‘It wasn’t a bad marriage, I can assure you of that,’ GeGurra said. ‘A Swedish prince of the House of Bernadotte tying the knot with a grand duchess of the House of Romanov. Maria Pavlovna was a cousin of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II. A close relative, in other words, of the father of all Russians, in those days known as the tsar.
‘Can you imagine, Bäckström?’ GeGurra went on. ‘A Swedish prince marrying a Russian princess. A woman from Russia, our old arch-enemy. The House of Bernadotte has never come close to anything like it in its 200-year history. They were married on 3 May 1908 in the imperial palace in St Petersburg. The festivities went on for a whole week. But perhaps that isn’t so surprising, given that there’s quite some distance between St Petersburg and Ockelbo,’ GeGurra declared, nodding hard and fortifying himself with a large gulp of his red wine as he reflected on his reference to the less than auspicious hometown of the current crown princess’s husband.
He went on to explain that things hadn’t gone well. The 24-year-old prince was a timid, feeble young man, in spite of his blue blood and gold epaulettes, whereas his eighteen-year-old wife was ‘a real tearaway’ who rode using a man’s saddle, smoked cigarettes and used to entertain herself by sliding on a silver tray down the stairs of the large villa out on the island of Royal Djurgården where they lived.
There had never really been much matrimonial harmony. A year after the wedding they had a son, admittedly, but to all intents and purposes they lived separate lives, and by 1914 they were divorced.
‘That was the first time a member of the House of Bernadotte got divorced,’ GeGurra said, looking as mournful as any royal correspondent.
‘What happened after that?’ Bäckström asked curiously. Our own king is definitely going to turn up in this story, he thought gleefully.
Separate lives in separate worlds, according to GeGurra. Maria Pavlovna had returned to Russia at first, worked for the Red Cross during the First World War and remarried in the summer of 1917. After the revolution a few months later, she moved to Paris, and thereby avoided being murdered by the Bolsheviks, unlike so many other members of her family.
‘She never returned to Russia,’ GeGurra said. ‘She lived in Paris to start with, and even spent a while in New York. In the mid-thirties, by which point she had divorced her second husband, she returned temporarily to Sweden. She spent the Second World War living in South America, in Buenos Aires, if I recall correctly. Towards the end of her life – she died in 1958 – she moved back to Europe. She spent her final years living by Lake Constance in Switzerland, close to her son, Lennart, and his family. He was the son she had with Prince Wilhelm. You must have heard of him? He was the one who lived at Mainau – you know, that castle with those gardens that are open to the public. For many years he was one of the most written about members of the House of Bernadotte.’
‘Of course, of course,’ Bäckström said. He took a deep swig of beer and wiped the drops from his lips with the back of his hand. ‘Who doesn’t remember little Lennart?’ How the fuck can you be a prince with a name like Lennart? he thought.
‘A brief summary of a life,’ GeGurra sighed. ‘A life full of change,’ he added.
‘Full of change? How do you mean?’ Bäckström asked. He preferred hard facts and things that could be predicted in advance. Preferably with a decent amount of commission into the bargain.
‘When she arrived in Sweden she was eighteen years old. Despite her youth, she was one of the richest women in the world. Maria was the cousin of the tsar of Russia, after all, and he was indisputably the richest man in the world at that time. She herself was far wealthier than the entire Swedish royal family put together. When she married Wilhelm, the Russian tsar agreed to grant her an annual stipend of three and a half million kronor. At the time, that was the equivalent of the collected wages of ten thousand Swedish workers and, in today’s money, it would be in the region of four billion. A year. Maria Pavlovna was rich beyond belief. Compared to her, her husband was a pauper.’
‘But she seems to have given him a fair few presents,’ Bäckström said. ‘Like that hunting service, for instance. That must have cost a bit?’
