Max paused, taking a drink. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Walter also disappeared, but he had a great deal of help, from some very surprising sources.” He picked up the next document, a declassified U.S. Army report, and continued the story.
Walter Beck was captured by American forces as he made his way toward northern Italy. His papers identified him as Horst Schmidt, a Wehrmacht chaplain. His interrogation by an army lieutenant had just commenced when Beck, desperately ill, collapsed in a faint from a lucky but severe case of flu and was carried unconscious to the infirmary. After his recovery, a paperwork mistake sent him directly into the general camp population of POWs without further questioning. He never had to bare his arm, on which the SS blood-group tattoo would have betrayed his identity. After the general release of prisoners he spent the next three years working in an olive grove on a farm owned by a friend of the SS, part of an underground network devoted to helping ex-Nazis elude detection. One day he received a packet with Red Cross identity papers and an Argentine landing permit, provided through the efforts of Alois Hudal, an Austrian bishop at the Vatican.
In May 1948 he boarded a Croatian freighter bound for Buenos Aires, where he was welcomed into a community of German fugitives among Argentine Catholics. He was given a laborer’s job in a saddle factory, but introductions made by his contacts soon led to work for the Peron government, which needed officers like Beck to train the military. Beck also found himself sought out by the American CIA, which paid him to provide a steady stream of hearsay and gossip about men he had known in his ancestral home, in what was now East Berlin, in exchange for which they kept his identity a secret. Beck was soon living opulently, happy to serve both masters. He married an heiress and thought his future secure.
After a decade or so things began to fray. The Americans grew bored with gossip and their money dried up. And then an Israeli team kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, who lived quite near Beck.
Argentina was no longer safe. He needed money. He left his wife without saying good-bye and went deep underground, hiding in a basement flat belonging to a sympathetic Argentine diplomat. He used his network to send a man to his father’s gallery in Berlin, to collect the case he’d left there in 1945. The crate traveled to Argentina in a diplomatic shipment, a costly but common method used by the Nazis to transport contraband out of Europe.
Beck had the reliquary broken down, the gold melted and the jewels mounted and sold. He also disposed of several of his paintings, modern works by Picasso and Chagall, highly marketable at the time.
He made his way to Paraguay, whose president, Alfredo Stroessner, had long provided another safe haven for Nazis. Beck lived in Asunción for nearly a decade, making regular payments for protection but growing more uncomfortable as the corruption of Stroessner’s government spiraled out of control. Men with so little personal honor would sell him for a pittance to the Jews, who were not letting go of a long-ago war. Josef Mengele was in country, one of the most high-profile targets alive.
One day Beck noticed two young men watching him at a café. They appeared not to know each other, one on a bicycle, another reading a paper, but to his growing paranoia they might as well have been wearing Stars of David. They followed him but he lost them. He did not return home but collected his valuables from their hiding place and fled to La Paz.
“This brings us to Victor Maslov,” Max said. He pulled a thick stack of clippings from a file. “He figured prominently in a series of articles in the New York Times about international arms dealers.”
Victor Maslov had scrapped his way up from nothing, starting work for a cousin who had acquired a World-War-II-era American bomber and converted it to carry freight. The cousin was no businessman but Maslov was. He learned to fly and soon was ferrying black-market goods to Croatia and Yugoslavia, Greece, and Hungary. He dealt mostly in wheat and flour at first, then beer and whisky, willing to make dangerous night landings as he built a network of partners in Europe and Africa. He soon had two more planes, graduating to small arms along with the whisky, then abandoning whisky altogether and selling nothing but arms. As regional conflicts grew so did his capabilities. His fleet eventually included an Ilyushin-76 aircraft big enough to ferry tanks.
He bought from America and Europe and sold in every corner of the world, meticulous with the end-user certificates he needed to keep the business legitimate under international law. His was a world of killers and despots, and one did not survive in that world without being ruthless and shrewd. Wherever he operated men died, whether as victims of the weapons he sold or from the hidden workings of his enterprise. He was a master of the grey world of the international arms trade, protected by powerful interests in every country. Governments condemned him at the same time they did business with him.
