by Paul Watkins
The plates were slipped away from under us and the next course was wheeled in on a trolley. It was a whole leg of roast lamb with a crust of rosemary, and new potatoes and baby carrots and asparagus. The roast was carved by the old man. Göring watched the process carefully, then gestured toward the pieces that he wanted.
Göring did not say one word to Fleury or Dietrich or me through the appetizer, or the main course, or the fresh strawberries, which were served with Chantilly cream, or the coffee, and not until we were drinking brandy and the old man was walking around to each of us with a box of cigars. Through all this time, he had grilled Pankratov about his days in the Tsar’s army, as if he had been starved for too long of talking about anything that really interested him.
At one point, Göring raised his hand above his head, grasping a spoon. Then he lowered his straightened arm in one slow gesture, recalling some great cavalry change. “Mit Volldampf Voraus!” he shouted.
This was followed by a roar of laughter from Göring. When the laughter had died down, Göring sat back, arms folded across his belly, face serious, shaking his head. Later, Göring’s hands began to twist and turn in front of him as he described some moment of air combat.
“Ah,” said Pankratov, nodding to show he understood. Throughout dinner he had remained quiet and observant.
Dietrich could not take his eyes off any of this. He reminded me of a young boy witnessing for the first time conclusive proof that his father was not perfect.
When the brandy was served, I noticed that Göring was given brandy different from ours. It was discreetly poured for him at the side table out of a crystal decanter which had its own leather traveling case.
Göring talked in a hushed voice to the old man in the white waiter’s tunic.
The man nodded and left the room. He returned a few seconds later with a leather folder. He handed this to Göring and then set about clearing the last of the plates. He pulled something that looked like a straight-edge razor from his pocket and scraped the breadcrumbs off the tablecloth.
Göring opened the folder and took out a photograph. He held it out for us to see. “Have you seen this painting before?” he asked us.
“Yes,” said Fleury at once. “It is Vermeer’s Geographer. One of a set of two.”
“Exactly,” said Göring. “It was purchased from the Charles Sedelmeyer Gallery, here in Paris, in 1885, by the Frankfurter Kunstverein. It’s still in Frankfurt, at the Staedelsches Kunstinstitut.” He flipped the photo around to look at it himself. “The irony is not lost on me that if we had waited fifty years or so, we could have gotten it for free.” He put the photograph back inside the folder and took out another. When he showed it to us, Fleury didn’t wait to be asked.
“The Astronomer. The second painting in the set.”
“Yes,” said Göring. “In 1886, this painting was bought in London by the Baron Alphonse de Rothschild. It was last known to have been hanging in the home of Baron Edouard de Rothschild, in France. But it, and several other very valuable works, have managed to disappear.” He set the painting down on the tablecloth, then picked up his brandy snifter with both hands, rocked it in his cupped palms, breathing the fumes, but did not drink. “Despite his enquiries—very forceful enquiries—Mr. Dietrich, a Hauptstürmführer of the SS…”
“Stürmbannführer.” Dietrich attempted to correct him. “I am a Stürmbannführer.
Göring ignored him. “… has turned up nothing.”
Dietrich went red in the face. “With respect, Herr Reichsmarschall,” he said.
“With respect,” replied Göring, “I am talking.” Then he set his little finger on the photo of The Astronomer, as if to stop it from blowing away in the breath of his words. “I want this painting,” he said, “and have what I think will be an interesting offer. Thomas tells me that you specialize in exchanges. Modernist paintings in particular.”
Fleury nodded slowly, eyes masked behind the light reflecting off his glasses.
“Have you heard of the Gottheim Collection?” asked Göring.
“I have,” said Fleury. “It was the property of Albrecht Gottheim, a Berlin art dealer in the thirties. The collection was confiscated in January 1939 and in March of that year it was burned in public as a protest against entartete Kunst.”
Göring shook his head. “Not true.”
