by Clare Clark
‘So, Fräulein,’ Gans said in a friendly voice. ‘You’re an artist, I understand.’
Emmeline shook her head. ‘Please, sir, I don’t think you understand. My mother, she’s unconscious. They think she might—they think she might die.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Fräulein, I am, but the law must be followed. So, are you or are you not an artist?’
Steel glinted under the friendly tone. Emmeline felt a quiver of fear. She swallowed, wiping her nose on her wrist. ‘I suppose so. Sort of.’
‘Come now, I understand you’re a graduate of Berlin Academy of Art. That’s no small achievement for a woman.’
‘I was not considered a very promising student.’
‘Is that so? But you make a good living from your work?’ He reached into the pocket of his coat, pulled out a packet of Wahr cigarettes. Flicking the bottom of the pack, he extracted the cigarette card and slid it across the table towards her. It was Jakob Muffel with his domed forehead and sucked-in lips, exhaling twin plumes of smoke from his nostrils. Emmeline stared at it, confused. What had her work to do with Dora?
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘It’s not very well paid.’
Gans glanced at Kufalt. Then, sliding an envelope from the folder in front of him, he tipped it out on the table. The other cigarette cards, a full set. He laid them out face up on the table as though he were playing patience. ‘Your employer, Wilhelm Balz, tells us you painted all of these portraits yourself, is that right? No assistance from friends, from fellow artists?’
‘I don’t understand,’ Emmeline said. ‘What has Balz to do with anything?’
Gans’s eyes narrowed. ‘Answer the question,’ he said, snapping the words like a whip. Emmeline flinched.
‘I painted them all,’ she said. Her mouth was dry.
‘An impressive range. And there were others, I think, paintings you worked up but which the Wahr people decided not to use?’
‘Yes. Herr Balz wanted to show them lots of options. So they could choose.’
‘Can you tell me some of the ideas they turned down?’
‘The best ones. All the women. They only wanted men.’
‘What about this one? This is one of yours too, is it not?’ Gans nodded at Kufalt, who took a large square of cardboard from the portfolio behind him and put it on the table. Van Gogh at his easel, a packet of Wahr cigarettes on his palette. There was something stuck in Emmeline’s throat, she could not breathe.
‘A very impressive imitation,’ Gans said. ‘I’m something of a dolt when it comes to art but, from what Herr Balz tells me, the resemblance to the original is uncanny. Were it not for the cigarettes, of course.’
‘I hope that is true of them all.’ Her voice was strange, high and tight. ‘That’s why they’re funny.’
‘Oh, they’re funny,’ Gans said. ‘This one in particular is very convincing. But then you’ve made something of a practice, haven’t you, of the work of Vincent van Gogh?’ He held out a hand to Kufalt, who rummaged again in the portfolio and passed him a battered-looking book. A cold clamminess spread over Emmeline’s skin as Gans placed it on the table. Her sketchbook. The one she had left at the Rachmann Gallery. The one they had never found. Gans opened it, turning the pages. Pages of sketches from the drawings in Matthias’s exhibition. Pages of van Goghs.
‘This one,’ Gans said, tapping a sketch with his finger, and he turned the book around so she could see. A sower in a wheat field, a basket in his arms. ‘This one I find particularly interesting. Do you know why that is, Fräulein?’
Emmeline shook her head, not trusting herself to speak, but Gans nodded as though she had answered. ‘That’s right. This sketch is almost identical in composition to a painting that was sold by the Rachmann Gallery to a Herr Zeckendorf several months ago for seventy thousand marks. A painting that the gallery owner, Matthias Rachmann, claims was purchased thirty years ago from the widow of van Gogh’s brother but for which the widow’s son holds no record. A painting that has recently been dismissed as a fake. Naturally, this sketch caught my eye.’
‘It’s not what you think.’ Fear screwed her voice tight.
‘And what do I think, Fräulein Eberhardt?’
