Treasure of Saint-Lazare (12 page)

The paper was thin onionskin of the kind once used for carbon copies. It had started as bright pink but had faded and become brittle over the years. It was a report from Maj. Arthur Grant to his superior, Lt. Col. Albert Sommers, and was dated Sept. 25, 1946. It began:

“SUMMARY: The undersigned interviewed HANS FRANK, formerly Nazi governor general of the part of Poland not incorporated into Germany, for four hours over two days, 23 and 24 September. Also present were SSGT Roy Castor, assistant to the undersigned, and SGT Mark Perry, Military Police, present as guard. SGT Perry did not participate in the questioning.

“The purpose of this interview was to determine the extent of FRANK’s knowledge of the current location of certain works of art, taken from the civilian institutions of Poland, whose locations are unknown as of the time of this writing. Most of what FRANK told us was known previously, but he did indicate that some valuable items may have been sent out of Poland before the main shipment of goods to his personal home near Munich early in 1945. He refused to be more specific about a painting known as “Portrait of a Young Man,” attributed to the Old Master Raphael, which was listed on the manifest but was missing when the shipment arrived and was intercepted.

“The time allotted to this interview was limited because of FRANK’s pending sentence of death. Numerous agencies of the Allied governments wish to question him before his hanging, which is expected to take place within the next several days. FRANK indicated his awareness of this schedule and appeared willing to discuss any matter we brought before him, other than the matter listed above.” A half-dozen pages giving more detail of the interview were attached.

Artie’s handwritten note was brief:

“Roy:

“I checked the files in Sommers’s office when I left Munich and the original wasn’t there. Be very careful with this as it may be the only copy.

“Artie  6 Jun 88”

“June 1988. That’s when you and your father visited us in Sarasota, isn’t it?”

Eddie responded, “It was —- that was right after I graduated from college. He must have come here to bring this. It’s like he was handing off the case.”

Jen said, “This is really odd because Al Sommers is part of his Wednesday group. He was walking home from their meeting when he was killed. You met him, didn’t you?”

“I went out to see him yesterday. He seemed harmless enough, but this gives a different spin to that conversation. We’ll need to read this very carefully before I go see him again. Artie obviously didn’t trust him.”

“I never understood exactly what they were doing, and Roy wouldn’t tell me much. Can you fill me in?”

“Sure. My father started out in Army intelligence. He’d grown up in Paris and knew both the language and culture, so he volunteered to work behind the German lines, mainly during the preparations for D Day. That’s how he met my mother — her father was in the Resistance in Southern France and Father landed from a submarine to help coordinate sabotage.

“At that point the priority objective was to slow down German troop movements, to keep fresh troops from getting to the invasion beaches. Margaux was a child at the time, living in hiding with a farm family when she wasn’t on the move with her father. Her own mother, my grandmother, secretly went back to Paris early in ‘44 and was killed during the Liberation battles that August.

“Father met Roy in Paris after the Liberation, in late August or early September of ‘44. Roy was a sergeant in Signals at the time, and handled some of Father’s communications back to London. They became friends, and when Father was asked to work with the Monuments Men he asked Roy to go along as his assistant.”

“Monuments Men?” Jen was puzzled.

“They were a special group of mostly officers who were looking for the historic and valuable art the Nazis stole, most of it from Jews in France. But every museum in occupied Europe was stripped to the walls. The best pieces were earmarked for the grand museum Hitler planned to build in Linz, his birthplace, and many others wound up on the home and office walls of Nazi bigwigs. They even had their own set of corrupt dealers and agents to bring artworks to them. Those were always appraised very low so they could be bought cheaply with overvalued Reichsmarks. The dealers got rich and the big Nazis built great art collections. They fought with each other for the right to steal the best pieces.

“Hans Frank was a special case. Aurélie’s told me something  about him, and I Googled him as well — he didn’t even pretend to buy many of the most valuable works. He just appropriated them from a big family museum in Krakow and put them on his walls for the duration.

