Circles of Confusion (20 page)

"First she was in London, and then when the war ended in

Europe, she went to Munich. She was a clerk, and I guess the idea was to free up a man to fight against the Japanese."

"I wonder if she ever met my grandfather. He was stationed outside of Munich just after the war. He was born in Germany and came over here as a child. He never lost his accent, but he was proud to bean American. He came from a family of weavers, and when the war broke out he tried to enlist right away. But what did the Army want with a fifty-year-old tapestry expert? He pestered them until finally, near the end of the war, they gave in and assigned him to the Monuments, Fine Arts and Architecture Division."

Claire imagined a group of artists advanced into battle wearing smocks and waving paintbrushes. "What was that?"

"MFA&A was part of the Army. Its job was to protect the art that had survived the war and return it to its rightful owners. My grandfather spent a year working for them in a place called Berchtesgaden, just outside Munich." Dante rolled the r of "Berchtesgaden" in the back of his throat in a way that reminded her of Charlie. Clearly his grandfather had taught him as well as his grandmothers. Claire realized she was enjoying herself.

"So he tracked down missing tapestries?"

"That and a little bit of everything else. A lot of tapestries didn't make it through the war. They were too heavy to carry and too bulky to hide. Not like jewelry, which can be slipped into a pocket. And as the war went on and on, beauty became more of an abstract concept. He said it wasn't unusual for refugees to saw apart a Gobelin tapestry and use it for blankets."

Between sips of cappuccino, Dante painted a picture of a country in chaos. Jewelry and silver were hidden and then forgotten about. Art vanished into the hands of neighbors, refugees, the secret police, soldiers on both sides, and people who simply saw an opportunity and grabbed it. Things were available for the taking, even more so after Germany lost the war.

"My grandfather said the Russian DPs were the easiest to work with because they always crossed themselves when they saw pictures of the Madonna, and did not dare touch religious works. And when they broke into museums they usually limited themselves to taking the more useful costumes."

"So your grandfather traced art back to its original owners?"

"He spent most of his time there worrying about what to do with Goring's estate."

"Goring!" Claire started. "My roommate is eighty-three, and originally from Germany. She's Jewish, and they tried to bribe their way out with an old family painting that was supposed to be a Rembrandt. But the person who took their painting gave them papers that were no good and they were arrested. Charlie lost her whole family in the camps." Claire thought of the little boy whose name Charlie never uttered. It was as if she could not bear to pull him into the world again. "She told me they traded the painting to someone who worked for Goring."

Dante tapped his heavy white mug with his index finger. "My guess would be that whoever gave them false papers did it without Goring's knowledge. Hitler was never too particular about the provenance of his art, but Goring wasn't a thief. Of course, he didn't have to be. People were eager to do him favors, and it was known he collected art. He especially liked early German and Dutch Old Masters." They both glanced at the photos of Claire's painting, clearly something that would have interested Goring. "Sometimes he bought things for ridiculously low prices. More often they were given as 'gifts' that were really bribes—like the deal your roommate tried to make. He let several art collectors smuggle out their collections in return for a prize painting or two. They say that by 1940, he had the most important art collection in Europe."

Dante told Claire about Goring's collection, which bordered on obsession. The walls of his estate were hung so thickly with hundreds of paintings that their frames touched. He lounged on 500-year-old hand-carved furniture, walked on rare tapestries, ate off plates made from silver and gold. "He had a vase filled with diamonds, and while he was thinking he liked to pour them from hand to hand. By the end of the war, he was wearing red velvet robes covered with jewels."

"He sounds a little crazy."

Dante nodded. "Probably more than a little. But he was a crazy man with excellent taste. My grandfather used to get all worked up when he told me about what happened to all those beautiful things."

"What happened? Were they bombed?"

Dante explained that at the end of the war, a worried Goring packed a train full of his precious art and then tried to find a safe place for it. First it went to Berlin, but the Soviet army threatened it. Then the train tried and failed to make it to his county home near Berchtesgaden. When the Americans and the French swept in, they found an abandoned train on a railway siding. They didn't know what they had until Goring's art adviser gave himself up.

"My grandfather made it to Unterstein—the little spot where most of the train cars ended up—too late. He said from a distance it was as if the people were streams of ants. When he got closer, the streams of ants turned into people fighting to get into cars and then fighting to get out of them again, only this time with their arms full. Children were running between people's feet, grabbing what fell. The station was littered with broken bottles of wine, enormous paintings, statues that had turned out to be too heavy to carry. He cried when he told me about how he found a group of men tearing up a tapestry because it was too big to carry in one piece. He chased them off by giving them some food and wine he had found in one car." Dante shook his head. "Even after all that looting, there were still more than six hundred paintings left on the train. But a lot of Goring's collection had vanished."

"Wasn't Goring hanged after the war?"

Dante shook his head. "Two hours before he was supposed to be hanged, he committed suicide by swallowing cyanide capsules he had smuggled into his cell. His ashes were thrown into the last incinerator in Dachau."

They were both silent for a minute.

Claire set down her mug. "Did they ever find the stuff that disappeared from the train?"

"My grandfather spent a year dressed in lederhosen roaming the villages around Berchtesgaden, attempting to recover items from reluctant locals."

"Did he succeed?"

"Only to a degree. He also had to cope with our own soldiers, who weren't any better. You probably remember the story about the guy from Kentucky."

"Was that the one who sent home a bunch of things that had been hidden?"

Dante nodded. "Treasures from a cathedral stored for safekeeping in a cave. One of the items he helped himself to was a fourteenth-century painting of the Christ child. He knew that it must be valuable because it had these big emeralds and rubies set around the frame. I don't know how he thought he was going to turn up with a six-hundred-year-old painting and pass it off as something that had been in his family all along."

