Trophies of War Page 19

  “What is this?” Zharova asked Aretz, pointing.

  He licked his lips but didn’t answer, looking down at the map.

  Zharova could sense that Chuzhoi was about to yell again. She caught his eye and shook her head.

  “Tell me what this is,” she said. “I can tell that you know what it is. Tell me.”

  Aretz muttered something. It sounded like “to hell with him.”

  “It is a map,” he sighed. “The lines are streets, the numbers are coded versions of the street names. I don’t remember how the code works, but it doesn’t matter because I know where it is. It is the center of Altmünster.”

  “What is the significance of the map?” Zharova asked. “What is special about this place?”

  Aretz put his finger on the dot in the center of the lines.

  “Something about this spot. I don’t know what it is—they never told me,” he said. He drew his finger along the lines. “This street is Teichwiesweg. This one is Salzkammergut Strasse. It goes along Lake Traunsee.”

  The picturesque view of Traunstein Mountain rising straight up out of the blue alpine lake didn’t fill Zharova with wonder at its beauty. She looked at the small wooden houses lining Traunsee and felt nothing but contempt for the people who were able to hide from the war amongst the pretty scenery. While she was hiding from German artillery in the basement of The Hermitage, eating soup made from glue, these people were probably skiing and drinking hot chocolate.

  “Faster,” she said to Chuzhoi, who grunted and floored the ZIS-5.

  They were down to the last of their fuel, but Zharova had insisted that they drive the sixty kilometers from Altaussee to Altmünster. Only something very important would be hidden behind a coded map—and one written on a real-life treasure map at that.

  When they pulled in to Altmünster, it seemed deserted like all the other villages they had driven through. Zharova didn’t know if the people were gone or hiding and she didn’t care.

  They continued along Salzkammergut Strasse until they came to the cross street Aretz named—Teichwiesweg. Chuzhoi stopped the truck and they all got out.

  On one side of Salzkammergut Strasse, green fields sloped down to the blue waters of Lake Traunsee. On the other, a large white hotel dominated the street, with a small building of storefronts to its left.

  Zharova held up the Altaussee map and compared the lines of the coded map with the streets. The dot appeared to be right where the storefronts were.

  She crossed the street to get a closer look, checking the map again.

  This is it, she thought. There’s nothing here but this building.

  The building was a single story with a Reichsadler clutching a swastika at each corner and four shops along the front. One was a gift shop, its merchandise collecting dust in the dark. Two were empty and one was a bakery that looked open for business but for its empty shelves and no one behind the counter.

  What could be so important about these little shops? she wondered.

  Zharova walked back and forth in front of the building, looking for something to jump out at her.

  Chuzhoi and the other SMERSH men leaned against the truck. Zharova could feel their stares.

  Not another dead end. Please.

  Again she walked along the storefronts. She checked the side of the building and looked behind. Nothing but brick walls, nothing unusual.

  Feeling despair taking over, she tried to think of some face-saving way to get out of this. Veselovsky would hear about the Americans beating her again and now she had compounded her failure by dragging these men out here, without enough fuel to get back to Vienna.

  She checked the map again, now hearing the men whispering across the street. The dot had to be this building.

  What am I missing?

  She peered into the plate glass window of the gift shop. Like the other three, it was small enough that she could see the back wall. There were no hidden rooms. The door was locked, but it wouldn’t be difficult to break the glass and enter the store if she wanted to. Next to the glass door was another made of wood, like a million entryways in every city of the world where shopkeepers lived above their stores.

  Zharova put her hand on the wooden door.

  That’s not right, she thought, trying the knob. Locked. She stepped back a few feet and looked up at the building.

  It was only one story.

  She turned and pointed to the door with a satisfied look.

  “No apartment,” she said. “Where does that door lead?”

  Chuzhoi understood right away. He ordered the SMERSH men to break it down.

  One of them kicked it with the sole of his heavy boot. Zharova would have expected it to come crashing down, but it didn’t move.

  They began to smash the butts of their rifles against the wood, the hinges and the knob.

  All they were able to accomplish was splintering some of the wood along the doorjamb.

  “Stop!” Zharova shouted and ran her finger along the crack they had just made. She pulled away a strip, a thin layer of wood, exposing the steel behind it.

  Chuzhoi and his men began tearing at the wood and soon they had peeled it all away.

  They now stood before a solid steel door that looked like it had been put there when the building was constructed. The hinges wouldn’t break, the knob wouldn’t yield, so they attacked the brick surrounding the door.

  “This should do it,” Chuzhoi said, producing an F-1 limonka grenade from his field jacket. He placed it along the lower edge of the door and pulled the pin.

  They ran around the side of the building and put their fingers in their ears.

  The blast shook the ground and the building. Returning to the door, they saw that the solid steel door, while scorched, was undamaged. The surrounding brick, however, was blasted apart. The men began pulling the loose bricks out until there was a hole big enough to climb through. Zharova ran to the truck and got a flashlight.

  After climbing through the hole one by one, they were now in a dark, narrow corridor that sloped down with a steep grade. Zharova shined her light ahead and guessed that the corridor passed below ground level by the time it reached the rear of the building. That’s why she didn’t notice it when she checked behind the building. Whatever this passage led to, it was underground.

