“But Pencic was way ahead of me. When we met to go over our battle plan before leaving he showed me all the documentation we’d be taking. Every available certification and stamp and insurance form for every item we knew to be missing, several thousand items in all. Amazing what all had been taken, the complete thoroughness of it.
“Then he pulled out a stack of blank certification forms. Blanks! And what are these for, I asked, as if I hadn’t already guessed. For whatever we might also be able to bring back, he said, and I knew that I had found my master. These were the tools of careful larceny before us, and he had not been content with planning on taking a dozen, or twenty, or even fifty. If he was going to risk fraud and deception, then he was by God going to do it full throttle. He had two hundred blank forms. Two hundred! And we would use these wisely, not for just any claimable piece of trash, and nothing for our own personal gain. We were on a mission for God and country.”
Glavas paused, sighing.
“Have you got another Drina-this one’s running low. Thank you.” Outside a screaming whistle was followed by a huge explosion. The building seemed to tremble. Glavas glanced toward his plastic-covered windows.
“Ah, the skies are clearing. A noisy afternoon ahead, most likely. So, then. We left for Berlin on a Monday in June. In a captured old Fokker, repainted white. My first time in an airplane, and I still remember the marvel of it. We left from here, and it occurred to me how beautiful the city was. Before, even when visiting here as a wide-eyed country boy, I’d always seen Sarajevo as some scar upon the mountains, a great gray gash in the green. But from up there it became a living thing, a long graceful body settled into the valley for a nap after a terrible night without sleep, smoke curling up out of the chimneys. And the river-it was early morning when we took off, in a brilliant sun-the river was like some lovely gold necklace on a very elegant woman. A wonderful moment. Then, up, over the mountains, and onward to Germany “Berlin. My God, Berlin. If you want to see the wastage of war you should have seen Berlin. Even after all that had happened I pitied those people. Whole blocks turned to bricks, except now it was becoming neat. Everywhere were these Prussian stacks of bricks, and everywhere these stout women in kerchiefs were making more of them, stacking them higher and higher, passing them in long assembly lines, some of the women actually quite young and pretty, wispy from the lack of food, widowed ghosts roaming the rubble. And if you think women here will do anything for cigarettes, well … But what I remember most is the stench. Heaven help you if you ended up downwind of the grand River Spree. It was a giant sewer, and still full of bodies, swollen like dead rats, black and bloated, the size of small whales.”
He paused for a drag on the cigarette. Already Vlado could see why this might take a while, so he nudged Glavas back toward the topic at hand. “And then you began your search. For the looted art.”
“Yes. We settled in and checked in with the authorities. First with the Russians, over in their occupation zone, which was mostly fruitless. It was all we could do to find anything at all in their zone without them carting it off for Moscow. They were looting the looters, and certainly the way we were thinking we didn’t blame them a bit, especially after what they’d gone through. Although by the end of the first week I was as disgusted with them as with the Germans. Strutting around in their boots and greatcoats, rolling their tanks over the rubble, checking everyone’s papers. Making silly arrests. And helping themselves to half the female population over the age of ten. They really were beasts, although their art people were top notch. Knew exactly what to take first.”
The next twenty minutes were a wandering exploration of the ways and means of the Russian art squads, fascinating but maddeningly distant from the subject at hand. Vlado interrupted a few times, but it was like trying to steer a derailed locomotive. Glavas would leap back on the tracks when he pleased.
“Next came the Western allies,” Glavas said, finally leaving the Russians behind. “Not much easier to deal with, but at least you weren’t worried they were shipping half of what they had back home on the very next boat. And the French would have been just as bad as the Russians if they’d had half a chance. Although don’t believe the Brits and the Americans weren’t taking things, too. Everybody got something out of it.
“The main collection point for the Americans was in Munich, but in those days there was still plenty of stuff scattered in the countryside, a lot of it out in the middle of nowhere, places where the Germans had stashed things in the last months of the war that still hadn’t been collected. We got out our maps and went off with our American guide on one subterranean tour after another, visiting old dungeons, caves and mines, cellars of convents and monasteries, wineries, breweries, castles. Everywhere we went was one magnificent collection after another. I couldn’t hold my eyes in my head for days at a time. And slowly we made progress. I had my list and began to tick things off, one by one. They’d crate our items for packing and ship them to a central point for sending back to Yugoslavia.
“And of course along the way we always kept looking out, as Pencic used to say, for ‘the lost lambs of art,’ the items wandering unclaimed in empty pastures. It was our job, he said, to welcome them into our flock as if they were family. And so we did.”
Glavas chuckled, smiling.
“I can still recall some of the tales we told, some of the finesse that it took to stake our claims. And I know that sometimes people just flat didn’t believe us. But in the end they often had no choice. Quite often these were not curators we were dealing with, anyway, except at the larger collection points. We only had to swindle clerks and low level officers, paper pushers who wouldn’t have known the difference between a Boticelli and a Beaujolais. So, in nine exhausting weeks we quite outdid ourselves. By the time we were ready to board our fine little white Fokker back to Sarajevo we had used up one hundred sixtyfive of our two hundred blank forms.”
“Weren’t you worried you’d be caught?”
“Oh, we knew we’d be caught, eventually anyway. And we were. By the late fifties it was quite apparent what had happened. Our behavior became a well-known minor outrage in come circles of the European art world, not so much for the volume and value of what we took, quite small in the grand scheme of things. What enraged them was the idea that two little people like us had pulled it off with such brazen ease and weren’t about to apologize. And of course memories grow old quickly, especially among the great hordes of army clerks who could no longer remember anything about what they’d signed over to us, much less the details of our little fictions and embellishments. But the ones at the top knew we’d made off with the goods.”
“So you had to give everything back?”
“Oh, no. We’d anticipated from the start we’d be found out. The rightful owners, we knew, would eventually become known in some cases. So we took precautions from the beginning that would make it as difficult as possible for these items to be retrieved. And that’s where the transfer file comes in.”
“How?”
“We knew we couldn’t leave them with our museum collections. Too easy to track down that way. So we immediately began to spread them around. Some pieces went to government ministries, beautiful paintings that would end up hanging behind some gray, grim clerk scribbling on forms all day. The icons went to churches, usually small rural parishes that were more than happy to have them. It was the one bit of government benevolence for religion that Tito ever allowed.