Goodbye Again (21 page)

‘Yes.’

‘And the man who helped my father ship it out after the war was Roberto Battaglia, your husband, manager of the Contini quarries here.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I’ve been working it out these last weeks. But why did my father tell you all about it? He didn’t have to.’

‘Luchino told me because he had to tell me. They caught Hans Frank and executed him, but Pfaffenroth – he’d escaped from a US army camp after the war. He turned up in our house in Carrara, a few months after Luchino arrived here. He was on the run. Luchino hid him in the cellars – with Roberto’s knowledge – since by then he was in on the whole business. I knew nothing of this. Until one day – I’d been in Livorno – I came back to the house earlier than usual and I found this man talking to Luchino and Roberto in the salon.’

‘But they needn’t have told you exactly who he was.’

‘They didn’t. Luchino just said he was an Austrian client, wanting to buy marble. Luchino hadn’t told me anything at that point about what had happened to him in Auschwitz and Krakow, and nothing about Pfaffenroth – not until he told me he was going to live in Ireland. But why, I asked, when you’ve just come home? Then Luchino told me everything – what he’d done in Auschwitz with the architect and in Krakow with this Austrian SS man with Dr Frank, and who he really was, how his real name was Pfaffenroth, and all the terrible things he had done in the war, so he could never be safe anywhere, except perhaps in Ireland, where he’d have a new name, a new life. And Luchino was going to go to Ireland with him as well.’

‘Why not let Pfaffenroth go on his own?’

‘Pfaffenroth didn’t trust him, with the loot nearby. Said he’d expose him if he didn’t come to Ireland, and if Luchino exposed Pfaffenroth, he’d be implicated himself. So they both went to Ireland.’

‘And they carried on their crooked business from Dublin, selling the looted art secretly to special customers, splitting the profits?’

‘Yes.’

‘And was the name Pfaffenroth took in Ireland Bergen? Joseph Bergen?’

‘Yes, but how could you possibly know that, if your father never told you anything about the whole business and you never met the man?’

‘I met his daughter,’ I said.

I got up, and walked away round the terrace, came back. ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘Luchino didn’t have to tell you the truth. He could have just said he wanted to live abroad.’

‘Yes, he could have said that, but he was impetuous like his father Amedeo, emotional. He badly needed to confide, and as his mother I was the only one he could confide in. He knew I wouldn’t betray him.’

I nodded. ‘Even so, why did he do it? Collaborate that with that Jew murderer Pfaffenroth?’

‘You haven’t understood, Benjamin, living all your life in the safety of neutral Ireland. But we understood what those camps were like, from the few who came back. I knew it especially from Luchino, who told me. You weren’t human there anymore, you became a different species. You’d do anything to survive. Cheat, steal, betray, kill – anything. I understand that.’

‘Yes.’

‘You only survived through sheer brutal tenacity for life. Nothing and nobody else mattered. And after the war, having survived that camp, Luchino was never going to be freezing or starving or bug-ridden or beaten or waiting for a selection for the gas chambers ever again. He was going to be rich, and put himself as far away as possible from all that pain and horror. At whatever cost to his conscience. I understand that, too. Those camps – they didn’t just kill millions at the time, they killed the few who survived as well. Killed them at heart, or in conscience, like Luchino.’

‘Yes, literally killed him at heart in the end. He died of a heart attack.’

‘He wrote me a letter some weeks before he died. Saying he was having chest pains. Your mother wrote a cold letter saying he’d died.’

‘I knew he didn’t get on with my mother. Rows, silences, and I never knew why.’

‘Why? Because he had told her everything as well, some years after he’d married her – what he’d done, in Auschwitz, and afterwards with the looted art. That need to confide again, like Amadeo. Knowing, as with me, that your mother wouldn’t betray him. The scandal. Your mother hated your father for what he’d done.’

‘Which is why she didn’t like me,’ I said, ‘the product of her marriage to a Nazi war criminal. And that explains the rows between my parents, and my mother’s coldness to me when I was growing up.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a terrible story,’ I said. ‘Difficult to forgive.’

