Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  "Who's coming to you about—" But I stopped myself before I made a complete hash of things. "I only meant to say that Mr. Stetten, like many other Austrians, was a victim of the Nazis too. They plundered his art just as they plundered the art of Russia. It was the same thing."

  Galina abruptly stopped again. "You think so? No, you are wrong. The art of Russia, the art most precious to us, our native art, they considered worthless. In 1941 alone, the first year, they destroyed more than two hundred Russian museums. Destroyed, you understand? Nothing looted, nothing saved. Destruction for pleasure of destruction."

  "That's awful," I said.

  "Yes, awful. Here in this beautiful city, the walls, the mirrors, the wonderful statues inside the palaces were shot for fun with machine guns, smashed in pieces. At Petrodvorets—Peterhof—they destroyed for pleasure the machinery of the wonderful cascade fountains, they took away the golden statues to the smelting furnace, right in front of the eyes of all the watching people. Animals! And at the end, when they ran away, what was left they burned or took with them to Germany . . . yes, and to Austria! Yet you come here and ask me to help them?" She stared at me, breathing hard through her nose.

  I said nothing. I didn't have the stomach to make the obvious argument about two wrongs not making a right, not when I was faced with the raw conviction that had painfully thickened her voice and made the tendons on her neck stand out like straws. More than that, although I disagreed with the Russians' stance on the return of their art loot, I didn't have any trouble at all understanding their point of view.

  "And I do not even mention," she said, "the terrible human sufferings, which you cannot begin to imagine, that they, these invaders, brought on us. In Leningrad—St. Petersburg—more than six hundred thousand dead of starvation, of freezing, of disease."

  "Galina," I said meekly, "I'm just trying to get information on behalf of one thoroughly decent man, not the German or the Austrian government. I'm not talking about repatriating—"

  "Repatriate!" she said hotly. "Here is not a question of repatriation. To repatriate means to accept idea of legitimate ownership by Germany. We do not accept that, never."

  "But I'm not saying—"

  "Besides, many, many art objects we already returned to German museums in 1957, including famous Pergamum altar."

  "To East Germany, you mean."

  "Of course, to GDR. Altogether, one-and-one-half-million objects we give back. That is enough. Is for German people to return two hundred thousand missing art pieces now, not for Russia to return."

  That depended on which side you were on. The Russian trophy brigades had made off with over 2.5 million pieces of art from Germany. As Galina had said, they had returned 1.5 million to their satellite in 1957. That left over a million items still in Russia, many of them not from German museums at all, but the property of blameless victims like Stetten, looted—pre-looted, so to speak—by the Nazis. Since 1990 Germany and Russia had been engaged in prickly negotiations over who owed what to whom, but so far little had come of them.

  I was beginning to lose hope but gave it another try anyway; I'd come a long way, and I hated to give up.

  "I appreciate what you're saying, Galina, believe me. Still, if—well, just on the possibility that Mr. Stetten's art is somewhere in the basement of the Hermitage or—"

  Galina stiffened. "We do not keep art in basement. We have proper storage, completely scientific, better than U.S." With a huff, she started us walking again.

  "At end of war," she said forcefully, "was much confusion, many things burnt, destroyed, lost. By taking objects safely back to Russia we have kept them from terrible ravages of war. Am I not correct?"

  Was she not correct, I thought with a sigh. That question, in its essence, was what was known in the trade as the Elgin argument: If we had not stolen (removed, confiscated, appropriated, seized) this painting (etching, engraving, statue, tapestry), would it not have been ruined (destroyed, lost, mutilated, corrupted) by the vicissitudes of war (climate, neglect, ignorance, barbarism)? In one form or another, it had been in use for two hundred years, by scoundrels and world-renowned institutions alike, ever since the Earl of Elgin carried off to England two hundred feet of glorious marble frieze that he'd stripped from the face of the Parthenon, claiming that he was saving it for posterity against the ravages of the Turks.

