The Forger (40 page)

“What about that man who shot Behr?” I asked, and felt my jaw muscles twitch, as they did every time I thought back to Tombeau’s face on the night that Behr had died.

“Tombeau. He’s the worst of the lot,” said Dietrich. “Always stirring things up. He’s the first one I’ll finish if I have to do any killing myself.” He breathed out slowly. Then he turned to business. “Do you have that Vermeer yet?”

“Does Göring still need it?” I asked. “Even now?”

Dietrich nodded. “He calls me almost every day. I tell you, we’re all dead if you can’t turn up that painting.”

“Why does Hitler want it so badly?”

“Who knows? Who dares to ask?” said Dietrich. “It’s an astronomer. A man pondering the mysteries of the universe. That’s how Hitler sees himself, I suppose.”

“We need you to get us some fuel,” I said. “A truck, too.”

“Done,” he said quickly. “We’ll do that right now.”

I had the feeling he would have given us just about anything to get the job done. I saw on his face the same intensity as I had seen in Göring when he mentioned
The Astronomer,
blind with the need to possess it.

Dietrich stood up to leave. “I won’t ask where you’re going, but if you’re heading toward the fighting, you ought to leave soon. Allied planes are shooting everything that moves along any road within a hundred kilometers of the front line.”

“So let’s go,” I told him. I hauled on my coat and headed for the door.

What Dietrich found for us was a military ambulance, which he kept at the Schneider warehouse. “The best I could do at such short notice,” he said, when we arrived, having picked up Pankratov from the Dimitri.

The ambulance was a requisitioned Citroën delivery van. The whole machine was painted dull field gray, except for the tires, and these were mismatched and almost worn out. On the sides and on the roof were neat white squares with a red cross painted inside. The headlights had been fitted with dampeners, which made them look like a pair of squinting eyes. Five jerrycans of fuel were lashed onto the roof. “We often use it to transport works of art around the city,” Dietrich explained. “No one stops an ambulance, least of all a military one.”

*   *   *

I
N THE OFFICE
, D
IETRICH
filled out passes that allowed us to travel by any roads we chose and to requisition fuel anywhere we could find it. He signed it himself, then pounded the pages with numerous eagle and swastika stamps. It would be enough, Dietrich said, to scare off any military policeman who might flag us down. He also had yellow armbands for each of us, on which was written in black Gothic letters—
IM DIENST DES DEUTSCHEN HEERES.
In the service of the German military.

Just as the four of us were walking out toward the ambulance, there was a flicker in the light around us, as if the sun had blinked. We looked up and saw the first of what looked to be hundreds of planes crossing the path of the sun. The planes were high, throwing the chalkiness of contrails behind them. If I looked closely, I could see they were four-engined, the streams of vapor merging into two, which merged with the other condensation paths until the whole sky looked like glass that had been scratched with a handful of diamonds. They were American bombers, coming over from England and heading deep into Germany. These days, the sky was never empty of contrails. Even at night, they stretched across the cloudless sky, lit up by the moon.

Dietrich stood with his neck craned back, tendons strained, his eyes almost shut against the brightness of the afternoon sun. “You’d better get going,” he said.

I drove Fleury and Pankratov out of Paris along boulevards as deserted as the ones we’d traveled four years ago, on our way to Normandy.

*   *   *

I
KEPT TO MYSELF
on the ride out.

Pankratov and Fleury’s conversations drifted in and out of my head. One time they were talking about food, and Pankratov was going on about some Finnish recipe for marinading raw salmon in vodka, dill and rock salt. Another time Pankratov was wondering who had painted the forgeries of his work in the Gottheim Collection and if the forger had done a good job. Later, when I heard them discussing what they would do after the war was over, I realized that I had done almost no thinking on the subject.

