Beck tossed the baby again, harder. She wailed angrily.
“I beg of you,” the mayor’s daughter said, crawling toward Beck on her hands and knees. “Do not hurt my baby.” A soldier stepped in her way.
The child flew higher, and then higher still, both mother and child now crying hysterically.
“Jerzy, please! For the love of God, give him what he wants!” The mayor’s wife pleaded with her husband.
Beck nearly missed, catching the baby roughly with one hand. She wiggled and kicked in his grasp, howling angrily. “This is really quite difficult,” Beck said. “I don’t believe I can catch her next time.” He began again, but the mayor had had enough. “Yes! We’ll show you!”
“No!” the priest snapped. “Be silent!”
The mayor ignored him, appealing to Beck. “If we do as you say, you will leave our village in peace? You will let us all go?”
“I want nothing more of you. You have my word.”
A dozen soldiers accompanied the mayor and the priest back to the village in one of the trucks. Beck returned the child to her mother’s care and sat again, sunning himself. Forty minutes later, just as the lieutenant reported sighting the advancing Russians, the truck bounced back up the rutted road, carrying its precious cargo.
The priest watched sullenly as Beck examined the reliquary, an exquisite ivory-and-gold casket that glistened with rubies and pearls, and then each of the paintings, everything precisely as Beck expected.
When everything had been safely loaded Beck took his seat in the back of his staff car. “You are free to go,” he said to the mayor. “You’d better hide quickly, before your new Russian masters arrive. I have heard they have no love for the Poles.”
The column’s engines roared to life as the villagers collected their dead and started down the hill.
Beck’s lieutenant approached. “At your command, Standartenführer, I am ready to carry out our orders.” The guns of the waiting Panzers were trained on the village, to follow the scorched-earth orders of the German high command.
“It would be unforgivable to destroy such a picturesque village,” said Beck. “Centuries of history should not be rubble. We shall leave Stawicki for the Russians to enjoy.” He nodded toward the departing villagers. “Only our friends there,” he said. “Nothing more.”
As Beck’s car pulled away canvas sides dropped from one of the troop trucks. With a great roar the machine guns inside opened fire.
Half an hour later, the screaming had stopped and the dust and smoke had settled. In the field before the village, there was only the sound of the approaching Russian column to break the silence.
Joe Cooley Barber set down the photograph of a stone memorial in front of the church in Stawicki, erected in memory of the villagers murdered during the war. “My God,” he said softly. “I thought they only did that to Jews.” He picked up a clipping from a South American newspaper, with Beck’s picture. “So Beck escaped with the painting to South America?”
“It wasn’t as simple as that. It took me time and a great many sources to piece the story together. U.S. Army reports, CIA documents, journalists’ reports, that sort of thing. And then these.”
Max leafed through a stack of copies of microfilm records, white on black and very difficult to read. “In the 1970s we found—or should I say the Stasi, the East German secret police, found—a collection of papers buried in a basement in Berlin, in what was the Soviet sector. The papers were part of the secret Stasi archives until after the fall of the Berlin wall, when they were released along with thousands of other documents. There was a journal, kept by Walter Beck’s younger brother Heinrich, who was just young enough to miss the shooting war. This is a copy.”
“It’s in German,” Joe Cooley said. “Can’t anybody write in English?”
“There’s a translation on the back.”
Business was always good at Beck’s. After the Great War proud old Germans sold family heirlooms to keep up with ruinous inflation. In the 1930s it was not only paintings but silverware and jewelry, the trade rising along with the Nazis. Even Jews could sell their valuables at Beck’s, at least until Kristallnacht in 1938, when it became too dangerous to deal with them. Otto Beck did not cheat the Jews but knew that he was often the beneficiary of their persecution. By 1940 it was wartime again and business prospered as never before, as officers returning from various fronts brought looted art to sell—paintings and tapestries, gold and silver. Beck’s paid top prices. Limousines arrived and departed, carrying a constant stream of government ministers and staff officers. Hitler’s own art dealers bought there. Goering was a regular. Otto Beck sold them what they wanted while privately mocking the Nazi taste in art. “Matisse and van Gogh, Kandinsky and Klee—mein Gott, the world for his taking, and the Führer prefers hunters and dumplings,” he said to his young son.
Heinrich cared nothing for the guns and games of war that fascinated most boys his age. He loved the art that moved through Beck’s. He accompanied his father on a business trip to Paris when he was only eight, and Otto Beck could not extract him from the Louvre.
From the time he was old enough to hold a brush, Heinrich devoted every spare moment to painting. He was a careful craftsman and displayed solid talent if not brilliance. One of his father’s workers told him he could improve his technique by copying the works he admired. Heinrich’s favorites were the Baroques. After half a dozen attempts, he produced an extraordinary Velázquez; except for the fresh paint and the craquelure—the age cracks in the painting—even the most knowledgeable restorers who worked for his father could hardly tell which was the master’s and which the boy’s. Had the war not intervened, Heinrich Beck might well have become a successful artist.
He learned all aspects of his father’s business, helping the artisans repair the traces of war on paintings passing through the gallery—boot marks and deep scratches, neat bullet holes and ragged edges left by knives that hacked priceless canvases from old frames, all mute testament to a war he did not see.
As Allied bombs began to bring the war closer, Otto moved his family and his inventory to the basement. The workshops were stacked floor to ceiling with frames and canvases, and the family slept on cots in a small room. The heavy floor beams rumbled and shook from distant bombs, but business went on.
The gallery’s clientele grew more desperate with each passing week, trying to finance escapes or buy new identities, or simply trying to survive. Rivers of art and silverware and cash flowed in and out of Beck’s through the winter of 1944–45.
“The war is coming close,” one entry read. “Our house smells of oil paint, mother’s cooking, and fear.”
Late one night in the spring of 1945, Heinrich looked up from his workbench to see a man standing in the shadows. He knew instantly whom it was. “Walter!”
Otto emerged from the back, where he had been working on the accounts. They had seen Walter only once since the war’s beginning, in 1941 as the Nazi high command prepared to open an eastern front. Then he had worn the black of the SS; now he wore civilian clothes. He was gaunt and his face was hard and he smelled of cigarettes and alcohol.
“Walter?” Otto said. “Are you all right?”
“I have some things you will keep safe for me.”
“Where are you going?” Otto Beck asked his son. Walter said nothing, stepping aside for two men carrying a wooden crate.
“I asked you a question, Walter,” Otto said, irritated. Otto Beck was head of his house and SS or not, Walter was his son. “Where are you—”
Walter slapped him viciously, knocking him down. “Arschloch!” he snarled. “Make certain this case is safe. Do you understand?” Otto was too stunned to reply.