“Indeed they were, Herr Reichsmarschall,” Dietrich interrupted. “I saw those paintings burn with my own eyes.”
Göring shook his head again and smiled. “We had copies made. The burning was carried out at night and no one was looking too closely. We didn’t have to burn the originals to make our point. I have the actual works in storage. I will give you the entire inventory, over sixty paintings and drawings, if you will bring me The Astronomer.”
“But we don’t know where it is,” said Fleury.
Göring stood up wearily. He rested his knuckles on the tabletop. “No,” he said. “I don’t think you do, or you’d have offered it to Dietrich by now. But I think you can find it. Thomas tells me if anyone can turn it up, you can.”
There was total quiet in the room.
“The truth is,” said Göring, after a moment, “that I would like to make a gift of it. I will be candid with you. I would like to give this painting to Adolf Hitler, and as soon as possible. The fall of Stalingrad has caused a rift in our ability to understand each other. I made certain implications about the capacity of the Luftwaffe to supply the troops within the city.” He rolled his hand in front of him, as if to shape the words as they came out of his mouth. “These implications led to expectations which were sadly not fulfilled. There was blame. There is a need to make amends. Hitler has become, I think I can say this, mildly obsessed with the missing Vermeer. He has cleared a space for it on the wall of the Berghof and has declared that it will stand empty until The Astronomer hangs on his wall. And I think it would be a good idea for me to be the one who puts it there.”
The sunlight had gone now. The room felt cold.
“Thank you,” said Göring.
I wondered why he was thanking us, but as Dietrich got to his feet, I understood that this was the signal to depart.
We said our good-byes, Göring looked impatient, as if wondering whether he had wasted his time with us. The only time a smile returned to his face was when he said good-bye to Pankratov. “I hope there will be other times,” he said.
Out in the street, the Horch was there to meet us.
Back inside the car, Dietrich opened up his silver cigarette case and offered us each a smoke. “The big man took a shine to you,” he told Pankratov, still unable to mask his amazement.
Pankratov didn’t answer.
Dietrich lit our cigarettes with his clunky lighter and the car soon filled with smoke. “You’ve got to find that painting,” he told us. “If there’s anything you need from me, just name it. I’d put a Panzer division at your disposal if I knew it would help.”
“Could you get me a list of the Gottheim paintings?” asked Pankratov.
“Done,” said Dietrich.
No more was said about it. Dietrich dropped us off at the far end of the Rue Descalzi. Pankratov came, too.
“What did Göring talk to you about?” Fleury asked him as we walked toward our building.
“The glory days,” said Pankratov.
“Am I supposed to know what that means?” asked Fleury.
“No,” said Pankratov, “but I can tell you that is the most dangeous man I have ever met. He has set his mind on that painting, and whether we want the job or not, he expects us to find it for him.”
We reached my apartment and put the water on to boil for tea. It wasn’t really tea, but a mixture of camomile and mint that I grew in my windowbox. When the drink was ready, we sat at the bare wood table, cradling the cups in silence. Outside, the streets were quiet except for wind rattling padlocks on the Postillon warehouse doors, like the ghost of the old Dragon come to check that all was well.
“Gen
tlemen,” said Fleury, “in case you were thinking about it, a forgery is out of the question.”
But of course that was exactly what Pankratov and I had been thinking about.
“If we used a period canvas,” Pankratov thought aloud. “Period frame.”
“No!” Fleury cut him off. “This isn’t going into some warehouse. This is going up on the wall of Hitler’s bedroom! He’ll be showing it off to every art connoisseur he can drag in there.” Steam rippled across the lenses of Fleury’s glasses. “Even if Vermeer himself were painting your canvases, you still couldn’t do it without having the original in front of you. We don’t know where that original is. The forgery would have to be perfect and you said yourself that such a thing cannot be done. Let’s face it, we could never make it work.”
Pankratov set his mug down on the table. “Yes, we could,” he said.
