Aaron Elkins - Old Scores

The stuff is a bit sweet for my taste, but I raised my glass to him and took a sip. "Have you gone to the authorities about this, Monsieur Mann?"

He nodded. "The Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Justice. They gave me a form to fill out. You know what they want to know?" He laughed bitterly. " 'Describe any identifying marks on the back. Describe the type of frame.' Can you believe this? A seven-year-old child is expected to know such things, and then remember fifty years later?"

I was glad I hadn't gotten started on the list of questions I'd thought up for him: Which way was the subject facing? What color was the plume? Could you see one hand, two hands, no hands? For one thing, Mann would have taken offense and possibly thrown me out on my ear. For another, he was right: you couldn't expect a kid to be accurate about details half a century later. If he got the answers wrong, that didn't prove his story wasn't true. And if he got them right, that wouldn't prove he hadn't been coached.

"I have no such proof to offer, monsieur; just my own memory of the painting hanging in our living room."

"No papers at all? What about the attribution? Wasn't it documented?"

He shrugged. "Gone."

"Well, do you know anything about its provenance, about who owned it before?"

"It had been my Aunt Marthe's. She had it a long time. I think it was in her husband's family. They're all dead now." He spread his palms. "That's all I know. I wish I knew more."

So did I. "There aren't any relatives who could testify that they'd seen the picture in your house?"

He lifted his glass to his mouth with both hands and drank. His face was hidden. "From those days," he said, "I have no more relatives."

"What about-what about friends, neighbors? People who'd been in your house in the old days?"

He smiled. "I'll tell you a little story, monsieur." He stood up and went to the window, looking down on the railroad yards.

"In those days we lived in a pleasant apartment in the thirteenth arrondisement. Very nice neighbors. My father was a supervisor in the Post Office; a valuable employee, the Nazis let him stay on. But on December 28, 1942-just a few weeks after Vachey came and bought the picture-they came for him. For my mother, too, and my brother, Alfred. And me. We went to Birkenau, you know where that is?"

"Poland," I said softly. It was one of the camps at Auschwitz.

"Yes, Poland. Well, three years later I came back, without a family now, and went to live in Strasbourg with the family of an older boy I met in the camp. Then, in 1948, I returned to Paris. I was fourteen. I went back to see our apartment building. It was on the Avenue D'lvry. Some of our old neighbors still lived there, a very kind old couple named Odillard, just below our old apartment. They were happy to see me, and terribly distressed to hear about the deaths of my father and mother and brother, and they made me stay for dinner. They gave me boeuf a la mode, not so easy to find in those days."

He was leaning on the windowsill, staring into the haze but not seeing it. "They gave it to me on my parents' dinnerware," he said tightly. "The willow-pattern plates my mother had bought when my brother, Alfred, was born, the silver that had been a wedding gift from her sister in Toulouse. In the corner was the buffet that we had kept them in. They didn't even realize it." He turned toward me, as if curious as to what my response would be.

I didn't know what to say. "They'd stolen them?"

I think he smiled, but it was hard to tell. "Not stolen, no. These were good, kind-hearted people, not thieves or monsters. Still, after the Nazis took us away, they just walked upstairs and took what they wanted. So did our other neighbors. We were Jews, after all, and what ever they might say now, they didn't expect ever to see us again. And then, somehow, these good, kind-hearted people managed to forget where they'd gotten these fine, new possessions, managed to forget the times my mother had served them coffee and cake on those same cups and plates. And they really did forget, you see."

He came back and sat wearily down. "And so, Monsieur Norgren," he said, picking up his Kir again, "do you really expect that I could find friends and neighbors who would remember the beautiful portrait that hung in our home, and vouch for my claim?"

Again, there wasn't much I could say. I sipped some more from my drink.

Mann had finished his, and the alcohol appeared to have mellowed him. I suspected he didn't often drink; both bottles had been full to start with. "You seem like a nice young man," he said-making that twice in one day that someone had called me "young man." "But I must warn you that I will not rest until this painting is returned. What's right is right."

Underneath the resolution there was a kind of subdued despair. He was fighting the good fight, I thought, but in his heart he didn't believe he could win it. Not against the famous Rene Vachey. Not against a big American museum.

"I understand," I said. "We're not against you, Monsieur Mann. We want the painting to go where it rightfully belongs. If it's your father's painting, I will do what I can to help you get it back. I mean that sincerely."

Behind the bottle-bottom glasses Mann's small, fierce eyes reappraised me. He'd begun with the idea that he was receiving an enemy. Now he wondered if I was-maybe not an enemy.

"Thank you," he said gruffly. "I would like you to know that my motive is not profit. I would never sell it. It's all that's left of my father's. Everything else-everything from my childhood-is gone."

"I understand," I said again. I was almost starting to wish it would turn out to be his.

He leaned dreamily against the back of his chair. "It's a wonderful painting, isn't it? As a boy, I-another drink, monsieur?"

I shook my head. The talk was winding down, and I sensed that I'd be going soon. Chalk up one more conversation that had answered no questions, resolved no ambiguities.

"As a boy, my older brother and I-Alfred was his name- would play at soldiers. The old man in the picture was our captain; Capitaine Le Nez, we called him. Because of the nose, you see. We would line up before him and salute…" An unreadable expression rolled over his face. His hand moved up to rest, trembling, on his domed forehead. "My God…"

My interest quickened. "What is it?"

"It's broken," he said wonderingly. "I forgot completely. We broke it."

"You broke the painting?"

"The frame-we broke the frame. I can describe it perfectly." Agitated, he reached out to touch my wrist with dry, spidery fingers. "That would be proof, wouldn't it?"

He and his brother, he said, had been reporting to Capitaine Le Nez one morning, when the play had gotten a little rough. They had accidentally knocked the picture from the wall and chipped a piece from the lower right corner. Terrified, they had glued it back on and apparently gotten away with it; their father had never noticed the repair.

"I'm afraid I don't remember noticing it either," I said.

"Well, we did a good job gluing it!" He was squirming with excitement. "Look for it, you'll see; the lower right corner! A piece-so big." He used his fingers to make a triangular shape about an inch on a side.

"What kind of frame was it?"

He gestured impatiently. "I don't remember the frame-no wait, I think it had fancy carving-but the break-look for it!"

"I'll look," I said. "You'd better mention this to your attorney too."

He jerked his head no. "I don't trust him. I trust you, monsieur. You look, please." He was out of his chair and practically pulling me out of mine, as if the sooner he got me up and walking, the sooner I'd be back in Dijon.

"I'll look," I promised again as I stood up, "but-I'm sorry, Monsieur Mann-I think I would already have seen it if it was there."