City of War (37 page)

“Immortality,” he said. “Hard to come by. I have mixed emotions even having this crap around, but the EPA vetoed my request for a bonfire.”

“You’ll have to forgive me,” I said, “but so far I haven’t seen anything that couldn’t be protected with a padlock and a rent-a-cop.”

“You’re correct,” he said, and just then, we turned a blind corner. Thirty feet ahead was a massive bank vault with a seven-foot, circular door. The word
overkill
came immediately to mind. In this vast hole in the ground, surrounded by hot and cold running Rangers, why on earth did they need a holiest of holies?

The vault door was open. We entered, and Michelangelo proved me wrong. So did Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro. Uccello and Da Vinci and Raphael. Antonio Stradivari and Fabergé. Guttenberg and Shakespeare. And at the center of this pageant of the inconceivable, a King John version of the Magna Carta.

The collection, set in a space the size of a large ballroom, seemed endless. Hundreds of works, from paintings to porcelain to sculpture to musical instruments to tapestries to manuscripts scholars would sell their mothers to get their hands on. Each sealed in its own custom glass case.

At the very rear of the room sat three long, mahogany tables set with rows of green glass and brass lamps that reminded me of the New York Public Library. And surrounding the tables along three walls were scores of black, lateral file cabinets running from the floor to at least ten feet in height, each drawer fitted with a combination lock.

“Recognize this?” Hood was pointing to an easel behind glass. Inside was a canvas that looked like it might suddenly turn to dust. On it were three very fine horizontal lines—one red, one blue and one black—painted so closely together that from a few feet away, they appeared to touch. However, when I bent to examine them, they clearly did not. The piece was unsigned.

Neither Archer nor I had even a guess.

“We’re not certain, but it may be the famous three lines of Protogenes and Apelles, Alexander’s portraitist. From the fourth century BC. If so, it once hung in Julius Caesar’s villa and was supposedly destroyed in a fire.”

“Is there a word for beyond priceless?” Archer asked, only half in jest.

Bibiana smiled. “If it is indeed that work, it belongs in Greece, perhaps on Rhodes, where it would have been painted.”

“How in the world did the army get it?” Archer asked.

Bibiana shook her head. “We have absolutely no idea. There isn’t a shred of paper about it anywhere.”

“That’s why Dr. Cesarotti is so valuable,” said Hood. “No one here would have even recognized it, let alone understood its value. It was just sitting in a container with a hundred others, some equally old, that we haven’t begun to identify.”

Bibiana waved her arm around the room. “This represents two years’ work, and we’ve only opened twenty containers.”

“How many more are there?” asked Archer.

“Seventy thousand that we know for certain contain things that need to be examined. Another fifteen thousand with no inventory at all, like the one with the Apelles,” she replied.

Archer took a moment, then replied. “I think twenty-five hundred years is optimistic.”

“So what happens to this and whatever else you find?” I asked.

“It’s not entirely clear,” said Hood. “We’re plowing new ground. By statute, the army is forbidden to sell anything, so our hope is to repatriate as much as possible. However, that’s easier said than done.”

“I would think it would be simple,” said Archer. “Just put it on a website.”

Hood looked at her with some amusement. “That would
be like a theatre manager posting a picture of a wallet he’d found containing a hundred bucks and no ID.”

“Couldn’t you be vague?”

“Much of this is so rare that any description at all could be deciphered by someone with a little expertise. And though it may sound crass, the army isn’t prepared, nor can it afford, to hire several thousand attorneys to sort through claims, let alone go to trial.”

“I can see what you mean,” she said. “So why not just declare the stuff ours and give it to the Smithsonian?”

“Personally, I’d love to, but unfortunately, finders-keepers doesn’t get much traction in a court of law—and even less in the court of diplomacy. Right now, all we can do is wait for governments or individuals to bring us an impeccable description of what they’re looking for along with ironclad documentation of their right to it.”

“Like the Tretiakov Collection,” I said.

“That was well before my time here,” Bibiana answered quickly—too quickly. I looked at her, but she didn’t meet my eyes.

