CHAPTER 10

“The card is all about art, you see,” Glavas said. “Fine works of art.”

Vlado felt a twinge of worry. So would this be the essence of the secret Vitas had died for? Some paintings from the museum? A bit of culture wrenched from a wall?

“Ah,” Glavas said. “I see that I bore you already. Not even interested enough to take notes.”

Vlado realized with a flush that he had put his pen down.

“Was I that obvious?” he asked. “I guess I had hoped that it might be something more. More than a few cases of liquor or cigarettes, or a few sides of mutton. And I’m sorry, but a few pictures strike me as an even less inspiring reason for getting yourself killed with a war on. Assuming that that’s where this might lead, of course. Meat, at least, you can eat.”

“Yes, meat,” Glavas said. “That and alcohol and gasoline and cigarettes can make you rich on the black market. Over time. And with a great deal of competition to worry about. But with a mere few pictures, as you put it, you can make yourself wealthy almost overnight. A millionaire, several times over, if you make the right choices. Even with the meager offerings of this town.

“And in the process, you can begin the destruction of an entire culture. Either one of those things alone, Mr. Petric, would seem reason enough for killing someone in this climate of looting and genocide, wouldn’t you agree? After all, what could be more calming to one’s conscience, being able to boast that you were destroying a nation’s emotional heritage even as you were lining your own pockets with a fortune to last a lifetime.”

“I guess if you look at it that way, it does seem a little closer to the heart of things.” Vlado pulled his own cigarette from the pack of Drinas that lay between them.

“And in the case of the transfer file, or these cards with the red circle on them,” Glavas said, “we’re not only talking of paintings, but also of manuscripts, sculptures, icons from the churches, both Catholic and Orthodox. Even a few old Jewish relics that the Communists managed to lay their hands on. A few old coins here and there, and some swords, vases, nice old boxes, that sort of thing. And each piece, or at least each piece of art in the ‘transfer file’ has ended up in the museum’s inventory files with a little red circle in the upper right corner, and my name on the bottom. And if you care to explore further, you’ll find that each of these cards tells its own tale of the way art moves and migrates, comes and goes, hither and yon, depending on the fortunes of war, the greed of bureaucrats, the cunning of politicians, and the whims of fate. Because, make no mistake, Mr. Petric, in every tale of war there is always a tale of art on the move, of one culture trying to steal the soul of another, whether in the name of booty or under the gentling guise of ‘preservation.’

“Which is why, in telling you of the transfer file, I must first go back to the spring of 1945, at the wretched end of yet another wretched war. So we’ll start there, if you don’t mind.”

“Please do.”

Glavas eased forward on the couch, shifting the rough blanket about his shoulders, collecting himself again with another deep breath.

“It was a hell of a lot worse then than now, I will tell you,” he said. “And that’s not just the generational carping of an old man determined to prove he’s had it worse than anybody nowadays. I sit here now under a pile of blankets with no heat and maybe two hours a week of running water, and that’s on a good day. And by God this is luxury compared to that war. The food now is the same every day, but it is food. The walls now are full of shrapnel, but they are still standing. The enemy shoots at us but he at least stays in the hills. This is a bad game of roulette. That war was one massacre after the other. You want to learn about some real ethnic cleansing? Then go back and read about that meat grinder. Or better still, ask your father, or your uncle.”

Vlado didn’t need to ask anyone. He’d heard most such tales in all their gory detail. And while the more glorious tales of heroism tended to be exaggerated-just ask Damir’s father, for example-the stories of hardship and horror had if anything been toned down. Croats killing Serbs, Serbs killing Muslims, Communists killing royalists, the Germans killing practically everybody-and for the survivors the old anger and mistrust had never been far from the surface. From their memories had come the embers that now burned so brightly across Bosnia, as if the fire had only gone underground for half a century.

“My village was gone, burned to a cinder, a small place in the east, barely a dozen houses altogether,” Glavas said. “Wiped out by the Nazis and those nasty Croats in the Ustasha. I’d been a university boy before everything shut down, an art history major with dreams of someday running a state museum, and I’d just won a curator’s internship in Belgrade when the fighting started. All that was over then, of course. And the village was gone in about the time it took you to buy your groceries. By the time the soldiers came I’d made it out of town on a farm wagon with four other boys my age. Then we ran from a roadblock and through the woods until I reached here. None of the other three made it. Shot while we ran, though I never once looked back. Just felt them falling around me, going down as if they’d suddenly gotten tired and given up on the spot. Amazing I wasn’t hit. For three days I lived on snow and a single heel of bread, and I spent the rest of the war holed up in cellars and back rooms, hiding from what passed for the authorities then.”

