The Doomsday Testament (3 page)

He shook his head at the memory and, still carrying the album, climbed the narrow stairs past the row of plaster flying ducks that guarded the hall like a flight of Spitfires. He knew he should be doing something more productive, but he was unable to break the lethargic grip of the past.

Matthew’s bedroom door stood ajar and he walked through with the feeling of a child entering a forbidden garden. It was years since he’d been inside this room. Perhaps fifteen feet by twenty, the only furnishings were a white melamine dressing table, a shallow cupboard where the old man kept his shoes, and an enormous, clumsy oak wardrobe that must have come from a second-hand shop. The room still carried a faint, sweetish scent of ill-health and when he lay back on the quilt he was surrounded by Matthew’s presence. He felt a sharp prickle behind his eyes.
Pull yourself together, Saintclair
.

He sat up and reopened the album. A newspaper cutting with a photograph of an adult Jamie holding a
small
painting in a gilt frame. Had he really made them proud? He supposed the cutting was proof that he had, but it was a pride built on false pretences. When his mother heard he had set up his own business after eight years jobbing for Sotheby’s and moved into an office in Old Bond Street, she’d insisted on opening a bottle of her carefully hoarded Asti Spumante. He’d never invited them to the office and hadn’t had the heart to reveal it was little more than an extended cupboard with a posh address. A decanter of whisky stood on a bedside table. He smiled as he heard Matthew’s soft voice – ‘
purely medicinal, my dear boy
’ – and poured himself a small glass. He studied the photograph more closely. The painting had brought him short-lived fame, and even shorter-lived fortune.

It was one of Rembrandt’s earlier works, a portrait of some rosy-cheeked Dutch merchant and not a particularly impressive one, but a Rembrandt nonetheless. Until 1940, it had hung in solitary splendour in the Paris mansion of the Mandelbaum family, cloth exporters for five generations and proud of it. Over the centuries the Mandelbaums, French Jews of German extraction, had weathered many storms, but the hurricane that blew in from the Third Reich that summer had well and truly sunk them. Monsieur Mandelbaum, who had waved away offers of sanctuary from his customers in England, took one last look at his Rembrandt on Friday 14 June as the Germans marched into Paris, then blew his brains out, leaving Madame and five little Mandelbaums to be evicted, registered, classified and eventually deported,
via
the transit centre at Drancy, to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. By the time the fighting ended, only a single little Mandelbaum, Emil, had been left to emerge miraculously from amongst the corpses and the living dead, like a ten-year-old version of one of Lowry’s matchstick men.

After the war Emil was claimed by relatives in the United States and he spent the next sixty years trying to forget the screams, the sight of hanged men and women and the never-ending stink from the crematorium chimneys. But a year earlier he had been tracked down by the son of an old business acquaintance of his father’s who suggested he reclaim the Paris property and asked what had become of the celebrated Rembrandt. Emil had only a vague memory of the painting, but by then being a retired stockbroker, he certainly knew its potential worth.

For a successful art dealer, tracking down stolen property, especially property stolen half a century earlier, is the professional equivalent of walking blindfold through a minefield. So it was unsurprising that Emil had trouble finding someone reputable to help him seek out the Rembrandt. At the time, Jamie was conspicuously lacking in obvious signs of success and the jury was out on his reputation after a series of auction ambushes that had left both him and his clients out of pocket. The two men had been introduced by Simon Marks, a merchant banker and former Cambridge classmate of Jamie’s, who had watched and despaired at his friend’s pitiful efforts at building a business.

‘Either do it to make money or don’t do it at all, old son,’ Simon had advised him. ‘Emil is rolling in cash, he’ll pay you a daily stipend and your expenses while you look for the bloody thing, and a whacking great finders’ fee in the unlikely event that you ever lay hands on it.’

Luck, his languages and what he liked to think was a modicum of good judgement had all played their part in what followed. As he told Simon: ‘The Nazis were just as efficient at cataloguing what they pinched as they were about everything else. Emil’s Rembrandt was one of thousands of artworks hoovered up by Hermann Goering’s Reichsleiter Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories. Once I discovered that, there were three possibilities. First, it could have been destroyed during the war: possible, but most stolen artworks survived. Second, some resourceful, high-ranking Nazi could have smuggled it out as working capital using one of the Odessa escape pipelines: again possible and if that’s what happened the most likely route was by Spain or Switzerland to South America. The third option – less likely – was that it ended up stored in a big cave in the Bavarian Alps and some enterprising GI lifted it to take home to his ma in Pittsburg.’