‘I want a lawyer.’
‘There’ll be plenty of time for lawyers in due course. For now, you are not under arrest, you are simply here to help us with our enquiries. It would be better for you if you made as little difficulty about that as possible.’
Emmeline hesitated. Gans smiled at her blandly but his eyes were hard. Shakily she took a breath. ‘Artists copy,’ she said. She forced herself to speak calmly, civilly. ‘At the Academy it was what we were taught to do, how we learned. It’s how we get better. Go to the Nationalgalerie, go to any gallery, you’ll see artists in every room. Just because I copied a few drawings at the Rachmann Gallery doesn’t mean—I mean, the show was open to the public. Anyone could have—’
‘Perhaps. But only your sketchbook was found in a locked drawer in Matthias Rachmann’s office. Would you like to tell me how it got there?’
‘Because I left it behind by mistake! I went back to get it, I wanted it back, but they said it wasn’t there. The young man, the assistant, I don’t remember his name, but if you ask him he’ll tell you—’
‘Herr Zedler? Oh, he has been very helpful. Very helpful indeed.’ Closing the sketchbook, Gans clasped his hands on the table. ‘I understand you were a frequent visitor to the Rachmann Gallery, Fräulein, often at times that it was not open to the public. Why did you visit Herr Rachmann after hours?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘You’re denying you went to the gallery?’
‘No, but it was to see the drawings, not to visit Rachmann.’
‘Even though he is your friend?’
‘He’s not my friend. I hardly know him.’
‘And yet you wrote to him just the other day, expressing your sympathy for his situation in most affectionate terms.’
Emmeline’s stomach turned over. She had forgotten the letter. ‘I felt sorry for him,’ she whispered.
‘You felt sorry for him. And why is that?’
‘Because of how he’s been treated by the newspapers.’
‘But, despite the warmth of your letter, you do not consider him a friend?’
‘No. He’s an acquaintance.’
‘And a business associate?’
‘Of course not. I’ve never had any business with Matthias Rachmann.’
Gans considered her. ‘I see. Is it true, Fräulein, that you have known Herr Rachmann for some years?’
‘I was introduced to him when I first came to Berlin, yes.’
‘And who was it who effected this introduction?’
‘A friend of my mother’s.’
‘This friend’s name?’
‘Julius Köhler-Schultz.’
‘Julius Köhler-Schultz, the art critic who since has issued certificates of authentication for—let’s see—twenty-six of Rachmann’s thirty-two questionable van Goghs?’ His eyes bored into her. Emmeline clamped her hands together under the table, holding them steady.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘But you met Rachmann when? I assume you remember.’
‘Yes. It was the summer before I started at the Academy. 1924.’
‘1924. Almost exactly a year before Rachmann’s first van Gogh came on to the market. Fascinating, the ins and outs of painting. I’m told that when oil paint is very thickly applied it can take months and months to dry.’
There was not enough air in the room. Emmeline dug her nails into her palms. She felt dazed, dizzy. ‘I want a lawyer,’ she said desperately but Gans only looked at her, his head on one side.
‘I understand there was some awkwardness at your bank this morning,’ he said. ‘That you attempted to cash a cheque for which you had insufficient funds. That must have been an unpleasant surprise. Until now the money’s been coming in so regularly,
hasn’t it, anonymous cash amounts every month for three years now, or is it four?’
‘That money is an allowance from my stepfather,’ she protested. ‘He never used his name, he didn’t want my mother to know, but he made the payments himself, every month. Jacob Vidler, he’s a businessman in Munich, call him, he’ll tell you, every month, so I could pay my rent . . .’
Gans nodded slowly. ‘It must have felt like a good deal at the beginning. Not a fortune, perhaps, but enough to live comfortably, if you were careful. But then you aren’t very careful, are you? Perhaps you hoped that a rundown tenement in Berlin-North would allow you and your associates to come and go without attracting attention. A shame for you that your caretaker keeps a log. A very thorough woman, Frau Schmidt. Descriptions, times in and out, names when she has them. Automobile registration plates. Not that automobiles are common in your part of town, a fact it might have behoved Herr Köhler-Schultz to remember.’
