Chapter Seven

Roma, Italy

Rule Number Six: Mind Your Mannerisms.

~Massimo Domingo’s Pocket Guide to Stolen Art Theft Recovery—Volume 3.

“You know he’s probably going to kill us,” Hadley said.

“Why would you say that?” Sweat poured out of Alessandra’s skin.

“To tie up loose ends. We can identify him.”

“He never gave us a name.”

“We know he has to be associated with the contessina and the Palazzo Allegretti, and we could pick him out of a lineup.”

“But don’t they need you to authenticate their paintings?”

“I’m trying to work as slowly as I can, hoping someone will rescue us. But I don’t think we can count on that. If we want to get out of this alive, we have to save ourselves.”

“And how do you propose we do that?”

“I have some ideas.”

“How can you remain so calm. Aren’t you scared?”

“Of course, but we can’t afford to show fear. My guess is that these paintings are all originals, worth billions, which makes us expendable. That guy is a brute, but he doesn’t know his backside from a Botticelli. He knows they’re valuable but has no idea how much they’re worth. We have the upper hand.”

“He’s a philistine,” agreed Alessandra. “All he cares about is money. He has no appreciation for the beauty of the paintings.”

“He’s going to keep us trapped in this warehouse until I analyze every one of these paintings,” said Hadley. “I’m exhausted. We haven’t showered in two days, and we’ve hardly eaten. I’m not going to tolerate this.”

“He doesn’t need me. Why is he keeping me around?”

“You’re his insurance. If I don’t cooperate, he’ll threaten to kill you.”

“What a pleasant thought.”

“I’m just being honest here. But I won’t let anything happen to you. Stay hydrated and eat anything they bring in. We have to keep up our strength.”

Hadley got back to the business at hand, and her eyes roamed the warehouse, disbelieving the treasures she was looking at.

“This is an embarrassment of riches,” she said. “Do you know how many people would kill to be able to handle these masterpieces?”

“Please, don’t use the word ‘kill.’ ”

“What I mean is, in my normal life, I’d never get this close to even a few of these paintings, and here I have an entire warehouse full of them. And it might take me a lifetime to go through them all. I mean, look at these! Some of the paintings here were part of Hermann Göring’s secret stash from Carinhall, his hunting lodge outside Berlin, many of them stored in his cellar. We thought they’d been destroyed when he demolished his country estate, or maybe were sunk at the bottom of a lake or buried in the woods or stored in the Friedrichshain flak tower in Berlin, or in any number of other places he might have hidden them. There was a fire at the flak tower, and we thought some of these Old Masters had burned and been lost forever or stolen by the Russians before the flak tower ignited. He had 1,350 looted paintings by Van Gogh, Rubens, Tintoretto, even Botticelli and others. These are priceless.

“Some of these paintings were scheduled to travel by rail to other locations in Germany, when Göring fled to Berchtesgaden, in Bavaria, and we thought the entire collection had been discovered by the Allies, but obviously, some were rerouted to Rome and bound for evacuation through the ratline. The conte, or his future son-in-law, the former SS officer, could have been friendly with Göring. Perhaps he trusted that rat to safekeep his treasures, and instead, the conte and contessa kept the artwork for themselves and passed it on to the contessina and her husband.”

Their jailer appeared behind Hadley, who was examining one of the paintings.

“Ah, the Van Gogh. That has always been one of my mother’s favorite paintings. A tree.”

So he’d let it slip that the contessina was his mother. Now they’d never get out alive. But they would stay alive for as long as Hadley could prove her worth to him.

“A Wind-Beaten Tree,” Hadley corrected. “Oil on canvas. Landscape art. Height: 13.7 inches. Width: 18.5 inches. Painted in August 1883 at The Hague. Stolen in 1997.”

“Ah, so you know it.”

“I know it was stolen from a private collection in Zurich and that it has never been recovered.”

“And its worth?”

“Considerable. As you well know, all of these paintings are priceless.”

“Yet we have to set a price.”

“So the plundering continues. It wasn’t just during the war. This painting went missing half a century later.”

“Our network cannot exist without a steady influx of cash.”

