“All of it?”
“Just for the sake of argument. First of all, if Varga doesn’t call, it’s over. And he hasn’t called. Second. Well, second, Tamid has probably already gotten to the man, and between his lack of finesse, his ignorance of the art market, and his ham-handed threats of litigation and the wrath of the Israeli government, I am sure that not only did he not acquire the painting for Yad Vashem, he just scared the shit out of Varga, who will now never admit to owning the painting. And third, and this is the likeliest: there is no painting. And that is why Varga hasn’t called.”
“Yeah,” said Natalie. “But don’t you want to know?”
The black Mercedes pulled up in front of the house on Strada Costache Negruzzi and idled. A moment later, the driver, wearing a black chauffeur’s cap, got out and went around to open the door for his passenger. With a flourish, he helped her out of the car. She was a stunning redhead in a flowing black coat, a knit dress with a plunging neckline, and a pair of stiletto-heeled boots.
“This is so wrong,” she said.
“It’s fine,” said the driver.
“I should be wearing a pair of sneakers and, like, an orange down vest.”
“He doesn’t know that.”
“Are you sure?”
“We aren’t selling the reality, we’re selling the dream. The Romanian dream. For that, you look perfect.”
She nodded, looking uncertain. It was her plan in outline and his in detail, and he gave it a 30, 35 percent chance of succeeding. He kept this estimate to himself, but she was no fool, and she was learning to read him, and though she had been gung ho all morning, now all at once she seemed to be experiencing doubt.
“Walk back and forth,” he told her. “Don’t look at me, look at the house.”
She obeyed, clicking back and forth along the sidewalk in front of the house that Varga’s grandfather had stolen from some Jews named Einhorn.
“Say what a nice house,” he suggested.
“What a nice house.”
“It might just do.”
“It has that certain something we’re looking for.”
“Good. Now, remember,” he said, speaking in an undertone, hardly moving his lips. “It’s probably not just hanging there on the wall. It might be in a cupboard or in a cabinet. Maybe even in the attic. These houses don’t always have basements, but if there is one, make sure he takes you down there, too. You have the flashlight?”
“I do.”
“Your phone?”
“Yes.”
“You checked to make sure the camera works?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now remember. It might get unpleasant. Varga is not a very nice man.”
“He’s an anti-Semitic pig,” she said, bright and smiling, miming her rapture with the house. “But why should Natalie Kennedy care what he thinks about Jews?”
In her (fake) Chanel purse she carried a stack of business cards, express printed at a copy shop down the road from their hotel, that identified her by this name, the most glamorous American name they could think of.
Amitai got back in the car. He straightened his black tie and settled more snugly on his head the peaked cap he had bought, for fifty dollars, right off the head of a limo driver parked in front of the hotel. Then he watched as she tottered to the door in her high heels.
He rolled down the window. Varga was not likely to trouble an anonymous limo driver with a glance, and even if he did, Amitai was confident that the cap was sufficient disguise. People never bothered to pay attention to those who served them. Waiters and drivers were the most invisible people in the world.
“Hullo!” Natalie gushed as the door opened. “Are you the owner of this wonderful house?”
Though Amitai could see that it was Varga who’d opened the door, he could not hear the man’s mumbled reply.
“Wonderful!” Natalie trilled. “My name is Natalie Kennedy. I work for Warner Brothers Pictures. In Hollywood.”
The idea had been inspired by the movie posters in Varga’s living room, and Amitai hoped now that he’d been right, that the man was indeed a fan of American films.
“I’m a location scout,” Natalie said. “My job is to find places to shoot movies. We’re making a movie here in Oradea, and I’ve been looking for ages for a house just like this one! Turn of the last century, intact, not broken into apartments. Honestly, I never thought I’d find it. Do you mind if I come in?”
Varga did not let her pass.
“Listen,” Natalie said. She glanced around as if looking for eavesdropping neighbors, then said, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but it’s a very high-budget film.”
