‘Things are not as they should be,’ Bar said when he’d gone. ‘This has not proceeded the way I had planned, John Spargo…’
Bar’s arm drooped gradually. As if realising he had almost dozed off he lifted the torch sharply. When he aimed its beam at Spargo, Spargo moved out of its light. The beam followed him, dazzled him.
‘I want to know why I’m here,’ Spargo said. ‘I want to know what you’ve done with my daughter.’
‘Do you mind if I smoke a cigar? No, of course not. Sit down, John Spargo, this place is small enough without you wandering around. What has Luis been telling you, that I am responsible for the abduction of your daughter?’
‘He has not said that. I’ve told him everything I know. If it is Volker’s journals you want, I can get them for you. You can have the full translation, it’s on my computer.’
Bar rested the torch on the table and it rolled to one side. He caught it before it went off the edge and stood it on end so its beam lit the ceiling. For the first time since the man arrived, Spargo could actually see him. He appeared to be dressed as he had been in Spain, in a lightweight suit and an open-necked shirt. His only concession to the cold was a three-quarter length overcoat, draped over his shoulders like a Mafia Don.
Silently he did the cigar ritual, trimming, rolling, and listening. He reached into one of the pockets of his coat, took out a matchbox, struck a match and lit the end of the cigar slowly, rotating it as he’d done at his villa. He took a long draw on it, sat back and sighed.
‘I do not want Theodor Volker’s books,’ he said, exhaling a stream of smoke. ‘They are of no interest to me. I knew Volker, John Spargo. I know about his books, his diaries. Many years ago I instructed him to destroy them but he was a stubborn man, he kept them and took them on his boat. I did not know it at the time.’
‘If they’re not important then why did three people die?’
Bar removed his cigar and blew smoke. Almost inaudibly he mumbled ‘Three? You think it is only three?’
‘Where are the journals now? Where is Marie Howard?’
‘Miss Howard? I am paying her to translate some documents for me. She is safe in a hotel in Madrid. You are a fool, John Spargo, your meddling put her at risk.’
‘You said the journals are unimportant.’
‘Did I say she was translating Volker’s diaries? I did not. I am simply employing her to keep her out of harm’s way.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘There are many things you do not understand, John Spargo. You were foolish to give her the journals. I know they are of no importance, but not everyone understands that. Sit down.’
‘I’ll stay standing.’
Bar pointed the cigar at Spargo and jabbed it like a finger. ‘Don’t be so irritating. Just sit down.’
Spargo sat back on the bed. The bending hurt his wound and he winced and gasped.
Bar watched him. ‘What is the matter? What have you done to yourself?’
‘Benares stabbed me. I need a doctor.’
Bar held his cigar out and tapped it with a finger. A slab of ash fell from it and splashed on the lino. Changing hands he picked up the torch, aimed it at Spargo, moving the beam up and down as if looking for a wound. Spargo lifted up the hem of his jacket to show his stained shirt. By the time he had undone his belt the torch was already back on the table.
‘I asked you what you had done,’ Bar said. ‘I did not ask to see it.’
‘Benares said you have my daughter. I want to see her.’
‘I am sure Luis said nothing of the kind. I do not have your daughter, I do not know where she is and I am not responsible for her disappearance. It is none of my business.’
‘He said if I left this place while he was away my daughter would suffer.’
‘That was most imaginative of him. He telephoned me. He said he had heard about your daughter’s abduction from you.’
‘That’s ridiculous. You’re lying.’
‘I’m sorry you think that. I have never lied to you, John Spargo.’
‘Everything you’ve said and done since I met Benares in London has been one long lie. I was led to believe you owned a mining company. You gave me the impression you wanted me to work here, at Kilcreg. I took you for a wheelchair-bound invalid but look at you now, even that’s a lie. Then there’s the Canadian mine, all lies…’
‘You have a contract to work on mine documents, that is what I am paying you to do. I never said you would be employed to work at Kilcreg.’
‘Benares told me you and a consortium were thinking of buying it. He lied.’
‘To do my bidding Luis might tell the occasional untruth. As for me being an invalid, I am no longer a fit man, I have a heart condition. My consultant tells me I must not overexert myself and for that reason I use my chair whenever I can. As for the mine and the contract, they are of no relevance. They are not the issue here.’
‘Then what is the issue? Why have you brought me here?’
‘I did not bring you here. You came to Kilcreg of your own accord.’
‘I’m a prisoner here.’
‘As I said, this is not how things should be.’
‘Nothing is as it should be. You run a company nobody has heard of. Then there are the empty offices in Madrid. Then there’s – ’
‘I find your protestations irritating. You behaved exactly as I predicted. You suspected things were not as they should be and yet you did nothing. With hindsight perhaps you should not have become involved.’
‘Hindsight wasn’t something that was available to me when I made my decisions.’
Bar leaned forwards. Lowered his voice.
‘Listen to me. Luis has many things to do, he will be gone a long time. I am going to explain to you what I have done and why I have done it.’
‘Your twisted explanations don’t interest me. All I want from you is my daughter.’
‘I do not know where your daughter is. Nobody was supposed to be abducted. Nobody was supposed to get hurt.’
