The One from the Other

They bought and sold Secessionists and Munich Post-Impressionists. I know that because I read it on a Brienner Strasse gallery window, once. This particular gallery looked a little different from those others. Especially inside. Inside it looked like one of those Bauhaus buildings the Nazis used to frown upon. Of course it wasn't just the open staircase and the freestanding walls that looked futuristic. The paintings on exhibition were similarly modern- looking, which is to say they were as easy on the eye as a sharp stick.

I know what I like. And most of what I like isn't art at all. I like pictures and I like ornaments. Once I even owned a French Spelter banjo-lady. It wasn't a sculpture, just a piece of junk that sat on my mantelpiece next to a photograph of Gath, my hometown in the land of the Philistines. If I want a picture to speak to me, I'll go watch Maureen O'Sullivan in a Tarzan movie.

While I shambled around the gallery I was closely tracked by the periscope eye of a woman in a wool black tailor-made, which, thanks to the Fohn, she was probably regretting having worn. She was thin, a little too thin, and the long, ivory cigarette-holder she was carrying might just as easily have been one of her bony, ivory-colored fingers. Her hair was long and brown and bushy, and it was gathered up at the back of her fine head in what looked like a twenty-five-pfennig loaf. She came up to me, her arms folded defensively in front of her, in case she needed to run me through with one of her pointy elbows, and nodded at the painting I was appraising with careful discrimination and good taste, like some queeny connoisseur.

'What do you think?' she asked, waving her cigarette holder at the wall.

I tilted my head to one side in the vague hope that a slightly different perspective on the picture might let me ante up like Bernard Berenson. I tried to picture the crazy sonofabitch painting it but kept on thinking of a drunken chimpanzee. I opened my mouth to say something. Then closed it again. There was a red line going one way, a blue line going the other, and a black line trying to pretend it had nothing much to do with either of them. It was a work of modern art all right. That much I could see. What's more, it had obviously been executed with the craft and skill of one who had studied licorice-making carefully. Putting it on the wall probably gave the flies escaping the Fohn through the open window something to think about. I looked again and found that it really spoke to me. It said, 'Don't laugh, but some idiot will pay good money for this.' I pointed at the wall and said, 'I think you should get that patch of damp seen to, before it spreads.'

'It's by Kandinsky,' she said, without batting a garden rake of an eyelash. 'He was one of the most influential artists of his generation.'

'And who were his influences? Johnnie Walker? Or Jack Daniel's?'

She smiled.

'There,' I said. 'I knew you could do it if you tried. Which is more than I can say for Kandinsky.'

'Some people like it,' she said.

'Well, why didn't you say so? I'll take two.'

'I wish you would buy one,' she said. 'Business has been a little slow today.'

'It's the Fohn,' I told her.

She unbuttoned her jacket and flapped herself with half of it. I sort of enjoyed that myself. Not just the perfumed breeze she made for us but also the low-cut silk blouse she was wearing underneath. If I'd been an artist I'd have called it an inspiration. Or whatever artists call it when they see a girl's nipples pressing through her shirt like two chapel hat-pegs. She was worth a bit of charcoal and paper anyway.

'I suppose so,' she said and blew a lipful of air and cigarette smoke at her own forehead. 'Tell me, did you come in here to look or just to laugh?'

'Probably a bit of both. That's what Lord Duveen recommended, anyway.'

'For an artless vulgarian, you're quite well informed, aren't you?'

'True decadence involves taking nothing too seriously,' I said. 'Least of all, decadent art.'

'Is that really what you think of it? That it's decadent?'

'I'll be honest,' I said. 'I don't like it one little bit. But I'm delighted to see it exhibited without any interference from people who know as little about art as I do. Looking at it is like looking inside the head of someone who disagrees with you about nearly everything. It makes me feel uncomfortable.' I shook my head sadly and sighed, 'That's democracy, I guess.'

Another customer came in. A customer chewing gum. He was wearing a pair of enormous brogues and carrying a folding Kodak Brownie. A real connoisseur. Someone with lots of money, anyway. The girl went to squire him around the pictures. And a little after that Father Gotovina showed up and we went out of the gallery, to the English Garden, where we sat down on a bench beside the Rumford Monument. We lit cigarettes and ignored the warm wind in our faces. A squirrel came bounding along the path, like an escaped fur tippet, and stopped near us in the hope of some morsel. Gotovina flicked his match and then the toe of a well-polished black boot at the furry oscillation. The priest was obviously not a nature lover.

'I made a few inquiries regarding your client's husband,' he said, hardly looking at me at all. In the bright afternoon sunshine his head was amber-colored, like a good bock beer, or maybe a Doppel. While he spoke, the cigarette stayed in his mouth, jerking up and down like a conductor's baton bringing to order the riotous orchestra of hydrangeas, lavender, gentian, and irises that was arrayed in front of him. I hoped they would do what they were told, just in case he tried to kick them the way he had tried to kick the squirrel.

'At the Ruprechtskirche, in Vienna,' he said, 'there's a priest who performs a similarly charitable function for old comrades like you. He's an Italian. Father Lajolo. He remembers Warzok only too well. It seems he turned up with a rail ticket for Gussing just after Christmas 1946. Lajolo got him to a safe house in Ebensee while they waited for a new passport and visa.'

'A passport from whom?' I asked, out of curiosity.

'The Red Cross. The Vatican. I don't know for sure. One of the two, you can bet on that. The visa was for Argentina. Lajolo or one of his people went to Ebensee, handed over the papers, some money, and a rail ticket to Genoa. That was where Warzok was supposed to get on the boat for South America. Warzok and another old comrade. Only they never showed up. No one knows what happened to Warzok, but the other guy was found dead in the woods near Thalgau, a few months later.'

'What was his name? His real name.'

'SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Willy Hintze. He was the former deputy chief of the Gestapo in a Polish town called Thorn. Hintze was in a shallow grave. Naked. He'd been shot through the back of the skull while kneeling on the edge of his grave. His clothes were tossed in on top of him. He'd been executed.'

'Were Warzok and Hintze in the same safe house?'

'No.'

'Did they know each other from before?'

'No. The first time they ever met would have been on the boat to Argentina. Lajolo figured both safe houses had been blown and closed them down. It was decided that what happened to Hintze had been what happened to Warzok. The Nakam had got them.'

'The Nakam?'

'After 1945, the Jewish Brigade--volunteers from Palestine who had joined a special unit of the British army--was ordered by the fledgling Jewish army, the Haganah, to form a secret group of assassins. One group of assassins, based in Lublin, took the name of Nakam, a Hebrew word meaning 'vengeance.' Their sworn purpose was to avenge the deaths of six million Jews.'

Father Gotovina pulled the cigarette from his lips as if to more effectively give them up to a curling sneer that ended by including his nostrils and his eyes. I daresay if there had been any muscle groups to control the ears, he would have brought them into it, too. The Croatian priest's sneer had Conrad Veidt beat into a poor second, and Bela Lugosi a sly, broken-necked third.

'No good thing cometh out of Israel,' he said, sulfurously. 'Least of all the Nakam. An early plan of the Nakam was to poison the reservoirs of Munich, Berlin, Nuremberg, and Frankfurt and murder several million Germans. You look disbelieving, Herr Gunther.'

'It's just that there have been stories about Jews poisoning Christian wells since the Middle Ages,' I said.

'I can assure you I'm perfectly serious. This one was for real. Luckily for you and me, the Haganah command heard about the plan and, pointing out the number of British and Americans who would have been killed, the Nakam was forced to abandon the plan.' Gotovina laughed his psychopathic laugh. 'Maniacs. And they wonder why we tried