  And the reason that this particular argument had been around so long was that, like most arguments that have been around for a long time, it wasn't easy to refute. The fact is that Elgin, vilified at the time by British public opinion, and since then by almost everyone else as well, probably did save those irreplaceable marbles. The Turks who were in charge, Greece being part of the Ottoman Empire at the time, didn't give a damn about the glories of ancient Athens (neither did the local Athenians, for that matter) and were, in fact, happily using the convenient Parthenon for explosives storage and target practice (not at the same time, but even so it wasn't doing the frieze any good). Moreover, neither the Greeks nor the Turks had raised any objection to his carting the sculptures off, which he did with their official blessings and only after paying heftily for the privilege. A few years later, in 1816, he sold them—at a substantial loss, or so he claimed—to the British Museum, where an enormous gallery was built for them and where they still remain.

  And I don't think that anyone who knows much about it believes for a minute that they would not have been lost (destroyed, ruined, mutilated, corrupted) had he left them on that hilltop in Athens. Still, as a modern-day rationale for making off with other people's property, it no longer held water, as it shouldn't. To say that it's all right to take art from people who can't take care of it is uncomfortably close to saying it's all right to steal somebody's car if he doesn't bother to lock it. Civilized nations can no longer get away with the Elgin argument, but at the same time many of the old disputes continue unresolved. Greece and England have been squabbling over those marbles for decades, but despite the recent increase in volume of the Greek complaints, I wouldn't bet on their going back to Greece any time soon.

  The last thing I wanted was to get into a similar squabble with Galina. Besides, as far as it went, she was right: the Russians had rescued a lot of art from destruction. The problem lay with what had happened to it afterward. And as far as owing the Germans some payback, she had a damn good case there too.

  There were some gypsies begging along the outskirts of the park, mostly women with babies slung on their backs, and grimy, skinny, big-eyed children clutching their skirts. One of the kids, a boy of eight ran up to me and started grabbing with scabby hands at my pocket, my sleeve. "Hey, meestair! Jeengle-change, meestair? Please, jeengle-change?"

  I began to reach into my pocket but Galina stopped me and, with a sudden motion and a snarl, as if she were going to hit him, sent him running. "To these people you don't give. Parasites."

  I cringed a little—the kid looked hungry, and he'd flinched as if he really expected to be hit—but let it go. I had enough things to differ with Galina about.

  But a few yards further along was a white-haired old woman on her knees, her head bent, with a cigar box in front of her that had a couple of cardboard images of icons in it.

  "To her, you give," I was instructed. "This old babushka, she lived through the Siege."

  Obediently, I leaned down and put a 10,000 ruble note—about $2—into the box. It had to be far more than she was used to getting, but she snatched it up and stuffed it in the pocket of her coat without ever looking at me. There were other elderly women like her kneeling on the cold, dirty sidewalks along Nevsky Prospect, shabby, kerchiefed, equally pathetic, all with their cigar boxes or cigarette cartons of icons, all utterly passive, never raising their eyes above the knees of the passersby, rocking back and forth, crooning to themselves and crossing themselves endlessly, like zoo animals caught up in a routine that they couldn't stop. They were the reason for the wad of rubles that I kept in my pocket when I was in St. Petersburg; it was imposs
ible to walk past one without giving something.

  "And what did you give to her?" Galina demanded as we turned and walked back toward the museum.

  "Ten thousand rubles."

  She nodded her approval. "Is good, Ben."

  "Galina," I began, heartened by getting back into her good graces a little, "all I'm trying—"

  "No," she said, stopping again, "I am sorry. You are not bad man. But I do not help you. I do not help Germany."

  "But look, surely you'd agree that you can't hold individuals responsible for the actions of their governments. Surely you see that there are some individual Austrians, some individual Germans, who were just as—"

  "No, I do not see. I see it was Germans who attacked us, not us them." She held her hand out to me. "Goodbye, I must work. I am sorry you come for nothing."

  That is one tough cookie, I thought, watching her stride manfully back through the park toward the museum, but admirable too, in her own way. If Galina Kuznetsova was on any of those Russian-German commissions, Germany would never get a single piece of art back.

