Rogues

PROVENANCE

David W. Ball

The letter arrived at the Wolff Gallery in New York with the usual catalogs and gallery announcements. It was marked “Personal,” so Max’s secretary left it on his desk, unopened.

Max slit the envelope with his good hand and removed a note, handwritten but neat. “Dear Mr. Max Wolff,” it said. “I hear you know a lot about fancy paintings and can sell them sometimes. I have one that I’m not sure is worth much, but thought you ought to take a look and if you are ok with it we could maybe do some business. On the quiet, of course. If you are interested, please send a note at the post office box below. Sincerely, L.M.”

Then Max saw the photograph. He blinked, disbelieving. He felt a fullness in his chest, a surge of pleasure and shock and sadness. He swept aside the clutter of papers on his desk and set the photo on the blotter. He opened a drawer and felt for the magnifying glass, then bent close to the desk.

The photograph had been taken in poor light by an amateur, but that didn’t make any difference. Max knew this painting, as any student of art history would know it. It was a beautiful and cursed creation, the work of a madman.

And it had been missing since the Second World War.

He straightened up, eyes watering. He felt light-headed and fumbled in his vest for one of his pills.

Max did not hear his secretary say good night, did not realize that dusk had turned to dark, as his mind churned through the sweep of its history, of Nazis and the Stasis, of arms dealers and Roman Catholic cardinals. So much violence and corruption in its past. He knew clearly then what must be the next stop in its long and troubled journey.

His good hand trembling, Max Wolff picked up the phone.

* * *

On a Sunday morning two weeks later Max waited for a client in a private study just off the sanctuary of the Risen Savior Church in Colorado Springs.

He sat in an overstuffed chair that nearly swallowed his small frame. Despite the sound-deadened walls he could hear the thunder and feel the building shake as four thousand impassioned souls in the sanctuary next door stomped and clapped and laughed and cried and sang, as the service rose to a crescendo.

The Reverend Joe Cooley Barber was in the business of saving souls, and business was brisk. With charisma, looks, and a voice born for a microphone, he had created an empire that spanned forty-seven countries on six continents. His Sunday Believers program, a folksy mix of parable and gospel, was simulcast in sixty-eight languages. He had seventeen books in print, all perennial best sellers. His media division sold CDs, videos, and T-shirts, every product carrying a Risen Savior hologram to thwart counterfeits.

He employed nearly a thousand people and had almost as many accountants and MBAs working for him as there were members of his choir: precisely 229, a number chosen from a revelation he’d had at a low point in his life when—drunk, destitute, and desperate—he dropped his Bible and it fell open to page 229 of the New Testament. On that page he read the second verse of the third epistle of John: “Prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.” Joe Cooley chose to give the word “prosper” its modern meaning, and from this passage sprang his signature refrain: “God wants us wealthy.”

He was not the first of the prosperity preachers, but he was the best (“a bit more satin than Satan,” he liked to say), and he lived what he preached: he owned a Gulfstream jet, a small fleet of cars including an Aston Martin and a Bentley, and what he liked to describe as “a modest little horse farm in Kentucky” where he raised Thoroughbreds. “I am not an end-of-times preacher,” he said. “I am a best-of-times preacher.”

With such success came controversy. For every dollar he took in from ministry, Joe Cooley Barber earned five from offshore corporations, all cloaked behind an impenetrable web of ownership. Amid allegations that a mere thirty cents of every dollar went toward missionary work, half a dozen investigations had been launched by the IRS, the Justice Department, and various congressional committees. A defiant Joe Cooley Barber was fond of pointing out that not one shred of evidence of wrongdoing had ever been proven against him. “I am just a simple God-fearing humanitarian,” he said. He had fed tens of thousands of hungry souls throughout Asia and Africa. Millions of Risen Savior malaria pills saved babies in Bangladesh and Botswana. Annual missions taught modern agricultural techniques to farmers in Malawi and Tanzania, providing tractors and seed to help the multitudes help themselves. He built churches in Zambia and opened new schools in Zaire.

“A plague of pissants,” was the way he privately described the prosecutors and politicians who hounded him. Yet he relished their attention and prospered from it. The more they complained, the more the money poured in. “Your dollars pave the road to your salvation,” Joe Cooley preached to the television cameras. “Your dollars are God’s judgment on our ministry.”

“Max, my friend!” Joe Cooley said, wiping the sweat from his forehead as he fairly burst into the room half an hour later. “I’m sorry to keep you.”

“Not at all,” Max said. “Quite a production. I’ve never seen you work before.”

Joe Cooley gave a broad smile. “You Jewish?”

“No.”

“Then why aren’t you here every week?”

“It would be a long commute. Perhaps if you sent your jet.”

“No need!” Joe Cooley went into the private bathroom to freshen up. “I’m as close as your television dial.” He emerged, wiping his hands. “But now, to business. I could hardly believe your call.” He lowered his voice a little. “Can it be? A Caravaggio?”

Max nodded. “There are perhaps ninety of his paintings in the world. I thought of you the moment it came into my hands.”

“I take it this one is off the radar?”

“Definitely one for your private collection,” Max said. “If you want it, that is.”

“Let’s go to the studio,” the preacher said, extending a hand to help Max up. The art dealer picked up his cane. His right hand was gnarled, the fingers crabbed and crippled. He slung the briefcase strap over his shoulder and picked up a large leather portfolio.

Joe Cooley’s eyes widened. “Tell me you don’t have it right there in that case,” he said. “What balls!”

“Hardly,” Max said. “It is well packed, and your men have been with me the whole way. Besides, I don’t look much like a mark. I once carried $5 million across Manhattan in this briefcase. All anyone tried to do was help me cross the street.”

“I’m not so trusting,” Joe Cooley said, “but I see your point.” Max was in his early seventies, standing just over five feet tall. He always wore a gray fedora. Years spent in study, sifting through historical records and peering at art, had made his eyes so bad that the thick lenses of his glasses distorted his features. He looked like a kindly old bookkeeper. Despite all that, Joe Cooley knew he was a tough negotiator with shrewd business sense. Max ran a highly respected art gallery and was a regular at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. His most lucrative business, however, was done in the netherworlds of commerce, a world in which men who shunned publicity bought and sold art, or used it in lieu of cash to leverage large purchases of drugs or arms. Max could find the paintings and arrange the deals.

They climbed in a golf cart for the ride across the complex. Risen Savior occupied a seventy-acre campus near the Garden of the Gods. Along with the church there were foundation offices, the broadcasting studio, a Christian college, and a museum. As the cart whisked them through statuary gardens and past contemplation pools, Joe Cooley returned the waves and the shouted greetings of parishioners who were enjoying the sunny day.

