Dirty Fire (18 page)

My eyes snapped open, and my heart was pounding. For an instant, I thought someone was with me in the dark of the room; without conscious thought, my hand groped for the pistol on the nightstand.

Then the phone rang again, and I knew what had broken into my troubled sleep was a different kind of intruder.

“I’m turning onto your street now,” the voice of Ron Santori said in my ear. “Get dressed. We’re going into the city.”

I started to rub my eyes and realized that I was holding the loaded automatic. The red digital numbers on the alarm clock read 11:48; I had been asleep less than an hour. I felt like hell, and half regretted my decision to give up vodka as a sleep aid.

“You there?” His voice was irritated. “Get it together, Davey. We’re meeting Charlie Herndon downtown.”

“Why?”

Santori laughed, once. “Apparently he stirred up a hornet’s nest. He says the Russians have landed.” From outside the window, I heard a car pull to a stop. “I’m parked outside. Hurry up, Davey. They’re waiting for us.”

I pulled on jeans and a turtleneck pullover and dragged a comb through my hair. The face in the mirror looked drawn, and there were dark hollows under the eyes. It was a face I had to work hard to recognize.

The only addition to my outfit was a light leather jacket I pulled from the closet. It would ward off the chill of the evening and had the advantage of hanging loosely just below my hips. It also had large side pockets, into one of which I slipped my tape recorder.

I zipped the jacket up halfway and glanced in the mirror as I went out my door.

I looked stylish, and there was no sign of the holstered weapon I had threaded onto my belt.

• • •

It is never really night in Chicago, at least not along the length of North Michigan Avenue that centers on the old Water Tower. Sodium-vapor streetlamps ally with the pearl-white necklaces of lights strung year-round in the branches of parkway trees, joined at each intersection with the tricolor of traffic signals. The effect is to forever banish the darkness of night to neighborhoods less favored by both fortune and fate. In the area around the Water Tower, the attitude is one of cheerful, arrogant invulnerability.

It has not always been that way.

The last serious attempt to level the city was the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. As a schoolchild in Chicago, I had been taught the blaze began when Mrs. O‘Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern. Today, an increasing number of historians reject the bovine-arsonist legend that has prevailed for more than a century in favor of alternate suspects. One of the more intriguing of these focuses less on the cow than on the cosmos.

A handful of revisionists now theorize the Chicago fire was ignited by white-hot fragments of a meteor flung from the heavens at the sinful frontier metropolis. If true, either the meteor or the Hand that threw it was blithely nonchalant about inflicting peripheral damage: two hundred miles to the north, in the single largest conflagration history has ever recorded, the virgin Wisconsin forests around Peshtigo also burst into flames—suspiciously or coincidentally, depending on your point of view—on the same day, at about the same hour.

Whatever the cause, the limestone Water Tower was among the handful of Chicago’s structures to withstand a firestorm that reduced most of its largely wood and frame construction to smoking ash. When Chicago rebuilt itself—making millionaires of the well-connected businessmen who owned the limestone quarries and brickyards suddenly made essential by new building codes—the fanciful stoneworks of the Water Tower and its accompanying waterworks facility were at the center of what gradually became its showcase commercial section north of the Chicago River.

Today, luxury hotels glitter in their opulence, surrounded by famous-name shops and world-class restaurants; its ten-square-block area comprises some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Even at this hour, with the new day less than fifty minutes old, an endless procession of cars flows past sidewalks thick with pedestrian traffic both along the main drag and on the side streets that branch off the
Boul Mich
.

And presiding over it all is the now-antique Water Tower, a spotlighted survivor whose single stone finger still points toward the sky as if in some urgent but only vaguely remembered warning.

“Her name is Petra Natalia Valova, and she’s some kind of official at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow,” Ron Santori was saying, waving me ahead as they entered the Omni Hotel’s impressive lobby. “Fairly high on the food chain, from what I understand. Charlie Herndon’s already up there with her.” We stopped in front of a bank of elevators and Santori pressed the button. “I hope nobody’s declared war yet.”

We walked down the hallway to a suite.

