Men of Snow (35 page)

‘Your birthday.’

‘What about it?’

‘Didn’t...didn’t....’

‘No Victor. No I didn’t. And I would remind you that this company’s policy is for work to have nothing to do with the personal. We’re supposed to be professionals here, not college students. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Steady on Franz, there’s no call for that tone of voice.’

‘Professional Victor, that’s all I ask.’

At that he had turned and left the office, carefully closing the door behind him.

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His apartment block was on a quiet, residential street that he knew in great detail. There were lines of trees down each side of the road. Franz recognised every car that was parked on the street. Most of them were owned by residents of his apartment block. The rest of the house owners had their own garages.

Franz watched the street’s daily routine from his large apartment window that stretched from floor to ceiling listening to music or reading the financial sections in the daily papers. After his early morning run he would shower, have a light breakfast and then settle down in his armchair. The first activity of each weekday would be a few delivery vans coming to some of the larger houses near the end of the street. This would be followed by the au pairs or parents who believed in taking their small children themselves to the local playgroup. BMWs and Mercedes would be next coming through the security gates taking their occupants into the centre of the city as well as few keen on their health like himself who would cycle to work. Then the street would settle into a period when little happened. The small children would be returned to their homes. Plumbers or builders vans might appear. It was the same through most of the afternoon until the time when Hamburg released its businessmen to return to their homes ready for guests that night or a journey into town.

The weekends had a different rhythm that still included the same people and the same cars that Franz recognised. The residents of his apartment block were the ones who created the most variety. Some of them were retired or worked part time. One even worked through the night, coming home in his VW at seven in the morning.

Franz watched all of them from his window. Ever since he had moved there he had needed to know everything that was going on around him in as much detail as possible. He got more information from Hochner who knew many of the trade people who visited the street. Some of the larger houses were worth millions. The emphasis was on quiet discretion, something that only a lot of money could obtain, creating a street that was as private as it could be without having security gates, which had happened in other rich areas of Hamburg. Franz was glad it had not come to that. It meant that if anybody was monitoring what was happening in the street it was him.

His watching was both a hobby and a necessity. He had been conditioned to always check his near environment. To begin with he felt his safety had depended on it. Now it had become a habit, one that still gave him satisfaction.

So it was a week later that he first noticed the red Audi parked further down the street across from the Hoffner residence. He had never seen this car before. The first time it was just noted. The second day it appeared he studied it more carefully. It was parked on the other side of the road, one hundred metres from his apartment block. Its two occupants were of the most interest. The early winter sun glazed across the Audi’s windscreen so it was difficult to make out what they looked like.   Only when the one from the passenger side got out and started walking down the street that Franz got a better look. This man was in his late sixties, early seventies, dressed in a smart overcoat and trilby, carrying a folded umbrella in his gloved hand and had a walk that was both slow and stiff as though he was suffering from some sort of leg or lower back injury. It was half an hour later when he returned to the car that Franz got a clearer view of this old man’s face. Immediately he recognised the Jew. It was an instinct. Franz knew the look of the Jew better than anybody, that dark shadow over their features, the walk of someone in submission. There was no doubt that was who he was watching as the old man got back in the car. As it drove off he managed to get the number plate

After a few minutes he phoned Angela to ask her to use her police contacts to trace the Audi’s number.

‘Sounds mysterious Franz,’ was her response to his request.

‘Not really. Just being a good neighbour. That’s all. How long will it take?’

‘I’ll let you know by the end of the day.’

‘That’s fine Angela. Thanks for this.’

‘You’re welcome Franz. We should do lunch more often.’

‘Is this your plan, to get me to eat more?’

‘Of course it is. See you soon Franz.’

He returned to his window. The sky was darkening as a few flakes of snow spiralled down, the first of the winter. The trees on either side of the road had twisted branches that were black lines against the grey light. Something was wrong. His mind was alert to the two occupants of the car.  Momentarily he felt a wave of deep irritation followed by an anxiety he had not experienced for a long time. He told himself he was overreacting, but still the concern persisted, especially when Angela told him that the Audi was a hire car.  

He almost expected its arrival back in the street that night. This time it parked near the entrance to the Hoffner house. He could just make it out under the street light as more flurries of snow crossed through the semi darkness. It was then he decided to go an extra run, quickly changing into his tracksuit and trainers.

As he jogged slowly on the other side of the road from where the Audi was parked he could see there were the same two occupants. This time he got a clearer view of the driver, much younger than the one beside him, well built, tall and definitely Jewish.

When he returned from going round the park the Audi was gone. Back in his apartment he showered and changed before having a light supper followed by his meditation. But on this occasion he could not clear his mind. The sight of the two Jews persisted in a car he had now seen on three different occasions parked near to the apartment block. The problem seemed to be getting closer. This was no coincidence. Somebody was being watched but in an obvious, amateurish way. He was not sure whether the occupants of the Audi wanted to be noticed, as if their presence was some kind of threat. When he had asked Hochner about it that morning the janitor said he had also seen this car on several occasions but had no idea about the reason for it being there.