  They walked, single file, following the beam of Zharova’s flashlight. At least a hundred yards down, the light bounced off metal straight ahead. It was two more steel doors, locked and blocking the way. Chuzhoi and his men set about trying to dismantle them.

  21

  Schloss Grasberg

  July, 1945

  The castle garden was the first sign that war had indeed affected the Salzkammergut region of Austria. A long rectangle with stone paths that radiated out from a circular pool, what was once tended by a staff of gardeners had long been neglected. Shrubs and grass were overgrown, topiaries had abandoned their careful shapes and the pool’s water was green with algae.

  DeLuca pulled the car onto the gravel in front of Schloss Grasberg’s cathedral-like entrance. Two tall sandstone spires cast shadows that reached the far end of the garden.

  “It’s open,” Clark noticed. The heavy wooden door stood ajar in the Gothic arch entrance, a laughing gargoyle sitting atop the keystone.

  Clark and DeLuca got out of the car and approached the doorway, Clark taking his Colt 1911 out of its holster. For the first time since setting foot in Europe, he cocked the hammer.

  DeLuca pushed the door open and stuck his head in.

  “Herr von Weiding?” he asked. There was no reply but the echo of his voice off stone. They went inside.

  The entranceway opened up to the castle’s great hall with dark wooden posts and beams giving it a rustic look. One of the long walls contained a fireplace tall enough to stand in, a few half-burned logs laying cold inside. Arranged around the fireplace were several wooden settees and two armchairs.

  Seated in the armchairs were a man and a woman, both dead.<
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  The man, slumped over the armrest, wore a bright red uniform tunic with a gold sash across the front and a chest-full of medals. When he saw the back eyepatch, Clark knew it was von Weiding. His wife, dressed in an ivory lace gown and elbow-length white satin gloves, sat upright in the chair, a diamond necklace glittering in the sunlight that streamed in from windows above. Her sightless eyes stared into the fireplace.

  On a table between them, an opened bottle of French champagne and two glasses stood next to a brown bottle with a label that read ‘Zyanid.’

  Cyanide.

  “We found him,” DeLuca said. “That was easy.”

  The odor of decomposition hit Clark, wafting across the cavernous room. He and DeLuca each held a sleeve across their nose and began the search of the castle.

  The first room they checked was von Weiding’s study, off the great hall. It was a wood paneled room with another enormous fireplace, but the hearth was blocked by wooden crates stacked to the ceiling. Several showed ‘A.H., Linz’ stenciled on the side, like so many like them at Altaussee. Others had ‘E.R.R.’ on them, but none were marked ‘H.G.’. Though Clark knew these crates could be full of Vermeers, Dürers or Rembrandts, he left them and moved on. DeLuca followed with a quizzical look, but said nothing.

  At the opposite end of the castle’s great hall was a long hallway that led to the living quarters. Clark opened every door, half-expecting a sight like the Kemenate at Neuschwanstein—bedroom after bedroom stuffed with treasures.

  The rooms were empty.

  They came to the kitchen where dirty dishes, pots and pans were stacked everywhere, another sign that servants had long since departed.

  Pressing on, Clark was beginning to feel that the hope he had harbored since Paris—that he could discover an unknown Manet amongst the chaos and ruin—was a foolish dream.

  Another door beyond the kitchen opened to a storage room with yet more ‘A.H., Linz’ crates. Still no ‘H.G.’

  Four metal filing cabinets stood on the far wall, covering its width. The only light came in from a dingy leaded-glass casement window. In the half-light, Clark opened a drawer in one of the filing cabinets and saw photographs of artworks and several photo albums, no doubt a catalog for Hitler’s perusal. He knew all of this was a good find, especially with the Russians closing in on the area. He didn't care. This was his last lead on the Manet and he was feeling let down by his own expectations.

  “Jim,” DeLuca said, pointing to the wall behind the filing cabinets.

  “What?” Clark asked, looking the wall over. Whatever DeLuca was seeing, he couldn’t spot it.

  “The mortar,” DeLuca replied. “It’s lighter on that wall than the rest of the room.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I spotted it right away after all those summers helping my Dad. That wall is new,” he said, waiting for Clark to catch on. “A new wall in an old castle and in a room full of stolen art?”

  Clark nodded. “It’s a false wall.”

  “I don’t have any tools in the car,” DeLuca said. “But there’s probably something around here we could use to pick out the mortar and take it down.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Clark said with a dismissive wave. “Once we get to the Munich collecting point, we can send someone to get all this stuff. We can’t fit any of it in the Mercedes anyway.”

  Then it struck him.

  Von Weiding already had more than a dozen crates full of art sitting out in the open, Clark thought. And not just any crates—ones earmarked for Hitler himself. If he has something hidden behind a false wall, it must really be special.

  Like art set aside for von Weiding’s idol, Hermann Goering.

  “Forget what I said!” Clark exclaimed, running out of the room. “There’s got to be something in the kitchen we can use!”

