“Is that what you gave for it?”
“Yes and no. I was going back and forth with this droopy-eyed Kraut and we reached a point where we’re five hundred dollars apart. And he whips out this thing of beauty. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I vill hate myself for doing zis, but you haff me over a bushel.’ And he goes on to tell me how it’s a genuine Von Schtupp or whatever the hell it is, and it’s worth a fortune.
“The way he did it, I couldn’t come back and say, look, Konrad, keep the picture and gimme a hundred dollars more. I do that and I’m slapping him in the face, and I don’t want to rub him the wrong way because Konrad and I do a lot of business. And the fact of the matter is yes, we’re five hundred bucks apart, but I could take the deal at his price and I’m still okay with it. So I said yes, it sure is a beautiful picture, which it’s not, as anyone can plainly see, and I said I’m sure it was valuable, but what am I gonna do with it? Sell it in Paris, he says. Sell it in London, in New York. So I let him talk me into it, because I wanted the deal to go through but what I didn’t want was for him to try palming off more of these beauties on me, because I saw the look in his eye, Gary, and I’ve got a feeling he’s got a shitload of them just waiting for a sucker with a suitcase full of dollars to take them off his hands.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Well, I don’t guess I’ll throw darts at it. I could take it home, but what’s a better souvenir, a genuine Luger or an ugly picture? And which would you rather spend your old age looking at?”
Gary looked at the painting, and he looked at Helga. He saw something in her eyes, and he also saw something in the canvas. “It’s not that ugly,” he said. “What do you want for it?”
“You serious?”
“Serious enough to ask, anyway.”
“Well, let’s see. I’ve got five hundred in it, and—”
“You’ve got zero in it. You’d have done the deal for what he offered, without the painting.”
“I said that, didn’t I? Strategic error, corporal. I’ll tell you what, give me a hundred dollars and it’s yours.”
“Let’s split the difference,” Gary said. “I’ll give you fifty.”
“What is it we’re splitting? Oh, hell, I don’t want to look at it anymore. Give me the fifty and you can hang it over your bed.”
They didn’t hang it over the bed. Instead Helga hid it under the mattress. “The Nazis looted everything,” she told him. “Museums, private collections. Your friend is stupid. It’s a beautiful painting, and we can make money on it. And if we can meet his friend Konrad—”
“There’s more where this one came from,” he finished. “But how do we sell them?”
“You can get to Switzerland, no?”
“Maybe,” he said.
The painting, which he sold without ever learning the artist’s name—he somehow knew it was not Von Schtupp—brought him Swiss francs worth twenty-eight hundred American dollars. The proceeds bought four paintings from the droopy-eyed Konrad. These were larger canvases, and Gary removed them from their frames and rolled them up and took them to Zurich, returning to Germany this time with almost $7000. And so it went. It wasn’t a foolproof business, as he learned when his Zurich customer dismissed a painting as worthless kitsch. But it was a forgiving trade, and most transactions were quite profitable. If he was in doubt he could take goods on consignment, selling in Zurich or Geneva—or, once, in Madrid—and sharing the proceeds with the consignor. But you made more money if you owned what you were selling, and he liked owning it, liked the way it felt. And if there was more risk that way, well, he liked the risk, too.
All his time and energy went into the business. Art was all he bothered with now—there were enough other soldiers making deals in stockings and cigarettes—and he was preoccupied with it, with the buying and selling and, almost as an afterthought, with the paintings themselves. Because it turned out he had a feel for it. He’d seen something in that first painting of Salome, even if he hadn’t realized it at the time. He’d responded to the artistry. Before he enlisted, he’d never been to a museum, never seen a painting hanging in a private home, never looked at any art beyond the reproductions in his mother’s J.C. Penney calendar. He learned to look at the paintings, as he’d never looked at anything before. The more he liked a painting, the harder it was to part with it. He fell in love with a Goya, and held onto it until something else came along that he liked better. Then he sold the Goya—that was the one he took to Madrid, where he’d heard about a crony of Franco’s who wouldn’t be put off by the work’s dodgy provenance.
It was easier to part with Helga. They’d been good for each other, as lovers and as business partners, but the affair ran its course, and he didn’t need or want a partner in his art dealings. He gave her a fair share of their capital and went on by himself.
Nothing lasts forever, not even military service. There came a time for Gary to board a troopship headed back to the States. He thought of staying in Europe—he had a career here, for as long as it could last—but in the end he realized it was time to go home. But what to do with his money? He had run his original stake of cigarettes and nylons up to something like eighty thousand dollars. That was a lot of cash to carry, and it was cash he couldn’t explain, so he had to carry it—he couldn’t put it in a bank and write himself a check.
But what he could do, and in fact did, was buy a painting and bring that home with him. He chose a Vermeer, a luminous domestic interior, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. It hadn’t come to him in the usual way; instead, he’d found it in an art gallery in Paris and had been hard pressed to get the snooty owner to cut the price by ten percent. On the troopship, squinting at the painting in his footlocker by what little illumination his flashlight afforded, he decided he must have been out of his mind. He’d had all that cash, and now he was down to what, fifteen thousand dollars? That was a lot of money in 1946, it would buy him a house and get him started in a business, but it was a fifth of what he’d had. Well, maybe he could run it up a little. It would be a week before the ship docked in New York, and there were plenty of men on board with money in their pockets and time on their hands. There were card games and crap games running twenty-four hours a day, and he’d always been pretty good at a poker table.
