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  “The Young Man was sent to Berlin.

  “And here’s the first surprise: not long after, all three paintings returned to Kraków. Not to the museum but to the residence of Hans Frank, the new ruler of Poland, which had been renamed the General Government. Frank, a thief and war criminal, regarded himself as an excellent connoisseur of art. He had his headquarters established in the Royal Castle on Kraków’s Wawel Hill and amassed a truly splendid collection of stolen masterpieces.

  “To this day we still don’t know how it was possible for such first-class works to be handed over to Frank, who wasn’t popular with the Nazi top brass. It was certainly very high on his agenda—he regarded every antique item looted from the territory of Poland as his own, but the Führer and his museum took absolute priority. Interestingly, these gifts were delivered to Frank in person by none other than Hitler’s right-hand man, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, on a special courtesy visit to the ‘king of Poland.’ And Himmler’s love for the Führer was boundless—he’d never have acted against Hitler’s will.

  “Some say it was Hitler’s gift to his faithful servant for so zealously implementing the policies of the Nazi Party by changing former Poland into a breeding ground for a slave-labor force. Or maybe it was just that Frank had dirt on someone, and that was enough for Himmler to leave Berlin and deliver the paintings himself. We know that during the war Himmler tried negotiating with the British and the Americans, paving the way for various scenarios. Maybe he and Frank were plotting something together? Or maybe he wanted to keep Frank quiet?

  “Either way, our brave threesome ended up in the Royal Castle, and it’s here that the riddles and mysteries begin.

  “Oh, looks like the pizza has arrived.”

  14

  The grilled chicken salad, avocado mousse, and shallots marinated in balsamic vinegar were delicious. The high-up State Department official, whom some regarded as a four-star asshole, was finding it easy to think. He had never trusted anyone from the Pentagon, with all their stars and stripes, mottoes and oaths, hysterical mythology and military friendships tinged with faggotry. Their uniforms were like bathing suits for wallowing in muddy patriotic ideology, but sometimes you just had to play the game.

  The diplomat believed that you only get good service if you find the best expert in the field, shell out hard cash, negotiate a solid contract, and supervise its execution with iron consistency.

  And that was how he planned to act now. If everything went well, in two weeks’ time it would all be settled efficiently, quietly, without a trace, and for good.

  And even if they had to rewrite the history books, it wouldn’t be his problem.

  15

  “Where was I? Oh yes, the riddles and mysteries. So the Young Man hung on the wall at Hans Frank’s residence, with the Lady and the Samaritan, and listened. First he heard about Germany’s triumphs, about her invincible army, how they’d entered the Soviet Union, how they’d gone all the way to Stalingrad. And then the news about the fighting on the eastern front, followed by the Allied landings in Normandy, and gradually he became lonelier. Because Frank soon lost faith in the thousand-year Reich and realized that what mattered more than propagating the Nazi ideology was securing a life after the war, and so quite early on, in 1942, he started dispatching the looted . . . pardon me, protected collections to his estates in Bavaria. The workmen spoke of mysterious metal chests that nobody was allowed to go near; thick volumes of conspiracy theories have been written on this, but that’s a topic for another day.

  “Frank kept the greatest treasures with him to the end.

  “In the summer of 1944 Frank found a place of refuge for his most valuable collections: Manfred von Richthofen’s manor house at a place called Seichau, now the small Polish village of Sichów. They naively thought it would be enough to export something to Germany to make it safe.

  “Then things started to get complicated. As they fled from the Soviets, the Germans did their best to steal as much as possible, but every day they had to change their plans, swap trains full of treasure for trucks, then cars, and finally whatever they could fit in a suitcase. It would be logical to suppose that at this point, at the turn of 1945, LRR didn’t leave Hans Frank, but that he picked out the most valuable works as the ultimate insurance policy. Frank and his closest people left Kraków on January 17, 1945, and spent a few days at Richthofen’s manor house in Seichau, sorting the treasures and sending them onward.

  “And listen to this: I once talked to the Richthofens’ daughter, who was a little girl at the time. She was only a few years old, but she vividly remembered those particular days, probably because of the atmosphere of fear, the sense of threat, and the Soviet artillery that was audible by then. She told me that one day her mother dragged her out of bed and ordered her to get dressed. Then they went down to the ‘big hall,’ as she put it, because her mother wanted to show her paintings that were so beautiful and the likes of which she’d never see again.

  “So what did she see? It appears from her description that she saw a Rubens, still never recovered, and Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine. The Portrait of a Young Man wasn’t there—I showed her some pictures of it, and she swore she had never seen anything like it.

  “From Seichau, our heroes traveled on to Bavaria, where on May 4 Hans Frank was arrested by the Americans, who soon found the Leonardo and the Rembrandt, both paintings right there with him. But where was the Raphael? Where was the Young Man? He’d vanished without a trace, and all the subsequent stories about his whereabouts appear to be nothing more than rumors.

