Love and Treasure (25 page)

Tamid had been furious but also, momentarily, flummoxed, unable to give any answer beyond the familiar quotation from Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

“Never again!” Amitai had said, raising his glass.

The doctor raised his glass, in relief and agreement, not realizing that what Amitai meant was
Never Again will I take such a tour
.

From then on, Amitai had studiously avoided the Jewish tourist destinations of vanished greatness and terminal horror. Though his work had taken him frequently to Prague, for example, he had never visited the famous Jewish cemetery with its snaggled headstones nor the medieval synagogue, the Alt-Neu, with its fantastical attic tenant. He had spent long weeks in Warsaw and Kraków, in L’viv and Lublin, negotiating for the return of works of art, jewelry, and, in one remarkable instance, six vials of frozen horse semen from a stallion descended from a champion bred by one of Poland’s few Jewish noblemen, but had never again felt the need to stand beneath the
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
sign at Auschwitz or genuflect before the seven heroically sculpted figures of the monument of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Amsterdam, he passed by the perennial
line of tourists waiting to troop through Anne Frank’s hiding place without ever bothering to take his turn.

Tamid said, “What brings you to Budapest, Amitai? What are you looking for now? Diamond tiaras? Abstract expressionists?”

Amitai smiled blandly.

“It’s Komlós,” Tamid said. “You have a lead on Komlós.”

“Komlós?” Amitai said. “The artist?”

“Don’t pretend with me!” Tamid said, floundering across the pool, through thigh-high water, to hover over Amitai.

What crime, Amitai wondered, had he committed that deserved the punishment of having to sit in such close proximity to the genitals of a man he despised? He smiled politely, heaved himself out of the tub and took his towel from its hook on the wall. He walked swiftly out of the room to the locker area, where he dried off and dressed, wondering all the while at the source of Tamid’s information. Could Elek have betrayed his confidence? No. Though Elek relied on Tamid to steer clients both to his shop and to his consultancy business, he shared Amitai’s antipathy for the man.

Amitai strode up the stairs, through the lobby, and up to his room. When he entered, he found the bed empty. Steam poured from the open bathroom door, and he heard Natalie humming over the noise of the shower. He poured a cup of coffee from the room-service tray and sat on the edge of the velvet armchair, sipping, his lips puckered against the sour, cold brew.

“Hey,” she said, when she walked out of the bathroom. She was wrapped in a thick terry robe, her face flushed from the steam, her hair in soaked tendrils on her shoulders. “I hope it’s okay that I ordered room service. Of course I’ll pay for it.”

“Please. It’s fine.” He drained his cup in a single gulp, and then, trying to maintain his habitual calm, asked, “Do you, by any chance, know a man named Dror Tamid?”

“Dr. Tamid? Yes! Wait, do you know him? He’s here, you know. In Budapest.”

“I know him.” He did not bother to conceal how little pleasure he derived from this particular acquaintanceship. “How do you know him?”

“He was a visiting professor at Brandeis when I was a junior. I took his seminar Eichmann and the Topography of Extermination.”

“Did you tell Tamid about your search, that you are looking for the owner of your pendant?”

She tilted her head to the side and squeezed the water from her hair. “Sure. He’s the one who recommended that I see Mr. Elek here in Budapest, rather than go straight for Nagyvárad.”

“And did you also tell him that you would be meeting with me?”

“I sent him an e-mail the other day, when Mr. Elek told me about you and your painting.” She put down her towel. “Are you upset? Is there something going on between you and Dr. Tamid?”