I suspect you can guess at the rest. Maybe he ran up against some card sharps, or maybe the cards just weren’t running his way. He never knew for sure, but what he did know was that he reached New York with nothing in his kick but the five hundred dollars of case money he’d tucked away before he started. Everything else was gone, invested in straights that ran into flushes, flushes that never came in, and bluffs some other guy called. You’d think he’d be desolate, wouldn’t you? He thought so himself, and was surprised to discover that he actually felt pretty good. If you looked at it one way, he left Germany with eighty thousand dollars and landed in New York with five hundred. But there was another way to see it, and that was that he had five hundred dollars more than he’d had when he left Iowa in the first place, and he’d been shot twice and lived to tell the tale, and he had a Bronze Star to keep his two Purple Hearts company, and he knew as much about women as anybody in Iowa, and more about art. The money he’d had, well, in a sense it had never been real in the first place, and, as for the paintings he’d trafficked in, well, they hadn’t been real either. They’d all of them been stolen, and they had no provenance, and sooner or later they could very well be confiscated and restored to their rightful owners. He figured he’d done just fine.
* * *
“Soldier? Have you finished?”
The soldier looked up, blinked. “More or less,” he said. “Why? Don’t you like the story?”
“It’s a fine story,” the doctor said, “but isn’t it unfinished? There’s a sense of closure, in that our hero is back where he started. That’s if he went back to his family’s farm, which I don’t believe you mentioned.”
“Didn’t I? Yes, he returned
to the farm.”
“And to the girl he left behind him?”
“I don’t believe there was a girl he’d left behind,” said the soldier, “and if there was, well, she’d been left too far behind to catch up with him.”
“That must have been true of the farm as well,” the priest offered.
The soldier nodded. “That proved to be the case,” he said. “He had, as it were, seen Paree—and Madrid and Geneva and Zurich and Berlin, and no end of other places more stimulating than an Iowa cornfield. He’d spent two days in New York, waiting for his train, and he’d spent much of it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the galleries on upper Madison Avenue. He stayed in Iowa for as long as he could, and then he packed a bag and returned to New York.”
“And?”
“He found a cheap flat, a fifth-floor walkup in Greenwich Village for $22 a month. He made the rounds of the art galleries and auction houses until he found someone who was willing to hire him for $40 a week. And, gradually, he learned the business from the ground up. From the very beginning he saved his money—I don’t know how he could have saved much when he earned forty dollars a week, but he managed. Half of it went into a permanent savings account. The other half went into a fund to purchase art.
“Years passed. Although there was often a woman in his life, he never married, never formed a long-term alliance. Nor did he move from his original apartment in the Village. The neighborhood became increasingly desirable, the surrounding rents went up accordingly, but his own rent, frozen by the miracle of rent control, was still under a hundred dollars a month twenty-five years later.
“His capital grew, as did his collection of prints and paintings. The time came when he was able to open a gallery of his own, stocking it with the works he’d amassed. Rather than represent living artists, he dealt in older works, and on more than one occasion he was offered work he recognized from his time in Germany, stolen paintings he’d brokered years ago. Since then they’d acquired provenance and could be openly bought and sold.
“He’s in the business today. He could retire, he’ll tell you, but then what would he do with himself? He walks with a cane, and on damp days he feels the pain of his second wound, the rib broken by the machine-gun bullet. It’s funny, he says, that it never bothered him once it healed, and now it aches again, after all those years. You think you’re done with a thing, he’ll say philosophically, but perhaps no one is ever done with anything.
“He’s respected, successful, and if I told you his name, which is certainly not Gary Carmody, you might very well recognize it. There were rumors over the years that he occasionally dealt in, well, not stolen goods exactly, but works of art with something shady about them, and I don’t mean chiaroscuro. But nothing was ever substantiated, and there was never a scandal, and few people even remember what was once said of him.”
“And that’s the end of the story,” the policeman said.
“Well, the man’s still alive, and is any story ever entirely over while one lives? But yes, the story is over.”
“And what does it all mean?” the priest wondered. “He was a rather ordinary young man, not particularly greedy, until circumstances created a great opportunity for greed to flourish. Greed led him into a marginally criminal existence, at which he seems to have thrived, and then his circumstances changed, and he tried to change with them. But greed led him to try his hand at poker—”
“Even as you and I,” murmured the doctor.
“—and he lost everything. But what he retained, acquired through greed, was a love of art and a passion for dealing in it, and as soon as he could he returned to it, and worked and sacrificed to achieve legitimate success.”
“Unless those rumors were true,” the policeman said.
“It’s a fine story,” the doctor said, “and well told. But there’s something I don’t entirely understand.”
“Oh?”
“The Vermeer, Soldier. He was working for nothing and living on less. My God, he must have been scraping by on bread and water, and it would have been day-old bread and tap water, too. Why couldn’t he sell the Vermeer? That would have set him up in business and kept him living decently until the gallery started paying for itself.”