The museum was Joe Cooley Barber’s pride and joy. He loved beautiful things, things that shouted out the glory of God. He believed there was no greater homage to the Almighty than to collect images that glorified Him and His holy word. Its galleries brimmed with religious art from every age: stained glass, Greek icons, illustrated manuscripts and early Christian scrolls, a Giotto, several Rembrandts, a Rubens, and an El Greco. Then there were Joe Cooley’s own oil paintings, mostly depictions of biblical prosperity tales, of Job and Solomon. To Max they stood out like pustules on the gallery walls, but they were among the most popular exhibits.

They entered Joe Cooley’s hideaway, a combination studio and study, with picture windows overlooking the grounds. Besides a large conference table there were workbenches, easels, and bookshelves filled with rare Bibles and rich leather volumes.

Max set the portfolio on the table, undid the snaps, and removed the inner case. The painting rested snugly in a bed of soft white cotton. Max laid back the cloth, gently lifted the painting, and set it on the easel. He stepped to the wall and flipped a switch, bathing the work in soft light.

The young shepherd David, sword in one hand, was lifting the bloody head of Goliath, the Philistine warrior. Goliath’s face was frozen in death, eyes and mouth open, forehead gashed, blood dripping from his severed neck. Joe Cooley Barber stared in silent awe, transfixed. “It’s smaller than I imagined,” he said quietly. “And darker.”

Max removed several thick binders from his briefcase. “I’ve brought documentation on the provenance, of course,” he said, setting them out on the table, then extracting folders which appeared to contain clippings, books, and handwritten notes.

Joe Cooley knew Max didn’t need the notes; those were for him. “My friend the professor begins,” he said. “Better have a drink. Whisky? Wine?”

“Just water.” The preacher poured whisky for himself and water for Max, and pulled up a chair.

“His work could be quite gruesome—beheadings, like this one. Assassinations, betrayals, martyrdoms, all caught at the instant of perfect revelation. It was his gift, capturing that moment. He painted this scene at least four times over the course of his career, each representing a progression in his maturity, expressed in the two faces,” Max said. “This was probably the second version, in which there is pride in David’s expression, but also deep humility—the triumph of the kingdom of heaven over the forces of Satan.”

Max ran his crippled hand just above the canvas, lovingly following Caravaggio’s lines, picturing the artist at work. “So sure of himself he rarely used sketches, like other artists. He painted directly from life. He left pentimenti, sharp creases in the paint—you can see traces here, and here. Such genius, do you see?—and all of it done so quickly that some said his work flowed as if from the hand of God. And the light! Look how the flesh runs to shadow, blood red runs to black, light runs to darkness and to death. Such mastery of light—or of the darkness, depending upon your point of view.”

“Light, of course,” said Joe Cooley Barber. “I’ve never seen you quite this worked up over a painting.”

Max smiled sheepishly. “There are not many paintings like this one, or many painters. His work was new and brilliant, but so raw that it often shocked his patrons in the Church, who complained of his vulgarity and sacrilege. He used whores for his models and dressed the Virgin Mary in a low-cut gown. He put warts on saints and gave them dirty fingernails. The Church establishment found him intolerable. They preferred perfection in their saints.”

“So does the U.S. Senate,” Joe Cooley muttered, sipping his whisky.

“His life was just as raw as his work. He was a tortured soul. Some think his madness came from lead poisoning, from his paints, others that he was simply tormented by his own genius. Whatever the cause, he lived hard, dueling and drinking. He whored and gambled and was hauled in and out of court. He assaulted a waiter for bad service and stabbed a lawyer in a fight over a prostitute. He murdered a police official, was tortured, and escaped. Another man would have languished in prison for any of that, but while Caravaggio had detractors in the Church, he had powerful protectors as well, this one among them.”

Max had marked a page in an art-history book, and opened it to a portrait of an ascetic-looking cleric. “This is Scipione Borghese, a nephew of Pope Paul V—the pope who ordered Galileo to abandon his heretical notions about our solar system. Paul elevated Borghese to the position of Cardinal Nephew, a position of immense power. He was brilliant, ruthless, and unprincipled. Besides being the de facto head of the Vatican government, he held multiple offices and titles that made him rich beyond measure. He bullied men and threatened their souls. He imposed taxes and acquired estates—whole villages—through extortion and papal edicts. He had an extensive collection of pornography, and his homosexuality scandalized the Church.”

Joe Cooley could not suppress a snicker of delight. “Somehow that Church has always known how to grow real scoundrels,” he said.

“Yes, but for all his faults, he was a great patron of the arts. He used his wealth to build a magnificent villa to display the works of Raphael, Titian, Bernini—and Caravaggio, for a time his favorite.”

“A man after my own heart, I guess,” Joe Cooley said. “Except for the boys, of course. All things for the glory of God.”

Max turned to another file. “As for our painting here, the Church owned it first,” he said. “Or, more precisely, was the first to steal it. Borghese had begun to collect art aggressively and was learning to use the tools of his power. Giuseppe Cesari was a prominent artist who had an important collection of more than a hundred paintings, including several by Caravaggio, who had worked in his studio as a young man. Borghese learned that Cesari also had a collection of arquebuses. Cesari was harmless, the guns just a hobby, but they were illegal. Borghese had Cesari arrested, his possessions confiscated. He was sentenced to death. That sentence was eventually lifted, but not until Cesari agreed to donate his paintings to the apostolic chamber. Several months later, the pope gave the entire lot to the Cardinal Nephew.

“About this same time, Caravaggio killed a man he thought cheated him at tennis and fled Rome with a price on his head. He spent the rest of his life running, hoping Borghese could arrange a papal pardon. While he was a fugitive, he did some of his best work. In Malta he painted for the Knights of St. John, becoming a Knight himself, until the Order imprisoned him for fighting. He escaped, but in Naples he was attacked and badly wounded, likely by assassins in the pay of the Knights. He made his way back toward Rome. His pardon had been granted, but he died of fever before he heard.” Max shook his head. “He was only thirty-eight. Imagine what he could have done with another twenty years.”

Max slid a ledger across the table. “As for our painting, Borghese only parted with it because he owned another version, sent to him by Caravaggio from exile. He included this one as part of a bribe to a Polish count named Krasinski. There were three other paintings—an Annibale Carracci, a Reni, and a Lanfranco—and an exquisite jeweled reliquary. We have cross-checked the list with Count Krasinski’s household ledgers. On his death the count bequeathed the items to his brother, who had just been appointed by the king as bishop of Stawicki. As you can see here, the items are included in a church inventory from 1685.” Max fished a paper out of the stack. “This is in Polish, of course, but I’ve circled the items for you.

“The paintings and reliquary stayed safe and anonymous in that church for nearly three hundred years, surviving fires and insurrections. For most of that time Caravaggio was a forgotten man, all but lost to history until the twentieth century, when scholars began to appreciate what a giant he was.”