“What network is that?” Hadley asked.

“That is no business of yours.”

“I know you’re going to kill us, eventually, and I’d like to know the full story. As an art historian, I need answers.”

The man smiled. “Then we understand each other. Well, let me introduce myself. I am Conte Stefano di Allegretti. My grandparents owned the villa and the paintings and works of art inside. Then my parents inherited the palazzo, and now the villa and its contents belong to me.”

“Not legally. Most of these paintings were stolen from private homes and museums.”

“No, they were legally purchased.”

“At fire sale prices,” Hadley countered.

“What do they say—‘All is fair in love and war’?”

“These paintings have nothing to do with fairness or love, only heartbreak.”

“The love my parents had for each other was legendary. My father was going to relocate to South America. Everything was arranged for his travel on an Italian steamship to Argentina. He was an SS officer and a member of the Gestapo, charged with transporting some paintings for Hermann Göring. But when he got to the villa, he took one look at my mother and it was love at first sight. He couldn’t leave her, and she wouldn’t leave Rome. They married, and I was born.”

“And they lived happily ever after with Göring’s stolen Nazi art.”

“Göring was taken prisoner in May of 1945 and was convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg, but he swallowed a cyanide tablet before he could hang in October 1946. What were they to do with the paintings? How could they possibly trace the provenance of all those works of art? Who could they give them back to?”

“They could have turned them in to the authorities.”

“But then my parents and grandparents would be implicated. My mother would never have allowed that.”

“Was your father a war criminal?”

“Of course not. He was just following orders.”

Hadley rolled her eyes at the time-worn rationale for war criminals.

“My great-uncle was a bishop at the Vatican.”

“And was he involved in the looting of artwork? Was he aware of the ratline?”

“We were protected. If some of the artwork ended up with my uncle, well, then it was a small price to pay to keep the escape pipeline going.”

“Of course, there were many churchmen who intervened on behalf of persecuted Jews. But surely you know there were people in the Catholic clergy who gave assistance to Nazi officers, high-ranking party members and collaborators, even war criminals, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. Ostensibly, they were helping Catholic war refugees. They hid them in Italian convents or helped them after they escaped American or Austrian POW camps, even furnished falsified passports. And while the Vatican remained neutral, they did not denounce the mass killings. Instead, they chose to remain silent, even though they knew what was going on, which condemned even more people to death. What is the purpose of this network you spoke of?”

“You have no idea how much it costs to finance all the German patriots who were relocated after World War II. And then we had their families to support, the future generations sympathetic to our cause.”

“And I’m sure you knew that Argentine President Juan Perón helped establish the “rat lines,” Alessandra said.

“He was also sympathetic to our cause,” the conte admitted.

“And you probably funneled money through Swiss banks to support the network and provide fake documents, which is where Herr Muller came in,” Alessandra added. “And you needed him as a front so you couldn’t be implicated.”

“And I suppose you had to sell off some of the artwork over the years to maintain the network,” Hadley speculated.

“The buyers were more than willing.”

“Private buyers?” Hadley asked.

“Art collectors. Art investors. Speculators. And museums.”

“Who were willing to look the other way,” Hadley offered.

The conte did not disagree.

“And what about the Jewish families whose possessions were confiscated? Who is supporting them, if they even survived?” Alessandra wondered.

“Germany has been paying reparations to Holocaust survivors since the 1950s, and they’re still paying today.”

Hadley shook her head. “So you think that justice was served?”

“It’s none of my concern. I wasn’t even born during the war.”

Hadley exhaled. “But you are still profiting from the large-scale theft.”

The conte shrugged. “Enough talk. Get back to work. We want to sell off the first batch of paintings as soon as possible.”

Unbelievable, Hadley thought. “Do you even care about the fact that these precious works of art will never be seen and appreciated again, except by a greedy private collector?”

“These paintings are my legacy. I have every right to profit by them.”

“Some wealthy patrons generously loan their works of art out for public viewing or donate their collections upon their death. What you’re doing is not only illegal, it’s selfish.”

“That is my business. Now, where are we in this endeavor?”

