Love and Treasure (21 page)

When Elek had buzzed Natalie into his tiny, poorly lit shop, hair ablaze, cheeks flushed from the river-bottom chill of the Budapest winter, Amitai was caught off guard. He had been so focused on the mysterious necklace that he had not bothered to try to imagine its owner. If he had, experience and a reflexive pessimism would have led him to expect a wealthy Upper West Side matron with a hint of a mustache and comfortable shoes, relieving her empty-nest tedium with the hobby of genealogy. Recovering from his initial shock, he had proposed to Natalie that they adjourn to the Centrál, to discuss their mutual interest over coffee and cake, so as to allow Elek privacy in which to haggle with the mistress of a minor Russian oligarch over the price of an emerald-encrusted diadem.

Now Natalie said, “The necklace was my grandfather’s, not my grandmother’s.”

Why, Amitai wondered, the distinction?

“It is a family heirloom? From his mother, perhaps?”

She busied herself with her cake. “He … got it during the war. He was an officer, a captain in the U.S. Army. He was in the infantry.”

“But American forces never fought in Hungary.”

“He served in France and then, after the war, in Salzburg. During the occupation. That’s where he … found the necklace.”

Amitai took note of the difficulty she faced in coming up with the right verb to describe the means by which the necklace had come into her grandfather’s possession. He wondered how many synonyms and euphemisms for “looted” she might resort to before she would be willing to face the truth.

“In Salzburg,” he said. “But you’re sure the piece is Hungarian?”

“Yes. At least, I know that its owner must have been. She was from a place called Nagyvárad, which I guess is now called Oradea? It’s just over the border into Romania, but it was part of Hungary at the time.”

An odd coincidence, he thought, that Natalie had told her story to one
of the few people who might know how a Hungarian heirloom could end up in the possession of an American soldier serving in Salzburg in 1945. Amitai was disappointed by the admission, not because it revealed her grandfather’s criminality, though it likely did. He was disappointed because if the necklace could have been traced to a relative of Natalie’s in Hungary, he would have been that much closer to learning the identity of the Frau E. who had posed for the portrait and thus, perhaps, its current whereabouts. Now he feared he had come all the way from New York for nothing.

“Mr. Elek told me that you’re an art dealer?” Natalie said.

“Of sorts.”

Amitai worked for his paternal great-uncle, Jacob Shasho, who had initially founded the firm of Shasho & Sons as a means of profitably disposing of the remnants of his collection of art and artifacts salvaged during his escape from Aleppo, Syria, in 1947. Shasho & Sons had expanded into a vast mercantile empire and now included real-estate holdings and various retail and wholesale businesses. Amitai had joined the firm after finishing his military service and emigrating from Israel to New York. Under his leadership, Shasho & Sons’ art and artifacts department had shifted away from the appraisal and sale of Middle Eastern art and decorative objects to their current specialty, the reclamation and sale of art lost in the Holocaust, and had consequently become substantially more profitable.

Natalie said, “And so, what, a necklace like mine is in a painting that you own?”

“A painting that I am searching for. The necklace in the painting is very much like yours. Identical, I think.”

“How do you know, if you’ve never seen it?”

“I have seen a photograph of the painting. The artist was named Vidor Komlós. You have never heard of him, I am sure.”

“No.”

“His work has been lost since the war. Komlós was a friend of the great Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, who took a photograph of the painting.”

Amitai scrolled through his phone until he found a black-and-white photograph. The vantage point was from above and at a distorted angle, but it was still easy to make out that it was of a young man with wild curly hair, wearing work clothes and holding a painting. The painting, though visible only in part, was of a woman, drawn from behind, nude
on a wooden chair with a rattan seat. The woman was posed twisting at the waist to look over her shoulder, face and chest to the viewer, eyes downcast. Her head, however, was not human. It was the head of a peacock.

Amitai showed the picture to Natalie, then had her zoom in on the pendant that dangled from the plumed throat of the peacock woman. Even in a blur of low-res pixels, it was unmistakably identical to the one Natalie wore.

“It’s my necklace!” she exclaimed.

“One of the things that’s exciting for me, seeing your necklace, is the color. The purple and green. Perhaps these give some indication or clue of the palette used by Komlós in the painting.”