The press dubbed him the Merchant of Death. News magazines ran full-color spreads of the destruction caused by his weapons, sometimes in the same issue in which they ran features about his private life. One of the world’s most eligible bachelors, he had homes in Los Angeles and Paris, a liking for high-stakes gambling, and impeccable taste in clothing and women. He had one genuine passion: he loved fine art. He collected it, studied it, was moved by it. He was self-taught, spending time in galleries and museums the world over. His acquisitions came from established auction houses and dealers and from less legitimate sources. Not only did he love art, he sometimes used it as currency in cases where a government’s financial controls hindered a particular transaction.
In 1981 Maslov was in Bolivia to negotiate a large arms deal with General Luis Garcia Meza, the brutal new Bolivian president. A bizarre alliance of characters had swept Meza to power in 1980, including the Roberto Suarez drug cartel and a group of Nazis and young neofascists led by Klaus Barbie, a member of the Gestapo known as the Butcher of Lyon.
Maslov disliked dealing with drug-financed clients because they attracted the attention of the American DEA, which Maslov feared more than the drug lords. They at least operated ethically, but the agency had used vile means to bring down more than one of his competitors. He was glad of their misfortune but had no desire to join their numbers.
Maslov was in the Palacio Quemado in La Paz on the final day of a difficult negotiation, in the course of which he had sized up Meza as an untrustworthy fool who would hold power no more than six months. Meza had placed a sizable order but wanted more weaponry than he could afford, particularly semiautomatic weapons and grenade launchers. He was still $8 million short of Maslov’s price. Meza had little hard currency and offered drugs instead, seeming genuinely surprised when Maslov laughed out loud at the notion, then compounding the humor by suggesting that Maslov extend credit. Exasperated, Maslov had excused himself to let Meza confer with his advisers.
That was when, almost absently, he noticed the Caravaggio.
He nearly strode right by it, a dark painting in a dark corner, propped casually with a half dozen others against a wall dominated by the gilded-gaudy portraits of Bolivian dictators and generals, which in turn were dwarfed by a twenty-foot painting of Simon Bolivar astride his horse, victorious on the battlefield.
The painting was unsigned, but Maslov knew the artist almost as surely as he knew his own face in the mirror. All of the paintings propped against the wall were valuable, but only one truly mattered to him.
Maslov returned to his meeting. “As you might know, Excellency, I am something of an art enthusiast. I see four or five pieces there that might interest me. Perhaps we could make an arrangement that would solve your cash-flow difficulties?”
“We can do nothing with those, at least not yet. They belong to a new supporter. A friend of Barbie’s, a Colonel Beck. We are at a stalemate. His estimation of their value is, I’m afraid, quite inflated.”
“If I am not overstepping, what does Colonel Beck want?”
“What they all want,” Meza said contemptuously. “A diplomatic passport and money. He claims the paintings are worth eight million. Our expert placed their value
at no more than four.”
Maslov knew their expert, the director of the national museum, a man who’d spent a lifetime acquiring portraits of generals and their horses. He had to be a fool of considerable accomplishment to have missed this, but he had.
“Your expert is wrong,” Maslov said.
“Perhaps, but no matter. We have summoned a specialist from Paris to settle the difference.”
Maslov shrugged. “Suit yourself, but I’ll give you Beck’s eight. However, I leave tonight. The offer is good only if we conclude the arrangement now, at this moment. If so you’ll have your weapons—the entire order—before the week is out.”
Meza could barely conceal his surprise, but he saw the opportunity to up the ante. “Unfortunately, my friend, it is not so easily done. The offer is very generous, but the paintings are not an outright gift. Colonel Beck wants cash out of the deal.”
“How much?”
Beck had asked for $2 million. “Three million,” Meza said.
“Why don’t you throw him in prison and keep it yourself?”
