Love and Treasure (31 page)

Impressed with her credentials, with her expensive clothes, with the black Mercedes parked in front of the house, Varga had been unctuous and accommodating as he showed her into the living room cluttered with ugly furniture. She diligently photographed the room and its contents, from every angle.

There were no paintings of any kind hanging in the living room, nor in the dining room, which was their next stop. But in the library, a landscape hung over the fireplace. Pretending interest in the bric-a-brac displayed on the cracked marble mantel, she aimed her camera at the painting.

Now she showed Amitai the image, and he risked a quick glance.

She said, “I thought maybe the Einhorns were art collectors. That it might be worth something. Or maybe they bought other work from Komlós.”

“If that’s a Komlós,” he said, “then I have made a terrible miscalculation. He’s not an artist at all.”

“What? Why?”

“This painting is from a kit. Paint by numbers.”

“No shit!” she said, hunching over the small screen.

“You don’t see the lines? There’s even an empty space.”

She zoomed in on the picture, squinted, and laughed. “Number twenty-six. Looks like it was supposed to be green. Oh well. Anyway, I took pictures the whole time, right? I kept telling him it was just what we were looking for, a real authentic Romanian house of the period. Perfect for our show. I called it a ‘show,’ see, that’s what movie people say, not ‘movie’ or ‘film.’ Then I asked if there was a view from the top floor.”

As he led her upstairs, she prattled on and on. “I kept saying ‘verisimilitude.’ I could tell he had no idea what it meant.”

Varga took her up to the attic, where, he said, his family stored their old and broken things, many of which might be brought down to furnish the house. For an additional fee, of course.

“Of course,” she said.

The attic extended the whole length of the house. Though dusty and unused, it was brightly lit by a long row of harsh fluorescent lights that flickered above their heads. She took photograph after photograph of the
broken-down dressers hulking against the attic walls, of chairs with torn cane seats, of steamer trunks, one labeled with a sticker from the port of Haifa, Palestine. At the sight of that sticker—clear evidence, she was sure, of the Einhorn family—her heart began beating with such force that she worried for a moment that the sound might be audible amid the silent whirl of dust in the attic.

“This is fantastic!” she gushed, hoping her effusiveness would be sufficient explanation for her flushed face. “The art director will be over the moon.”

“ ‘Over the moon’?”

“Happy! Very happy.”

After that they went back downstairs. She hovered for a moment in the front hall, insisting, “You must keep in very close touch with me. My phone number and my e-mail address are on my card.”

She said to Amitai, “And then, since we seemed to be pretty much out of rooms, I told him I needed to pee.”

There was a narrow, whitewashed five-panel door. She opened it, and before Varga could object, closed it smartly behind her.

The painting was hanging on the wall opposite the toilet.

Amitai couldn’t help it. He gasped.

“I know!” she said. “In the bathroom! When I saw it, I jumped like a foot in the air. I swear, I must have peed all over the place. I had to buy some time, so I made a couple of, like, straining noises. Then I got really close to it. It’s in the cheapest wooden frame. Clearly Varga has no idea what it might be worth. I stared into the eye of the peacock. You know, it’s not just a black dot like it seems in the picture or like a peacock actually has. It’s hazel. Like a woman’s eye. It looks more like the eye of a peacock feather than the eye of an actual peacock.”

And, hanging in the painting as it hung on Natalie, in the shadowland between her breasts, was Frau E.’s locket. It was depicted in painstaking, hyperreal detail, each jewel and filigree rendered in paint so thick the locket cast a real shadow across the canvas.

“Show me,” Amitai said.

“What?” Natalie said, suddenly anxious.

“The photograph! You took one, didn’t you?” He groaned. “Please, tell me you remembered to take a picture of the one thing we’re looking for.”

“Can I just please finish the story?”

“I can’t believe—”

“Just please let me finish.”

She was enjoying this, he thought. He was going crazy, and she was enjoying telling the story. “Fine. Then what did you do?”

She leaned over the seat of the car, reached into the puddle of black wool that was her oversize coat, and pulled out the painting itself, in its plain wooden frame.

“I just put it behind my back, tied the belt of my coat, and ran.”