“I’m making progress, but we’re exhausted,” Hadley explained. “We can’t work under these conditions. We need to shower and rest and get some proper nourishment or I can’t continue. Is there a place we can sleep?”

“Does this look like a first-class hotel?”

“Hardly. But I’m afraid I can’t concentrate. And it’s unnerving to have a man with a gun pointing his weapon at my back.”

“He has strict instructions to make sure you don’t send a message to the outside world. Because if I find that you try to contact—”

“I told you, I’m only using the computer to do research.”

“All right,” conceded the conte. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

“Thank you.” Hadley made an attempt at being polite, but she could hardly control her temper.

The conte walked away and consulted with the guard.

“Do you still have that diary?” Hadley asked Alessandra.

“Yes,” she answered, patting her dress pocket. “And the envelope that fell out of the back of the painting.”

“We’ll have a look at them when we get to wherever we’re going to sleep later tonight.”

Hadley picked up another painting, this one by Rubens. When it left this warehouse, it would disappear from public view forever. What a shame. It was criminal.

“Alessandra, take notes, please,” Hadley instructed. “I’m going to tell you the name of the artist and the title of the painting, the genre, whether the painting was signed or unsigned, the medium, such as oil on canvas, or oil on oak panel, a description of the piece, and the dimensions. I’ll also give the approximate date it was painted and my estimate of its current appraised value, and try to fill in the blanks to trace the true provenance or the history of ownership of the painting. We’ll need to know where it was exhibited and any other information, notes or references, catalogue listings, et cetera, that I can access from an archive and verify records on the painting.”

“How will you know how much a painting is worth?”

“That’s difficult, but I can make an estimate based on what the last painting by that artist sold for. For example, the Vermeer we just processed will sell for about forty million dollars.”

“Do you have everything you need to do the authentication and appraisal?”

“No, of course not. I should be doing a lot more in-depth research, but this computer will have to do. The internet is an easy way to complete my due diligence. There will be a lot of information missing. The conte has given us some of his parents’ records, and a catalogue of many of the works, but the provenances were undoubtedly altered, especially between 1933 and 1945. Of course, certificates of authenticity can be forged. I can use this computer to access Interpol’s ID-Art app that allows me to tap into their Stolen Works of Art Database. It has descriptions and pictures of more than fifty-two thousand items of stolen and missing objects of art. Anyone can use it—police officers, cultural offices, art dealers, journalists, art enthusiasts, the general public.”

“How can you tell if the painting is a reproduction or the original?”

“I can usually tell by inspecting the materials. For example, the weight of the piece is one giveaway. If it’s thin and lightweight, it is probably a reproduction. I can try to identify the age of the painting. If I hold it up to the light and view it from the back, I can check for written notations or stamps, labels from auction houses or galleries, indicating previous sales. Another indication is the material. Authentic works are usually done on canvas. Most original works will have a stretcher. I can check the signature. Luckily, the conte gave us a magnifying glass, so I can look for dots and check whether the brush strokes are real or simulated.”

“Wow, that’s impressive.”

“I’m not an expert, by any means. My boss is. But he’s not here. When we receive a painting, I always send it for verification to be chemically tested with X-ray fluorescence analysis and microscopy to test the pigment and the canvas. And we’ll be missing the documents of past ownership. But under the circumstances, I’ll do the best I can. What choice do we have? I would wager there’s not a forgery among these paintings, just because of where and when they were stored, and with whom, and their obvious connection to the war.”

“I’m sorry I got you into this, all over a Fragonard we don’t even have.”

“No need for an apology. I know stolen art has a dark side. If we do get out of here, let’s hope the Fragonard is still hanging on the wall of the villa and the conte doesn’t actually sell these before he gets caught.”

“I’m dead on my feet. I hope the conte makes good on his promise to let us rest and shower and eat.”

“If he doesn’t, I’m not going to cooperate. Right now, he needs us alive.”

“He thinks we’re expendable.”

“True, but he’s greedy. He’ll need my help if he’s going to profit from these paintings. And as you pointed out, he’s all about the money. His greed will cloud his judgment, and eventually, he will make a mistake.”