“Since Cieloczki’s visit, Charlie’s been impossible to live with,” Santori said in a low voice. “He’s been burning up the phone wires talking to his sources all over the goddam world. He’s spent hours on the Internet, posting notes to news groups connected to the Holocaust, art experts, military historians—dozens of ‘em. Next thing I know, we get a call from the Russian Consulate that this Valova woman is in town, needs to see him on an urgent and confidential matter. Believe it or not, it’s not the kind of phone call the FBI gets every day.”

He knocked on a door, which immediately opened. Even silhouetted, I had no problem identifying the figure whose bulk filled the entrance to the suite. Herndon looked at both of us with ill-concealed irritation.

“This whole thing is turning into one major rat-fuck,” he said, then looked at me. “Don’t even
think
of using that damn tape recorder of yours when I talk to these people. Understand me?”

“I don’t even have it with me, Agent Herndon.”

“Uh-huh.” He did not sound convinced, but stood aside to let us enter. “Come in, then. The Russian Mata Hari is waiting for us.”

Petra Natalia Valova was young to be a senior official anywhere, let alone at one of the premier art institutions in the world. I guessed her age in the mid to late thirties. Her center-parted straight black hair fell to her shoulders. She wore a no-nonsense business outfit of black wool that looked better suited for a colder climate, its skirt tailored to the middle of her knees. Red plastic glasses of a style that had been fashionable a few years before gave her an earnest, studious appearance. If she wore makeup, it was applied artfully enough to be indiscernible.

When Santori and I entered, Valova was talking in a near whisper with a trim, balding man of indeterminate age. From their expressions, it did not seem to be a casual conversation.

“Tarinkoff, from the consulate,” Herndon said to Santori. He did not whisper. “Cultural attaché, so he’s probably SVR.”

The man turned away from the conversation and approached with his hand outstretched. “Anotoli Tarinkoff,” he said with a practiced smile, “and no, Mr. Herndon—I am not with the Foreign Intelligence Service, though I suspect this matter will not long be without their most sincere attention. Nor was I with their predecessor, the KGB. I am that most rare of all specimens, a
genuine
Russian cultural attaché.” His chuckle was carefully self-deprecating, his handshake was firm, and his accent was of the American Midwest. He might have been the manager of a hardware store, greeting latecomers to a Rotary Club meeting.

“I’m disappointed,” Santori said with a smile of his own. “I missed out on the excitement of the Cold War. I was hoping to meet a real-life Russian spy.”

“I do not have the time for spying,” Tarinkoff said pleasantly. “Chicago is a city with a passion for the arts, and as a result all of my waking hours are quite fully accounted for. In just the past week, I have met with an automotive parts corporation that wishes to sponsor a tour by the Petrograd Symphony, arranged for one of your Chicago filmmakers to enter the Moscow Cinematic Festival, and attended two exhibition openings.” He smiled broadly. “It is good that I enjoy my job, is it not?”

The woman stepped to Tarinkoff’s side and looked at Santori with a gaze that was steady enough so that I suspected it was forced. Without appearing to do so, I studied her. Her lips were a thin tight line and there was a slight, almost imperceptible tremor to her fingers that I had seen before, most recently in myself. It was not the product of a tranquil mind.

“May I introduce Dr. Petra Valova, Senior Curator of Fine Arts of the Pushkin Museum?” he said, turning to include her in the introduction. “She has come here on an urgent matter—one she believes may also be of interest to you, Mr. Herndon.”

• • •

“It is a well-known fact that the large parts of the Soviet Union suffered almost catastrophic devastation when the Nazi army invaded our country in 1942,” Petra Valova said. Unlike her consular companion, no one would mistake her for a native English speaker.

Like a number of professional scholars I had encountered, the only road to the point she needed to make involved a long journey—one for which she held the only map. She addressed the room as if she was standing in a university lecture hall filled with undergraduates, which seemed to amuse Santori as much as it annoyed Herndon.