Good fortune came when investigating Option Two. He had followed a trail from a Madrid art house that led him by a circuitous route to Option Three and the jackpot. An auctioneer in Santiago knew a dealer in Buenos Aires who thought he had seen the self-same painting on the wall of the Argentine Embassy in
Panama
. A trip to the Canal Zone and a friendly cultural attaché who was terribly proud of the embassy’s prized artwork confirmed the identification. The look on his young host’s face when he suggested the Rembrandt might be stolen property almost broke Jamie’s heart. It was the first of many moments of unease created by his new career path. Tracing the painting’s course backwards led him to an American veteran who had indeed taken the Rembrandt home to show Ma, only in Omaha, not Pittsburg, then sold it on. The chain included a respected New York art dealer who had been creative with the Rembrandt’s provenance and whose reputation was now damaged beyond repair. Jamie had savoured his moment of triumph – but it was short-lived. Only too quickly he realized that it made him about as popular in the tight-knit art community as a dose of bubonic plague. Suddenly the small galleries, which had once greeted him with a sympathetic smile and had always been happy to throw him a few crumbs, didn’t want to know him. The big dealerships didn’t even return his phone calls. Still, he had the money to tide him over. At least he did until the New York dealer’s lawyers got involved. The suit never came to court, but keeping a lid on it had cost him most of what he’d been paid to find the painting. His only consolation was that the publicity the find generated and Emil Mandelbaum’s endorsement resulted in a slow stream of commissions from Jewish families who likewise wished to be reunited with their treasures. The work kept him afloat and occupied, but he had never been able to repeat that initial success and
he
was beginning to wonder if the luck that had brought him the Rembrandt was the beginner’s variety.

He pulled himself off the bed and tentatively opened the top drawer of the dressing table. No hidden surprises. Carefully folded handkerchiefs, socks laid out just so, uniformly white vests and pants that probably dated back decades. He’d wondered if the old man still kept his mother’s correspondence, perhaps a perfumed love letter from Jamie’s father whose name she had never revealed, but there was nothing.

He turned his attention to the wardrobe, breathing in a mouthful of mothballs and well-worn tweed as he opened it. At the same time he caught a glimpse of himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. The man staring out at him was tall, angular and still carried the vaguely foppish air cultivated at Cambridge. His grandfather’s death had marked him in some way, but he couldn’t really say how. Perhaps it was the slight bruising below the eyes that made him look older than his thirty years, or a set to the thin lips that hadn’t been there previously. Wholesome, verging on handsome, with a steady green-eyed gaze that was more shrewd than intelligent; dark, unruly hair that flopped over his eyes and a hard edge that, strangely, only women seemed to notice. Who are you? he asked the man in the mirror. Where did you come from?

He rummaged through the dark suits, threadbare white shirts and ancient clerical gear, checking pockets, then began on the wardrobe floor, where Matthew had stored his supply of gardening magazines. Nothing
there
for him to worry about. He turned away, his mind already on the next room. As he did, he caught the faint gleam of metal in a tiny crack at the junction of the floor and the walls. With growing puzzlement he crouched to identify it, but it was only when he removed the magazines and tested it that he realized the floor consisted of a removable plywood panel. His heart beat a little faster. As he raised the wood his eye found a sharp-edged metal box in the darkest corner of the recess.

The box was about the size of an old-fashioned biscuit tin and covered in chipped dark green paint, which gave it a distinctly military look. A patch of bare metal had revealed its hiding place below the wardrobe. When he lifted the box the contents rattled intriguingly. He placed it on the bed with the same feeling of anticipation as when he’d first laid eyes on the Rembrandt, like a clock wound too tight with the springs threatening to explode free. A rusting metal clasp held the box closed and with a deep breath he carefully unclipped it, levered the lid free and lifted it open.

His first impression was of a hotchpotch of army memorabilia; a few tarnished medals, dusty strips of ribbon, worn badges and scraps of time-stained paper. But as his eyes took in the individual elements he realized it was much more than that. The maroon booklet half hidden among the medal ribbons could only be a soldier’s pay book. What he had before him was a man’s whole identity. He felt a surge of exhilaration and had to suppress a shout of triumph. This was his
father’s
identity
. With shaking hands he lifted the booklet and opened it, eyes greedily searching for the name. ‘Shit!’ The word echoed from the walls and he could feel his mother’s posthumous disapproval.

