AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Four times. No rational person would separate them.”
“Then they were separated through ignorance or by accident. Two paintings of the Bridge of Sighs. If the person who stole them still has one of them, wouldn’t he want to get the other back?” Popil said.
“Very much.”
“There will be publicity about this painting when it hangs in the Jeu de Paume. You are going to the display with me and we will see who comes sniffing around it.”
30
LADY MURASAKI’S invitation got her into the Jeu de Paume Museum ahead of the big crowd that buzzed in the Tuileries, impatient to see more than five hundred stolen artworks brought from the Munich Collection Point by the Allied Commission on Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives in an attempt to find their rightful owners.
A few of the pieces were making their third trip between France and Germany, having been stolen first by Napoleon in Germany and brought back to France, then stolen by the Germans and taken home, then brought back to France once more by the Allies.
Lady Murasaki found in the ground floor of the Jeu de Paume an amazing jumble of Western images. Bloody religion pictures filled one end of the hall, a meathouse of hanging Christs.
For relief she turned to the “Meat Lunch,” a cheerful painting of a sumptuous buffet, unattended except for a springer spaniel who was about to help herself to the ham. Beyond it were big canvases attributed to “School of Rubens,” featuring rosy women of vast acreage surrounded by plump babies with wings.
And that is where Inspector Popil first caught sight of Lady Murasaki in her counterfeit Chanel, slender and elegant against the pink nudes of Rubens.
Popil soon spotted Hannibal coming up the stairs from the floor below. The inspector did not show himself, but watched.
Ah, now they see each other, the beautiful Japanese lady and her ward. Popil was interested to see their greeting; they stopped a few feet from each other and, while they did not bow, they each acknowledged the other’s presence with a smile. Then they came together in a hug. She kissed Hannibal’s forehead and touched his cheek, and at once they were in conversation.
Hanging over their warm greeting was a good copy of Caravaggio’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes.” Popil might have been amused, before the war. Now the back of his neck prickled.
Popil caught Hannibal’s eye and nodded toward a small office near the entrance, where Leet was waiting.
“Munich Collection Point says the painting was seized from a smuggler at the Polish border a year and a half ago,” Popil said.
“Did he roll over? Did he tell his source?” Leet said.
Popil shook his head. “The smuggler was strangled in the U.S. Military Prison at Munich by a German trusty. The trusty disappeared that night, into the Dragunovic ratline, we think. It was a dead end.
“The painting is hanging in position eighty-eight near the corner. Monsieur Leet says it looks real. Hannibal, you can tell if it is the painting from your home?”
“Yes.”
“If it is your painting, Hannibal, touch your chin. If you are approached, you are just so happy to see it, you have only passing curiosity about who stole it. You are greedy, you want to get it back and sell it as soon as possible, but you want the mate to it as well.
“Be difficult, Hannibal, selfish and spoiled,” Popil said, with unbecoming relish. “Do you think you can manage that? Have some friction with your guardian. The person will want a way to contact you, not the other way around. He’ll feel safer if the two of you are at odds. Insist on a way to contact him. Leet and I will go out, give us a couple of minutes before you come into the show.
“Come,” Popil said to Leet beside him. “We’re on legitimate business, man, you don’t have to slink.”
Hannibal and Lady Murasaki looking, looking along a row of small paintings.
There, at eye level, “The Bridge of Sighs.” The sight of it affected Hannibal more than finding the Guardi; with this picture he saw his mother’s face.
Other people were streaming in now, lists of artworks in their hands, documentation of ownership in sheaves beneath their arms. Among them was a tall man in a suit so English the jacket appeared to have ailerons.
Holding his list in front of his face, he stood close enough to Hannibal to listen.
“This painting was one of two in my mother’s sewing room,” Hannibal said. “When we left the castle for the last time, she handed it to me and told me to take it to Cook. She told me not to smudge the back.”
Hannibal took the painting off the wall and turned it ove
r. Sparks snapped in his eyes. There, on the back of the painting, was the chalk outline of a baby’s hand, mostly worn away, just the thumb and forefinger remaining. The tracing was protected with a sheet of glassine.
Hannibal looked at it for a long time. In this heady moment he thought the finger and thumb moved, a fragment of a wave.