Varga said something, and she laughed, a delightful trill. “Why would you say that? Oradea is just the place! All that European mystique. Seriously, won’t you let me come in? I won’t take more than a few minutes of your time. And I promise it will be worth it.” She rubbed her thumb and index finger together. “Warner Brothers pays top dollar for locations.”
Varga spoke again, but Natalie held up her hand. “You know what? That’s fine. I just noticed that house across the street.” She pointed to a villa opposite. “It’s a similar house. Not as nice, but it might do in a pinch. Sorry to have troubled you.”
She offered Varga a glance at her perfect behind as she headed down the path to make her lucrative offer to his neighbors.
This time Amitai heard him as he called, “Please! Come back. Is wonderful house! Perfect house for movie!”
As Natalie swept by him through the door, Varga spoke again, but Amitai heard only her reply. “Yes, my great-uncle. But of course I never knew him. He was assassinated years before I was born.”
Thirty-eight minutes and nineteen seconds after she gained entry to the house that had been stolen from the Einhorns, the door opened again, and Natalie raced out, the flaps of her black coat fluttering oddly behind her. She looked like a crow with a broken wing. She ticktocked awkwardly down the steps on her high heels, threw open the back door of the car, and tumbled inside.
“Drive!” she shouted.
Varga burst through the front door, moving much more quickly than Amitai would have thought possible for a man of his age and girth.
“Go!”
Amitai slammed the car into gear and took off down the narrow street with a melodramatic squeal of tires. Natalie shrugged out of her coat and climbed into the front passenger seat, buckling herself in with a determined air, as though she were expecting bumps and blind curves.
“Dude,” she said, “I’m going to need you to go way, way faster than this.”
• 26 •
IT WAS A FIFTEEN-MINUTE drive along a well-maintained road to the border. Amitai stuck to the speed limit, glancing again and again in his rearview mirror. It wasn’t until they had flashed their passports at the lackadaisical border guards and crossed back into Hungary that he relaxed enough to ask Natalie what had happened.
“At first it went great,” she said. “You were right. He’s a huge movie buff. His place is covered in Scarface posters and, like, American Gangster. He was only too happy to let me inside.”
“He didn’t seem suspicious? Did Tamid get to him?”
“He wasn’t suspicious. Not at first. He didn’t mention Tamid. But I don’t know, maybe he was just fucking with me.”
She had told Varga that the movie she was scouting, to be directed by the Coen Brothers, was set in the late 1920s, at the end of the Jazz Age. At this, Varga—as much as, he was obliged to admit, he loved the Coen Brothers—had experienced his first stab of doubt. The Jazz Age, in Romania?
Natalie lowered her voice.
“Okay, Mr. Varga, look, this is just between you and me, all right? Can I trust you?”
Varga looked hurt. Could she trust him? What kind of question was that?
“Obviously, with a production like this … the plot is absolutely under wraps. Total lockdown. But if you promise to keep it to yourself …?”
Varga nodded.
“The lead character … and we have a big star …”
“Is George Clooney?”
She looked astonished. “Oh, my God. Yes! How did you …?”
Varga downplayed his burst of perspicuity.
“I feel like you’ve been scouting me. Anyway, he’s an American jazz musician, a trombonist, right, who leaves San Francisco and ends up coming to Romania in search of love.”
“Romanian women are very beautiful,” Varga said, nodding.
“Exactly,” she said. “It’s a historical film, so I’m particularly interested in the older parts of your house. We’ll be bringing in furniture, of course, appliances and artwork, things from that period. But I, well, I’d love to see if you have anything, already here in the house, that we might be able to use. We pay very generous rental fees.”
Impressed with her credentials, with her expensive clothes, with the black Mercedes parked in front of the house, Varga had been unctuous and accommodating as he showed her into the living room cluttered with ugly furniture. She diligently photographed the room and its contents, from every angle.
There were no paintings of any kind hanging in the living room, nor in the dining room, which was their next stop. But in the library, a landscape hung over the fireplace. Pretending interest in the bric-a-brac displayed on the cracked marble mantel, she aimed her camera at the painting.