‘Yes. But try and understand it. You didn’t know your father before he went to Auschwitz. I did. And he wasn’t that kind of man at all. He was a good man. But the evil in those camps made men behave in ways they’d never have dreamt of in ordinary life, and some of them carried on in the same way after the war, without a conscience. If the evil didn’t kill you in those camps it killed you afterwards, one way or another.’

EIGHTEEN

I’d wanted to expose Elsa’s and my father as Nazi art looters and war criminals. I had that proof now, and I was appalled at what my father had done. And afterwards, how he’d gone to Ireland and lived the great lie, bought a big house, fine furniture, servants, a motor cruiser, and a position as one of Dublin’s richest, most respected and charitable citizens.

I certainly wouldn’t tell Elsa what I’d found out, that her much-loved father was one of the very worst Nazis, along with Eichmann and Dr Hans Frank. If I was shocked at finding out what my father had done, how much greater the shock for Elsa if she learnt who her father really was, of his far greater crimes?

When I got back to the hotel I told her how the old lady was indeed the Emelia of the nude painting, how she and Modigliani were my grandparents, and how this had come about, years before. As to the paintings hidden in the Contini quarries – I said how the explosion up on the mountain proved my father a crook, clearly involved with some Nazis in the looted art business, but not her
father, since Emelia had told me nothing about him, no ‘Joseph Bergen’ in my father’s life during the war. Simply that my father, having helped a group of Nazis move the looted art from Poland, had turned up in Carrara alone after the war, found her married to the Contini quarry manager, and had gone to Dublin, on his own, to make a new life, where – as we knew – he’d met Joseph Bergen with his antiques shop in Dublin and had later moved the looted paintings out of Carrara and sold the stuff through Bergen in his shop.

‘So it seems my father did much worse that yours,’ I said. ‘He collaborated with the Nazis in Auschwitz and Krakow. Your father was just a fence in Dublin, selling stolen goods.’

‘Just a fence? That’s bad enough, isn’t it?’

‘Is it? Remember, we weren’t in the war, weren’t refugees in a strange country without a penny. War changes people completely. It brings out the ruthless nature, the survival gene. There were millions of black-market fences, in and after the war.’

‘Maybe. But my father never seemed that kind of man.’

‘People don’t. Katie never seemed the sort to kill herself. Few people are what they seem.’ We looked at each other.

‘At least we should know who we really are,’ she went on, some urgency in her voice. ‘After all we’ve been through, the best and the worst, neither of us has anything left to hide now.’

‘True,’ I said, lying, hiding a truth that might destroy her, and us. I kissed her, and she put her arms around me. Flesh and blood – and lies – was better than the truth.

The chief superintendent came to see me that afternoon. I told him an equally shortened and untrue version of what Emelia had told me, and nothing about Joseph Bergen.

‘Well, it must certainly have been her husband, the quarry manager Roberto Battaglia, who helped your father up in the old quarry,’ he said.

‘Yes, but she wasn’t going to tell me that. So I’m sure she wouldn’t tell you.’

‘No. Anyway, it hardly matters now. She wasn’t involved, but others must have been, apart from the manager. Germans, Nazis – your father couldn’t have got all the paintings out of Poland alone. Must have been others who got the stuff down to him here.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘The authorities in Rome will try to find out. It’s going to be a big affair – a priceless hoard of Nazi looted art, mostly Italian masterpieces. There’ll be an enquiry, people up from Rome already, the Special Police, Ministry of Culture officials, journalists.’

‘Well, the trail is cold, and the loot is locked in there forever now, isn’t it?’

‘No. We sent men down the rock face this morning. The explosion didn’t block the cave entrance. Blew it all open, in fact, and the paintings, and a lot more, are inside.’

‘So,’ Elsa said later, back in our bedroom. ‘It really is all over now. We can go home. To your barn. And maybe us, then,’ she added. ‘Together, in some place or other?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, I hope so. Dear Elsa.’ It was the sentence I’d waited five years for Katie to say, which had never come, and now that it had, a whole new life rose in my mind and heart. ‘I’ll call Harry in Paris, ask him to look after my boat, pay whatever’s due, and put it on the market. I don’t think I want anything of my father’s now. Though I’ll have to go back to the house in Killiney, clear up, see the Mullinses. But the Dublin charity can have the house.’

