by John Pearce
“That puzzles me, too,” Sommers said. “He kept to himself, or with that daughter of his, and wasn’t active in any new business deals or much of anything, as far as I know. The last time we talked about the missing painting was six or seven years ago, when he got back from helping make some French TV show about it. He said then he’d met some new people but they didn’t seem to know anything concrete. One of them was an art dealer, as I recall. I think he might have been an Arab. Or maybe he was a German. I don’t really remember.”
Sommers glanced at the TV and Eddie could tell he was getting tired, so he stood up to leave. At the door, Sonny stopped him and asked, “How long will you be in town?”
“Not long. I’m here only because Roy wrote my father about the painting, and it looks now like both of them had already dropped the subject. I don’t see that there’s much for me to do here, and I don’t want to get in the way of a police investigation. And I have a business to run back home in Paris.”
He said goodbye to Sommers and Sonny escorted him to the front door. “The gate will open when you get close,” he said.
Eddie walked to the gravel parking area and, as he unlocked the car, looked quickly toward the back of the property. To the right stood a small barn, big as a triple garage and two stories tall. Directly behind the house was an earthen mound that he would have recognized as a fallout shelter even without its rusty steel door. The property appeared to end fifty feet behind the barn at a solid wood fence seven feet tall, weathered but substantial. A trail was worn in the grass from the house to the barn.
The horses were still munching the grass as he left.
He used his key to go through the front door and found Jen in Roy’s study, reading in a bathrobe at the desk. Eddie’s laptop, a first-edition super-lightweight MacBook Air, sat on the corner of the desk.
She looked up and told him, “Jump in the shower pretty quickly if you’re going to. I’ve made dinner reservations at the Columbia, a really good Cuban restaurant. We need to be there in an hour.”
A half-hour later they backed out of Jen’s driveway in her black BMW 335i. She had opened the hardtop and the evening breeze was warm on their skin as she drove across the brilliant blue-green of Sarasota Bay. The view from the high bridge both up and down the barrier island was the magnet for thousands of wealthy retirees who choose the city for their homes. For the first time, he understood the appeal of its escape from Midwestern winters.
“This bridge is pretty new,” Jen told Eddie as they passed its crest. “The old drawbridge was far out of date, but when the state proposed replacing it there was a huge hue and cry. Now that the deed is done, we’re happy with it. It’s a beautiful bridge.”
She drove once around the full circumference of St. Armand’s Circle, bright and clean-looking home to expensive shops and restaurants, then stopped at the valet space in front of the restaurant and handed her key to the attendant.
The restaurant was all Jen had promised. They started with its famous garlicky salad and went on to paella and flan, all accompanied by a strong Rioja Gran Reserva from northern Spain.
“Eddie, do you drink white wine at all?” Jen asked.
“Not really. France has some good whites, as does Germany, but I’m pretty faithful to the French reds. Some people could spin a long line about the finish and mouthfeel and a lot of other BS, but I just like the taste. If I’m just going to have a glass or two I’ll generally pick a Bordeaux, but if I want to drink a lot of it I go for Burgundy, a Pinot Noir or a Beaujolais, more like the one we had last night. I even have a little cellar in the basement of the hotel, but I’m not an expert by any means. I thought we’d like this Spanish wine with Spanish dinner, and it did turn out to be pretty good.”
After the flan, she said, “Let’s skip coffee here. I can make better at home.”
They were silent during most of the drive back over the bridge and through town. He rested his hand lightly on her thigh, and she held it tightly until she had to take hers away to shift the six-speed manual transmission. “If I’d thought more about this problem I’d have bought an automatic,” she said with a laugh, as she took his hand once again and pressed it between her legs.
They left the car in the driveway near the rear of the house and went in through the kitchen door. As he closed and locked it, and Jen reached into a cabinet to find her coffee press, he said, “Maybe we don’t need coffee after all.”
“You’re so right,” she said, taking his hand and leading him toward the bedroom.
9
Arcadia
“Roy trusted me with all his business problems — or at least I think he did. No lawyer is ever certain his client is telling the whole truth.”
Victor Coulson looked at them across a large glass-topped wooden desk where Eddie counted eight stacks of files, plus a random assortment of legal pads and single sheets of paper. Around him on the floor were more stacks. Through the window behind him, Eddie and Jen could see the vacant lot where Roy’s killers had made their escape.
Jen asked, “Did he ever indicate where he kept private papers, other than his will?”
“Just the one bank where you and I went to find the letter that started all this complication. That’s where we keep private client files, so he put his will there, too.”
“What I don’t understand is why Roy would go to so much trouble to hide the key,” Eddie said. “Why didn’t he just leave it for you with his will?”
“Flexibility,” Jen said. “He always wanted to be able to change his mind. This way it was out of sight but he could always change his mind about who got access to his files. He just couldn’t plan on being run down in the street.”
“I think you may be right,” Victor said. “He wanted to have a way out of every document he signed. Said he learned that from leaving too much money behind him when he sold his business in Germany.”
