Love and Treasure (28 page)

AMITAI HELD THE DOOR FOR
Natalie and ushered her into the crooked stairway, last carpeted during the Brezhnev era, that led up to the attic of the Dohány Street Synagogue. Mrs. Vázsonyi waited for them in the dark and muddled room that was, he had frequently been promised, only awaiting adequate funding before it would be transformed into a model library. With every successful Hungarian venture, Shasho & Sons wrote a check to assist in these efforts, but so far Amitai had seen no change. Still, though the room itself was a disaster, the woman managing it was brilliant, and he greeted her warmly.

“Did you bring it?” she said. Mrs. Vázsonyi dressed for her job as if for a gallery opening, swathed in chic black, red lipstick, glittery drops dangling from her ears.

“Don’t I always?”

He reached into his bag and took out two huge plastic bottles. Natalie raised a curious eyebrow, and he winked at her.

Years ago Mrs. Vázsonyi had complained to him about how impossible it was to tame her head full of wild frizz. He’d gone home and asked his then wife how she solved the same problem and ever since had been providing Mrs. Vázsonyi with hair conditioner and gel, a New York City brand, designed specifically for a Jewess’s curls. The way to a woman’s heart, it seemed, was through her hair.

“Bless you, you wonderful man,” Mrs. Vázsonyi said. “I was almost out.”

“It’s you who are wonderful,” Amitai said.

“I am,” she agreed. “Sit!”

The only chairs other than hers were covered in heaps of files. Natalie hesitated, but Amitai dumped the papers on the floor and motioned for her to do the same.

“Okay,” Mrs. Vázsonyi said, lighting a cigarette. She clenched it between her teeth and leafed through a sheaf of documents. “I found your man. The attorney Ignác Einhorn was a decorated officer in the
Magyar Honvédség, and also a member of the Hungarian Olympic team.”

“He was in the Olympics?” Natalie said, surprised.

“There have been many Hungarian Jewish Olympians,” Mrs. Vázsonyi said. “In some years before the war, upwards of thirty percent of the team was Jewish.”

Natalie laughed. “That’s certainly not true in the States.”

Mrs. Vázsonyi seemed disappointed by the athletic ineptitude of America’s Jews. “Your Mr. Einhorn seems to have been a star of the prosecutor’s office with a promotion to judge all but guaranteed, but with the enactment of the second anti-Jewish law in 1939, which included a purge of Jewish civil servants and government employees, he was dismissed.”

After his dismissal, Mrs. Vázsonyi continued, Einhorn had removed, with his wife, Nina, and their two adult children and their grandchildren, to Nagyvárad. Their son and son-in-law were drafted into the labor service. Between May 25 and June 3, 1944, the inhabitants of the Nagyvárad ghetto were deported to Auschwitz. The elder Einhorns, their daughter, and their grandchildren were all killed. Their son-in-law died, like Vidor Komlós, of starvation, overwork, or a bullet on the Russian front. Imré, the son, survived the torment and depredations of the labor service and returned to Nagyvárad after the war, only to be beaten to death on the streets of that city two days after his arrival. “There is no evidence or testimony in the archive,” Mrs. Vázsonyi said, “but I expect that he was killed when he tried to reclaim the family house.”

“Like what happened in the Polish village of Kielce?” Natalie asked.

“Very similar, in fact,” Mrs. Vázsonyi said, with a look at Amitai that signaled mild surprise. He imagined that she had dismissed Natalie as one of his conquests. Though he’d never before brought a woman with him to the archive, he’d nonetheless acquired in the archivist’s mind the (fair and accurate) reputation as a ladies’ man. She continued, “But I found no record of accusations of blood libel, nothing about a pogrom. Though, at this point, in late 1945, the city was again part of Romania, and the record is not as comprehensive as it might be if it were still a part of Hungary. Even so, were I a betting woman, I would wager that what happened was personal. The young man came back to his home, the ones who had taken it were not willing to return it. In that time, people were killed for a good deal less.”

