by Michael Dean
She felt relief flood over her like warm water inside. She would not tell Papa, but one day, when the paintings were brought out, not destroyed at all, he would be so happy. He will be like lovely Frau Lἂmmle was, when she was delighted with her patchwork.
The giant – he was like a figure from a fairy story – put all the paintings back in the handcart, seized the long handle and pulled it effortlessly behind him. She thought they would be going into the Stern – all bright lights and the sound of singing ahead of them. But he was leading her by a winding path round to the side of it.
‘Where are we going?’
She had to trot to keep up with him. She was alternatingly hot then cold in her thin yellow dress. He turned to stare at her. The stare lasted quite a long time and made her uncomfortable.
‘There’s a door to the storeroom further along. We don’t need to go into the inn. We don’t want to attract attention, do we?’
She felt better when they really did come to an iron door, down a few steps apparently in the middle of the wood. Herr Wagner produced a large iron key to this door. He unlocked it, and then effortlessly lifted the handcart full of paintings in his giant arms. They went down into a musty cavern which had another door in the far wall.
Herr Wagner put the handcart down and lit an oil lamp. There were indeed some paintings there already, as he had said. That reassured Barbara.
‘Where does that lead?’ she asked, pertly, pointing at the far door.
‘Into an underground tunnel which comes out at the palace,’ Wagner told her. ‘Come here a moment,’ he added, briskly. He strode past her and locked the entry door behind them. ‘We’ll put your paintings here, with the others. At least we will in a minute. There’s something else I want to do first. You’re really quite a woman now, aren’t you?’
It was that stare again.
‘I … I want to go now.’
It was dark down there, even with the oil lamp lit. It was dank, too. Musty. It smelled like damp stockings.
‘What’s your name, Ketz’s girl?’
‘Barbara.’
‘Good. Now take all your clothes off, Barbara, or I’ll break your neck.’
*
When she got home, she told her father the paintings had all been burned. Then she had a bath and went to bed. She told him nothing of what Wagner had done to her, not then and not later.
Chapter 3
London, Monday August 13, 1945
‘My own sister? John, how could you? I knew you were a bastard. I accepted it. But not with my own kid sister.’
She was standing at the foot of the bed they had so recently loved in, wearing only a pink nylon slip. He had slept heavily afterwards. She had obviously gone through his wallet and found the brief but passionate note from Sally.
He rose up on one elbow, still half asleep. ‘Maureen, look, she had a crush on me and …’
‘And you thought you’d take advantage of her? John, she’s seventeen …’
‘Eighteen, actually. Eighteen last month.’
That did it.
John Hodge never did work out why correcting Maureen about her younger sister’s age should send her over the edge into frenzy, but it did. She went berserk, screaming, launching herself at him, a whirlwind of slapping and punching. When he gripped her wrists, she spat copiously in his face.
‘Maureen, I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry! It’s a bit late for sorry. I want to kill you. I want to see you dead.’
He managed to hold her off long enough to scramble inelegantly into his clothes. He was still wearing his captain’s uniform – or he had been – but he didn’t think he would be for much longer. His unit was among the last to be demobbed.
‘You think you’re God’s bloody gift, don’t you?’
She was crying softly now, and there was something subdued, flat and defeated about it. Then suddenly she stopped.
‘Let me tell you something, John. Before you go. You’re a very good-looking man, and don’t you know it. But it wasn’t just that. I loved you. I really did. I gave you something you did not understand. Now get out. I never want to see you again.’
It was warm outside, even at nine in the morning; the start of a clear, dazzling English summer day with a domed blue sky. Carrying the kit-bag which was too large for the overnight stuff he had in it, he made his way along Montague Street to Russell Square.
He wandered into Russell Square Gardens. They had taken the railings down ages ago, and you could get into the little park at any point. He found a corner of earth which had once been a flower-bed and where they were now growing vegetables. Bending right over, he vomited copiously onto some emerging cabbage.
It was supposed to be fun, being Jack-the-Lad. Love ‘em and leave ‘em. Blonde or brunette, young or old, married or not. Oh yes, there had been his brother officers’ wives, too. Quite a few of them.