I was just opening my mouth to say something about it when we came over the ridge of a small hill and saw the wreckage of two German army trucks. I remembered what Dietrich had said about air attacks. One of the trucks was flipped on its side in the ditch and another was standing out in a field, just off the road. The one in the ditch had burned out completely and the still-smoking metal was dirty orange from incinerated paint. The windows had melted out. The tires were bubbled and smeared all over the wheel wells. Only the steel tube frame remained of the canvas-covered roof. The truck out in the field had been blown almost in half, the cab fallen forward from the rest of the truck, making it look strangely beheaded. All around the truck were pieces of soldiers’ equipment—German helmets, some with chicken wire bent around the rims for holding camouflage, unraveled white bandages, leather belts, mess tins and felt-covered canteens so twisted and torn that it looked as if they had been wrenched off the owners’ backs by a tornado. I saw white chips in the tarmac where bullets had struck the road.

We were now on the outskirts of Caen. The city was burning. Four separate pyres of smoke rose from the city and merged, dirty and black-brown against the sky. I could smell the smoke, even though it looked to be about a mile away. It tangled with heat off the fields, the smell of the warm earth, pink foxgloves and the tiny white blooms of elderflowers in the thick
bocage
hedgerows.

It was here that we met our first roadblock, but it was only a traffic diversion. Two military policemen, one of them standing on top of a fifty-gallon oil drum, pointed us down to the south. They wore half-moon chained breastplates across their chests and aimed the way for us with long-stemmed lollypop markers. They both wore camouflage jackets and had camouflage paint on their helmets. Beyond them, on the road, lay more burned-out vehicles.

The detour took us down through a village called St. André-sur-Orne, then crossed over the Orne River and up through the towns of Maltot, Verson and Carpiquet. By that time, we had overshot Ardennes Abbey by a couple of miles and had to double back.

Most of the old houses had their rickety, paint-peeled shutters closed up. There were very few people moving around in the little towns, and no vehicles at all. Neither were there any traces of German troops, except in the fields, where marks of recent encampments could be seen as fade marks in the grass and deep gouges of tank tracks across the muddied ground. They had all gone forward to the front.

I pulled into the shade of some large trees that grew across the road from the abbey. Then I cut the engine. For the first time in many hours, I took my hands from the wheel. I clenched them both, working the blood back into my knuckles.

Pankratov ran across the road to the gate. It opened before he reached it.

Marie-Claire came out to meet him. She looked as pretty as I had remembered. She gave Pankratov a big hug and then pointed back into the courtyard.

Pankratov stepped back from the hug, rested his hands on Marie-Claire’s shoulders and spoke to her.

She nodded.

Pankratov kissed her on the forehead and went inside the abbey.

Seeing Marie-Claire again brought back to me the almost forgotten lightness in my chest of being a stranger in Paris.

Marie-Claire walked across to where Fleury and I stood stretching our legs after so many hours of being cramped up in the ambulance. Her small feet crunched on the khaki gravel of the driveway. Above her, a warm breeze rustled the tops of the trees. “How are you, my darlings?” she asked, embracing each of us in turn.

I said how good it was to see her again. Then I asked if Pankratov had explained why we were here.

“My husband has already opened up the wall.”

“Has Madame Pontier called you?” I asked nervously.

“Pankratov swore us to secrecy,” she replied. “She can call all she wants. She won’t learn anything from us.”

“Thank you,” I breathed out. “I’ll go help with the painting.”

She shook her head. “There’s nothing for you to do. You must rest now.” She didn’t need to ask me twice.

I eased myself down beside the truck and let my head fall back against its chevronned engine grille. “I think it’s been about a million years since I sat in the grass and did nothing,” I said.

“Has it been terribly difficult for you in the city?” asked Marie-Claire. “I hear the most awful stories. The only thing that happened to us was that we had to move out because a German officer came to live here. His name was Generaloberst von der Schulenberg.” She made no attempt to pronounce the words correctly. “After a few months, he got bored out here in the country and took our apartment in Caen instead. That was in 1941. We’ve been back ever since.” She looked off down the shady road. “Wasn’t it sad about Artemis?” she asked.

“It was,” said Fleury.

I thought back to the day we found out he’d been killed. I wondered if Marie-Claire had convinced herself it wasn’t her fault. That he would have been conscripted anyway. That he would have been killed in the fighting.

She breathed in suddenly. “It’ll all be over soon. I just hope they don’t wreck this place on their way through.”

“All be over soon.” The words repeated in my head. I closed my eyes and felt the warm breeze coming off the fields.

