They had some trouble fitting me, but half an hour later, dressed like a team of biotech scientists, Hood, Archer and I made our way through three gas disinfecting airlocks and into CITI-3. A very pretty, dark-haired, dark-eyed lady around forty was waiting for us. She extended her hand to me. “Dr. Bibiana Cesarotti,” she said, with a pleasant Tuscan accent. “And please call me Bibiana.”
Then she turned to Archer. “You’re Archer Cayne, aren’t you?”
Archer looked surprised. “Have we met?”
“The Michelangelo Caravaggio Competition,” Bibiana answered. “I’m the one who stopped it.”
Suddenly, Archer threw back her head and laughed. When she finished, she saw my blank look and said, “You ever see any Italian television?”
“Naked weather girls can pretty much erase a bad day.”
“I’m sure. Well, when I was living overseas, one of the networks decided to run a contest to find the next Caravaggio. Grand prize: a hundred million lire.”
“What was that back then? About a hundred grand?” I asked.
“Less,” said Bibiana, “but it didn’t matter. In America, everybody wants to be a singer. In Italy, every good family has at least one successful priest and one failed artist.”
I liked this lady.
She continued. “At that time, Signorina Cayne was the most beautiful woman in Europe. People would go wild just seeing her step out of a taxi.” She turned back to Archer. “How many magazine covers?”
Archer was enjoying the trip down memory lane. “I did thirty-seven…not counting the North African knockoffs.”
Bibiana looked back at me. “The network’s plan was to put the Caravaggio contestants through a series of competitions. And at the end, the two finalists would paint your friend.”
“In the nude, I trust,” I said.
“Absolutely,” said Archer. “And on national television.”
I had to admit it beat the hell out of some plus-sized dame choking out a Celine Dion tune on American Idol. “So how did this show not sweep the planet?”
Bibiana turned very serious. “I am what happened. There are scholars who devote their entire professional careers to Caravaggio. And ordinary people who spend their life savings to just walk past one of his paintings. He’s an Italian national treasure, not a subject for a voyeuristic gangbang. And as Deputy Minister of Culture, I had the prime minister’s ear.”
General Hood smiled. “In addition to being beautiful, the lady has integrity.”
I saw Dr. Cesarotti blush, and she wasn’t the blushing type. You didn’t need a program to know this is where Mrs. Hood’s coffee cup had been aimed. “So what do you do in this place besides not produce reality shows?” I asked.
Bibiana looked at Hood, who nodded.
“Let’s proceed while we talk,” she said. “It’s more productive.” And she commandeered a small electric bus, which we climbed aboard.
While the driver threaded his way through the skyscraping caverns of vaults and past more blue cranes, General Hood took over as tour guide. “When the current army was organized in 1791 to deal with Indian conflicts, it quickly began to accumulate artifacts and treasure. In a time when long-distance communication with battlefield commanders was spotty at best, and not wanting a mercenary fighting force that might choose objectives to enrich themselves, Congress drew up rules governing anything of value that might fall into the military’s hands. These were loosely called the Museum Regulations, but they had nothing to do with museums as we think of them. They simply designated the army to hold in trust all items of real or intrinsic value until a final disposition could be determined. And to free fighting units from additional burden, the army created special collection teams to secure the spoils.
“There the matter sat for almost a century. By then, we had hundreds of warehouses full of all kinds of things, and there still wasn’t enough space. So even though the regulations had initially precluded lending, we began contracting with public institutions for long-term storage, often just to get stuff out of the rain. For the accommodation, we expressly didn’t limit what these institutions could do with the items, thereby opening the door to study—and display. Today, many of the collections in our most prestigious institutions—especially Native American artifacts—are still technically army property. We don’t want them back, but the paper trail is there.”
“And classified, I’m sure,” Archer said.
The general became thoughtful. “I’m not at liberty to comment on that, but for the past several decades, we’ve been working to return identifiable objects to their original tribes, presuming they are still in existence. The difficulty is that record keeping at the time of collection was highly unreliable. And there are many competing claims.”