Joe Cooley stood. “Time for another drink. Sure you won’t have something stronger?”

“Just a bit more water. There is a great deal more to cover.”

Max opened a thick file of yellowed documents and newspaper clippings. On top was a black-and-white photograph of a German officer. Max slid it across the table.

“SS,” Joe Cooley commented. “Handsome devil.”

Max nodded. “Walter Beck. This photograph was taken just after his promotion to colonel, a year before the end of the war.”

Joe Cooley studied the long, angular face and intelligent eyes. “Perfect German officer,” he said. “Cold bastard, by the look of him.”

Max pulled a clipping from the folder, a copy of a birth announcement from the Berlin papers. “He was the oldest son of Otto Beck, a prominent German art dealer. Beck’s was one of Berlin’s oldest galleries, started by Otto’s grandfather as an artist’s supply shop, selling oils, stretchers, and canvas. The artists were always poor, so Beck’s sometimes traded supplies for their work. Otto’s father began selling the paintings. Business flourished and by 1900 Beck’s occupied a large two-story building. The family lived on the upper floor, while the rest of the building was devoted to a gallery and workshops where Beck’s craftsmen restored and repaired paintings. Artists, collectors, and curators brought damaged works from all over Europe.

“Walter worked for his father for a few years. He had a good head for business but no particular love of art. He was young and ambitious and got swept up in the socialist fever of the thirties. He joined the Nazi party. His father disapproved but Walter didn’t care. He read the political climate and he understood Hitler. He moved quickly up the ranks, and his training in his father’s gallery landed him a position with the Sonderauftrag Linz.”

“English, Max.”

“It means ‘Special Operation Linz,’ a secret project of Hitler’s. He was a frustrated artist, of course, and thought most of Europe’s art was his by right. He was obsessed with building a museum in Linz, a city he was going to remake into the cultural capital of Europe after the war. Before the war his agents toured museums, galleries, and private collections throughout Europe, compiling exhaustive lists of the most important artworks. The result was a guide to what Hitler’s armies were to confiscate—to loot—the instant German forces overran an area. Beck helped compile that guide, which is how he came to know where our painting was hidden.

“Beck should have spent the war in Paris, where all the best art was, but he was an arrogant man and made the mistake of getting into an argument with Alfred Rosenberg himself. Rosenberg was the Nazis’ ideologue, one of the most powerful men in Germany, and Beck found himself reassigned to the eastern front. He was an excellent officer, but even by SS standards he was exceptionally cruel. Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland—Beck managed to make himself one of the most wanted criminals of the war.”

There were more yellowed clippings, most in languages Joe Cooley did not recognize—eastern European, he thought, and some in Hebrew. Most carried the same photograph. He could not read the captions, but he was looking at a hunted man.

* * *

The German column pulled to a halt on a ridge near the ancient village of Stawicki. There were five troop carriers, two tanks, and various smaller vehicles, the ragtag remnants of a routed army that had banded together in retreat. SS Colonel Walter Beck emerged from an open staff car carrying a pair of field glasses. He stretched his legs, then calmly trained the glasses on the distant road behind them. The Russians were not in view. Thanks to the mines laid by Beck’s men, they would probably be another few hours, giving him time for the present business. Beck knew the war was hopelessly lost and that he would soon be hunted by men who would not forget. Surrender would mean execution. He would run, but first needed to acquire the means to ensure the hunters would never find him.

He turned his attention to the village. From outward appearances, this war had somehow passed the village by. He could see the steeple of the old church, and beyond that the clock tower of the town hall; everything seeming at peace. He could send his men to find what he sought, but the villagers would long ago have carefully hidden their precious treasure. He did not have time for games of hide-and-seek.

“Bring the village priest, and the mayor and his family,” he said to a lieutenant.

“At once, Standartenführer.”

“And twenty-five villagers,” Beck added.

As the officer set off with a truck, an aide set up a portable table and chair. Beck sat down with a bottle of wine and turned his face toward the sun, enjoying its warming glow.

The truck soon snaked its way back up the road, halting near Beck, who sipped his wine as soldiers barked orders, prodding the villagers out of the truck. There were only women, children, and old men. The priest, the mayor, and the mayor’s wife, daughter, and child were brought before the colonel. The mayor was a heavyset man with florid cheeks, the priest old, lean, and cross.

“I must protest,” the mayor began. “We are noncombat—” A soldier struck him in the stomach with the butt of his rifle. The mayor fell to his knees and bent over, gasping and retching.

“There is no need for unpleasantness,” Beck said, “if you do as I say. I merely require several items from your church.”

“Our church has already been stripped bare,” said the priest. “There is nothing of value left.”

“Quite the contrary,” Beck said. “Carracci and Caravaggio. Reni. Lanfranco.” He smiled. “Does my memory serve? All gifts of Count Krasinski to his brother the bishop.” A flicker in the priest’s expression was all the confirmation Beck needed.

“Excellency,” the mayor blurted, his face bright red, “those paintings were all taken away before the war, to Gdynia. Yes, to Gdyn …” He couldn’t catch his breath.

“Help me, here, Father,” Beck said to the priest. “Surely you recall. Behind a false wall in the crypt, or beneath a carefully laid pile of rubble? No doubt a search will turn them up. Most likely near the reliquary, I suspect.” He sipped his wine. “Which, by the way, I shall require as well, although you can keep its contents—a finger of Saint Barnabas, I believe? Or a rib of Hedwig or the hair of Casimir or the toe of Sarkander? Forgive me, I cannot recall that detail, but I would not dream of removing such a precious relic from your devotions.” He looked at his watch. “I have very little time, I’m afraid. The Bolsheviks are pressing.”

“We cannot give what we do not possess,” said the priest.

“Very well.” Beck stood, dropped his leather gloves on the table, unsnapped his holster and removed his Luger. He picked an old man from the crowd and shot him. A woman fell to her knees beside him, shrieking in grief as his body twitched in death. Beck shot her as well. Villagers screamed. Beck’s soldiers stood fast around them, weapons at the ready.

“Well, Father?” Beck asked. “What are you prepared to sacrifice to protect a few paintings? What is the going price in your church for oil and canvas, for a few baubles? A dozen lives? Everyone here? Or will you martyr a whole village?”

The priest closed his eyes, crossed himself, and bowed his head in prayer. Beck raised the Luger to his temple. The priest flinched at the touch of the hot metal but kept praying. Beck considered the possibility that only the priest knew where to find what he wanted. He returned his pistol to its holster and turned to the mayor, still on his knees. “You have not introduced me to your family,” he said, stepping forward to the young woman and her baby who stood behind him. “Your lovely daughter, I presume?” The mayor’s fat cheeks quivered with fear. His daughter gasped and shrank back, clutching her baby tightly. Beck reached for the child and pried it from her grasp. The baby began to cry.