“He fell in love with it,” the policeman offered. “How could he sell it? I daresay he still owns it to this day.”
“He does,” the soldier said. “It hung briefly on the wall of his room in the farmhouse in Iowa, and for years it hung on a nail in that fifth-floor Village walkup. The day he opened his own gallery he hung it above his desk in the gallery office, and it’s still there.”
“A lucky penny,” the doctor said. “‘Keep me and you’ll never go broke.’ And I’d say he’s a long way from broke. I haven’t priced any Vermeers lately, but I would think his would have to be worth an eight-figure price by now.”
“You would think so,” the soldier allowed.
“And he wouldn’t part with it. Is that greed, clinging so tenaciously to that which, if he would but let it go, might allow him to reach his goals? Or is it some other sin?”
“Like what, Doctor?”
“Oh, pride, perhaps. He defines himself as a man who possesses a Vermeer. And so it hangs on his crumbling wall while he lives like a churchmouse. No, make that like a ruined aristocrat, putting on a black tie every night for dinner, setting the table with Rosenthal china and Waterford crystal, and dining on stone soup. Made, you’ll no doubt recall, by simmering a stone in water for half an hour, then adding salt.”
“An old family recipe,” the policeman said. “But would the painting be worth that much? An eight-figure price—that’s quite a range, from ten to a hundred million dollars.”
“Ninety-nine,” the doctor said.
“I stand corrected. But if it increased in value from fifty thousand dollars to—oh, take the low figure, ten million. If it performed that well, how can you possibly argue that he should have sold it? He may have struggled, but it doesn’t seem to have harmed him. Who can say he was wrong to keep it? He’s a success now, he’s been a success for some years—and he owns a Vermeer.”
They fell silent, thinking about it. Then the priest cleared his throat, and all eyes turned toward him.
“I should think,” he said, “that at least two of the figures are after the decimal point.” He drew a breath, smiled gently. “I suspect Soldier has neglected to tell us everything. It’s a forgery, isn’t it? That priceless Vermeer.” The soldier nodded.
“By Van Meegeren, I would suppose, if it fooled our Mr. Carmody the first time around. That fellow’s Vermeers, sold as the fakes that they are, have reached a point where they command decent prices in their own right. I don’t suppose this one is worth quite what that young soldier gave for it half a century ago, but it’s a long way from valueless.”
“A fake,” the policeman said. “How did you guess, Priest?”
“The clues were there, weren’t they? Why else would his heart sink when he peered at the painting as it reposed in his footlocker? He saw then by flashlight what he hadn’t seen in the gallery’s more favorable lighting—that he’d squandered all his profits on a canvas that was never in the same room as Vermeer. No wonder he gambled, hoping to recoup his losses. And, given the state of mind he must have been in, no wonder he lost everything.”
“An expert in New York confirmed what he already knew,” the soldier said. “Could he have sold it anyway? Perhaps, even as the Parisian dealer, knowingly or unknowingly, had sold it to him. But he’d have taken a considerable loss, and would risk blackening his reputation before he even had one. Better, he always felt, to keep the painting, and to hang it where he would see it every day, and never forget the lesson it was there to teach him.”
“And what was that lesson, Soldier?”
“That greed can lead to error, with devastating results. Because it was greed that led him to sink the better part of his capital into that worthless Vermeer. It was a bargain, and he should have been susp
icious, but the opportunity to get it at that price led him astray. Greed made him want it to be a Vermeer, and so he believed it to be one, and paid the price for his greed.”
“And hung it on his wall,” the priest said.
“Yes.”
“And moved it to his office when he opened his own gallery. So that he could look at it every day while conducting his business. But others would see it as well, wouldn’t they? What did he tell them when they asked about it?”
“Only that it was not for sale.”
“I don’t suppose it harmed his reputation to have it known that this new kid on the block was sufficiently well-fixed to hang a Vermeer on his wall and not even entertain offers for it,” the doctor mused. “I’m not so sure he didn’t get his money’s worth out of it after all.”
* * *
They fell silent again, and the policeman dealt the cards. The game was seven-card stud, but this time the betting was restrained and the pot small, won at length by the priest with two pair, nines and threes. “If we were playing Baseball,” he said, raking in the chips, “with nines and threes wild, I’d have five aces.”
“If we were playing tennis,” said the doctor, who had held fours and deuces, “it would be your serve. So shut up and deal.” The priest gathered the cards, shuffled them. The soldier filled his pipe, scratched a match, held it to the bowl. “Oh, it’s your pipe,” the doctor said. “I thought the old man over there had treated us to a fart.”
“He did,” said the soldier. “That’s one reason I lit the pipe.”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” the doctor declared, and the priest offered the cards and the policeman cut them, and, from the fireside, the four men heard a sound that had become familiar to them over time.
“You see?” said the doctor. “He’s done it again. Try to counteract his flatulence with your smoke, and he simply redoubles his efforts.”
“He’s an old man,” the policeman said.
“So? Who among us is not?”
“He’s a bit older than we are.”
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