  “In his memoirs, Hans Frank’s son Niklas claimed that toward the end of the war the Young Man was at a villa in Fischhausen, and as he casually puts it, ‘then it got lost somewhere; it’s probably been hanging in some village shack ever since my mother swapped it for bacon.’ The village shack version of events is pretty unlikely; if the Raphael really was at Fischhausen, it’s far more likely to have been spirited away by the Americans. They like to boast about saving looted works of art, but they don’t like being reminded that many of them didn’t go home empty-handed.

  “A few members of Frank’s personal guard who might have seen something were sent to Poland as war criminals. At their interrogations they suffered from amnesia, but even so they were hanged without delay. Curiously, one man was sentenced not for war crimes, but for looting works of art on Polish soil. He might have been an interesting source of information if they hadn’t executed him two months after. Believe it or not, the official version issued by the Reds was that he’d been killed in jail by an American spy. They claimed the spy had come to Poland as part of the escort for a train in which treasures stolen by the Germans were being returned to us from the American zone of occupation. Even by the standards of Stalinist propaganda, the notion of imperialist spies murdering German criminals in Polish jails is taking things too far.

  “Hans Frank was hanged in 1946, and so, less than eighteen months after the war ended, every witness to the most significant act of looting had bitten the dust.

  “It seems most likely that either the Raphael was stolen by the Americans or someone in Frank’s entourage managed to put it on the black market. I don’t believe in any of the other theories: that the painting was misplaced during Hans Frank’s evacuation, that it was left behind somewhere in Lower Silesia, that it was eaten by rats or torched by the Russians. The Germans may have abandoned various Polish paintings that they regarded as second-rate at country inns along the way, but the Raphael? Not a chance!

  “The probability of the Young Man having ended up on the black market is very high. And he’s likely to have changed owners over the past seventy years. It may have happened in the 1970s, when a suspiciously large number of rumors about him suddenly began to make the rounds. One of them led to East Germany. That was also when a mysterious ‘American with a Texan accent for whom money was no object’ appeared, looking for a specialist who’d agree to give an expert opinion on a painting in secret. He l
ooked in Warsaw and New York, and hinted that accepting the task would mean a journey to Australia. And that’s all we know.

  “I’ve often wondered what sort of life the Young Man has been leading for the past few decades. Has he spent years dying of boredom, missing the Lady and the Samaritan from within the walls of a padded safe? Or maybe he’s been hanging in the company of other lost works, watching the owner meet with his closest friends in a secret study to drink expensive wine and discuss the fate of the world. Or perhaps he’s faded from overexposure to harsh sunlight hooked on a sheik’s bedroom wall, where he passes his time admiring the beautiful women who sleep at his owner’s side?

  “Yes, I’ve imagined many things, but never that some wretched beast would hang him next to a television. Have a look. This is the most recent photo of the Young Man, which proves that our hero is still in action, still watching the world’s fortunes and smiling ironically. Adorning an orange wall in the suburban residence of an American businessman, extremely prominent and with very close links to the Democratic Party. I’ll tell you more once we’ve crossed the Atlantic.

  “Karol and I fly over in a week. The official reason for our journey and cooperation is interest in a painting that has turned up at an antique shop in Manhattan, spotted by one of the Polish diplomats. From the description it sounds like a painting by Brandt from the list of losses. The canvas isn’t signed, but the diplomat noticed it because there’s only one nation that likes depictions of grimy cavalry wearily wading through the snow.

  “Anatol will get there via NATO channels.

  “Lisa is under state custody until she takes off. She’ll fly over as a Polish citizen on a normal American tourist visa. She already has a Polish passport—don’t ask me how.

  “Karol will fix us up with accommodations by exploiting his social network. We’ll be left to our own devices there—once we cross the border we’re on our own; the authorities will disown us at the drop of a hat.”

  16

  As she stood in the dark sitting room, waiting for Lisa to come back from the bathroom, she gazed at the picture, still projected on the wall. She shook her head at the sight of the TV set. It was beyond belief—only an American would do something like that: here’s my TV, here’s my Raphael, here’s my kid at a baseball game. She didn’t actually know if there was a kid at a baseball game, but the edge of a picture frame was showing on the far side of the Young Man, and part of a photo with a splash of green and an oval piece of wood that looked like the top of a baseball bat.

  “Pretty good setup, huh?” asked Karol, coming up behind her. “What a show. Only an American could come up with something like that.”

  She felt a sudden stab of anxiety. Was it because Karol seemed to have read her mind? Or was it because they were going to a foreign country and attempting an audacious theft that might earn her an American jail sentence: four life terms plus 183 years of hard labor?

  No, it was something else, something about the picture. Something wasn’t right. But what? There was something missing. A feeling she always had when she looked at a recovered work of art. Damn, an important thought was escaping her, but what was it?

  She hadn’t noticed Karol moving closer.

  “Why don’t you stay?” he said.

  Without even glancing at him, she shook her head and left. Whatever thought had been eluding her had vanished in a cloud of irritation.

  17

  Karol scoured the empty boxes and found the last piece of cold pizza.

  He took a beer from the fridge and figured he was bound to regret getting mixed up in this whole thing. Ordering the pizza had given him a foretaste of what this adventure would be like. Zosia wanted no mushrooms, no seafood, and no pineapple. Lisa wanted no carrion—prison jargon that he’d interpreted as vegetarian. Anatol said it was all the same, but he wasn’t wild about sweet corn or artichokes. A real commando. Finally he had ordered three large Margheritas with double cheese.