“Please, no,” she pleaded quietly, tears streaking her cheeks. Beck cooed at the baby. “What a lovely child,” he said. “You must be so proud.” Playfully bouncing it up and down, he walked to the edge of the escarpment, its slope scarred with jagged rocks.

He tossed the baby into the air, as an uncle would do. The baby’s cry rose in pitch.

The mother moaned and slumped. “Father, tell them,” she pleaded with the priest.

Beck tossed the child higher, her cry now searing. A woman fainted; another screamed. “Yes, Father,” Beck said as the child soared. “Tell me.”

The priest prayed.

Beck tossed the baby again, harder. She wailed angrily.

“I beg of you,” the mayor’s daughter said, crawling toward Beck on her hands and knees. “Do not hurt my baby.” A soldier stepped in her way.

The child flew higher, and then higher still, both mother and child now crying hysterically.

“Jerzy, please! For the love of God, give him what he wants!” The mayor’s wife pleaded with her husband.

Beck nearly missed, catching the baby roughly with one hand. She wiggled and kicked in his grasp, howling angrily. “This is really quite difficult,” Beck said. “I don’t believe I can catch her next time.” He began again, but the mayor had had enough. “Yes! We’ll show you!”

“No!” the priest snapped. “Be silent!”

The mayor ignored him, appealing to Beck. “If we do as you say, you will leave our village in peace? You will let us all go?”

“I want nothing more of you. You have my word.”

A dozen soldiers accompanied the mayor and the priest back to the village in one of the trucks. Beck returned the child to her mother’s care and sat again, sunning himself. Forty minutes later, just as the lieutenant reported sighting the advancing Russians, the truck bounced back up the rutted road, carrying its precious cargo.

The priest watched sullenly as Beck examined the reliquary, an exquisite ivory-and-gold casket that glistened with rubies and pearls, and then each of the paintings, everything precisely as Beck expected.

When everything had been safely loaded Beck took his seat in the back of his staff car. “You are free to go,” he said to the mayor. “You’d better hide quickly, before your new Russian masters arrive. I have heard they have no love for the Poles.”

The column’s engines roared to life as the villagers collected their dead and started down the hill.

Beck’s lieutenant approached. “At your command, Standartenführer, I am ready to carry out our orders.” The guns of the waiting Panzers were trained on the village, to follow the scorched-earth orders of the German high command.

“It would be unforgivable to destroy such a picturesque village,” said Beck. “Centuries of history should not be rubble. We shall leave Stawicki for the Russians to enjoy.” He nodded toward the departing villagers. “Only our friends there,” he said. “Nothing more.”

As Beck’s car pulled away canvas sides dropped from one of the troop trucks. With a great roar the machine guns inside opened fire.

Half an hour later, the screaming had stopped and the dust and smoke had settled. In the field before the village, there was only the sound of the approaching Russian column to break the silence.

Joe Cooley Barber set down the photograph of a stone memorial in front of the church in Stawicki, erected in memory of the villagers murdered during the war. “My God,” he said softly. “I thought they only did that to Jews.” He picked up a clipping from a South American newspaper, with Beck’s picture. “So Beck escaped with the painting to South America?”

“It wasn’t as simple as that. It took me time and a great many sources to piece the story together. U.S. Army reports, CIA documents, journalists’ reports, that sort of thing. And then these.”

Max leafed through a stack of copies of microfilm records, white on black and very difficult to read. “In the 1970s we found—or should I say the Stasi, the East German secret police, found—a collection of papers buried in a basement in Berlin, in what was the Soviet sector. The papers were part of the secret Stasi archives until after the fall of the Berlin wall, when they were released along with thousands of other documents. There was a journal, kept by Walter Beck’s younger brother Heinrich, who was just young enough to miss the shooting war. This is a copy.”

“It’s in German,” Joe Cooley said. “Can’t anybody write in English?”

“There’s a translation on the back.”

Business was always good at Beck’s. After the Great War proud old Germans sold family heirlooms to keep up with ruinous inflation. In the 1930s it was not only paintings but silverware and jewelry, the trade rising along with the Nazis. Even Jews could sell their valuables at Beck’s, at least until Kristallnacht in 1938, when it became too dangerous to deal with them. Otto Beck did not cheat the Jews but knew that he was often the beneficiary of their persecution. By 1940 it was wartime again and business prospered as never before, as officers returning from various fronts brought looted art to sell—paintings and tapestries, gold and silver. Beck’s paid top prices. Limousines arrived and departed, carrying a constant stream of government ministers and staff officers. Hitler’s own art dealers bought there. Goering was a regular. Otto Beck sold them what they wanted while privately mocking the Nazi taste in art. “Matisse and van Gogh, Kandinsky and Klee—mein Gott, the world for his taking, and the Führer prefers hunters and dumplings,” he said to his young son.

Heinrich cared nothing for the guns and games of war that fascinated most boys his age. He loved the art that moved through Beck’s. He accompanied his father on a business trip to Paris when he was only eight, and Otto Beck could not extract him from the Louvre.

From the time he was old enough to hold a brush, Heinrich devoted every spare moment to painting. He was a careful craftsman and displayed solid talent if not brilliance. One of his father’s workers told him he could improve his technique by copying the works he admired. Heinrich’s favorites were the Baroques. After half a dozen attempts, he produced an extraordinary Velázquez; except for the fresh paint and the craquelure—the age cracks in the painting—even the most knowledgeable restorers who worked for his father could hardly tell which was the master’s and which the boy’s. Had the war not intervened, Heinrich Beck might well have become a successful artist.

He learned all aspects of his father’s business, helping the artisans repair the traces of war on paintings passing through the gallery—boot marks and deep scratches, neat bullet holes and ragged edges left by knives that hacked priceless canvases from old frames, all mute testament to a war he did not see.

As Allied bombs began to bring the war closer, Otto moved his family and his inventory to the basement. The workshops were stacked floor to ceiling with frames and canvases, and the family slept on cots in a small room. The heavy floor beams rumbled and shook from distant bombs, but business went on.

The gallery’s clientele grew more desperate with each passing week, trying to finance escapes or buy new identities, or simply trying to survive. Rivers of art and silverware and cash flowed in and out of Beck’s through the winter of 1944–45.

“The war is coming close,” one entry read. “Our house smells of oil paint, mother’s cooking, and fear.”

Late one night in the spring of 1945, Heinrich looked up from his workbench to see a man standing in the shadows. He knew instantly whom it was. “Walter!”

Otto emerged from the back, where he had been working on the accounts. They had seen Walter only once since the war’s beginning, in 1941 as the Nazi high command prepared to open an eastern front. Then he had worn the black of the SS; now he wore civilian clothes. He was gaunt and his face was hard and he smelled of cigarettes and alcohol.