“His German friends continue to provide us support. We cannot alienate them. Besides, these are not the last of his assets. We may need him again.”
“Very well,” said Maslov. “I’ll pay the colonel myself.”
“But …” Meza fumbled for words, outmaneuvered.
“I insist,” said Maslov, rising to leave. “Do we have a deal?”
That night Caravaggio, Velázquez, Picasso, Braque, and a few others accompanied Victor Maslov to Los Angeles. From the aircraft he made a call to General Torrelio, the Minister of the Interior who was seeking to overthrow the young Meza dictatorship. Maslov did not often betray a client, but he knew not to back a loser. General Torrelio was delighted to receive details of the impending shipment and promptly wired $2 million to Maslov as the discounted price for the weapons. Maslov knew the money came from the DEA, which sweetened the deal. A week later, the promised arms shipment arrived at a remote airstrip near La Paz. Torrelio’s men ambushed Meza’s troops and took possession of the cargo Maslov had sold to Meza. It was the beginning of the end of the young Meza dictatorship.
A Bolivian colonel delivered a message to Walter Beck, arranging a meeting at which he would be paid for the paintings and given his new passport. Beck appeared punctually, secure in the knowledge that the Bolivian generals did not betray their benefactors.
Eighteen hours later, an unconscious Walter Beck was carried off a plane in Tel Aviv and bundled into the back of a battered van. His captors did not care to repeat the spectacle of an Eichmann trial. Beck awakened naked in the Negev desert, in a tiny dark cell with a dirt floor and a slit for a window. He bloodied his hands pounding on the walls, calling for help from men who did not hear him. It was hellish hot. “Water!” He screamed. “Animals!”
In Bolivia, word leaked that the Israelis had abducted Beck. The Israelis denied it. Of course, everyone assumed they were lying.
Max closed the folder on Walter Beck and Victor Maslov. “That’s just about it,” he said.
“Just about,” Joe Cooley said. “But there’s the obvious question—how did a man like Victor Maslov part with a painting like this? How did it get to you?”
“A petty thief, a man named Lonnie. One of the most interesting clients I’ve worked with in thirty years. He sent me a letter.” Max found yet another magazine clipping, this one featuring his own picture.
“Remember this?”
It was Max’s gift that he was able to read people. He had been wrong on occasion, but not often, and the trepidation he’d felt about Lonnie Mack contacting him out of the blue being a disguise for some sting or fraud had dissipated the instant they met. By the end of the meeting he was as certain as he’d ever been of anything that Lonnie Mack was the genuine article. Sometimes it was that way in the art world: a Rembrandt discovered at a rummage sale, a Braque in Aunt Sally’s attic. And then a man like Lonnie, a petty thief who accidentally stumbled into the mother lode.
Lonnie was skinny, nervous, and polite, worried whether he could trust Max, at first saying that it was a friend who had actually stolen the painting but quickly giving up that pretense.
“So I can trust you, I mean, even if it was stolen? I mean, not that I did, or anything. I just know someone.”
Max waved his hands. “Please, Mr. Mack, tell me. If I can’t help you, I’ll tell you that, too. There are many possibilities with something like this—including returning it to the owner, or their insurance company, for a reward. That can be done anonymously.”
“Really?” Lonnie’s eyes lit at that. “OK then. See, I’m a termite man, you know?
“I beg your pardon?”
“Termites, you know. Bugs.”
“Ah.” Max raised his eyebrows. He did not understand.
“My brother Frank has a company. We kill drywood termites. They do a lot of damage, you know? They’d go through this place of yours in about a week. The only way you can get them is gas.”
“Gas?”
“Yeah. Sulfuryl fluoride. We have to wrap it up in tarps—the whole house. Takes three days. I’m the one does the alarm systems, so we can clear the house and secure it. Well, I always tell the owners to change their codes after we finish, but I’ve taken a course, you know? I can fix the box so I can still get in, even after they’ve changed it.
