“SS,” Joe Cooley commented. “Handsome devil.”
Max nodded. “Walter Beck. This photograph was taken just after his promotion to colonel, a year before the end of the war.”
Joe Cooley studied the long, angular face and intelligent eyes. “Perfect German officer,” he said. “Cold bastard, by the look of him.”
Max pulled a clipping from the folder, a copy of a birth announcement from the Berlin papers. “He was the oldest son of Otto Beck, a prominent German art dealer. Beck’s was one of Berlin’s oldest galleries, started by Otto’s grandfather as an artist’s supply shop, selling oils, stretchers, and canvas. The artists were always poor, so Beck’s sometimes traded supplies for their work. Otto’s father began selling the paintings. Business flourished and by 1900 Beck’s occupied a large, two-story building. The family lived on the upper floor, while the rest of the building was devoted to a gallery and workshops where Beck’s craftsmen restored and repaired paintings. Artists, collectors, and curators brought damaged works from all over Europe.
“Walter worked for his father for a few years. He had a good head for business but no particular love of art. He was young and ambitious and got swept up in the socialist fever of the thirties. He joined the Nazi party. His father disapproved but Walter didn’t care. He read the political climate and he understood Hitler. He moved quickly up the ranks, and his training in his father’s gallery landed him a position with the Sonderauftrag Linz.”
“English, Max.”
“It means ‘Special Operation Linz,’ a secret project of Hitler’s. He was a frustrated artist, of course, and thought most of Europe’s art was his by right. He was obsessed with building a museum in Linz, a city he was going to remake into the cultural capital of Europe after the war. Before the war his agents toured museums, galleries, and private collections throughout Europe, compiling exhaustive lists of the most important artworks. The result was a guide to what Hitler’s armies were to confiscate—to loot—the instant German forces overran an area. Beck helped compile that guide, which is how he came to know where our painting was hidden.
“Beck should have spent the war in Paris, where all the best art was, but he was an arrogant man and made the mistake of getting into an argument with Alfred Rosenberg himself. Rosenberg was the Nazis’ ideologue, one of the most powerful men in Germany, and Beck found himself reassigned to the eastern front. He was an excellent officer, but even by SS standards he was exceptionally cruel. Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland—Beck managed to make himself one of the most wanted criminals of the war.”
There were more yellowed clippings, most in languages Joe Cooley did not recognize—eastern European, he thought, and some in Hebrew. Most carried the same photograph. He could not read the captions, but he was looking at a hunted man.
The German column pulled to a halt on a ridge near the ancient village of Stawicki. There were five troop carriers, two tanks, and various smaller vehicles, the ragtag remnants of a routed army that had banded together in retreat. SS Colonel Walter Beck emerged from an open staff car carrying a pair of field glasses. He stretched his legs, then calmly trained the glasses on the distant road behind them. The Russians were not in view. Thanks to the mines laid by Beck’s men, they would probably be another few hours, giving him time for the present business. Beck knew the war was hopelessly lost and that he would soon be hunted by men who would not forget. Surrender would mean execution. He would run, but first needed to acquire the means to ensure the hunters would never find him.
He turned his attention to the village. From outward appearances, this war had somehow passed the village by. He could see the steeple of the old church, and beyond that the clock tower of the town hall; everything seeming at peace. He could send his men to find what he sought, but the villagers would long ago have carefully hidden their precious treasure. He did not have time for games of hide-and-seek.
“Bring the village priest, and the mayor and his family,” he said to a lieutenant.
“At once, Standartenfuhrer.”
“And twenty-five villagers,” Beck added.
As the officer set off with a truck, an aide set up a portable table and chair. Beck sat down with a bottle of wine and turned his face toward the sun, enjoying its warming glow.
The truck soon snaked its way back up the road, halting near Beck, who sipped his wine as soldiers barked orders, prodding the villagers out of the truck. There were only women, children, and old men. The priest, the mayor, and the mayor’s wife, daughter, and child were brought before the colonel. The mayor was a heavyset man with florid cheeks, the priest old, lean, and cross.