Victor leaned back in his oversized chair, rubbing his forehead. Eddie could see he was trying to recall something, so didn’t interrupt but looked at the picture of the basketball player on the wall to his left and wondered how that athletic younger man had turned into the overweight lawyer.
“If you have to go to every bank in Southwest Florida it will take days. Maybe — just maybe — I can help.
“When Roy came to me all those years ago he asked for a bank recommendation. Because my practice is contracts I get a lot of requests like that, so I have a list. He might have stored his records in one of them.”
He pulled a single sheet of paper from a drawer and handed it across the desk. “Jen, do any of these look familiar to you?”
She ran her carefully manicured fingertip down the page. “Here’s a possible. Arcadia. He went there more than anywhere else I remember. I went with him sometimes but it’s been a couple of years.”
“Is that very far away?” Eddie asked. “I didn’t know there was an Arcadia in Florida.”
“It’s an old farming town out near the middle of the state. Its main claim to fame is a rodeo once a year. I never understood why Roy liked it. He would only say it reminded him of when he was poor.”
“Looks like you get one more lunch in Arcadia. Do you have your estate papers?”
“Two copies. I’ll drive.”
“Jesus, that was a ride,” Eddie said as Jen slowed the black convertible under a canopy of trees lining Magnolia Street. “Where did you learn to drive like that?”
“Like I told you, I had a wild youth. It cost Roy some money, but I learned you can drive pretty much any way you want as long as you don’t speed over hills or around curves. I’m a pretty dowdy middle-aged driver most times, but it’s still fun to push the limits.”
On the way they had passed miles of pasture and low scruffy palms, the original landscaping of old Florida. But once past the ring of RV parks and auto dealers guarding Arcadia they saw the unmistakable signs of faded affluence side by side with swaybacked frame houses that long ago had been visited by shingle-siding salesmen.
Jen turned into a downtown area that still showed the signs of early-twentieth-century prosperity. The stone pediments bore construction dates a hundred years before, and many had been partially covered by new facades that appeared to date from the sixties and seventies. Once they had housed department stores and cattle feed suppliers but those had given way to antique stores and tea rooms, and the upstairs floors were mostly vacant. Jen pointed to a café on the left. “That’s where we usually went for lunch. Great chicken-salad sandwiches.”
She parked and Eddie took out the list of banks, which held only one name for Arcadia — a big chain bank. “It’s probably just around the corner. That’s the direction Roy always took when he left the café,” she said.
A cheerful receptionist greeted them in the lobby. She heaved herself up to lead them to a small conference room, her three hundred pounds unconcealed and unrestricted by her loose dress. Jen saw the look of surprise on Eddie’s face as she closed the door and said, “That’s what more and more of us look like. Some of it’s poverty, but mostly it’s McDonald’s.”
“We don’t have it in Paris yet. Never, I hope, but we do have McDonald’s.”
The door opened and a balding man well into his sixties entered. He introduced himself as William Maxwell — “call me Billy Joe” — and said he had been the manager through three owners, for almost forty years.
Jen told him briefly that she was the executor of her father’s estate and believed he had kept a safety deposit box at Jim’s bank. “This is the key,” she said, holding up the one Eddie had found in Roy’s library.
He looked carefully at her driver’s license and the state letter of administration naming her personal representative.
“I hate to be so picky but we’ve had to be a lot more careful since 9/11. Yes, Roy opened a box here more than thirty years ago. He also kept a checking account, which he used only to pay the rent on the box, as far as I can tell.”
“Funny. I haven’t seen any statements,” Jen replied.
“That’s because Roy didn’t want anyone to know. He had me send all the mail to Jimmy Dean, a lawyer here in town. Once a year he made a cash deposit to cover the rent. But you’ve already talked to Jimmy, haven’t you?”
Eddie looked at Jen, who had a puzzled expression on her face.
“I haven’t heard his name until today,” she said.
“Well, he called me and said he’d read of Roy’s death in the Sarasota paper. He said he had your number and would call you.”
“I haven’t heard from him. We probably should go ask him what happened.”
“Jimmy’s getting on, a few years older than Roy. He’s pretty sharp, but forgets things from time to time. He doesn’t really practice much law anymore, but you’ll find him either at the courthouse or his office most days. Would you like to see what’s in the box first?”
He handed Jen an index card to sign. She pointed out Roy’s last use of the box, almost a year before. Until then, his visits had been more frequent, about every three months. “Bet that’s when he gave up,” she said.
The three went into the vault. Billy Joe took the key Jen had brought and knelt to insert it into one of the locks on a box near floor level. He took the bank’s key from an envelope and slid it into the other lock, then turned both and swung open the door. Eddie and Jen watched silently as he pulled a long, dark-green steel box from the wall, then stood and carried it into an inspection room just outside the vault door. Placing it on a counter, he said, “come out and call me when you’re finished.”