Emmeline stared at him, her heart racing, as he drew the cardboard folder towards him. His nails were square and neatly manicured.
‘So,’ he said. ‘I understand you speak Russian.’
Some time in the afternoon Gans left the room. Kufalt followed him out. Emmeline was left alone. She could hear the heavy thud of footsteps along the floor above her, the distant roar of the traffic on Alexanderplatz. The shriek of a motor toboggan as it veered out of control. She counted her breaths, in and out, in and out. In her empty teacup the dregs were a brown smear.
It was her choice, Gans had said with a shrug. She could make this easy or she could make it hard. No one blamed her. She had been an impressionable young art student in a city still reeling from the inflation. No wonder she had been tempted by the offer of easy money. It was not illegal to buy and sell approximations of other artists’ paintings, there was always someone flogging something or other for a few marks in the city’s market halls. How could she have known the swindles Rachmann intended? He had cheated her at least as much as the dupes who had paid tens of thousands of marks for her forgeries. He had made a fortune, had lived like a king on her talent, while she scraped by in a worn-out coat and a tenement building that was not worth the cost of demolition. Now, at last, she had the chance to put things right. If she cooperated, deals could be struck, arrangements made.
And if she did not cooperate? Gans did not trouble to say. It was all there in the cheerless cell, the knuckles tapped lightly but insistently against the palm of his other hand. There had been no space left for her denials, no option of innocence. The choice was simple: either an informer or an accomplice.
‘One thing you should know,’ Gans said as he left the room. ‘We have Rachmann. Do you really want him to be the one who talks first?’
It grew late. The driver would be waiting for her at Munich station. Emmeline wrapped her arms around herself, squeezing herself tight, but the pain was too deep in her, she could not reach it. She thought of the drawings she had made when she was small, the same drawing over and over, her mother as tall as the paper and Emmeline beside her, her hand in hers. She had always coloured it so it looked like their dresses were the same.
She had never imagined there would come a time when her mother was not there to be angry with, when the chances to renounce her would have all run out.
The door opened. Emmeline looked up blearily as Gans entered, followed by a baby-faced policeman who stood expressionless by the closed door, his hands behind his back. Gans took something from his pocket and put it on the table. Julius’s telegram from that morning, the torn-up pieces stuck together on a sheet of card. It felt like it had been sent from another life, a hundred years ago.
‘Perhaps you’d care to tell me what this is?’ Gans said.
‘You broke into my flat?’
‘A civil action has been brought today against Herr Rachmann. The police have been granted the authority to search all suspicious premises.’
Emmeline was silent. She could feel her heart in her chest, a dull throb like a punched face. This is not going to end, she thought suddenly, this nightmare is going to go on unspooling, one incriminating coincidence after another, and at some point it will be enough. ‘I demand a lawyer,’ she said.
‘And you will get one. Just as soon as you are under arrest. For now we are only asking questions, so I would suggest you answer this one. What is this?’
‘It’s a telegram,’ she said wearily.
‘From Herr Köhler-Schultz, who first introduced you to Rachmann.’
‘Yes.’
‘And what was so urgent that he had to speak to you immediately?’
‘I told you, my mother has been in an accident. Why won’t you let me see her?’
‘And what exactly has that to do with Herr Köhler-Schultz?’
‘My stepfather cabled Julius. He wanted him to tell me.’
‘He did not think to cable you himself?’
‘He couldn’t. He doesn’t have my address.’
‘Your own stepfather doesn’t know where you live?’
‘My arrangements are none of his business.’
‘And yet he pays you a monthly allowance. An interesting accommodation. But Herr Köhler-Schultz, you are willing to do business with him?’
‘Julius lives in Berlin. He knew where to find me. That’s all.’
