Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  "Dr. Revere? It's Stetten. Did you hear? Dulska is dead!"

  "Yes, I know."

  "My painting is gone!"

  "Yes, I know."

  "I still can't believe it. I can't make myself believe it. It's terrible, I don't know what to do." He sounded dazed, as if he were rocking back and forth and wringing his hands in despair, or would have been if he weren't holding the telephone in one of them.

  "Why don't we meet downstairs?" I suggested gently. "We can talk about it over a cup of coffee." Coffee was certainly what I needed.

  "Coffee?" From his amazement you'd have thought I'd suggested brake fluid. "No . . . no, I don't want any coffee. I must leave at once. I don't wish to get involved in this." His voice, a little on the quavery side anyway, was shaking so hard you could hear the beat, like a vibrato on a violin string.

  "But the police are going to want to talk to you. I've—"

  "To me?" He was horrified. "No, I'm leaving, it's not my affair. It's too much to expect of me, of a man my age. I'm sorry I ever began this terrible business."

  "But—"

  "Your hotel expenses have been posted to my account," he said, not letting me get in a word, "and if you'll send the rest of your bill to me I'll take care of it at once. Goodbye, goodbye, and thank you."

  "No, wait," I said hurriedly. "What about all your other paintings? I've been thinking about them, and I've come up with a few ideas that might just lead—"

  "I'm sorry, I can't discuss it, I have to go. Goodbye, goodbye," he cried again, and the receiver hit the cradle with a bang.

  * * *

  By the time I'd showered and eaten a room-service meal of juice, coffee, rolls, and cheese, it was almost eleven-thirty and time to get over to police headquarters. Pirchl had offered to send a car for me but I decided to walk instead. Every cop in the Württemberg room had smoked without stopping, and I felt the need to gather in a few lungfuls of fresh air before being submerged in what was bound to be a similar fug at the police station. I also wanted to walk, to swing my arms and legs at a good clip for a while, something I hadn't done for far too long, and the station's location off Schottenring on Deutschmeisterplatz would give me a brisk half-hour stroll through the heart of Old Vienna, just what I needed to clear my lungs, and my head as well.

  But before I left I put in a call to Christie Valle de Leon at CIAT. It was early in New York, not yet 6 a.m., but Christie was one of those people—surely the only one in the art world—who like to get to work at that time, at least when the weather's good, so that they can get something done while things are quiet. Of course, she also usually left for the day at three, so she wasn't completely crazy. Sometimes she wouldn't even pick up the phone before nine, but this time I was in luck.

  In less than five minutes she filled me in on the claimants that Alex had told me about. There were five altogether, none of whom had been identified in the news releases, but Christie had looked into them herself, as I'd assumed she would. Three of them, in her opinion, were mere opportunists with no more claim to the painting than she had. Of the remaining two, one was a Hungarian art dealer named Szarvas, and the other was a Viennese named Nussbaum, both of whom raised troubling questions and made potentially persuasive cases. I wrote down their names and addresses, listened to the few facts she could tell me about them, and left for the police station in a more optimistic mood. Nussbaum's address placed him about a mile from where I was at that moment, and Szarvas was in Budapest, where I had to change planes on the way back here from St. Petersburg anyway. So I had two brand-new leads to follow—if I could convince them to talk to me. I put in a quick call to Nussbaum's number to see if I could arrange a meeting, but got no answer. Calling Szarvas in Budapest was bound to take some time, so I put it aside until later and headed off through the old section of the city for Deutschmeisterplatz.

  In the dozen or so years I'd known Vienna, it had changed not at all physically. The same broad boulevards and narrow cobblestoned streets, the same pleasant, stately open spaces, the same splendid hotels and cafés. In other ways, things were different. As always the city was awash in posters advertising concerts of Strauss and Mozart, but now they were fighting a losing battle for space with notices of appearances by Joe Cocker, U2, Jewel, and David Bowie. There were also a lot of homegrown bands with names meant to sound like famous English or American groups: the Gruesome Babies, Tommyboy, Anal Chickens, Beastly Sneakers. Or maybe they were famous English or American groups, what do I know?

