Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  These aren't exact copies, you understand—the man's goatee is darker, and he's looking rightish, not leftish, and there's no book in his hand, but it's close enough to make anybody stop and think. And—get this—all anybody knows about it is that it came into ERR possession in PARIS, some time in 1942!—source unknown! As far as I know, in all these years nobody's ever put in a claim for it.

  So—could this possibly be what Nussbaum's talking about? It's probably wishful thinking on my part because I'd like to help him if we can; it's obvious from his letter that he isn't getting any competent legal advice of his own. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it turns out to be true?

  So if you do talk to him, would you see what you think of him? Maybe he can provide some helpful details. If you think there's something there, put him in touch with me. It could be that CIAT could give him some assistance. (But don't get his hopes up! You know what the odds are.)

  Still, stranger things have happened. What do you think?

  What did I think? I thought it was a great idea. Cheered by the possibility that I might at long last be able to do a deserving, living human being some actual, concrete good, I settled back and asked the stewardess for another cup of strong, good Austrian Airlines coffee.

  * * *

  "Actually, I didn't want to ask you anything, I wanted to show you something," Alois said, seated behind his desk and puffing away at a curving, carved Meerschaum pipe, handsomer than the stubby little job I'd seen him with before, but equally foul. He pulled open the crammed top drawer of the desk, rooted around through dog-eared cards and papers, ballpoint pens, and pipe cleaners (some used), and located a sheet of paper folded in half. "What do you think of this? I'm afraid it didn't reproduce very well."

  I spread it out to see what looked like an enlarged ID photo, possibly from a passport, of a brutal, nearly cubical head set on a neck like a tree trunk. It was a good thing I'd put down the coffee I was sipping because otherwise I'd have gotten it all over Alois.

  "It's him! This is—he's the one who, who killed Simeon, the one who . . . Alois, who is this? How did you get this picture?"

  Alois snuffled with pleasure, his shoulders shaking. "I thought you'd be pleased!"

  "I don't know if 'pleased' is the right word," I said, staring at the blunt, heavy-jawed face and feeling a ghost-twinge in my left side, where the prybar had made contact.

  "This illustrates what superior investigative work can accomplish," Alois said complacently. "It was your description of him that made me begin to wonder, and now I find that I was right. The gentleman's name is Janko Golubov."

  Good name for him, I thought. He looked like a Janko Golubov.

  "Otherwise known as The Hammer," Alois said.

  "Gee, I wonder why that is. What is he, a mafia killer, a . . ."

  "A hitman, yes, and a highly specialized one, one of those fellows who flies into a country, does the deed, and is on his way back out within two hours. Now, do you recall my mentioning the Chetverk gang?"

  "I think so. A Moscow crime family?"

  "Yes, the one that Zykmund Dulska was associated with. Well, it's also the one that uses Golubov. So you see, we've started to narrow things, to tighten the noose a little. Naturally, I'll want to tell the police in Boston about all this. Do you have a name for me?"

  "Sergeant Cox. I'll give you his number."

  I was beginning to get excited, to take heart. We had accomplished something, I thought. Simeon's killer; we knew who he was, we knew his name, we knew who he worked for. Maybe those crushed ribs and endless weeks of brushing my teeth in slow-motion had served a purpose after all. "Do you know where he is now? Can you find him?"

  "Not yet. People generally know where he was after the fact, when it's too late."

  "Is that right? He didn't strike me as all that bright." Persuasive, though.

  "Perhaps not, but he's effective enough at what he does," Alois said.

  My hand rose on its own to the still-tender area on my left side. "No kidding," I said. "Tell me about it."

  * * *

  A few minutes later I emerged blinking into the autumn sunlight and looked at my watch. Two o'clock. On the spur of the moment I called Jakob Nussbaum's number from a post office pay phone.

  "Mr. Nussbaum, this is Ben Revere. I'm in Vienna a day early. Do you suppose we might meet today instead of tomorrow? Would right now be all right?"

  "Why not, one day's as good as another. You know my address?"