Glavas went on for another twenty minutes about those times, his voice rising with a passion as if the events had occurred just last week. Vlado sought a way to steer him back toward the subject at hand, but it was obvious Glavas was going to have his say. A man like this didn’t get much in the way of visitors anymore. So let him talk it out, Vlado figured, glancing at his watch. By the sound of it, Glavas was finally nearing the end of World War II.

“By the time you survived something like that you not only had the fear of God worn out of you, you also had the fire of revenge burning in your belly, and you were ready to take this revenge any way you could get it. My chance would come through art. A few months after the war ended I was invited to join the delegation going to Germany to recover the items that had been plundered from the new nation of Yugoslavia during the war. I say delegation, which makes it sound grand, but it was actually just me and one other fellow. If so many museum people hadn’t been killed or taken off to the camps, I never would have been chosen. But as it was I was an easy choice for them. My training made me stand out, and when I heard they were looking for help I jumped at the chance. I could extract revenge canvas by canvas. And let me tell you, from the very beginning I had no intention of sticking by anyone’s rules. I was full of zeal, ready to claim anything and everything that wasn’t tied down, particularly if I suspected it was a piece that really belonged in Germany. My chief worry was how I’d be able to keep my boss from finding out-Pencic, the museum director from Belgrade. And then, of course, I’d also have to deal with the Allied officers in charge of the operation. The Monuments officers, they called themselves. Americans, mostly.

“But Pencic was way ahead of me. When we met to go over our battle plan before leaving he showed me all the documentation we’d be taking. Every available certification and stamp and insurance form for every item we knew to be missing, several thousand items in all. Amazing what all had been taken, the complete thoroughness of it.

“Then he pulled out a stack of blank certification forms. Blanks! And what are these for, I asked, as if I hadn’t already guessed. For whatever we might also be able to bring back, he said, and I knew that I had found my master. These were the tools of careful larceny before us, and he had not been content with planning on taking a dozen, or twenty, or even fifty. If he was going to risk fraud and deception, then he was by God going to do it full throttle. He had two hundred blank forms. Two hundred! And we would use these wisely, not for just any claimable piece of trash, and nothing for our own personal gain. We were on a mission for God and country.”

Glavas paused, sighing.

“Have you got another Drina-this one’s running low. Thank you.” Outside a screaming whistle was followed by a huge explosion. The building seemed to tremble. Glavas glanced toward his plastic-covered windows.

“Ah, the skies are clearing. A noisy afternoon ahead, most likely. So, then. We left for Berlin on a Monday in June. In a captured old Fokker, repainted white. My first time in an airplane, and I still remember the marvel of it. We left from here, and it occurred to me how beautiful the city was. Before, even when visiting here as a wide-eyed country boy, I’d always seen Sarajevo as some scar upon the mountains, a great gray gash in the green. But from up there it became a living thing, a long graceful body settled into the valley for a nap after a terrible night without sleep, smoke curling up out of the chimneys. And the river-it was early morning when we took off, in a brilliant sun-the river was like some lovely gold necklace on a very elegant woman. A wonderful moment. Then, up, over the mountains, and onward to Germany “Berlin. My God, Berlin. If you want to see the wastage of war you should have seen Berlin. Even after all that had happened I pitied those people. Whole blocks turned to bricks, except now it was becoming neat. Everywhere were these Prussian stacks of bricks, and everywhere these stout women in kerchiefs were making more of them, stacking them higher and higher, passing them in long assembly lines, some of the women actually quite young and pretty, wispy from the lack of food, widowed ghosts roaming the rubble. And if you think women here will do anything for cigarettes, well … But what I remember most is the stench. Heaven help you if you ended up downwind of the grand River Spree. It was a giant sewer, and still full of bodies, swollen like dead rats, black and bloated, the size of small whales.”

He paused for a drag on the cigarette. Already Vlado could see why this might take a while, so he nudged Glavas back toward the topic at hand. “And then you began your search. For the looted art.”

“Yes. We settled in and checked in with the authorities. First with the Russians, over in their occupation zone, which was mostly fruitless. It was all we could do to find anything at all in their zone without them carting it off for Moscow. They were looting the looters, and certainly the way we were thinking we didn’t blame them a bit, especially after what they’d gone through. Although by the end of the first week I was as disgusted with them as with the Germans. Strutting around in their boots and greatcoats, rolling their tanks over the rubble, checking everyone’s papers. Making silly arrests. And helping themselves to half the female population over the age of ten. They really were beasts, although their art people were top notch. Knew exactly what to take first.”

