"I'm afraid I can't tell you that," I answered mysteriously.
Chapter 15
Somebody once said that when World War II ended, the British were in control of Germany's industry, the Russians had the agriculture, the French the fortresses, and the Americans the scenery.
If Berchtesgaden is any example, he was right. What's more, the Americans still have it. Not Berchtesgaden per se, which is a lovely old Alpine village with winding streets, quaint shops, and a picturesque sixteenth-century square complete with an elegant little royal palace. That Berchtesgaden is as German as ever. What the Americans have is the Berchtesgaden of Hitler and Goering and Bormann and Speer. The Berchtesgaden to which Lloyd George, Daladier, Mussolini, and the Duke of Windsor trekked. And of course the Berchtesgaden at which Neville Chamberlain found peace in his time.
This more notorious Berchtesgaden is actually a beautiful, rolling, forested plateau more than half a mile above the town and properly called the Obersalzberg, sitting as it does on top of the Salzberg, or Salt Mountain. By the war's end, Anne had told me, almost all the buildings on the Obersalzberg had been bombed. Those that hadn't were razed during the next few years, except for a few that were ambitiously restored to make a vacation complex for American servicemen, and that's what it's been for forty years: R and R at Hitler's playground in the Bavarian Alps.
I had arrived at ten, after a flight to Munich the night before, a pleasant morning train journey, and a ride on the military shuttle bus that regularly drives up the mountain road from the village center. Anne was waiting at the bus stop, laughing, rosy and fresh from the cold, and convincingly and satisfyingly glad to see me. We hugged like old friends, which was just right for that time of the morning.
"It's a work day for me," she said, "but they've given me a couple of hours off for you. I told them you were a bigwig art expert with government connections."
"Damn right."
"I'm glad you're here. Any new, exciting developments?"
"Not since yesterday," I smiled. I'd called her from Munich the evening before and told her about the last couple of days.
"Well, you know, I've been thinking. We've been assuming that the forgery-"
I held up a hand. "Please. Could we talk about something else for a while? I've been up to my eyeballs in forgery. Right now it'd be great just to get my head clear in this fantastic air."
"OK," she said amicably. "I'll save my brilliant deductions. How'd you like that tour I promised? It's all open-air."
And so we spent an intriguing couple of hours poking around the snow-dusted rubble that had been Goering's house, probing with our toes at the dismal frozen marsh that had been his tiled swimming pool, clambering over the nearly nonexistent remains of Bormann's extravagant home, wandering through the burned-out skeleton of Hitler's guest house.
The Eagle's Nest, which I asked to see (as did everyone, Anne said) was now a restaurant, open to the public, but closed in winter. It was visible another two thousand feet above us, not much more than a speck on the very tip of Kehlstein Mountain, and the amazing road to it that had been blasted from the granite by slave labor wasn't drivable for seven months of the year.
"It was a birthday present from Bormann to Hitler on behalf of the German people," Anne explained, slipping into her standard lecture. "It was just a tea house, not any kind of special headquarters, and it cost ten million dollars by the time the road was completed. Hitler never liked it much; he preferred it down here. He went there exactly five times, which comes to two million dollars per cup of tea. Obligatory laughter, please."
To get to the site of Hitler's celebrated home, the Berghof, we had to fight our way through tangled brush and small trees, and ignore an Eintritt Verboten sign that was there to ward off the random tourist who found his way up the unrestricted road to the Obersalzberg. Nothing was left but the massively walled garage, and most of that was below ground, impossible to find unless you knew exactly what you were looking for. The house, Anne explained, had been damaged by wartime bombing, but it had been the Bavarian government that had leveled it a few years later, for fear that it might become a shrine.
Even now, it felt enough like a shrine-of sorts-to exude a dank, evil aura that made me want to get out of there. And, believe me, I'm not the kind of person given to making dopey statements like that.
"Let's go," I said almost as soon as we'd found it.
She shivered sympathetically. "It does the same thing to me. Usually I tell people we don't know where it is." How about some nice, hot Gluhwein?"
I agreed readily. We climbed down to the road and walked the fifty yards or so to the Gasthof Zum Turken, the only private German establishment on today's Obersalzberg. It was an old family hotel, she told me, that had been commandeered by the Nazis and converted into the headquarters for Hitler's elite, private Gestapo corps. The owner, an anti-Nazi who had objected and spoken his mind, had died for it in a concentration camp, but now the Zum Turken was back in the hands of the family with the blessings of the
American military administration.
"Ahh," I said, warmed by the first sip of the hot, spiced wine, "that's better." I stretched my legs, leaned back in the wooden chair, and looked appreciatively out at the stupendous Alpine view. "All right, this has been fascinating, and you've been very good, and now I'm ready to talk about art forgery."
"That's good," she said promptly, "because I've been thinking that you might have things all wrong."
I looked at her reprovingly. "Surely not."
"Chris, you've been assuming that the fake is either from the Hallstatt cache, in which case just about anybody might have been behind it anytime over the last forty years, or else it's in the collection from Florence, in which case you're pretty sure that someone on our own staff must have had a hand in it."
"That's true," I said. "What other possibilities are there?"
"Well, what if the forgery is from the Florence collection, but it was already there before it ever left Bolzano's house?"
I shook my head. "Peter would have seen it when he was there for the packing."
"How can you be sure? You've been looking for it for a week and you haven't found it yet."
"That's right, rub it in."
"Don't be sensitive. You know what I mean."
"Look, Bolzano's an extremely discriminating buyer. If there was a forgery in his collection-especially one that Peter could spot without scientific help-Bolzano would just about have to be aware of it too. Agreed?"
Anne thoughtfully moved the rim of the glass back and forth across her mouth, inhaling the pungent aroma. "Probably."
"Definitely. And why would he try to pass off a fake as the real thing? He's got enough genuine art to make his reputation ten times over without messing around with forgeries."
"Well, I think there could be several reasons. Maybe he sold one of his originals a long time ago and replaced it with a fake that no one knows about- maybe he intends to try to sell it as the real thing himself someday."
"Why? If he ever needs money, he's got plenty of real masterpieces to sell. Why take a chance with a forgery?"
"I don't know why, Chris," she said exasperatedly. "I'm just guessing, like everybody else. All right, how about this: The forgery was bought by his father-I mean the older Bolzano's father-a long time ago, before there were all these fancy tests, and Bolzano-Claudio Bolzano-found out that his father'd been snookered, and he's ashamed to admit it. How's that?"