Treasure of Saint-Lazare

by John Pearce

  Pistol in hand, Eric opened the door and said roughly, “just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “Don’t you know about this? Your uncle told me I could take two bars back to Memmingen with me, and you can do the same. See, they packed this crate with four extra bars. That’s two kilos of gold for each of us. It’s worth more than a major earns in an entire year.”

  “That’s not our gold to take. It belongs to the Reich.”

  “But the Governor-General said we could have two bars for all our work and danger. Didn’t he tell you?”

  Eric paused. “He did say there would be a gift for me, but I think he meant I would get it in Paris. How much did you say it is worth?”

  “He told me each bar is a kilo. At the official rate each of them would be worth more than 1,100 U.S. dollars. He suggested I take it to Switzerland and exchange it for Swiss francs.”

  Eric holstered his pistol, still suspicious, but Otto had so many details that the story could be true. Just maybe.

  “I have to believe you because I was told to expect some sort of gift. Let’s nail the crate back together and get the truck ready in case we have to leave on short notice.” Eric watched Otto put the two bars in the side pockets of his uniform jacket, then pound the nails he’d removed back into the walls of the crate.

  “I’m going back to bed.”

  When he woke the sun was up. Otto hummed softly as he worked at the alcohol stove.

  “You should have waked me for my shift,” Eric said sharply to him.

  “I thought I’d upset you so much already that you’d prefer to sleep. Anyway, I wasn’t a bit sleepy.”

  They shared an ordinary breakfast of eggs and potatoes, washed down by the dreadful ersatz coffee. When they’d finished Otto took the dishes to the brook and scrubbed them in the cold water.

  “Dishes are clean but I’m not. I think I’ll wash up and take a nap. We’ll be here all day?”

  “Yes, we can’t leave until dark. I haven’t heard any bombers but they could come any time. Don’t go all the way into the stream. It’s running too fast.”

  “I’ll just wash up on the bank,” Otto replied.

  He carefully hung the heavy uniform coat on the lowest branch of a tree at the water’s edge. Then he removed his undershirt and laid it on the coat.

  Eric asked himself how anyone could allow himself to gain so much weight, and how he found the food it would take to provide so many calories, although he suspected he knew the answer. At least three rolls of fat danced above his belt. A good match for his three chins, Eric thought.

  He watched Otto drop to his knees, then reach down with both hands, splashing the cold water under each arm and then all over his face and head. He moved at the moment Otto leaned further out over the stream.

  As he splashed his face a second time, Eric grabbed the back of his neck in a vise grip and forced his head under the water. He put his right knee on Otto’s back and forced his chest to the ground. Otto thrashed and kicked for more than a minute. When he was still, Eric counted another two minutes second by second, then released his grip and stood up. Otto’s head hung loosely under the surface of the water. His dead hands floated back and forth in the current.

  Eric rinsed his hands. “A pederast I could accept,” he said gently to the body. “A thief, perhaps. But not both.”

  He took the gold bars from Otto’s pockets and returned them quickly to the crate under the seat, nailing it tight. Then he pulled Otto’s heavy body from the water and dressed him. The undershirt was hardest to manage, but when he was done he had the fully dressed corpse of a lieutenant, with no visible sign of how he had died. With difficulty, he carried the body to a clump of bushes a dozen yards away and laid it face down where it could not easily be seen from the dirt track they’d used to enter from the highway.

  I should bury him, Eric said to himself. But the animals won’t get him for a day and I’ll be miles away. He moved the truck a few hundred yards closer to the highway so he wouldn’t be near the priest’s body if someone stumbled on it. As night fell he drove back onto the highway and pointed south toward Memmingen, but as he neared Augsburg a military police car stopped him to warn that there were air raids further south.

  “Memmingen,” he asked?

  “They’re raiding the airfield,” said the MP sergeant, a dour north German who’d been very suspicious of Hans Frank’s laissez-passer. “Go there if you want, but it will be dangerous.”

  Eric looked closely at the map and found a route that would take him directly across France to Paris. He took inventory of his food and spare fuel and decided getting the treasure to Paris before it fell to the Allies was more important than a visit to his mother, and without Otto there was no other reason to visit Memmingen. He would see his mother after the war ended.

  He stopped for the first day in the Schwarzwald and the second in a municipal forest near the small town of Château-Thierry, an hour’s drive outside Paris. Two hours before sunset he began the final leg, anxious to arrive before the curfew because he wasn’t certain how much weight the laissez-passer would carry in Paris. Hans Frank had many enemies in the Wehrmacht, and he was far away.

  Coming from the south, he avoided the busy Porte d’Orléans, instead taking the Rue de la Tombe Issoire, turning into Rue Hallé a block south of the tiny street where he’d lived in the poor Hôtel Saint-Pierre. “I’d better be certain the old bastard has a room for me tomorrow,” he muttered.

