Not in Time

by Shawna Seed

She began to grasp the huge task the men at Neuschwanstein had faced. The castle and its grounds held thousands of looted objects. Some carried identifying marks from their original owners. Others had been tagged by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, which confiscated Jewish property in France.

  After a couple hours, Julien came to sit with her. “Any luck?” she whispered.

  “I’m not sure what I’m looking for,” he said. “What are you looking at?”

  “I’m reading memos. It’s funny how many really bad typists there were. You see all these strikeovers and mistakes,” she said. “They found a good typist at some point. You can tell it’s the same person, because there’s ‘sfm’ in lowercase letters at the bottom of the memos.”

  “One of the women working here told me the Nazis created an index card for everything, and they have the records here,” Julien said “Do you think I should look at those?”

  “The ERR files?”

  “Eizen-something Rosenberg,” Julien said. “Is that ERR?”

  “That could be really good. I can’t even imagine how many boxes that is. Maybe I should come look with you?”

  “They’re on microfilm. She said she’d show me this afternoon,” he said. “If I need help, I’ll come find you.”

  After a quick lunch, Genevieve went back to her boxes of memos; Julien went to look at microfilm.

  By midafternoon, her attention began to flag. She was tired, depressed about Julien, and no closer to finding what she was looking for. All she really knew was that the Monuments Men faced a daunting task, generated lots of memos and eventually found a good typist.

  Henry Lazare was really going to be impressed.

  Julien was probably chatting with some attractive archivist who actually knew what she was doing.

  Genevieve stared out at the barren woods, brooding.

  She realized she’d sold the landscape short. The weak daylight slanting through the trees cast interesting shadows. She imagined what a gifted photographer could make of the scene.

  “Well, duh,” she said aloud. She was a visual person. She needed visual stimulation.

  Genevieve was sitting at a table with photos from Neuschwanstein spread in all directions when Julien appeared at her elbow looking equally discouraged.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I mean, it was educational. I learned how the Nazis put a code of letters and numbers on the back of the artwork and then created an index card for it. But I didn’t find a card for the drawing.”

  He looked down at the photos. “What have you got here?”

  “I decided I needed visual stimuli.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  Genevieve shook her head.

  “Maybe this guy is your perfect typist,” Julien said, picking up a photo. It showed three men in uniform crammed into an office. Two in the foreground were looking at a painting. A third man was seated at a desk with a typewriter in front of him.

  Genevieve slid down so that the back of her neck rested against the top of the chair. She stared at the ceiling tiles.

  “I don’t know what I expected to find,” she said. “I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

  “I don’t know either,” Julien said. “I mean, you’re going through boxes of photos, so you can learn what? That the unit at Neuschwanstein had a great typist named…” He flipped over the photo. “Private Stimson F. Miller?”

  Genevieve, who had been counting ceiling tiles, sat up so abruptly that she almost tipped over her chair.

  “What did you just say?”

  Julien looked at the back of the photo. “It says ‘Lt. Commander James J. Rorimer, Sgt. R.J. LaRue and Pvt. Stimson F. Miller.’ ”

  “Stim Miller?”

  Julien put the photo down. “You know this guy?”

  “He’s on the board of the Hilliard.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  At 10:30 the next morning, Genevieve and Julien were in a cab headed to Henry Lazare’s house.

  It felt good, although disorienting, to be back in the California sunshine. They’d left their hotel in the predawn hours for an early flight, spent nearly six hours in the air, and yet it was still just midmorning in LA. Genevieve had to fumble in her carry-on for her sunglasses. It seemed ages since she’d needed them.

  She was nervous about meeting Henry for the first time and wished they weren’t going straight from the airport. She was tired of all the clothes in her suitcase and felt bleary after the flight. But Henry had insisted on meeting right away, and at his home, not his office.

  He lived in a sprawling Mediterranean-style house in a quiet corner of Brentwood. Huge hedges and an electronically controlled gate screened it from the street.

  “This is quite something,” Genevieve said as the driver piled their luggage on the circular driveway. “I wish I could have cleaned up first.”

  Julien had been uncharacteristically quiet on the ride. “Don’t worry about it,” he said as he stepped up to the massive wooden door and rang the bell. It echoed for what seemed like minutes.

  A tiny woman in a blue dress opened the door. “Oh, Mr. Julien, hello,” she said.

  Julien greeted her warmly. “Hello, Anna.”

  She stood back from the door. “You can leave the luggage in the hall,” she said. “Mr. Henry is on the way from the office. You should wait in the library.”

  They followed her down a long hallway and then turned left through a pair of heavy wood doors.

  The books in Henry Lazare’s “library” were confined to two low shelves that flanked a stone fireplace. A pool table anchored the middle of the room. Opposite the fireplace was an old-fashioned wooden desk, nearly as big as the pool table, with an arrangement of cracked leather club chairs in front of it.

  A small landscape of the Dutch school hung on the wall behind the desk, and Genevieve moved in for a closer look.

  “I’d love to know the story on this painting,” she said. “How long has he had it?”

