On his dining room table, he unwrapped an old, old package as dust rose and the senior curator’s wife clucked and twitched at the defilement of her home, to her husband’s utter indifference. One roll, five oils on canvas were unveiled; he delicately unscrolled them and peeled them free, one at a time. It was clear why the Stalinists thought they’d be better off destroyed; they told too much truth for totalitarian minds. They were far from socialist-realist glory. The first was a somewhat crude evocation of the SS shooting the Jews outside of either Kolomiya or what used to be called Stanislav, though it made no difference, as actions had occurred at both places. The second was a starved farm woman, her face crushed in grief, warding off nurses who’d come to feed and rescue her. She was clearly too weak to care and would die soon. The third was a burning village, bodies all over the ground. Yaremche? Probably not, as no mountains were visible. It could have been any place in Ukraine in any year from 1941 to 1944. The fourth was five partisans hanging at a gallows, no other details. And the fifth was the mass execution of some German prisoners of war, by partisans. It was squalid, for the men begged even as the gunners sprayed them.
“Nothing,” said Swagger. “And that’s it?”
The old man answered. “Paintings, you said. Yes, that’s it for paintings. However, there are some items with pictorial representations on them. Folk art, they would be called, certainly not a part of the formal socialist-realism tradition. You know, peasants or soldiers who scribbled something on something. A textile, a piece of pottery, a gunstock. I have a few. It’s not much.”
“We’d like to see them.”
He brought out an old leather suitcase, much battered, sealed off by straps. It took a second or two for him to unlock and uncinch the thing and open it. He brought out the objects one by one and placed them on the table. It was a collection of the shabby and the forlorn, most crude and earnest, by amateurs. They even had an American Indian feel to them, like those images of the Little Big Horn from the Sioux point of view, both childish and gory.
Two pictorial weavings, musty of smell, which appeared to show pictographs of partisans and Germans shooting at each other. A ceramic pot with a German tank burning on it. A heroic triumvirate of Ilyushin Sturmoviks flying in tight formation, on a plate, poorly drafted. And finally, another plate.
Bob looked at it, struggling to make sense of the lines, which were messy, and the jumble of the composition, which was uninformed by any sense of perspective, but ultimately he found the right angle from which to view it and saw that it depicted a rifleman hunched in trees, bent over, concentrating on, giving himself to a generic rifle; far off, some kind of netting bore three figures while fluffy clouds rose around it. Loki shoots at Thor in Valhalla? William Tell updated to gun guy taking out Geisler in Switzerland? What could it be?
“Somebody’s shooting something,” Bob said to nobody in particular, noting that the scale was all off, that the artist had no convincing sense of human structure, that if you worked it out, the rifle was nowhere near aligned with the target, which he now saw was a kind of pedestrian bridge.
Familiar somehow. Why did he get a buzz? His deep brain was aligning points, drawing associations, making connections. “Does this—” he started to ask, but then it leaped into his mind. The netting was a rope-and-spar bridge over the River Prut at the waterfall, producing the clouds of mist, in old Yaremche. The three figures were the targets on the bridge. Bob shifted his eyes back to the sniper, saw what looked to be a cascade of brightness at the head, and realized in that second it was her blond hair.
“It’s Mili,” he said. “Jesus Christ, she got her shot.”
CHAPTER 26
And do I understand, young Captain, that although you are renowned for your discriminating knowledge of wine, you yourself have never tasted it?”
“Yes, Herr General,” Salid said to 12th SS Lieutenant General Muntz, “it is so. In my faith, one does not drink alcohol. It interferes with one’s absolute fealty to the will of Allah. But it is also true that to an Arab, there is no more profound responsibility than to be a fine host. How does one reconcile these seeming contradictions? My father, who was a man of power and prominence in Palestine, had a brilliant idea: he assigned a son to learn all that could be learned of wine and thus be able to welcome sophisticated Europeans to our household in a style to which they were accustomed and in which they would feel the warmth of Palestinian hospitality. It was a responsibility I cherished. And when I came to Germany in my teens for training and to further cement the bonds between our two peoples, I was able to find enough time to continue my passion.”
The young officer was quite the hit. Even Nazis were drawn to stars, and he was fully a star. Slim, handsome, elegant in his jet-black uniform, his epaulets and flashing SS runes on his tunic collar opposite his 13th SS Mountain Division scimitar insignia, his shiny boots under his sharply pressed riding breeches, his gloves immaculately white, his ceremonial dagger glittering in the candlelight of the garden of the Hotel Berlin, Stanislav’s finest, he was a picture of masculine beauty and exoticism; but it was his fez that made him seem so special. Bloodred, with the national emblem of the art moderne eagle grasping the twisted cross over the chill explicitness of the SS death’s head in bone white on the forehead, it had a red tassel hanging raffishly off it, and it made him seem like an exotic exemplar of Eastern royalty, a warrior prince from the land of the great white desert. The fact that he’d killed a lot of Jews was a definite social plus.
“And so you chose the wines tonight? And this was after or before you destroyed the Bak bandit group in the mountains?”
“It was actually after. We returned from that mission, and I came to the hotel and discovered a wine cellar as yet undisturbed by the fortunes of war. I would not say it was an extraordinary accumulation, strong on the French reds, a little weaker on the German whites, but not without a few items of interest. I think you will find the sensations to your palates quite amusing.”
“Hans, Hans,” the lieutenant general squealed at Dr. Groedl, “where did you find this lad? He is such a delight!”
All the glitterati of the Kommissariat were present, dressed to the nines in the latest Nazi high style. These were the men of power, drawn from the administrative and military lords of what remained of the Reich’s Ukraine empire. Besides the slashing black of the SS dress uniform, the others wore immaculately tailored evening attire, white-jacketed, as it was broad summer.
“The man has the most educated nose in Europe,” someone said, and Sturmbannführer Salid modestly accepted the compliment.
“Especially for sniffing out Jews!” someone else said, to much laughter and a little melancholy, for all understood that the days when the Reich’s most sacralized mission could be talked about openly were coming to an end.
“More so than you realize,” boasted Senior Group Leader — SS Groedl, now sporting a monocle, as well as an elegant ivory cigarette holder for his Effekt. “He was one of the most enthusiastic and aggressive advocates of our policies in Einsatzgruppe D. His work was tireless and self-sacrificial. Onward and onward he pressed. It was truly the spirit of his Allah that moved him to such energies.”