  In any case, she was certainly right about my having made the trip to St. Petersburg for nothing beyond a rousing argument, which I'd lost hands-down. On my dejected way back out of the park I came across the group of gypsies and beckoned to the kid who'd come up to us before.

  He approached like a dog that wasn't sure whether he was going to get a treat or a kick. "Jeengle-change?" he inquired from a safe distance.

  I held out 5,000 rubles. Delighted, he plucked it out of my hand and with the kind of sudden, dark, gleaming laugh that was going to slay the girls in another fifteen years, scampered off to the women.

  That made me feel a little better. "Is good, Ben," I said to myself.

  Chapter 20

  My flight to Budapest didn't leave until eight p.m., but I couldn't think of anything useful to do in the interim, so I spent the afternoon in the Hermitage as a tourist, lunching on a hamburger and potato chips at the museum's Koka Kola Kafe, which looked depressingly like every other museum cafeteria in the world. Walking back to the Grand Hotel at a little before five, Yuri was on my mind. Galina's appearance in his stead clearly meant that he wasn't considered reliable when it came to spouting the party line, and although the days when his freedom might have been endangered for such a thing had passed, I hoped that I hadn't put his job in jeopardy, especially for what had turned out to be nothing.

  As I was crossing the lobby of the Grand, a clean-cut, smiling young man in neatly creased, buff-colored slacks and a crisp, striped Oxford shirt with a button-down collar got up from a chair wedged into an out-of-the-way niche between two pillars and approached me. I could tell that he'd been there a while, waiting for me to show up.

  I stopped. "Yes?"

  The smile broadened. "Hey, Ben! Is me!"

  "Yuri, I didn't recognize you!"

  The last time I'd seen him in his off-duty persona he'd been wearing a Hard Rock Café T-shirt and baggy shorts, with an earring (the clip-on kind) in one ear, green dye (the rinse-out kind) in his hair, and a funny haircut. I think the idea was to look like a punk-rocker. Now, it seemed, he'd gone in for the preppie look (with considerably more success), and had done some filling-out as well, so he looked less boyish, less soft. He also looked cheerful and and happy, not at all like a man in big-time hot-water, which I was happy to see.

  "So, how was your meeting with the Dragon Lady?" he asked, pumping my hand up and down.

  "Not too bad, except that she wouldn't tell me anything. Listen, Yuri, I haven't gotten you in a lot of trouble over this, have I?"

  "No, only a little, don't worry."

  Now this doesn't come close to reconstructing our actual conversation, you understand; I've had to take some liberties. Remember, we were communicating in four languages at the same time: German, of which I knew a lot and he knew a little; French, of which I knew a little and he knew a lot; Russian, of which he knew a lot and I knew next to nothing; and English, of which he knew next to nothing and I knew a lot. So our dialogue, while its gist was as indicated, was nothing like the model of concision and linearity described above. To spare both of us—you and me—the pain and the laughter of a literal transcription of our conversation, I'm honing it into something along the lines of comprehensible speech. Anyway, to appreciate the real thing, you'd have had to be there.

  He was proud of having found me. "I remembered the problem you had with your stomach the last time," he said (sort of), "so I figured this was where you'd be staying. I want to talk to you, but I don't want to hang around the Grand. Too many people I might know. There's a string of little restaurants on Kanal Griboyedova, practically around the corner, where the apparatchiks never go. You want to have dinner?"

  Sure, I told him, as long as it wouldn't turn into the standard Russian dining-out experience, which never ended before eleven, and seldom as early as that; I had an eight o'clock plane to catch.

  "No problem," Yuri said, this time in perfect English. Surely by now this has to be the most ubiquitous American phrase in the world, having overtaken even "okay."

  The restaurant that we decided on was a Russian-Ukrainian place that Yuri said smelled particularly good (it smelled like boiled cabbage to me). Called the Ukrainskaya, it was, at any rate, atmospheric, with a dejected-looking balalaika duo playing sweet, mournful Russian folk music, and waiters in rolled-up shirt sleeves and dirty white aprons.