Now she showed Amitai the image, and he risked a quick glance.
She said, “I thought maybe the Einhorns were art collectors. That it might be worth something. Or maybe they bought other work from Komlós.”
“If that’s a Komlós,” he said, “then I have made a terrible miscalculation. He’s not an artist at all.”
“What? Why?”
“This painting is from a kit. Paint by numbers.”
“No shit!” she said, hunching over the small screen.
“You don’t see the lines? There’s even an empty space.”
She zoomed in on the picture, squinted, and laughed. “Number twenty-six. Looks like it was supposed to be green. Oh well. Anyway, I took pictures the whole time, right? I kept telling him it was just what we were looking for, a real authentic Romanian house of the period. Perfect for our show. I called it a ‘show,’ see, that’s what movie people say, not ‘movie’ or ‘film.’ Then I asked if there was a view from the top floor.”
As he led her upstairs, she prattled on and on. “I kept saying ‘verisimilitude.’ I could tell he had no idea what it meant.”
Varga took her up to the attic, where, he said, his family stored their old and broken things, many of which might be brought down to furnish the house. For an additional fee, of course.
“Of course,” she said.
The attic extended the whole length of the house. Though dusty and unused, it was brightly lit by a long row of harsh fluorescent lights that flickered above their heads. She took photograph after photograph of the broken-down dressers hulking against the attic walls, of chairs with torn cane seats, of steamer trunks, one labeled with a sticker from the port of Haifa, Palestine. At the sight of that sticker—clear evidence, she was sure, of the Einhorn family—her heart began beating with such force that she worried for a moment that the sound might be audible amid the silent whirl of dust in the attic.
“This is fantastic!” she gushed, hoping her effusiveness would be sufficient explanation for her flushed face. “The art director will be over the moon.”
“ ‘Over the moon’?”
“Happy! Very happy.”
After that they went back downstairs. She hovered for a moment in the front hall, insisting, “You must keep in very close touch with me. My phone number and my e-mail address are on my card.”
She said to Amitai, “And then, since we seemed to be pretty much out of rooms, I told him I needed to pee.”
There was a narrow, whitewashed five-panel door. She opened it, and before Varga could object, closed it smartly behind her.
The painting was hanging on the wall opposite the toilet.
Amitai couldn’t help it. He gasped.
“I know!” she said. “In the bathroom! When I saw it, I jumped like a foot in the air. I swear, I must have peed all over the place. I had to buy some time, so I made a couple of, like, straining noises. Then I got really close to it. It’s in the cheapest wooden frame. Clearly Varga has no idea what it might be worth. I stared into the eye of the peacock. You know, it’s not just a black dot like it seems in the picture or like a peacock actually has. It’s hazel. Like a woman’s eye. It looks more like the eye of a peacock feather than the eye of an actual peacock.”
And, hanging in the painting as it hung on Natalie, in the shadowland between her breasts, was Frau E.’s locket. It was depicted in painstaking, hyperreal detail, each jewel and filigree rendered in paint so thick the locket cast a real shadow across the canvas.
“Show me,” Amitai said.
“What?” Natalie said, suddenly anxious.
“The photograph! You took one, didn’t you?” He groaned. “Please, tell me you remembered to take a picture of the one thing we’re looking for.”
“Can I just please finish the story?”
“I can’t believe—”
“Just please let me finish.”
She was enjoying this, he thought. He was going crazy, and she was enjoying telling the story. “Fine. Then what did you do?”
She leaned over the seat of the car, reached into the puddle of black wool that was her oversize coat, and pulled out the painting itself, in its plain wooden frame.
“I just put it behind my back, tied the belt of my coat, and ran.”
• 27 •
THEY LEFT THE CAR with the valet of the Hotel Gellért, and Amitai carried the painting bundled in his arms in Natalie’s coat like a sleeping baby, a stolen child no one else must see. He laid the bundle on the bed in their room, tenderly, as if not to disturb the slumber of what lay wrapped inside. He pointed to an overstuffed armchair in the corner by the television.