“The Nazis hated Slavic culture,” the woman continued. “They bombed and shelled our cities without restraint, and many ancient and irreplaceable
objets d’art
were destroyed. It was only right that this terrible destruction should be punished, and that lost Soviet art treasures be replaced with that taken from the aggressors. This became a principle of Soviet State policy, which was duly carried out when Hitler and his followers were defeated by the Red Army.

“Unfortunately, there was a corrupt element among the leadership who saw this as an opportunity to enrich themselves in an illegal and antisocial manner. One of these was Viktor Abakumov.” She paused for effect.

I was seated on a low sofa directly in her line of sight. It was probably for that reason that she looked at me and nodded solemnly. I felt mildly embarrassed, as if I had skipped the assigned reading for the day.

“You have probably never heard of Viktor Abakumov,” Petra Natalia Valova said, “but during the Great Patriotic War and for a number of years afterward, he was a very powerful person in the Soviet Union. He was head of SMERSH—the Soviet Internal Counterintelligence Apparatus—and later, Minister of State Security. All of this is to say that, during that unfortunate period, he was in charge of the official use of terror and murder to eliminate traitors, political dissidents or potential enemies of the state. There were many abuses during this period. No one was immune, and no one knew when—or for what reason—one would be denounced and arrested.

“In Germany, even as the Red Army crushed the Nazi in battle after battle, SMERSH remained a power unto itself,” she said. “Even the great Marshal Zukov, who commanded all the Soviet forces in the Western Campaign, was exceptionally cautious in any matters where SMERSH was involved. For that reason, he kept a blind eye toward Abakumov and his activities. This allowed Abakumov to be very brazen.

“It was also well known that when Abakumov wanted to send items for his ‘collection’ out of Germany, he would often commandeer an airplane. The official requisition always stated it was for the ‘transportation of arrested persons.’ But the airplane was always met by armed soldiers from SMERSH; customs officials were not allowed near these transports, nor could they examine the many crates which were removed from them.”

Valova laughed, a single mirthless bark.

“The story is told that in May of 1945, a shipment of appropriated items was sent by a special railroad from Dresden to Moscow. On the side of each railcar, painted in white letters as tall as a man, was the name ‘ABAKUMOV.’ That alone was sufficient to ensure the train arrived in Moscow untouched by either bandits, Red Army inspectors or state customs authorities.

“After the war, there were countless conspiracies by which these men attempted to remain in Stalin’s favor by denouncing each other,” she said. “By this time, Abakumov was head of the Ministry of State Security, and as a powerful man he had powerful enemies in the regime. In 1954, it was his turn to be denounced, arrested and executed. The many art treasures he had collected for his personal property were confiscated and turned over to the Pushkin Museum. Subsequently they were sent for safekeeping to a place then called Zagorsk, now re-named Sergeyev Posad. Specifically, to the Trinity-St. Sergius monastery there.”

For the first time, she shifted her gaze to Herndon, who had been standing at the decorative fireplace against the far wall. He was tall enough to rest one elbow on the high mantle, and irritated enough to look bored while doing it.

“I apologize if I have taxed your patience during this story, but it is important for you to understand. Both as official reparations seized from German museums and as the very many ‘unofficial’ confiscations by officers such as Abakumov, almost three million objects of art and other cultural properties were removed to the Soviet Union. This occurred during a chaotic period when a world conflict was ending. It had no precedent in history—and regrettably, it was not always handled in the most organized manner.”

She hesitated. “By this I mean that documentation of the individual pieces remains…incomplete.” I saw her eyes shift quickly toward the FBI art expert before she continued, her voice quickening in her defensiveness. “With so many items, neither the Pushkin Museum nor the other cultural facilities where these pieces have been stored have completely catalogued these holdings. Nor have they successfully traced prior ownership in every case.

“For that reason, many of these items have not been made available for display or study in many years. This has resulted in some unfortunate misconceptions related to my government’s intentions and motivations regarding them.”

I felt rather than saw the effect the long-winded apologia was having on Charlie Herndon. From my initial meeting with Herndon, I had no illusions about the art expert’s intolerance for even well-phrased obfuscation. I could sense that the storm clouds were gathering, and I wondered how long we had before lighting began to strike.