•
27
•

THEY LEFT THE CAR
with the valet of the Hotel Gellért, and Amitai carried the painting bundled in his arms in Natalie’s coat like a sleeping baby, a stolen child no one else must see. He laid the bundle on the bed in their room, tenderly, as if not to disturb the slumber of what lay wrapped inside. He pointed to an overstuffed armchair in the corner by the television.

“Sit,” he said.

Natalie sat. Now that she was done playing girl adventurer—now that she could see how badly he was taking this—her giddiness had vanished, and her manner had become watchful. She was waiting, he knew, for him to get angry, to scold her, lose his temper, explode. But he knew how women went about such things. He was not going to give her the opportunity to turn the tables, become the aggrieved party. Make no mistake, he was the aggrieved party in this affair. He was the one to whose world, with all its hairsprings and escapements of profit and morality carefully tuned, this woman had taken the hammer of her foolish idealism, her childish sense of justice, her lack of self-control.

He carefully untied the arms of the coat, unwrapped the painting. It was facedown, and he kept it that way, moving it onto the mattress. He hung Natalie’s coat up in the closet, removed and hung up his own. He began pacing back and forth across the floor, not looking at her, not looking at the thing on the bed. He began silently to review the procedure that would be involved in returning the painting. If he did it himself, he would face prosecution. He needed an intermediary. Could he enlist Elek? Would Elek be willing to make the journey, to take the risk? Or would Elek refuse, given what he had revealed about his belief in the right of nations to their artistic patrimony?

No, Amitai would have to do it himself. He would say that a woman had tried to sell it to him, that he’d confiscated it and was now returning it to Varga. Would Varga believe him? If he did, perhaps he’d be grateful enough at that point to consider a sale. Or, Amitai thought angrily, Varga would call the police. What would life be like for an Israeli in a
Romanian prison? And even if he avoided incarceration, the success of his business depended wholly on his reputation among antique dealers, museum administrators, and low-level government officials. Were this theft to become public knowledge, he’d be ruined in Romania, in Hungary, and who knew where else. And if Tamid found out? The man would blackmail him. He would threaten that unless Amitai gave him the painting to turn over to Yad Vashem or to the Israel Museum, he would report him to the Romanian police or to Interpol or to whatever agency currently had jurisdiction over stolen Jewish property. Tamid would be thrilled to be granted the opportunity to ruin Amitai’s career and his life. Amitai imagined for a moment the phone call to his uncle. Jacob’s fury, his own humiliation.

He stopped pacing, stood staring at the painting lying facedown on the bed, and laughed out loud.

“Amitai?” Natalie said, astonished. This was not, it seemed, the reaction she was expecting. “Why are you laughing?”

“Why am I laughing? I always laugh when I see a good magic trick. And this, Natalie, this was an amazing trick you pulled off.”

She looked up at him, her expression willing and worried at the same time, wanting to see the mood lightened, to be let in on the joke, fearing that it would not turn out to be very funny at all.

“Did I?”

“You did. You turned Vidor Komlós into Bruno Schulz.”

He watched her face, prepared, if she looked blank or clueless, to strike her forever from the book of his heart, walk out of the room, leave her to deal with the mess she had made alone. When he saw that she understood what he was talking about, he didn’t know if he felt relieved or disappointed.

“Okay,” she said, sounding determined to match his hostile and aggressive calm, if that was how he wanted to play it. “First of all, I didn’t, like, chisel it off a wall. It was hanging on a hook. So what I did is not irreversible. If you want to, we can just get in the car, drive back to Oradea, and return it.”

She sat expectant, hands on her knees, making a show of it. All he needed to do was say the word. That was when he realized the extent of the damage she had done to his Swiss-movement life. The moment passed, irretrievably.

“Second,” she said, “say I did turn Vidor Komlós into Bruno Schulz, how is that a bad thing? Schulz has got to be one of the most famous
Jewish artists of the last century. And I don’t see how what they did was so wrong.”

“Are you serious?” he said. “Those
baheimot
from Yad Vashem, those art-thug friends of Dror Tamid? They go in there with crowbars and pickaxes, they tear the fucking murals right off the walls. There was significant damage.”