The next twenty minutes were a wandering exploration of the ways and means of the Russian art squads, fascinating but maddeningly distant from the subject at hand. Vlado interrupted a few times, but it was like trying to steer a derailed locomotive. Glavas would leap back on the tracks when he pleased.

“Next came the Western allies,” Glavas said, finally leaving the Russians behind. “Not much easier to deal with, but at least you weren’t worried they were shipping half of what they had back home on the very next boat. And the French would have been just as bad as the Russians if they’d had half a chance. Although don’t believe the Brits and the Americans weren’t taking things, too. Everybody got something out of it.

“The main collection point for the Americans was in Munich, but in those days there was still plenty of stuff scattered in the countryside, a lot of it out in the middle of nowhere, places where the Germans had stashed things in the last months of the war that still hadn’t been collected. We got out our maps and went off with our American guide on one subterranean tour after another, visiting old dungeons, caves and mines, cellars of convents and monasteries, wineries, breweries, castles. Everywhere we went was one magnificent collection after another. I couldn’t hold my eyes in my head for days at a time. And slowly we made progress. I had my list and began to tick things off, one by one. They’d crate our items for packing and ship them to a central point for sending back to Yugoslavia.

“And of course along the way we always kept looking out, as Pencic used to say, for ‘the lost lambs of art,’ the items wandering unclaimed in empty pastures. It was our job, he said, to welcome them into our flock as if they were family. And so we did.”

Glavas chuckled, smiling.

“I can still recall some of the tales we told, some of the finesse that it took to stake our claims. And I know that sometimes people just flat didn’t believe us. But in the end they often had no choice. Quite often these were not curators we were dealing with, anyway, except at the larger collection points. We only had to swindle clerks and low level officers, paper pushers who wouldn’t have known the difference between a Boticelli and a Beaujolais. So, in nine exhausting weeks we quite outdid ourselves. By the time we were ready to board our fine little white Fokker back to Sarajevo we had used up one hundred sixtyfive of our two hundred blank forms.”

“Weren’t you worried you’d be caught?”

“Oh, we knew we’d be caught, eventually anyway. And we were. By the late fifties it was quite apparent what had happened. Our behavior became a well-known minor outrage in come circles of the European art world, not so much for the volume and value of what we took, quite small in the grand scheme of things. What enraged them was the idea that two little people like us had pulled it off with such brazen ease and weren’t about to apologize. And of course memories grow old quickly, especially among the great hordes of army clerks who could no longer remember anything about what they’d signed over to us, much less the details of our little fictions and embellishments. But the ones at the top knew we’d made off with the goods.”

“So you had to give everything back?”

“Oh, no. We’d anticipated from the start we’d be found out. The rightful owners, we knew, would eventually become known in some cases. So we took precautions from the beginning that would make it as difficult as possible for these items to be retrieved. And that’s where the transfer file comes in.”

“How?”

“We knew we couldn’t leave them with our museum collections. Too easy to track down that way. So we immediately began to spread them around. Some pieces went to government ministries, beautiful paintings that would end up hanging behind some gray, grim clerk scribbling on forms all day. The icons went to churches, usually small rural parishes that were more than happy to have them. It was the one bit of government benevolence for religion that Tito ever allowed.

“Some pieces went to a few of the big state-run hotels. But the bulk went to individuals. Party functionaries. Ministry bigwigs. It was the moral equivalent, I suppose, of a millionaire collector hiding pieces in his closet. But it was the best way to display them at all while still ensuring we’d keep them in the country. So once outsiders started asking if they might please have these items back, we could honestly say, ‘Oh, dear me, these pieces are no longer in our museums, and to track them down would take ages, and, well, we’ll certainly get on the job but it can’t possibly be a priority, you see.’ Only we knew all along where everything was.”

“Because it was all recorded in the transfer files.”

“Yes. And I was their lord and master. Even as my duties here at the museum began to broaden, I held on to this role. Partly because I knew more about it than anyone else, but partly because I felt an emotional attachment. I’d rescued them and brought them back.

“But then a funny thing happened. All the Party officials and ministry chieftains who were beneficiaries of our scheme found that they quite liked to have nice artworks in their homes. And of course, their underlings were all jealous. They wanted art for their houses, too. As the bureaucracy grew, so did the demand. And of course we had nothing left to give them then but our own museum pieces.”

“And did you?”

“But of course. Just because they weren’t ministers didn’t mean they couldn’t make your life miserable if you crossed them. So we complied, and the transfer files began to grow. Museum art began moving, piece by piece.”

He chuckled again.

“I even ended up with a piece, one of the original transfer items, in fact.”