Mrs. Vázsonyi leafed through the file until she came to a large black-and-white photograph, creased and tattered at the edges. She unclipped it from its backing and passed it across her desk. Amitai and Natalie leaned in to look. It depicted a youthful man dressed in an ornate Hungarian military uniform, complete with high leather boots and gold braid. To his left and slightly in front of him stood a boy of three or four years, his fair hair curled around his ear, dressed in a flowing white shirt trimmed at the cuffs and collar with lace, short pants, and shoes that buttoned up the side. Just behind the boy, with her hand on his shoulder, stood a good-looking blond woman with a serious face, dressed in a sacklike flapper’s shift that struggled but failed to conceal her curves. Older, plumper, sterner, she was unmistakably the young suffragette from the picture in Natalie’s locket.

“Nina Einhorn,” Natalie said.

“Frau E.,” Amitai said. “For ‘Einhorn.’ ”

“I can’t believe she was killed.” Natalie sounded stunned, even grief stricken.

Amitai said gently, “But you already knew she was dead.”

“Of course I knew,” Natalie snapped. “The picture in the locket was taken a hundred years ago. I didn’t think I’d find some one-hundred-twenty-year-old crone in an old-age home. I just, you know, I guess I just hoped that she hadn’t died in the war along with her entire fucking family.”

Mrs. Vázsonyi grimaced and raised an eyebrow. Amitai tried to put a comforting arm around Natalie, but she shook him off.

“Mrs. Vázsonyi,” Natalie said, “can you find out if any of her family are still alive? Maybe she had brothers and sisters who survived the war? Their children? Even, I don’t know, a cousin?”

“I can look. There will be some record of her maiden name. And if her family is from Budapest and not the countryside, it is very possible that they survived. At least some of them.”

“Okay,” Natalie said, resolutely cheering herself up. “This is good news, not bad. We now know who the girl in the picture with Gizella is. Her husband was a prosecutor, and she must have convinced him to intercede on Gizella’s behalf. We’ve connected the dots.”

“Not all of them,” Amitai said, a gentle reminder to Natalie that though they had the search in common, their goals were different. “Do you have any other information about Nina, Mrs. Vázsonyi? I am curious if she moved in artistic circles.”

The archivist glanced around the jumbled room, narrowing her eyes at various heaps of documents. “The Israelite Women’s Artistic Society,” she said, yanking loose a sheaf of disintegrating card stock from a pile of similar documents. She leafed through the pages. “Yes, Nina Einhorn was a member, indeed. Her name is listed as a subscriber to the newsletter. Also, here, in August 1922 she donated to a fund established to provide paints and canvases to needy artists.”

“Could Vidor Komlós have been one of those needy artists?” Natalie asked.

The archivist said, “Mr. Shasho’s mysterious artist? Maybe. I don’t know. It doesn’t say. But it’s certainly possible. Why not?”

“All the dots,” Natalie said. “Nina Einhorn lived in Nagyvárad. The locket was from Nagyvárad, so it must have been hers. She was a patron of the arts, and a supporter of artists. She has got to be the Frau E. of the portrait.” She looked at Amitai. “So? Now can we go to Nagyvárad?”

He was closer than he had ever been before to the painting for which he had been searching for so long. But with the prospect of an end to his search in sight, he allowed himself a hint of uncertainty. Why, when the world was full of lost treasures, had he been searching so hard and so long for this one? What was it about Komlós or this painting that compelled him so? And what would he do if he found it?

“Yes,” he said. “Now we can go to Nagyvárad.”

•
23
•

THOUGH THE PROPERTY RECORDS
of the city of Oradea, once Nagyvárad, were not as thorough and complete as those of some comparable cities, there was enough information to lead Amitai and Natalie to the house on Strada Costache Negruzzi, a house that had been occupied since 1944 by the Varga family, and before that by the Einhorns. Amitai parked their rental car a block away from the house. Natalie was about to open the door, when he stopped her.

“I wonder,” he said. “Would you mind very much if I went alone?”

“Alone, why?”

“These negotiations can be very delicate. I don’t want to intimidate him by outnumbering him.”

This excuse sounded as lame to his ears as he could tell it did to hers. The truth was he didn’t want her to see him at work, to witness his Dale Carnegie pitch, his false smoothness. His outright dishonesty. He wanted her to think of him as an upstanding art dealer, not as a kind of con artist.

She seemed to sense the urgency of his request. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll wait in the car.”

