“The paintings from the train can’t have just disappeared,” Natalie said. “Some of them have to be somewhere.”
“The U.S. Army stored the paintings somewhere in Salzburg, that much we know. But what nobody knows is where, though many, including me, have searched.”
“Well, maybe the painting wasn’t on the train. Maybe just the necklace was. Maybe the peacock woman hid the painting. Or maybe she survived, and her heirs still have the painting.”
Amitai said, “Elek tells me that you are searching for the rightful owner of the necklace?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To return it.”
“Why do you want to return it?”
“Why? Because my grandfather …” Her voice trailed away, and all at once he felt impatient with her evasiveness.
“Stole it?”
“Yes. And I guess it bothered him for a very long time. He was not a bad man; in fact he was a very sweet, kind, gentle man. He was a classics professor, not a thief.” She pushed her curls off her forehead. “He died a couple of weeks ago.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you.” Her eyes swam, and she blinked a few times. “Anyway, he asked me to return the necklace for him.”
“But surely he knew that he was asking the impossible?”
“Not impossible. Just, you know, difficult.”
“And you are, what?” he said. “A woman who enjoys a challenge?”
“Don’t miss a trick, right?” she said. “That’s your shtick, isn’t it? Mr. Perceptive. See right through people like you’re X-raying a painting.”
“That is one of my shticks,” he agreed. “I have one or two others.”
“If you were to find the painting, what would you do?”
“In the unlikely event that the painting was not on the train, you mean? Then it depends.”
“On what?”
“Well, if it is as you suggest, and the painting is in the possession of a descendant of the owner of your necklace, who was in fact the model for the painting, then I would congratulate that person on his or her good fortune and go back to New York.”
“And if someone else has it?”
“Then it becomes a question of provenance. If the person in possession can prove he purchased the painting before the war, I might try to buy it, depending on the price. But that is not usually the kind of art I deal in.”
“Why not?”
“I am not interested in artwork with legitimate provenance, only art stolen during the Holocaust.”
“And in that case, what? You sue?”
“Not usually. People have had a limited success with this kind of suit, but not here in Hungary. Here the government has consistently ignored international norms and precedents regarding the repatriation of property. And, anyway, neither my firm nor I is interested in lawsuits. That is not our style. We look for compromise.”
Natalie said, “What kind of compromise?”
“We convince the individual in possession that it is in his interest to allow us to sell the work and give him a portion of the proceeds. The rest we turn over to the rightful heirs.” Less Shasho & Sons’ 40 percent commission, he refrained from adding.
“You give a percentage to the very people who stole the property? How is that fair?”
In Amitai’s experience the glorification of abstract notions of fairness and justice was a characteristic found primarily among children and Americans. But this was another observation that he kept to himself.
“Most of the time, those who actually did the stealing are long dead. But still, it’s true, you’re right. My solution is not, strictly speaking, fair. But it is often the only way to repatriate the object.”
“What kind of objects have you ‘repatriated’?” He was familiar with the hint of scorn in her voice. It was one adopted by many who learned of his profession.
Again he scrolled through the images on his phone until he found a photo of a brooch, worked in a tulip design, inset with dozens of diamonds.
“Things like this,” he said, showing her the image.
“Beautiful!” she said. “Who did it belong to?”
“A couple named Patai from here in Budapest.”
“They must have been very happy to get the jewelry back.”
“Zoltán Patai and his wife, Bertha, died in the winter of 1945, of starvation and exposure, but there was a brother, Albert, who immigrated to Argentina before the war. It is Albert’s grandson who is my client. And yes. He was very happy.”
The Argentinian heir had indeed been very happy with the outcome of the case, though he never set eyes on the brooch but only on the check from Shasho & Sons, a windfall from a great-uncle he’d never even known existed. The heirs rarely saw the objects Amitai retrieved. As Jacob Shasho said, “We are not a charity, nor a firm of private detectives.” Shasho & Sons did not represent people who longed for their grandfather’s lost Degas statuette because it reminded them of their mother’s years as a ballerina and who planned to display it in a special cabinet constructed in their living room. The firm represented people who recalled with sufficient detail the items in their relatives’ collections, who ideally had some documentation backing up these claims of provenance, and who wanted nothing more than to sell the objects to the highest bidder.