‘Yes, it certainly did,’ GeGurra said. ‘And it was far from the only thing she gave away while she was in Sweden. Practically everyone in her vicinity received expensive gifts, and when she moved here she brought an immense amount with her, including valuable works of art and antiquities. Not least antiquities. Almost all of it got left behind when she moved back to Russia. It looks like she just didn’t care, and most of it presumably ended up in the hands of her first husband, Prince Wilhelm.’
‘So what happened to him?’ Bäckström asked. This could turn out to be brilliant, he thought. Four billion a year. Bergman can shove his scabby old sealskin slippers right up his arse.
‘Prince Wilhelm had an artistic nature,’ GeGurra said. ‘He wrote books, loads of books, about anything and everything, from love poetry to ballads, lots of sea shanties, lots of travel writing. And he was very interested in film. He made films all round the world, mostly in Sweden, of course, but also in Africa, Asia and Central America. He spent the last thirty years of his life on his estate at Stenhammar in Södermanland. He died in 1965 and, if you ask me, I think he was very lonely, even though he socialized with almost all the Swedish intellectuals of note during his lifetime, painters, authors, musicians. As a patron and art lover, of course, but also as an equal. He was one of them, really, and in that respect he was fairly similar to a lot of his relatives in the House of Bernadotte. The most famous one, of course, was Prince Eugen, the painter, whom I’m sure you’ve heard of.’
‘I’ve heard the name,’ Bäckström lied. ‘But, to go back to Prince Willy … the one who married the Russian with all the money …’
‘Yes?’
‘No new wife, no more kids?’ Bäckström asked, seeing as he was having trouble dropping the thought of the doubtless astonishingly valuable hunting service.
‘No,’ GeGurra said, shaking his head. ‘Towards the end of the twenties he seems to have met another woman, a French woman, but the relationship was unofficial, and she died in tragic circumstances in 1952. A car crash outside Stjärnhov in Södermanland, when they were on their way to his beloved Stenhammar. A very tragic story. The prince was driving, and he seems never to have got over it.’
‘I can imagine,’ Bäckström said. Daresay he’d been on the piss, he thought.
‘They drove into a snowstorm,’ GeGurra said, sounding as sad as if he were part of the family. ‘The prince was very careful with alcohol, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ he added.
‘I’m thinking about that hunting service,’ Bäckström persisted. I’ve heard all this other stuff before, he thought.
‘I can see why,’ GeGurra said. ‘It definitely belonged to Prince Wilhelm, so that part of its provenance is perfectly straightforward. Nineteen of the twenty objects Eriksson was tasked with selling on behalf of his secretive client definitely – or in all likelihood, to be more correct – came from Maria Pavlovna originally, and formed part of the belongings that she brought with her to Sweden after her marriage. They were either gifts to her husband, or objects that belonged to her and got left behind when she returned to Russia. I’ve been able to track their history that far, and most of the evidence suggests that they ended up with Prince Wilhelm after the separation.’
‘Nineteen out of twenty,’ Bäckström said, with a faint hint of anxiety in his voice.
‘Precisely,’ GeGurra said emphatically. ‘But as far as one of the items is concerned, I’m quite convinced that it could never have belonged to either Maria Pavlovna or her then husband, Prince Wilhelm.’
‘How can you know that? What’s the problem?’ Bäckström said.
‘That’s one of the reasons I need your assistance, my dear friend,’ GeGurra said. ‘I need all the help that you and your finely honed detective’s mind can give me. I’m interpreting the fact that you have been given
the job of investigating Eriksson’s murder as a sign from above. I think it could be of great assistance to the pair of us.’
78
According to GeGurra, there were no problems working out to whom nineteen of the twenty objects had originally belonged, and who had owned them after that: first Maria Pavlovna, then her former husband, Prince Wilhelm. What confused matters was Versjagin, the young drunkard, and the ‘icon’ – or rather, insult – representing Saint Theodore which he painted to offend his father-in-law on his birthday. Definitely not a proper icon – in fact, the exact opposite of the work produced by true iconographers, which was intended to convey the Christian message and glorify the Lord in artistic form.
