“We moved into a big house, not a palace, but a very big house, and there were lots of people to help take care of me. They were all very good to me. My father was happy and it seemed like a perfect life for a long time.
“I remember how much he loved his art. He had brought some very fine paintings with him. He had them hung very proudly in our home. He always showed them to me, and explained them. He knew more about art than anyone I’d ever met. I suppose we had quite a lot of money, or maybe life wasn’t expensive then. We had a country house too. He entertained a lot, and I had many pretty dresses. My father was a very handsome man, like you.” She smiled at Joachim. “There were women in his life, but I think he loved his paintings more. Maybe even more than he loved me. He was always excited about new art he bought, and he had an important collection. Looking back on it, I’m not sure how he brought the ones that came with us from Germany. I suppose he smuggled them in. He never told me, and I never asked him when I was older. He was my hero and I thought he could do no wrong.
“I didn’t know then, but he changed his name when we came to Argentina. Von Hartmann was my paternal grandmother’s maiden name. He wanted no association with his own name, the one that he had used during the war. I only learned that later. He was from a noble family on both sides. His own name, the one he grew up with, was von Walther.” A shadow crossed her eyes as she said the words and went on.
“My father was at the center of society in Buenos Aires, greatly respected and admired and very popular. There were many Germans in Argentina then, newly arrived ones, not just those who had been there for generations. Many people went to Argentina from Germany during and after the war. There were questions one didn’t ask. But how we got there and why was never questioned, not by me anyway. For much of it, I was a child. And then I married Alejandro Canal, your father. He was from one of the most social, important families in Buenos Aires. They were related to Spanish royalty, and very aristocratic.
“We were happy and went to every party we were invited to. There had been five hundred people at our wedding. He worked at his family’s bank. We had ten happy, carefree, easy years together. And it took a long time for you and Javier to come along.” Her eyes filled with tears at the remembered joy. “It was the happiest time of my life when you and Javier were born, and your father was so proud of both of you. We were doubly blessed, and you completed our already seemingly perfect life.” She paused for a moment. “And then everything went terribly wrong, all at once.” Joachim knew that both his grandfather and his own father had died within months of each other, fortunes had been lost, and their lives had changed radically while he was still an infant.
“There was a famous hunter of war criminals who was very active then. He combed South America for important Nazis, with great success. It was roughly thirty-five years after the war by then, and they were still looking for Nazis from the High Command. Many were still in hiding. Some had covered their tracks well and were living out in the open. I had heard of it, but never paid any attention. It had nothing to do with my life or my father’s. Until the hunter in question found my father.
“The man’s skills were extraordinary. He had been looking for Papa for years but had had misleading information. Once he realized he had found my father, everything happened very quickly. My father didn’t die suddenly, he was kidnapped, taken back to Germany, where he was charged with heinous war crimes, and stood trial. The testimony against him was horrendous. I read it all,” she said, with tears still welling up in her eyes. It was hard to admit this to him now, but she thought he should know. “He was tried and found guilty. He was sentenced to hang, but they commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. He was seventy-three years old when they took him from Buenos Aires, and they took everything he owned. He had quite a lot of money, which the war crimes tribunal in Germany demanded as restitution to the victims. His art collection, our houses, everything he had, gone. It was the right thing to do, but it took away everything he had and that I would have inherited one day. I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway, once I knew how he got it, but it changed everything for me.
“Once my father was convicted, your father’s family demanded that he separate from me. We’d been married for ten years and had four-month-old twins. I begged him not to leave. It was an ugly time. He was a good person, but he was close to his family, and he saw me differently after what happened. I’m not sure he believed that I hadn’t known about my father’s past because we were so close, and apparently he thought I’d hidden it from him. I think he felt terrible about it, but he followed his family’s wishes, and he left me very quickly. The governor and a judge they knew granted him a divorce almost immediately. They gave me a small amount of money to live on for a short time, until I could find a job, and for you. And according to his family’s demands, your father renounced all rights to you and Javier. They wanted no connection to the bloodline of a criminal. He refused to see me or speak to me after he left, and he never saw you and Javier again.” Joachim stopped her then, with a look of shock and horror on his face as he grabbed her arm.
“Wait, are you telling me that during all those years you told us our father was dead, he was alive?” The idea that their mother, whom they trusted implicitly, had lied to them about something so important was an additional shock.
She shook her head in answer to his question. “By the time you asked me about him, he was dead. He remarried almost immediately after the divorce, a very young, very beautiful socialite. He died in a polo accident three years later. They had ordered me to take back my maiden name of von Hartmann after the divorce. They denied you and Javier the use of their name too. They wanted nothing to do with any of us. So, I changed yours and your brother’s as well. You were both three years old when he died. We never saw him again from the day he left. And I was ordered to leave our home within weeks, with both of you. They considered me the daughter of a monster, and a criminal myself by association. Your father and his family wanted nothing to do with any of us after that, no intermingling with their pure bloodline. I never heard from any of them again. Your father never saw you or Javier after he left us when you were four months old.