‘I don’t mind going up and asking them if they needed any help, play ignorant and make out I thought they were lost or something,’ was the janitor’s suggestion, ‘I don’t mind doing that.’

‘No, leave it for a while,’ was Franz’s response.

He did not want them frightened off. He wanted to find out for definite who they were and what they wanted. He would wait and see if they turned up the next morning.

CHAPTER 15

‘I’m glad you like it. I think it works on all levels, works very well.’

‘I’m listening Leon. I’m never sure it’s what I want to hear but that makes no difference.’

He smiled and knew she would buy the painting. Geraldine Dunlop had been one of his first serious customers and he understood how she only gradually came to an appreciation of a certain work. He had to give her time. This was the third occasion he had arranged for just the two of them to be in the gallery.

‘I appreciate your staying late so I could have another look. We’re going away this weekend and I would like to have this settled otherwise it will become a worry.’

‘And we don’t want that,’ he said, trying to control his own nervousness.

‘It was a Wright,’ Geraldine suddenly mentioned, ‘the first painting I ever bought here. It must be over twenty years ago now.’

‘It was his beach abstract.’

‘We have it in the front room of our house in Cornwall.’

‘The right place for it,’ Leon concurred.

‘Wright is right,’ she joked.

‘And see how successful he has become.’

‘A good investment.’

‘That, but a lovely painting.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed.

Later he shut the gallery’s glass doors behind her. Rain was bouncing off the pavement outside and the usually busy London street was deserted. He sat at his assistant’s Sonya’s desk, watching the few cars and taxis swishing along the road.                                                                                                            He was tired. Selling had become difficult. There was more competition. London had become a centre of the art world and he hated the idea of having to keep up. Leon accepted art was a business, but for him it was always more, an investment in the human world. It was his purest enjoyment, to walk around the gallery looking at some of the new talent on display.

‘It’s you who gives it the ideas, the emotions Leon,’ Christine Harley, one of his discoveries, had told him, ‘I just paint.’                                                                                                                                                  He envied her as he envied all his other artists. They produced something different. All he had as a talent was the ability to point these differences to anyone interested. His artistic ambitions had been destroyed in the war. He knew that all he would want to express would be the horror and that he could not do.

‘There are other things than just culture,’ his wife Rachel had often said. It had been another argument about how much he was spending on his collections, books, records, paintings, small ceramic pieces, anything that brought him repeated moments of thankfulness.

The inheritance from her father’s textile business had had no effect on his wife’s concerns about money. Even though some of it had been used to set up the gallery they would always have been financially secure, something that he had struggled to make her believe. Rachel had always been troubled about the future and Leon had never managed to change that.

‘You never know what might happen. You understand that more than most people and yet you try and make me think nothing will change. How can you of all people have that kind of confidence?’ had been her cruel question.

Rachel’s family had always been well off and yet money for her had always been a threat. It was as if how you lived had to be accounted for in every detail. Leon often wondered if such pressures had been part of the reason for her early death.

‘I believe cancer can come from stress, not directly but as part of the difficulties,’ one of the specialists had told them when they had been searching for some kind of hope.

Leon felt how he had failed their marriage, how his own personality had suffocated what had been possible. Their relationship had solidified into totally different approaches to almost everything, leaving their son David lost between the two.

Now he was tired and the headache and the pains in his chest were the usual symptoms. What his body had been put through in the war years had left him completely weakened with a long medical list of constant complaints that meant regular visits to his doctor and the hospital.

‘You should take more time away Leon. You know I can manage,’ Sonya had said a few weeks before.

He often wondered why he had been so fortunate to come across Sonya, his support, his expert. Never once had he questioned her choice. She was the one who asked him to take the risks that thankfully often succeeded.

‘I love it when I see something and immediately know. It’s just there and you can’t leave it,’ Sonya had often told him, ‘I used to think we created the market, created the interest and demand for a certain artist, but not any more, not when we’re competing against the big galleries and sale houses.’

He appreciated her sharpness, the way she articulated art, the approach she had to the gallery that always seemed fresh and different to anywhere else.

‘You could set up your own gallery,’ he had repeatedly mentioned.

‘Even if I could I wouldn’t want to. It’s rare to do something you love and be paid for it without any of the risks. Don’t say you want rid of me Leon?’ she had teased.

She came every day to work in a dark jacket and matching skirt, white blouse, long black hair and high heel shoes that clipped over the gallery’s cement floor. He sometimes wondered how she and David might get on. His son had met her once at a gallery launch.

‘They just like the idea of being here,’ he had complained to his father on one of those previews.

‘That doesn’t matter so long as they’re here,’ he had answered.

‘But they won’t buy anything.’

‘Not this evening, no they won’t. But you see, in the next weeks a few of them will return in their own time. I know they will have seen something they like or something they think might make them money.’

‘And what’s worse, art as investment or art as decoration stuck up on the wall of some pretentious Knightsbridge flat?’