“I check out the house and see what there is to boost later on. We gas the termites, take off the tarps, and that’s that. Then a few weeks or months later, I get back in and help myself. I never get greedy or nothin’, just stuff that’s easy to get rid of.”
“That’s not risky?”
“Nah, that’s the easy part. On the way out I set the alarm, and then just break a window or door. Alarm goes off, police show up, bam. Burglar, they think.”
Max was amused. “And this is how you came across this painting? A … termite job?”
Lonnie nodded eagerly. “What a place, you know? Some kind of international businessman or something. I never met him. Always traveling, they said, real hotshot. I only met his man, this guy who said he was a curator. I didn’t know what that was until he told me; he took care of the stuff. Boy, did that place have stuff. Marble statues like in a museum, and bronze in the halls, paintings everywhere, and antique furniture. Fact is, I really didn’t like it much, you know? I figured the termites might actually improve things, but you don’t say that to a customer.
“We looked around and boy, there were termites. You can tell by their feces. They leave little piles, you know? You see those piles, that’s your house, coming down.
“He was all worried about the paintings. I told him it was probably one of the frames that brought the termites in in the first place, from Bora Bora or somewhere, and that the gas would hurt them, wouldn’t hurt nothing except food and dogs and like that. He said he couldn’t take any chances, though, so he went to all the trouble to get the pictures out of their frames.
“He called an armored-car company to pick everything up, and that’s when I got lucky. My guys were setting up, you know, tarps everywhere, plastic and all, and these guys are crating up the pictures, very white-glove deal. Big waste of time, but it’s not my money, OK? Must have been a hundred crates, all over the place, but I didn’t care, I was just noticing they had a pretty good set of copper pots and pans in the kitchen.
“They finished up and signed their papers, and the armored cars left, and I had to see everyone out, see, it’s my job and I have to be very careful so nobody gets gassed. And that’s when I saw they missed a crate. It was half-covered by some of our plastic already and they just missed it, you know?
“I didn’t even know what was in it, but I knew I could take it and nobody would ever be the wiser, because they signed the papers and all, and if they ever noticed, they’d figure it was the armored-car guys, and some insurance company would pay. I don’t like insurance companies much, you know? So I took it.”
Lonnie shrugged. “Easy as that
, but I have to say I was pretty disappointed when I got the crate open. A bejillion bucks worth of stuff in that house, and all I managed to get was an old painting. A pretty gross one at that. Kid holding up a guy’s head, blood everywhere. Definitely not something to hang next to your TV, you know?
“I thought about just throwing it out, or even taking it back and leaving it in the hallway, and no one would ever know. Hell, I couldn’t do nothin’ with a painting. The only painting I’d ever boosted was a velvet one. They said it was done for Elvis Presley, you know? Or was it by him, maybe? Anyway, I got eight hundred bucks for it, so I was pretty happy.
“So I didn’t know what else to do, I just nailed it up in the shed. Then one day Della—she’s my girlfriend, she works in a beauty salon, and like five years later, she brought home one of those magazines the customers look at, and there was a story about a lost painting. The picture was a lot like mine, only hanging in Italy or something. I knew mine was old, too, so … well? I just thought it might be the real deal.” So I brought it home and showed Della, and we put it up over the dinette.”
“So that’s how you found me,” Max said. In thirty years there had been only one public blemish on the Wolff Gallery. The story had been sensational, involving famous clients and alleging that Wolff had sold a stolen painting on the black market. Max had done that very thing many times, but not in the instance alleged in the article. Nothing had come of it except for a libel suit, which Max won, and the publicity, which had not been altogether a bad thing. The story had run in the same issue as that about the lost Caravaggio.
“That’s right,” Lonnie nodded proudly. “I read the article. So, Mr. Max Wolff, do you think you can help me?”
Joe Cooley laughed out loud. “Imagine that,” he said. “A Caravaggio, hanging in a trailer. Next to the spaghetti sauce.”
Rogues Page 22