In the years after Amitai’s misbegotten participation in Tamid’s Highlights of the Holocaust tour, he and the topographer of extermination had continued periodically to bump into each other, never with very felicitous results. A number of years ago, Tamid had even managed to queer one of Amitai’s deals. Amitai’s client in that case had passed the years of her adolescence as the concubine and galley slave of a group of Polish partisans who had brought nearly as much energy to the task of mopping up those few Jews who managed to survive the liquidations of the ghettos as they did to attacking the German army. After Amitai spent eight months and nearly ten thousand dollars tracking down the woman’s father’s collection of Chagall drawings, Tamid, knowing full well the extent of Amitai’s investment, convinced the woman’s children to have their mother declared mentally incompetent and thus void her contract with Shasho & Sons. Amitai was then forced to watch as the fruits of his labor were promptly—again at Tamid’s urging—donated to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, in return for a large tax deduction for his former client’s eldest son and the honor of having a urinal in the museum dedicated, with an informative plaque, to the memory of the old woman’s father. (It might, in retrospect, have been a library nook or a bench in the lobby, but Amitai preferred to remember that Dr. Tamid’s interference had resulted in the bartering away of his profits in exchange for a porcelain piss pot.) To his knowledge, the drawings, which were charming and technically interesting, had been shoveled into the museum’s vast archive and never put on display.

“I don’t get upset,” he said.

Natalie’s attempt to suppress her smile served only to annoy him more than an actual grin would have. “I didn’t mention you or Komlós by name,” she said. “Only that Elek said there was an art dealer interested in my pendant because of a painting. But I suppose he guessed?”

“It’s not a problem.”

“Is he looking for Komlós’s painting as well?”

“Everyone with interest in the field is looking for Komlós’s painting. But again, it is no matter.”

At this point, he had invested nothing more than a plane ticket and the price of a few nights in the Hotel Gellért in this latest dead end in his search. The best thing he could do was cut his losses and leave. There were other artists, other paintings. There were even other jobs. He indulged for a moment the fantasy of asking his uncle to transfer him to a different branch of the company. Why should he not sell real estate, like his cousins? Or electronics?

Natalie said, “Well, it obviously is a ‘matter.’ ”

There were other artists, other jobs, and other girls, too. Lots and lots of other girls.

She sat down in a chair, tucking her bare legs up beneath the terry robe. She wrapped her hands around a cup of coffee. The robe slipped off her shoulder. Even wet, her wild curls tumbled prettily over her pink skin.

He said, “Come, shall we go to the Castle Hill? I am not sure when the Széchényi reference libraries close for lunch.”

•
19
•

IT TOOK ONLY A
few minutes in the Széchényi Library for Amitai and Natalie to discover that the bulk of what they needed was available online, in an archive meticulously translated and uploaded by the reference staff of the New York Public Library.

“I spent a thousand dollars to fly to Budapest,” Natalie said, exasperated, “and the papers I’m looking for are a mile from my apartment.”

“I once spent a month in the Czech Republic on the trail of a Degas statue,” Amitai said. “Only to discover that my client’s father had given it to his pregnant mistress when he sent her to America after the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland. I eventually found it in a cardboard box in her daughter’s basement in Hackensack, New Jersey.”

“Seriously?” Natalie said. “What did you do?”

“I introduced the half sisters and organized the sale.”

The huge cache of photographs from the Suffrage Congress that had been archived by the NYPL included pictures of the delegates arrayed on the steps of Parliament, of the mayor of Budapest greeting the attendees, of Boy Scouts who had served as city guides, and, in a photograph captioned “Mrs. Rózsa Schwimmer and colleague at Mrs. Megyeri’s villa in Budapest,” of a stout yet elegantly dressed woman in a platter-sized ostrich-feather hat, standing on a set of sweeping white marble steps between two pillars on which cherub archers stood on tiptoe. Standing beside the famous suffragist, looking equally elegant in a pleated tunic over a fitted sheath, was the unnamed colleague, the top of whose plumed toque just reached the underside of Mrs. Schwimmer’s formidable bosom.

“Holy shit,” Natalie said. “Amitai, oh, my God, it’s her.”

“Probably.”

“It is totally her!”

Her exuberance was at once charming and disconcerting. Amitai was used to carrying out his business in an atmosphere if not of secrecy, then certainly of discretion. He glanced around. They were sitting side by
side on a small settee in the Gellért’s lobby with his laptop open on the table in front of them. The waiter caught his eye and winked.

She snapped open the locket and held it up to the screen of the laptop, looking back and forth at the tiny face emerging from the pixel blur of the scanned photograph to the tiny portrait on a scrap of ancient photo paper, scratched and faded. “I can’t believe we found her!”

“Madam,” the waiter said, appearing at Natalie’s elbow with a small plate of apricot
kiflie
.

