“I know.”
“Arrange a personal meeting with Nikulin, include Lestov, for him to get the credit,” advised Charlie. “But you make the direct accusation, against Viskov and Travin.”
“I know that, too,” said Natalia. “And I’m as frightened as hell.”
There wasn’t the hiss-voiced fury of Kenton Peters’s first telephone calls, a loss of control Boyce had never before known. Now the anger was in the frustrated determination to find out how Henry Packer had been exposed.
“Only you and I knew he was still in Moscow. And neither of us made the calls,” said Boyce. It was Cartright who’d discovered the anonymous contacts. “And there wasn’t any way Charlie Muffin could avoid recognizing him, after the amount of television coverage.”
“Still damned impudent of Dean to put what he did in the exchanges.”
“It would have been wrong for me to intervene.”
“I quite understand,” said Peters. “I don’t know or understand how, but the information must have come from a Russian source.”
“From which it follows that Moscow has more than we suspected or guessed about Raisa Belous and Yakutsk,” suggested Boyce.
“I’ll not give up,” insisted Peters. “I’ll go on until I do find out.”
“We both will. But shouldn’t we move on a little?”
“I don’t like Norrington being identified,” said Kenton Peters, taking the suggestion.
“I’m not letting it be made public,” assured Boyce.
“I’m surprised the Russians allowed the photograph to be published, to let Raisa Belous be identified,” continued Peters. “I’ve always said they’re the uncertainty, didn’t I? This and Packer confirm it.”
“You didn’t know your president was going to make his hero announcement until it was too late,” gently reminded Boyce.
“What the president did will never occur again,” said Peters. “He knows just how annoyed I am about that. I’ve told him enough to understand what the effect could be. He’s terrified.”
“I was merely pointing out that oversights can happen. And we can hardly remind Moscow, can we? We’re not supposed to know.”
Unable to move his mind for long from what came close to being the first embarrassment of his career, Kenton Peters said, “The Agency lost a good man in Packer. He’s useless now that he’s been so publicly identified.”
Boyce said, “We’ll have to put on hold any move against Muffin for the time being. Nothing too close.”
“I’ve asked for someone else to be selected,” disclosed Peters. “Muffin’s an uncertainty and you know I don’t like uncertainties.”
22
Again it was the absence of anything positive or worthwhile that confirmed for Charlie a suspicion he didn’t need proved any further. It wasn’t even the fault-or obstruction-of the other three with whom he’d yet again gathered in the military attache’s office. They were as much puppets as he was intended-chosen-to be. The difference was they didn’t know how their strings were being pulled. Charlie did and was thoroughly pissed off at the realization. Withhis feet, dancing was a dirty word anyway; it was equally forbidden when he was the puppet.
“My people can’t trace anything on a Lieutenant Simon Norrington, either by name or by the army serial number his family gave,” apologized Gallaway. “Nor any cross-reference to a Raisa Belous. Whatever existed must have been destroyed.”
“What about an art squad?” persisted Charlie, as a test, already knowing that one existed.
“I only filed that request yesterday,” said the attache. “I’m still waiting.”
“So am I,” said Cartright. “So far I haven’t even had an acknowledgment. As far as I know, SIS didn’t have an interest.”
From that morning’s conversation with London, Charlie knew Sir Rupert Dean was also still waiting for a reply to his inquiry, made even earlier. The director-general hadn’t argued with Charlie’s open accusation that they were being played with by every other interested government ministry and department. Instead he’d told Charlie he wanted him back in London by the end of the week.
“It’s put a lot of extra pressure on me,” complained Raymond McDowell. “The biggest continuing diplomatic dispute between Germany and Russia is stolen or disputed wartime art, even after all these years. I’ve averaged four cables a day from London since Raisa Belous was identified. So’s the ambassador.”
“I thought everyone was supposed to be fighting a war after 1939,” said Gallaway.
The limited military attache probably did, accepted Charlie. He decided to excuse himself as soon as possible from this aimless discussion. He wanted to be at the end of a telephone if Natalia called. There was even more to talk about after Dean’s week’s-end ultimatum.
McDowell said, “The Nazi treasure looting was more efficiently organized than the Final Solution. There was even a connection, of sorts. Hitler considered the people of Eastern Europe subhuman. He didn’t intend just to eradicate the Jewish race. Eastern Europeans were to go, too; become a vast slave resource while the Germans expanded eastwards to take over their countries. Anything of any cultural, artistic or historical significance was seized by Alfred Rosenberg’s E.R.R. organization: entire museums, libraries. And notjust by them. Goering, whose favorite was nudes, had Hitler’s permission to take whatever he wanted from occupied countries for an art gallery that was to be as big as Hitler’s, in Linz. Hitler had the plan and model of it with him when he committed suicide in the Berlin bunker; the speciality was to have been heroic Aryan portraits and sculptures. Himmler, Bormann, and von Ribbentrop each had their art squads; von Ribbentrop took every Renaissance painting he could lay his hands on in Italy. He had his own art-scavenging battalion, with three companies from it working exclusively for him in Russia alone ….”
Charlie began to concentrate, looking at the lecturing head of chancellery with sudden interest. It obviously all came from London and the detail was surprising. Maybe even more surprising was that the Foreign Office clearly considered it necessary to provide such an intense briefing. Calling upon his own specific, self-imposed modern history lesson, hopefully to encourage the diplomat further, Charlie said, “And the Soviet Union had the sort of Trophy Brigades that Ivan and Raisa Belous belonged to, with every front line regiment. The Soviet Trophy Brigades virtually trawled the countries-Germany particularly-when the war turned against Hitler. The almost obscene irony is that the Nazis made it easy for them: they’d stolen and got a lot of it conveniently together, for the Russians simply to pick up. Germany has officially listed something like three hundred thousand heritage treasures Russia refuses to give back. Moscow claims they’re war reparation.”
Gallaway snorted a laugh. “How can anyone argue the legality of that?”
“London did. And Washington,” deflated McDowell. “America’s OSS formed a special Art Loss Looting Investigation Unit. President Truman personally signed the order to ship two hundred European paintings to America, to go on touring exhibition. The intention was to hold on to them until Germany made its financial reparation. The paintings were only returned after American and European academics and art historians pointed out that America could be accused of the same cultural rape as the Nazis …”
Not all take and no give, thought Charlie; not a wasted morning, either! He hadn’t known of the existence of an American unit. But the FBI would. From which it logically followed that Miriam Bellwould, too. It had been almost forty-eight hours since Raisa Belous had been named and her art connection established. Time enough to have had the photograph Miriam had recovered from the body-and more recent ones of the corpse itself-checked through OSS archives. It might, even, account for the woman’s seemingly casual questioning of Fyodor Belous the previous afternoon and why, for the first time, she hadn’t wanted to talk things through after leaving the Russian ministry. If she already knew who her victim was-what he had been doing, even-all she would have needed to do was sit and listen during the meeting with Belous to ensure nothing emerged to endanger Washington’s cover-up. In fact, thought Charlie, warming to his speculation, it all made perfect sense of that intended cover-up and what he’d