"I don't remember what happened to him." When Claire had read about the case, she had never guessed that it might someday be of personal interest to her.

"He died not long ago. There was a lot of controversy when the German government bought the painting back from his family for several million dollars. Last I heard, the IRS was slapping his estate for back taxes. And they were considering criminal charges. But now that he's dead, who knows what will happen? At least he didn't pry the jewels out of the frame. During the war, the average soldier didn't care too much about art. My grandfather used to cry when he told me about what he had seen over there. Soldiers smashed or shot at sculptures. People used Renaissance Limoges enamels as plates and then threw them away. If a soldier did have an appreciation for art, he simply took what he liked and sent it home through the military field post."

"Aunt Cady mentioned something like that in her diary." Dante sat forward. "Your aunt kept a diary when she was stationed in Germany?"

Claire nodded. "I was reading parts of it last night." "Where is it now? In your hotel room?"

"Actually, I have it right here in my backpack. Before you hijacked me, I was planning on reading it while I had my coffee."

"Would you mind if I looked at it? It might tell us exactly where that painting came from."

Claire wasn't sure how she felt about it. Was it right to share Aunt Cady's musings, her fears, her desires, with a stranger? Claire had a connection to the woman, memories that helped her understand her attraction to Rudy. She didn't want Dante to judge her aunt.

He was still looking at her expectantly, so she showed him what she thought were the relevant parts—the day Aunt Cady had met Rudy, the description of the warehouse that Rudy had been set to guard. Dante eventually took the diary from her hands and read to her.

***

July 17,1945

A radiant summer day. The German housewives have been busy, dusting, wiping and scrubbing. When you go outside you hear the sounds of carpet-beating, sweeping, hammering. Munich is being cleaned up. Children look washed again. Everywhere you see refugees on their way home, family groups with little handcarts piled high with sacks, boxes, suitcases. Many of the carts are pulled by women or boys with ropes over their shoulders, followed by children or a grandfather pushing the cart from behind. Atop almost all the carts either children or very old people sit huddled among the baggage. These old ones, whether men or women, look awful—gray, emaciated, already half dead, listless bundles of bones.

This morning I saw a garbage truck belonging to the city of Munich. On it were six coffins, one of which the driver used as a seat. The garbagemen were having their breakfast up there. The sun sparkled off the beer bottles they raised to their mouths.

After breakfast, Frau Lehman, our cook, told me about what happened to her younger sister. Last year, when she was seventeen years old, her leg was torn off by shrapnel when she got caught outside during a bombing raid. She bled to death. Her parents buried her in their garden behind some red currant bushes. For a coffin they used their broom cupboard.

Tried to extract from her the German word for dream. By paraphrasing it in various ways such as "a movie in the head," "seeing pictures with one's eyes closed," and "not-real things taking place in one's sleep," I finally succeeded. Traume. It sounds a lot like the English word "trauma."

I dreamed about Rudy last night. I dreamed we had just finished making love and I was lying on my back with my eyes closed. I opened them, only a little bit, and he was watching me with a look, his eyes flat and his face expressionless. He didn't say anything, just watched me, but for some reason when I woke up I was frightened.

***

"Dante!" A man in his mid-fifties had entered the cafe and now came straight to their table, waddling a little because he was extremely fat. His bulldog face was split by a grin.

"Hello, Uncle Alfonso."

He turned to give Claire a frankly appraising glance from eyes nearly buried in folds of flesh. "So who's this you have with you? Have you been keeping something from the family?" His growling voice gave a special emphasis to the word "family."

"I'm Claire. Claire Montrose." She held out her hand. "I only met Dante a few days ago, at the Met."

His grip was soft, but with a surprising underlying firmness. He gave Claire's hand an extra squeeze before releasing it. "The Metropolitan Museum of Art?" He curled his lip when he said the word art, then appealed to Dante. "When are you going to join the business? Family is family."

Dante's answer was soft, but Claire saw a pulse in his jaw. "I like what I do, Uncle Alfonso. You know I'm not cut out for all that."

"You should give up this nonsense. Stop being afraid of getting your hands dirty."

Claire, who felt as if she had stepped onto a movie set, was finally putting it all together. What was all this talk about the family business? Dante was Italian, wasn't he? And wasn't New York home to the five families, the mob bosses who ruled the Mafia?

She shook her head, realizing she was letting fantasy overtake her.

Claire sat on the bed in her hotel room and laced up her Nikes, the new ones with an extra-cushioned midsole. They were embarrassingly white, with a brilliant aqua stripe. Anyone looking at them would think she had never run before.

It was still early, just after seven on Sunday, but it seemed wrong to be sleeping away her last day in New York City. In twenty-four hours she would be back in the Custom Plate Department, listening to Frank describe his weekend in excruciating detail.

When she had returned to her hotel room, after having spent most of the day with Dante, Troy had called. He was all apologies for his behavior the night before, calling himself boorish. And partly it was Troy's use of the word boorish—a word that no one she knew would ever use—that had made Claire relent and agree to let him take her out to breakfast before she left. But she had decided she would go as Claire Montrose, not some woman in a too-sexy dress. It was too much work to be anyone but herself.

To Claire's surprise, Fifth Avenue was practically deserted. Seven- fifteen in the morning on an October Sunday, and the greatest city in the world looked almost unpopulated. The pavement was wet from an overnight shower, but the clouds had retreated and were now scudding high overhead. She braced her hands against a wall and began to stretch out her legs. Rather than rinsing the air, the rain had released all the smells of the city, so that the stink of garbage and gasoline and urine and the perfume-scent of a basement laundry hung all mixed together in the air, acrid and steamy.