But those words of Maureen’s: ‘I gave you something you did not understand’ rang in his head. He knew he would never forget them. And he knew she was right. Had it really been worth it? To hurt Maureen and Sally so? He did damage, he caused hurt, and he was tired of it. Sick of it, in fact.
In his state of deflated misery, John Hodge recalled his appointment. A lieutenant-colonel called William Palfrey had written to his commanding officer, Colonel Fitzpatrick, about some mysterious mission or other. This Palfrey had then set up a meeting, with Fitzpatrick’s blessing, not in any military establishment, but at the Athenaeum Club.
Hodge had been only mildly surprised. There had been talk of transferring him to some War Crimes Unit or other, chasing down the art the Nazis had looted. He assumed this approach had something to do with that.
He had already been sounded out about staying on, in the army. He was flattered – he was easily flattered. It would mean being demobbed and then re-enlisting, but he was well-disposed to the idea. The alternative, doing a doctorate in German Expressionist Art, was not the strongest of career moves in whatever world the peace would usher in.
Hodge looked at his watch. He was late.
By the time he got to Pall Mall, he wished he hadn’t bothered. But he perked up at the sight of the building – the Athenaeum. Beauty always cheered him, whether in flesh or in stone. It looked like a Nash façade, that unfussy spare elegance.
Grandeur! That’s what we all need now, exhausted from battling bloody Hitler. Grandeur. Lovely spare elegance. He hated adornment – Rococo especially, but even Baroque. It was uncluttered elegance that moved him – elegance and colour.
Hodge realised he had come to a halt outside the building and was staring admiringly up at it. Oh what the hell! He was late anyway; he might as well be a bit later. As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and all that!
When he finally drifted inside, Hodge’s élan swelled still further. Lovely wood panelling!
‘Can I help you, sir?’
‘Um.’
He was addressing a liveried attendant. Hodge smiled, half to himself half at the attendant. Livery was a bit of a rarity where he had grown up, in a terraced house in Romford, Essex.
‘Sir?’ The liveried one was an old man, white-haired, too old for a call-up no doubt. He was looking rather concerned.
‘I’ve got an appointment with Lieutenant Colonel Palfrey.’
The liveried one looked relieved. ‘Let me take your bag, sir.’
Hodge glanced down at his kit-bag as if he had never seen it before. ‘Oh. Righty-ho! Jolly good of you!’ Oh Lord, why did he say that?
The liveried one smiled – people always liked Hodge – and made his laborious old man’s way away with Hodge’s kit-bag.
Hodge wondered which of the two splendidly curving staircases to take, then realised it didn’t matter, as they both ended at the same place. At the top was a high-ceilinged lounge. Of the four or five older men ensconced in deep brown leather armchairs only one was in uniform.
‘Lieutenant Colonel Palfrey?’
The man hardly looked the
part. He was overweight and ruddy in the face from good living. His uniform looked as if it belonged to somebody else. It contrived to be creased and too small at the same time. He looked up from the depths of his armchair. ‘Ye Gods and Little Fishes! Are you Hodge?’
‘Afraid so.’ Hodge’s mood had swung from Maureen-induced depression to a kind of farouche nonchalance. He sat down in the armchair opposite Palfrey, uninvited.
Palfrey sighed. ‘I thought you weren’t coming. I take it this means you don’t want the job?’
Hodge did a theatrical double-take. ‘Sorry? I don’t know what the job is yet.’
‘Captain Hodge, you are forty-five minutes late. You are unshaven. In fact, you look as if you have been dragged through a hedge backwards. You plonk yourself down without so much as a by-your-leave. Perhaps I may be forgiven for deducing that you wish to fail this interview? Mmmm?’
Hodge laughed. ‘I know it looks like that. But, the fact is, I had to leave my mistress’s bedroom in a bit of a hurry.’
‘And why was that?’
‘She found out I was sleeping with her sister.’
Palfrey, a plain man, licked his lips lasciviously. He laughed, joked out of his earlier spleen, charmed by Hodge.