The fact that Versjagin’s icon was the complete opposite of this, and that it was intended as a blunt joke at his father-in-law’s expense, the man who supported both him and his family, was of secondary interest, given the broader context. Its repercussions meant that it was far worse than that. It was an almost revolutionary act that called into question both the Church and the state, blasphemous, an insult against both God and the tsar.
When the scandal was made public in the summer of 1899, during Versjagin’s father-in-law’s birthday celebrations, the gift was returned forthwith. Versjagin’s despairing young wife took the children and moved back in with her parents, while Versjagin himself left Russia, only to pop up a week later among his radical artist friends in the Russian expatriate community in Berlin, on the run from the tsar’s secret police.
He returned to St Petersburg that autumn, after several itinerant months in France, Germany and Poland. It was his wife who finally persuaded him to come home to her and their three young children. She had already forgiven him, his father-in-law never would, and just a few months later Versjagin would be dead.
On New Year’s Eve in the year 1899 Versjagin drank himself to death as he celebrated the dawn of the new century at the art academy in the imperial capital. Even by then a fair amount had already been written about the events of the preceding year. Private letters exchanged within the family, with friends and enemies, newspaper articles and, eventually, also academic articles about Versjagin and the scandal he had caused.
One month before his death he had also sold his portrait of Saint Theodore, under an oath of confidentiality, and for a surprisingly good price, to one of his father-in-law’s competitors. An Englishman who was the representative of a British shipping company that did a lot of business with tsarist Russia, and who chose to leave the country after the first troubles in St Petersburg in 1905 and returned home to England, where he started work in the company’s head office in Plymouth.
The first time Versjagin’s icon was seen in public in its new homeland was in connection with an exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London in the autumn of 1920, about art as a political statement in revolutionary Russia. And, once again, it provoked a lot of debate. The English papers wrote about the scandal the picture had caused twenty years before, and The Times also published a lengthy interview with the owner of the work. Now the retired director of the shipping company, Sir Albert Stanhope had for various reasons chosen to speak at greater length about Versjagin the landscape painter than the young scoundrel who had attracted international infamy by insulting his father-in-law. This despite the fact that the father-in-law had been German, and at least as fat as his Greek forerunner, but the war was over now and Sir Albert was willing to draw a line under that part of the affair.
‘The war is over and it’s time to let bygones be bygones. And let’s not forget that Alexander Versjagin was a first-class landscape artist.’
‘As far as the provenance of the portrait of Saint Theodore is concerned, it can be mapped in detail from the creation of the work in 1899 until the Second World War,’ GeGurra declared. ‘It was bought by Stanhope, and he owned it until his death in 1943. When the picture left Russia in 1905, Maria Pavlovna was only fifteen years old, and it’s quite out of the question that anyone in the Romanov family would have touched it, even with very long tongs.’
‘What about later on?’ Bäckström persisted. ‘What happened after the shipping agent died?’
‘It was sold at auction by his descendants. At Christie’s auction house in London, in the autumn of 1944. On that occasion it sold for one hundred and twenty pounds, which was a reasonable price at the time, considering the war that was raging throughout Europe. But of course it was only a fraction of the price that it reached when it went under the hammer at Sotheby’s a few months ago.’
‘So the picture’s trail stops during the Second World War, in the autumn of 1944,’ Bäckström summarized, stroking his chubby chin.
‘Yes. It certainly doesn’t seem to have appeared at any further exhibitions or auctions.’
‘So what happened? Who bought it?’ Bäckström nodded encouragingly at his host.
‘No idea,’ GeGurra said. ‘As you’ve no doubt already realized, my assistants and I have conducted a fair bit of research on the matter. Among other things, my English contact has looked through Christie’s records of that auction in the autumn of 1944. The buyer paid for the painting in cash. His name isn’t listed. But there is a note that he wished to remain anonymous.’
‘Cash? Dodgy,’ Bäckström said. Fucking dodgy.
