jascha—from Odessa. Damn, I should have realized something about him was fishy!"

  "Oh, I wouldn't say that. The man hardly has an accent at all. I'd say you did rather well."

  I shrugged. "I was pretty lucky. By the way, who's Shaposhkin?"

  "Dimitri Nikolayevich Shaposhkin, lord of the Chetverk crime family in Moscow. His relationship with Loitzl goes back a long way, maybe even to the war. They were in the same battalion."

  "Schnittke—that is, Loitzl—said he was responsible for Simeon Pawlovsky's death."

  Alois spread his hands. "It's possible. Janko Golubov is Shaposhkin's boy, not Loitzl's."

  Much later, over a midnight meal of cold roast chicken, potato salad, and beer in the noisy, turn-of-the-century ambience of the St. Gotthard Café on Bahnhofstrasse a few doors down from the bank, a contented Alois filled me in on the rest of what they'd been able to piece together about the details of the mafia plan.

  "The upshot being," he said, jaw muscles working away on his second chicken leg, "that you were never in any real danger, except inadvertently."

  "Great, I wish somebody'd told me that before. I wish somebody'd told Janko."

  "Well, that was your fault; you kept interrupting him at his work."

  "I know, damn thoughtless of me." I smiled. "But I'm sure glad I did, in Nussbaum's case."

  Janko, it seemed, had been sent to kill Jakob Nussbaum for the same reason he'd been sent to kill Attila Szarvas, which had nothing to do with anything either of them could pass on to me. It was simply because they were claimants to the Velazquez, Stetten's rivals. Whether they were legitimate claimants or not, the mafia had no way of knowing, and therefore they were best "removed" before they queered the plan to get the paintings into his nominal possession.

  Me, they had no interest in killing. In fact, they preferred having me around. I was the frosting on the cake. Who better than the famed (I'm stretching a point here) Boston Art Cop to employ his investigative skills in helping the victimized Count Stetten hunt down his stolen patrimony? Did I want to go to St. Petersburg to look into that Turner from the Lost Truck? Sure, great idea. To Altaussee to see what I could learn about the Lost Truck itself? Absolutely, go ahead. With our blessing.

  And why not? The mafia people behind Stetten had no interest in the Lost Truck as such, but only in 73 of the 106 paintings. Why 73? There, with Stetten not knowing the answer himself, we could only guess. But guessing wasn't that hard, as I told Alois. Those 73 must have been what was left from the original haul of 106 after it had worked its way from the Russian army, to Russian officialdom, to semi-officialdom, to organized crime. The other 33—including the Turner in the Hermitage—had in all probability simply peeled away in various directions in the intervening time, a kind of natural attrition that was common where precious contraband was involved.

  "That makes sense," Alois agreed.

  "Sure it does. And it means that the mafia couldn't care less if I actually traced down any one of those paintings, or all 33. They were only concerned with the ones they had their hands on—the 'collection.'"

  "Which, when you come to think of it, is probably why you're still alive."

  I laughed. "That and Mr. Nussbaum's trusty frying pan."

  Chapter 37

  So it all turned out pretty well, considering. And after I returned to Boston, things kept on improving.

  First, thanks to Christie Valle de Leon's energetic taking on of Jakob Nussbaum's case, it looked as if the Conde de Torrijos, presently in the evidence room at Boston Police headquarters, would soon go to him. Nussbaum would get to live out his life across from Prinz-Eugen-Strasse 22 on his own means. And Wittgenstein would get his liver twice a day—on gold dinner plate, if he preferred it that way.

  Second, the Swiss government, finding themselves in a potential public relations nightmare over what to do with the seventy-two looted, ownerless paintings that had been in one of their vaults for over a decade, had gratefully taken Christie up on her suggestion (prompted by my suggestion, may I add) that they go to CIAT, which would mount an exhibition of them to be called Plunder Reclaimed. The show would travel to ten cities in Europe and the United States, partly for aesthetic and educational reasons, and partly in the hope that the publicity would help in finding the rightful owners.

  As for Simeon, even if no perfect resolution was possible, at least there was partial closure. Janko Golubov, if the Austrians ever let him out of jail, would face murder charges in Boston, although he was bound to be pretty decrepit by then. So would I, but I was looking forward to tottering into the witness box and testifying against him all the same. As for what would happen to Schnittke/Loitzl, that was less certain, but Alois and Pirchl were both working on it, and that was good enough for me. Shaposhkin, unfortunately, was out of their reach.

  Stetten, by the way, had continued to cooperate, and it appeared that he would get off lightly, which, on reflection, was okay with me. I'm not one to hold a grudge, and in the end he did do his best to keep me from getting plugged.

  The question that had bedeviled us so often and for so long—Why would a mafia courier pawn a $5,000,000 painting for $100?—would probably never be answered for sure, but Alois had his theory, based on putting together a lot of bits and pieces: Korolenko, the courier, had been on a mission to deliver that particular painting to a fence or a buyer in the United States. But once safely off the plane in Boston he'd decided to defect, from Russia as well as from the mafia, and try to make it on his own in the States. At that point The painting was just something he had to get rid of, and, not possessing a brain of high order, had shown up with it in his valise at the nearest pawnshop where Russian was spoken. Of course, it had taken the mafia no time to catch up with him.

  It was Alois's guess that it was after the debacle in Boston that they'd decided there had to be a better way to get rid of the paintings than by doing it piecemeal at low black-market prices, and had come up with the plan to use Stetten to move the entire lot of them. Quite possibly, this was when Schnittke had come into the picture, which would mean that his claim that he'd had nothing to do with Simeon's murder might possibly be true.

  Was that really the way it had all happened? There was no way to know for certain, but it made sense and it tied things up about as neatly as a thing like this is likely ever to be tied up.

  All in all then, a lot had been accomplished, and by the time CIAT was finished, a lot of old wrongs were going to be righted. Even better from a personal point of view, I would continue
to be involved. Plunder Reclaimed would need a curator, and since I couldn't imagine anybody better qualified for the job, particularly since it was my idea in the first place, I surprised Christie by accepting the six-month assignment when it was offered. After surprising her, I then proceeded to flabbergast her by saying that if there was any possibility of a continuing position with CIAT for someone with my background, I was raring to go.

  Well, Alex had said it back in Vienna; I wasn't the same person.

  "I'll say this much for you," Christie said when she got her breath back, "your timing's good. We're going to be losing Dick Benedetti, our consultant on seventeenth-eighteenth-century European painting. Actually, I would've suggested it before, but it never occurred to me that you'd be—"

  "I'll take it," I said.

  "Don't be in such a hurry. If the past is any guide, it'd involve spending six or ten days a month here in New York, on the average."

  "That's not a problem; I like New York."

  "And there isn't much pay to speak of, but as you know it's in one hell of a good cause, and there's plenty of opportunity for travel, and I know you like that, and there's also—"

  "Christie, you don't have to talk me into it; I'm the one who's asking. I'll take it, I'll take it."

  "Son of a gun, I wouldn't have believed it. Well, Ben, that's just dandy. I'm going to love working with you. I hope you can say the same for me."

  "I'm not showing up at six o'clock in the morning, I can tell you that."

  "No, there's room for only one crazy person here," she said. "Now let's get back to Plunder. It's going to open in December, which means you really ought to be here full-time for the next couple of months getting it ready. If you want, we can put you up at our visiting-scholar residence, a wonderful old brownstone with its own private garden on East Seventy-seventh, midway between the Frick and the Met. Now I ask you, what could be better than that?"