“Technically, before mine, as well,” said Hood. “The Chief of Staff has direct oversight of all CITIs. However, I was also the previous chief’s aide, so I was peripherally involved. The Tretiakov Collection was our first large-scale, national heritage repatriation since 1945. It became something of a test case. Everyone watched very closely—State, Justice, even the CIA—to see if we raised the temperature of any interesting groups. Fortunately, we didn’t. There were a few glitches, but it went smoother than anyone could have hoped for. Largely because the Russians were able to provide us with indisputable provenance, along with descriptions of all twenty-two works.”

“From Konstantin Serbin,” I said.

“Through him, yes.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, General, but I’ve always thought of national heritage as pieces of foundational culture. The
things citizens collectively revere…get misty-eyed about. Like the Declaration of Independence and the Pyramids. According to Ms. York, only a tiny number of people had any knowledge of Captain Tretiakov’s mission, and only General Zhuk knew about the paintings. Then Zhuk was executed, and they disappeared.

“I’ll accept that they might be valuable, but national heritage, no. So who would even know to ask about them? Even more intriguing, how did somebody convince Yeltsin’s people, who were as culturally deaf as the Taliban and didn’t even seal the state museums until three years after they took power, that a little-known World War Two junior officer and some phantom artwork deserved any kind of priority? Now you’ve got Putin, or whoever is fronting for him this week. I’m not a Russia expert, but it would seem to me that as soon as he learned about Tretiakov, he’d be sweating our ambassador for a lot more than some unknown dissidents’ meanderings. They’re still looking for the Amber Room, aren’t they?”

Hood stared at me like he was trying to make a decision. He turned to Archer. “I’m sorry to be rude, but there’s a security issue here. Because of his background, I can make an exception for Mr. Black.” Hood then looked at Bibiana. “Perhaps you could show Ms. Cayne our restoration facilities.”

“How about a ladies’ room and a cup of coffee instead,” said Archer.

“Sounds pretty good to me too,” said Bibiana, and they left.

With no further conversation, Hood led me to one of the tables at the back and asked me to take a seat. As I did, he went to a file drawer and worked the lock. Shortly, he brought back a large, red box about twenty-four inches square and sealed with two wide bands of yellow plastic tape that had to be scissored off.

With the open box in front of me, Hood said, “Half an
hour should be enough. I’ve got some calls to make.” He started to leave, then turned back. “I don’t think you’d violate my confidence, but just so there aren’t any embarrassments, each item is impregnated with a microscopic security strip that would be picked up on your exit scan.”

“If Sandy Berger shows up, I’ll let him know.”

Hood didn’t say anything.

31

Nehemiah and the Tooth Fairy

The key document was on top. Unfortunately, it was maddeningly incomplete, either by incompetence or design.

The Tretiakov Collection had been discovered at 21:03 on December 22, 1996 in Vault C3-44777 by a Corporal Nehemiah Jacobs, a research assistant in the Army Documents Division. Corporal Jacobs had been attempting to locate a copy of a 1901 treaty between Germany and the Ottoman Turks, but what had led him to that particular vault wasn’t noted. Nor was it noted how he’d learned the name Tretiakov, or even how the paintings had been packed or labeled. He also didn’t mention other contents of the vault, assuming there had been any, or the name of the officer who had given him the assignment. Not surprisingly, he also didn’t say whether or not he had found the treaty.

Jacobs’s two-page report had been copied to three army departments and the assistant secretary of defense, but it was not even marked Confidential. In other words, his find had raised no alarms, sent no one into immediate motion. File and forget.

So what had happened to elevate it? And how had it been determined even what the Tretiakov Collection was? I
checked the staple holding the two pages together but saw no evidence of an attachment that might have been removed.

Under Jacobs’s report was a folder containing a set of extraordinarily high-resolution photographs of the paintings. I knew from things I’d seen at Benny Joe’s that they were satellite imagery size, eighteen by twenty inches, and the detail was so precise that if I’d had an enlarged version, I would have been able to count individual brush strokes. Obviously, somebody had thought it necessary to bring in pros to do the documenting.