  "Prinz-Eugen-Strasse 24."

  "That's right, it's on the corner of Plösslgasse, not far from the Belvedere. You can find it?"

  "I know just about where it is. I'll see you shortly. And sir? I hope you understand: I'm not here either as Mr. Stetten's advocate or as your adversary. I'm just interested in seeing that—well, that the right thing gets done, that—"

  "Yes, yes, you don't have to explain, I trust you. All right, I'll see you at—no, wait, that's not so good. Two-thirty, when the weather's good, I go for a walk in the Belvedere gardens with Wittgenstein. I have to; the old fellow depends on me."

  "Oh. Well, in that case it'd probably be better if we just waited—"

  "I tell you what. Why don't you meet us in the gardens? It's a beautiful day, we can talk there. We'll be by the big fountain at the top, you know, the one with Hercules pulling on the poor alligator's mouth? It's a beautiful view of the city from there."

  "Yes, but—"

  "We'll be on a bench. With us, it's more sitting than walking anyway."

  "Well but wouldn't you rather—"

  "Don't worry, Wittgenstein won't mind."

  Chapter 30

  Wittgenstein, being a miniature bearded Schnauzer of contemplative mien had no objection whatever, but lay placidly at our feet, his head resting on its forepaws in measured reflection, while Jakob Nussbaum, a spic-and-span old man in a buttoned-up, bright yellow cardigan sweater and a cornflower-blue bow tie, told me what he remembered about the painting.

  It wasn't much. He'd been only sixteen in 1938, when he'd last seen it, and although he'd been working part-time in his uncle's gallery, it was only in the nature of after-school sweeping and straightening up. He couldn't remember if the subject's beard was light or dark, or say for sure whether he was looking left or right, or if he had a book or anything else in his hand, or how "finished" the portrait was. And this was after seeing a photo in the papers only a week ago. All the same, he stuck to his guns. The minute he'd seen the photograph it had jumped out at him.

  But was he sure it was a Velazquez? Could it have been painted by Juan Bautista del Mazo? Well, about that he didn't know. He was pretty sure his uncle had said Velazquez. Mazo he'd never heard of. But whatever it was, it was one of the two pictures his uncle had given to Cazeau, the Parisian dealer, in 1938, before things had gotten really bad.

  "Two pictures? What was the other?"

  He shook his head. "That I can't tell you. My uncle didn't keep it in the shop so I never saw it. By a Frenchman—the name's on the tip of my tongue. Lebrun, was it? Delacroix? Le Nain? I'm not sure, I can't remember. But who's this Mazo fellow? Where does he come into it?"

  "I'll explain that in a minute. But is there anything else at all that you can tell me that might help identify it? Do you have any recollection of the frame, for example? Do you know who your uncle bought it from? Did he ever tell you anything about it, other than that it was by Velazquez?

  No, no, and no, he shook his head, and then, as if coming upon something he'd forgotten long ago: "Wait, it was one of a pair that Velazquez made, is that any help? There was a woman too . . . ."

  My ears pricked. Christie had said that there was a pair, that Mazo had made studies of both of the Velazquez portraits. I started to get excited on Nussbaum's account. "And your uncle owned both of them?"

  "No, no, I didn't mean that. He always wanted the other one, because it was the other half of the set, you see, they belonged together, a man and his sister, I believe. Or maybe it was a man and wife?
But the fellow who owned it, I can't remember his name, also Jewish, also an art dealer, wouldn't sell it. In fact, he kept trying to buy Eberhard's. They were always in competition, bitter enemies."

  He turned his thin, clean-shaven face up to the September sun, eyes closed. "Not so bitter, really. It was this man who was a friend of Paul Cazeau's and put my uncle in touch with him, which was a very great favor, and a lucky thing, because a few months later the gallery was Aryanized, and that was that." He looked at me. "You understand the term—Aryanized?"