“Walter?” Otto said. “Are you all right?”

“I have some things you will keep safe for me.”

“Where are you going?” Otto Beck asked his son. Walter said nothing, stepping aside for two men carrying a wooden crate.

“I asked you a question, Walter,” Otto said, irritated. Otto Beck was head of his house and SS or not, Walter was his son. “Where are you—”

Walter slapped him viciously, knocking him down. “Arschloch!” he snarled. “Make certain this case is safe. Do you understand?” Otto was too stunned to reply.

Heinrich nodded for his father. “Yes, I heard you,” he said in a small voice. “We’ll take care of it. I promise.”

Walter turned and started up the steps. Bravely, Heinrich followed. “Walter, wait! Are you a general now? What did you do in the war? Were you ever shot? Do you know how close the Russians are? Are you hungry?”

Walter Beck stepped into the night and ducked into the back of a waiting car. It sped off as Heinrich’s other questions died on his lips.

Otto Beck’s mouth was bleeding, his cheek bruised. Heinrich helped him up onto a chair and ran to get water and a cloth. Otto waved him away, his eyes on the empty stairs, his mind on his wife, who was sleeping. “Don’t tell her he was here,” he said. Otto Beck never spoke of Walter again.

The crate was hidden away below the basement with Otto’s most valuable paintings, in a vault that was lined with metal to keep it dry. It remained there until after the war, long after the Russians had come looking for Walter. Russian reprisals against former SS were terrible, especially for those like Walter Beck, who had made their reputation in the east.

One day Russian troops smashed their way into the building. Otto had just enough time to shove his son into the lower basement and close the trapdoor. The Russians beat Otto to death and shot his wife. They tore apart the shop, but they were drunk and not very good at what they did and never found the trapdoor beneath which Heinrich trembled with his treasures. For three months they peed on priceless canvases and drank vodka while Heinrich hid beneath the floor, listening to their balalaika and living on jam and stale bread and a drum of water that tasted of diesel, only emerging when they were asleep or out on patrol.

“My God,” Joe Cooley said. “How does a boy live through that?”

“He was luckier than most,” Max said. “He was alive.”

After the Russians left, Heinrich resumed his father’s business under the new reality of life in East Berlin. As the years passed and Heinrich heard nothing from Walter, he assumed his brother was dead or a prisoner of the Soviets, which amounted to the same thing. But one day a man came to the gallery with a letter from Walter, instructing Heinrich to give his crate to the man carrying the letter.

“Heinrich only kept his journal for a few months after that,” Max said. “The last entry was made just two days before the Stasi raided the gallery. It is possible they were aware of his black-market dealings. We have no further word of Heinrich. He disappeared.”

Max paused, taking a drink. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Walter also disappeared, but he had a great deal of help, from some very surprising sources.” He picked up the next document, a declassified U.S. Army report, and continued the story.

Walter Beck was captured by American forces as he made his way toward northern Italy. His papers identified him as Horst Schmidt, a Wehrmacht chaplain. His interrogation by an army lieutenant had just commenced when Beck, desperately ill, collapsed in a faint from a lucky but severe case of flu and was carried unconscious to the infirmary. After his recovery, a paperwork mistake sent him directly into the general camp population of POWs without further questioning. He never had to bare his arm, on which the SS blood-group tattoo would have betrayed his identity. After the general release of prisoners he spent the next three years working in an olive grove on a farm owned by a friend of the SS, part of an underground network devoted to helping ex-Nazis elude detection. One day he received a packet with Red Cross identity papers and an Argentine landing permit, provided through the efforts of Alois Hudal, an Austrian bishop at the Vatican.

In May 1948 he boarded a Croatian freighter bound for Buenos Aires, where he was welcomed into a community of German fugitives among Argentine Catholics. He was given a laborer’s job in a saddle factory, but introductions made by his contacts soon led to work for the Perón government, which needed officers like Beck to train the military. Beck also found himself sought out by the American CIA, which paid him to provide a steady stream of hearsay and gossip about men he had known in his ancestral home, in what was now East Berlin, in exchange for which they kept his identity a secret. Beck was soon living opulently, happy to serve both masters. He married an heiress and thought his future secure.

After a decade or so things began to fray. The Americans grew bored with gossip and their money dried up. And then an Israeli team kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, who lived quite near Beck.

Argentina was no longer safe. He needed money. He left his wife without saying good-bye and went deep underground, hiding in a basement flat belonging to a sympathetic Argentine diplomat. He used his network to send a man to his father’s gallery in Berlin, to collect the case he’d left there in 1945. The crate traveled to Argentina in a diplomatic shipment, a costly but common method used by the Nazis to transport contraband out of Europe.

Beck had the reliquary broken down, the gold melted, and the jewels mounted and sold. He also disposed of several of his paintings, modern works by Picasso and Chagall, highly marketable at the time.

He made his way to Paraguay, whose president, Alfredo Stroessner, had long provided another safe haven for Nazis. Beck lived in Asunción for nearly a decade, making regular payments for protection but growing more uncomfortable as the corruption of Stroessner’s government spiraled out of control. Men with so little personal honor would sell him for a pittance to the Jews, who were not letting go of a long-ago war. Josef Mengele was in country, one of the most high-profile targets alive.

One day Beck noticed two young men watching him at a café. They appeared not to know each other, one on a bicycle, another reading a paper, but to his growing paranoia they might as well have been wearing Stars of David. They followed him but he lost them. He did not return home but collected his valuables from their hiding place and fled to La Paz.

“This brings us to Victor Maslov,” Max said. He pulled a thick stack of clippings from a file. “He figured prominently in a series of articles in the New York Times about international arms dealers.”

Victor Maslov had scrapped his way up from nothing, starting work for a cousin who had acquired a World War II–era American bomber and converted it to carry freight. The cousin was no businessman but Maslov was. He learned to fly and soon was ferrying black-market goods to Croatia and Yugoslavia, Greece, and Hungary. He dealt mostly in wheat and flour at first, then beer and whisky, willing to make dangerous night landings as he built a network of partners in Europe and Africa. He soon had two more planes, graduating to small arms along with the whisky, then abandoning whisky altogether and selling nothing but arms. As regional conflicts grew so did his capabilities. His fleet eventually included an Ilyushin-76 aircraft big enough to ferry tanks.

He bought from America and Europe and sold in every corner of the world, meticulous with the end-user certificates he needed to keep the business legitimate under international law. His was a world of killers and despots, and one did not survive in that world without being ruthless and shrewd. Wherever he operated men died, whether as victims of the weapons he sold or from the hidden workings of his enterprise. He was a master of the grey world of the international arms trade, protected by powerful interests in every country. Governments condemned him at the same time they did business with him.

