He smiled at Maslov’s reaction. Of all his clients, Victor Maslov loved his art the best. “Yes, quite certain. It’s in good shape, considering it’s been hanging in a storage shed for a few years. It had spaghetti stains, believe it or not, but no lasting damage. I’ve had it cleaned in my studio. It’s as good as new. I’m looking into David’s eyes right now.” He lightly touched the shepherd’s cheek. “Such a powerful work, my friend. The triumph of good over evil.”
Max gave Maslov brief details about how he’d recovered the painting. “Yes,” he laughed. “As easy as that. It was just a lucky call, that’s all. He’s a good kid, Victor. I promised him half a million—a modest fee, I think, even though he took the painting. Yes, good. You’ll take care of that for me? Just a moment, I’ve already lost the paper.” He patted his pockets, then realized the paper was still sitting on the table. He read off the address. “Yes, that’s right.”
“There’s the matter of your finder’s fee,” Maslov said. “I was thinking five million.”
“Please, Victor. You’re a good client, but that is too generous.”
“The painting is worth many times that to me. I thought it was lost forever. I thought my curator took it.” Victor laughed. “All this time, a termite man.” Max knew that Victor’s curator had died in an automobile accident not long after the theft.
“I’ll be happy to take your money once the painting is safely back in your hands,” Max said. “For now you just need to send someone for it.” He couldn’t resist a gentle jab. “Someone competent, please. It wouldn’t do to lose it again.”
The next day, as promised, Lonnie Mack received his cash, neat stacks of bills in an aluminum briefcase delivered by a man he didn’t know. Lonnie had never seen so much money. He took it home to Della with a bottle of expensive champagne, and they began planning a trip to Las Vegas.
That night the local TV news stations led with a story of a fiery explosion in a trailer park, the result of an apparent propane leak. News helicopters captured dramatic footage of the flames and smoke from the blast, which leveled half a dozen homes and left an unknown number of dead.
It was the part of the business Max enjoyed least. One could not have Lonnie concocting stories for the press, any more than one could have him showing up on the doorstep in a year, looking for more money.
Accompanied by two bodyguards, Victor Maslov’s new curator picked up the Caravaggio in person, fairly bubbling with enthusiasm when he saw it. A few days later Victor wired the finder’s fee to Max, less the money that had gone up in smoke with Lonnie.
Now Max had only to decide what to do with the original Caravaggio, still sitting in his office.
* * *
There were, of course, a few details he’d left out of Joe Cooley’s provenance—particularly about Heinrich Beck, Walter’s younger brother. His journal had ended with a Stasi raid, but not his story.
The Russians who killed his parents had billeted in Beck’s building for several months, while he remained hidden in the vault below the basement. He emerged only at night to forage for food and water, at rare moments of safety.
Beneath the trapdoor his father had built, Heinrich filled those lonely months with painting. Though surrounded by beautiful art, he had no new canvas on which to work, so he painted over some of the works he liked least, trying his hand at new ideas, then scraping canvases clean to start again. He also worked at his copies, learning to mimic brushstrokes and color and depth. It pleased him how good his copies were, and how much the process taught him. Among the originals, of course, were those in his brother’s case. The more Heinrich studied the Caravaggio, the more he admired it. He made six copies in all but kept only two, reusing the other canvases. He knew the two copies were the best he’d ever done.
The Russians eventually abandoned the gallery and he emerged from his hiding hole. Life in postwar Berlin was difficult, but Heinrich was a survivor. Art remained easy to work with and was better than currency if one knew how and had the connections, and of course Heinrich had both. He still had scores of paintings from the cellars that had survived with him, and he began trading. For a long time his business was conducted mostly in secret, buying from the nameless and selling to the faceless, servicing newly humbled Germans who denied the past and bowed now to Russian masters, as they set about learning the new subtleties of festering Bolshevik corruption.
It was not long before it occurred to Heinrich to sell his own copies as well. It was easy, particularly among the new elite classes who had money but knew nothing whatever of art. Heinrich knew his father would have been appalled, but his father was dead and he was not, and that truth made for the only rules that mattered. He painted new copies and traded and bribed and survived as the war began to recede and Berlin rebuilt and the radio ran hot with a new cold war.
Walter’s icy note, demanding that he give the crate to the emissary, prompted Heinrich to do what he did. He reacted impulsively, from anger—for shame at what Walter had done to the family name, for parents dead because of Walter’s past, for a note that merely demanded obedience, asking nothing about him or his parents.
He sent his brother one of the copies, sure that Walter would never know the difference.
The Stasi raid told him how wrong he had been. They had come at night after the gallery closed and he was alone. They were not only Stasi but former SS, and they had known what they were looking for. They asked him where the original painting was hidden. The more he denied any knowledge, the more they beat him. “You are a fool,” one said. “Your brother left a mark on all his paintings. It was missing from the one you sent.”
Heinrich did not give up the painting. He decided he would die before he would do that. They nearly obliged him, beating him savagely.
They helped themselves to a fortune in other works, loading canvases into the back of their truck, taking everything they could carry. Before leaving, one of the men untied his right arm and forced it out over the workbench. “Your brother told us not to kill you,” he said as Heinrich struggled fiercely. “He did tell us, however, to make certain you never fooled him again.” Using a ball-peen hammer, the other man carefully smashed the bones of Heinrich’s right hand, and then each of the fingers, one by one.
Heinrich Beck never wrote another word in his journal, and never painted again. It took him two years, but eventually he was able to buy the passport of a dead German youth named Max Wolff and bribe his way out of East Berlin, the Caravaggio and one copy rolled up with some of his own paintings. The U.S. customs agent glanced at a few of the canvases and waved the lot through, as the amateur work of a second-rate student.
Now Max considered what to do with the original. He was an old man, running out of time. Perhaps he ought to think about a legacy. He considered bequeathing it to the village of Stawicki, where it had spent more than three centuries, but that seemed so … profitless.
He leafed through his old telephone messages, and found one from a newly wealthy Chinese collector who was looking for precious art. Something important, he had said. Something spectacular. He was going to build a museum.
Carrie Vaughn
New York Times best seller Carrie Vaughn is the author of a wildly popular series of novels detailing the adventures of Kitty Norville, a radio personality who also happens to be a werewolf, and who runs a late-night call-in radio advice show for supernatural creatures. The eleventh and twelfth Kitty novels, Kitty Rocks the House and Kitty in the Underworld, were released in 2013. Her other novels include the Young Adult books Voices of Dragons and Steel; a fantasy, Discord’s Apple; and the superhero novel After the Golden Age. Vaughn’s short work has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Subterranean, Wild Cards: Inside Straight, Realms of Fantasy, Jim Baen’s Universe, Paradox, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and elsewhere. Some of her short stories are collected in Straying from the Path and in Kitty’s Greatest Hits. She lives in Colorado. Coming up is Dreams of the Golden Age, a sequel to her superhero novel, and more books in the Kitty series.