  A hundred meters and he turned under the carved-stone archway of a rundown apartment building that hid a second equally squalid building behind it, and behind that a defunct auto repair shop. Its owner had gone out of business soon after the Germans requisitioned all private cars in 1940 and he’d quickly found there was no living to be made repairing bicycles. He drove into one of the unused repair bays and closed the door behind him, then changed from his lieutenant’s uniform to the worker’s clothing he’d worn for his job at the gallery. Only when he was no longer recognizable as a German soldier did he remove the truck seat and carefully take out the crate of gold bars, which he wrapped in a blanket.

  He muscled the 55-pound crate up the winding stairs to the narrow landing on the third floor, then deposited it as quietly as he could in front of the right-hand door. A tired-looking woman apologized as she shepherded a small boy by him on her way to the floor above. He knocked — two sharp raps, a pause, two more — and waited for his sometimes girlfriend Édith to open the door.

  “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you in two weeks.” She smiled but her tone was sharp. He normally visited her at least twice a week and wanted more but her husband sometimes came home on the weekend from his job as a traveling salesman. Eric was suspicious that the agricultural equipment was a cover story but didn’t push the issue with Édith.

  “Can I stay tonight? I’m just back from Poland and I have to deliver a truck tomorrow.”

  “A truck?”

  “My boss bought one and sent me to pick it up. The Wehrmacht let him have an old Citroën for deliveries, but I had to drive it back all the way from Poland.”

  “What’s in the blanket?” she asked.

  “My pay for the trip. It’s heavy, so don’t try to pick it up or you’ll hurt yourself.” He pushed the crate to the back of a closet in her unkempt living room and closed the door firmly. She pulled a battered wooden chair out from the decrepit table that separated the corner kitchen from the tiny living room and sat down. “I’ll show it to you tomorrow after I get back from delivering the truck. Right now I’m exhausted. Is there anything to eat?”

  “Nothing. I was going to go out to one of the neighborhood places.”

  “Don’t. There’s some food in the truck. It’s German army chow but we shouldn’t let it go to waste and besides we can spend the time better if we stay here.” He leered at her. She smiled back.

  He ran quickly down the stairs and returned with all the remaining food — Uncle Hans had been generous. Th
ere was enough to last them for several days, so long as they could eat sausages, potatoes and dried eggs. He wrapped it in the remaining blankets, which he planned to share with her.

  When he got back to the third floor the door stood ajar the way he’d left it. He found her sitting in the same chair and laid the package before her. “All this came with the truck. They gave me a lot because nobody was sure how long the drive would take. Let’s enjoy it while we can.”

  Édith slowly fried the dry sausages until they gave up a little fat, then threw in potatoes. When they were done she added the dried eggs and water, stirring until she had made a recognizable omelet. She added a slice each of the dark bread, then put the dinner on the table with a half-bottle of red wine that had been open too long. They ate in silence until she pushed back from the table and said sardonically, “Vive le Wehrmacht.”

  Then she took his hand and led him into the bedroom.

  17

  Château Tours

  “And after he brought the truck you never saw him again?”

  The old man looked away at a corner of the room before he turned to answer Eddie’s question.

  “He was supposed to come back to work the next day, but he didn’t show up. Then two years later he appeared at the gallery and said I owed him wages from 1944. I did owe him for a few days, but I felt sorry for him and gave him two weeks, sort of severance, even though times were tight for me then and my wife gave me hell for it. He really looked rough, but two years in Santé would do that to anybody. The Count spent six months there and died only a month or two after they let him out.”

  “He was in Santé?”

  “His girlfriend wasn’t what she seemed. She and her husband were both in the Resistance, and when Eric left to deliver the truck that morning she ran to tell her friends about him. When he came back she was gone, the gold was gone, and two men were waiting for him. They spirited him down into the old quarries near the Catacombs with some other collaborators they’d captured and kept him there until after the Liberation. He was one of the first to be tried, and there was serious thought of just shooting him, but in the end he got a sentence of two years at Santé. He came to see me as soon as he got out.”

  “Did the Count ever say anything more about the painting?” Eddie looked at Aurélie, hope in his eyes. She shook her head slowly to say he shouldn’t expect luck that good.

  “He acted like he didn’t know what Eric had brought from Poland. When he got out of prison in 1945 he sent me a note saying I could have the truck if I wanted it, and I went over to see him and look at it. His daughter told me his health was very bad, and I shouldn’t bring up the past.

  “But I did ask him. He told me he had called his contact with the SS and an officer had come with a driver to get the truck the next day. A couple of days later they brought it back and put it back in his garage. The bed had been repaired, and it was a foot lower than it was when I first saw it.”

  Aurélie asked him, “Do you think he was telling you the truth?”

  “In his position I’d have told the same story. Anyone would have.

  “I hired a mechanic to get it running again and brought it back to the gallery, where I used it for a couple of years and finally sold it.”

  Aurélie said, “A daughter? Tell us more about her.”

  “Yes. A lovely girl, pretty notorious. She went around with a Saudi prince who was supposed to be the unofficial ambassador to Vichy, even though the Saudis had broken off relations with Germany before Poland and were sort of passive allies of the Americans, in return for protection. He preferred Paris to Vichy — who would blame him? — although he went home right after the war. Somebody told me he was one of 2,000 princes and had a family back there. They had a child, a son.