  It was a good decision—despite everything, cold pizza with lots of cheese tasted better than with less. He sat on the floor and looked at the two pictures. The Young Man, as Zosia called him, and Wyczółkowski’s curly-haired model. They gazed at each other, as if waiting for one of them to finally say, Your place or mine?

  He thought bitterly about the fact that for the past four years, he hadn’t had the chance to ask that question. The little minx had sure gotten into his brain, as Lisa had put it in her jailbird Polish. Now he had to work with her, and if anything went wrong, they’d spend many long years in prison.

  He yawned and drank the beer. Before he turned out the light he glanced automatically at the portrait of Zosia. For a split second he was surprised to see that it was gone—it had always hung in that spot.

  Then he remembered that he’d taken it down that morning and hung the Wyczółkowski there instead, not to give the little minx the satisfaction.

  18

  Zofia got out of a cab in front of the international terminal at Warsaw’s Okęcie Airport and, huddling against the cold, ran to the glass doors. It was snowing like mad, and a fierce wind blew, prompting the hope that the winter of the millennium—as the European media were calling it—might be bothering her now but wouldn’t pose any problem for her flight.

  Earlier she had decided to spend the ten-hour flight on her own, away from Karol. She didn’t want any dozing on shoulders, closeness enforced by the small seats, or squeezing past each other on the way to the restroom. Anyway, what would they have to talk about? They couldn’t discuss the case and wouldn’t want to talk about anything else.

  So she had arrived early and gone to the self-check-in station, where she chose to sit in 30B, at the back and, as ever, on the aisle. The view from the window always bored her an hour after takeoff; at least with an aisle she could stretch out a leg, and she wouldn’t have to push past people every time she went to the restroom. She collected her boarding pass and moved on.

  She liked traveling.

  As Zofia wheeled her luggage toward the baggage drop, she didn’t notice the man behind her. Hunched beside his suitcase, he looked like the typical traveler, tired of waiting, killing time on his phone. The man waited for Zofia to walk away from the self-check-in points, and went up to the same one she’d just been using.

  He keyed in his reservation code from memory, took out his phone, and enlarged the photo he’d taken a minute ago. He zoomed in on the image to enlarge the slip of paper in Zofia’s hand. The picture was blurry, but he was still able to read the large printed letters.

  He switched off the phone and selected seat 30A.

  He, by contrast, liked sitting by the window.

  19

  The engines roared, and the force of the acceleration pressed her into her seat as the plane gathered speed on the runway. The sleet flowing across the oval windowpane streamed ever faster. She wasn’t sorry to be leaving wintry Warsaw and found herself wishing that the mission would be a success, and if not, at least that she wouldn’t go to jail.

  Moments later the plane broke through the clouds, and in full sunlight banked to turn west; the people gluing themselves to the windows pointed things out to each other. Intrigued, she smiled at the man sitting next to her and glanced out of the window. It really was an unusual sight. The thick clouds were lying so low that the tallest buildings in downtown Warsaw were sticking up through the sea of white. She saw the spire of the Palace of Culture, surrounded by the tops of skyscrapers; she saw a construction crane beside one of them and long shadows cast by the buildings on the waves of fog. Apart from that, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but white, with just the chimney of a power plant protruding, belching gusts of steam high into the air.

  “Amazing,” said the man seated next to her in English. “I rack up several dozen flights a year, but I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  He smiled gently.

  “I’ve never thought of Warsaw as one of the most attractive cities on earth, but it has just
become the star of one of the most poetic things I’ve ever seen . . . I’ll try to make my judgments more carefully in the future.”

  She returned his smile, because she liked what he was saying. The stranger spoke English with a hard-to-identify accent and seemed very attractive—tall, naturally tanned, fifty years old, with intensely green eyes and black hair. He looked like a yachtsman or a mountaineer. He was casually dressed, but with an expensive, sporty style, and wearing a high-quality cologne.

  Zofia felt lucky to be next to him. As long as he didn’t talk too much.

  As if reading her mind, the stranger pulled out a book and put on his glasses. Zofia shuddered when she noticed the title—The Sacred Art of Stealing by Christopher Brookmyre.

  Zofia was regretting her decision not to bring along a medical thriller, instead of choosing to read a collection of Alice Munro’s stories, which felt forced and pretentious.

  Karol had ostentatiously chosen to ignore her, ever since she’d replied that morning to his text “So where shall we meet?” with “NYC.” He was in the middle set of seats, a few rows in front of her, next to an American woman, whom he was charming with his fake British accent. The American woman was ecstatic. As Zofia passed them on her way to the restroom, she heard a scrap of dialogue.

  “No, it can’t be . . . I’m sure you work for a major corporation. There’s no such thing as a professional Indiana Jones. You’re pulling my leg, you naughty man!”

  Overhearing this, she had a fit of nausea and had to race back to her seat.

  “Is that a novel or a manual?” she asked the man sitting beside her.