  The tourist population had altered too. There still seemed to be plenty from Rome, Munich, and Paris, but now, with the Iron Curtain gone, the rows of boxy tour busses pulled up at cultural shrines and group hotels were more likely to be from Bratislava, Moldavia, and points farther east, and the clumps of people sticking close to their Slavic-speaking guides wore the mistrustful expressions of country folk who'd been warned to keep one hand on their wallets when they were in the big city.

  By the time I reached Schottenring, the northernmost segment of the Ring, which is actually six sides of an octagon that more or less encircles the Inner City (the curving Danube Canal serves as the other two sides), the monuments, the tourists, and the posters had thinned out. Deutschmeisterplatz itself was a square plot of worn grass, deserted except for a couple of elderly dog-walkers, with a few benches and a weather- and pigeon-stained monument to the exploits of an eighteenth-century Viennese garrison. The only building of any size that faced it was a handsome, five-story, late-eighteenth-century "palazzo" in the Florentine style, with a façade of "rusticated"—rough-textured and deep-jointed—stone blocks. There was nothing about it to suggest from any distance that it was police headquarters, but beside the tall, ornate, wooden double doors—the original ones, if I wasn't mistaken—an inconspicuous red-and-white sign made it clear that I'd found the right place.

  Bundespolizeidirektion

  Wien

  Bezirkpolizeikommissariat

  Innere Stadt

  The left-hand door opened to a cobblestoned inner courtyard, where a policewoman in a guard shack directed me to a second-floor counter. There, in an antiseptically clean waiting room with magazines and a wall-mounted television set in one corner, I was asked by a receptionist with braided blonde hair to wait. I watched a dubbed Magnum, PI episode for a while, wondering, not for the first time, why it was that European dubbers gave all American leading men a deep, sonorous voice. Every time the real Tom Selleck went "hee-hee-hee," the voice on the TV went "harr-harr-harr."

  After a while an efficient-looking cop in a crisp, faultlessly fitted green uniform came out with my typed-up statement and waited, shifting from one foot to the other, while I read and signed it, then politely asked me to continue waiting. I returned to Magnum, who had just run into one of his friends in a Honolulu dive. ("Harr-harr, TJ, wie geht's?")

  "Ben Revere, am I right?" somebody asked in plain old American English, Upper Midwestern variety.

  I looked up to see a rumpled, overweight man of fifty in a lumpy tweed sport coat that reeked almost visibly of pipe tobacco, baggy slacks with bulging pockets, and an exhausted tie twisted into a skinny knot. Above the knot was a fleshy, friendly face with a bulbous red wine-bibber's nose.

  "That's right," I said, standing. "And you're. . . ? Oh, are you from the consulate?"

  "Lord have mercy, no, I'm Polizeioberstleutnant Feuchtmüller."

  "I . . . you're . . . I beg your pardon?" The man looked as if he couldn't be from the same planet as the spruce, sleek Viennese cops I'd seen so far.

  He took pity on my confusion. "All is explainable. I'm half-American—my mother's from Green Bay, Wisconsin in the Land of the Round Doorknobs. My full name's Alois McGuffey Feuchtmüller, and, as bizarre as it may seem to you—as it seems to me sometimes—I really am a genuine polizeioberstleutnant in the Office of the Federal Directorate-General for Public Security, Organized Crime Division. On my honor. Am I not, Greta?"

  "Ze rreal ssing," the blonde receptionist agreed. />
  Chapter 16

  Policemen must not trust each others' interrogative skills because they're always asking you to tell them what happened, no matter how many times you've told it before, and Polizeioberstleutnant Alois McGuffey Feuchtmüller was no exception. For a good hour I talked while he muttered in his snuffly voice from time to time, asked an occasional question, smoked a foul, sooty pipe, and took no notes whatsoever, unless his doodles of ducks and swans (chickens and turkeys?) were a secret code. I told him about everything pertinent that had happened to me in Vienna, and about Simeon and the Boston Velazquez. The history of the Lost Truck particularly intrigued him, and so I dredged up every fact, hypothesis, and reasonably plausible speculation I'd ever heard about it while we sipped coffee and then Cokes in his stuffy office—more like a college professor's than a cop's, what with books piled on every flat surface. The furniture was gray steel and Naugahyde, the walls pale green, the floor linoleum-tiled. I felt right at home, as if I were back in my old non-tenure-track cubicle at Harvard. Even the book titles were professorial: thick tomes in German and English on sociology, political theory, and economics, most of them with multiple torn-paper markers sticking out of them. A funny cop, I thought.