Matthew Sinclair
.

Not the father he’d never known, but the grandfather he had. Dotty old Granddad Matthew who had sat Jamie upon his knee quoting endlessly from the scriptures and expecting him to enjoy strange stories told in his fluent German. Who had taken him to his first art gallery and taught him the importance of composition, form and line as they stood in front of an enormous Civil War portrait of some curly-wigged knight. His gentle, kindly grandfather, who quite literally would not have squashed a fly, had been a soldier. It didn’t seem possible, but the evidence was here on the bed.

He laid the pay book aside, picked up the medals one by one and placed them on the quilt; two silver circles about twice the size of a ten-pence piece, three bronze stars differentiated only by the colour of their ribbons, and – he hesitated, half-recognizing what he had in the palm of his hand – a fine silver cross with a crown embossed at the end of each arm. He turned the cross over and read the inscription on the reverse side:
Cptn M. Sinclair (Royal Berkshire Regiment) 8 May 1945
. The cross, though Jamie could only hazard a guess at which award it was, meant Matthew Sinclair had not only served in the army, he had fought, and fought well. And there was more. Now that he’d almost emptied the box he found two small scraps of cloth nestling at the
bottom
. One was a set of parachute wings and the other the instantly recognizable winged dagger of the Special Air Service.

Jamie stared at the badge in disbelief. He felt excited and robbed at one and the same time. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he demanded of the empty room. His mother had not just cheated him of his father, she’d cheated him of his grandfather as well. The sweet, eccentric old man he’d lived beside all those years had been a war hero. Yet neither of them had ever mentioned it.

He was so angry he almost missed the battered journal that had been hidden beneath the box.

THE SIX MEN
in black overalls sat bathed in dim red light in the rear compartment of a large van parked on Vasilevskiy Island diagonally across the Neva from the Hermitage museum. Their leader was very pleased that the vast, imposing building on the far riverbank wasn’t tonight’s target. When it had become clear that what his client sought was in St Petersburg he had reconnoitered the six buildings of the main complex and discovered exactly what he’d known he would: the Hermitage was as tough a nut to crack as the Bank of England or Fort Knox. Fortunately, he didn’t have to crack it. Like every major museum in the world, the Hermitage is home to far more treasures than it can ever display at one time and those treasures are dispersed among its sister museums. It also holds several thousand items whose origins and ownership have been subject to dispute since the end of the Second
World
War. As greedy for retribution as he was for power, Stalin insisted that Germany’s art and historic artefacts should make up part of the blood price to be paid for Mother Russia’s suffering. When his generals closed in on Berlin, special NKVD trophy brigades spread across the country plundering carefully chosen paintings, books and sculptures, taking home with them between three and twelve
million
artworks, depending on who you believed, including paintings by Botticelli and Van Dyck. Some of those artefacts were almost certainly not far from where he sat with his assault team, but tonight only one of them interested him. He looked at his watch. 01:55.

‘Get ready.’ He pulled a black ski mask over his head. The others followed suit, automatically checking their weapons and equipment.

Dimitriy Yermolov stifled a yawn and struggled to keep his eyes open. Time to take another look around. If one of the supervisors came in – admittedly unlikely – and discovered him even half asleep he’d be out of a job by morning, and then who’d pay to put his wastrel son through university? He was getting too old for this night work, but what else could he do? The New Russia had been just as tough on Dimitriy as the Old Soviet Union had. That was the problem with being an honest man in a country where corruption was an essential element of any successful career. It didn’t matter whether it was turning a blind eye to some Mafia drug dealer from Kazakhstan or keeping your mouth shut about a party
functionary
selling off state alcohol, it was the same old stink. Trouble was, being a lowly security guard, even in one of Russia’s most prestigious museums, didn’t pay well and never had. And let’s face it, this was just a sideshow compared to the Hermitage across the water. Don’t get him wrong, the Menshikov Palace was impressive enough, a glorious Baroque mansion house overlooking the river in one of the world’s prime locations. It was probably the oldest surviving building in the best city in Russia. Forget Moscow, ‘Piotr’ had always been the capital and always would be, and he loved it, even if that bastard Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin had also been born here. But compared to the State Museum or the Winter Palace, the Menshikov was just a collection of pretty rooms really, with the odd Old Master here and there to give it a wafer-thin veneer of distinction. Nobody would rob
this
place.