Treasure of Saint-Lazare (18 page)

“Your father returned to the family business in New York State, married but it didn’t last, and after three years or so moved back to Paris, where he was very successful in selling much of the steel that went into rebuilding Europe. There he married your mother, whom he knew from his cloak-and-dagger days with Army intelligence. The family business was ultimately sold to another American steel firm that had no need for a second European CEO and he retired, but he had the good judgment to recognize that the domestic steel industry was on the skids and sold his stock in the acquiring company as soon as he legally could, a good decision since it went bankrupt a dozen years later. As a result you and your mother are among the wealthiest Americans in France or anywhere else. You have done a successful job of preserving your assets and hers during the current economic unpleasantness. I take it from your investment activities over the last eighteen months that you expect things to get worse.”

“Much worse,” he replied.

She paused to push a hank of shoulder-length hair behind her right ear.

“Is that a fair summary of our starting point?”

Eddie nodded and told her she seemed to have a good grasp of everything he’d known before Roy Castor’s death.

“There are a couple of things we know that you may not yet have heard, and I’d like to get them onto the table early.” He nodded at her to continue.

“First, Colonel Sommers is a more complicated character than he might appear on the surface.”

“I suspected that,” Eddie said. “I interviewed him day before yesterday and he certainly wasn’t anxious to volunteer information. In fact, he lied.”

Carole continued, “I’m not at all sure how pertinent any of this is to the case at hand, but Colonel Sommers is well known to my office as having been a mid-level thief during his time in Munich. Like too many GIs, he just couldn’t keep his hands off the material he was supposed to be preserving. He seemed to favor old religious silver. As far as we can tell he’s never overtly sold any of it, and we never were certain exactly what he took, so the Justice Department took a pass on him. The FBI did give him a once-over about ten years ago, but couldn’t find enough evidence to move forward and he was a pretty small fish.”

Eddie interrupted her. “Roy’s daughter Jen and I found some of Roy’s files in a bank box yesterday and I’d say his behavior in Munich was consistent with what you just told me. For example, my father did a long report to Sommers about his interview with Hans Frank, and later sent the pink copy to Roy with a notation that the original wasn’t in the files where it should be. The clear implication was that Sommers had plucked it out for his own purposes. In it there’s a mention that Frank may have sent one painting separate from the others, which could have attracted his attention.”

“That’s consistent with what we know. Many of the looters were enlisted men who just accidentally-on-purpose forgot to turn in everything they found and mailed a few pieces home, but he picked through everything and chose the pieces he wanted. It doesn’t appear he was particularly good at it, but he really abused his position. But as I said, nothing’s going to happen to him on the criminal front. It’s just been too long and he’s too old.”

“I understand that, but he went out of his way to try to convince me he wasn’t interested in art and didn’t know much about it, but his dining room walls are hung with a half-dozen nice oil paintings. Not museum-quality by any means, but if he chose them he knows something about painting. On the surface it would make sense that the gold is the big target here, but the painting might also be important. Also, he knew about the safe deposit box where I found the Frank interview report but he didn’t mention it to me. Then the next day when we left the bank Jen and I were chased at very high speed by someone the police could never identify.”

Carole asked him to go through the story of what had happened since Jen had turned up at his door. She questioned him especially closely about the attack at the Hôtel Chopin, and asked him to repeat his description of the attackers, then she laid two photos on the desk before him. One was black and white, poorly focused, and showed a tall man dressed in 40s style standing between two French policemen, each of them holding an arm. It had been cropped so that only half of each policeman was in the frame, but it was clear they had their man firmly under control. The other appeared to be a frame from the same surveillance video Thom had shown him.

“We’re really interested in this guy,” Carole said, tapping her index finger on the surveillance clip. “We’re pretty sure he was in the group that tried to kidnap Mr. Castor, and we think he may have been the man who cut up the French hotel clerk so badly. “Our embassy asked the Paris police for the mug shots, but they only got two of the three Germans so we had to make do with our own — this is from the camera in the long-term parking lot at Sarasota airport, and it shows this man stealing the car that hit Mr. Castor.

