Even though Poland had been savaged.
We began to walk back towards the house, which was perhaps a half-mile from us. The dogs ran on ahead. Tommy moved so as to put me between him and Nicki and make me feel at one with them. This gesture he was to repeat so many times, yet each time I always felt as if I, too, was special, a bond between them.
It was then, I think, that I first realized that what must have begun as a business relationship had somehow changed. Oh, for sure, Nicki would insist that the insurance he had paid for should cover his losses. There would be no question of this, no matter what, yet for all their differences, the two of them had drawn a lot closer.
Tommy genuinely liked him, and he wanted me to like Nicki, too.
‘You mustn’t be angry with Thomas, madame. What he did may seem inexcusable. The tiara of the Empress Eugénie is only a small part of the tremendous traffic in great works of art this war has already caused. The Nazis are systematically plundering my country. Day by day, trainloads of priceless pieces come into the depot they’ve set up in Kraków. Some lie out in the rain, there are so many.’
Can a brave man stand and cry before a woman he has only just met? That one did, nor would he turn away. ‘Schiller,’ he said, as we started out again. ‘The Obersturmführer Johann Schiller of the SS, the Schutzstaffel. In 1938, the Nazis sent art experts to my country. We thought not to trust them, and we didn’t, but …’
Nicki paused to pluck a last wild aster that was half-hidden among the dense grasses at the side of the lane. Droplets of rain clung too it. ‘For you,’ he said, and shaking them off, fixed it through the buttonhole of my collar.
‘But I, like others, Lily, had to greet these strangers. Two art historians travelled with this Schiller, one a Polish higher-up in the government and supposedly working on a book. My family had many beautiful things. Perhaps I was vain, perhaps a little naive, but I showed them through our house and tried to learn from them what I could so as to warn the others.’
‘That’s when Nicki got in touch with his insurance agents, a London firm, so we came into it as we had in the past when backing that agency,’ said Tommy.
‘The Nazis have their spies, Lily. Here in England, as well as in France. Often they work through a fifth column. Poles who would do their bidding, though there weren’t so many of them; Frenchmen and Englishmen who are still too willing to sell out their countries. They tracked the treasures I had had shipped to London and had them stolen.’
‘Nicki’s certain this Schiller was behind it, Lily. Apparently, the Reichsmarschall Göring has an eye for Raphael, Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci, and a lot of others.’
‘Icons also, and of great value, madame. Those from the Byzantines of the early twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Holy Mother with Child, Our Lady of Light. Icons by Theophanes the Greek, others by Rublyov, my paintings by Jan Polack, and other great Polish artists. The Hellenistic terra-cottas from the third century B.C., the Roman and Etruscan glasses. Schiller, madame.’
A hardness crept in to Nicki’s voice that I was to hear again and again. ‘Not in uniform, so of course he claimed he wasn’t of the SS but of an insurance firm my family had once used. Thirty-two years old, blond, arrogant, tall, and extremely handsome. The blue-eyed Teuton with a scar down the left cheek that he wears with pride.’
‘A Schmiss, a duelling scar,’ said Tommy. ‘Apparently, Schiller fences with some of the Prussian nobility, but he’s solidly of the Sicherheitsdienst.’
‘The Security Service of the Nazi Party, their SS and their Gestapo,’ said Nicki. ‘Has your husband ever had contact with this man?’
‘Schiller?’ I managed. What did I know of the SS and the Gestapo? I shrugged. I think I said something lame like, ‘Jules, he doesn’t tell me everything. I’m just a wife.’
‘But has the lieutenant ever visited your house?’
‘The château?’ I shook my head. ‘Jules is very jealous of his family’s estate and very protective of the works of art and other things his father left him. Please, you must remember that, in France before the Great War, there was no income tax, so his father, he could buy lots of lovely things and did.’
‘Then you’ve no idea how your husband came by that fake?’
Nicki had done the asking; Tommy the waiting. Me, I was caught between the two of them as I shook my head, so it was then that I mentioned that last weekend with Jules and of how my husband and my sister had brought their friends: the Vuittons, Louis and Dominique, my Nefertiti; Dmitry Alexandrov, the Russian student of electrical engineering; Marcel Clairmont, also.
Nicki glanced shrewdly at Tommy as we reached the house, a half-timbered, canted, ramshackle place dating from the mid-seventeenth century. Standing in the rain, they detained me a moment more.
‘Was your husband completely fooled, Lily? Tricked by the Vuittons?’ asked Tommy. ‘I don’t know of them and neither does Nicki, so anything you can tell us would be useful.’
‘Or was it this young Russian?’ asked Nicki. ‘Someone must have sold it to your husband, who couldn’t have looked too closely and was far too anxious to lay his hands on it.’
A fake he had then discovered and hidden away with the rest of that stuff. ‘If I knew I would gladly tell you, but I simply don’t.’
We went indoors to shake off the wetness and hang our things in the great hall beside a roaring fire. There were several of Nicki’s compatriots-the place was a refuge for them. Nicki’s wife was circulating, now a touch here, now a word there.
The tiara sat on a little table all by itself. I remember that they both stood back a little as I looked at the thing. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ I said, ‘even if it is a fake.’
Neat vodka, ice-cold and in small, clear glasses, was offered, and I took one and quickly downed it as the others did. ‘Why not try it on?’ asked Nicki’s wife. She had such a lovely, all-encompassing smile, warm yet shrewd, a toughness, too, I was to learn much later. The thick mass of red hair was worn loose, yet stunning, the sea green eyes the most beautiful I had ever seen.
Katyana Lutoslawski handed that thing to me and I turned it this way and that, felt the emeralds, knew that all eyes were on me as she said softly in the most beautiful French, ‘Please put it on for us. Don’t be ashamed to wear it even if it is a fake.’
How could I have known then what I know now? I put the tiara on. They all oohed and aahed. The men bowed. Someone proposed a toast and the partying began.
I don’t remember when it was that Nicki and Tommy told us of the last wolf hunt they’d been on. I do remember reliving it as if I’d been there.
They have a way of hunting wolves in eastern Poland that must be unique. In the depths of winter, the snows lie deep. The frost is so cruel, it snaps the branches and makes them creak as the moon gives shadows of silver to the ribbons of ice that are the rivers.
A freshly killed pig is drawn behind the sleigh, and the wolves come to this if not to the scent of the terrified horses. They snap at the pig, dash ahead to nip at the forelegs and tendons of the horses. One man controls the reins, the other shoots. Both are bundled in furs, and they race through the forest, laughing, shouting, drunk on vodka and excitement, the sleigh bells jangling.
‘It’s a way of taking wolves,’ said Nicki, the nostalgia all too clear. ‘We share with them the thrill of the hunt.’
I remember touching the base of my throat. Somehow the top buttons of my blouse had come undone. I was thirsty. I was hot. ‘Does the sleigh never turn over?’ I asked.
Nicki held me with a look. ‘What if it did? Would it not be better to die like that than to live like this?’
We telephoned the children at their suppertime. I was most conscious of the need to reassure them. Marie-Christine gave wet kisses and tears to the telephone. Jean-Guy was very brave and told me not to worry, that he had been given a puppy to look after and that he was being allowed to take it for walks.