The press dubbed him the Merchant of Death. News magazines ran full-color spreads of the destruction caused by his weapons, sometimes in the same issue in which they ran features about his private life. One of the world’s most eligible bachelors, he had homes in Los Angeles and Paris, a liking for high-stakes gambling, and impeccable taste in clothing and women. He had one genuine passion: he loved fine art. He collected it, studied it, was moved by it. He was self-taught, spending time in galleries and museums the world over. His acquisitions came from established auction houses and dealers and from less legitimate sources. Not only did he love art, he sometimes used it as currency in cases where a government’s financial controls hindered a particular transaction.

In 1981 Maslov was in Bolivia to negotiate a large arms deal with General Luis García Meza, the brutal new Bolivian president. A bizarre alliance of characters had swept Meza to power in 1980, including the Roberto Suarez drug cartel and a group of Nazis and young neofascists led by Klaus Barbie, a member of the Gestapo known as the Butcher of Lyon.

Maslov disliked dealing with drug-financed clients because they attracted the attention of the American DEA, which Maslov feared more than the drug lords. They at least operated ethically, but the agency had used vile means to bring down more than one of his competitors. He was glad of their misfortune but had no desire to join their numbers.

Maslov was in the Palacio Quemado in La Paz on the final day of a difficult negotiation, in the course of which he had sized up Meza as an untrustworthy fool who would hold power no more than six months. Meza had placed a sizable order but wanted more weaponry than he could afford, particularly semiautomatic weapons and grenade launchers. He was still $8 million short of Maslov’s price. Meza had little hard currency and offered drugs instead, seeming genuinely surprised when Maslov laughed out loud at the notion, then compounding the humor by suggesting that Maslov extend credit. Exasperated, Maslov had excused himself to let Meza confer with his advisers.

That was when, almost absently, he noticed the Caravaggio.

He nearly strode right by it, a dark painting in a dark corner, propped casually with a half dozen others against a wall dominated by the gilded-gaudy portraits of Bolivian dictators and generals, which in turn were dwarfed by a twenty-foot painting of Simón Bolívar astride his horse, victorious on the battlefield.

The painting was unsigned, but Maslov knew the artist almost as surely as he knew his own face in the mirror. All of the paintings propped against the wall were valuable, but only one truly mattered to him.

Maslov returned to his meeting. “As you might know, Excellency, I am something of an art enthusiast. I see four or five pieces there that might interest me. Perhaps we could make an arrangement that would solve your cash-flow difficulties?”

“We can do nothing with those, at least not yet. They belong to a new supporter. A friend of Barbie’s, a Colonel Beck. We are at a stalemate. His estimation of their value is, I’m afraid, quite inflated.”

“If I am not overstepping, what does Colonel Beck want?”

“What they all want,” Meza said contemptuously. “A diplomatic passport and money. He claims the paintings are worth eight million. Our expert placed their value at no more than four.”

Maslov knew their expert, the director of the national museum, a man who’d spent a lifetime acquiring portraits of generals and their horses. He had to be a fool of considerable accomplishment to have missed this, but he had.

“Your expert is wrong,” Maslov said.

“Perhaps, but no matter. We have summoned a specialist from Paris to settle the difference.”

Maslov shrugged. “Suit yourself, but I’ll give you Beck’s eight. However, I leave tonight. The offer is good only if we conclude the arrangement now, at this moment. If so you’ll have your weapons—the entire order—before the week is out.”

Meza could barely conceal his surprise, but he saw the opportunity to up the ante. “Unfortunately, my friend, it is not so easily done. The offer is very generous, but the paintings are not an outright gift. Colonel Beck wants cash out of the deal.”

“How much?”

Beck had asked for $2 million. “Three million,” Meza said.

“Why don’t you throw him in prison and keep it yourself?”

“His German friends continue to provide us support. We cannot alienate them. Besides, these are not the last of his assets. We may need him again.”

“Very well,” said Maslov. “I’ll pay the colonel myself.”

“But …” Meza fumbled for words, outmaneuvered.

“I insist,” said Maslov, rising to leave. “Do we have a deal?”

That night Caravaggio, Velázquez, Picasso, Braque, and a few others accompanied Victor Maslov to Los Angeles. From the aircraft he made a call to General Torrelio, the minister of the interior who was seeking to overthrow the young Meza dictatorship. Maslov did not often betray a client, but he knew not to back a loser. General Torrelio was delighted to receive details of the impending shipment and promptly wired $2 million to Maslov as the discounted price for the weapons. Maslov knew the money came from the DEA, which sweetened the deal. A week later, the promised arms shipment arrived at a remote airstrip near La Paz. Torrelio’s men ambushed Meza’s troops and took possession of the cargo Maslov had sold to Meza. It was the beginning of the end of the young Meza dictatorship.

A Bolivian colonel delivered a message to Walter Beck, arranging a meeting at which he would be paid for the paintings and given his new passport. Beck appeared punctually, secure in the knowledge that the Bolivian generals did not betray their benefactors.

Eighteen hours later, an unconscious Walter Beck was carried off a plane in Tel Aviv and bundled into the back of a battered van. His captors did not care to repeat the spectacle of an Eichmann trial. Beck awakened naked in the Negev desert, in a tiny dark cell with a dirt floor and a slit for a window. He bloodied his hands pounding on the walls, calling for help from men who did not hear him. It was hellish hot. “Water!” he screamed. “Animals!”

In Bolivia, word leaked that the Israelis had abducted Beck. The Israelis denied it. Of course, everyone assumed they were lying.

Max closed the folder on Walter Beck and Victor Maslov. “That’s just about it,” he said.

“Just about,” Joe Cooley said. “But there’s the obvious question—how did a man like Victor Maslov part with a painting like this? How did it get to you?”

“A petty thief, a man named Lonnie. One of the most interesting clients I’ve worked with in thirty years. He sent me a letter.” Max found yet another magazine clipping, this one featuring his own picture.

“Remember this?”

It was Max’s gift that he was able to read people. He had been wrong on occasion, but not often, and the trepidation he’d felt about Lonnie Mack contacting him out of the blue being a disguise for some sting or fraud had dissipated the instant they met. By the end of the meeting he was as certain as he’d ever been of anything that Lonnie Mack was the genuine article. Sometimes it was that way in the art world: a Rembrandt discovered at a rummage sale, a Braque in Aunt Sally’s attic. And then a man like Lonnie, a petty thief who accidentally stumbled into the mother lode.

Lonnie was skinny, nervous, and polite, worried whether he could trust Max, at first saying that it was a friend who had actually stolen the painting but quickly giving up that pretense.

“So I can trust you, I mean, even if it was stolen? I mean, not that I did, or anything. I just know someone.”

