Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  "Ah. Well. Yes. Well, naturally, the records of the immediate postwar years are somewhat confused, but I can assure you that the gentleman—a very prominent Belgian gentleman of impeccable family—who owned the artworks of which this is one, did indeed purchase the painting in good faith, knowing nothing of its history or even of its real value—it is not signed, remember—in the mid-nineteen-fifties, and owned it until the time of his death, when I successfully bid on his collection at auction—also in good faith, I need hardly add. That, I am afraid, Excellenz, is all that is known of its provenance since it was taken from your home."

  "Well, then," Stetten said with relief, spreading his hands as if that took care of that. But it didn’t; not by a long shot.

  "Mr. Dulska," I said with appropriate severity. "In the first place, I think we need to know the name of this prominent Belgian gentleman of impeccable family."

  Dulska looked suitably shocked. "Ah, I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to provide this information. Professional ethics don't permit me to reveal his name."

  Sure, I thought, that and the shady dealer's typical worry that if he disclosed his real source, we might very well cut out the middle-man.

  "And in the second place, I'm afraid we're going to need some proof that you have title to the painting."

  Dulska lifted his chin and pursed his fleshy lips to let me know that his feelings were wounded. "I have papers that would satisfy you, of course, but I did not think to bring them with me at this time. I assumed we were operating as gentlemen, in an atmosphere of mutual trust."

  I just looked at him. Schnittke took the cigar out of his mouth again for the purpose of uttering a short laugh.

  "I could have them here tomorrow if that would be satisfactory," Dulska said stiffly. "Say three o’clock?"

  "How about having them faxed?" I asked.

  "It will take time to collect them. Tomorrow is the best I can do."

  "Leo?" Stetten said.

  Schnittke ran stubby fingers through his wispy beard. "All right," he said grudgingly, a man who didn't like giving in on anything.

  "Then that's what we'll do," Stetten said, taking charge again. "You'll get in touch with Mr. Schnittke tomorrow, when you have the papers?" He looked ready to go; he'd begun fidgeting in his chair.

  Dulska nodded sulkily, a misunderstood man (who was trying only to do the right thing). "Yes."

  "I'll be going, then, Albrecht," Schnittke said. "I have things to do. You know where to find me. Gentlemen." We stood up and bowed to each other. Once again, Schnittke chose not to shake hands. Dead cigar stuck in his face, he waddled out like a grumpy bear with berries on its mind. Stetten, obviously restless himself, reached for his walking stick, anxious to follow him.

  But there was one more point I wanted to raise, even if Stetten had had enough. "Mr. Dulska, I’m sure—"

  Stetten cut plaintively in. "Is there such a thing as a toilet in here, Dulska?"

  I realized that it hadn't been restlessness that had been making him fidget, but pressure on the bladder, not something most men in their eighties are able to put off for very long.

  "Of course, Excellenz." Dulska bowed him toward a set of double doors at the rear of the room, sat down, and returned his attention to me.

  "You were saying?"

  "I'm sure you know that this wasn't the only painting confiscated from the Stetten family. There were seventy-odd others taken at the same time and also known to have been on the Lost Truck. I can’t help wondering if you might possibly have some information on those as well."

  With the exception of those moist, protuberant eyes, which never stopped their darting and shifting, he became stone-still. "Why should you think I would have such information?"

  Bingo; I'd hit on something. "I don't really know," I said, trying not to let my excitement show. "Do you?"

  "And if I did? It would be of interest?"

  "Well, of course it would."

  "Even if the provenances were not 'impeccable'?"

  "Mr. Dulska, if you have any information at all—"

  He shushed me with his hand as Stetten came back through the double doors. "Later."

  By the time Stetten and I left a few moments afterward, Dulska was affable and obsequious again, but I had the unsettling feeling that those fervid, froggy eyes were taking in my every gesture, every nuance, as if he were filing them away for future reference.

  If I ever ran into him on a lily pad I was going to have to watch my back.