  “As long as I can remember,” Julien said. “When I was a kid, Henry’s dad was always calling me in here to lecture me. ‘Julien, your mother was disappointed you got a B in Algebra. Your mother was upset to find music by a group called the Dead Kennedys in your room. Your mother says you’ve been staying out past curfew,’ ” he intoned solemnly. “I just wanted to shoot some pool.”

  Genevieve looked away from the painting. “That is a nice table. Solid slate, I bet.”

  “Are you an expert at pool table provenance, too?”

  “D and I were dorm champs freshman year. Took down a couple really cocky rednecks, and oh, were they mad,” Genevieve said. “Although D ended up dating one of them later.”

  “You’re a pool shark?” Julien asked, incredulous.

  “My dad taught me, and D grew up with all these brothers,” Genevieve said. She backed a couple paces off the painting. “He’s got this hung too high. Is Henry really tall, like you?”

  Julien laughed. “Want to shoot pool while we wait?”

  Before Genevieve could respond, the doors opened and Henry Lazare strode into the room, trailed by Melvin.

  Genevieve’s first thought was: My God. He’s shorter than me.

  She caught Julien’s eye. He smiled and shrugged.

  Henry Lazare’s suit was impeccably tailored but failed to conceal his figure flaws: short legs, rotund belly. He looked like a well-dressed penguin with an expensive haircut.

  He held his hand out to Genevieve. “Nice to meet you finally.” He clapped Julien on the arm.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” he said, waving them toward the club chairs and seating himself behind the massive desk. Melvin hovered off to one side, his back to the wall.

  Genevieve detailed what they’d found in the archives in Paris and Maryland, keeping her presentation concise. Julien had coached her during the flight, and she was grateful. She might have been tempted to meander otherwise. He’d done a good job anticipating Henry’s questions.

 
When she finished, Henry leaned back in his chair, which Genevieve saw now was on a small platform to give him the illusion of height. “We don’t have enough to go to the museum yet, is that what I’m hearing?” he asked.

  “It would be one thing if we were sure the museum would deal in good faith,” Genevieve said. “But we can’t count on that. The response we’ve provoked – from someone – is completely out of proportion to the value of the drawing.”

  “You have a theory about that?” Henry asked.

  “It has to be something that involves a lot of money. Why go to all this trouble? Maybe the drawing doesn’t matter, but the route the drawing took does. Maybe it leads to other, more valuable things looted from your family,” Genevieve said.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Julien sitting with his chin propped in his hand, staring at her with something that looked suspiciously like admiration.

  “Who knows what artwork could be out there?” she continued. “We’ve got no eyewitnesses, no business records to reconstruct the inventory of the gallery.”

  Julien took this opportunity to jump in. “Where are we on the threats, Henry?”

  Henry turned to Melvin. “Yes, Melvin, let’s get an update on that, since my cousin felt the pressing need to call me in the middle of the night about that.”

  Confused, Genevieve tried to catch Julien’s eye, but he ignored her.

  Melvin stepped away from his spot against the wall.

  “Still working on the emails, but it’s different ISPs. Might even be two different guys. Neighborhood canvas turned up a lady the next street over who works at home, some kind of writer, although it sounds like she mostly stares out her window all day. She saw an unfamiliar black SUV in the neighborhood a couple times. Another guy thought he saw...”

  Genevieve found herself zoning out, looking at the landscape above Henry’s desk as Melvin went through the information he’d gleaned from her neighbors.

  “I also found a bag from a fish market in Glendale in the scrub behind the apartment. I’m hoping to call in a favor and get that run for prints, but that takes time.”

  His report concluded, Melvin perched on a corner of the massive desk.

  “What about the anonymous email to my friend’s boss? Is that related?”

  Melvin and Henry exchanged a glance.

  “That’s going to be hard to trace without a copy of the email,” Melvin said.

  Henry weighed in. “If your friend has legal counsel, it’s probably best that we coordinate through him. Or her. Can you get the name?”

  Genevieve had been hoping to avoid that conversation, but it looked as if she wasn’t going to have a choice. “I’ll talk to Thomas this afternoon,” she said.

  Melvin’s phone buzzed, and he pulled it from a case attached to his belt and checked it. He and Henry exchanged another glance.

  “The main thing is, you’ve been safe with Mr. Brooks, and there’s no reason to think that won’t continue to be the case,” Melvin said.

  Genevieve took a deep breath and looked at Julien. He was staring pointedly in the other direction. “Actually, I need to take you up on the offer of a hotel. I’ve already stayed too long – it’s an inconvenience for someone who works from home.”

  She and Julien had argued about this for roughly half of their nearly six-hour flight.

  “You can’t do your work at Starbucks, Julien? Every other quote-unquote self-employed person seems to,” Henry said.

  Genevieve winced at how sharply Henry spoke to Julien.

  “This is my decision. He’s very graciously offered to keep my cat for me,” Genevieve said.

  “Her mind’s made up, Henry. Good luck trying to change it,” Julien said.

  Henry raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Instead, he picked up a phone on his desk and asked the housekeeper to call a cab.

  The meeting was breaking up, but the cab wouldn’t arrive for a few minutes, and Genevieve had an idea. She excused herself to wash her hands.