We had arrived at an open square where tables and chairs were arranged for workers to take breaks. On one side of the square was an elaborate clean room within the clean room that was lined with thick windows through which I could see people painstakingly restoring paintings and sculpture. On another side was a glass-walled laboratory containing rows of bench-mounted microscopes that generated images on high-resolution monitors. These were manned by technicians, some of whom were matching colors to a spectrum while others compared metals and stone to photographs. The third and fourth sides of the square were taken up by an L-shaped, windowless, two-story building.
As we dismounted from the bus, Hood held us for a moment. “By the turn of the twentieth century, what had begun as a temporary custodial program to safeguard important and valuable items had mushroomed into a conservator and arbitrator responsibility. And no one was happy about it—especially at budget time.”
“Such are the responsibilities of victory,” I said.
Hood nodded. “They are.”
“And thus, CITI-3.”
Archer looked up at the stacks as if for the first time. “My God, so many wars. I can’t even imagine what’s here.”
“Neither could we. That’s why I lured Dr. Cesarotti to America. It was time to find out.” Hood smiled and put his hand on Bibiana’s shoulder. “She’s the absolute best there is.”
Bibiana looked admiringly at Hood. “The general says if I work fast, I might finish in twenty-five hundred years.”
The cutie-pie act was a bit much, so before I had to put on my hip-waders, I said, “With all due respect, Doctor, with your background, you’re not here for the tom-toms and teepees.”
There was an uncomfortable silence and an exchange of glances with Hood before she answered. The lovey-dovey had disappeared. “No, Mr. Black, my expertise is European art. Why don’t you follow me.”
I saw Archer look at me; she mimed touching a hot stove and pulling her hand back sharply. You can get two things from hitting a nerve—silence or justification. Shortly, we’d find out which I’d prompted.
When we entered the L-shaped building, it was dark. Then the lights came up, and I still wasn’t sure what I was seeing. We were in a long center aisle, and on either side were rows of tall, thin, vertical walls like you’d find displaying bedspreads or Oriental rugs. Only these were thirty feet high and twice that in length and draped in heavy-gauge, clear plastic. I wandered between the two nearest walls and realized that they were made of stainless steel and perforated like pegboards. Affixed to them were hundreds of battlefield drawings and paintings, some framed, most not.
General Hood came up beside me. “The essence of battle. Drawn by eyewitnesses.” There was a catch in his throat, and I believed it was genuine. Though many of the works were of uneven quality, they projected the kind of drama that a dispassionate observer could never achieve. Hood pointed to a small painting of a World War I dough-boy straining under the weight of a wheeled cannon. The work was entirely in shades of brown. “Done in the artist’s own blood,” he said.
It was indeed powerful, and I said so.
“We used to rotate these in and out of army installations,” he said. “Then we discovered that many weren’t coming back. So now, Bibiana has hired artists to reproduce them, and those are the only ones that go on the circuit.”
“There must be thousands,” said Archer.
“Eleven thousand six hundred and four, to be precise,” answered Hood. “But it’s only about a fifth of the collection. In 1775, newspapers began sending artists into the field with the Continental Army to document the Revolution. It was one of the only ways to get the story, and often, accounts of battles were written not from a correspondent’s observations but from an artist’s drawings and description. In the 1800s, soldier-artists began to emerge alongside the civilian ones, and the army finally went exclusively to military personnel during the First World War.”
“What happened when there weren’t any wars going on?”
“The artists would travel to various installations and memorialize commanders, camps, equipment and sometimes more frivolous endeavors.”
“So embedded reporting wasn’t invented in the desert,” said Archer.
“You’d be surprised at the names on some of the early work,” answered Hood.
“Let’s go into the other wing,” said Bibiana.
She and Hood led, and Archer and I followed.