  At one o'clock he reamed out the pipe for the third time, emptied the ashtray—thoroughly nasty by now—into a wastepaper basket, and made his first declarative statement in some time: "Lunchtime, my friend, what do you say to going and getting something to eat?"

  "Sounds great," I said. "Here I've been in Vienna for over twenty-four hours now, and I've yet to meet my first wienerschnitzel."

  Under tangled gray eyebrows his eyes lit up. "Oho, do I know the place for you."

  * * *

  Ten minutes later we were at the Café Schottenring a few blocks from police headquarters, seated under a green awning at a sidewalk table. Boxed junipers more or less shielded us from passersby and from the steady hum of automobile traffic on the Ring. Our orders had already been taken. I had ordered the schnitzel mit pommes frites, while Alois—mercifully, he had told me to call him Alois after hearing me mangle "polizeioberstleutnant" a few times (to say nothing of "Feuchtmüller")—had asked for the salad plate. He was, he sorrowfully explained, watching his waistline.

  Obviously, his proscriptions did not extend to beer, inasmuch as each of us had a generous stemmed goblet of Gösser Bier, the velvety, justly famous Viennese brew, in front of him. Alois downed a third of his glass in two luxurious swallows, licked his lips, leaned back, and rolled his eyes with contentment. "Now then, this Dulska: was he telling you the truth? Do you think he really had access to all of Stetten's missing paintings?"

  I shrugged. "Maybe. Everything else about this is weird, so why not that too?"

  "How much do you know about him, Ben? Ever run across him before? Heard of him, I mean?"

  "No. According to Stetten, he was a reputable dealer, but—"

  Alois's wheezing laugh cut me off. "'Reputable.' Not the word I'd choose."

  "But he was an art dealer?"

  "Oh, yes, that was one of his businesses, all right, but he's been involved, one way or another, with the Moscow mafia ever since the Wall came down. He does jobs for the Chetverk crime family—it means Thursday, by the way, don't ask me why. Front-man, fence, go-between, you name it. He's the only reason they've put me on the case, y'see."

  "Not really, no," I said. "Aren't you just investigating the murder?"

  "Good heavens, no, that's Pirchl's job. Do I look like some sort of homicide detective? Can you imagine them giving me a gun? Who would be safe? No, I'm a member of the investigative wing of the organized crime bureau." I was beginning to detect the slightest of Viennese accents in his speech, more a matter of meter than pronunciation.

  "I didn't realize Austria had much of an organized crime problem."

  "It didn't until recently, if you mean the homegrown variety, but you know, we share three borders with what used to be the Soviet bloc, and they do, they most certainly do. And now we do too. Is Klaus Loitzl a familiar name to you?"

  "No."

  "Well, Klaus Loitzl is to Viennese crime what John Gotti was to New York City crime, if that helps. He was a big boss in East Berlin when it was East Berlin. When the Wall came down, he moved to Vienna, to greener pastures. The organized crime bureau was formed a few years ago to try to deal with Loitzl and his people, but also with the more general intrusion of East European gangs. My own specialty happens to be the Russian mafia. I thought you understood."

  I shook my head.

  "True," Alois said, "I am a policeman now, of a sort, but until three years ago, I was a happily obscure professor of socioeconomic theory with a specialty in applied Western Marxist doctrine and a particular interest in Soviet post-Communist reform or the lack thereof."

  A professor. Ah, now, that explained things.

  When the waiter came with our food, Alois watched hungrily as my plate was set down, the golden veal cutlet hanging over the sides, the tawny French fries fragrant and perfectly crisped. He looked so forlorn that I offered him some.

