The Chrysalis (25 page)

Hilda's voice dropped to a whisper. Mara tried to catch every word. “So I rushed to Milan. In those days, all international trains came to Milan via Berlin, and I went to the station immediately. I remember so well that cool winter day. I had dressed in my wartime finest, my highest heels with a matching bag, a fur stole around my thin shoulders, and some black-market lipstick to warm my wan face. I wanted to look my best to greet them. I did not want them to see the hardships I had been enduring, so small in face of their own. I stood in the very spot where their train would disembark, under the enormous ticking station clock. The Berlin train announced its arrival with a deafening horn blast and a bellow of steam. I could not wait to see them, touch them, and embrace them—to make them real again. A stream of soldiers and important-looking officials passed by. But not my parents.

“Surely they would be on the next train, I thought to myself. So the next day, I repeated my vigil. And the next day. And the next. And the next. And the next. A whole week of waiting and watching. I grew intimately familiar with the soaring metal skeleton of the station; with the routines of the station workers, who had grown so un-Italian in their punctual attention to schedule; with the endless flights of refugees looking for a safe place to land. At the end of the week, I had to acknowledge that something had happened to them and that they would not be on the next train.

“I tracked down my husband, desperate with worry. We tried to find out where they were. At last, after an endless fortnight, we got the information that my parents had been taken to a concentration camp, to Dachau. We knew what that meant. I cannot even explain to you the depths of my devastation, but I was forced to deny it for the time being. My husband and I went to Rome and were received by one of Mussolini's own ministers. We told him of the terrible mistake, of the letter from Seyss-Inquart, of the promised safe passage. He pledged to try to help save my parents. But the war was turning against Germany. By 1943, the Italian army was losing to the Allied invasion force, which meant the end of any influence on the Nazis through my Italian connections. Then Mussolini fell, and blackness descended upon me.”

Hilda stopped. Not wanting to interrupt, Mara sat without making a sound.

Hilda shook herself from her deep reverie. Her voice grew strong and businesslike. “As you know, on that first day of peace, I undertook the search for my parents and learned what had happened to them at the Berlin train station, at Dachau.” The mask did not hold; Hilda began to weep. She got up from her chair and went through the motions of putting on more tea. Mara felt tears stream down her own face, overwhelmed with the horror of it all and the role she had played, however unwittingly.

“I had to wait until 1946 to go back to Amsterdam. Because I was traveling on an Italian passport at that time, I was regarded as an enemy of the Netherlands. Imagine that.” Mara saw Hilda shaking her head from the back. “I remember well approaching my parents' house. From the outside, it looked exactly the same. The gardens were in full bloom, and Mother's prize tulips were flowering. I kept expecting Mother and Father to rush out in greeting. On the inside, however, the Nazi ravages were evident. Walls stripped bare of paintings, tapestries, and mirrors; floors left naked of carpets; rooms fully exposed, without so much as a stick of furniture for cover. The Nazis left only the bare bones of a house.

“I scoured the neighborhood, looking for anyone who'd been with my parents in their last days. Searching for a keepsake, any kind of remembrance of them. I found Maria, Mother's lady's maid, drunk in a nearby pub. She'd been with my mother in the final days, and inebriated ever since.

“Maria told me what had happened. On that last morning, an S.S. officer arrived at the house, pulling up in a black Daimler-Benz. My parents were terrified at first, but the officer greeted them with an enormous grin and first-class train tickets to Italy. My parents were thrilled, thinking I had arranged them. While my parents scampered about packing their worldly goods like rats in a trap, the officer and his aide went slowly from room to room looking at the few remaining paintings, touching the furniture. The smiles returned as the officers helped load the Daimler-Benz to escort my parents personally to the station, to their own private compartment in first class, a rarity in those days. Maria bade my mother farewell as the car pulled away from my parents' home. Along with Willem, my father's servant, she watched my graying parents, mother bedecked in her finest, both sealed in by crates and trunks, grow smaller in the distance.”

Hilda turned from the stove, drawing close to Mara. “I wanted something of my parents, Ms. Coyne. Something tangible that I could touch, feel, caress in those dark moments when I could hear them crying out from Dachau. I wanted
The Chrysalis
most of all.

“If only I could have found it in Europe after the war. Any civilized country would have returned the painting to me. But
The Chrysalis
was long gone. Gone to the United States where your laws are so very different and so very unjust.”

Mara spoke, her voice raspy and dry from sitting so long in silence. “That's why I'm here, Ms. Baum, though it may seem an empty gesture now that
The Chrysalis
is gone. I hope perhaps to make up, in some small way, for the injustice that has been done to you and to your family.”

Hilda's eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

Mara cleared her throat, more nervous than before any judge or tribunal. “I came to tell you of a deception perpetrated by Beazley's upon me, upon you, and upon countless others like you.”

Mara longed for absolution, but the remnants of her old, self-protective persona stepped in with justifications. “You must understand that, from the beginning, Beazley's assured me they had obtained
The Chrysalis
legitimately, that they'd purchased it from Albert Boettcher & Company, an impeccable dealer. They even showed me the documents to prove it.

“Ms. Baum, it was all a lie. After the summary judgment motion, I learned that Beazley's bought
The Chrysalis
from Kurt Strasser, a man who's been described as an eager profiteer of plundered Nazi art loot. So I did some investigation. Beazley's—I should say my client, Michael Roarke's, great-uncle Edward, who was a chair of Beazley's—forged a bill of sale showing instead that it'd been bought from squeaky-clean Boettcher. They hoped to bury forever the fact that the Nazis must have stolen the painting from your father's aunt in Nice, where your father sent it for safekeeping, and laundered it through Strasser, like so many others. Even worse, the person through whom Strasser laundered it in turn was an American soldier working in league with Edward Roarke.”