  Yuri ordered us a kind of high tea made up of a lot of small, individually served courses that kept coming and coming: a thick soup of sturgeon and marinated cabbage, three kinds of piroshki, red and black caviar served with chopped eggs and onions (it's hard to find a meal without caviar in St. Petersburg) and open-faced sandwiches of smoked salmon and thick-sliced cucumber and tomato on brown bread plastered with half-an-inch of butter. All served with a pot of Russian-style tea, i.e., very hot and very weak.

  While we grazed our way through this I explained to him, in more detail than I had on the telephone, what had brought me there and what I was trying to find out.

  And this time, this time it seemed that I'd hit paydirt.

  "I know about those paintings," Yuri said, first looking around to see if anybody was listening in.

  "About Stetten's paintings?"

  "About all the paintings that were on the truck."

  That started my heart pounding. I sat up straight and put down my salmon sandwich. "You know where they are?"

  He nodded gravely. "You mustn't say where you got this information, Ben."

  "Of course not, you have my word."

  It was a complicated tale, not made any simpler by our language difficulties. At the war's end, it appeared, the truck and all its contents had been captured by the trophy brigades somewhere in eastern Austria. Some said that it had been taken directly from a captured German convoy, others that it had come to them by way of a unit of Austrian partisans; Yuri didn't know which story was true. Once back in Russia, the paintings went to a central collecting point in Moscow, along with everything else the brigades had "liberated," and there they had stayed until 1947 or 1948, at which time some of the materials were distributed to Russia's major museums. Of the hundred and six paintings on the truck, six had gone to the Pushkin Museum, three to the Hermitage, and two to the Tretyakov. The others were put into a KGB warehouse in Moscow.

  He smiled, pleased with himself. "And that's the story."

  Everything but the punch line. "But where are they now?" I asked. "There aren't any more KGB warehouses. There isn't any more KGB."

  Yuri started to squirm. "But I thought you asked me what happened to them at the end of the war."

  "Well, I did, but what I really need to know is who has them now."

  "Now?" He shook his head. "No, that you do not want to know."

  "Yuri, please—"

  "Ben—"

  By now the noise level in the restaurant, which had been steadily going up, had just about gone off the scale, so in addition to o
ur polyglot-language problem we were having trouble hearing each other. Dining out in Russia is unlikely to be a quiet affair under any circumstances, and as the evening wears on it gets noisier. Partly it's because the entertainment inevitably grows louder—the balalaika duo had been replaced by a rowdy (and apparently raunchy) floor show with disco lights—and partly because of the incredible amount of vodka that the diners put away. Every table but ours had a liter-bottle of Smirnoff, Stolichnaya, or Sinopskaya sitting on it in an ice bucket. Every few minutes a waiter would come, unscrew the cap, and slosh the stuff into four-ounce tulip glasses, filling them to the brim as if it were wine or mineral water. And the noise would go up another notch.

  It didn't seem to bother Yuri, who was either used to it or deafened by frequent exposure to it, but it was giving me a headache, so I suggested we leave. Out in the blessedly quiet street I started in on him again as we began walking back toward the hotel. "Yuri, this is really important to me—"

  "Ben, do I have to put it into words? You must know what happened to them—the same thing that happened to anything else in the KGB repositories that could bring a price."

  Yes, I knew. He meant they'd fallen under the control of the mafia. When the KGB had been disbanded, its displaced members hadn't taken long to find another place that was practically made for their specialized skills: the newly hatched Russian mafia, which quickly took the place of the old KGB as the most powerful, and feared institution in Russian society. High-level KGB officials moved with ease into high-level mafia positions and never left. And with them went much of the KGB's treasure-storehouse of weapons, drugs, booze, and art.

  "If you mean the mafia," I said, "yes, I guess I already knew that, but it doesn't get me anywhere, there's nothing I can do with it. I need specifics. I need—"

  He shook his head. "Ben, I'm sorry, I can't tell you any more." We had reached the corner of Nevsky Prospect. We were both hunched and shivering; the temperature was dropping fast. I noticed that Yuri, hugging himself, hung back, out of the range of the bright street lamps.