Chapter Sixteen
“YOU’RE MAD!” SHOUTED FLEURY, throwing his hands in the air and walking off to the far end of the apartment, only to come pounding back a second later. “Completely mad!”
It was the day after our meeting with Göring. I’d just returned from the warehouse, where Pankratov and I had been talking all morning. We thought we had worked out a plan. “Will you meet with Pankratov and listen to what he has to say?” I asked.
Fleury shook his head. “It’s crazy. The whole thing.”
I tried to reason with him. “Pankratov says Madame Pontier might be able to get the painting for us. Then we can do the forgery.”
Fleury pressed the heels of his palms against his temples and groaned with frustration. “No, you can’t! Who the hell do you think you are? Are you so obsessed with the challenge that you just can’t turn it down? You’ve lost touch with reality working in that warehouse all the time. Do you remember what Pankratov said about the Mona Lisa’s smile? About how it could never be forged? Do you remember?”
“Yes,” I said quietly, to offset his shouting.
“Well, there’s a good reason for that and it doesn’t have to do with anything unearthly about the painting. The reason it can’t be forged is that no one would be foolish enough to try. It’s too well known. And the same goes for the Vermeer. You would have to become Vermeer!” Fleury shook his head. “You no longer understand your limitations.”
I sat there in silence. I knew that nothing Fleury could say was going to change my mind, no matter how much sense he made. I understood what he was telling me. I saw the logic in it. But my mind had raced ahead of his words. I kept thinking of the moment when Pankratov had said we would be able to make the forgery. I trusted his judgment of my skills more than I trusted my own. Fleury was right that I didn’t know my limitations. Only Pankratov did. Over the years, he had become an almost supernatural presence for me, as if he were the creation of a spell, drifting in and out of human shape. And yet for all my faith in his mysterious powers, a warning image of that Mona Lisa smile flickered half alive in my brain, like a death-watch moth in the darkness. “I’ll go to Madame Pontier. Get her to find us The Astronomer. Then, when I finish the work, if you don’t think it’s good enough, we won’t give it to Dietrich.”
Fleury was quiet for a moment. His eyes closed slowly and then opened again. “I’m telling you now, if it doesn’t look right.…”
I sighed. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” said Fleury.
* * *
MADAME PONTIER AGREED TO meet me on the Pont Royal. She told me to come alone. It would look less suspicious that way.
We stood on a part of the walkway that jutted out over the river and had stone seats built into it. It was a cool day. Hard wind blew down the Seine into our faces.
A silk scarf was drawn over her hair. She kept her hands in the pockets of her loden coat.
I told her about Göring’s offer and our plan.
Before I’d even finished, she told me it was out of the question.
“But we can’t reproduce the Vermeer if we don’t have it in front of us,” I said, exasperated. “You’ve understood that with other works. Why not with this?”
“You must let it go,” she said. “For everything else you have done, I am grateful to you. The people of France are grateful…”
“I’m not doing this for the people of France,” I told her angrily.
“Then the artists themselves, whether they’re alive or not, would all be grateful…”
“I’m not doing it for them either, Madame Pontier.”
She watched me for a long time, as if waiting for me to flinch. “I have never cared about your motives,” she said. “Only your results. The answer is no, Mr. Halifax.” She turned to leave.
“Why do you hate us so much?” I asked.
She stopped and turned around. “Do you really believe that I hate you?” She gave me no chance to reply. “If you try to do this Vermeer, you will fail. And if you fail, you will end up dead. The forgery cannot be done.” The condensation of her breath made it seem as if her lungs were smoldering. “The painting is too well known. Hitler appointed a man named Dr. Hans Posse to be in charge of selecting paintings for the museum he hopes to build in Linz. Dr. Posse died two years ago, and the man who took his place is Hermann Voss. Voss is far too busy to check every painting being shipped into the Reich. He’s too busy at the moment even to unpack most of them. But the Vermeer he will examine. And you might be able to fool Dietrich, or Göring, or even Hitler, but you will not fool Hermann Voss. He’s studied the original. It’s not going to be like those others you’ve made.”