“Is it valuable, the painting? Is that why you’re looking for it?”

“Possibly. The photo is fairly well known, and for many years people have wondered about this painting and the young man who was holding it. It was not in the style of Moholy-Nagy. It is reminiscent of Max Ernst’s work, so there was some speculation it might be his. But I have established with reasonable certainty that the man in the photo is Komlós. Correspondence between Moholy-Nagy and Komlós was discovered not long ago that makes it clear that this painting was Komlós’s
Portrait of Frau E
. And that makes it very interesting.”

“Why is it more interesting if it was painted by someone unknown?”

“Komlós’s peacock head is reminiscent of a character in the work of Max Ernst, Loplop, a bird. Loplop was in many ways Ernst’s alter ego. When he wrote of Loplop, Ernst said he first received visitations by the bird in 1930 and began after that to paint and draw him. But the Moholy-Nagy photograph was taken in Berlin early in 1929, before Loplop first appeared. Also the Komlós painting, a nude with the head of the bird, shares something with Ernst’s
The Robing of the Bride
, which was painted many years later. I wonder, did Komlós know Ernst? Had they met before Ernst created Loplop? Who influenced whom?”

“Do you own other Komlós paintings?”

“No one does. The works of Komlós have been missing for nearly seventy years. But lately a mythology has grown up around Komlós because of the Moholy-Nagy photograph, because of the idea that he might have inspired Ernst.”

“What happened to Komlós?” she asked. “Why were all his paintings lost?”

“Unlike his friend Moholy-Nagy, Komlós did not escape to the United
States at the outbreak of World War Two. He remained in Hungary, and like most Jewish men, he was conscripted into the labor service. He died on the Russian front.”

“And his paintings?”

“Lost during the war. However, in the letter to Moholy-Nagy, Komlós wrote that he made a gift of the bird painting to its muse. That is why, when Elek told me of you and your necklace, I had hoped that I might find this model, and that by finding her, I would find the painting.”

Though he had refrained from allowing his voice to reveal the extent of his disappointment, the girl was more observant than he’d given her credit for, and she said, “You had hoped. You don’t anymore.”

“You said your grandfather was in the American army in Salzburg.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s where he got the necklace.”

“Yes.”

“So then he took it from the Gold Train.”

She lost her grip on her cup, splashing coffee into the saucer. He took hold of the saucer with one hand and with the other steadied her wrist. He tipped the spilled coffee back into the cup.

“You know about the Hungarian Gold Train?” she asked.

“I specialize in art and artifacts lost during the Holocaust,” he said. “So yes, I know about the train. If the necklace came from the train, then, unfortunately, its owner, this mysterious muse of Vidor Komlós, was a Jew. This suggests that the painting which Komlós presented to her was likely confiscated along with the rest of her property. In that case it, like every other painting on that train, is gone.”

“The paintings from the train can’t have just disappeared,” Natalie said. “Some of them have to be somewhere.”

“The U.S. Army stored the paintings somewhere in Salzburg, that much we know. But what nobody knows is where, though many, including me, have searched.”

“Well, maybe the painting wasn’t on the train. Maybe just the necklace was. Maybe the peacock woman hid the painting. Or maybe she survived, and her heirs still have the painting.”

Amitai said, “Elek tells me that you are searching for the rightful owner of the necklace?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“To return it.”

“Why do you want to return it?”

“Why? Because my grandfather …” Her voice trailed away, and all at once he felt impatient with her evasiveness.

“Stole it?”

“Yes. And I guess it bothered him for a very long time. He was not a bad man; in fact he was a very sweet, kind, gentle man. He was a classics professor, not a thief.” She pushed her curls off her forehead. “He died a couple of weeks ago.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.” Her eyes swam, and she blinked a few times. “Anyway, he asked me to return the necklace for him.”

“But surely he knew that he was asking the impossible?”

“Not impossible. Just, you know, difficult.”

“And you are, what?” he said. “A woman who enjoys a challenge?”

“Don’t miss a trick, right?” she said. “That’s your shtick, isn’t it? Mr. Perceptive. See right through people like you’re X-raying a painting.”

“That is one of my shticks,” he agreed. “I have one or two others.”