“It can’t have been easy to track down that brooch,” Natalie said.
“Easy? No.”
In recent years, Amitai had come to realize that there was an even more lucrative way to approach the business. He began now with the property itself, not with the owner. He determined what specific types of work were selling well in the current art market and then researched lost Jewish collections. For example, the sale of Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer for $135 million, one of the highest reported prices ever paid for a painting, and the consequent resurgence of interest in works of the period, had inspired him to begin searching for lost Hungarian collections. The Jews of Hungary, particularly of Budapest, had been financially secure, many of them even wealthy, during the height of the Art Nouveau or Jugendstil, and they had thus acquired a large amount of valuable artwork, virtually all of which was then stolen from them during the war. More important, although a great number of them had been murdered—at least half a million—relative to the Jews of other countries there were more survivors, particularly in Budapest where the wealth was concentrated. This combination of stolen wealth and living heirs made Hungary uniquely suitable for his purposes. Though great wealth had been acquired by certain of Poland’s and Ukraine’s urban Jewish communities, the thoroughness of the decimation of the Jewish populations of those countries made their stolen art irrelevant. What point was there in discovering that a provincial Polish museum was in possession of a valuable Renoir that could be traced to the private collection of a Lemberg banker and art collector, if that man and every single member of his extended family had been shoveled into the pits at Bełżec?
In the case of the brooch, Amitai had discovered the existence of an intact archive of a distinguished Viennese jeweler, and Elek had acquired for him through means not entirely legitimate a digital catalog of all the holdings of the Budapest Bedö-Ház, a museum devoted to the art of the Magyar secession movement, the Hungarian version of the Austrian Jugendstil. Amitai had cross-referenced the two lists. It was meticulous, tedious work, comparing descriptions of rings and brooches, diadems and necklaces. His work was always like this: vast expanses of featureless failure out of which there would appear, from time to time, a solitary mast flying like a flag, the promise of treasure. Eventually he found in the jeweler’s archive a reference to the sale in 1934 to a Herr Patai Zoltán of Budapest of an exceptionally valuable brooch that matched a description in the Bedö-Ház archive. Then it was simply a matter of tracking down the lucky nephew and convincing the Bedö-Ház that a quick and quiet sale was preferable to a noisy public scandal.
Natalie said, “Well, will it be that
much harder to find out what happened to the painting? I mean, if my necklace can lead us to the model?”
“I have been looking for a long time,” he said. “And though I’d hoped your necklace would lead me to the painting, I fear now I’ve learned only that the worst is true. I’ve learned that the painting was likely on the train, and so it’s gone.”
“You can’t know that for sure. Don’t you think it’s worth looking? I mean, since you’ve spent so much time already?”
“I fear not.”
“You strike me as a man who enjoys a lost cause.”
She took him by surprise. How could she know that he always felt most comfortable among the uncomfortable, most at home among the homeless? This, more than anything perhaps, explained the passion of his search for Komlós’s painting. There were many lost paintings, after all, many dead artists. And many of those other lost paintings by dead artists were likely to be more valuable than this particular one. Yet this was the search that consumed him. There was something about Komlós, about the extent to which the man had been so effectively erased from the earth, virtually all shadow he’d cast gone with him, that interested Amitai enough to make him drop everything and fly across the world at the smallest glimmer of hope.
“How do you mean?” he said.
“Well, for three years you’ve been looking for the lost painting of a lost artist on behalf of whom? His lost relatives?”
He had hoped Natalie would not ask him about his client in the Komlós case. It had taken him nearly a year of concerted effort to find any surviving relative on whose behalf he could claim the artwork. Jill Gillette, the widow of a second cousin of the artist, was as close as he had come. Attenuated as the relationship was, Ms. Gillette was in possession of genealogical evidence of the connection, which made her a perfectly adequate client. Still, not one of whom he was eager to brag.
He said, “I know Komlós’s relatives. They’re not lost.”