Unlike the first room, this one needed no explanation. The stainless pegboards here ran along the center aisle, and on them were hung life-sized portraits of some of the world’s most bloodthirsty despots and mass murderers.
“I call this the Walk of Assholes.” Bibiana smiled. “Unofficially, of course.”
The description was apt. The first dozen paintings, each at least eight feet tall, were of Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich, Goring, and the rest. Most of the canvases had sustained water or bullet damage or both. “From our Reichstag collection. Danced under by kings, prime ministers and presidents. Also Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford,” said Bibiana. “Curiosity pieces of no particular monetary value but historically worth preserving.”
As we passed another of a white-uniformed Joseph Stalin being handed tulips from adoring schoolchildren, Hood said, “This was hanging in the Grenada post office. Evidently, they hadn’t gotten the memo he’d been dead for thirty years.”
It was a unique rogues gallery. Kim Il Sung (seized by MacArthur from a spy in Inchon), Juan and Eva Perón dancing the tango (a gift to a U.S. military attaché), a young Che Guevara (courtesy of the Bolivian army), Pablo Escobar (from an informant in his Medellín villa) and, of course, Saddam Hussein. I said to Hood, “I’ve always found it fascinating that murderers and despots can’t have their portraits painted often enough…or large enough.”
“Immortality,” he said. “Hard to come by. I have mixed emotions even having this crap around, but the EPA vetoed my request for a bonfire.”
“You’ll have to forgive me,” I said, “but so far I haven’t seen anything that couldn’t be protected with a padlock and a rent-a-cop.”
“You’re correct,” he said, and just then, we turned a blind corner. Thirty feet ahead was a massive bank vault with a seven-foot, circular door. The word overkill came immediately to mind. In this vast hole in the ground, surrounded by hot and cold running Rangers, why on earth did they need a holiest of holies?
The vault door was open. We entered, and Michelangelo proved me wrong. So did Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro. Uccello and Da Vinci and Raphael. Antonio Stradivari and Fabergé. Guttenberg and Shakespeare. And at the center of this pageant of the inconceivable, a King John version of the Magna Carta.
The collection, set in a space the size of a large ballroom, seemed endless. Hundreds of works, from paintings to porcelain to sculpture to musical instruments to tapestries to manuscripts scholars would sell their mothers to get their hands on. Each sealed in its own custom glass case.
At the very rear of the room sat three long, mahogany tables set with rows of green glass and brass lamps that reminded me of the New York Public Library. And surrounding the tables along three walls were scores of black, lateral file cabinets running from the floor to at least ten feet in height, each drawer fitted with a combination lock.
“Recognize this?” Hood was pointing to an easel behind glass. Inside was a canvas that looked like it might suddenly turn to dust. On it were three very fine horizontal lines—one red, one blue and one black—painted so closely together that from a few feet away, they appeared to touch. However, when I bent to examine them, they clearly did not. The piece was unsigned.
Neither Archer nor I had even a guess.
“We’re not certain, but it may be the famous three lines of Protogenes and Apelles, Alexander’s portraitist. From the fourth century BC. If so, it once hung in Julius Caesar’s villa and was supposedly destroyed in a fire.”
“Is there a word for beyond priceless?” Archer asked, only half in jest.
Bibiana smiled. “If it is indeed that work, it belongs in Greece, perhaps on Rhodes, where it would have been painted.”
“How in the world did the army get it?” Archer asked.
Bibiana shook her head. “We have absolutely no idea. There isn’t a shred of paper about it anywhere.”
“That’s why Dr. Cesarotti is so valuable,” said Hood. “No one here would have even recognized it, let alone understood its value. It was just sitting in a container with a hundred others, some equally old, that we haven’t begun to identify.”
Bibiana waved her arm around the room. “This represents two years’ work, and we’ve only opened twenty containers.”
“How many more are there?” asked Archer.
“Seventy thousand that we know for certain contain things that need to be examined. Another fifteen thousand with no inventory at all, like the one with the Apelles,” she replied.