Had Attila Varga’s appearance matched his Transylvanian ancestry, his violent family history, and the implied savagery of his given name, he would have come to the door of his villa accompanied by the scrape of a heavy tread, by the sound of rattling chains, by the clanking of massive bolts drawn back, by the loud grating noise of a long-disused key turning in a lock. He would have been clad in black from head to foot. The steely hand he offered to Amitai would have been cold and clammy. His face would have been aquiline, his nostrils arched, his lofty domed forehead bare of all but scant wisps of hair, and his mouth cruel, with perhaps just the slightest suggestion of sharpened fangs peeping from the parting in his fish lips. But Varga looked more like Santa Claus than Count Dracula. A faded, dissolute Santa Claus, maybe, running short of cheer and goodwill toward men but squat and portly, with a tangled white beard, yellowed at the corners of his mouth, and watery blue eyes, in one of which the role of elfin twinkle had been taken over by a fiery-red
sty. His handshake, proffered with a hint of grudgingness, was warm and limp.

“Mr. Varga!” Amitai said, his voice full of false conviviality. “Do you speak English?”

“Yes.”

“Wonderful! Otherwise I would have had to return with an interpreter!”

“What do you want?”

“First of all, I must say that I am so very glad to meet you.”

“To meet me?”

“Yes! I have come to Oradea to offer you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. May I come in?”

Amitai pressed forward, but Varga crossed his arms over his chest and blocked the door. “What you want?”

“To give you the chance to transform what I know is a very awkward possession into a not-insubstantial pile of cash. Dollars, Mr. Varga. Or euros. Whatever you like.”

Those words had the magic effect they always did. Varga’s frown faded, and after a moment he stepped back through the door, indicating with a jut of his chin that Amitai should follow him.

“Dollars for what?” Varga said.

Amitai began an imperceptible assessment of the value of the furniture in the entry hall. A mirror framed in walnut, the glass cracked but the starburst inlay intact (1930s approximately, could fetch as much as two thousand if authentic), an oaken chest of the type used to hold a young girl’s dowry linen (popular in American antique shops but insufficiently valuable to justify the cost of shipping), a laminate IKEA bookcase (worthless), a hat rack screwed to the wall (at least one hundred years old, decent oak, but homemade, worth a hundred, max).

“I am looking for artwork,” Amitai said. “Paintings.”

Varga’s eyes narrowed. “What paintings?” he asked, warily.

Amitai doubted that Varga would recognize the work of Moholy-Nagy, let alone understand the value added to the painting by its presence in a photograph by a great artist, but he had nonetheless taken the precaution of cropping the photograph so that he could show the man an enlargement of the painting out of context. He watched Varga’s face as he looked at the print and was rewarded by a widening of the eyes, a flicker of rapacious grin.

“Why you look for this?”

“You recognize it,” Amitai said. “Very good.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Is valuable?”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Amitai echoed, smiling. “Shall we sit down?”

Varga led him into a sitting room off the entryway. Again Amitai did his swift and undetectable inventory. Two sofas (twenty to twenty-five years old, torn upholstery, worth less than the cost of removal), another IKEA bookcase (sigh), two American movie posters in metal frames (as much as a hundred dollars if the
Scarface
was original), an Oriental carpet (finally! classic turn-of-the-century Tabriz, slight change in dye lot at one end but excellent condition, at least fifty thousand dollars).

Amitai sat on one of the sofas, Varga on the other.

“Okay,” Varga said. “How much this painting?”

“Do you have it?”

“How much?”

“Is it here? May I see it?”

“How much?” Varga repeated, raising his voice.

“That depends. There is the problem of ownership.”

“What problem?”

“A court of law would find that the painting belongs, by right, to the heirs of the artist, Vidor Komlós, or to those of the model, Nina Einhorn.” Amitai watched Varga’s face, satisfied by the flash of recognition at the second name. He decided to take a small risk. “The Einhorns were the prior owners of this house,” he said.

“This house has been in my family for generations,” Varga said gruffly.

This, Amitai knew, was perfectly true. The Varga family had maintained diligent possession of the house they had stolen, all through the long decades of Communist nationalization, the brutalities of the Ceauşescu regime, the upheavals and disruptions that followed its fall.

“Three generations,” Amitai agreed. He smiled pleasantly. “Your grandfather”—he rapidly considered and rejected other formulations, before settling on the anodyne—“moved in during the war, after the Einhorns were deported.”

Varga crossed his arms over his chest. “The Jew sold house to my grandfather. He pay good price.”