“Even better. I’ve now given you the chance to search for the lost owner of a found necklace on behalf of a found relative. Simple, right?”
She spoke with her hands moving emphatically in the air. Her cuticles were torn, and she had a hangnail on her thumb. He thought she might be a nervous woman, high-strung. The kind of woman he had sworn not to pursue anymore.
“Right,” he said. “Simple.”
• 16 •
PÉTÉR ELEK WORE HIS silver hair long, slicked back from his high forehead and falling past his collar. His mustache and beard ended in a hussar cavalryman’s sharpened points. He exuded a kind of vintage urbanity; he was a Budapest flaneur, down to the paisley cravat tied around his throat and fixed with an onyx tie pin. He bent over Natalie’s hand and planted upon it a kiss. She blushed.
“Forgive me for being busy when you first arrived,” he said.
“Did you make the sale?” Amitai asked.
“Did I make the sale, what kind of question is it? ‘Did you make the sale?’ Please.” He winked at Natalie.
“Don’t insult the man,” Natalie said.
“I have time now, if you wish,” Elek said to Natalie, “to examine the necklace more thoroughly.”
Natalie unfastened the pendant and handed it to him.
“Mm,” the elderly man murmured, “such a lovely warmth the gold retains. You must be quite hot-blooded. It’s the red hair, no doubt.”
Amitai laughed. “Oh-oh. Look out,” he said. “I must warn you, Elek is a notorious ladies’ man.”
“Really?” Natalie said. “And who’s going to warn me about you?”
Elek pulled a square of black velvet from the hip pocket of his suit pants and spread it across the top of one of the glass cases. He aimed a task lamp at the cloth and positioned the necklace at the center of the bright bluish spot of light. He screwed a jeweler’s loupe into his eye and examined the pendant, angling it this way and that.
“As I told you when you first showed me the necklace, my dear, I would call it more Art Deco than Jugendstil, although the enamel work, the use of semiprecious rather than precious stones, this is indeed emblematic of the Art Nouveau.”
“Can you tell who made it?” Amitai said.
“The enameling reminds me of some of the early work of Lajos Kozma, before he devoted himself to architecture. You see how the peacock is made of geometrical patterns? This is very typical Kozma. The subject matter is unusual, though. In Hungary the peacock feather is an omen of ill fortune, and so one doesn’t generally see it used decoratively. The colors are also not Kozma’s. He most often worked in yellow, blue, red, and gold. I have never before seen him use purple, white, and green. They are not so beautiful, these colors together, I don’t think. Not harmonious. So they must mean something, no?” Elek continued examining the pendant, flipping it over, bringing it close to his eye and away again. “But Kozma, he is a man who likes to sign his work, so if it is his, where is the signature?”
Elek reached beneath the counter. He dug around in a drawer until he found a leather case in which were arrayed a selection of tiny screwdrivers. Moments later he grunted “ah!” and held the pendant out for the other two to see. The back and front were separated, joined by an infinitesimal hinge. It was not just a pendant, but a locket. Inside the locket was a tiny photograph.
Amitai laughed, delighted both by the intricate workmanship and by Elek’s skill in discovering it.
“As I thought. Kozma,” Elek said. “See, his signature is here.”
Elek passed the loupe to Natalie and directed her attention to a swirl of calligraphy on the inside of the locket, opposite the photograph. In spidery letters it read KOZMA LAJOS, surname written first in the Hungarian manner.
Natalie peered at the photograph on the other side of the locket. After a few moments she offered Amitai the loupe, and he held it to his eye. The tiny sepia-toned photograph depicted what Amitai took to be a woman and a child in front of a glass-fronted building draped with flags. The child, a girl in a ruffled white dress, had been posed standing on top of a wooden box. On either side of the figures dangled two long white banners inscribed with characters too small for Amitai to make out, even with the loupe.
“I can’t read what’s on the banners,” he said.
Natalie took back the pendant and the loupe. “One’s in Hungarian, so I don’t know, but the other’s in English. It says SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE CONGRESS, JUNE 15–20, 1913.” She brought the tiny photograph closer to the loupe, squinted. A tendril of hair fell forward, and she jammed it impatiently behind her shell-pink ear. “I thought it was a little girl.”
