Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  "That's putting it mildly," I said. "I've never seen anything like it."

  "Oh, yes?" He turned to look at me. "Do you think they might prove useful in pressing my claims, then?"

  "Useful. . . !" I said before I realized that he was chortling away with his chin tucked down into his ascot, having his little joke.

  "Hm, yes," I said, going along with it, "I suppose you might say that."

  Indeed he might. There was information here that, to my knowledge, had never been recorded anywhere else; not in any catalogue raisonné, not in the MFA&A reports, not in the ERR records. There was only one place it could have come from, and that was from a personal, detailed study of the paintings themselves, all seventy-three of them. Added to everything else, it was tangible confirmation that they had once really belonged to Stetten's father. It was more than confirmation; it was as close to solid proof as you could get when you were dealing with war-looted art; better than some dubious provenance or some easily forgeable bill of sale from a defunct dealer. Without some enormously convincing evidence to the contrary, any court of law in the world would accept Stetten's claim to the collection.

  Which raised a question. "Albrecht, what about those other paintings you tried to get back from the government? Something like four hundred, didn't you say?"

  "No, something like three-hundred-and-fifty were taken by the Nazis, but most disappeared for good. Only thirty or so were ever returned to the Austrian government. Those were the ones I filed for."

  "But you couldn't convince the officials they were yours." I'd been sitting a long time, so I got up and moved to the railing beside him, both of us looking out over the gardens.

  "The officials," he said dryly, "were not easy to convince."

  "I know that, but I don't understand how they could possibly give you any trouble if you had material like this."

  "Ah, but I didn't. All I have are the contents of this album, seventy-three paintings. These were my father's most precious possessions, the ones we took away to Paris with us. Unfortunately, he didn't go to such lengths with the others. Or it may be that he did, and they've been lost. I don't remember ever seeing them."

  "Damn, that's a shame."

  "My dear friend, don't look so gloomy," he said. "Were you under the impression that life is always fair?" He patted the binder. "These, these are the ones that mean the most to me, and with you to help, I have new hope that they may yet be found."

  "Let's hope so," I said, not very confidently.

  "And after all, don't forget that I still have my own collection to comfort me."

  That came out of the blue, a complete surprise. "You do? But I thought everything had been—"

  "No, no, I have quite a sizeable collection still. I've had the wall between the sitting room and one of the bedrooms knocked out to make a gallery. Would you like to see it? His eyes had lit up, something that invariably happens to collectors when they have the chance to show their things off to an appreciative audience. And the pink was back in his cheeks.

  "Very much."

  "Excellent. It's getting a bit chilly out here in any case."

  We walked through the big living room with a sprightly if limping Stetten, sans cane, leading the way, past an old-fashioned kitchen in which Georg was skulking noiselessly about with his sleeves rolled up, then down a hallway with more family photographs, to a room closed off by a heavy pair of velvet curtains instead of a door.

  "Now, will you let me go in first and adjust the lighting? I want it to be right. You know how important the proper lighting is."

  He slipped in between the curtains and I could hear him fussing and talking to himself on the other side. "Ah," he said after a minute, "that's perfect. Come in, Ben!"

  Chapter 25

  I parted the curtains and stepped through. Don't ask me what I was expecting. Probably something English—Turners, or Constables, or maybe Hogarths—or else an Impressionist collection. You know, a son's rebellion against his father's taste for the Old Masters, and so forth. Well, this was a rebellion against his father's taste for the Old Masters, all right, but there weren't any Turners or Constables.

  I found myself standing in a strange, semi-darkened room with a gray-blue floor, dusky olive walls, and a ceiling painted a silvery aquamarine. The indirect lighting that Stetten had been fussing over was a dim, sea-water green with perhaps one or two rose-colored bulbs hidden away somewhere to cast a diffuse, sunset-like glow. The result was to make me feel as if I were standing on the bottom of a giant aquarium—an effect not lessened by the objects on display. There were thousands of them: miniature helmeted divers, some of them battling octopuses or alligators; tiny shipwrecks; pert, Kewpie-like mermaids—hundreds of mermaids—and bathing beauties, and little, hollow castles and lighthouses, and wrecked ships, and treasure chests with gold spilling out of them, and Chinese pagodas and Japanese torii, and porcelain snails and seashells and fishes and starfish. Altogether, there must have been five thousand such things, none of them more than six inches high and most of them less. Some were displayed on shelves along the walls, some in cases, some in water-filled but fishless aquariums of their own.