Archer took a moment, then replied. “I think twenty-five hundred years is optimistic.”
“So what happens to this and whatever else you find?” I asked.
“It’s not entirely clear,” said Hood. “We’re plowing new ground. By statute, the army is forbidden to sell anything, so our hope is to repatriate as much as possible. However, that’s easier said than done.”
“I would think it would be simple,” said Archer. “Just put it on a website.”
Hood looked at her with some amusement. “That would be like a theatre manager posting a picture of a wallet he’d found containing a hundred bucks and no ID.”
“Couldn’t you be vague?”
“Much of this is so rare that any description at all could be deciphered by someone with a little expertise. And though it may sound crass, the army isn’t prepared, nor can it afford, to hire several thousand attorneys to sort through claims, let alone go to trial.”
“I can see what you mean,” she said. “So why not just declare the stuff ours and give it to the Smithsonian?”
“Personally, I’d love to, but unfortunately, finders-keepers doesn’t get much traction in a court of law—and even less in the court of diplomacy. Right now, all we can do is wait for governments or individuals to bring us an impeccable description of what they’re looking for along with ironclad documentation of their right to it.”
“Like the Tretiakov Collection,” I said.
“That was well before my time here,” Bibiana answered quickly—too quickly. I looked at her, but she didn’t meet my eyes.
“Technically, before mine, as well,” said Hood. “The Chief of Staff has direct oversight of all CITIs. However, I was also the previous chief’s aide, so I was peripherally involved. The Tretiakov Collection was our first large-scale, national heritage repatriation since 1945. It became something of a test case. Everyone watched very closely—State, Justice, even the CIA—to see if we raised the temperature of any interesting groups. Fortunately, we didn’t. There were a few glitches, but it went smoother than anyone could have hoped for. Largely because the Russians were able to provide us with indisputable provenance, along with descriptions of all twenty-two works.”
“From Konstantin Serbin,” I said.
“Through him, yes.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, General, but I’ve always thought of national heritage as pieces of foundational culture. The things citizens collectively revere…get misty-eyed about. Like the Declaration of Independence and the Pyramids. According to Ms. York, only a tiny number of people had any knowledge of Captain Tretiakov’s mission, and only General Zhuk knew about the paintings. Then Zhuk was executed, and they disappeared.
“I’ll accept that they might be valuable, but national heritage, no. So who would even know to ask about them? Even more intriguing, how did somebody convince Yeltsin’s people, who were as culturally deaf as the Taliban and didn’t even seal the state museums until three years after they took power, that a little-known World War Two junior officer and some phantom artwork deserved any kind of priority? Now you’ve got Putin, or whoever is fronting for him this week. I’m not a Russia expert, but it would seem to me that as soon as he learned about Tretiakov, he’d be sweating our ambassador for a lot more than some unknown dissidents’ meanderings. They’re still looking for the Amber Room, aren’t they?”
Hood stared at me like he was trying to make a decision. He turned to Archer. “I’m sorry to be rude, but there’s a security issue here. Because of his background, I can make an exception for Mr. Black.” Hood then looked at Bibiana. “Perhaps you could show Ms. Cayne our restoration facilities.”
“How about a ladies’ room and a cup of coffee instead,” said Archer.
“Sounds pretty good to me too,” said Bibiana, and they left.
With no further conversation, Hood led me to one of the tables at the back and asked me to take a seat. As I did, he went to a file drawer and worked the lock. Shortly, he brought back a large, red box about twenty-four inches square and sealed with two wide bands of yellow plastic tape that had to be scissored off.
With the open box in front of me, Hood said, “Half an hour should be enough. I’ve got some calls to make.” He started to leave, then turned back. “I don’t think you’d violate my confidence, but just so there aren’t any embarrassments, each item is impregnated with a microscopic security strip that would be picked up on your exit scan.”
“If Sandy Berger shows up, I’ll let him know.”
Hood didn’t say anything.