“I must protest,” the mayor began. “We are noncombat …” A soldier struck him in the stomach with the butt of his rifle. The mayor fell to his knees and bent over, gasping and retching.
“There is no need for unpleasantness,” Beck said, “if you do as I say. I merely require several items from your church.”
“Our church has already been stripped bare,” said the priest. “There is nothing of value left.”
“Quite the contrary,” Beck said. “Carracci and Caravaggio. Reni. Lanfranco.” He smiled. “Does my memory serve? All gifts of Count Krasinski to his brother the bishop.” A flicker in the priest’s expression was all the confirmation Beck needed.
“Excellency,” the mayor blurted, his face bright red, “those paintings were all taken away before the war, to Gdynia. Yes, to Gdyn …” He couldn’t catch his breath.
“Help me, here, Father,” Beck said to the priest. “Surely you recall. Behind a false wall in the crypt, or beneath a carefully laid pile of rubble? No doubt a search will turn them up. Most likely near the reliquary, I suspect.” He sipped his wine. “Which, by the way, I shall require as well, although you can keep its contents—a finger of St. Barnabas, I believe? Or a rib of Hedwig or the hair of Casimir or the toe of Sarkander? Forgive me, I cannot recall that detail, but I would not dream of removing such a precious relic from your devotions.” He looked at his watch. “I have very little time, I’m afraid. The Bolsheviks are pressing.”
“We cannot give what we do not possess,” said the priest.
“Very well.” Beck stood, dropped his leather gloves on the table, unsnapped his holster and removed his Luger. He picked an old man from the crowd and shot him. A woman fell to her knees beside him, shrieking in grief as his body twitched in death. Beck shot her as well. Villagers screamed. Beck’s soldiers stood fast around them, weapons at the ready.
“Well, Father?” Beck asked. “What are you prepared to sacrifice to protect a few paintings? What is the going price in your church for oil and canvas, for a few baubles? A dozen lives? Everyone here? Or will you martyr a whole village?”
The priest closed his eyes, crossed himself, and bowed his head in prayer. Beck raised the Luger to his temple. The priest flinched at the touch of the hot metal but kept praying. Beck considered the possibility that only the priest knew where to find what he wanted. He returned his pistol to its holster and turned to the mayor, still on his knees. “You have not introduced me to your family,” he said, stepping forward to the young woman and her baby who stood behind him. “Your lovely daughter, I presume?” The mayor’s fat cheeks quivered with fear. His daughter gasped and shrank back, clutching her baby tightly. Beck reached for the child and pried it from her grasp. The baby began to cry.
“Please, no,” she pleaded quietly, tears streaking her cheeks. Beck cooed at the baby. “What a lovely child,” he said. “You must be so proud.” Playfully bouncing it up and down, he walked to the edge of the escarpment, its slope scarred with jagged rocks.
He tossed the baby into the air, as an uncle would do. The baby’s cry rose in pitch.
The mother moaned and slumped. “Father, tell them,” she pleaded with the priest.
Beck tossed the child higher, her cry now searing. A woman fainted; another screamed. “Yes, Father,” Beck said as the child soared. “Tell me.”
The priest prayed.
Beck tossed the baby again, harder. She wailed angrily.
“I beg of you,” the mayor’s daughter said, crawling toward Beck on her hands and knees. “Do not hurt my baby.” A soldier stepped in her way.
The child flew higher, and then higher still, both mother and child now crying hysterically.
“Jerzy, please! For the love of God, give him what he wants!” The mayor’s wife pleaded with her husband.
Beck nearly missed, catching the baby roughly with one hand. She wiggled and kicked in his grasp, howling angrily. “This is really quite difficult,” Beck said. “I don’t believe I can catch her next time.” He began again, but the mayor had had enough. “Yes! We’ll show you!”
“No!” the priest snapped. “Be silent!”
The mayor ignored him, appealing to Beck. “If we do as you say, you will leave our village in peace? You will let us all go?”
“I want nothing more of you. You have my word.”