“If you were to find the painting, what would you do?”

“In the unlikely event that the painting was not on the train, you mean? Then it depends.”

“On what?”

“Well, if it is as you suggest, and the painting is in the possession of a descendant of the owner of your necklace, who was in fact the model for the painting, then I would congratulate that person on his or her good fortune and go back to New York.”

“And if someone else has it?”

“Then it becomes a question of provenance. If the person in possession can prove he purchased the painting before the war, I might try to buy it, depending on the price. But that is not usually the kind of art I deal in.”

“Why not?”

“I am not interested in artwork with legitimate provenance, only art stolen during the Holocaust.”

“And in that case, what? You sue?”

“Not usually. People have had a limited success with this kind of suit, but not here in Hungary. Here the government has consistently ignored international norms and precedents regarding the repatriation of property.
And, anyway, neither my firm nor I is interested in lawsuits. That is not our style. We look for compromise.”

Natalie said, “What kind of compromise?”

“We convince the individual in possession that it is in his interest to allow us to sell the work and give him a portion of the proceeds. The rest we turn over to the rightful heirs.” Less Shasho & Sons’ 40 percent commission, he refrained from adding.

“You give a percentage to the very people who stole the property? How is that fair?”

In Amitai’s experience the glorification of abstract notions of fairness and justice was a characteristic found primarily among children and Americans. But this was another observation that he kept to himself.

“Most of the time, those who actually did the stealing are long dead. But still, it’s true, you’re right. My solution is not, strictly speaking, fair. But it is often the only way to repatriate the object.”

“What kind of objects have you ‘repatriated’?” He was familiar with the hint of scorn in her voice. It was one adopted by many who learned of his profession.

Again he scrolled through the images on his phone until he found a photo of a brooch, worked in a tulip design, inset with dozens of diamonds.

“Things like this,” he said, showing her the image.

“Beautiful!” she said. “Who did it belong to?”

“A couple named Patai from here in Budapest.”

“They must have been very happy to get the jewelry back.”

“Zoltán Patai and his wife, Bertha, died in the winter of 1945, of starvation and exposure, but there was a brother, Albert, who immigrated to Argentina before the war. It is Albert’s grandson who is my client. And yes. He was very happy.”

The Argentinian heir had indeed been very happy with the outcome of the case, though he never set eyes on the brooch but only on the check from Shasho & Sons, a windfall from a great-uncle he’d never even known existed. The heirs rarely saw the objects Amitai retrieved. As Jacob Shasho said, “We are not a charity, nor a firm of private detectives.” Shasho & Sons did not represent people who longed for their grandfather’s lost Degas statuette because it reminded them of their mother’s years as a ballerina and who planned to display it in a special cabinet constructed in their living room. The firm represented people who recalled
with sufficient detail the items in their relatives’ collections, who ideally had some documentation backing up these claims of provenance, and who wanted nothing more than to sell the objects to the highest bidder.

“It can’t have been easy to track down that brooch,” Natalie said.

“Easy? No.”

In recent years, Amitai had come to realize that there was an even more lucrative way to approach the business. He began now with the property itself, not with the owner. He determined what specific types of work were selling well in the current art market and then researched lost Jewish collections. For example, the sale of Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer for $135 million, one of the highest reported prices ever paid for a painting, and the consequent resurgence of interest in works of the period, had inspired him to begin searching for lost Hungarian collections. The Jews of Hungary, particularly of Budapest, had been financially secure, many of them even wealthy, during the height of the Art Nouveau or Jugendstil, and they had thus acquired a large amount of valuable artwork, virtually all of which was then stolen from them during the war. More important, although a great number of them had been murdered—at least half a million—relative to the Jews of other countries there were more survivors, particularly in Budapest where the wealth was concentrated. This combination of stolen wealth and living heirs made Hungary uniquely suitable for his purposes. Though great wealth had been acquired by certain of Poland’s and Ukraine’s urban Jewish communities, the thoroughness of the decimation of the Jewish populations of those countries made their stolen art irrelevant. What point was there in discovering that a provincial Polish museum was in possession of a valuable Renoir that could be traced to the private collection of a Lemberg banker and art collector, if that man and every single member of his extended family had been shoveled into the pits at Bełżec?