“I would have gone to see my father in Germany, but I never had the money. I wanted to see him at least once so he could explain everything to me himself. We wrote to each other several times. I moved from our big house to a tiny apartment. I got the job I had at the museum. They were aware of the scandal, but they knew that I was desperate and had two babies to support. And unlike my in-laws, they didn’t blame me for my father’s crimes. They were very kind to me. I was heartbroken over my father and what he had done. I never saw him again. He died in prison in Germany. And then, all those years later, fifteen to be exact, Francois and I met, and two years later, I married him and we came to Paris.
“Francois knew the whole story. I told him. I would never have kept it from him. He got me the job at the Louvre, and once I was there I discovered the organization I work for now. When I realized what they did I begged them to hire me, and they did. It is my way of paying penance for my father’s sins. He took much more than paintings from the people he robbed and sent to their deaths. But with each painting I can find and restore to its rightful owners, I am doing some small thing to restore dignity to them, and justice, and often even money that they need. I can’t bring their relatives back, but if I can find their art for them, that’s something.”
She had been doing it for twenty-five years and had returned an astonishing amount of art. She was driven to help them, and tireless. There were tears sliding down Joachim’s face at the end of the story. He put his arms around his mother and sobbed, thinking of the blows she had survived, the heartaches she had endured, the loss of a father, a husband, dignity, protection, her home, and even the money she needed to survive and support her children. He had never known anyone so brave. And even now, when she told him, she didn’t speak with bitterne
ss.
He could only guess at the hardships she’d been through, how panicked she must have been when the father she adored was taken away and exposed as a criminal of heinous proportions, and how crushed she was when the husband she loved left her, abandoned her penniless with infant twins. And yet, she had survived. She had taken good care of them, been an admirable mother, and provided a good home for them. Now he realized what a savior Francois had been for her. She had spent twenty-five years atoning for her father’s crimes, not her own. The losses in his mother’s life had been monumental. Then on top of it, she had lost Javier. Yet, she was still standing, and strong, and compassionate. She was a living testimony to the endurance and resilience of the human spirit. Even now, she didn’t condemn the husband who had left her. She had simply been resourceful and prevailed. She had had the hardest life of anyone Joachim had ever known, and he loved his mother more than ever after he heard her story.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he asked in a hoarse voice.
“You were too young. And I was deeply ashamed of my father for a long time. And I saw no point in poisoning you against your own father. He wasn’t a strong man. He did what his family wanted him to do. They saw me as a criminal, linked to my father. They treated me as if I was as guilty as he was, and Alejandro didn’t have the courage to fight them. It was easier for him to let go of me, which is what he did, even if it meant giving you up too.”
“He abandoned us. What if you couldn’t support us? What if we had starved?” His voice shook as he said it and she smiled.
“I wouldn’t have let that happen. And I didn’t. We didn’t have much, but we had what we needed, and we had each other. We always had food on the table and a roof over our heads.” But the roof had been a thin one, and Joachim remembered now how she had washed their clothes every night, when they only had one set to wear, and she never bought anything for herself, and wore the same dress to work every day. He realized that she must have felt like a queen when she married Francois. He tried to spoil her in every way he could afford to. He wanted to make up for all the hardships she’d endured. And quite amazingly, she wasn’t bitter about her father, or the husband who had left her. She had simply done whatever she had to, to survive and give her two boys the best life she could.
“I never felt the same way about my father again,” she admitted, as Joachim looked at her.
“How could you? My father doesn’t sound like much of a man either. How could he have left you alone to fend for yourself with your two babies?” She didn’t tell him or his family, but the small amount they had given her had been enough to rent her tiny tenement apartment but had run out in a few months. They had never inquired how she was after that. She had sent a letter of condolence to his parents when their son died, and they had never responded. They were hard people and she had paid a high price for her father’s sins. He had committed them when she was a small child, born during the war in 1940. It was an extraordinary life story, and Joachim felt numb with shock after she’d told him.
“How could you survive it, Mama?” Joachim asked her, profoundly shaken, and in awe of her.
“I had no other choice. I had to take care of you and Javier. He was always different, though. There was always something in him that worried me. You were identical physically, but there was something in him that was always very hard as he grew up, like your father’s family.” The rest of what had happened to her made Javier’s abandonment and disappearance into the underworld seem even worse. Did she have to go through the pain of that too? It seemed so unfair. And Javier knew none of this.