  “It turned out that she was a Communist and a member of the Resistance, and had funneled back a lot of pillow talk he’d picked up from the Germans. She wound up getting the Order of Liberation from DeGaulle himself. That would have killed her poor father if he hadn’t already died. He was an unrepentant Nazi until his last breath. She became a Gaullist — hell, everybody did, even me — and she was a big deal in Paris society for a while. But when her son came of age he moved back among the Arabs and her health began to fail, and she finally died in the seventies. Nobody wanted a house that grand right next to the railroad tracks, so they tore it down to build new apartments, and that was the end of the story.”

  Eddie asked him, “Did they look through the house for the painting?”

  “I imagine so. When the daughter died everything was sold and the house stood vacant for a couple of years before it was torn down. It’s probably in a bank vault somewhere, waiting for the right owner to show up.”

  “You wouldn’t have any idea where that vault might be?”

  “Me? Hardly. I was never on anything but commercial terms with the Nazis. If I knew where it was I’d have figured out a way to get it earlier, when it would have done me more good.”

  “And Eric. Did you ever hear from him again?”

  “Not directly. When DeGaulle came back to power in 1958 the government was in chaos, a mess. It was all he could do to handle the rebellion in the colonies, so he did his best to close the books on some of the old postwar issues. That winter a couple of men from one of the new intelligence services came to see me at the gallery and asked about him. I told them about the truck, which they seemed to know about already. They didn’t know where we had taken it and I let them think Eric had driven it away alone. They did tell me that five crates of gold were nailed into a fake bed.

  “The standard Reichsbank crate held twenty-five one-kilo bars. That would have been worth almost thirty thousand dollars to Eric, if he’d been able to get away with it. God knows what it would be worth today.”

  Aurélie did the math quickly and said, “Almost nine hundred ounces. Each of them is now worth nine hundred dollars, so a crate would now be worth almost a million dollars. The price has tripled since 2001. So that’s why this whole thing came back to life now?”

  “It confirms what Sonny told the police,” Eddie replied. Then he said to Jacques, “I believe we’re beginning to understand what’s happened, but please go on about Eric Kraft.”

  Jacques continued, “Anyway, these intelligence men told me something of Eric’s life after the war, including the prison term. After I saw him he went looking for his old girlfriend and found her, along with her husband, in Lyon. He killed both of them but didn’t find the gold he’d left with her. They told him the Resistance had traded it for several of their colleagues the Nazis had arrested and were threatening to kill. He cut their throats and set fire to their apartment. Burned down the whole building.

  “And then he headed east. First he stopped at Memmingen to see his mother, but she’d been killed in an American air raid at about the same time he would have been there. Then he went on to Berlin and landed in the Russian sector, where he joined the secret police, who were glad to have him — he had their kind of skills. I never heard anything more about him.”

  The old man turned to knock the ashes out of his pipe into an ashtray with a cork knob in the center.

  “He’s dead by now.”

  The sound of the heavy briar pipe against the cork knob reverberated against the walls, like the sound of a drum far away.

  Eddie said, “He died in Frankfurt during the eighties but he left behind a son who’s very much a chip off the old block. He’s the one we’re trying to find now.”

  Jacques leaned forward almost imperceptibly and turned his head away from them to study the ceiling. His mouth moved slightly, then closed.

  Eddie moved to ask another question but Aurélie held up her hand.

  The grandfather clock ticked slowly, until Jacques broke the silence.

  “I think I can help you,” he said. “God knows I shouldn’t, but enough people have died.”

  He looked directly into Aurélie’s eyes, then at Eddie.

  “Eric’s son came to se
e me not two weeks ago. He was pleasant enough, but I could see the mean streak under the surface. The deformed ear wasn’t the only thing he had in common with his father.”

  He made them wait while he went to refill the teapot, then carefully poured each of them a fresh cup.

  “Erich came here unannounced a week ago last Thursday.” Eddie and Aurélie looked at each other — that was the day they’d been accosted by the two Germans outside the Hôtel Chopin.

  “He introduced himself and told me his father had been grateful I gave him more money than I owed him. He said he and his friends thought they were very close to finding the Raphael and a lot of gold that his father had brought to Paris at the same time. He just wanted to know if I could add anything, because his boss had found a buyer for the painting in China, or maybe Russia. In any case, to one of the new billionaires.

  “He was only interested in the day his father and I took the truck to the Count, and I told him just what I told you.

  “But…” He pushed himself upright and walked to an ornate marble-topped chest near the front door. “I was feeling lightheaded that day, not very sharp. You try being 92 years old and you’ll soon see it’s no bed of roses. It’s just better than the alternative.

  “I told him I would probably feel stronger the next day and I’d try to think of more about the Count. He gave me his phone number and asked me to call him. He said I’d have to leave a message but he would call me back.”

  He pulled a slip of paper from a drawer and handed it to Eddie. “This may help you. Please don’t tell him I gave it to you. I may be old but I’d prefer to grow older yet.”

  Aurélie asked, “Did he threaten you?”

  “No. He was on his good behavior. He knew my situation here and told me there would be a reward if I helped them find the treasure. I wouldn’t have any objection to that, but I just don’t know anything more.”