Greeks Bearing Gifts

ELEVEN

“Do you know where the Glyptothek is, Christof?”

“I know where it is,” I told Dietrich. “I’m not sure what it is.”

“It’s Munich’s oldest public museum and the only one in the world solely dedicated to ancient sculpture. There was a break-in last night and I’d like you to go and see what’s been stolen. Which is another way of me telling you to find out if they’re going to make a claim. If they are—check them out for contributory negligence, that kind of thing. Something that might affect a payout. Did someone leave a door unlocked or a window open? You know.”

“I know.”

And I did. Before joining Berlin’s Murder Commission I’d attended enough burglaries to feel confident and even quite nostalgic about investigating this for Munich RE.

It was about a thirty-minute walk southwest to the museum on the north side of Königsplatz; the Glyptothek had been badly damaged in 1943–44 and restoration was now almost complete but there was still scaffolding on the side of the west wing and I wondered if this was where the break-in had occurred. Behind a portico of Ionic columns with two wings adorned with niches were the exhibition rooms deriving their light from a central court and, in a way, the place reminded me of the offices of Munich RE, which said a lot more about the insurance business than it did about the plastic arts, at least in Germany. The marble group on the pediment featured a one-armed Athena ordering around a bunch of workers who couldn’t have looked more indifferent to her protection, which made me think they were already members of a trade union—and very probably English, since none of them seemed to be doing much. Outside the entrance was a police car; inside were a lot of Greek and Roman marble sculptures, most of them too big to steal or already too badly damaged to notice if they’d been damaged, so to speak. A uniformed cop asked me who I was and I gave him one of my new business cards, which seemed to satisfy him. They certainly satisfied me; it was several years since I’d had a business card and this one was as stiff as a starched wing collar.

The cop told me the break-in had taken place on the floor above and, noting an alarm bell as big as a dinner gong and a ladder under the stairs, I followed the sound of voices as I climbed to a suite of offices on the second floor of the west wing. A detective was inspecting a cracked window that looked as if it had been forced open, while another was listening to a man with glasses and a chin beard, whom I took to be someone from the museum.

“It’s very odd,” said the man from the museum, “but as far as I can see almost nothing was taken. Just a few very small pieces, I think. When I think of all the treasures they could have stolen, or vandalized, my blood runs cold. The Rondanini Medusa or the Barberini Faun, for example. Not that it would be easy to move such a thing as our treasured Faun. It weighs several hundred kilograms.”

“Was anything damaged?” asked the detective.

“Only the desk in my office. Someone forced it open and had a good rake around in the drawers.”

“Probably kids,” said the detective, “looking for some easy cash.”

It was about now that they both noticed me and I stepped forward with my business card and introduced myself. The detective was an inspector called Seehofer and the Fritz from the museum was Dr. Schmidt, the deputy assistant director.

“It looks as if you’ve had a wasted journey, Herr Ganz,” said Seehofer. “It seems that nothing has been recently damaged or taken.”

I wasn’t convinced about that. “Is that where they got in? These kids.”

“Yes, it looks as if they climbed up the scaffolding.”

I walked over to the window. “Mind if I take a look?” I asked the detective inspector.

“Be my guest.”

I put my head out the window. There were fresh-looking footprints on some planks stacked nearby. They might have been a builder’s footprints but I’d already seen a similar footprint on the carpet by the office door. A big fellow by the look of it and not kids at all, I thought. But I didn’t contradict the detective inspector. I decided it was best to keep on the right side of him for now.

“Do you get many visitors in this museum?” I asked Dr. Schmidt.

“It’s February,” he said. “Things are always a bit quiet in February.”

“What about the alarm?” I asked. “Why didn’t it go off?”

“What alarm?” asked Seehofer. “There’s an alarm?”

“I don’t know,” said Dr. Schmidt, as if he’d only just thought of it, and clearly he hadn’t mentioned it to the detective inspector, who looked slightly irritated to discover the existence of such a thing now.

“If you could show me where the bell is, sir?” said Seehofer, a little too late to fill any insurance investigator’s heart with confidence.