I stood and laid the photos side by side, then went down the line absorbing the details of each. The styles varied widely, but each was the work of a very talented person. Petr Stech’s
Scourge out of the East
was one of the most intriguing, and I was immediately impressed with Archer’s power of recollection. The only detail she’d omitted was a shield carried in the skeleton’s rein’s hand.

The last photograph, however, literally took my breath away. It was Orlov’s
Offering of the Babushkas
. No one, not even Vermeer, had ever drawn a finer line. Even in a photograph, Orlov’s hand reached out and touched you.

The scene was Moscow’s Red Square under a full moon. St. Basil’s Cathedral loomed to the left, and the Kremlin to the right, their haunting shadows giving the wide concourse the look of a brick-paved cavern. The windows in the Kremlin were dark, many were broken. At St. Basil’s, flames poured from the oblong apertures beneath the spires, and one dome had collapsed. On the street below, in the left foreground, prowled a pair of fierce-looking, yellow-eyed dogs, perhaps gone mad in the search for food.

The detail was so precise that the roughness of the buildings’ mortar seemed tactile and the broken glass sharp. But the real business of the painting was a throng of women, milling about the square. Each wore a different patterned babushka and carried in her arms the limp, dead body of a young man dressed in a Soviet prison uniform. Their burdens clutched tightly to their breasts, the women actually
seemed to stagger under their weight. Further adding to the drama was that, like the women’s, each young man’s face was so flawlessly drawn that it was actually an exquisite tiny portrait.

I knew how many there were going to be, but I counted the women anyway. Twenty-two. Then something caught my eye, and I leaned closer. Tucked into the shirt pocket of all but one man was an artist’s brush. The one who did not have a brush was at the very front, and his bearer, unlike the other women, who were of obvious peasant stock, was tall and slender, her dress fashionable. Likewise, her scarf was a brightly patterned blue and not threadbare, and instead of boots, she wore high heels of the era. A crucifix dangled from her neck, catching a tiny ray of moonlight.

Her young prisoner wore dark-rimmed eyeglasses, his face very much her own. And his paintbrush was held between his fingers as he would have done in life. Almost certainly, this was Illya Orlov. And the others were the mothers and artists of the remaining twenty-one paintings.

Orlov had left a record…the only way he could. I felt a little sick inside and was surprised that a painting could have such an effect.

There was nothing else of major importance in the box. Certainly nothing to merit the drama Hood had evoked before he’d left the room. The formal repatriation request on Office of the President stationery and signed by Yeltsin was almost generic. No impassioned, dramatic language like one would expect for something so dear—or wordy in the extreme like everything else Russian. The only passage relating directly to the paintings stated that they no longer had any value as road maps, because Tretiakov’s notebook had been discovered among Zhuk’s effects, and the surviving items had been located and moved back to museums in 1946. And the attached descriptions of the paintings were sketchy at best. They didn’t even identify the artists.

The only thing that nagged at me was that Serbin had written a separate letter to the secretary of state, claiming that
Russian researchers had been unable to locate any record of how and when the paintings had gotten out of Russia after they had been given to the American attaché. Why even say this? If it was even true, all these years later, who cared? More to the point, nothing could be less Russian than admitting ignorance.

I put everything but the file of photographs back into the box and busied myself looking at some of the other glass-protected exhibits until General Hood returned. When he saw me, he looked uneasy. “You’re a fast study,” he said.

“General, with all due respect, there isn’t anything there you couldn’t give to the
New York Times
. There aren’t even manifests for Major York’s trips. The Orlov was on the last flight, but what about the others? Was he carrying just one painting per trip or something else too? For that matter, did he ever carry a Tretiakov? You can’t tell from what you showed me. And the only provenance is that the Russians say they’re theirs and sort of wave at describing them. To paraphrase A. A. Abernathy, if somebody tried that on me, I’d call the FBI.”

“Who is A. A. Abernathy?”

“Not important. But I don’t believe you’re that sloppy around here, so it looks like this is some kind of exercise to cut off my banging around where you don’t want any banging.”

Hood’s face turned red, but he held his tongue, confirming my suspicion. While he was uncomfortable, I pressed. “Let me try it another way, General. Who verified the Russians?”