  As far as I could tell, there wasn't anything in the room worth more than $4.99.

  I could see Stetten off to the side, watching me with nervous anticipation. I stood there staring dumbly around, searching for something nice to say. Everything looked as if it had been picked up at a dime store or a seaside souvenir stand. "It's . . ." I ran my tongue over my lips. "It's astonishing. I've never seen anything like it."

  "Do you really think so?" he said, touchingly pleased. "I value your opinion, Ben."

  "Absolutely," I said. "It's beautiful, Albrecht, really beautiful. And the way you have it displayed!" What the hell, in for a dime, in for a dollar, and who was I hurting?

  "You like aquarium furniture?"

  "Sure, I do." At least now I had a name for the stuff.

  "The lighthouses—they're particularly wonderful, don't you think so?"

  "The lighthouses, yes. Definitely, the lighthouses. Wonderful."

  He moved fondly to a six-foot-high case full of the things. "I don't mean to boast, but I honestly believe this to be the finest collection of Spanish bisque miniature lighthouses in the world. Not the largest, you understand—Nobutaka in Kyoto has the largest collection; I'd be the first to admit that—but the finest. I'll stand by that."

  "Mm," I said.

  "Do you know what their function is? They were designed as places for baby fish to hide so the bigger fish don't eat them. Interesting, isn't it? And some of them are aerators to keep the fish from drowning, which seems an odd thing to have to worry about with fish but is nonetheless true. As for the mermaids—oh, and did you notice these little seals with the balls balanced on their snouts? So delightful. They were made in the early 1880's; not so easy to find any more, I can tell you. Look, look here, the balls spin if you . . ."

  This was a Stetten I hadn't seen before, passionate and melting at the same time. Everything about him had softened as he spoke: his eyes, his voice, even the dry creases around his mouth. The pink on his cheeks was brighter than ever. He was like a man raving about his children or his long-lost first love.

  He took me through the collection, talking non-stop and shining with something close to bliss. The seals with the balls on their snouts were worth over $5,000, not that you could find them anywhere these days because there were only about 200 in existence, and the Spanish bisque lighthouses brought $2,000 each. I made appreciative noises, of course, but, personally, I still wouldn't have given five bucks for anything in the place.

  "Albrecht," I said when we were back in the living room, with me sunk into one of the low, cream-colored sofas and Stetten on a thinly padded armchair that would be easier for him to get out of, "may I ask you something?"

  "Certainly, my friend," he said, ruddy with the afterglow of his mermaids and lighthouses. He held up a cut-glass decanter. "A cordial?"

&n
bsp; "Yes, thanks."

  Stetten filled two glasses and gave one to me. "Prosit."

  It was caraway-flavored Kümmel, another of the spicy Continental liqueurs that sit so queerly on the American palate. I sipped, set the glass down, and leaned forward (not an easy thing to do on that soft, sagging sofa) steepling my fingers in front of my chin while I looked for the right words.

  "It's easy to see how much you love your collection," I began.

  He looked suddenly alarmed, as if afraid that I was about to find fault with it.

  "And I can certainly understand why," I added to his relief. "But at the same time . . . well, I get the impression that the paintings don't mean that much to you—"

  He looked hurt. "Ben. Why do you say such a thing?"

  "No, offense, Albrecht, but they just don't seem to affect you the same way. Watching you in there with that, um, aquarium furniture, you were a different man. That seal with the ball on its nose made you light up in a way that The Countess of Torrijos never did."

  He laughed quietly. "Well, I have to admit that you're right about that. It's true that I don't have my father's passion for paintings as paintings. I don't really know that much about them—or care that much about them as such, if it comes to that. And their monetary value means very little to me."