‘I’ll have to do the same with my father’s house. Clear up, put it on the market, then back to New York.’

‘But you’ll come back with me to the barn first?’

‘Of course.’ She kissed me, and that was enough. I didn’t ask any more questions about what sort of future we might have. After Katie I’d learnt the folly of asking a woman about the future.

A man from Rome, a public prosecutor or some such, came to see me that afternoon, asking me to make a statement, confirming all that I’d told the chief. Some Italian journalists, hanging around the hotel lobby as we were going out to eat, tried to ask me questions. I brushed them off.

‘I’ll be glad to get out of here,’ I said to Elsa, walking quickly away towards the fish restaurant. ‘We’ll book a flight out to London tomorrow.’

Next morning the carabinieri chief came to see me again. Elsa and I were in the breakfast room, almost finished, sipping coffee. I offered him a seat. He was in a good mood.

He spoke to me in Italian. ‘We’ve been going through the cave overnight, making an inventory of the stuff. We’ve got the name of the German your father was working with, who must have brought the looted art down here – an SS Major Pfaffenroth, alias “Joseph Bergen” according to your father.’

He had the names out before I could stop him, and Elsa, though her Italian wasn’t good, had heard her father’s name. She was instantly alarmed.

‘Joseph Bergen?’ she asked me. ‘What does he say about my father?’

‘Oh, nothing …’

‘Come on! I just heard him say his name.’

It was no use pretending then. I said to the chief. ‘How did you find out about this man, that he was Pfaffenroth, alias “Bergen”?’

‘It’s all here, in a letter from your father. It was in a steel box, beside one of the big paintings.’ He produced the letter and handed it to me. It was my father’s handwriting. I started to read it to myself, but Elsa insisted I translate. It was dated July 1969, presumably when he and Pfaffenroth had taken out all the paintings he’d wanted, had sold the quarries and booby-trapped the cave.

I write this to say how I was blackmailed into helping get all
this looted art out of Poland just before the end of the war, by SS Major Helmuth Pfaffenroth, aide to Dr Hans Frank in Krakow, who afterwards went to Dublin, forcing me to follow him, where he took the name of Joseph Bergen, living in Killiney with an antiques shop in the city where he sold the stolen art over the years.

‘Pfaffenroth,’ she said. ‘The name’s familiar.’

‘I’ve not heard of –’

‘Wait, wasn’t he the man your friend Harry told you about in Paris – a man who worked with Dr Frank in Poland, who’d sent millions of Polish Jews to Auschwitz?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t remember.’

The chief, understanding something of what we were saying, said helpfully, in English, ‘Yes signora, the Special Police from Rome confirmed the name this morning: SS Major Helmuth Pfaffenroth – he was the “Joseph Bergen” in the letter.’

Later, upstairs, in our room, Elsa was nervous, haunted, just as she’d been during those first meetings in Dublin. She said ‘Ben, there’s something wrong. If your father was up to the hilt with Pfaffenroth – with my father in the picture looting business out here in Carrara, then your Grandmother Emelia must have known him.’

‘She didn’t tell me that.’

‘But you said your father told her everything about the looting business. So he must have told her about my father.’

‘No.’

‘I can see it in your face, you’re lying. You just want to protect me.’

‘Okay. Yes, she did tell me about your father. And I do want to protect you.’

‘You didn’t before. That’s exactly what you wanted to prove to me, that both our fathers were war criminals – as we know they were now, and my father was one of the worst.’ I turned to her. ‘And now you want to deny it all, like I wanted to.’

‘Yes!’ I said vehemently. ‘Because no good can come of worrying over the truth of it now.’

‘Which is exactly what I used to say. But we have to face it now. Isn’t that what we came down here for, to tell the truth?’

‘Right! And we’ve done that.’

‘Easier for you than me. Your father didn’t send millions of Polish Jews to the ovens.’

‘No. But he was a Jew killer by association, since he must have known all about what your father had done.’