  When she returned, she summoned her best smile for Henry. “That’s a very nice landscape. I understand it’s been in your family a long time?”

  Henry cast a quick glance over his shoulder. “As long as I can remember.”

  “I hope you’ll forgive my saying this,” Genevieve said, channeling her best Texas manners, “but it’s hung just a little too high.”

  Julien suppressed a smile, but just barely. That smile turned to surprise, though, when Genevieve stood and walked behind Henry’s desk.

  “Maybe I could show you? Would you two help me?” She looked at Julien, then Melvin. “Is this wired into the security system, or could we take it down?”

  Shocked but game, Julien sprang to his feet.

  Melvin peered behind the painting. “Not wired. It really should be, boss.”

  Henry had swiveled his chair around to watch. He waved his hand, granting permission. Julien and Melvin each grasped an edge of the painting and removed it from the wall.

  “Now bring it down about six inches,” Genevieve said. She stepped back. Then she moved forward, putting her hand under one corner. “Maybe just a little higher,” she said.

  She repeated the process of stepping back, then put her hand under the other corner and raised the painting a bit.

  Returning to Henry’s side, she said, “See, isn’t that better?”

  “If you say so,” Henry said.

  The housekeeper knocked once and stepped into the room. “Your cab’s here.”

  In the cab, Julien gave the driver his address, then turned to Genevieve. “What the hell was that? Were you trying to make me jealous? Trust me, Henry is not your type.”

  Genevieve was tired and cranky, but she did her best not to respond in kind.

  “Oh, please,” she said, clapping her sunglasses on. “That was research.”

  “Research?”

  “That’s a very nice painting. And by nice, I mean significant, and worth a lot of money.”

  “Really? I’ve always thought it was ugly,” Julien said.

  “I was sitting there looking at it, and I was thinking, well, it makes sense that Henry’s father would have had something that nice,” Genevieve said. “Your family was in the gallery business for generations, after all. But here’s the thing.”

  Julien waited.

  “That’s exactly the kind of thing the Nazis would have stolen,” Genevieve said. “And then I thought, well, maybe Henry’s father bought it after he came to the U.S. But you told me that side of the family was never really interested in art.”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “Didn’t you tell me there was always tension between your mother and her oldest brother?”

  “Neither of my parents had anything good to say about him. Why?”

  I wasn’t adjusting the height of the picture,” Genevieve said. “I was feeling the back of it. In the lower left corner, there’s an erasure – you can feel the roughness.”

  Pushing his sunglasses up, Julien rubbed his hands over his face. “Which means what?”

  “You’d need an infrared camera to tell for sure, but I think there was a code there at one point. I think that painting was looted, and I think Henry’s grandfather got it back. I wonder whether Henry knows more about looted Lazare art than he’s telling. Why didn’t he want to go to the museum with this? And why doesn’t Melvin ever want us to call the police?”

  At Julien’s house, Genevieve started a load of laundry and played with Mona, who seemed not to have missed her at all.

  Julien gathered up the mail the cat-sitter had left on the dining-room table and disappeared into his office.

  He’d been surprisingly defensive about her suggestion that Henry might be playing a double game. He thought his cousin treated him like a 15-year-old and was often guilty of behavior that Julien characterized as “dick swinging.” He did not, as it turned out, believe his cousin was truly dishonest.

  He rejected her idea that Henry had someh
ow engineered their original meeting in Las Vegas. “Conspiracies always have too many moving parts. The simplest explanation is usually the right one.”

  Genevieve wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t want to press the issue. “Just friends” was proving difficult to navigate; she saw no need to make things harder.

  They’d already argued over her desire to go straight to a hotel. She’d agreed to go to his house only because she wanted to see her cat and she needed clean clothes.

  She decided to try to arrange lunch with Thomas, which would serve two purposes: She could get the name of Philip’s lawyer, as Henry had requested, and she could take a break from Julien.

  Thomas was reluctant when she called, because he thought he’d been gone from the office too much lately. “Even when I’m here, I’m completely distracted,” Thomas said.

  “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important,” Genevieve said. She checked the time. “Can you meet me at our usual place at 12:30?”

  “It’s gone out of business,” Thomas said. “I went to get takeout Monday and there was a sign on the door.”

  “But it always seemed so busy,” Genevieve said. “Well, what about the cheap coffee place?”

  There was a long silence, but Thomas finally relented. “OK, 12:30.”

  Genevieve went back to Julien’s office and tapped tentatively at the door to get his attention. He was sitting at his worktable, staring intently at the computer screen.

  “Hey, I’m getting ready to leave for lunch with Thomas,” she said.

  “OK.” Julien stretched his arms above his head and then picked up his keys, wallet and sunglasses.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You want to move your car so I can get mine out of the garage?”

  “No. You are not coming with me,” Genevieve said. “This conversation is going to be hard enough, and Thomas doesn’t even know you.”

  Julien stood. “You don’t go anywhere alone. Didn’t we just discuss this from the East Coast to the Mississippi this morning?”

  “I won’t be alone, I’ll be with Thomas,” Genevieve said. “In the middle of Santa Monica, at high noon, practically.”