Hodge settled in again behind the façade that wasn’t him – the persona he had so recently vowed to abandon. Fly boy. Jack-the-Lad. Oh, what a Ladies-Man. A helluva-fella!
Over coffee and biscuits, Hodge listened with a growing sense of excitement as Palfrey outlined the work of his unit. Based in Paris, CROWCASS – the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects – had been set up by the Americans, ‘Our friends from across the water’ as Palfrey called them. Its task was to gather information on Nazi war criminals.
‘We’re processing a huge amount of information, as you can imagine,’ Palfrey drawled. ‘We bash masses of facts and figures through a whiz bit of machinery called a Hollerith. Heard of them?’
Hodge had. They were notoriously unreliable, the breakdown rate was fabled.
‘Yes, I have, sir,’ Hodge said, sounding impressed. ‘I wouldn’t be able to use one, though.’ The implication was clear. Only an expert like Palfrey could handle a complicated machine like a Hollerith. Hodge was enjoying himself enormously.
Palfrey grunted. ‘We are plagued by near constant machine breakdowns, political battles to hang onto our offices in Paris, and a stream of complaints from the Americans about the ratio of results to expenditure. Not high enough, apparently.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir.’
‘I’ll be frank with you, Captain Hodge – I have little choice. I need a big success, a flagship victory, to impress the Americans. And I need it PDQ. A victory that belongs to CROWCASS alone. I fear they will close us down otherwise.’
‘Did you get on to me because of this talk about a British War Crimes Unit, sir?
Palfrey nodded, sagely. ‘Precisely.’
He made a mental note to check up on any British War Crimes Unit. He had never heard of one. He had found Hodge by sending a circular from Paris to every brigade commander in England, asking for a suitable man. Only two commanders had replied. The man recommended by one of them turned out to be dead. Hodge was the remaining name he had been given. So Hodge it would have to be.
Palfrey leaned forward conspiratorially in his armchair. ‘Let me outline the mission, Hodge. I think you’ll find it … appealing.’
Hodge nodded, suppressing a sense of excitement that he had evidently got the job – whatever the job was.
Palfrey clicked his fingers at a distant attendant.
‘Do you want some brandy?’ Palfrey grunted at Hodge. ‘Hair of the dog, by the look of you. Unless it’s too early for you?’ He made it sound like a challenge.
‘No, brandy’s fine.’
By the time the brandies arrived – doubles, Palfrey was clearly well-known at the club – he was well into the story behind the mission.
‘Throughout the war, Adolf Hitler had a bank account in London. Does that surprise you?’
‘Yes!’
‘It surprised me, too. Hitler spent 163 million Reichsmarks on art works during the war, most of it from his account with J M Stein Bankhaus, in Hamburg. To keep the transactions secret, Stein sent instructions to their parent company in London, J Henry Schroder, in Bond Street. Hitler’s account there was in the pseudonym of “Wolff”.’
‘Good Lord!’
Palfrey, pleased at the reaction he was provoking, pulled a battered briefcase from half under the massive armchair. ‘We have traced Herr Wolff’s transactions. Well, some of them.’
Hodge sipped at his brandy. ‘That’s fascinating. But given that Hitler is dead, how does it help us find war criminals?’
Palfrey smiled. ‘Good question. I’m coming to that. Fortunately, we have the early transactions in some detail, including shipment details. For example, we know what happened to all the paintings in the Degenerate Art Exhibition. You know about that, I take it? You are an art specialist? I asked your commander.’
‘Yes. And I certainly do know about the exhibition. 1937, in Munich. It displayed the art the Nazis considered degenerate – Expressionism, Cubism and so on. German art is my field, actually.’
‘Good. Well, after the exhibition closed, Hitler sent the paintings to his usual dealer, Theodor Fischer, in Geneva to sell them for him. Here are the invoices for the transportation of the paintings from Munich to Geneva. Except that one consignment didn’t get as far as Geneva. It was never intended to.’
‘Where did that end up then?’
‘A place called Ludwigsburg. Deep in German wine country. Pretty enough place, by all accounts. Heard of it?’