Hilda's face was blank; she said nothing. “Ms. Baum, I'm so sorry. I wanted to share this with you before you read about it in the papers. To protect us all, to shield us from what Michael Roarke and Philip Robichaux might do to prevent all this from becoming known, I told the story to a
New York Times
reporter and gave her copies of the documents about
The Chrysalis.
The truth about
The Chrysalis
will become public tomorrow. I know it's not much of a consolation for you, now that
The Chrysalis
has been stolen, even though I hope the settlement money is something of a comfort. Regardless of the fate of the painting, I wanted the truth to be known. I'm sorry.”

Hilda's voice escalated into rage. “You're sorry? Do you think your little investigation into the truth offers justice? Before you found out that Beazley's had forged the bill of sale, you were ready to hand
The Chrysalis
to them. Ms. Coyne, it doesn't matter if my father sent
The Chrysalis
to storage for the Nazis' ripe picking or sold it to the Nazis himself. Either way, the Nazis stole
The Chrysalis
from him. They forced Father to wear the Jewish star. Forced him out of his business. Forced him deep into debt. So deep that maybe he tried to sell some of his precious art to purchase freedom for himself and Mother, or maybe just to buy food to survive. If I'd been able to bring the suit in the European courts, I could have argued that even a voluntary sale in such circumstances is forced and tantamount to Nazi wartime theft. The European courts might have returned
The Chrysalis
to its rightful owner: me. But no. The battle for
The Chrysalis
took place here in the unsympathetic American courts—with you and all your crafty little arguments.”

“Ms. Baum—”

“You've heard my story. Now leave and take your apologies with you.”

Sick to her stomach, her head spinning with the possible futility of her efforts, Mara staggered to the door. Briefly she turned back, and as she did so, a wooden crate, tucked into the far corner of the packaging-strewn living room, came into her vision. She had missed it during her hurried entrance, but the crate now looked familiar. Mara pinpointed it in her memory: the storage room at Beazley's. It was the crate that had housed
The Chrysalis.

So this was how Michael and Philip had laid the
Baum
case to rest, how they had planned on keeping
The Chrysalis
bomb from a public detonation. They had arranged for the painting to be conveniently “stolen.” The insurance money would go to the empty coffers of the current owners, the Jesuits, and the painting landed in Hilda Baum's eager hands. The controversy mooted and settlement achieved, the case of
Baum v. Beazley's
would be dismissed, with prejudice, of course. Everyone was happy, except perhaps the insurance company, but it had premiums to placate it. The scheme would work as long as Michael silenced the truth and got back the documents from Mara—which he had failed to do.

Mara stared at Hilda, who stood tall and firm, defiant in the face of her accusatory gaze. “Ms. Coyne, I'm sure you now understand that I couldn't leave it to the courts. Your arguments—about the possibility that Father willingly sold
The Chrysalis
to the Nazis, about the delay in filing suit, about my search, about that damned release—were too clever to take the chance. You and your courts were all too ready to give the painting to Beazley's. So, when I was offered
The Chrysalis
last night, well, you left me no choice but to accept.”

“Of course you had a choice.”

“Ms. Coyne, I would do a deal with the devil himself to get back
The Chrysalis.
”

The right words came to Mara. “Ms. Baum, I think you did.”

thirty-four

NORTH OF MUNICH, 1943

T
HE SOLDIERS DRAG ERICH OUT OF THE DARK INTERROGATION
cell into the light of morning. Though slate-gray clouds blanket the sky, the sun somehow penetrates the cloud cover and blinds him.

His eyes stream through his swollen lids; the outside world seems unimaginably vivid after so many days of blackness. He does not want the soldiers to mistake it for weeping, so he reaches up to wipe them. His pale blue tattered shirtsleeve returns red, stained with fresh blood. The wetness is not tears.

After his battered eyes adjust, Erich realizes that the soldiers have deposited him in the middle of the camp courtyard. To his right, he recognizes the gate he passed through when the soldiers brought him and Cornelia here. There, Dachau's incongruous motto is scripted in wrought iron:
Arbeit Macht Frei,
or Work Will Set You Free.

As he looks around the courtyard, he begins to appreciate that he stands alone at the center of a large circle of inmates. He scans the crowd, desperate to catch a glimpse of his wife, from whom he's been separated since their arrival, too many excruciating days before to count. The shorn, skeletal women, distinguishable from the men only because of the differences in their camp uniforms, bear no resemblance to Cornelia. Her absence terrifies him.

The prisoners encircle him, and heavily armed soldiers ring them in turn. He notes that the prisoners' eyes are averted from him, though their bodies face toward him. It is as if they have been ordered to look at him but cannot endure it.

An officer breaks through the masses surrounding him. The officer, whom he recognizes from the interrogation chamber, calls out to him in German, “Prisoner Baum, I will ask you one last time. Will you divulge the location of your art collection and sign it over to its rightful owner, the Third Reich?”

Erich knows what is about to happen, what will transpire regardless of his signature. The Nazis want it only for slavish adherence to their own complicated laws on confiscation of property, and perhaps the appeasement of Seyss-Inquart. He is scared, but he will not allow his last words to be those of a victim; he will not sanction the Nazis' sins. “No, I will not.”

“Then you know what I must do.” A firing squad materializes from the crowd, and the officer gives a signal.

As they ready their guns, he closes his eyes and sees the turquoise eyes of the woman in
The Chrysalis
before him; he feels her outstretched arms wrap around him as if welcoming him home. In his mind, an epitaph forms in defiance of Dachau's own motto: “Faith will set you free.” He smiles.

The guns fire.