Max waved his hands. “Please, Mr. Mack, tell me. If I can’t help you, I’ll tell you that, too. There are many possibilities with something like this—including returning it to the owner, or their insurance company, for a reward. That can be done anonymously.”

“Really?” Lonnie’s eyes lit at that. “OK then. See, I’m a termite man, you know?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Termites, you know. Bugs.”

“Ah.” Max raised his eyebrows. He did not understand.

“My brother Frank has a company. We kill drywood termites. They do a lot of damage, you know? They’d go through this place of yours in about a week. The only way you can get them is gas.”

“Gas?”

“Yeah. Sulfuryl fluoride. We have to wrap it up in tarps—the whole house. Takes three days. I’m the one does the alarm systems, so we can clear the house and secure it. Well, I always tell the owners to change their codes after we finish, but I’ve taken a course, you know? I can fix the box so I can still get in, even after they’ve changed it.

“I check out the house and see what there is to boost later on. We gas the termites, take off the tarps, and that’s that. Then a few weeks or months later, I get back in and help myself. I never get greedy or nothin’, just stuff that’s easy to get rid of.”

“That’s not risky?”

“Nah, that’s the easy part. On the way out I set the alarm, and then just break a window or door. Alarm goes off, police show up, bam. Burglar, they think.”

Max was amused. “And this is how you came across this painting? A … termite job?”

Lonnie nodded eagerly. “What a place, you know? Some kind of international businessman or something. I never met him. Always traveling, they said, real hotshot. I only met his man, this guy who said he was a curator. I didn’t know what that was until he told me; he took care of the stuff. Boy, did that place have stuff. Marble statues like in a museum, and bronze in the halls, paintings everywhere, and antique furniture. Fact is, I really didn’t like it much, you know? I figured the termites might actually improve things, but you don’t say that to a customer.

“We looked around and boy, there were termites. You can tell by their feces. They leave little piles, you know? You see those piles, that’s your house, coming down.

“He was all worried about the paintings. I told him it was probably one of the frames that brought the termites in in the first place, from Bora-Bora or somewhere, and that the gas would hurt them, wouldn’t hurt nothing except food and dogs and like that. He said he couldn’t take any chances, though, so he went to all the trouble to get the pictures out of their frames.

“He called an armored-car company to pick everything up, and that’s when I got lucky. My guys were setting up, you know, tarps everywhere, plastic and all, and these guys are crating up the pictures, very white-glove deal. Big waste of time, but it’s not my money, OK? Must have been a hundred crates, all over the place, but I didn’t care, I was just noticing they had a pretty good set of copper pots and pans in the kitchen.

“They finished up and signed their papers, and the armored cars left, and I had to see everyone out, see, it’s my job and I have to be very careful so nobody gets gassed. And that’s when I saw they missed a crate. It was half-covered by some of our plastic already and they just missed it, you know?

“I didn’t even know what was in it, but I knew I could take it and nobody would ever be the wiser, because they signed the papers and all, and if they ever noticed, they’d figure it was the armored-car guys, and some insurance company would pay. I don’t like insurance companies much, you know? So I took it.”

Lonnie shrugged. “Easy as that, but I have to say I was pretty disappointed when I got the crate open. A bejillion bucks’ worth of stuff in that house, and all I managed to get was an old painting. A pretty gross one at that. Kid holding up a guy’s head, blood everywhere. Definitely not something to hang next to your TV, you know?

“I thought about just throwing it out, or even taking it back and leaving it in the hallway, and no one would ever know. Hell, I couldn’t do nothin’ with a painting. The only painting I’d ever boosted was a velvet one. They said it was done for Elvis Presley, you know? Or was it by him, maybe? Anyway, I got eight hundred bucks for it, so I was pretty happy.

“So I didn’t know what else to do, I just nailed it up in the shed. Then one day Della—she’s my girlfriend, she works in a beauty salon, and like five years later, she brought home one of those magazines the customers look at, and there was a story about a lost painting. The picture was a lot like mine, only hanging in Italy or something. I knew mine was old, too, so … well? I just thought it might be the real deal. So I brought it home and showed Della, and we put it up over the dinette.”

“So that’s how you found me,” Max said. In thirty years there had been only one public blemish on the Wolff Gallery. The story had been sensational, involving famous clients and alleging that Wolff had sold a stolen painting on the black market. Max had done that very thing many times, but not in the instance alleged in the article. Nothing had come of it except for a libel suit, which Max won, and the publicity, which had not been altogether a bad thing. The story had run in the same issue as that about the lost Caravaggio.

“That’s right,” Lonnie nodded proudly. “I read the article. So, Mr. Max Wolff, do you think you can help me?”

Joe Cooley laughed out loud. “Imagine that,” he said. “A Caravaggio, hanging in a trailer. Next to the spaghetti sauce.”

Max smiled. “I actually think Caravaggio himself might have approved.”

He closed the file and patted it. “So there you have it. Quite a simple provenance, really. A curse heaped upon a damnation, one of the scholars said. A mirror of its maker, perhaps.” He gave a little shrug. “Or just a beautiful painting. So, tell me. You are satisfied?”

“I was satisfied, my friend Max, the moment you told me I might buy this at all,” he said. “But I am curious. Why did you come to me? Why not give the painting back to Maslov?”

“Simple economics. I know Victor Maslov quite well. He would pay me a finder’s fee. Generous, no doubt, but a mere reward. You, on the other hand, will pay me more—still only a fraction of its true worth, but a great deal more—and of course you will never display the painting in public, any more than Victor himself could. If you did, you would face an embarrassing and endless succession of lawsuits as the painting’s former owners tried to recover what at one time belonged to them. No publicity, no trouble. The painting will satisfy your vanity—forgive me, but is it not true? And you will treat it well and leave the question of its ownership to your heirs. As for Victor, he is a realist. I have always treated him fairly. I value him as a client, but I owe him nothing. He lost a painting, I found one. I am neither the thief nor Victor’s police. I am just a simple art dealer.”

Joe Cooley Barber laughed at that. “Simple indeed,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s good enough for me.”

“I think I’ll have a glass of wine now,” Max said. Joe Cooley poured him one, and a double whisky for himself. He picked up the phone and reached his business manager, who called their banker. New York, the Bahamas, the Caymans; the money moved at light speed as Max nursed his wine, lost in thought. When he received confirmation from his own banker he stood and Joe Cooley helped him with his things.

“Done, then,” Max said.

“As quickly as that,” Joe Cooley Barber said. “The good Lord is smiling, that this troubled painting has found a home in a blessed place at last. A golden new entry in the provenance.”