I reached across the table and squeezed her hand. ‘Dear God, Elsa, forget it. We were no part of it. No part of it at all.’ There was a slight squeeze back, but I don’t think she’d accepted my message.

‘I’m tired, Ben, I’d really like to go home – but with you first, to your barn.’

I had the feeling she was just being loyal to her promise now, going through the motions. ‘I’ll ask Carlo to book us tickets. Then I’ll call on Emilia before we leave. I’m going to give her the Modi nude.’

Emilia was indoors this time. Rain clouds had come over the great view in the late afternoon. She was not with the other elderly people in the humid, gloomy room, but in her wheelchair in a small chapel, which had been adapted from a room at the side of the villa, where it was cool. She was parked at the back, not praying, just sitting.

‘So,’ she said looking round, ‘The news is everywhere about Luchino and Pfaffenroth.’

‘Yes, but I told nobody. It was all in an open letter from Luchino they found in the cave up there.’ And I told her what he’d written in the letter.

‘He could never blame himself,’ she said with finality. ‘He always had to be right. Can you wheel me about a bit, Benjamin, with your one good arm?’

‘Oh, yes. I can nudge you along at least.’

I nudged her out of the chapel, down a side corridor and out
into an overgrown garden at the back of the villa, along a weedy marble path, past ruined flower borders that led into an orchard beyond, fruit and olive trees, wild vine groves with big black grapes, a mulberry tree. Pushing underneath the trailing branches of the mulberry, I said, ‘Of course I can understand your affair with Amedeo. And marrying Marcello. But after you’d married Roberto, when you discovered the criminal things he was up to with Luchino – forgive me, I wonder why you didn’t leave him?’

‘I’d loved him, that’s why. He was a good man, too, before Luchino dangled millions in front of him, and he took the bait. Loving someone isn’t to know how they’re going to turn out later.’

‘No, but when you found out you could have left him.’

‘I thought it’s better to stay faithful to the good in people you’ve loved, not to betray the faith you once had in them. Better that than leaving and denying the love I’d had for him.’

We moved through the dark wood. The clouds had come right down over the hill. I said, ‘You’re right. Despite the bad things about Luchino and Roberto, you stayed faithful to the good things in both of them. I should do the same about Luchino. After all, he was a good father: he loved me, paid for my art schooling in Dublin and Paris, always encouraged me. He was the making of me.’

‘That’s good. If you go on thinking the worst of people, even if it’s true of them – you come to think even worse of yourself.’

‘Yes.’

‘Wheel me on, Benjamin.’ We came out of the dark wood, to a view over the sea, and to the west a clearing sky, a glimmer of evening light over the distant water.

‘Luchino loved you and was generous to you because you were Amedeo’s grandson. He knew that, since of course I’d told him, but he couldn’t tell you. Yet he wanted you to be as good a painter as Amedeo, and have all the chances Amedeo never gave himself.’

‘And maybe that’s why he hid the painting of you up in my old
attic studio – hoping I’d find it one day, which would lead me back to the truth about him – and to you.’

‘And that’s even better,’ she said reaching her arm up to me. I grasped her hand and squeezed it. ‘That’s very good.’

When it started to rain, we went back inside, and I retrieved the painting from the chapel and unwrapped it. I said, ‘I’ll come back soon and paint you, may I?’ She nodded, and I went on, ‘Meanwhile, this painting is yours much more than mine.’

‘No, no! I don’t want to be reminded of what I was once like!’

‘Well, then sell it. The Sister told me the villa here, all the grounds … they’re being sold.’

‘The Sisters only have a leasehold and the owners have had an offer, property development people, a lot of awful apartment blocks all over the hill – millions of Lira.’

‘The painting is worth more – millions of dollars. Buy the villa and the hill twice over.’

‘All right.’ She was suddenly pleased, with just the same bright-faced smile as my father when an unexpected happiness had occurred between us. A bounty out of the blue, fair weather after a squall out on the boat in Killiney bay or two complimentary glasses of champagne before lunch from Harry the barman downstairs at the old Hibernian buttery. ‘Thank you,’ she resumed, ‘I think I could survive anywhere, but the other ancients here couldn’t. Thank you. Thank you very much.’