Painted Ladies

35

The Museum of the Dutch Renaissance was on upper Madison Avenue in Manhattan, several blocks north of the Viand Coffee Shop. The museum was a lovely low building that had once been a church, and Carl Trachtman was the curator.

“Otto is a glorious dog,” Trachtman said when I sat down.

“So is Pearl,” I said.

Trachtman smiled.

“Proud parents,” he said.

“You have a dog?” I said.

“I do,” Trachtman said. “A Piebald dachshund named Vermeer. We call her Vee.”

“She glorious?” I said.

Trachtman smiled.

“Completely,” he said.

“Many dogs are,” I said.

Trachtman went around behind his ornate antique desk, doubtless of low-country origin, and sat down and smiled.

“Now that we’ve exchanged bona fides,” Trachtman said, “let me say that I’m very familiar with this case. I’ve followed it with great interest. My great hope is that it wasn’t Lady with a Finch that exploded.”

“Wasn’t enough left to test,” I said. “But for what it’s worth, I don’t think it was destroyed.”

“Its life has been so hazardous,” Trachtman said, “for the nearly four hundred years since Hermenszoon painted it.”

He looked at my card.

“You’re a private detective,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“What is your interest in the case?”

“I was Dr. Prince’s bodyguard when he got killed,” I said.

Trachtman nodded slowly. He was a smallish overweight man with a Vandyke beard and receding gray hair.

“And you wish to get what? Revenge?”

“You might call it that,” I said. “I cannot let people murder somebody I was hired to protect.”

Trachtman nodded.

“So it would be, perhaps, more about you than poor Dr. Prince,” he said.

“Probably,” I said. “But whatever it is, I’m on it, and I’m not going to let go of it.”

“Determination is not a bad thing,” Trachtman said. “Properly applied. How would you like me to help you.”

“Tell me about the painting, tell me about Prince; you may correctly assume that I know nothing.”

“I suspect you know more than you pretend to,” Trachtman said.

“Hard to know less,” I said.

“Where shall I begin,” Trachtman said. “Background on seventeenth-century low-country realism? What makes this painting so special? What makes Hermenszoon so special?”

“Probably a paragraph of that stuff, so I can sound smart talking about the case,” I said. “But mostly I’m interested in the history of the painting and whatever you may know about Ashton Prince.”

Trachtman leaned back a little in his chair, as if he was about to enjoy a good meal.

“Frans Hermenszoon,” he said, “had he lived, would have been as widely known today as Rembrandt or Vermeer, with whom he was contemporary. He was in many ways an exemplar of the best of everything in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Use of light, and meticulous realism, and an understated commentary on human, by which he would have meant Dutch, existence. Lady with a Finch, for instance, in its stillness and beauty and meticulous realism, seems permanent. Yet, of course, we know that the bird will fly off any moment. So with human life, Hermenszoon seems to suggest.”

“He died young?” I asked, just to avoid passivity.

“Not yet thirty,” Trachtman said. “Stabbed through the eye, apparently in a drunken brawl.”

“Like Christopher Marlowe,” I said.

“My, my,” Trachtman said. “You do know more than you let on.”

“I live alone,” I said. “I read a lot.”

“No wife?” Trachtman said.

“No,” I said. “Though I have kept intimate company with the girl of my dreams for most of my adult life.”

“But not married?”

“No.”

“Why?” Trachtman said.

“I don’t know.”

“It is good to have someone,” Trachtman said. “I’m glad you do.”

“How many paintings are there by Hermenszoon?” I said.

“In his lifetime there were perhaps eight. To the best of our knowledge, only Lady with a Finch survives.”

“How do you know there used to be eight?”

“Transaction records, diaries, letters,” Trachtman said. “Usual sources.”

“So being the one and only makes it even more valuable than it otherwise might be?”

“The painting is a great work of art,” Trachtman said. “It’s priceless.”

“And its pricelessness is enhanced by its singularity,” I said.

Trachtman smiled.

“Well put,” he said.

“Is there a history?”

“Certainly,” Trachtman said. “It remained in the Hermenszoon family something like two hundred years, then was acquired by a wealthy Jewish family in Amsterdam named Herzberg. It remained in the Herzberg family until 1940, when Judah Herzberg and his entire family were arrested by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. The Nazis also confiscated the vast and priceless art collection that the family had maintained. After the war, some of the paintings were recovered and identified with the Herzberg family by a special unit of the U.S. military established to deal with stolen art. But the entire family had perished in Auschwitz, except a son, Isaac, who would have been about nine when he arrived in Auschwitz. No one could find the boy, who in 1945 would have been fourteen. He had disappeared into the tidal wave of refugees, many of them homeless, which inundated Europe at the time.”

“What happened to the paintings,” I said, “when they couldn’t find anyone to return them to?”

“They were kept in a sort of holding facility and distributed to museums or sold to private collectors. The army took surprisingly good care of them, being, you know, military men. But inevitably some just re-disappeared.”

“Ever hear of the Herzberg Foundation?” I said.

“No,” Trachtman said. “I haven’t. What is it?”

“Just a name,” I said. “Came up in discussion. Probably a coincidence.”

“If it had to do with seventeenth-century Dutch painting,” Trachtman said, “I would know of it.”

“Of course,” I said. “Did the Hammond Museum get the painting from the army?”

“In 1949,” Trachtman said.

“They never found the Herzberg kid?”

“There have been several claimants,” Trachtman said. “But none has been able to prove his lineage.”

“Hard to do if your entire family is wiped out and you’re in a death camp for five years.”

“Very hard,” Trachtman said.

We were silent for a moment.

“When was he last heard of?” I said.

“He is on a list of surviving prisoners released from Auschwitz by the Russians,” Trachtman said. “That would date to 1945. We have no further record.”

“So he could have died six months later,” I said.

“Could,” Trachtman said.

“Or he could be alive and living in Zanzibar,” I said.

“Could,” Trachtman said.

I nodded.

“Tell me what you can about Ashton Prince,” I said.