‘Is it? Is it not true that Köhler-Schultz wished to alert you to Rachmann’s return from The Hague, that his cable was a warning to get out of Berlin?’
‘No. I told you, he wanted me to telephone him so he could tell me about my mother. He thought it would be kinder.’
‘And yet according both to his secretary and his housekeeper no such telephone call was placed.’
‘I didn’t telephone him because by then I already knew.’
‘And how exactly did you know when nobody had been able to reach you?’
‘I rang Jacob’s office. When he didn’t deposit my money I—’
A loud knock on the door interrupted her. Gans glared at the policeman, who opened the door and stepped out. When he returned his face was apologetic.
‘Herr Kommissar?’ he said.
Gans’s frown deepened. Taking the room in three strides, he slammed the door behind him.
‘I need to use the lavatory,’ Emmeline said to the policeman, but he only stared blankly at the wall, his hands behind his back. Pushing back her chair, she stood up. Her legs felt shaky but there was something emboldening about the small rebellion, the assertion of her own will.
‘Sit down,’ the policeman ordered but she only shook her head. There was a smear of dried blood on his cheek where he had nicked himself with a razor.
‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘I have to go. Or would you rather I did it here, on your boots?’
The policeman looked at her warily. When the door banged open they both turned round. Gans stood stony-faced in the doorway, a man in a civilian’s wool overcoat and wire spectacles behind him.
‘Fräulein Eberhardt,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘The Berlin police would like to thank you for your cooperation with our investigation. We have no further questions at this time.’
Emmeline blinked stupidly at the man in the overcoat. He had a kind face.
‘Alfred Böhm,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’
15
Böhm wanted to take her to the Köhler-Schultz house on Meierstrasse. The Köhler-Schultzes could give her a hot bath, dinner, a warm bed, he said, she could travel to Munich in the morning, but Emmeline had wasted too much time already. She asked him to take her to Anhalt station. As she stepped out of the car he pressed a fifty-mark note into her hand.
‘Call me as soon as you get back,’ he said.
At the ticket counter the clerk shook his head. He had no ticket in the name of Eberhardt. Perhaps the police had taken it. She bought a third-class ticket. The clerk held Böhm’s banknote up to the light and reluctantly counted out her change. The last train for Munich would leave in one hour.
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br /> She walked across the deserted concourse, her feet ringing out beneath the vast glass vault. It was very late. Most of the kiosks were closed. According to Böhm the police knew very well that they could not hold her, that what little evidence they possessed was circumstantial at best and quite insufficient to justify an arrest. The newspapers were making them look foolish, that was the problem. They were clutching at straws. They might clutch at them again, Böhm warned her, if their investigations foundered. He wanted her to see him when she came back to Berlin. Damage limitation, he called it. Courts were required to adhere to legal procedure. The gutter press took a different approach.
The cafeteria was still open, its windows milky with steam. A woman in a grease-spotted apron brought her liverwurst and a buttered roll. The smell made Emmeline think of the Zuerst offices and fat, diligent Olga, wiping her fingers carefully on the napkin she kept in her desk drawer, Olga with her cardigans and her kindness and her blurry daughters with their sharp knees, squashed inside the borders of their snapshot.
It was before dawn when she arrived at the Hauptbahnhof in Munich. The streets were blank with snow, the shops and houses shuttered and dark, but as they drove towards Wurnsee the sun rose behind the black cut-outs of the mountains, painting the low clouds with orange and rose gold, and the frozen lake shone like beaten copper. The beauty of it peeled away the last of Emmeline’s courage.
The clouds thickened, blotting out the sun. By the time they reached the Metz house, it was snowing. As the car drew up Jacob came out to meet her. His face was grey and creased, salted with stubble, and there was an unsteadiness in his step that might have been weariness or drink or both. Taking her hands he looked at her and shook his head. He smelled ashy, of burned-down fires and dead cigars.