Marie-Claire’s hand brushed softly against my face. “Why don’t you stay?” she asked.

“Stay?” My eyes opened wide.

“Yes,” she said. “The Allies aren’t far away. The whole of Normandy will be liberated soon.”

I said nothing. The idea had put me into shock.

“My God,” said Marie-Claire. “You didn’t consider this, did you?”

“There’s more work to do,” I mumbled. “It’s more complicated than you think.”

She turned to Fleury. “What about you?”

Fleury just stared at her.

It was the first time I had ever seen him at a loss for words.

Marie-Claire pointed down the shady road. “In about a week, the Allied armies will be driving their tanks down this little road, and they may blow a few holes in our house before they get here, but I don’t care, because I’ll be free. But God knows how long it’s going to take them to get to Paris. And who’s to say the Germans won’t destroy the city before they leave it? You don’t want to be stuck in the middle of that.”

Just then, Pankratov emerged from the gate. He was carrying the painting, still wrapped in its white cloth.

“It’s not too late,” said Marie-Claire, her voice an urgent whisper.

Fleury was looking off down the road, as if to see Allied soldiers advancing through the dappled shadows of leaves upon the shady road. Then he glanced at me.

“It’s all right,” I said. “You stay.”

“What about you?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Got to try,” I told him.

One more time, Fleury looked down the road. Then he got back in the ambulance. He rolled up the window, and the dirty glass rose around him like floodwater. He sat very still.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” asked Marie-Claire.

I stepped over to the door of the ambulance and opened it.

Fleury sat with his Craven A tin on his lap. He was down to his last cigarette, which was often the case. He seemed to be debating with himself about whether or not to smoke it.

I opened the door and leaned down to him. “Look,” I said. “Stay if you want.”

Fleury smiled. He took hold of the door and pulled it shut. A moment later, a wisp of smoke rose up around his head.

Marie-Claire took my arm. “What’s happened to you people?”

Pankratov reached the ambulance, carrying the painting. He got down on his haunches, back against the door of the Citroën. He tore off the painting’s white cloth cover and wrapped it around his neck like a scarf. The painting was small. He held it at arm’s length, gripping the honey brown frame.

I sat down next to him. We stared at the Astronomer in his blue robe, long hair down around his shoulders. One hand touched a globe. The other gripped a table, as if the shock and vastness of whatever knowledge was about to reach him might throw his body back across the room. A tapestry bunched on the table. Yellowy light through the window lit up the brilliance of the threads. It was the first time I’d seen the actual painting. Now I understood how someone could become obsessed with it.

The Comte de Boinville appeared at the entrance. He was lugging two watering cans made of tin with brass spouts. As he came close, I could smell that they were filled with gasoline. “I’ve been hoarding fuel for months,” he said. “I thought you’d need some now.” He glanced at the painting and looked unimpressed. “All this work for that?” he asked.

“All this,” said Pankratov.

The count shook his head and smiled wearily, as if Pankratov had just told him a joke he’d heard before. “I tell you, I’d trade that thing for fifty liters of petrol, and so would almost everybody else around here.”

Marie-Claire slapped him on the arm. “Max,” she said. “You talk such rubbish.”

“No, I don’t,” he insisted. “I meant it. I think you’re all insane to be taking such risks.”

“And what do
you
value?” asked Pankratov.

“Peace of mind,” said the count, without hesitation.

Pankratov opened up the two doors at the back and stashed the Vermeer under a pile of blankets that were folded and strapped to a stretcher.

I wondered what it must be like to see
The Astronomer
through the eyes of the Comte de Boinville—just canvas, wood and paint.

Marie-Claire hugged me good-bye. As she stepped back, she let her hands trail down my arms until they reached my fingertips.

It was dusk as we drove the long way around Caen and onto the main road back to Paris. The moon was out and lit up the fields. We saw the silhouettes of tanks and guns lined up, preparing to advance. German soldiers passed us on the narrow roads, their helmets wet with dew. Whenever we came to a roadblock, where trench-coated military police held up lollypop signs that said,
HALT
, we handed them our papers and they waved us on our way.