‘Then you screwed up.’
Bar sat back and concentrated on his cigar, exhaling smoke into the torch beam and watching it curl as it rose. For almost one minute the silence was broken briefly by the buzz of a turboprop plane heading north to the islands. Spargo listened as it faded away. Bar waited too.
‘You are aware that during the war the Nazi leaders took it upon themselves to protect works of art?’
‘Protect? Don’t you mean loot?’
‘You have no sense of humour. You are right of course, though those responsible for the looting would have preferred the word liberated. What do you know of these things?’
‘I know what most people know. I’ve heard that at the end of the war most of the art was recovered from a salt mine.’
‘The Altaussee mine in Austria, yes. Most of the art but by no means all of it.’
Bar had changed. Away from the villa, the Mercedes and Benares, he seemed smaller somehow. He was also uncomfortable. The room was cold and damp and the plastic chair he sat on gave little support to his back. Spargo stared at him. Bar stared back.
‘You are not a young man, John Spargo. But you make the young man’s mistake of seeing me as I am now, not as I used to be. Many years ago I had a vision, like others I wished for an all-powerful Reich. Fortunately for me – and for the rest of humanity – that vision did not materialise.’
‘I thought you were Swedish.’
‘Then you thought wrong. For more years than I care to remember I have been a citizen of Spain. That country has been good to me.’
‘You said you knew Theodor Volker. What were you, a U-boat man?’
‘I was not in the Kriegsmarine. I was in a different service.’
‘Volker mentions Carinhall, Göring’s house. He says he was taken there by a Luftwaffe officer, Walter Wolff. Did you have a hand in that?’
‘I am dismayed Theodor recorded matters in such detail, it was most unwise. But yes, John Spargo, I did
have a hand in it. I took him there. Against his will, as a matter of fact.’
‘You? You are Walter Wolff?’
‘You are no lateral thinker… or possibly you have no German. When I changed my name I spelled Bar with an umlaut. It would be pronounced Bear, not Bar. Childish, you might think, changing my name from wolf to bear. Both are animals with teeth. When I was younger that appealed to me.’
‘Both predators. Both killers.’
‘I prefer hunters. But enough of this, we never wanted war, not with England. I should say Britain, shouldn’t I, I have no wish to be politically incorrect, that wouldn’t do at all, would it, not in our brave new world. You and the bloody Americans denied us our Empire, do you realise that?’
‘That doesn’t interest me. You and your cronies helped Göring with his looting.’
‘I did nothing of the kind. I helped to liberate art plundered by others. The war was lost, the new order was crumbling. Why should my colleagues and I not benefit from our leader’s successes? Should we have stood by and watched those treasures fall into the hands of our enemies?’
‘So you appropriated art from Göring’s collection? You and Volker?’
Bar laughed. ‘Appropriated? My friend Theodor?’ The laugh brought on a deep painful cough and Bar doubled up. When he regained his breath he dropped the cigar on the floor and ground it underfoot.
‘Volker practised his signature in one of his journals,’ Spargo said. ‘Why would he do that if he wasn’t taking stuff for himself?’
‘His signature? Whose signature?’
‘Göring’s. It’s written in the margin of one of his books. It says Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.’
‘The Reichsmarschall signed himself simply Göring, he never used Hermann. And in any case, you could not be more wrong. Theodor’s great failing was that he was an innocent, he would never forge anything. Ask yourself, would a guilty man have been so careless? The signatures you saw can be nothing more than doodles. The man was simply playing.’
‘You took stuff out of Germany. Had you left it there it could have been restored to its owners after the war.’
‘Could have been? Many things could have been, John Spargo. Are you aware that only a fraction of the recovered art was returned to its owners?’
‘Presumably that’s because you had already slaughtered most of them in the camps.’
‘You and your victorious American friends hardly acquitted themselves with honour. Along with the bastard Soviets you raped our country. You looted everything of value, so don’t blame me for the wrongs of others.’
‘So you escaped. Then what?’
‘I re-established my connections.’
‘With other ex-Nazis.’
‘With like-minded ex-officers. Also several Americans and Swiss. We established legitimate companies in Portugal and Spain.’
‘And in the United States. I’ve seen claims you made against an airport authority.’
‘I am impressed, John Spargo. But that particular item was part of a legitimate trade, I own a business that buys and sells works of art. Every year I sell many hundreds of paintings.’
‘And make most of your money from the illegal ones.’
‘Made, John Spargo. Made.’
‘No more golden eggs?’
Bar shrugged. ‘You make it sound easy. The paintings you speak of were dispersed across Europe and took many years to retrieve. When we recovered them we sold them to collectors and invested the proceeds. Some of the works are now in the United States, others in the Middle East, Japan and Russia. The last painting we recovered was sold to one of your British footballers. I can only hope he hung it the correct way up.’
‘The room in Madrid, the framed photos. Benares said they were left by the previous occupants.’
‘He should not have left you alone, you should not have seen them. The prints you saw are copies of photographs from books and art gallery archives. Years ago one of my late partners suggested we assemble a collection of photographs of all the paintings we could personally account for in the hope we could recover them. All the photographs were in black and white. When we recovered a painting we photographed it – in colour – before we sold it. In each case it replaced the black and white one.’