  I wondered if that could be because he'd never computed what they were worth. Surely he couldn't be rich enough to be that casual about three hundred million dollars. "Then why am I here?" I asked. "Why are you investing so much effort into getting them back?"

  He put his glass down. "Is that a serious question, Benjamin?"

  He pronounced it the European way, Ben-yameen. It produced an unexpected tug because of course it was the Yiddish way too, and that's how zayde had said my name. Zayde, I suddenly realized, would have been younger than Stetten when he died, yet at the time he had seemed like Abraham the Patriarch.

  "Yes, it's a serious question."

  He stood up with his glass, went to the French doors to the terrace and looked out over the town and the hills. "I wonder if I can make you understand," he said as if he were talking to someone out there. A lethargic bluebottle fly that had managed to outlast the summer bumbled on the pane near his face but he didn't seem to notice. After a few moments, without turning from the doors, he began to speak.

  "I don't want them because they're beautiful paintings, or even valuable paintings," he said in the same quiet, neutral tone that his voice had in the Café Imperial, when he told me about what had happened to his family during the war, "I want them because they are my father's beloved paintings, taken from him at the cost of his life. I want them because, by recovering them I recover a precious piece of my family's past that was stolen from me. My memory, my identity, are in those pictures. And—well, I want them because it's right, Ben. If I can really recover them, you see, I will have attained, on behalf of my dead family, after so many years, the only justice I can still hope for."

  Delivered by an actor in a movie, it would have made a mawkish, uncomfortable speech, but from Stetten, said in that simple, almost throw-away manner, it made the hair on my neck stand up. I wanted to apologize for having asked the question in the first place.

  "Forgive me, I didn't mean to make a speech," he said, still looking out over the town.

  "I—that—I'm sorry I asked. I should have understood what they mean to you."

  He turned from the window, blinking. I could see that he was more moved than his voice had let on. "I may know very little about the art of painting, but those pictures I love with all my heart."

  As always, he refused to stay sentimental for long. "Almost as much, in fact, "as my Spanish bisque lightouses."

  * * *

  The Hotel Altstadt was in the most picturesque part of Salzburg, right on Judengasse, one of the main pedestrian streets. A brewery in medieval times, it still had old stone arches, wood-beamed ceilings, and fifteenth-century stucco work poking picturesquely out here and there among the many twentieth-century mod. cons. If not quite in a class with the Grand Europe in St. Petersburg, it was nevertheless pretty swank and would have been out of my league if I'd been the one paying the bill. My room had a pleasant little window alcove on the quiet side of the building, overlooking the Salzach River, which flowed behind the hotel through the heart of the town, and it was there that I sat for what was left of the day, watching the copper roofs on the far bank turn a glowing orange-yellow as the sun fell, replaying the day I'd just had.

  It took a lot of replaying: the meeting with Szarvas and János, Szarvas's murder, the wild chase through Ecseri Piac, the heart-stopping confrontation with Tibor, the flight to Salzburg, the fantastic catalogue that Stetten's father had prepared, the many sides of Stetten himself. . . . Some day. Was it possible that not even twelve hours had passed since I'd been eating prune pastries at the Hotel Duna's funhouse-buffet?

  Thinking of food made me realize that that all I'd had since then were some finger-sandwiches and cookies out on Stetten's terrace, which made me realize that I was as hungry as a wolf. I walked downstairs and out into the narrow streets, bustling even at eight p.m. with tourists, crowded shops, and restaurants. It was impossible to go two steps without the smell of schnitzel, gulasch, or Salzburger nockerl in one's nostrils but what I sought was nourishment for the spirit as well as the body; good, familiar, honest, all-American food. Pizza.

  I found it too; a thick-crust pepperoni pizza at a tiny place with picnic tables out on the sidewalk, just around the corner from Getriedegasse 9, Mozart's birthplace. I shared a wooden trestle table with a lively group of Austrian soldiers in fatigues, clinked pewter beer steins with them, and returned to the Altstadt in an optimistic and self-assured frame of mind.