“It is a little girl,” Amitai said.
“I don’t think so,” Natalie said. “She has a big head, an adult-sized head, and her hair is up in a bun. A little girl wouldn’t have worn her hair like that. She’s a dwarf.”
Amitai and Elek each took another look and agreed with Natalie’s revised assessment.
“Sharp eyes,” Elek said, with only a hint of lechery.
“This will make our search much easier,” Amitai said. “We just go to the National Széchényi Library and ask to see the archive of the Suffrage Congress of 1913. Surely there was no more than one dwarf in attendance.”
He took a closer look now at the other woman, whom at first he had taken for the mother of the child. She was thin and fair haired, and possibly quite beautiful.
“Do you think that’s her?” Natalie said. “The model in your painting?”
“It’s hard to tell, since she has the head of a pretty girl and not a peacock. But it’s certainly not impossible.” He handed her the necklace. “A very good day’s work.”
As Natalie reached back to reclasp the necklace, Amitai saw that the skin on the underside of her arms was pale and smooth. No freckles.
He continued, “Justifies a celebratory dinner, don’t you think?”
“All right,” she said. “Sure. Mr. Elek, I hope you’ll join us?”
“I’m afraid not, madam. As much as I would lov
e to. My wife waits for me at home.”
“Well, you could bring her, too,” Natalie said.
The two men exchanged a glance. Between a sharp-eyed jeweler and a gray-market art dealer much can be said without a word being spoken.
Elek said, “You are very kind. Indeed my wife, when properly rested, can be quite a lively dinner companion, but she will be tired at the end of a long day of working. I will see you again, perhaps, before you leave Budapest. When it is time for you to purchase a souvenir of your visit, you will return, yes?”
“Of course!”
Amitai steered Natalie out of the store. He flagged down a cab. “Please take us to the Hotel Gellért,” he told the driver.
“To the hotel?” Natalie said, nonplussed, whatever flirtatious tone she had previously allowed herself now gone.
“They have a very fine restaurant,” he reassured her.
• 17 •
THE STUFFED CABBAGE for which the hotel restaurant was justifiably famous tasted fine, better even, from a room-service tray. They ate in bed, the tray balanced on a pillow between them. Modest after the fact, Natalie twisted the white sheet around her body, covering her breasts. Her curls, liberated from their restraining clip, dangled fetchingly around her face.
If Amitai had thought their quest was anything more than a mutual fools’ errand he would not have complicated their relationship with sex. But as it was, there was no point in denying himself the pleasure. Even so, it was unusual for him to have brought a woman to his own room. After his divorce, he had come to value his privacy obsessively, and made it a point always to go to a woman’s apartment or hotel room rather than invite her to his. The home he had shared with his ex-wife, like the homes of most of the members of the close-knit community of Syrian Jews in Midwood, Brooklyn, was always spilling over with relatives and friends, friends of relatives, relatives of friends. When Jessica was not entertaining all of her female cousins over Turkish coffee and pastries or hosting a baby shower for a sister-in-law, she was serving dinner to thirty members of her immediate family. He and Jessica had been expected to report at least once a week to the respective homes of her parents, her aunts and uncles, and at least one of her seven siblings. And on the rare Sabbaths or holidays when Jessica’s family did not demand their presence, his own extended family did. Even more than escaping the suffocation of a marriage to a woman with whom he had nothing in common beyond the accident of their mutual Syrian Jewish ancestry, he had longed to get away from the crush of familiar humanity in Midwood. The delightful solitude of his Manhattan bachelor’s apartment was still, three years after his divorce, a singular pleasure. He had never once allowed a woman even to visit. When traveling, he generally extended this prohibition to include his hotel rooms. And yet he’d invited this young woman to his room without any hesitation at all. Moreover, he thought, she appeared to be preparing to stay the night. He tested out the idea in his mind. Why, he wondered, didn’t it bother him?
Love and Treasure Page 17