“At one time he had a Leonardo, a Rembrandt and a Raphael. The Raphael is still missing. It would be priceless today but it disappeared while Frank was scurrying back to his home in Bavaria, trying to stay ahead of the Russians. At least it was on the manifest for that trip. It could have been stolen earlier, if I read my father’s memo correctly. Aurélie and her colleagues are just about one hundred per cent sure the Raphael is the painting that’s at the root of this whole business.”

Jen asked, “Isn’t sixty years long enough for most of it to be found?”

“Probably, but there are still some important works missing, and Frank’s Raphael is the most valuable of all. Of course, it may have been destroyed or lost, or still be sitting in a bank vault in Switzerland or Houston.”

“Houston? How would that be?”

“The Nazis weren’t the only looters. Just a few years ago some very fancy Old Testament panels showed up in the hands of a former soldier in Texas. He had just mailed them home through the Army’s own post office. Other pieces have been resold to museums, who generally bought in good faith. Some were returned to their owners by shady representatives of unknown sellers, most of them lawyers, who generally receive a generous finder’s fee.

“The whole affair started out corrupt and it will end that way. People are willing to kill to preserve either their secrets or their fortunes. This affair combines both. Roy found that out the hard way.”

Eddie turned another page in the Leitz binder, looked at the page for a minute and whistled. “Wait a minute. Look at what we have here.”

He pointed at the first of a series of letters to Roy. “My German isn’t up to this. Would you read it?”

“Sure,” she said. Her finger traced a path down the page and when it arrived at the bottom she stopped on the signature. “Damn,” she said.

“What is it?” Eddie asked.

“This is basically a blackmail note, and it’s signed by a man named Erich Kraft. Do you remember I told you my mother’s husband had an unpleasant son my age? That was — is —  Erich Kraft. I guarantee you anything connected with either of them is no good.”

They counted six letters, written about two months apart, the last one dated November 2000. Roy had responded politely to each, saying he’d found no trace of the painting or any other treasure and was no longer actively searching. Each was more insistent than the last that he must know where to find the painting, or have already found it himself. The final letter cited a mysterious witness.

“You must deal with me honestly or bad things will happen,” the final letter said. “The painting and the gold were the property of my father, and they are mine now. I intend to have them.”

The receptionist helped them copy the contents of the binder and return the originals to the vault. Eddie put the copies into his old brown briefcase, which he’d tossed into the back seat at the last minute just in case they struck paydirt.

Following Billy Joe’s instructions, they walked across the street to a fading b
uilding whose last ground-floor tenant had been an antique shop. Under a sagging tin awning they found a wooden door, repainted a bright blue much more recently than the rest of the building. Its glass window had a sign, in gold leaf, announcing that James Dean, Attorney at Law, practiced on the second floor.

The wooden stairway had seen little recent care. A single bare bulb at the top threw each step into a half shadow that made walking up them difficult. Jen tripped and would have fallen once, but caught Eddie’s arm at the last second. At the top an unlighted hallway, its linoleum floor peeling at the edges, turned to the left. A man stood waiting in a pool of light at the open door of what appeared to be the building’s only inhabited office. He wore the trousers from an aged blue suit, a white shirt and a black bolo tie cinched tightly under his deeply sun-lined face with a large turquoise ornament. Brown cowboy boots with blue stitching stuck out below his too-short cuffs. His white hair was swept into an enormous pompadour that reminded Eddie of the television preachers he’d seen during his college days. Jen didn’t see anything unusual about it.

“Billy Joe called and told me you two would be here. Come on in and I’ll tell you everything I know, which ain’t much. And I am surely sorry at the death of your father, little lady. I didn’t know him well, but what I saw, I liked.

“Take a seat on the couch there.” He pointed to an old leather sofa. It stood under a window with a view out to Hickory Street, to the right of a roll-top desk that would have been at home in a Bogart movie. A row of filing cabinets, wooden except for a newer steel one at the end, stood against the opposite wall. Without the new-looking MacBook Pro on the desk, the room was pure 40s.

The old lawyer eased himself into an old wooden desk chair and turned to face them. He looked quizzically at Eddie. “Where do you fit in all this, young man? The banker told me you’re from France, but you look American to me.”

“Actually, I’m both, Mr. Dean. Roy and my father worked together during the war, and Jen brought me a letter from Roy. He didn’t know my father had died.”

“Where did they serve?”