‘No.’
‘Here’s a copy of the paintings that went to Ludwigsburg.’ Palfrey handed the list to Hodge.
Hodge’s eyebrows went up at the sight of it. ‘And these figures are … the dates the paintings were originally bought by each gallery and the amount the gallery paid. Yes? Before the paintings were seized for the Munich exhibition.’
‘That’s right.’ Palfrey leaned forward, evidently knowing the list well enough to read it upside down. ‘So this first one, by Jankel Adler, you see the Dṻsseldorf State Gallery paid 800 Reichsmarks for it in 1926.’
‘Wow! There’s two here by Chagall!’
‘Yes. Mannheim City Gallery, you see, paid 4,500 Reichsmarks for one of them in 1928. And the other one was bought by Frankfurt City Gallery in 1925 but the price is missing.’
‘So together these paintings are worth a king’s ransom?’
‘Absolutely! I don’t suppose you can work out what they all have in common?’
‘All the artists were Jewish?’
‘Yes. But there is something else, aside from that.’
Hodge shook his head.
Palfrey took the list back. ‘Yes, well, that would be a tall order. Even for an art expert with a PhD.’
‘I’m afraid I never started the PhD.’
‘All the paintings listed are from one room at the Degenerate Art Exhibition. Room 2, actually. It was the paintings from this one room which ended up in Ludwigsburg. The Nazis called the paintings in this room Offenbarung der jṻdischen Rassenseele.’
‘What’s that?’
‘What do you mean “what’s that?” Don’t you speak German?’
‘’Fraid not.’
‘So I’ll be sending you bare-arsed into Germany without a word of the language?’
Hodge was delighted. He was going to Germany! He treated Palfrey to the grin that had won him a hundred female hearts. ‘I’ll manage.’
‘You’ll bloody have to!’
‘Anyway, Offenbarung der jṻdischen Rassenseele means ‘exposure of the Jewish racial soul’. The Nazis meant these pictures to shame the Jews. That is before they sold them for profit, of course.’
‘Shame the Jews? Let me have that list back would you.’ Hodge read aloud. ‘Jankel Adler, Marc Chagall, Lasar Sagall, Hans Feibu
sch. I don’t know them all, but this is a role of honour! There are some great paintings here. Look, one of the least well-known of them, Lasar Sagall’s Widow at the Feast of Purim is a masterpiece in my opinion.’
Palfrey smiled. To Hodge’s amazement, he put a hand on his arm and squeezed it affectionately. ‘You should come to Paris, John. Spend a couple of days with Veronica and me before we ship you off to Germany. We’ll take you round the galleries. They’re open again, you know. I’ll brief you properly about CROWCASS then.’
‘Thank you, sir! I’d love that!’
‘And so would we, John! Oh, I’ve just realised. I haven’t actually told you what you’re going to Germany for.’ Palfrey snapped his fingers again and ordered two more brandies.
‘The chap who signed the transport chit at the Ludwigsburg end was one Karl Wagner. Know him?’
‘Nope.’
‘He was Hitler’s personal bodyguard. A major big-wig. It would be quite a coup for CROWCASS to nail him.’
Hodge nodded. ‘I see that, sir.’
‘And you can stop calling me sir. You’re making me feel old. Call me Bill.’
‘My pleasure, Bill.’
‘Anyway, I was telling you about Karl Wagner. Thoroughly nasty piece of work. Well, that’s obvious, he would be. We have good reason to believe he’s back in his home town, Ludwigsburg.’
‘How do we know that?’
‘Sadly, old boy, we know that because we had him. Wagner was arrested on his way back to Ludwigsburg. But nobody knew who he was. He had false papers, of course. The high-ups always do. So they let him go. By the time the mistake was spotted he was back in Ludwigsburg. No idea where he’s hiding, of course. That’s your job.’
‘And the paintings?’
‘They must still be in Ludwigsburg, too. He wouldn’t have dared sell them in case Hitler got wind of it. He must have realised the Nazis would lose, most of their high-ups did. The paintings were his insurance policy for after the war.’