A dozen soldiers accompanied the mayor and the priest back to the village in one of the trucks. Beck returned the child to her mother’s care and sat again, sunning himself. Forty minutes later, just as the lieutenant reported sighting the advancing Russians, the truck bounced back up the rutted road, carrying its precious cargo.
The priest watched sullenly as Beck examined the reliquary, an exquisite ivory-and-gold casket that glistened with rubies and pearls, and then each of the paintings, everything precisely as Beck expected.
When everything had been safely loaded Beck took his seat in the back of his staff car. “You are free to go,” he said to the mayor. “You’d better hide quickly, before your new Russian masters arrive. I have heard they have no love for the Poles.”
The column’s engines roared to life as the villagers collected their dead and started down the hill.
Beck’s lieutenant approached. “At your command, Standartenfuhrer, I am ready to carry out our orders.” The guns of the waiting Panzers were trained on the village, to follow the scorched-earth orders of the German high command.
“It would be unforgivable to destroy such a picturesque village,” said Beck. “Centuries of history should not be rubble. We shall leave Stawicki for the Russians to enjoy.” He nodded toward the departing villagers. “Only our friends there,” he said. “Nothing more.”
As Beck’s car pulled away canvas sides dropped from one of the troop trucks. With a great roar the machine guns inside opened fire.
Half an hour later, the screaming had stopped and the dust and smoke had settled. In the field before the village, there was only the sound of the approaching Russian column to break the silence.
Joe Cooley Barber set down the photograph of a stone memorial in front of the church in Stawicki, erected in memory of the villagers murdered during the war. “My God,” he said softly. “I thought they only did that to Jews.” He picked up a clipping from a South American newspaper, with Beck’s picture. “So Beck escaped with the painting to South America?”
“It wasn’t as simple as that. It took me time and a great many sources to piece the story together. U.S. Army reports, CIA documents, journalist’s reports, that sort of thing. And then these.”
Max leafed through a stack of copies of microfilm records, white on black and very difficult to read. “In the 1970s we found—or should I say the Stasi, the East German secret police, found—a collection of papers buried in a basement in Berlin, in what was the Soviet sector. The papers were part of the secret Stasi archives until after the fall of the Berlin wall, when they were released along with thousands of other documents. There was a journal, kept by Walter Beck’s younger brother Heinrich, who was just young enough to miss the shooting war. This is a copy.”
“It’s in German,” Joe Cooley said. “Can’t anybody write in English?”
“There’s a translation on the back.”
Business was always good at Beck’s. After the Great War proud old Germans sold family heirlooms to keep up with ruinous inflation. In the 1930s it was not only paintings but silverware and jewelry, the trade rising along with the Nazis. Even Jews could sell their valuables at Beck’s, at least until Kristallnacht in 1938, when it became too dangerous to deal with them. Otto Beck did not cheat the Jews but knew that he was often the beneficiary of their persecution. By 1940 it was wartime again and business prospered as never before, as officers returning from various fronts brought looted art to sell—paintings and tapestries, gold and silver. Beck’s paid top prices. Limousines arrived and departed, carrying a constant stream of government ministers and staff officers. Hitler’s own art dealers bought there. Goering was a regular. Otto Beck sold them what they wanted while privately mocking the Nazi taste in art. “Matisse and van Gogh, Kandinsky and Klee—mein Gott, the world for his taking, and the Führer prefers hunters and dumplings,” he said to his young son.
Heinrich cared nothing for the guns and games of war that fascinated most boys his age. He loved the art that moved through Beck’s. He accompanied his father on a business trip to Paris when he was only eight, and Otto Beck could not extract him from the Louvre.
From the time he was old enough to hold a brush, Heinrich devoted every spare moment to painting. He was a careful craftsman and displayed solid talent if not brilliance. One of his father’s workers told him he could improve his technique by copying the works he admired. Heinrich’s favorites were the Baroques. After half a dozen attempts, he produced an extraordinary Velázquez; except for the fresh paint and the craquelure—the age cracks in the painting—even the most knowledgeable restorers who worked for his father could hardly tell which was the master’s and which the boy’s. Had the war not intervened, Heinrich Beck might well have become a successful artist.
