Trophies of War Read online

  “Manet came into the shop every now and then. He was known as the Father of the Impressionists, so giving this painting was a way for Manet to thank my grandfather for supporting the younger artists.

  She paused and closed her eyes, like she was seeing the painting again in her mind.

  “The painting was three purple flowers and a lemon. The flowers were in a glass vase on a table with a white tablecloth and the lemon was on a silver plate. When I was born, my grandfather gave it to my parents as a gift. It hung in my bedroom, this beautiful painting by a great French artist, was hanging there just for me.”

  Florette opened her eyes.

  “My father’s nicknames for me came from that painting—he called me Little Flower. When I was bad he called me Little Lemon. Other than some clothes, it was the only thing I brought with me when we left Paris for Larchant.”

  She paused, but Lyon didn’t move or say a word. It had been just the two of them when he was growing up, and they had had conversations about many things, but she had never told him this story.

  “Over the next two years things got worse,” Florette continued. “The puppet Vichy regime cooperated with the Germans in coming after the Jews. Police came to our house and confiscated our telephone and radio. Soon we had to wear yellow stars, ride in the last car of the Metro, my father’s business was harassed … It went on and on.

  “Then one day in July, I believe it was 1942, word spread that the police were arresting Jews. Not the Gestapo—this was the French police. I remember my mother was terrified, but again my father tried to tell us all it was nothing to be worried about. He said everything was in order with his shop—he had registered it as a Jewish-owned business as required. There was no other reason why Jews should be arrested if everything was in order, he told us.

  “What he didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine, was that they were arresting thousands of us and that there was no criminal or legitimate reason for it. Men, women and children were being taken from their homes with just the clothes on their backs. The Nazis demanded it and the police complied.

  “Well, that day my brothers had knocked a boule onto the kitchen floor and were playing ‘bread football.’ My mother was furious and, despite her fears about the rumors, she sent me to the boulangerie to get another loaf for dinner. It was just around the corner from our house on the rue des Rosiers. Maybe it took me fifteen minutes.

  “When I came home, Mr. Bailly from next door rushed out onto the sidewalk as I put my hand on our front door. He grabbed me around the waist and dragged me, whoosh, right into his house and slammed the door.

  “He told me they were all gone. The police had come and taken my father, my mother and my brothers. Along with all the other Jews in the neighborhood, they were lined up in the street. Men, women and children were separated. They were all put on buses and driven away. The whole thing was done while I walked to rue Pavée to buy a loaf of bread.

  “Mr. Bailly said that while my family was being rounded up in the street, four policemen were in our house. He had heard them ransacking the place. The two houses were right up against each other, so he heard everything. As the buses drove away, the policemen came out with candlesticks, silverware, and as many paintings as they could carry. As soon as he told me about the paintings, I jumped up and tried to run next door. I had to see if they had taken my Manet. He blocked the door and shoved me to the floor.

  “ ‘Stupid girl!’ he yelled. ‘Do you want them to get you, too?’

  “I spent the next few days hiding in his house, then being shuffled off to hide in another house and then another for weeks.”

  Florette paused and looked out the window. Lyon wondered if she was imagining her old Paris neighborhood beyond the glass.

  “I don’t remember any of those people from those other houses—but I remember Mr. Bailly. He was an old man by then, bent over and with silly, old-fashioned pince-nez eyeglasses on a red ribbon, but that day I remember him being as strong as a bear when he grabbed me and when he pushed me down. I remember being shocked by it. I cried for days. I wanted to go to the police station to find out where my family was. I wanted to talk to other neighbors to see what they knew. Mr. Bailly kept me locked up in that house. I threatened to scream, but he gagged me and tied me to a chair. I hated him. I hated him for years, especially after the other families that hid me were so kind, treating me like the sad little girl I was. I thought, why did he have to be so mean? But he saved my life.

  “No one wanted to tell me what had happened, just that my family was gone and not coming back. I found out later that they had been taken with thousands of other Jews to the Vélodrome d’Hiver—the Vel’ d’Hiv they called it—a cycling stadium in the 15th arrondissement, near the Eiffel Tower. They were kept there for a few days then sent to one of the transit camps at Drancy or Pithiviers and then probably on to Auschwitz and the gas chambers.”