  Chapter 13

  It was almost noon when we left Dulska. Stetten, looking frail, retired to his suite, explaining that inasmuch as we'd had a late breakfast and it was going to be an unusually long day for him, he would skip lunch, rest during the afternoon, and then order a light, early dinner from room service. We agreed to meet in the hotel lobby at six-thirty, half-an-hour before Rigoletto's curtain time.

  That left me with six hours to myself, and I did just what you'd expect somebody like me to do with himself when he has a free afternoon in a place like Vienna. Without even having to think about it I headed, the way a cow heads for the barn, for the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna’s superb treasure house of art. But at the entrance, I had a change of heart. The trouble was, I had some serious thinking to do, and I knew from experience that the riches of the Kunsthistoriches would have me hurrying greedily from Holbein, to Rembrandt, to Brueghel, to Dürer—so many painters, so little time!—as overstuffed, wild-eyed, and rapacious as one of Stetten’s buffet groupies. Besides, it was bound to be, because it always was, swarming with visitors.

  What I needed was someplace not quite so stimulating, something more conducive to placid cogitation. So with my mind running in a museum groove, I went instead into the Naturhistorisches Museum, which faces the Kunsthistoriches in a twin building—twin palace, if you like—across the wide green lawn of Maria-Theresien-platz.

  It turned out to be a good choice. The Naturhistorisches has its areas of charm (the tiny Venus of Willendorf in its little, out-of-the-way glass case, for example), but no one has ever called it overstimulating. It is what a museum used to be in the days before "hands-on exhibits" and "interactive learning experiences," full of roomy nineteenth-century cases, each with a complement of moth-eaten alligators, or lions, or hyenas. Miles of rows of beetles, butterflies, and bees, each mounted on a single pin and with its own faded, curling little label in Latin. Vast, ornate galleries lit only by a dim, dusty daylight. And not an educational diorama in sight.

  It didn’t take long to find a bench in a quiet corner of a quiet gallery with a dozen twenty-foot-long, cases in which, lined up in mind-numbingly regular rows, rested one specimen each of what must surely have been every kind of coral known to man. There, lulled into a reflective state by slowly revolving columns of sunlit dust motes, the only moving things in sight, and knowing that I was unlikely to be disturbed by rowdy gangs of coral-enthusiasts, I gave myself over to thinking about what was bothering me.

  Not Dulska, as you might expect. I mean, sure, the guy was a shyster, but how much thinking did that take?

  But what about Stetten? What was he?

  One minute—most minutes—I liked him. The next, I found myself pulling back. A big part of it was that count business. It wasn’t that I wasn't used to titled aristocrats, either. When you work for a major art museum, you work with big-time art collectors, and when you work with big-time collectors, you’re bound to run into the occasional peer of the realm. The ones I’d met had ranged from a lord-of-the-manor English viscount who firmly believed that the decline of Western civilization had begun on August 10, 1911, when the House of Lords lost its right of absolute veto, to a twenty-five-year-old German baroness with a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder, a ring through her belly-button, and a passion for motorcycles and motorcycle-racers.

  But Stetten was almost too good to be true. When I was with him I felt as if I were in the middle of a Sigmund Romberg operetta. Every time a waitress had approached our table at break
fast I'd expected her to burst into song. Well, I told myself, Stetten was my first Austrian count, and maybe that made it different.

  But there was more than that. Why had he been so ready to seal the deal with Dulska? He'd haggled a little about the amount of the finder's fee—or rather, Schnittke had—but he'd wanted to ignore the really crucial aspects in terms of potential legal battles in the future: the provenance and the proof of Dulska's ownership. Unless Dulska himself had legal title to the painting or was acting as agent for someone who did—and that was yet to be settled—he had no right to sell it, or transfer it, or do anything else with it.

  No matter how naïve Stetten was, it still seemed incredible that, if not for my objections and some timely support from Schnittke (who didn't really seem to know a hell of a lot about buying paintings himself but was at least quick to grasp the issues), he would have let Dulska skate right by those all-important particulars. For that matter, why was he so naïve? If he'd been chasing down his father's art all these years, you'd think he'd have learned a little about the business. I'd assumed he was a collector in his own right, but maybe not.

