The Dead Caller from Chicago

Thirty-five

She said she needed something stronger than coffee. All I had was the ancient gallon of Gallo that I’d kept, mostly untouched, since the aftermath of our divorce. Sometimes the old jug mocked me; sometimes it beckoned me. Always it challenged me.

I got the jug and poured wine into our coffee cups.

Only after she took a long, slow sip did she begin. “You know of the Nazis seizing famous art before and during World War II?”

“I’ve read snippets about looting.”

“It was more than simple looting, and it was huge. Adolf Hitler had the idea to build a grand Führermuseum, a gigantic cultural museum that would dwarf anything in Paris, London, Vienna, or Florence. To stock it, he had his Nazi sickos plunder, loot, confiscate, and, as a last resort, buy all the great art they could find in Occupied Europe. They grabbed so much, they had to store it in multiple locations in Munich, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and other places. Toward the end of the war, as things began going badly, they moved most of it into salt mines near Salzburg. And there it all sat, until the U.S. Army discovered it.” She took another sip of wine. “That brought on new problems.”

“Not all the art got returned to its rightful owners?”

“Even now, there’s litigation over the identities of the rightful owners. Remember I said that Hitler’s minions actually paid for some of the pieces?”

“Yes.”

“A sale doesn’t make for a proper legal transaction, a rightful transfer of ownership, if it’s the result of a threat, or worse, a drawn gun.”

“Sell or else?”

“Exactly, and those happened all the time. Then there are different sorts of issues, ones concerning entitlement. In those cases, a Nazi did indeed pay fair market value for a work of art. The army found the work after the war, yet did not return the work to the Nazi or his family, because the Nazi had been convicted as a war criminal, and his assets had been seized as retribution.”

“Where would the art go then?”

“Victims’ groups.”

She raised her eyebrows to make sure I was following. I nodded.

“To muddle things even more, there are other cases where ownership records have been lost over the passage of more than half a century.”

“Making it impossible to determine who truly is the rightful owner?”

“Yes.”

“So many complications,” I said.

“Now let me tell you about the Brueghels. They were a distinguished Flemish family of artists. One in particular, Jan the Elder, was known for his floral still lifes. He was nicknamed ‘Velvet’ for the velveteen sheen of his colors, or perhaps for his fondness for wearing velvet. In the late 1500s, Velvet Brueghel did a series of four paintings, one each of a daffodil, a daisy, a chrysanthemum, and a rose. They changed hands, legally, many times over the years.”

“The four together?”

“Only at first. The set of four was broken up in the 1700s. Over the next two hundred years, each flower was separately sold-”

“Or confiscated, or sold under dubious circumstances, in the years leading up to World War II?”

“Exactly. Three of the flowers were part of the Nazi trove discovered by the army.”

“Three of the four? That’s a high percentage to have gotten into Nazi hands.”

“They had an objective, but don’t get ahead of me. The Daffodil, the Chrysanthemum, and the Rose were the ones recovered, and they were subsequently sold in the late 1940s, each to a different buyer. The proceeds were given to several authorized victims’ groups.”

“And the Daisy?”

“It was never recovered by the army.”

“It’s valuable?”

“In and of itself? Of course, as much as any of the other three, simply because it’s a Brueghel. But let me add one more piece to the puzzle. The descendents of a Nazi captain successfully sued in Germany for the return of a collection of paintings he purchased.”

“But he was a Nazi. Wouldn’t his paintings have been subjected to claims from victims, just like all the others?”

“He’d been rumored to have helped outfit the death camps, but so far, that’s never been proven. What’s known for sure is he was only a captain, and he didn’t acquire the paintings for the Reich. He bought them for himself, always paying with his own personal funds, always making sure he got a receipt. That’s why his heirs won their lawsuit.”

“You think he used his Nazi credentials to scare owners into selling cheap?”

“I have no doubt, but that can’t be proven.”

I was getting confused. “Included in his collection were the Four Flowers?”

“No. Remember I told you three had been recovered by the army, sold after the war, and their proceeds distributed to victims’ groups?”

I nodded.

“Our Nazi bought only the long-missing Daisy, from a reputable dealer who had it on consignment from a man without heirs, who perished at Dachau. The dealer himself is long dead, and his records are lost.”

I turned to look for a moment at the painting on the card table behind us. “Who has the Daisy now?”

“Where’s Leo?” she asked.