  The movers had finished with the boxes and most of the furniture. Lyon and his mother sat at the dining room table as the apartment emptied out around them, not moving as Florette’s seventy year-old story unfolded.

  “You know the story about how your father and I met,” she said. “Both of us were Jewish children being hidden by Gentiles, eventually meeting up in Toulouse and then further south as part of a plan to get us out of the country. Robert and I were on the same ship out of Marseilles, sailing with twenty other children to Halifax. We were the lucky ones who had Québécois relatives to take us in—Canada hardly accepted any Jewish refugees, even children.

  “By coincidence, we were both sent here to the Snowden neighborhood and met up again in high school. Even after we were married while your father was at university we never talked about what had happened before we met. It was as if our history had started in Toulouse.

  “It was when I was pregnant with you that we finally spoke of it. We were picking a name for you and I said I wanted you to be named David, after my father. Robert asked me to tell him about my father—I never had. I was twenty at the time, only a dozen years or so after my ordeal—but finally enough time had passed that I was ready to talk about it. I told him all about my brothers and how everyone thought they were twins even though they were two years apart. I told him about my mother and her curly brown hair that was like a big cloud around her head, and I told him about my father and how he called me Little Flower or Little Lemon, after my painting.

  “It made me so sad to talk about them, but it was also good to tell your father. I never stopped thinking about them, of course. I still do. But the worst part was that I couldn’t remember any of their faces, just little details like my mother’s hair or my father’s mustache. The painting, though—I could remember everything about it. I could picture it perfectly in my mind. The exact shade of purple Manet used for the flowers, the heavy brushstrokes of yellow on the lemon.

  “I don’t blame your father for what he did. He thought it would be nice to find a copy of my painting and frame it as a present for when you were born, just as my grandfather had done with the original when I was born. But, he couldn’t find one. He searched every book on Manet, but couldn’t even find a mention of a picture of purple flowers and a lemon. It makes sense, since Manet gave it directly to my grandfather—it wasn’t like it was in a museum first. So, your father found a picture of another Manet flower painting in a magazine and had it framed. It was hanging on the wall just there behind you when we brought you home from the hospital.

  “It made me too upset. I was finally able to talk about my family, but seeing that picture … It wasn’t my Manet so it felt like even more of a reminder of what I had lost, not any sort of happy memory. I took it down and put it in my old steamer trunk in the basement. It’s been there since you were just two days old.”

  3

  Montreal

  Lyon was quiet the rest of the day, not knowing quite what to say after hearing his mother’s story. He had known about her family being lost in the Holocaust, about her escape from Franc
e and how she met his father, but just now hearing the story in such a detailed way, it made it more real. Like the lived experience it was, not just facts of history.

  He had put the framed picture back in the trunk with all the photographs and his schoolwork, but had the movers deliver it here to her room at the Résidence Mont Royal. Lyon stood in the room while his mother was meeting some of the staff down the hall. They called it her ‘orientation’ but it was nothing more than a forced march through the facility, meeting doctors, nurses and fellow residents. He pulled the trunk over to the couch.

  This is the time in her life when she should be reminiscing about happy memories, he thought. These pictures should be out where she can see them. I’ll have to buy some albums for her to put them in.

  Lyon sat down on the couch and lifted the trunk lid, moving a stack of photos to get another look at the framed magazine page. He pulled out his phone and took a picture of it.

  If her painting was stolen, shouldn’t it still be out there somewhere? he wondered. If Manet was the “Father of Impressionism” then any painting by him had to be worth a lot of money.

  Lyon did a web search on his phone for ‘Manet painting sale.’ He scrolled through the results.

  “Holy shit,” he said aloud.

  One sold in the Eighties for $26 million. More recently, a self portrait had fetched $33 million.

  Just then, Florette walked into the room.

  “Maman,” he said, jumping up. “Have you ever tried to find out what happened to your painting?”

  She gave him an uncomprehending look.

  “Have I ever what?”

  Goddamn it. How is that she can talk for an hour about things that happened seventy years ago, but ...

  He stopped himself.

  “Your Manet, maman …” Lyon paused, thinking. What the hell. Why not? “I’m going to try to find your painting.”

  “No,” she replied. “You leave the past alone.”

  “But it could be worth millions!” Lyon shouted.