  "Yes, I do," I said, dropping my glance to the dog. Aryanization had been the Nazi policy, officially applied in countries under German domination, of forcing all Jews who owned businesses to "sell" them to Gentiles, thereby morally and esthetically cleansing Europe of the dread influence of Jewish culture—and materially increasing the assets of non-Jewish merchants, a benefit that did not escape the notice of the local business communities.

  Nussbaum nodded, his hands folded quietly in his lap. "I'm sorry, young man," he said kindly, "I know it's not such a pleasant subject. I didn't mean to bring it up."

  I shook my head with something like awe. This made twice in the last week—Stetten had done it my first day in Vienna—that one of these resilient, upbeat old geezers who had been through the tortures of the damned had apologized for depressing me by mentioning it.

  He smiled at me. "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: how can he bear to live here, right where it all happened, among these very same people—" He gestured at the strollers, the baby-nurses, the old people on the benches. "—who didn't do anything to stop it from happening? Am I right?"

  "You're pretty close," I said.

  "It's a good question," he agreed. "Let me tell you a story. My father had a young friend, Dr. Luckner, a pediatrician, a very kindly, gentle man; he died only a few years ago. Well, when the Nazis came he saw a Jewish woman who was being mauled by hooligans commit suicide by jumping under a tram. People applauded. This was in the heart of Vienna. He was appalled, shocked. After a few days the Jews began to be rounded up and to disappear. Dr. Luckner couldn't claim ignorance; he could see as well as anyone what was happening. And what did he do about it? Nothing. He tried to live his life quietly, treating his patients, doing no harm to others, dealing as little as possible with the new authorities, making no trouble for himself or his family. Was he therefore a bad man? In his place, would I have done differently?" He gave me a gentle smile. "Would you?"

  "I don't know." I shook my head, filled with admiration for this tolerant old man.

  "Of course, it took me a little while to get so philosophical about it. Thirty-five years, to be exact."

  He had moved through several labor camps during the war, managing through blind luck and good health to avoid being sent to an extermination center, and ending up in Kielce, Poland at the war's end. He was 24 at the time, and went to South Africa, where some distant relatives on his mother's side lived. There he had gone to college and become a teacher of mathematics and philosophy for almost 30 years. When he retired he'd tried living near his son in Chicago for a while, looking for someplace that felt more like home. And ten years ago he'd reached the conclusion that the only place that would feel like home was home.

  "So back I came. And it was the right decision."

  "As long as another Hitler doesn't show up."

  "Hitler's not coming again." He leaned down to scratch behind the dog's ear. "Is he, Wittgenstein? Ah. Sussman."

  "Pardon?"

  "Sussman, that was his name—Eberhard's competitor, the one who owned the other painting we were talking about. Raoul Sussman. Also dead, of course, him and his whole family. They went in the first roundup. Us, we were luckier, we went a little later. So what do you say we go back to my apartment for a cup of coffee? I'm ready to put my feet up. You can tell me about this Mazo while we walk."

  * * *

  He surprised me by accepting without argument the possibility that the painting might be by the little-known Mazo rather than by the great Velazquez.

  "What would it be worth?" was what he wanted to know as we came out of the gardens onto Prinz-Eugen-Strasse.

  "I don't know—whatever it would bring. With a painter like Mazo there's really no such thing as market value. But probably a fair amount."

  "But not five million dollars?"

  "No, not five million. I'd guess a hundred thousand, maybe even two hundred thousand."

  "That's not chicken feed. Invested, it would do the trick. What do you think, Wittgenstein? Liver twice a day."

  The widowed Mr. Nussbaum and his dog, it seemed, now lived, in comfortable enough circumstances, on a combination of his pension and the largesse of his son-in-law, a building contractor in Chicago. His hopes for the painting, if he got it, were strictly financial: that it would allow him to provide for himself without being dependent on them.

  "I can't take from them any more. Besides, it would be nice to buy them a present now and then," he said wistfully, "instead of being a drain on them, not that they would ever bring it up."