“Here’s one of a man with almost the same name taken sixty years ago, from our own files. Obviously they aren’t the same person, but you can see more than a superficial resemblance.”

Superficial? Eddie thought the resemblance was uncanny.

“Who is this? They could be brothers.”

“We think they’re father and son, the Krafts,” Carole said. Both are named Eric, the son with an h.

“What’s most interesting is that the photo of the father was taken in 1947 when he was released from Santé Prison after he’d served two years for collaborating with the Germans. At the time he told a wild story about how he’d brought a truckload of gold and a valuable old painting to Paris on behalf of Hans Frank, who was a relative — his mother’s side, I believe, but that’s murky. But there was no evidence of either the gold or the painting, so the police put him down as a windbag. As soon as he got out of jail he hightailed it for Germany, where he went to work for the Stasi. Later he surfaced in Frankfurt, where he died in the eighties.”

Eddie caught his breath. “What then?”

“We aren’t sure. He was in the shipping business and probably was involved in some undercover work on behalf of Stasi. Frankfurt was on its way to becoming a huge financial center, so there would have been a lot of opportunities for industrial espionage. But the agency just didn’t have the resources to chase every East German spook, so he fell off the radar.”

“Let me fill in some of the blanks,” Eddie said. “One of the things he did was marry Jen Wetzmuller’s mother, Gutrud, who was Roy Castor’s office manager and maybe his sometime lover. She died in 1980, but Jen remembers that he had an unpleasant son who looked just like him.”

“Ugh. The two of them must have been a pair.”

“No doubt about that. It means that there may have been something to the father’s tale about the painting and the gold, or at least the son is convinced of it. But why now? Why is this coming to life this year, and not next year or fifteen years ago? And what has the son been doing all this time? And could Al Sommers have heard the father’s story?”

Carole said, “The price of gold could have something to do with it. It’s more than tripled in the last four years, which would make it very attractive to someone with a cash-flow problem. And young Erich may have found a lead, or met somebody who thinks he can find the treasure. Or he might have found someone who could sell the gold. It would have swastika markings cast into it, so all banks and legitimate gold dealers would recognize it as wartime loot, unless of course he can find someone to melt it down for him, which wouldn’t be easy, or sell it to someone who didn’t care. He was pretty young when the wall fell, so he wasn’t ever an official Stasi agent, but since then it appears he’s been hanging out with some of the more disreputable Stasi alumni, including some with terrorist connections. That, by the way, is the intersection of your case and my usual work.”

Eddie thought for a minute before responding. “And it may have something to do with Sommers’s health. Jen told me he was in really good shape until a year ago, but now he’s in a wheelchair and on oxygen part of the time. He might have decided it’s now or never.”

“There’s something else that’s bothering us.” Carole pointed again to the second photo on the table.

“We’ve enhanced the parking-lot shot, which was pretty good to begin with. Here’s a blowup of the man you see at the door.”

The photo was clear. It showed a man in his 40s, with short brown hair, wearing a brown jacket that looked like leather.

“We know the men Philippe’s people arrested were German, so we started looking for this one among the pictures TSA takes at immigration checkpoints.”

“Did you find him?”

“No, which bothered us. The Sarasota police found out that three men arrived in Tampa via Amtrak a couple of days before Mr. Castor was killed, then took a cab to Sarasota, where they slipped away.

“Imagine our surprise when we found out this German had arrived in Atlanta from Frankfurt and gone through immigration as a U.S. citizen, with a valid U.S. passport.”

“How could that be?”

“You have to keep in mind that TSA’s facial recognition software is very good, but it’s not yet perfect. It picked out this face from among a group of passports issued to naturalized citizens almost ten years ago, so there’s still a little bit of doubt about the identification, but I doubt he’ll want to try renewing it.”

“That’s a surprise. I’d think the pre-naturalization checks would have turned up his background.”

“That should have happened, except that he had a legend that seems to have been years in the making. You’re looking at citizen Erich Wetzmuller, who was vouched for by his loving sister, Jennifer Gutrud Wetzmuller.”