  And what about his reaction to the painting, or rather his non-reaction? Why had he shown next to no interest in a picture for which he’d been searching for the last five decades? The frame, yes, but the painting? He’d hardly looked at it. Even allowing for the fact that he wasn't the collector his father had been, you’d think he’d have said something: remarked on some aspect of it, or just stood there basking in its glow, or even gloated over it a bit. Something . . .

  That was as far as I got before a combination of jet lag and those mesmerizing dust motes did me in. When I woke up with a jerk that hurt my neck, I was slumped on the base of my spine, head tipped back against the hard marble wall, mouth gaping in mid-snuffle. I felt like hell. The clock on the wall said 4:55; barely time enough to get a bite on my way back to the Imperial, brush my teeth, and dress for the opera before meeting Stetten in the hotel lobby.

  For all the answers I'd come up with, I might just as well have spent the time jogging between the Dürers and the Holbeins.

  * * *

  "Mr. Revere?"

  Even if I hadn't been half-expecting the call, the throaty voice would have been easy to recognize.

  "What can I do for you, Mr. Dulska?"

  I was in the bedroom of my suite, about to leave to meet Stetten. But I'd just been thinking about Dulska; about that whispered "Later" when Stetten had returned from his visit to the bathroom. It had gone in one ear and out the other at the time, so that it wasn't until I was idly changing clothes that I grasped what it meant—which was of course, that he wanted to discuss the other looted paintings not with Stetten, or with Schnittke, but with me. Alone. And that, in turn, had to mean that Dulska had thought that that was the way I wanted it too, that I had purposely waited to raise the subject until Schnittke had left and Stetten was out of the room, that I had some ulterior, personal motive in mind.

  In other words, Dulska was under the impression that I was bent.

  "Are you alone?" he asked while I was still reflecting on this astounding circumstance.

  "Um, yes."

  "You know, I've been thinking about our conversation this morning," he said with a treacly negligence that came across as fake even over the telephone. "I thought it might be interesting to continue it. Are you free? Would you care to join me in my suite for a drink?"

  "Sorry, I have an appointment."

  "A little later, then? Say eight o'clock?"

  "No, I'll be out for the evening—"

  "Mr. Revere, no more games!" he blurted, surprising me with his vehemence. Apparently the guy was convinced that everything I said had a hidden meaning. He was also jumpy as hell.

  "Mr. Dulska, how about just saying what you have to say?"

  He breathed in and out, a long, noisy breath through his nose, then was silent for a few seconds. When he spoke it was quietly, but with a lock-jawed intensity. "As it happens, I do have information about certain other missing paintings. I know, in fact, where they are and who has them. And I know that this person—you understand, I cannot name him—is now interested in disposing of them. Would you be interested in hearing more?"

  Would I be . . . but I needed to make sure that I was tracking before I got in any deeper. "You're talking about some more of Stetten's missing paintings; that's right, isn't it?"

  "I'm talking about all of them."

  All of them? Practically the entire contents of the Lost Truck? Giorgione, Tintoretto, Hals, Goya . . . the idea was enough to drop me into a chair. Coming as it did from the mouth of a slimy customer like Dulska I wouldn't have given it a moment's credibility—except that he'd already produced the Velazquez, hadn't he, so who could say what else he might have up his sleeve? Maybe even, I realized with a prickle of excitement, the why's and how's that had brought the companion-Velazquez to Simeon Pawlovsky's shop and ended in his death.

  "Why not offer them to Stetten, then?" It seemed like what a bent person in my position would want to know.

  "For reasons of his own, this gentleman prefers not to do business with Count Stetten," Dulska said smoothly. "But he has authorized me to act as his agent in offering you a generous commission for your help in locating a dependable buyer—a discreet buyer, if I make myself clear." An oily silence, and then: "A very generous, very discreet commission, I can tell you."

  He waited for my response, breathing noisily into the phone, while I scrambled for something to say that sounded as if I knew my away around dealings like this.

  "Exactly how much money are we talking about here?" I asked. It was hard to see how I could go wrong with that.

  Dulska liked it too. "A great deal," he said with an unpleasant laugh, as if he now knew that he had me in his pocket. "When would you like to discuss it? I must tell you that time is of the essence."