He pointed across the room to the oil painting that had so impressed Vlado when he’d first entered. It was a verdant field of lilies in the light of later afternoon, an impressionist masterpiece.

“It’s nineteenth century. Chances are it belonged in a small museum in Stuttgart. ‘Tut mir leid, ’ as the Germans say.”

“Aren’t you worried it will be damaged?”

“At first I was. When the war started I put it in the building’s cellar in its own locked cabinet. But after a while I couldn’t stand the thought of it down there with the mice and the rusting bicycles and the grubby street urchins, with the huddled families too scared to move every time the shelling started. So I went down one night to get it, and a good thing I did. The cellar was ankle deep in water from pipes that had burst in the shelling. The water was only a few inches from destroying it altogether. It was strange. It was exactly how they’d found a lot of the old German sites in cellars and mine shafts. In standing water or encrusted with salt. Blighted with mildew. Some things ruined or half ruined. Others caked in dust or nibbled by mice, or buried alive by cave-ins. They’d shoved paintings between mattresses, draped them with lingerie, blankets, and lace curtains. Amazing what they’d done with some of it. And there was my own precious old canvas, slowly dying as the waters rose. So I brought it up here. If the shells get it, if some sniper puts a hole in it, well, better a quick death than slow torture by moisture and mildew. At least this way I can enjoy it until either it or me is finished. Anyhow, where was I?”

Vlado checked his notebook. “Art was moving out of the museums, you said, trickling away a piece at a time.”

“Yes, and strictly by the book. Certainly not just anyone could come in and ask to ‘borrow’ a painting for the rest of their lives. You had to have some connections, or some weight with the party. Some asked but were turned down. I got to help decide who was worthy, which of course meant certain advantages for me. Bartering points. This carpet you see. That chair you’re sitting on. One could do quite well in my position while still assuring that the art was safe, catalogued, and insured and carefully accounted for.

“After awhile we even discovered a nice side effect of the practice, apart from our own enrichment of course. We found we were creating room for our own new artists. Most museums will send items off into storage to do that. We, on the other hand, were able to keep our patrons happy by putting art in their homes while also giving our brighter young artists someplace to hang their work. The irony is that as some of them became popular, a few pieces of their work ended up being ‘loaned out’ as well. So, you see, art begets art as it moves and shifts.”

“It sounds like a lot of volume you’re talking about.”

“By the late eighties, close to a thousand pieces, I’d say. And as each piece moved somewhere it became a part of my domain. We’d take the card out of the central file, place a red circle in the upper corner of its inventory card, next to my signature, and place it in the transfer file. And even though I was still based here, Belgrade never did get control of it. I think partly because no one really wanted to fool with it once it became too big and unwieldy. Once Pencic died I was the last one left who could really trace the whole thing back to its beginnings. So, I was curator of the world’s most scattered collection. The shepherd, if you will, of all our country’s wandering lambs.”

“Didn’t anyone ever get a little concerned about all this? Having so many pieces-what, more than a thousand, you said? – all over the place like that.”

“What was there to be concerned about? A thousand is a drop in the bucket compared to the national inventory. And it had all happened too gradually to alarm anyone. And let’s face it, Mr. Petric, how many people except for a few bent old eccentrics really know enough about a museum’s inventory to notice if a piece here and there has been removed. So, anyhow, everything progressed smoothly, my empire growing all the while.

“Then the war began brewing. A vague sort of edginess crept in. I slowed down the movement, put a halt to it, in fact. Because if anything we wanted to start putting some of our better museum pieces in more secure locations. Bank vaults, that sort of place. So we shifted our energies. And it was at about this time that I got a visit-here, not at the office-from a most unusual patron, more so even than you or Mr. Vitas.”

“And when was this?”

“March of ninety-two. Just before everything went to hell. It was a general, a brigadier in the Yugoslav People’s Army. A General Markovic. He is now somewhere up in the hills near here, I am told. His men shell us every day”

“A Serb, then.”

“Yes, a Serb. And he had suddenly become very interested in the world of art, and in my scattered little collection in particular. In an official capacity, of course. He said he was representing ‘government interests.’ I must say that he wasn’t at all the sort of man you would ever bump into in the galleries of the National Museum.”

“What did he want to know?”

“Everything. He’d had a look at the transfer file already, either that or someone had told him about it, and he knew damn well what the red circles meant. He wanted a rundown of every transfer item in the city, a summary on location-how scattered, how easy to find, how resistant owners might be to ‘protective removal,’ what our recordkeeping was like, what the insurance companies knew. And values, he wanted to know what sort of stuff had the best value. Or, as he put it so disingenuously, which items needed immediate attention if we were to save them from the war, if a war indeed began. Did he ask about technique, about the merits of different schools, the value of a landscape as opposed to, say, some abstraction that might signify something larger, something visionary, some totem or talisman? Hell no. It is like I told you, this man was a businessman.”