  "No, thanks," he said mournfully, "I have a hard enough time keeping my weight down as it is."

  If a Viennese saladteller was his idea of a diet plate, it was no wonder. Anybody would have had a tough time keeping his weight down lunching on the four hefty mounds on his plate: thickly sauced German potato salad, curried creamed chicken, beef in cream sauce, and chunks of wurst in some kind of rich, mustardy gravy. The only thing with less than 200 calories per mouthful was the layer of leaf lettuce on which it all sat. And that, naturally, he never touched.

  As we ate—and once he got going, he attacked his "salad" with good cheer—Alois gave me a quick course on the Eastern European crime wave that had followed the Communist collapse and had yet to slow down. In part, it seemed, it was a matter of logistics. The East-West borders that had been fiercely controlled until 1989 were now wide-open, and the poorly paid border guards, when they weren't overwhelmed by the flow, were easily bribed by anybody who wanted to haul anything across them—drugs, alcohol, forged currencies, Kalashnikovs, Strontium-90 . . . or Old Master paintings.

  And within the borders of countries that had been ruled by Communist governments, hatred and fear of the police still ran high, so that Western methods of going after organized crime were usually outlawed: no police wiretapping, no bugging devices, no "sting" operations, no undercover agents, no cutting deals with little fish in order to catch the big ones. As Alois put it, it would be a long time before the Poles, the Czechs, and the rest of them truly understood that it was possible for a democratic society to use modern police techniques and still remain a democracy.

  These factors, along with rising standards that had made Eastern Europe a lucrative new target, had combined to produce something new: an international, borderless criminal underground, in which rival syndicates competed with and killed off each other in inter-tribal warfare that made 1920's Chicago look like a playpen. Last year, Alois said, there had been a summit meeting in Krakow, where Czech, Russian, Polish, and Hungarian gang lords, trying to hold down the fraternal bloodshed, worked out formal rules of engagement and cooperation. And even the Japanese Yakuza, the Chinese Triads, and the Colombian drug cartels, sensing money to be made, had now gotten into the act in eastern and central Europe.

  But Alois's baby was the Russian mafia and in particular the Moscow crime families, the region's most ruthless and effective criminal organizations—no surprise, since much of their leadership had more or less transferred straight out of the KGB. And where Berthold Dulska was involved, the Russian mafia was sure to be involved.

  Which was why he was on the case.

  "Another beer?" he asked hopefully when the food was gone and he'd wound down his lecture.

  "Why not?" The first one had gone to my head, I was pleasantly full of wienerschnitzel, and I was feeling expansive for the first time in months.

  "One more question, Ben. You said you never told Stetten that
Dulska called you about making a deal on the side. Are you sure you didn't tell anyone else? On the telephone, perhaps. . . ?"

  "Uh-uh, no."

  "And you're absolutely positive you didn't imply it to Stetten in some way? Inadvertently?"

  "I don't see how. He didn't stop griping about the opera long enough for me to get a sentence in."

  "So the question is—assuming that was the reason he was killed, which may or may not be the case—how did anybody manage to find out about it between six-thirty, when he called you, and eight o'clock, or so, which Pirchl tells me is the approximate time he died. Quick work, wouldn't you say?"

  "I don't know, compared to what?"

  "You know, the usual way the Russians deal with this sort of, ah, disloyalty, is to send a hitman, a contract killer, in from Moscow and back out on a plane, all in the same day so that it's next to impossible to trace. By the time anyone finds out the victim is dead, the killer is back sleeping in his own bed. In this case, obviously, there was no time for that sort of arrangement. The killer would already have had to be in Vienna. All we have to do is figure out who it is."

  "Alois, you're not seriously thinking it was Stetten, are you?"

  "I don't know, am I?"

  "But it's impossible. We were in a box at the opera until well after ten. He was sitting right next to me the whole time."

  "Stetten himself, all right, but you wouldn't expect him to do it with his own hands, would you? These things can be arranged."

  "But why would Stetten want to have Dulska killed, for Christ's sake? Dulska was his only link to the painting."