  His apartment, a corner set of rooms on the third floor, was very Viennese—full of knicknacks, Oriental rugs, varnished surfaces, and dark, overstuffed chairs and hassocks, but with a light, modern kitchen in which, as promised, he brewed us some coffee in a French coffee-press and brought it out to the living room with a few straight-from-the-carton cookies arranged on a tray, which he set out on a coffee table. Wittgenstein, for his part, got a piece of knotted rawhide that he immediately and single-mindedly turned his attention to.

  Nussbaum sank into the armchair opposite mine, got his feet up on the hassock, and listened, visibly affected, while I told him about CIAT and Christie Valle de Leon's offer of help.

  "How wonderful, what a kind person. And you too, thank you! I'll get in touch with this woman right away."

  "That's fine, I'll fill her in." I was feeling pretty good myself.

  We grinned self-consciously at each other, embarrassing ourselves, and Nussbaum poured some more coffee. "What do you think of the view?" He gestured with his chin at the corner windows, and I got up to look.

  One of the windows faced the Belvedere Palace's grounds across the boulevard, and the other looked up Prinz-Eugen-Strasse to its origin at the World War II Russian War Memorial (or the Tomb of the Unknown Plunderer, as it was wryly referred to by the Viennese). Even now it was an elegant residential street with several embassies on it, but it had suffered heavy bomb damage during the war, so that for every beautiful, nineteenth-century apartment building still left—and Nussbaum's was one of them—there was now a plain, flat-fronted concrete box as well.

  "Nice," I said.

  Nussbaum came to stand beside me. "That's a building I never get tired of looking at."

  "This one right across the street?" It seemed an odd one to never get tired of: one of the anonymous cubes from the 1950's, with six rows of identical, rectangular windows. The sign out front declared that it was headquarters for a local employees' organization.

  "That's Prinz-Eugen-Strasse 22. In that building, or rather in the one that stood there before, was the Bureau of Jewish Emigration . . . as they chose to call it." I heard something like a little sigh escape him. "Colonel Eichmann's headquarters."

  Eichmann's headquarters. I stared at it, at the pleasant street on which it stood, at the beautifully maintained formal gardens across the way, at the elegant, civilized, courteous Viennese out walking or going about their business. Except for Number 22 itself, and the modern cars on the street, everything would have been the same in March of 1938. And yet . . . impossible to believe . . .

  "My father and I, we stood out there on that sidewalk for two days with a thousand other Jews, all the way down the block, because there was a rumor we could get exit visas, but they wouldn't let us in. A few, yes, but not us. The next day we were in the Spanish Riding School, and four days after that we were in the trains on our way to Lublin."

  "The Spanish Ridin
g School?" I said.

  "That was where they put us to wait," he said, still gazing at the plain building. He spoke quietly, in the same unemotional way that Stetten had told me his story. "Many people in Vienna were upset when they heard; they protested to the authorities."

  "Well, at least I suppose that shows—"

  "They were afraid that we would dirty the place. Which we did, all of those people cooped up in there." He smiled. "It's human nature, I don't blame them any more."

  I said nothing. I would blame them, I thought.

  The dog, sensing that he was wanted, came to him and gazed lustrously up into his eyes. Nussbaum crouched to take him in his arms. "Ah, Wittgenstein, things are better now, it's nothing for you to worry about."

  "But to live here," I said thickly, "right across the street . . ."

  "And why not?" he said mildly. "It's wonderful. Every day I look out that window, I see beautiful gardens. I look out this window I see there’s nothing there any more at Number 22. Eichmann's dead and gone, the bastard, with his boots, and his armband, and his Heil Hitlers. But me, I'm still right here, here I am."

  "That's a good way of looking at things," I said, smiling. Jakob Nussbaum had a lot of good ways of looking at things.

  "Besides, I got restaurants in the neighborhood, a Big Billa two blocks away, a bus right outside the door that goes straight downtown—excuse me a minute."

  The door buzzer had sounded. Still cradling Wittgenstein, he went to open it. I don't know what sense it was that tingled at the back of my neck and made me turn around, but when I did it was to see a hulking figure taking up almost the entire width of the doorway. I felt my insides twist even before I consciously recognized him.