“Did he ever bother to explain his interest, other than saying he represented the government?”

“Oh, his motives were all very patriotic, of course. He said that he and his superiors feared war would begin soon, so they wanted to get a handle on this very vulnerable portion of our national artistic heritage-the whereabouts, the values, the scope of it all-so that once things got rough he could make sure it was all protected. He said that people at the very highest levels had expressed their concern and put him in charge of protection.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Would you? This big philistine with garlic and slivovitz on his breath? Not for a moment. Not a word of it. If someone had been interested in protection it would have come through official channels, and there would have been visits to the museum, not to my home. There would have been forms to sign in triplicate, memos to circulate and meetings to hold. It would have been more red tape than you’d care to imagine, and it all would have been bungled very nicely, by all the proper channels, so that the art would have been in exactly the most vulnerable location possible at the time the shooting started.

“The general, on the other hand, was interested only in speed, efficiency, and, if you ask me, stealth. Does that sound like an official government operation to you? No, he was a mercenary, a silk-lined old Bolshevik who only wanted to know more about value and marketability. A capitalist in training looking for his big opportunity, the sort of accident that has been waiting to happen to this country since Tito died.”

“Then what did you tell him?”

Glavas sat up straight in his chair, pulling the blanket around his shoulders.

“Everything I knew. Places, values, estimates on how much he might be able to round up and in what period of time. Whatever he asked tor, really.”

Vlado was momentarily taken aback. He frowned slightly, prompting an impatient sigh from Glavas.

“Why did you help him?” Vlado asked.

“Why not? Why risk this man’s wrath. If I could have a friend in Grbavica with a war coming and the Serbs crouching to spring on the city like a cat, why not. And I am a Serb, Mr. Petric.” He leaned forward again, the blanket slipping. “Not a Serb patriot, or an Orthodox zealot or someone who still laments our glorious losses God knows how many hundreds of years ago on the plains of Kosovo. But still, a Serb, with an identity that I may need someday. That I needed then. And I will not squander the possible value of that identity, Mr. Petric, not for you and not for all the goddamned painted canvas in this city. Tell me, Mr. Petric, under these circumstances, would you? Toss away your security, I mean, by standing up for principle against some philistine in hopes of keeping a few hundred pieces of art from leaving the country?”

“Is that what you think has happened? That this art has left the country.”

“Has left or is leaving, take your pick. How else would you be able to profit from it. By selling it at the Markale Market, next to the potatoes and the plumbing joints? Prop it up on a card table with the insurance appraisal tacked to the frame? Use your head, Mr. Petric. Art may survive in a war zone, but the art ‘community’ that is supposed to protect it usually scampers away on the cowardly feet of foxes. A few diehards always stay to try to hold the old order together, or to try to ‘protect our heritage,’ as they put it. But the others get out while they can, using every connection available to them, leaving the rest of us to get ourselves killed. Like your friend Mr. Vitas.”

“Is this what Vitas thought as well, that art was leaving the country?”

“He suspected it strongly even before he arrived here, I believe, and once I told him of my chat with the good General Markovic he seemed quite sure of it. Or so I gathered from his questions.”

“What sort of questions?”

“He wanted to know about the current supply, about what might still be in the city from the transfer file. About what might have been moved since the beginning of the war, who had been in charge of moving it, who had been in charge of protecting it, if anyone. And who had been in charge of the records, or had access to them, besides myself. He asked if anyone had been in touch with the insurers, or if anyone from the U.N. had shown an interest. And he wanted to know what sort of market there might be for these items, assuming one could indeed get them out of the city, out of the country. In fact, he wanted to know very many of the same things as General Markovic, except he was obviously a few years behind.”

“You don’t think he was involved with the general? Trying to find out if he’d been dealing straight with him, for instance?”

“He could have been, I suppose. When I thought about it later I realized Vitas could have been simply following in the general’s footsteps to see if his story rang true. Wondering if he was being cheated by his partner in crime, so to speak. Yes, that occurred to me. It also seemed unusual that the chief of the Interior Ministry police would be doing his own investigation. I’m not in your line of work, of course, but I gather that the chief usually has someone lower down, like yourself, to actually go out in the field and get his feet muddy. Especially if they have to come some place like this. What do you think?”