We went back downstairs, crossed the hall, and looked up at the bell that was mounted on the wall about a meter above our heads. From where we were standing it wasn’t going to reveal very much and after a while I felt obliged to move things along a bit and fetched the ladder from under the stairs.

“I should be doing that, you know,” said Seehofer as I mounted the ladder, which, now that I was working for an insurance company, felt a bit less than safe on the polished marble floor.

I nodded and came back down without a word, happy not to take the risk. I wasn’t about to get paid my twenty-five marks a week if I fell off a ladder.

Seehofer went up the ladder, looked down precariously several times, and finally managed to reach eye level with the bell, where his powers as a detective really started to kick in. “That explains it,” he said. “There’s a piece of folded card between the bell and the clapper.”

“Then don’t for Christ’s sake pull it out,” I said.

“What’s that?” he asked, and pulled it out. The bell began to ring, very loudly, almost causing Seehofer to fall off the ladder. Losing his nerve for the height he was at, he came quickly down again.

“Can you turn it off, sir?” I shouted at Dr. Schmidt.

“I’m not sure I know how,” he admitted.

“Who does?”

“The security guard.”

“Where’s he?”

“Er, I fired him when I discovered the break-in. I imagine he’s gone home.”

Since none of us could now hear ourselves think, let alone speak, I felt obliged to take the piece of card from Seehofer’s nervous fingers, go back up the ladder myself, and replace it between clapper and bell, but not before unfolding it to reveal that it was actually an empty packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

I came back down and said, “Why is this ladder here?”

“It was up all day yesterday,” said Schmidt. “One of the builders was using it to replace the lightbulbs in the ceiling fixtures.”

“So it might have been left unattended for some length of time.”

“Yes.”

“Then my guess is that whoever broke in here last night came into the museum as a visitor yesterday and, seeing an opportunity, went up the ladder and disabled the alarm with that empty cigarette packet.”

Seehofer murmured, “Lucky Strike. But not for some,” which hardly endeared him to Dr. Schmidt, whose sense of humor was understandably absent that morning.

“It looks very opportunistic,” I said. “Like our man saw his chance to disable the alarm on the spur of the moment and used the first object that came to hand.”

“Which makes it all the more surprising that nothing was stolen,” said Schmidt. “I mean, this was planned. I can’t see kids going to that amount of trouble. Or with that amount of foresight. Can you?”

“Could I see inside those desk drawers?” I asked him. “If you don’t mind, sir.”

“Certainly, but there’s nothing to see. Just some museum stationery and some guidebooks. Perhaps a few very small artifacts that were kept in a desk drawer. I’m not sure exactly. It’s not my desk. It’s the assistant director’s.”

“Maybe we could ask him what’s missing, if anything.”

“I’m afraid not. He’s been ill for some time now. In fact, I doubt he’ll be coming back at all.”

“I see.”

We went back across the hall, which was when we caught a glimpse of a large marble statue in a Pantheon of a room by itself, and if this caught our eye it was not because it had been damaged but because of what it was: a life-sized statue of a Roman faun or Greek satyr, legs akimbo—one of them at a right angle to the rock he was seated upon—who looked like he was suffering after a late night in the Hofbräuhaus. The indecorous statue was extremely well rendered and left nothing to the imagination.

“Christ,” said Seehofer. “For a moment I thought he was the real thing. It’s very—very realistic, isn’t it?”

“That’s the Barberini Faun I was telling you about,” said Schmidt. “Greek. Possibly restored by Bernini after being badly damaged during an attack by the Goths almost a thousand years earlier.”

“It seems that history is always repeating itself,” I said, momentarily picturing those previous Germans in some desperate fight to the death.

Back in the office I took a look inside the desk. “Anything stolen from in here?” I asked. “A cash box, perhaps.”

“No, not so much as a ticket roll.”

“Then why do you keep it locked?”

“Habit. Sometimes I leave my own valuables in there. A gold pen. A nice cigarette lighter. My wallet. But not on this occasion. Not when I go home. Really. It’s most extraordinary. Everything looks just fine.”

I might have agreed with that but for something I’d seen on the desk that didn’t look as if it belonged anywhere except in an ashtray. It was a half-chewed cigar projecting at a right angle from the edge of the desk like the leg of the Barberini Faun.