  When I got back I called Alex's number in Brookline.

  "Alex, hi. Listen, I wonder if you could do something for me—"

  "I'm fine, thank you for asking."

  "Sorry," I said, laughing, "I've had sort of a long day. I guess I'm a little stupid. How are you?"

  "Still fine, thanks, how are you? Where are you?"

  "In Salzburg. I'm spending some time with Stetten."

  "Ah. Is he—well, you can tell me about it in a minute. What was it you wanted me to do?

  "Stop by my place and pick up some stuff for me. I'll be going up to the Altaussee mine the day after tomorrow, and I realized it might be useful to have the MFA&A material on the place with me. It's sitting right on my desk in a blue binder. Records of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Something Something Something."

  "How would I get in?"

  "Ring the downstairs buzzer for Rochelle Blackburn. I'll tell her to expect you. She'll have a key."

  Come on, I thought, at least ask me why Rochelle Blackburn has a key to my condo, show that much interest. (Rochelle was the 62-year-old building manager.) But no, she wouldn't.

  "All right, and do what with the file?"

  "Fax it to me at the Hotel Seevilla in Altaussee. Got a pencil?"

  "Just a second. Yes, go ahead."

  "The fax number's 622-71-3-02-82. Country code's 43. There are forty or fifty pages, so it'll take a little time, but I have a fax machine right there. Make yourself some coffee. There might even be some cookies in the freezer; you can defrost them in the microwave."

  "All right. And you need it by when? Now? Tomorrow?"

  "No, the day after. I want to stay in Salzburg another day. He's got this incredible catalogue of his paintings that his father made and I want to spend one more day with it."

  "All right, Ben, will do. Now, seriously, how are you? How's it going?"

  "Well—are you sure you really want to know?"

  "Of course."

  "Okay, you asked for it. Where was I the last time I called?

  "In Vienna. You were about to go to St. Petersburg."

  "Right. Well, I've been to St. Petersburg, where I had a strange but interesting visit and got very little information, but all kinds of dire
warnings from Yuri Minkov. I also went to Budapest—"

  "Budapest? Hungary? Why?"

  "One of the claimants you told me about lived there; I thought I might learn something."

  "And?"

  I took a breath. "And he turned out to be a mafia bigwig who was shot to death right in front of me in this huge flea market, and I only managed to get out of there alive by clubbing a mafia hood in the chops, disguising myself as a bad guy, and running like hell for the airport with the whole Budapest mafia right on my tail. I had to leave all my clothing, my luggage, everything, behind."

  There was a very long silence at the other end. "You know what's really weird?" she said at last. "I believe every word you've just told me."

  "You should, it's true."

  "When did all this happen?"

  "This morning."

  "This. . . ! My God, and the day's not even over yet."

  "Bite your tongue. I've had all the excitement I can handle for one day."

  "Ben," she said soberly. "What's going on?"

  I settled myself in the armchair a little more comfortably. "This may take a little time," I said.

  Chapter 26

  The two-and-a-half-hour trip from Salzburg to Altaussee, through the Lake District, is one of the most beautiful drives in the Austrian Alps, which is to say one of the most beautiful drives anywhere: craggy, glacier-topped ridges and pyramidal peaks above you every which way you look; rolling, impossibly green pastures; humpy, forested hills; tiny hamlets clustered in the very bottoms of valleys as if they'd slid down the steep sides and come to rest there; and sky-blue mountain lake after mountain lake, each with a picturesque village on its shore. Heaven.

  But Lake Altaussee is one of the smaller lakes and Altaussee itself one of the less picturesque hamlets, lacking the usual gemütlich village center and arranged instead into a long, strip-zone-style line on either side of the road. At the lakefront, where the road ends, things are better: leafy, sun-dappled paths alongside the water, rustic pensions, fish restaurants, and the lake itself, crisscrossed by small tour boats and towered over on three sides by walls of granite rearing straight up from the water's edge a thousand feet and more.