“I’m not sure what to think. Vitas must have had a reason to handle the investigation himself, if that’s what he was doing. Or maybe, like you said, he was trying to check out his partners.”

“No, I decided I didn’t really believe that. But he could have been trying to cut himself in on the whole scheme, I suppose, a latecomer who’d gotten wind of the scheme and wanted to make his own killing before the supply was all gone. That could explain his interest, too. Because he also seemed interested in learning how to pick up the trail, how to identify the traces of the items that had already moved, the sort of signs that might be left behind by this kind of activity”

“And what kind of signs would it leave?”

“Empty spaces mostly. Empty spaces on walls where paintings used to hang.” Glavas broke into a laugh, cackling and wheezing, motioning with his hands for another cigarette. He inhaled deeply, stifling another wheeze, then paused to catch his breath.

“Empty spaces? That’s all?”

“No. That’s only the most obvious sign. If you wanted to keep the appearance of propriety and cover your tracks, there would have to be new notations on the cards in the transfer files for every item taken. It would be simple enough in a war. ‘Destroyed, claim applied for,’ or, ‘Looted, claim applied for.’ All with dates since the beginning of the war, in buildings known to have been hit or attacked or seized by the wrong sort of people. That sort of thing. Or if you were simply too lazy and maybe a bit too greedy as well, there was an easier way altogether. You could just destroy the transfer files, then there wouldn’t even be any records to doctor. And eleven months ago that’s exactly what happened.”

“Destroyed? All of them?”

“Every last card. One freak shell through a window and then a fire. Or so they said at the museum. The fire was miraculously contained in one room.”

“You sound like you think it was deliberate.”

“Look at who was guarding the place. The same thugs who’d saved it. All of a sudden one morning everything in the file is gone, or rather, burned to cinders, yet not a single painting in the museum is damaged. tried raising a stink, and would still be raising one, but two days later I was sacked.”

“Why?”

“That bastard Murovic, the empty-headed young fool who took over the National Museum three weeks after the war began, right after the director was killed by a mortar shell. He hated all the old hands, and he hated worst of all the ones who knew more than he did, which was two strikes against me right away. Being a Serb didn’t exactly mark me for advancement, either. And with the transfer files gone, Murovic had the excuse he needed. I was obsolete without my collection.”

“What’s his role been in all this?”

“Murovic? Not much until lately. The museum had been in total confusion anyway since the war began. For two months everyone was more or less in their cellars during the worst of the fighting. Then as they started climbing out, rubbing their eyes and shaking off the dust, that’s when people started to think they just might survive this. And then, too late, everyone began to worry about the art.

“But by then Murovic and his young bureaucrats had the jump on me. He’d gotten back in there as soon as he could, staking his claim as acting director and bending the ears of whoever was left at the local offices of the Ministry of Culture. Meanwhile I was still out here in Dobrinja, unable to move. It was another six weeks before I could get into the city, and even then only by riding in a U.N. armored personnel carrier. In those days I stayed in the city a week or so at a time to work, then came back here in those awful rolling coffins. But by the time I’d first made it back into the city Murovic had convinced the ministry that I was a closet Serb zealot who couldn’t be trusted, and that furthermore I’d gone senile, wasn’t up to the job anymore, especially, as he put it, ‘in the chaos of wartime.’

“I couldn’t deny I’d let things slide the last few years, either. I’d gotten lax, lazy. But my recordkeeping was still clear, and I still had the best institutional memory of the entire ministry. The last person Murovic wanted around was somebody who’d continually be correcting him and second guessing as he took over. But by my way of thinking, I could write down a quarter of the transfer file from memory right now, getting it down to the penny on appraised and insured value, and plenty of the locations, too. All I’d need would be a full week in a clean, quiet room, with good food and an unlimited supply of Marlboros.

“Of course I told this to Murovic, but he just laughed. He found it quaint, wished me well in retirement, told me to stay out of harm’s way. He told me the U.N. would sort it all out eventually, and in a far more scientific way. Then he packed me straight off to Dobrinja, and there went my authorization for U.N. escorts into town. He’d exiled me as effectively as if he’d sent me to Elba. So here I am in my confinement, where, I regret to say, I have lost all touch with that insular little world called the art community”

He paused, sinking back in the chair.

“Another cigarette please,” he said weakly.

Vlado tried to digest all he’d heard as he held out his lighter. Then a puzzle occurred to him. He flipped back through his notes a moment, then asked: “If the files were destroyed eleven months ago, what was Vitas doing with a card last Tuesday?”

