The Doomsday Testament

XI

Jamie took a deep breath and laid the journal down. He had returned from the interview with David more disconcerted than illuminated and with the feeling of having thrown a stone into a dark and dangerous pool. Walter Brohm’s past both fascinated and horrified him. He’d heard about the experiments carried out on inmates in the concentration camps, but the thought of Matthew riding in the same jeep as a man such as Walter Brohm brought the war — and its atrocities — closer than he felt comfortable with. It was as if a door had blown open to allow in the smoke from a crematorium chimney. There was also the puzzle of the amount of information David had provided. The sheer detail was astonishing, yet, like the missing years of Matthew’s diary, it left a large gap in the story that needed to be filled. What had Brohm done in the three years after he left the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute? And if his fate was such a mystery, what had been the purpose of Matthew Sinclair’s mission? He stared at the book. Were the answers in those final few dozen entries?

He picked it up again and scanned the pages, not reading now, searching, but his brain must have continued to soak up the words because, gradually, he became consumed by a sense of impending disaster that crept up his spine like a python slithering towards its prey. The realization grew with each page he turned. It couldn’t be? Not Matthew, the man whose newly discovered heroism had given Jamie a whole new belief in his own worth. But there couldn’t be any doubt. It was all there in those neat, tightly spaced sentences, as good as a handwritten plea of guilt.

Captain Matthew Sinclair and his men were helping three notorious Nazi war criminals to escape justice.

He flicked through the pages again, desperately hoping to find something, anything, that would prove him wrong, but there was nothing; no plea in mitigation apart from the five mealy-mouthed words of the Nuremberg defence — ‘I was only obeying orders’.

As he read on, a single word leapt into his head and he was astonished that he could have missed it on the first reading. It was never mentioned specifically by name, but the clues were all there. He felt like a man who had walked into a pyramid and triggered the mechanism that opened the pharaoh’s undisturbed tomb. The pain of Matthew’s betrayal was replaced by a feeling of breathless wonder and his memory took him back to an Italian hilltop town; cool, narrow streets beneath a sun-baked henna roofscape, and a house with a brass plaque engraved with the same word that now made him react like a love-struck teenager.

Raphael!

Raffaello Sanzio di Urbino. Artist and architect. The only man who could stand side by side with Leonardo and Michelangelo and not be dwarfed by their greatness. Raphael’s name might not be as well known, but those with vision recognized his genius and his paintings were characterized by a serenity that was unmatched, even in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Those paintings were now valued in their tens of millions of pounds, and from what he was reading it appeared that one of them might have been the price of the three Germans’ lives.

More importantly, this wasn’t just any Raphael.

Jamie carried the journal through to the spare room that doubled as a home office and rummaged beside his desk until he found what he was looking for. It was a scrapbook he’d started when he had been commissioned by Emil Mandelbaum to find the Rembrandt. He quickly turned the pages to three cuttings from a Sunday colour supplement on the world’s top ten missing works of art. There, among the Cézannes, the Degas and the Picassos, was a single work by Raphael.

Portrait of a Young Man. Painted in oil on wood panel and regarded as one of the sixteenth-century Italian artist’s finest works. It had been the prize exhibit at the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow, hanging alongside Leonardo’s Lady in Ermine, and another Rembrandt, Landscape with Good Samaritan, until the first week of September 1939, when, along with the rest of Poland, the museum had found itself under new management.

Even before the invasion of Poland, Hitler had decreed that the great artworks of Europe should be confiscated to hang in a grandiose Führermuseum at Linz, his birthplace in Austria. Teams of collectors followed the Wehrmacht’s armoured spearhead like hunting dogs, sniffing out paint and marble. One of them, Kajetan Mülhmann, an SS officer and the Nazi Special Delegate for the Securing of Art in the Occupied Territories, had tracked the three paintings to their hiding place on the Czartoryski estate. Later, they had become the subject of a three-way tug-of-war between Hans Posse, Hitler’s art curator, Hermann Goering, who naturally wanted them for himself, and Hans Frank, the governor of Poland. Perhaps surprisingly, Frank won the contest and had hung the paintings in the Wawel Castle where he could enjoy them as he organized the massacre of the Polish intelligentsia and the enforced segregation of the millions of Jews under his control.

When Hans Frank left Poland in 1945, a few steps ahead of the avenging Red Army, his paintings went with him. But after his capture by the Americans in Bavaria only the Leonardo and the Rembrandt were among his hoard of looted treasures. Frank claimed he had given the Raphael to Reinhard Heydrich early in 1942, but despite confessing to war crimes and converting to Catholicism before he was hanged in 1946, his interrogators refused to believe him. There was no record of Heydrich ever possessing the picture.

Portrait of a Young Man was the most important masterpiece still missing from the Second World War. According to the article it had a potential value of one hundred million dollars but that had been three years ago. Jamie reckoned that, given the way people were now pulling their money out of plummeting shares and investing in art, it was certain to be a great deal more.

Somewhere in Matthew Sinclair’s journal were the only known clues to its whereabouts. It was all there. A portrait by one of the big three, the one Leonardo feared. Oil on wood. One of his later works.

Jamie felt as if his heart might burst; an almost sexual feeling of anticipation. With shaking hands he picked up the book and flicked through the remaining pages… only to find what he least expected.

Twenty leaves at the end of the journal had been carefully removed.