The Stolen (11 page)

‘You worked on the government investigation into the Reichskulturkammer and their nice little business of shipping looted cultural assets into Switzerland?'

‘A massive can of worms, that one – most of them still crawling around the backrooms of half the galleries in Zürich, not to mention Lucerne. They were all involved. Lovely people, art dealers, too artistic to keep records. If you're lucky there might be the provenance somewhere, or someone is actually brave enough to recognise a work. Rumour is that there are at least a hundred thousand looted art works at large.'

Klauser whistled. ‘That's a lot of dosh. Tell me, is 1962 significant?'

‘It is. That was the first year there was any real pressure, the year the world Jewish lobby started leaping up and down, the SNB freaked, and everyone suddenly got very nervous about the security and privacy of their vaults. Me, I don't have one, but try telling that to the taxation department.'

‘Interesting. Did a Galerie Neumann come up in your investigation?'

There was a pause and Klauser knew he'd struck gold.

‘I hate you,' Munster growled down the line.

‘C'mon, professor, I have a murdered gypsy
and
a murdered priest on my hands.'

‘It was on our list; there was a series of suspect deliveries from 1937 until 1945, but what we had was little more than a rumour on paper. By the time we got around to investigating the owner had been killed in a burglary gone wrong. And after we got a call from the chief of police asking us to desist, we didn't pursue it. In truth, the commission was so under-funded we didn't have the manpower to investigate properly anyhow. At the time I had the sense there were some heavy hitters involved. I mean, that gallery was small; it was nothing. The perfect front.'

‘Any of those deliveries mention a statuette – a holy relic?'

‘Probably. Neumann had all kinds of weird shit: shrunken human heads, fake mermaids, buddhas, priceless Russian icons – it was what he was known for – objects of the occult. You'd be surprised at what people will pay for that rubbish. For all I know he could have been bumped off by a disgruntled customer.'

 

 

Matthias sat at the kitchen bench nursing a large cup of black coffee, a steaming plate of rösti the housekeeper had just made sitting before him, battling a growing panic about how he was going to keep the laboratory running. It was past eleven in the morning and he'd slept in, the stress of the fundraiser he guessed. He was sure he'd made a hash of it; and there was the issue of ethics.
A backer without strings simply doesn't exist
, he concluded ruefully.
I have no choice but to sell
. If he liquidised his current stock in the Holindt Watch Company he would be set up for years – and he only needed a few more months. But that would totally alienate his father. Matthias owned over ten per cent, and he knew exactly who to sell them to: Wim Jollak, who, apart from Christoph himself, was the other major shareholder. Jollak, Matthias believed, was the only one young and innovative enough to understand the threat of the electronic luxury watches now flooding the market.

‘You're up late?' Johanna, the housekeeper, stood before him in her customary black blouse, skirt and white collar, her gold cross flat on her wide bosom.

‘We had the fundraiser yesterday; I gave myself the morning off to recover. Did Liliane get off to school this morning?'

‘School? It's Thursday, she never goes in on Thursday mornings – religious study, remember? You told her that was okay, although I disapprove. Shall I get her up?'

‘Don't worry, I expect she'll make her own way down in a minute.'

‘So are you going to eat that beautiful plate of rösti?'

‘Sorry, Johanna, I'm just distracted.' He picked up his fork and began eating.

‘When are you not? You need a new woman, you do.' In her early fifties, she had been with him since he was first married. She took both her own widowhood and Catholicism seriously and after Marie's accident it had been Johanna's stoic pragmatism that had carried the family through the initial grief and shock.

‘That's the last thing on my mind, right now.'

‘Maybe so, but you need to notice the outside world. Which reminds me, last night I saw something, just outside the house. A gypsy…' She failed to keep the disgust out of her voice. ‘Hiding behind a tree, just staring over this way.'

‘Are you sure?'

She nodded slowly. ‘I think he was planning to break in. But the strange thing is, Herr von Holindt, he wasn't interested in any of the other houses. So why this one? It's not the biggest.'

‘Firstly, you don't know he was checking the house out. Secondly, I have a state-of-the-art security system, including a camera over the front door. And thirdly, in this town if he is a gypsy he's a gypsy king with a net value of at least a hundred million, so I doubt he'd bother burgling us.'

Johanna remained stony-faced. ‘This is no joking matter, sir. Those people are not to be trusted; they don't belong here.'

Matthias was just about to launch into a defence of plurality when the doorbell interrupted him.

‘That'll be the church, collecting money…' he sighed.

‘Are you in?'

‘To anyone except my father,' Matthias replied and, to steel himself for another possible encounter, took a deep swig of coffee.

 

Liliane, hangover throbbing at her temples, stood at her bedroom window, staring down at the garden path. She'd climbed out of bed after hearing a car pull up, hoping it would be her grandfather. He had the habit of spontaneously turning up to take her for a stroll along the waterfront. Together they would talk about the state of the world, Christoph carefully circumventing any of Liliane's emotional problems. Instead they would chat about the Middle East, the oil crisis and how it might affect the world politically, the escapades of the Holindt Watch Company's latest clientele, anything to distract Liliane, Christoph making his granddaughter laugh with anecdotes about the impossible demands of the rich and famous while she would regale him with her dreams of how she wanted to have her own rock band, perhaps go to a music school in New York or London, all of which he would listen to without judgement, something she loved him for, and something she did not have with her father.

Remembering, she stared down, pressing her pounding forehead against the cool glass, expecting Cristoph's tall, stooped figure to appear at the top of the path. Instead, a heavy-set man around sixty appeared, wearing an old battered leather coat with a briefcase under one arm. Something about his air of bemused resignation was vaguely familiar. Detective Klauser – he'd sat in on her interrogation last year when she had been arrested for possession. Unlike the other detectives, he hadn't been patronising and had actually been quite friendly. But he was still a cop. And what was he doing here?