Perhaps Javier was like their grandfather too. Javier had turned into a gangster and a hoodlum, and probably a drug dealer. Their grandfather was a war criminal of the highest order, destroying families and lives with the sanction and approval of the Nazi High Command. He was truly a monster. Javier was just a small-time operator, but a criminal nonetheless and would come to no good.
“Do you think your father regretted what he did after he was convicted?”
She thought about it for a minute. “I’m not sure. I asked him questions about it in my letters, but he never answered. He wrote about the books he was reading in prison, memories of his childhood, and mine. He said that a soldier’s actions and recollection of them must stay in the confines and secrecy of the army he served, and at the time they existed. He said that war justifies all actions against enemy forces. But they weren’t enemy forces,” she said with tears streaming down her cheeks. “They were children deported in trains and sent to the gas chamber. And families, men and women. They stole everything from them. They robbed them of their homes, businesses, dignity, their lives, their futures. Their artwork is the least of it, and so little to give back to them. How do you make restitution for the children those people lost, the husbands and wives, their homes, everything they held dear? I can never make up for that.”
“No one can. But you’ve done everything you could to make up with what you could restore. It’s been your life’s work, Mama.” He had never loved or respected his mother more. “I wish I had known about all this sooner. I’m glad you told me now. Francois must have been so proud of you.” She smiled through her tears as she nodded.
“He was. No one ever knew why I did it, except him. And now you. I’m glad I told you too. That’s why I will never retire. This is my mission for as long as I live. And it feels so wonderful every time we make a match, and get a piece of art back to someone, even if only to a distant relative. It always matters to them, and to me too. It’s a victory every time.”
They talked for a long time that night and finally hugged each other and went to bed. She had given him much to think about, not only about who their father and grandfather had been, but their perfidy, and the heinous things they had done, to her and others. He had also learned about his mother, and the extraordinary woman she was. It was some small consolation, as he cried himself to sleep that night, knowing that her noble blood ran in his veins as well as hers.
Chapter 6
When the agent from Sotheby’s called Olivia, she had three possible homes to show her. They were all available to rent for a year, sparsely furnished if she wanted them that way, or the furniture could be removed. There was a house and two apartments. She saw the house first. It was small and cramped. There was evidence of leaks in the ceiling and it smelled musty. It looked sad to Olivia, and the furniture in it was battered and drab. It looked as if it had been unoccupied for a long time and didn’t appeal to her at all.
There was an extremely modern apartment, which looked industrial and trendy, but everything about the place felt cold, like a refrigerator. It had no soul. It was minimally furnished and looked like a cheap hotel suite. The location was excellent and the building clean and nice. It was owned by Italians who kept it as an investment property and occupied it briefly from time to time between renters.
The third option was in the sixteenth arrondissement, in a beautiful old building in good condition, with a broad spiral staircase in the main hall. It had a grand look to it, and the apartment was on what the agent called the “noble floor,” or second floor, with high ceilings, wood paneling, beautiful old floors, and fireplaces. The kitchen was sparse and barely functional, and there was almost no furniture. If she rented it, she’d have to furnish it. It would be like camping out in the beginning, but the bare bones were beautiful, with high ceilings and good light. It was owned by a couple who had moved to Brussels for tax reasons and didn’t want to part with their apartment. It had magnificent cream-colored satin curtains, but the rest of the furniture was dingy and inadequate. It was more of a commitment than the others because she knew she’d have to furnish it and decorate, but the place was so pretty and inviting that it was hard to resist, and the rent wasn’t exceptionally high. The agent could see immediately how much she liked it.
“You could put in an Ikea kitchen for very little
money,” she told her. “And enough furniture to get by.” Olivia was well aware of it, but she also wondered if she was crazy to be renting an apartment in Paris, and if she should just go home in a few weeks and face real life, instead of running away from it and playing house. But it was such a pretty apartment, and in good condition, in a lovely building in a safe residential neighborhood, that she was sorely tempted. She felt as though she was in a dream as they walked down the grand staircase.
“I love it. I just don’t know if I should be doing this, renting an apartment for a year.”
The agent gave her the expected sales pitch, that they rarely got apartments as nice as this one, it was a terrific deal, and she didn’t have to spend much to furnish it. It had a big master bedroom, a smaller second one, decent closets, two good marble bathrooms, a pretty living room, small dining room, and kitchen. It had everything she needed, and it was nicer than her apartment in New York. She worked all the time and never entertained, and she used her apartment there to crash after eighteen-hour workdays, not to spend leisure time in. She could see herself entertaining in this apartment in Paris. It would be fun to furnish it. She could always ship the furniture to New York at the end of the year when she went back. It opened up countless horizons, and she wasn’t sure what to do when she reached the street.
The Butler Page 7