  The underground tunnel was now musty and damp, but Zharova was glad the slope had leveled out, making the walk on the slippery concrete easier. She had fallen twice already—the second time she had almost broken her flashlight. Now and then the beam would flicker out until she shook it to bring the light on again.

  “How far do you think we’ve gone?” she asked Chuzhoi.

  He shrugged. “Maybe a hundred meters total. Thirty or forty since that last set of doors.”

  Opening the two doors inside the tunnel had proven much more difficult than the one on the outside of the building. Chuzhoi carried another grenade, but it was too dangerous to use inside the tunnel, so his men had nothing to dismantle the steel doors with but rifle butts and combat knives. They had done it, though it had taken nearly an hour and resulted in bloodied hands and splintered Pepesha stocks.

  “We must be getting closer,” Zharova muttered.

  “Closer to what?” one of the SMERSH men asked, drawing a sharp look from Chuzhoi.

  “People don’t build secret tunnels with locked steel doors unless they have something valuable to hide,” Zharova replied.

  At that, all the SMERSH men let out a groan, Chuzhoi included.

  “What?” Zharova asked, confused. “All I said was … ”

  Then she saw it.

  Ten meters ahead, another set of steel doors blocked the way.

  Clark and DeLuca used pieces of the von Weiding’s silver set to dig mortar out from between the stones. The mortar was mostly dry, but not cured enough that they couldn’t scrape it out with spoons and knives. They had pulled one of the filing cabinets away from the wall and were trying to take two chest-high stones out of the wall.

  “One or two ought to do it,” DeLuca said. “If we can push them in or lever them out, we should be able to pull the rest down by hand.”

  “Let’s try out and not in,” Clark replied. “We don’t know what’s in there or how well it’s protected. I don’t want to push a stone through a canvas or on top of a delicate sculpture.”

  “Good point, though it’s going to be harder that way, and slower going. We don’t have a pry bar or tongs to pull the stone out.”

  “Understood.” Clark held up the spoon he was using, now bent in half. “The lady of the house won’t mind us ruining her silverware—we can figure it out.”

  Zharova tried not to let her impatience show. She held the beam of her flashlight steady while the SMERSH men worked on the steel doors. Her redemption could be right on the other side of these doors, or there could be more tunnel, but either way, she sensed something big waiting for her.

  The second set of double doors was proving easier to open. After battering their rifles and fists against the last two, searching for a way to take the doors down, Chuzhoi and his men now knew how to attack the hinges and lock. One man held the point of his combat knife against the hinge pin while Chuzhoi pounded the knife pommel with the butt of his rifle. After a few minutes of smashing, resetting and cursing, the pin popped free.

  Chuzhoi squatted on the floor, taking a break.

  “There better be a pile of gold on the other side of these doors,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow. “And a table set for a feast, and a tub of vodka.”

  Zharova said nothing.

  If there’s another repository behind these doors, she thought. There will be plenty of vodka waiting for you when we return to Vienna.

  DeLuca used a cake server to lever a stone—a little to the left, then a little to the right—back and forth to remove it from the wall. When he had pulled enough of the square gray stone out, he grasped its edges with his fingers and pulled. It slid out of the wall and onto the floor with a thud.

  Clark peered into the hole, but saw only darkness.

  “This wall is no more than a week old,” DeLuca said. “We should be able to … ”

  He reached behind a stone in the wall and pulled. The mortar around it cracked and the stone pulled free. The two of them set to work taking the wall down, stone by stone.

  When the hole was big enough, light penetrated the darkness behind the wall. Clark stuck his head in. The false wall had created a space the w
idth of the storage room and about four feet deep. He saw rolled tapestries on the floor, something wrapped in a blanket, and four wooden crates.

  All four were stenciled with the letters ‘H.G.’

  One was stenciled in red.

  Chuzhoi stood with his palms pressed against the door on the left while one of his men tapped the smashed lock cylinder out. It took three of them to lower the heavy steel slab to the floor. Zharova shined her flashlight into the darkness beyond, afraid there would be yet more tunnel.

  The doors opened up to a wine cellar with walls of stone.

  The SMERSH men began picking through the bottles, laughing and joking about taking personal revenge through drinking the fascists’ champagne.

  The cellar’s stone steps led to a wooden door at the top. Zharova was less interested in the wine than she was in understanding what this place was. The men complained as she brought the light with her up the stairs. One took a candle from his pocket and lit it to read the labels on the bottles.

  She put her hand on the ornate iron doorknob, then froze when she heard sounds coming from the other side. It was faint, but it sounded like the thudding of stone upon stone.

  And voices.

  “Hurry!” Clark shouted. He began pulling stones as hard as he could. He felt a muscle pull in his shoulder, but he didn’t care. “It’s here!”

  DeLuca helped him until the hole was big enough for Clark to step inside the wall.

  Clark picked up the rolled tapestries and tossed them through the wall, making room so he could drag the crates across the floor. Like he was working a sliding tile puzzle, Clark maneuvered the crates so the red-stenciled one could be pulled out through the hole. It was a smaller crate, and narrow. Clark was sure it held canvases, maybe only two or three.