‘Not really,’ GeGurra said with a shrug. ‘The price wasn’t particularly remarkable, and plenty of buyers used to prefer it that way. Not least a considerable number of my colleagues in the art business, I can tell you.’
‘Then there’s a gap of seventy years until it pops up again. Here in Sweden, in the hands of Eriksson the lawyer, who’s been told to sell it on behalf of an unknown client.’
‘Yes, that’s a pretty good summary.’
‘And you haven’t got any idea where it’s been all this time. I mean, everything seems to suggest that it had to be owned by someone Swedish? Why else would it turn up here?’
‘I’m inclined to agree with you,’ GeGurra said. ‘So if you could help me with that little detail, I really would be extremely grateful.’
‘So our baron is the man who sells it this spring. On the orders of the lawyer. Did he sell anything else at the same auction?’ That faggy little nobleman seems to be up to his ears in this crap, he thought.
‘There were three items from the collection that were sold which Eriksson wanted to have valued,’ GeGurra said. ‘The icon, as well as the hunting service for maritime use which appears to have made such a deep impression on you. The third was a gold cigar-lighter. That was also made in St Petersburg in the early 1900s, to judge by the hallmark. But there was no inscription, nothing that could connect it to Prince Wilhelm. If you want my opinion, I’m still fairly confident that it was given to Prince Wilhelm by Maria Pavlovna. It was also produced by the most famous jeweller in St Petersburg at that time. His name was Carl Fabergé, and he was goldsmith to the imperial court. No doubt you’ve heard of him.’
‘So what did it cost, the cigar-lighter?’
‘I don’t remember exactly, around a hundred thousand at auction, I think. Nothing remarkable, and about the same as it was originally bought for, if we take into account the change in the value of money over the years. There are quite a few from that time. A cigar-lighter was pretty much an essential accoutrement to every well-equipped gentleman’s room. Even if this one did cost rather more than most,’ GeGurra said, and shrugged his shoulders.
‘What happened to the hunting service? What did he get for that?’
‘I’m not sure “service” is quite the right word, really,’ GeGurra said, shaking his head. ‘It’s a terribly tragic business, an absolute calamity.’
‘Go on.’
79
According to GeGurra, the hunting service was an absolute calamity when it was sold at auction almost one hundred years after its delivery from the imperial porcelain factory in St Petersburg. In pristine condition, it would certainly have warranted a price of more than ten million Swedish kronor, as it was made to
the excellent standards of the age, and given its provenance. A gift from a Russian grand duchess to a Swedish prince. The Houses of Romanov and Bernadotte on the same plate. This, alas, was not the case, as all that remained was just a tragic fragment of what had once been a hunting service for maritime use in 148 parts.
‘Certainly not a bad gift to a young prince who had just been appointed a lieutenant in the Royal Swedish Navy and commander of the torpedo boat Castor,’ GeGurra said. He evidently had an eye for romantic details.
‘But all that remained was a mere thirty-nine pieces,’ he went on. ‘Most of those chipped and cracked. Soup dishes, sauce boats, saucers – a right mixture. There didn’t seem to have been any method in the destruction that must have taken place. So it was a very tragic business,’ GeGurra declared with a deep sigh, as deep as if he had been talking about a recently deceased and much-loved relative.
‘He couldn’t have had it with him, then? On that torpedo boat he went about in? I mean, he could have got caught in a storm or something,’ Bäckström suggested. By now he was open to any idea that would help all the pieces to fit into place. Preferably in the ownership of the Swedish crown.
‘With all due respect, I find that very hard to believe. Firstly, I doubt there would have been room for it and, secondly, Wilhelm was extremely interested in art. And a thoughtful, careful man when it came to such matters. So that thought would almost certainly never even have occurred to him.’
‘I hear what you’re saying. So you weren’t interested in buying it in the state it was in?’
‘No, I certainly wasn’t. Not for half a million, anyway,’ GeGurra said. ‘It probably ended up in the hands of one of those Russian oligarchs who presumably aren’t remotely bothered about what things cost.’
The Sword of Justice Page 29