He learned all aspects of his father’s business, helping the artisans repair the traces of war on paintings passing through the gallery—boot marks and deep scratches, neat bullet holes and ragged edges left by knives that hacked priceless canvases from old frames, all mute testament to a war he did not see.
As Allied bombs began to bring the war closer, Otto moved his family and his inventory to the basement. The workshops were stacked floor to ceiling with frames and canvases, and the family slept on cots in a small room. The heavy floor beams rumbled and shook from distant bombs, but business went on.
The gallery’s clientele grew more desperate with each passing week, trying to finance escapes or buy new identities, or simply trying to survive. Rivers of art and silverware and cash flowed in and out of Beck’s through the winter of 1944–45.
“The war is coming close,” one entry read. “Our house smells of oil paint, mother’s cooking, and fear.”
Late one night in the spring of 1945, Heinrich looked up from his workbench to see a man standing in the shadows. He knew instantly who it was. “Walter!”
Otto emerged from the back, where he had been working on the accounts. They had seen Walter only once since the war’s beginning, in 1941 as the Nazi high command prepared to open an eastern front. Then he had worn the black of the SS; now he wore civilian clothes. He was gaunt and his face was hard and he smelled of cigarettes and alcohol.
“Walter?” Otto said. “Are you all right?”
“I have some things you will keep safe for me.”
“Where are you going?” Otto Beck asked his son. Walter said nothing, stepping aside for two men carrying a wooden crate.
“I asked you a question, Walter,” Otto said, irritated. Otto Beck was head of his house and SS or not, Walter was his son. “Where are you …”
Walter slapped him viciously, knocking him down. “Arschloch!” he snarled. “Make certain this case is safe. Do you understand?” Otto was too stunned to reply.
Heinrich nodded for his father. “Yes, I heard you,” he said in a small voice. “We’ll take care of it. I promise.”
Walter turned and started up the steps. Bravely, Heinrich followed. “Walter, wait! Are you a general now? What did you do in the war? Were you ever shot? Do yo
u know how close the Russians are? Are you hungry?”
Walter Beck stepped into the night and ducked into the back of a waiting car. It sped off as Heinrich’s other questions died on his lips.
Otto Beck’s mouth was bleeding, his cheek bruised. Heinrich helped him up onto a chair and ran to get water and a cloth. Otto waved him away, his eyes on the empty stairs, his mind on his wife, who was sleeping. “Don’t tell her he was here,” he said. Otto Beck never spoke of Walter again.
The crate was hidden away below the basement with Otto’s most valuable paintings, in a vault that was lined with metal to keep it dry. It remained there until after the war, long after the Russians had come looking for Walter. Russian reprisals against former SS were terrible, especially for those like Walter Beck, who had made their reputation in the east.
One day Russian troops smashed their way into the building. Otto had just enough time to shove his son into the lower basement and close the trapdoor. The Russians beat Otto to death and shot his wife. They tore apart the shop, but they were drunk and not very good at what they did and never found the trapdoor beneath which Heinrich trembled with his treasures. For three months they peed on priceless canvases and drank vodka while Heinrich hid beneath the floor, listening to their balalaika and living on jam and stale bread and a drum of water that tasted of diesel, only emerging when they were asleep or out on patrol.
“My God,” Joe Cooley said. “How does a boy live through that?”
“He was luckier than most,” Max said. “He was alive.”
After the Russians left, Heinrich resumed his father’s business under the new reality of life in East Berlin. As the years passed and Heinrich heard nothing from Walter, he assumed his brother was dead or a prisoner of the Soviets, which amounted to the same thing. But one day a man came to the gallery with a letter from Walter, instructing Heinrich to give his crate to the man carrying the letter.
“Heinrich only kept his journal for a few months after that,” Max said. The last entry was made just two days before the Stasi raided the gallery. It is possible they were aware of his black-market dealings. We have no further word of Heinrich. He disappeared.”
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