“Ah. That is exactly what I wanted to know. Because it was an original he had, not a copy. My very own handwriting right there on the back. He was very coy about it. Very foxy, yet still the courtly gentleman. He told me it would be better for both of us if I didn’t know. He sort of smiled when he said it. I asked if the rest of the files were still around, and he told me something very odd. He said they were in sate hands in unsafe surroundings. Whatever that means.”

“You said he also asked you if anyone besides General Markovic had ever expressed an interest in the file. Other government people, or even U.N. people. Had they?”

“No one to my knowledge. Perhaps you should ask Murovic that.”

“Did either Vitas or Markovic mention other names, other possible contacts?”

“Not one. As I said, Vitas was very careful. His questions told me little, and mostly he just sat and listened, nodding as if he’d known everything all along. And if he’d ever heard General Markovic’s name come up before, then you wouldn’t have known it from his reaction. He was as blank as a stone. Not someone I’d want to play cards with.”

Vlado mulled this over for a moment, then offered another cigarette to Glavas.

“So, then,” Vlado said. “Perhaps you can help me figure out where I might begin. Where I might go from here. If the files are gone, or hidden, then I guess another possibility is in tracking down art that might be leaving. Assuming that pieces were still being taken, or that any have been taken at all, how would one go about getting a painting out of the city without arousing suspicions.”

“Under conditions like these? Use your head, Mr. Petric. There has never been a better time. Half the city’s evacuated, or dead and buried. Buildings are destroyed or half wrecked. Even the Nazis didn’t have it so easy. At least with them, once the war was over we knew who had it, where to look for it. Under these conditions who’s to say where something might end up once it’s looted. There will be a thousand suspects to choose from. The Serbs will blame the Muslims, the Muslims will blame the Chetniks, the Croats, too. Everybody will blame everybody, and then you’ve got the gangsters, Zarko or Enko or any of a dozen hoods in this city alone. And if you don’t like your neighbor’s looks you can always blame him. I’m a Serb and know my stuff, so maybe someone will even think to blame me. Maybe they already have. Or maybe now someone will pin it all on Vitas. Dead men always have a knack for attracting blame.

“The point is, there are a thousand built in excuses if you want to explain away a lot of missing art, and that gives you all the opportunity in the world for lifting, looting, or ‘misplacing’ any piece you might get your hands on. And that goes double for items from the transfer files, as long as there aren’t any records. Who can even say what’s been taken if you don’t know what existed to begin with? And even if that idiot Murovic ever gets UNESCO on his side, by then anything that turns up missing will be written off as a casualty of war. And whoever took it will be home free.”

“Yes, but actually getting it out of here is a different matter. It’s not like you can just crate up a picture and drive it over the mountain in a truck, unless you have a U.N. escort. Even then you might lose it on the way at a checkpoint. The only sure way is by air, and that’s strictly U.N.”

“And you think that’s an obstacle?”

“Isn’t it?”

“Ah, the U.N.”

Glavas cackled, wheezing again, then broke into a splitting cough. By now Vlado was expecting to see his insides begin bubbling out of his mouth in a red-and-gray froth. Glavas lifted a crusted, yellowed handkerchief to his mouth and hawked into it. As he pulled it away a rubbery green thread stretched from his nostrils like a strand of melted cheese from a slice of pizza. Glavas wiped it away with the sleeve of his other arm as he heaved gently with laughter.

“Pardon me, Mr. Petric. One thing that I must say pleases me about wartime. No more resting on the need for convention and good manners. It’s all too tiring, so I’m free to just be a grotesque old man, and I can blame it all on the Chetniks.”

He laughed again, and for a moment Vlado thought he was about to descend into another gorge of hacking. But the wheeze subsided, and Glavas slumped back in his chair, spent.

“Yes, the U.N.,” he began again, in a softer voice, his face tilted toward the ceiling. “Our protector against evil. Do you realize, Mr. Petric, that if you want to ship in something other than beans and rice and flour that the U.N. won’t let you? Not fair, they say. That would be taking sides in the war. Not even medicine. The Serbs would object, they say. Maybe some salt and pepper then? Or perhaps a load of vegetables or two? No, not possible. Against the rules. Yet I firmly believe that if you want badly enough to send something out of the city on those empty departing planes, something small and portable and easily loaded into an air cargo bay, then that is entirely possible provided you have the right sums of money. Do I know this officially? Or for certain? No, Mr. Petric, I don’t. But I feel intuitively from the whisperings I heard around the gallery early in the war, talk of private collectors protecting their choicest pieces by sweet-talking UNESCO underlings and blue-helmeted shipping officers. A few Deutschemarks here and there. It is all a private matter, a few favors for friends, and then it need never be spoken of again. So, yes, I believe the U.N. is not so great an obstacle.”