She rushed to the leather jacket she'd been wearing the night before and found the cocaine she had wrapped in some silver foil. She stepped into the en suite bathroom and taped it to the inside of the toilet cistern. Putting on a dressing gown, she made her way to the landing and sat on the top step, looking down between the wooden slats of the staircase as the housekeeper let the detective in and led him to the kitchen. Liliane then crept down the stairs and settled in an armchair near the half-open door.

 

This was not how Klauser had imagined a scion of the von Holindt dynasty to live. The house was very contemporary with its low ceiling and sweeping wooden floors that seemed to be designed around the views of the town and Zürichsee below, but it wasn't palatial or impersonal and it was this sense of homeliness that he now felt he had intruded upon.

‘Sorry to disturb you, Herr von Holindt, but it was rather important…'

Matthias studied Klauser. Preparing himself for yet more bad news, he was nevertheless intrigued that the detective had chosen to visit him and not his father. Klauser met his perplexed gaze and held it. ‘And you did offer to help with my enquiries.'

‘Indeed, but to come all the way to Küsnacht, to the house?'

Klauser shrugged apologetically then helped himself from the coffee pot while Johanna looked on disapprovingly.

‘Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures. Interesting place, Küsnacht – such a discreet paradise. I always found the fact that Jung chose to live here intriguing – can you imagine the contrast? His imagination and intellect surrounded by all this tranquillity. Seems like a paradox, but then that's our country in a nutshell, Matthias, isn't it? You don't mind me calling you Matthias, do you?'

‘Why not? You're drinking my coffee,' Matthias replied, bemused.

Klauser squeezed his wide posterior into one of the high bar stools and joined Matthias at the kitchen bench. ‘Yesterday I found myself staring at the corpse of a priest, a man who had, theoretically, just hung himself.' There was a loud rattle of dishes from the sink where Johanna stood, now staring over in shocked disapproval.

‘Johanna, you may go; we can look after ourselves,' Matthias instructed, and the housekeeper left reluctantly. Matthias turned back to Klauser.

‘My housekeeper is very religious and, as you know, suicide is considered a mortal sin by Catholics. For a priest to commit suicide…'

‘Exactly. And my priest was frightened, not suicidal. He came to see me to tell me about a visit he'd had from an old gypsy —'

‘Ah-ha, I'm beginning to see a pattern.'

‘Who, himself, had been found murdered —'

‘Outside the company's Altstadt showroom?'

‘Correct.' Klauser opened his briefcase with a dramatic flourish. ‘None of which would have meant much except when I searched the priest's monastic cell I found this…'

He pulled out the clock book and handed it to Matthias. ‘Recognise it? It is a book about the great clocks commissioned by royalty.'

Matthias ran his hands across the thin plastic cover. ‘No, but it's rather beautiful.' He noticed the stain that bled into some of the pages. ‘Pity about the stain.'

‘It's blood. The book dates back to the eighteenth century and is one of an edition of ten. A real collector's item, and extremely valuable. In fact it's so valuable it's on a list – a list that was issued by Interpol and sent to the Swiss government. The list is of some of the artefacts seized illegally by the Nazis during the last war and never returned to their rightful owners – the ones who weren't exterminated, that is.'

Matthias opened the book, in which delicate etched illustrations of the clocks, along with diagrams of their movements, and descriptions in archaic German, filled the pages. Then the book fell open at a marker. He recognised the clocks on the page immediately – he'd seen them every day of his childhood in his father's glass cabinet. Originally commissioned by Marie Antoinette, the clocks were Christoph's prize possessions – the clocks of the elements, he'd called them. Matthias suddenly had a sense of vertigo; snippets of half-remembered comments and images rushed through his head like stills from an old movie.

‘You mean…' He couldn't say the words. The detective studied him carefully, trying to assess how much the son really knew about the father, but the physicist seemed genuinely stunned.

‘Ownership is an interesting concept and naturally in times of political upheaval such notions become very fluid. I mean, how did a Catholic priest end up with a stolen antique book that was originally owned by a wealthy Jewish book-collector gassed in a concentration camp in 1943? And why sew it into his mattress? I would say this was more than interesting. Especially as the book was “reappropriated” from a gallery owner who was murdered in 1962, a German called Eberhard Neumann who appears to have been an associate of your father's. At the front of the book is a card saying that Christoph von Holindt brought the book in for preservation work. Is Neumann's name familiar?'

‘No…' Matthias's mouth was dry and he felt nauseous, torn between the natural urge to protect his father's reputation and a queasy feeling there was an uncomfortable truth bubbling up from something Klauser was obliquely telling him. He knew his father had certain prejudices, ones he tended to ignore, attributing them to Christoph's age – after all, a lot of Swiss his father's age held similar views, but to have actually done business with Nazi thieves and murderers? ‘I do, however, recognise the clock collection depicted on page fourteen. Is that the real reason you're here?'

‘Mind if I smoke?' Before Matthias could respond, the detective had lit up. ‘I'm not sure whether you completely understand the implications. The priest was connected to the dead gypsy and the dead gypsy was connected to your family. How, why and when, I have no idea, but it has a smell about it.'

As Klauser spoke, Matthias remembered Johanna's story about the gypsy watching the house the night before. He was about to tell the detective but loyalty held him back. Christoph was innocent until proved guilty and there were many who would like to see both his father and the company's reputation ruined. If this investigation involved his family,
he
would get to the bottom of it, not the police.