‘From what I remember there were only six black and whites on the wall. Does that mean you recovered – and sold – all but those?’
‘That is correct.’
‘And now you have run out of money.’
‘I shall never run out of money.’
‘One of the photos showed a woman in a brown robe. Is that one of the paintings you thought were in the U-boat?’
‘The Raphael, you mean? It is not a woman, it is a portrait of a young man. The Portrait of a Young Man, in actual fact. He is pretty, is he not? But why just that one? You said yourself there were six in black and white.’
‘One was the Mona Lisa. Even I know it is in the Louvre.’
‘You are wrong, John Spargo. The painting in the Louvre is not the original, it is one of many contemporary copies. It is a painting Göring should not have had. The Führer could not possibly have known he had it.’
‘Do you really expect me to believe that?’
‘The Louvre will tell you that in August nineteen-thirty-nine the genuine Mona Lisa was taken to a place of safety. Believe me, John Spargo, the French had no such place.’
Spargo was smiling, shaking his head.
‘You smile, John Spargo. If you disbelieve me then explain to me why, so many years after the war when it really should not matter, officials at the Louvre are unwilling to reveal this so-called safe place? It is because they cannot. It is because there was no such place.’
‘The painting in the Louvre has been tested. The paint is right for the era.’
‘Of course. It was painted at around the same time. Is that not the meaning of the word contemporary?’
‘It was X-rayed. They found changes da Vinci made to it.’
‘They found many peculiar alterations that were not adequately explained, as is often the case with many old masters. The great Leonardo had pupils, John Spargo, they were encouraged to copy his original. In claiming its authenticity the Louvre behaves like the church in the matter of the Turin Shroud. Many tourists visit the Louvre to see the da Vinci, do you think they would still visit the place in such numbers if they knew the principal attraction was not genuine? Believe me, John Spargo, the Louvre does not have the original.’
‘And are you now going to tell me where the original is?’
‘If I could do that then you and I would not be sitting in this godforsaken hole.’
Spargo sat quietly and looked at the floor. Bar’s polished shoes had scuffed in the cigar ash and spread it around.
‘Are you seriously asking me to believe one of the crates you are looking for contained the Mona Lisa?’
‘Who said anything about crates?’
‘Benares did. When we were looking at the Mine House. He said they were not there.’
‘Very well. Yes, you are correct. There should be six boxes, John Spargo, only six, you must have read that in Theodor Volker’s writings. And I am not am not asking you to believe anything, I have no interest in what you believe. What I am stating is fact.’
‘Why put them in crates? Why not just take them out of their frames and roll them up?’
‘Tell me how it is possible to roll up a wooden panel.’
‘I didn’t realise. I assumed they were painted on canvas.’
‘You are a man who assumes many things.’
‘Tell be about Letchie. You paid him to beat up my mother and search her house.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. He was employed by Luis simply to look into things. He seemed well-placed to do that. Hiring him was a mistake. He was a barbarian.’
‘And this was to be the big day, was it? The day you razed the mine house to the ground and discovered the boxes and their priceless contents? That is why you are
here. You brought wine and glasses. You planned a celebration.’
‘A small toast to my success, yes.’
Spargo was nodding. He allowed himself just a trace of a smile. ‘How could you be so wrong?’
‘I am not wrong. I was in Hamburg the night Theodor’s submarine was loaded, I stood on the quayside and watched it sail. Now the wreck of that vessel has been investigated. No remains of the boxes were found.’
‘So you reasoned they had been brought ashore and hidden in the mine house.’
‘A deduction you seem to have made yourself, John Spargo. You found Volker’s box with his writings in the roof of the old house, which means he, or someone from his boat, brought it ashore. It was reasonable to assume other bronze boxes came ashore also. If it is of interest to you, the box you found was a sample sent to me by the makers for my approval. I had no use for it and I gave it to Theodor Volker.’
‘That doesn’t fit. Kalman said the U-boat was lying at sixty metres, that’s over sixty tons per square meter of pressure. No boxes could have withstood that, not for fifty years. Spending so much money makes no sense. It would have been cheaper to look on land first.’
‘Spare me the technicalities. I was well aware that if the paintings were still on the boat they would be worthless. But as they are not there, they have to be somewhere else. My task was – and still is – to discover that place.’
‘But you spent millions!’
‘I spent nothing. My former colleagues are dead now but the consortium still exists, there are new members and they are greedy, it was their money. Personally I had no hope of recovering the paintings. Though I would have loved to see my favourite I was willing to let her go. Do you know who she is, by the way?’
‘The Mona Lisa? No idea. I thought it was her name. I’m a mining engineer not an art critic.’
Wrong answer. Bar swivelled on the plastic chair and glared.
‘I find it shameful you think that as an engineer you can ignore the arts. In mines have you not seen crystals, things formed by nature? Have you not marvelled at their beauty?’
Spargo nodded.
‘And is it not possible for man to reproduce such beauty in his works of art?’
The Man Who Played Trains: The gripping new thriller from the author of Playpits Park Page 40