  "Well, I'm about to leave for the opera with Stetten. I don't see how I can break that. I should be back by ten-thirty."

  "You'll come to my suite?"

  "I don't think so. What about the bar?"

  "Wouldn't my suite be more private?"

  Definitely, which was why I wanted to meet in the bar. I was all too aware that I was swimming—dog-paddling was more like it—in unfamiliar waters here. For all I knew I was being set up for something, and I didn't want Dulska, whom I trusted not an inch, ever to be able to claim that he and I had met anywhere but in a public place.

  "The bar, I think, "I said.

  "If you insist. Shall we say eleven?"

  "Eleven it is."

  "Oh, and Mr. Revere? It goes without saying, yes?—nothing of this to our friend the count, eh?"

  "Not a word," I said.

  * * *

  I didn't, either; not because of Dulska's warning but because I didn't know what Stetten's reaction might be. He might have wanted to call in the police or confront Dulska himself, and I didn't want anything to happen that might bollix up whatever was in the works. I don't believe I was being disloyal to Stetten; my commitment to him concerned the Countess of Torrijos, and I intended to fulfill it. The rest of the paintings were another matter. In the end, assuming that they were really his, it would be a pleasure to do everything I could to see that they got back to him. But for the moment my interest was bigger than the Count of Stetten's rightful patrimony—bigger, if I'm going to be honest, than getting to the root of my friend's death. Because if Dulska was telling the truth (or some version of the truth), I now had a one-of-a-kind chance to pick up the scent of a stolen collection of irreplaceable, culturally priceless masterpieces that the world at large had thought lost forever. I couldn't pass it up.

  At some point Stetten would have to be brought into it, of course. And the police; I had no illusions about continuing the charade with Dulska for very much longer or about chasing the paintings down on my own. But not yet. If I went to the police now, what would I tell them? I didn't know where the paintings were or who had them. When
it came down to it, I didn't even know whether Dulska knew or was merely spinning some scam of his own. Dulska himself would simply deny what he'd said, and that would be the end of that. The paintings would slip back into whatever black hole they'd been in until now, and who knew when they'd surface again?

  Or if.

  * * *

  Rigoletto was a flop. Stetten had gotten us terrific seats in the nearest of the five horseshoe-shaped, gilt-and-white rungs of boxes in the opera house, but I couldn't concentrate on the music for thoughts of my upcoming meeting with Dulska. And the black-tied Stetten, who began the evening as chipper as could be, reminiscing lovingly about the glories and grandeur of Vienna in the days before the war, fell into a carping, biting mood almost as soon as we entered the great opera house, finding fault from beginning to end. The tenor was "a poor, thin stick of a Duke" (as I would have realized if I'd ever heard the great Richard Tauber in the role). The soprano looked more like a fashion model than a serious singer. (I should have seen Scwarzkopf's Gilda.) The orchestra, once the glory of the Staatsoper, was shamefully ragged and undisciplined. (If only I'd heard them in the glory days of the great Karl Böhm.)

  Even the audience failed to meet his standards. "In my day," he said as we looked down on them between acts, "the fat, ugly women were all on the stage and the pretty ones were in the audience. Now it's the other way around. I call that a net loss." I don't doubt that he would have had something to say about the scarcity of evening dress in the hall, except that I was wearing the disreputable, mystery-fabric sport coat that I travel with because it never wrinkles.

  Afterwards we walked the three blocks back to the hotel along Kärtner Ring, its glossy shops closed but its streets still filled with pedestrians. Stetten walked slowly and precisely, now using his stick like a working cane, putting his weight on it at every other step. For the first time I noticed a limp, a hitch in the way one of his hips worked. The opera had left him in a melancholy, reminiscent mood and he began to talk about his father's collection. At one time, he said, there had been well over 400 paintings in the family residences at Melk and Csorna. His father had bought the Csorna castle—well, a country house, really, but everyone called it the castle—specifically to hold the overflow. When the family moved to Paris all but the 73 paintings that went there with them had gone into storage in Austria.