Jen looked up at Eddie as she opened the box. Inside they found a Leitz file binder, its labels brown with age, and under it a large brown envelope.
“Roy always was organized,” she said. “This is the type of binder the Germans use for their files, which probably means he brought it with him from Frankfurt.”
She opened it to find a two-inch stack of paper, each sheet neatly punched in the center of its left margin to fit the two binder posts of the heavy cardboard notebook.
Eddie felt a chill as he lifted the cover page from the little stack and saw his father’s neat script in a note at the bottom. He took a sharp breath.
“What is it?”
“My father really was in this. That’s his note.”
The paper was thin onionskin of the kind once used for carbon copies. It had started as bright pink but had faded and become brittle over the years. It was a report from Maj. Arthur Grant to his superior, Lt. Col. Albert Sommers, and was dated Sept. 25, 1946. It began:
“SUMMARY: The undersigned interviewed HANS FRANK, formerly Nazi governor general of the part of Poland not incorporated into Germany, for four hours over two days, 23 and 24 September. Also present were SSGT Roy Castor, assistant to the undersigned, and SGT Mark Perry, Military Police, present as guard. SGT Perry did not participate in the questioning.
“The purpose of this interview was to determine the extent of FRANK’s knowledge of the current location of certain works of art, taken from the civilian institutions of Poland, whose locations are unknown as of the time of this writing. Most of what FRANK told us was known previously, but he did indicate that some valuable items may have been sent out of Poland before the main shipment of goods to his personal home near Munich early in 1945. He refused to be more specific about a painting known as “Portrait of a Young Man,” attributed to the Old Master Raphael, which was listed on the manifest but was missing when the shipment arrived and was intercepted.
“The time allotted to this interview was limited because of FRANK’s pending sentence of death. Numerous agencies of the Allied governments wish to question him before his hanging, which is expected to take place within the next several days. FRANK indicated his awareness of this schedule and appeared willing to discuss any matter we brought before him, other than the matter listed above.” A half-dozen pages giving more detail of the interview were attached.
Artie’s handwritten note was brief:
“Roy:
“I checked the files in Sommers’s office when I left Munich and the original wasn’t there. Be very careful with this as it may be the only copy.
“Artie 6 Jun 88”
“June 1988. That’s when you and your father visited us in Sarasota, isn’t it?”
Eddie responded, “It was —- that was right after I graduated from college. He must have come here to bring this. It’s like he was handing off the case.”
Jen said, “This is really odd because Al Sommers is part of his Wednesday group. He was walking home from their meeting when he was killed. You met him, didn’t you?”
“I went out to see him yesterday. He seemed harmless enough, but this gives a different spin to that conversation. We’ll need to read this very carefully before I go see him again. Artie obviously didn’t trust him.”
“I never understood exactly what they were doing, and Roy wouldn’t tell me much. Can you fill me in?”
“Sure. My father started out in Army intelligence. He’d grown up in Paris and knew both the language and culture, so he volunteered to work behind the German lines, mainly during the preparations for D Day. That’s how he met my mother — her father was in the Resistance in Southern France and Father landed from a submarine to help coordinate sabotage.
“At that point the priority objective was to slow down German troop movements, to keep fresh troops from getting to the invasion beaches. Margaux was a child at the time, living in hiding with a farm family when she wasn’t on the move with her father. Her own mother, my grandmother, secretly went back to Paris early in ‘44 and was killed during the Liberation battles that August.
“Father met Roy in Paris after the Liberation, in late August or early September of ‘44. Roy was a sergeant in Signals at the time, and handled some of Father’s communications back to London. They became friends, and when Father was asked to work with the Monuments Men he asked Roy to go along as his assistant.”
“Monuments Men?” Jen was puzzled.
“Hans Frank was a special case. Aurélie’s told me something about him, and I Googled him as well — he didn’t even pretend to buy many of the most valuable works. He just appropriated them from a big family museum in Krakow and put them on his walls for the duration.
“At one time he had a Leonardo, a Rembrandt and a Raphael. The Raphael is still missing. It would be priceless today but it disappeared while Frank was scurrying back to his home in Bavaria, trying to stay ahead of the Russians. At least it was on the manifest for that trip. It could have been stolen earlier, if I read my father’s memo correctly. Aurélie and her colleagues are just about one hundred per cent sure the Raphael is the painting that’s at the root of this whole business.”
Jen asked, “Isn’t sixty years long enough for most of it to be found?”
“Probably, but there are still some important works missing, and Frank’s Raphael is the most valuable of all. Of course, it may have been destroyed or lost, or still be sitting in a bank vault in Switzerland or Houston.”
“Houston? How would that be?”
“The Nazis weren’t the only looters. Just a few years ago some very fancy Old Testament panels showed up in the hands of a former soldier in Texas. He had just mailed them home through the Army’s own post office. Other pieces have been resold to museums, who generally bought in good faith. Some were returned to their owners by shady representatives of unknown sellers, most of them lawyers, who generally receive a generous finder’s fee.