Eddie stood up to get a closer look at the pictures. “Merde!” he said softly. Then, “that would explain some things.”

“Such as?”

“Just a feeling I’ve had that Jen wasn’t playing this completely straight. She was just a little evasive, like her mind was elsewhere. And she reacted very strangely when Philippe Cabillaud mentioned the clipped ear. She didn’t seem really surprised. And I could never figure out why the people who killed her father would wait ten days to go after her, when they could have done the same thing in Sarasota. Maybe they were spooked when Roy died and got out of town as quickly as they could.”

Carole asked, “Do you think she set her father up for the kidnapping?”

“I doubt it. I don’t believe Roy had ever indicated to her that he knew where to find the painting, but they had the idea — and I’m told this was from Dmitri — that my father knew where to find it. So they may have figured Roy had the same information. But why would they wait seven years?

“In any case, it’s pretty clear to me now that they wanted to kidnap him and sweat the hiding place out of him, because they thought he knew where it all was hidden. But he didn’t know where it was, or is, but they were pretty sure he did. And then when he tried to escape from them and instead ran in front of the car, accessory to kidnapping turned into accessory to murder.

He paused a moment, then added, “She must be tough, to deal with all of that and string me along as well.”

Carole said, “Hard to say. Her business is in serious financial trouble, and the police suspect she may not have passed on all the money she took in from selling paintings that she took on consignment. Her inheritance from her father will take care of that, because as this sort of scam goes it was pretty small beer. There’s a competitor who’s about to go to prison for stealing millions.”

“How do you know all that?”

“We have friends who have friends. Unfortunately, Florida is home turf for an astounding number of very inventive scams. Most of them have absolutely nothing to do with us, but now and then somebody like citizen Sommers will come along, and then we get involved, just for the information — CIA isn’t, officially, a law enforcement agency on American soil. One contact like that generally leads in a lot of other directions. For example, the Sommers lead came from a disgruntled employee while he was still in Texas. It led us to Sonny Perry and the hoard he inherited from his father.”

Eddie paused for a second. “I heard about Sonny’s record just yesterday, but not from the police. I wonder why Thom Anderson never mentioned any of this to me?”

“For all he knows you’re part of the deal — you’re sort of European, your father was present at the start and stayed in touch with Roy over the years. And, you’re sleeping with her. Down there I’m not certain which is worse, all that or speaking French.”

“Well, I’m most definitely not part of any art or gold scam. But do you think I may have trouble with the local police before this is over?”

“I don’t think so. Icky talked to the local chief about it. You certainly don’t need the money, Raphael isn’t your taste in art, and you’re a Special Forces officer with a bronze star and a V, so I don’t think they’ll bother you. No, I think they believe they’re dealing with a local bad apple, or several of them, and if they can solve it on that basis they’ll be happy.”

“That’s good to hear. There’s one more thing that will help you, I think. The witnesses to Roy Castor’s death said Roy shouted at one of the kidnappers, ‘You’re no better than your father,’ or words to that effect. That picture of Eric the older when he got out of Santé prison sort of looks like the right ear might be a funny shape, but the surveillance photo in the parking lot just shows the left ear. If you can find a picture of that other ear it might square the circle.”

“Thanks,” Carole said. “We’ll look for another view. I’ll get your phone number from Icky and call you if I find anything else.”

Eddie crossed the hall to Icky’s office and waited in the anteroom for a few minutes until the door opened. A three-star Air Force general wearing a glum expression emerged and Icky walked him to the security door at the end of the hall. He returned and signaled with a nod that Eddie should come in and take a seat at the long conference table.

“Was Carole helpful?”

“I’ll say. It seems the woman who brought me into this, and with whom I’ve been pleasantly sharing a bed, may be part of the other side. At least she has some friends who aren’t on the same side Roy was or I am.” He smiled ruefully at Icky. “It’s funny, but I thought of her as the soft 20-year-old I knew. I wonder if she’s changed or was like this when I first met her.”

“Doesn’t matter, take it from a serial philanderer. What are you planning to do about it?”