The private jet lifted off, giving Max a glorious view of the sun setting over Pikes Peak. He felt a great calmness, and slept peacefully on the flight. Once back in his Manhattan study he telephoned Lonnie Mack, who ecstatically received the news that he would receive half a million dollars for a painting he had nearly tossed out. “You’ll have the money tomorrow,” Max said. “But I must remind you that you must not say anything about this to anyone.”

“Are you kidding?” Lonnie said, hurt, his euphoria briefly tempered by Max’s caution. “I never talk about my jobs.”

“Of course not,” Max said. “Just being cautious. Tell me where you’d like to meet. Somewhere safe. You choose.”

Lonnie thought for a moment, then gave him an address. Max heard him whooping for joy as they hung up.

Max made another call. “Victor? Max. Quite well, thank you. I have wonderful news. I’ve recovered your painting. Yes, the Caravaggio.”

He smiled at Maslov’s reaction. Of all his clients, Victor Maslov loved his art the best. “Yes, quite certain. It’s in good shape, considering it’s been hanging in a storage shed for a few years. It had spaghetti stains, believe it or not, but no lasting damage. I’ve had it cleaned in my studio. It’s as good as new. I’m looking into David’s eyes right now.” He lightly touched the shepherd’s cheek. “Such a powerful work, my friend. The triumph of good over evil.”

Max gave Maslov brief details about how he’d recovered the painting. “Yes,” he laughed. “As easy as that. It was just a lucky call, that’s all. He’s a good kid, Victor. I promised him half a million—a modest fee, I think, even though he took the painting. Yes, good. You’ll take care of that for me? Just a moment, I’ve already lost the paper.” He patted his pockets, then realized the paper was still sitting on the table. He read off the address. “Yes, that’s right.”

“There’s the matter of your finder’s fee,” Maslov said. “I was thinking five million.”

“Please, Victor. You’re a good client, but that is too generous.”

“The painting is worth many times that to me. I thought it was lost forever. I thought my curator took it.” Victor laughed. “All this time, a termite man.” Max knew that Victor’s curator had died in an automobile accident not long after the theft.

“I’ll be happy to take your money once the painting is safely back in your hands,” Max said. “For now you just need to send someone for it.” He couldn’t resist a gentle jab. “Someone competent, please. It wouldn’t do to lose it again.”

The next day, as promised, Lonnie Mack received his cash, neat stacks of bills in an aluminum briefcase delivered by a man he didn’t know. Lonnie had never seen so much money. He took it home to Della with a bottle of expensive champagne, and they began planning a trip to Las Vegas.

That night the local TV news stations led with a story of a fiery explosion in a trailer park, the result of an apparent propane leak. News helicopters captured dramatic footage of the flames and smoke from the blast, which leveled half a dozen homes and left an unknown number of dead.

It was the part of the business Max enjoyed least. One could not have Lonnie concocting stories for the press, any more than one could have him showing up on the doorstep in a year, looking for more money.

Accompanied by two bodyguards, Victor Maslov’s new curator picked up the Caravaggio in person, fairly bubbling with enthusiasm when he saw it. A few days later Victor wired the finder’s fee to Max, less the money that had gone up in smoke with Lonnie.

Now Max had only to decide what to do with the original Caravaggio, still sitting in his office.

* * *

There were, of course, a few details he’d left out of Joe Cooley’s provenance—particularly about Heinrich Beck, Walter’s younger brother. His journal had ended with a Stasi raid, but not his story.

The Russians who killed his parents had billeted in Beck’s building for several months, while he remained hidden in the vault below the basement. He emerged only at night to forage for food and water, at rare moments of safety.

Beneath the trapdoor his father had built, Heinrich filled those lonely months with painting. Though surrounded by beautiful art, he had no new canvas on which to work, so he painted over some of the works he liked least, trying his hand at new ideas, then scraping canvases clean to start again. He also worked at his copies, learning to mimic brushstrokes and color and depth. It pleased him how good his copies were, and how much the process taught him. Among the originals, of course, were those in his brother’s case. The more Heinrich studied the Caravaggio, the more he admired it. He made six copies in all but kept only two, reusing the other canvases. He knew the two copies were the best he’d ever done.

The Russians eventually abandoned the gallery and he emerged from his hiding hole. Life in postwar Berlin was difficult, but Heinrich was a survivor. Art remained easy to work with and was better than currency if one knew how and had the connections, and of course Heinrich had both. He still had scores of paintings from the cellars that had survived with him, and he began trading. For a long time his business was conducted mostly in secret, buying from the nameless and selling to the faceless, servicing newly humbled Germans who denied the past and bowed now to Russian masters, as they set about learning the new subtleties of festering Bolshevik corruption.

It was not long before it occurred to Heinrich to sell his own copies as well. It was easy, particularly among the new elite classes who had money but knew nothing whatever of art. Heinrich knew his father would have been appalled, but his father was dead and he was not, and that truth made for the only rules that mattered. He painted new copies and traded and bribed and survived as the war began to recede and Berlin rebuilt and the radio ran hot with a new cold war.

Walter’s icy note, demanding that he give the crate to the emissary, prompted Heinrich to do what he did. He reacted impulsively, from anger—for shame at what Walter had done to the family name, for parents dead because of Walter’s past, for a note that merely demanded obedience, asking nothing about him or his parents.

He sent his brother one of the copies, sure that Walter would never know the difference.

The Stasi raid told him how wrong he had been. They had come at night after the gallery closed and he was alone. They were not only Stasi but former SS, and they had known what they were looking for. They asked him where the original painting was hidden. The more he denied any knowledge, the more they beat him. “You are a fool,” one said. “Your brother left a mark on all his paintings. It was missing from the one you sent.”

Heinrich did not give up the painting. He decided he would die before he would do that. They nearly obliged him, beating him savagely.

They helped themselves to a fortune in other works, loading canvases into the back of their truck, taking everything they could carry. Before leaving, one of the men untied his right arm and forced it out over the workbench. “Your brother told us not to kill you,” he said as Heinrich struggled fiercely. “He did tell us, however, to make certain you never fooled him again.” Using a ball-peen hammer, the other man carefully smashed the bones of Heinrich’s right hand, and then each of the fingers, one by one.

Heinrich Beck never wrote another word in his journal, and never painted again. It took him two years, but eventually he was able to buy the passport of a dead German youth named Max Wolff and bribe his way out of East Berlin, the Caravaggio and one copy rolled up with some of his own paintings. The U.S. customs agent glanced at a few of the canvases and waved the lot through, as the amateur work of a second-rate student.

Now Max considered what to do with the original. He was an old man, running out of time. Perhaps he ought to think about a legacy. He considered bequeathing it to the village of Stawicki, where it had spent more than three centuries, but that seemed so … profitless.

He leafed through his old telephone messages, and found one from a newly wealthy Chinese collector who was looking for precious art. Something important, he had said. Something spectacular. He was going to build a museum.