She paused for a moment, blinking in the freezing air. “I am saving your life, Monsieur Halifax. I know the stories people tell about me—that I care more for paintings than I do for people. I know how it must look to you. I am what I need to be. And I am looking out for you.” She was already walking away. When she reached the end of the bridge, a man who had been standing under a lamppost smoking a cigarette fell in step with her and they crossed the road together. It was Tombeau. He had kept his distance, not showing himself to add to Madame Pontier’s threat. But the fact that he stayed out of sight showed me they were beyond the point of making threats. She may have been looking out for me, but if I went ahead and put her in danger, or the paintings in danger, she would have me killed. It would not be personal, as Tombeau had told me before.
But I wondered if had misjudged her all along.
That evening, Pankratov came to my apartment, where Fleury and I were once again eating mashed turnip for dinner. I told them what she’d said.
“There,” said Fleury, laying down his spoon. “It’s over with.”
Pankratov reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper. He laid it on the table, smoothing out its creases with the heel of his palm. “This is a list of the paintings in the Gottheim Collection. I picked it up from Dietrich earlier today.” He slid the page across the table toward me.
I checked down the list of names, feeling sick at the thought of these paintings fading back into irretrievable darkness. Corot, Klee, Sisley, Picasso, Picabia, Munch, Dufy, Braque, Léger, Masson. Then, jabbing at my sight as if something were rising off the page, I read the name Pankratov. There was one painting, titled Valya. Confusion twisted inside me. “I don’t understand,” I said.
Pankratov was clearly upset. With shaking hands, he brought out his halved cigarettes and shook one out of the packet. He put it in his mouth but couldn’t get a match lit. The sticks kept breaking on the box. Eventually, he gave up, forced a deep breath down his throat and put the cigarette down on the table. He spoke in a wavering voice. “In 1938, a gallery here in Paris decided to have a retrospective of all my paintings. The gallery managed to persuade all the various owners to lend them for the show. We stored them at my studio. I had all except one, and that was Gottheim’s. The National Socialists were in power and Gottheim didn’t think he could transport the paintings safely out of the country. So he refused. One year later, the Nazi turned his whole collection into their s
acrificial lamb.” Pankratov picked up the cigarette again and this time succeeded in lighting it.
“Why didn’t you say anything to us earlier?” I asked.
“I wanted to be sure,” said Pankratov.
“But what would you have done with the painting, anyway?” asked Fleury. “Burned it like the others?”
Pankratov shook his head. “I burned them for reasons that made sense to me at the time. Now I look at paintings differently than I used to. I see them as separate from the people who made them. The way a child is separate once it is born. Once I made them, they became separate from me. I had no more business setting fire to them than I would have setting fire to someone else’s work.” He scratched his fingers down his forehead, streaking the skin violent red. “Things are different now,” he said.
Fleury folded the list along its original creases. He handed it back to Pankratov. “Without the original,” he said, and left it at that.
Fleury was right. The Gottheim Collection, and everything it had come to stand for in my head, now seemed completely out of reach.
Pankratov had been staring at the table for a few seconds. Now he glanced up at us. “It’s in Normandy,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“How do you know?” Fleury’s voice was sharp and accusing. “Only Madame Pontier has that information.”
“When we stopped at that café on the way to Ardennes Abbey, and I went out to stretch my legs, I looked under the wrappings of every single painting in the truck.” Pankratov shrugged. “I couldn’t help myself.”
“But how could we get it now?” I asked. “We don’t even know if the de Boinvilles live there anymore?”
“They do,” said Pankratov. “I called Marie-Claire this afternoon.”
“Did you tell her about the Vermeer?” asked Fleury
“I couldn’t tell her exactly. I hinted at it.”
“Do you think she understood?” I asked, knowing that what Pankratov called a hint might make no sense to anyone else on the planet.