“The murals had been there in that apartment for decades, derelict, rotting inside a kitchen cupboard.”

“They’d been found. They were being excavated.”

“That’s not how it happened.”

“Oh, really. And you know how it happened?”

“Yes, I do. This German filmmaker, of all people, got obsessed with Schulz and the nursery murals. He goes looking for them, they’re supposedly long lost, but they’re right there, in the cupboard of this miserable apartment, where they’d always been, because it turns out they weren’t lost, it’s just that no one had bothered to look for them. Not the Poles who made such a big deal out of Schulz being this great Polish genius and damn sure not the Ukrainians. They didn’t look, because they didn’t care. They only cared when we dared to take them.”

“We?”

“Okay, you. Israel. Yad Vashem. Whatever.”

“Not me. I am always careful to act within the law.”

“Whose law? The laws of the people who stole the property in the first place? Do you know what happened after the Schulz murals were taken? After everybody freaked out about those horrible Israelis, how dare they, destroying the sacred property of Poland and Ukraine? The parts of the murals that Yad Vashem left behind were vandalized. But I guess you’re saying, what, you’re saying it was their right to do that, because by law the murals were their property.”

“Thank you, Natalie, you just proved my point.”

She looked puzzled, going back over what she had said, looking for the flaw.

“The Poles and the Ukrainians never cared about Schulz’s murals until Yad Vashem took them. True. Absolutely correct. And, in just the very same way, the Hungarians and Romanians never cared about Vidor Komlós. I’ll go further: they never even heard of Vidor Komlós. But you can be damn sure they’re going to care now. Now that we’ve stolen the painting? Vidor Komlós will become a cause célèbre! You have guaranteed that. You have just fucking guaranteed that!”

The echo of his outcry rang against the surfaces of the hotel room, the pipes in the walls. Then silence.

Slowly, she rose from her chair. She walked silently to the bed. She lifted the painting, turned it over, and laid it faceup.

It was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen, and one of the most terrible. The frank eroticism of the woman’s nude body, sensual and ripe. Her skin, alabaster pale in places, and then blushed a tender pink. The dense, brilliant color of the feathers on the peacock head, a dozen different iridescent blues, their intricate texture. The peacock’s demonic, piercing eye, not black but green, even hazel. The peacock’s head with its woman’s eye virtually burst from the canvas. The painting was at once opulent and unsettling, lush yet stark, sensual yet deeply disturbing, and Amitai was conscious suddenly of a painful, erotic longing. He ached to fall into the arms of this woman. He knew that in those arms a man who had always felt homeless could feel finally at home. He understood why Varga had kept it in the bathroom of all places. If it belonged to him he, too, would hang it in a private, intimate place, where he was the only one allowed to look at it.

Natalie stripped off her boots. She wriggled out of her dress, pulled her hair out of its tight bun, and lay down on the bed next to the painting. He sat down beside her and put his hand on her soft, warm belly, granting her absolution with his touch.

“No way am I giving it back to that motherfucker,” he said.

“Right?”

“You’re right. You did the right thing.”

“So what are we going to do with it?”

“We will bring it home.”

“How?”

The better question was, What home? Whose? Where would he take this painting he wanted more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life? Anything except, perhaps, the woman lying beside it.

“I’ll figure it out,” he said.

•
28
•

THE NEXT MORNING AMITAI
received an e-mail from Mrs. Vázsonyi at the Jewish library. She was sorry, she wrote, to inform him that her research had turned up no surviving members of Ignác Einhorn’s family, though it appeared that there was a connection, albeit distant, to the family of Baron Móric Einhorn. The noble branch had survived the war but had not fared well under communism. There were rumors that some number of them might have escaped via Austria to America, where they were said to have shed the title and changed the name. Of Nina Einhorn’s family, named Schillinger, there was even worse news. Only one, a brother, had lived through the war. His wife and children had been killed by the Arrow Cross, and he had never remarried. He had died a bachelor in the early 1960s. There was, it seemed, no Einhorn or Schillinger on whom Natalie could foist the five-gram locket that dangled so heavily from her neck.