“But once you’ve shipped it, then what? What’s the international market for stolen art? Won’t someone ask questions about where it’s from?”

“Do you have any idea how much stolen art is ever recovered, Mr. Petric? Any idea at all?”

“A third? Maybe a quarter?”

“Less than one percent. And when no one even has a piece of paper to alert the international auction markets, then you’re going to shave that figure even closer. All you need is a broker willing to ask as few questions as possible. London, Zurich, New York, any of those three places would probably do. And if there are still worries, there’s always some discreet oilman in Texas who’ll take it for his basement. Or some rich old German in South America who has half the local constabulary in the hip pocket of his lederhosen. Selling it and keeping it a secret aren’t the hard parts unless it’s something so notoriously famous that everyone will spot it right away. And nothing from here fits that description. Which isn’t to say you can’t make a lot of money from it.”

“So how many items are we talking about? You said the transfer files were up past a thousand, but obviously not everything was in Sarajevo.”

“No. But more of it than you’d think. Belgrade and Zagreb never seemed quite as interested as local folks and officials. This always has been a city that prided itself on its tastes, on its private collections. About three hundred or so were here.”

“Then how much money are we talking about? On average.”

“Art isn’t something that lends itself to averaging. At least that’s what I used to tell people to show off my purity. But I’ve grown vulgar in my old age, and I’ll tell you right now that the worth of the three hundred or so transfer items in the city probably averaged out to about a hundred sixty thousand dollars apiece. Hardly something to get the art people at Scotland Yard excited about. But get your hands on a third of the supply and you’ve got sixteen million. Not bad for a hard cash economy And if you’re willing to be a little more discriminating you can easily up your average, maybe four hundred thousand apiece for the top one-third. Now you’re looking at forty million, or at least twenty million even after you’ve accounted for the discounting you sometimes have to do when you’re selling items of questionable provenance. I can see someone getting killed over that, Mr. Petric, can’t you?”

So much for meat and cigarettes, Vlado thought. So much for the sad, tawdry underbelly of the city’s organized crime. Now death on a small scale began to have a certain logic.

“I’d like you to do a favor for me,” he said to Glavas. “I can’t provide you with either a clean, warm room or good food, and I don’t have any Marlboros. But I can leave you a full pack of Drinas if you can start trying to put together what you remember of the local items that were in the transfer files.”

“Under the circumstances, I’d consider that a generous offer.”

“Take the next two days and write down as much as you can remember about the most valuable pieces. Who had them. At what location. Particularly in the city center. Never mind the Grbavica and Ilidza locations. Never mind your piece up on the wall, either. I want to start looking for some of those ‘empty spaces’ you were talking about, the more recently empty the better, and the only way I’ll know where to look is with the help of your memory.”

“Consider it done,” Glavas said, flashing some of the old nobility and grace he must have employed during his years in the universe of artists and museums. “It will be a privilege to feel useful again. I’ll begin as soon as you’ve left.”

Vlado shut his notebook, hunching forward as if ready to stand, then asked, “Did Vitas say anything about where he was going next. About who else he might be seeing?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid. As I said, he was quite careful about those things. And if someone as careful as he can be killed so easily, then I would think you might want to watch yourself, Mr. Petric.”

“The thought has occurred to me. And if you should get any more visitors interested in this subject, Mr. Glavas, please let me know.”

“And how am I to do that? How, for that matter, am I to get this list to you once I’m done. The phones here work about once a month. And something tells me you don’t want me sending messages out through the police or the U.N.”

“I’ll come pick it up. Same time in two days. Though don’t be alarmed if I’m late, even if by a day or two.”

“Either way. I won’t be going anywhere.”

Vlado stood, stepping toward the door.

“In the meantime, I suppose I should pay a visit to your friend, Mr. Murovic. Do you know where to find him?”

“In his new office at the National Bank of Bosnia, down next to the main vault, like Tutankhamen in his tomb. Our Boy King of art, and every bit as naive and easily led. But if you’re truly interested in looking for those ‘empty spaces’ right away, Mr. Petric, I think I may have a starting place for you.”

Vlado paused with his hand on the doorknob.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I’d appreciate that.”

“Try starting with Murovic’s head,” Glavas said. “It’s the emptiest space in all of Sarajevo.”

And with that he tumbled into another great outburst of wheezing laughter, which continued as he waved Vlado out the door.

As Vlado started down the steps, the wheezes hardened into a sharp cough, and it was still crashing onward as Vlado emerged from the exit downstairs, where the sound was finally drowned out by the urgent shouts of children and the rattle of gunfire.

Загрузка...