“Sit,” he said.
Natalie sat. Now that she was done playing girl adventurer—now that she could see how badly he was taking this—her giddiness had vanished, and her manner had become watchful. She was waiting, he knew, for him to get angry, to scold her, lose his temper, explode. But he knew how women went about such things. He was not going to give her the opportunity to turn the tables, become the aggrieved party. Make no mistake, he was the aggrieved party in this affair. He was the one to whose world, with all its hairsprings and escapements of profit and morality carefully tuned, this woman had taken the hammer of her foolish idealism, her childish sense of justice, her lack of self-control.
He carefully untied the arms of the coat, unwrapped the painting. It was facedown, and he kept it that way, moving it onto the mattress. He hung Natalie’s coat up in the closet, removed and hung up his own. He began pacing back and forth across the floor, not looking at her, not looking at the thing on the bed. He began silently to review the procedure that would be involved in returning the painting. If he did it himself, he would face prosecution. He needed an intermediary. Could he enlist Elek? Would Elek be willing to make the journey, to take the risk? Or would Elek refuse, given what he had revealed about his belief in the right of nations to their artistic patrimony?
No, Amitai would have to do it himself. He would say that a woman had tried to sell it to him, that he’d confiscated it and was now returning it to Varga. Would Varga believe him? If he did, perhaps he’d be grateful enough at that point to consider a sale. Or, Amitai thought angrily, Varga would call the police. What would life be like for an Israeli in a Romanian prison? And even if he avoided incarceration, the success of his business depended wholly on his reputation among antique dealers, museum administrators, and low-level government officials. Were this theft to become public knowledge, he’d be ruined in Romania, in Hungary, and who knew where else. And if Tamid found out? The man would blackmail him. He would threaten that unless Amitai ga
ve him the painting to turn over to Yad Vashem or to the Israel Museum, he would report him to the Romanian police or to Interpol or to whatever agency currently had jurisdiction over stolen Jewish property. Tamid would be thrilled to be granted the opportunity to ruin Amitai’s career and his life. Amitai imagined for a moment the phone call to his uncle. Jacob’s fury, his own humiliation.
He stopped pacing, stood staring at the painting lying facedown on the bed, and laughed out loud.
“Amitai?” Natalie said, astonished. This was not, it seemed, the reaction she was expecting. “Why are you laughing?”
“Why am I laughing? I always laugh when I see a good magic trick. And this, Natalie, this was an amazing trick you pulled off.”
She looked up at him, her expression willing and worried at the same time, wanting to see the mood lightened, to be let in on the joke, fearing that it would not turn out to be very funny at all.
“Did I?”
“You did. You turned Vidor Komlós into Bruno Schulz.”
He watched her face, prepared, if she looked blank or clueless, to strike her forever from the book of his heart, walk out of the room, leave her to deal with the mess she had made alone. When he saw that she understood what he was talking about, he didn’t know if he felt relieved or disappointed.
“Okay,” she said, sounding determined to match his hostile and aggressive calm, if that was how he wanted to play it. “First of all, I didn’t, like, chisel it off a wall. It was hanging on a hook. So what I did is not irreversible. If you want to, we can just get in the car, drive back to Oradea, and return it.”
She sat expectant, hands on her knees, making a show of it. All he needed to do was say the word. That was when he realized the extent of the damage she had done to his Swiss-movement life. The moment passed, irretrievably.
“Second,” she said, “say I did turn Vidor Komlós into Bruno Schulz, how is that a bad thing? Schulz has got to be one of the most famous Jewish artists of the last century. And I don’t see how what they did was so wrong.”
“Are you serious?” he said. “Those baheimot from Yad Vashem, those art-thug friends of Dror Tamid? They go in there with crowbars and pickaxes, they tear the fucking murals right off the walls. There was significant damage.”
Love and Treasure Page 24