“My father was in intelligence from 1940 on, but they served together at the end in Munich, helping recover art and treasure the Germans had stolen.”

“Ah. I’ve heard about that operation,” Jimmy said. “I was further north, in Belgium and at the Bulge, and then I got sick and wound up working in the pharmacy at a hospital in France. I was a completely green kid at the Bulge. Scared me to death.”

Jen sensed that Eddie was getting impatient. She knew his next question would be a pointed effort to get the conversation back onto Sommers, and that the old man might feel rushed. She raised her hand and replied to him, “You must have some stories to tell. Could we come back in a week or two and talk more when everything is more relaxed?”

It was the right touch. Jimmy sat up straighter in his chair and apologized. “I know you’re here about your father’s records, so I’ll tell you what I know about them.

“He came to me thirty years ago and said he needed a lawyer in Arcadia for something very specific. He wanted me to be his address of record for the safe deposit box he planned to open at Sun Bank, because he didn’t want anything in the records to show his home address. It had a different name then, but Billy Joe took charge at about that time.”

“That would have been in the late seventies, before I came to live with him,” Jen said.

“Yes, he told me he lived by himself and had no family here. But he was worried about something, I could tell. Most people wouldn’t jump through all the hoops he did to keep his address confidential.”

“Billy Joe — Mr. Maxwell — said you had an emergency contact for him. Please tell us about that.”

“Sure.” Jimmy got up from the chair, conspicuously favoring his right knee. “Arthritis. Old age. Whatever, it makes the stairs hell.”

He limped to the file cabinets and opened a wooden box standing on the top, rummaged in it and brought out an index card. “Here’s the card I keep whenever a get a new client. I ask them for all their addresses and contact information, although that’s blank on this one. But Roy did give me an emergency contact number just in case. ‘Bout ten years ago he came to see me and said he needed to change the contact name. Said the original man died and the new man would know what to do with all the stuff in the box. And he added your name, too, in case I couldn’t reach the primary.”

He handed the card to Jen, who looked at it and raised her eyebrows. She turned to Eddie and pointed out the contact name, carefully written in Roy’s European hand: Albert Sommers.

“Did you call Mr. Sommers?”

“Sure did. I talked to him right after I saw the notice in the newspaper a week ago Sunday, and he said he would see that Roy’s bank vault was taken care of. I got a funny feeling about him, though. When I told him I was calling about some papers of Roy’s, just for an instant he sounded surprised, maybe even a little bit frightened. I haven’t heard anything more from him.”

“The old bastard knew something was up when I talked to him yesterday. How much do you think Roy told him about the painting?” Eddie was beginning to feel like the man who finds a wasp nest but not the wasps and knows they’re lying in wait for him nearby. He had a sinking feeling that Roy had been surrounded by enemies, which he’d reali
zed early and as a result had moved his files away from his home, but hadn’t spotted them when they closed in on him.

Jen said, “He never hid his interest in the painting, but he thought the search was a lost cause. I never heard him say anything different from what he told Erich in those letters eight years ago. I always thought Al Sommers was twisted in some way, but I chalked it up to his wartime injury and his nasty politics. He saw conspiracies everywhere. Do you think he could be behind Roy’s death?”

“Too early to say, but it certainly is suspicious. We need to know a lot more about him. Who are his friends?”

Jen thought a minute as she made the turn toward Sarasota on Highway 70. “We used to see him now and then for dinner, but since he left the bank and his health started to fail I don’t think he’s been going out much. At one time he was active in Republican politics, but even they got tired of his anti-Semitic rants. He has a couple of gay friends who visit him from time to time, strange as that sounds. I think the father of one of them used to work for him in Texas — he was the guard your father met at Nuremberg. And there’s a couple who look after him. They’re East Germans but they’ve been here a long time and they keep pretty much to themselves. They live in a little caretaker’s house on his property, and the story is he won’t let them go into Sarasota, so they have to drive to Tampa on their days off. Otherwise I don’t know if he still has any friends.”

“I met Sonny yesterday. Strange guy. I’d better tell Thom some of what we found,” Eddie said as he pulled the iPhone from his shirt pocket. “I hope there’s a signal out here.”