“Thank you,” she said, with an effusive grin, her excitement over the photograph spreading to everything and everyone in their vicinity.

“I don’t know,” Amitai said when the waiter had gone.

“Okay, first of all, what are you saying, there were two beautiful dwarfs who attended the International Woman Suffrage Congress in 1913?”

“Perhaps there was an entire dwarf delegation.”

“It’s definitely her,” Natalie said. “She’s got that same incredible pompadour.”

“So who is this Schwimmer of whom our lady is the unnamed colleague?”

A quick search found that Mrs. Rózsa Schwimmer had been one of the organizers of the congress. She was the editor of the Hungarian feminist magazine
The Woman
, the founder of the Hungarian Feminist Association and of the Women’s Peace Party, and Hungarian ambassador to Switzerland. In 1921, she had fled to the United States in response to the Jewish purges in her homeland. It was her papers that had been donated to the New York Public Library to create the archive they were searching.

“Let me see what I can find out about the women’s magazine,” Natalie said. “Maybe there will be some reference to Schwimmer’s colleague.” She clicked rapidly through a few links. “Damn it! It’s all in Hungarian.”

“Perhaps I can help?”

They glanced up to find the waiter hovering.

“I am not only a waiter but also a student. I have a master’s degree in English literature, and I am applying now to graduate schools in America. I can translate for you.”

After first making sure no other patrons were waiting for his attention, the waiter sat down with them, took the laptop, and began searching. Very quickly he turned up an article from the February 16, 1913,
issue of Schwimmer’s magazine about a lecture at the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, at which a Miss Gizella Weisz, described as “Mrs. Rózsa Schwimmer’s diminutive and talented young secretary,” presented on behalf of her employer a letter praising the Men’s League’s efforts in combating the transport of Hungarian girls to Russia and Turkey for the purposes of sexual slavery.

“It must be her,” Natalie said. “Otherwise why reference her height at all?”

“Gizella Weisz,” Amitai said. Could it be that he was finally closing in on the painting that had obsessed him for so long? No, he reminded himself sternly, chances were still that it had simply disappeared along with the rest of the contents of the Gold Train.

“That’s her,” Natalie said, gazing down at the picture in her locket. “She’s got the most beautiful face.”

“She is beautiful,” Amitai agreed. “Now who is that equally beautiful woman beside her?”

At this point Krisztián, their waiter-cum-translator, was forced to abandon them to serve a group of Japanese tourists. They resumed their study of the NYPL photo archive, searching through hundreds of scanned images for the other young woman, the willowy one with the fair hair and the full lower lip. Though they found no photograph that was clearly of her, they did find one of a group of young women holding posters on long poles, each with the name of a different language. They wore light-colored dusters over their white dresses, sashes across their chests, and what appeared to be white sailor caps. The young woman holding the sign that said
DEUTSCH
must have moved just as the film was exposed, because her face was blurry. Her hair was tucked up under the sailor cap so that its color could not be distinguished, but nonetheless Natalie insisted that she resembled the photograph in the locket.

“Possible” was the most Amitai was willing to allow. Though he could not help but be affected by Natalie’s enthusiasm, he tried to remain calm. It was never useful in his business to rush to conclusions, to allow optimism and enthusiasm to overwhelm caution and skepticism.

Unfortunately, the photograph was captioned only “Pages at Cong., 1913,” with no other identifying information, and nowhere in the index of archived documents was there a list of the names of the young women who had acted as congress pages.

Krisztián returned. “I’m off work,” he said, pulling out a chair. “Maybe I can help you more?”

“You’re being so helpful, Krisztián,” Natalie said. “How can we repay you?”

Krisztián appeared to consider the question.

“How about money?” he suggested.

Amitai swiftly negotiated a fair price for Krisztián’s time. He then directed the young man to search through the online archives of the various Budapest dailies from the period, searching for references to Miss Gizella Weisz.

They found one article from March 1913 in a magazine called the
Magyar Genius
, a society column that recorded that Gizella Weisz, a “girl dwarf,” had attended a performance at the Royal Theater of the play
The Yellow Lily
as the companion of Mrs. Schwimmer.