  “No,” Florette repeated. She lowered herself into an armchair and turned to look out a window. “You brought me to this place, Robert. You got what you wanted. I think you should leave now.”

  “I’m David,” Lyon muttered through gritted teeth. He waited for a response, got none, and left.

  From where he sat, looking out his hotel room window, Lyon could see Montreal’s skyline lighting up as dusk turned to night. He sipped his mini-bar scotch and put his feet up on the desk. Most people saw Montreal as a romantic city—a piece of the Old World right next door, but it was different for him. He had plenty of fond memories of his old neighborhood and his friends—trying to climb the cross on Mont Royal or getting pub-goers to give them sips of beer on Crescent Street, but mostly he had just wanted to get out. While his friends went to McGill or Université de Montréal, Lyon went to the States to Boston University. He met Sarah there and never looked back.

  Sarah.

  Lyon unconsciously rubbed the smooth spot on his ring finger and wondered what she was doing now. He snapped himself out of it and opened his laptop.

  He pulled up a browser, searched for ‘World War 2 art theft’ and got 45 million results. Clicking through the links he quickly got the sense that Nazi looting operations were massive. Site after site documented the millions of objects stolen by the Nazis—from Jews in every occupied land, from Polish, French, Dutch and other museums, the lists went on. Several databases had been compiled of known artworks and their current locations. Even seventy years later, people were still trying to find out what had happened to their family’s property. He searched a few databases for works by Manet, but nothing came up suggesting that his mother’s painting was on any list, or even that anyone had ever heard of it in the first place.

  Lyon just found it hard to believe that such a valuable work could be lying around after all these years without someone making its existence public.

  Manets are going for tens of millions of dollars, he thought. I can’t imagine that a French policeman or some Nazi functionary just has my mother’s painting hanging over their mantlepiece. Hell, by now it should be with their children or grandchildren. Someone should have figured out what they had.

  After more reading, Lyon realized that art restitution was a big undertaking, still after all these years. In New York, there was a Holocaust Claims Processing Office dedicated to seeking the return of assets stolen during the Nazi period. There were law firms dedicated to tracing and returning art and other property to Holocaust victims.

  Lyon looked at some of the online forms for initiating a claim.

  Description of property.

  Location of property.

  Property Address.

  City where property is currently located.

  Last known owner.

  It was clear that all of these resources were for people who had already located their stolen art and wanted to start a legal process to get it back. Some of the stories he read were about people finding their missing art for sale at auction or hanging on a wall at a museum. But what about people who didn’t know where their art was?

  Lyon closed his laptop, pulled another scotch out of the mini-bar and tried to drink his way to sleep, hoping that the dream wouldn’t come.

  It did.

  4

  Old Saybrook, Connecticut

  A coffee shop would have been a more sensible place to meet his lawyer, but Lyon wasn’t feeling sensible.

  Let’s just sign the damn papers and be done with it.

  He took the last sip of his beer and tossed the can belowdecks, stretching out in the cockpit of the Shark Byte. He heard someone clomping their way down the dock and knew it was Bob Franks.

  “Hey, Bob,” he said without looking, his face turned toward the late morning sun.

  “Dave,” Franks replied, coming aboard. “Don’t get up or anything.”

  The final version of the contract was done and they reviewed the changes as an osprey flew low over the water just off the starboard bow.

  Franks pointed to a spot on the last page.

  “And there’s the final figure.”

  Lyon grunted.

  “A pretty good payday,” Franks said. “Once you sign this, we send it over for Doug’s signature, then it’s on to Palo Alto and you should have the funds wired within a few hours.”

  “OK,” Lyon said with no emotion.

  Franks was quiet for a moment. He held up a pen, pointed to the signature line and held the papers while Lyon signed. Franks put the contract back in his briefcase without a word.

  “How are you doing, buddy?” he asked.

  “Fine,” Lyon replied.

  “Don’t give me that ‘fine’ bullshit,” Franks shot back. “You’re not fine, and you shouldn’t be fine. No one would be fine in your position.”

  Lyon sat up and shrugged.

  “I guess the way I’d put it is that the burden hasn’t gone away, but it’s getting a little easier to bear,” he said.

  Franks nodded.

  “That sounds about right … Look,” he said, patting his briefcase. “After this is done, you’re not going to be buying an island or flying a private jet to Monte Carlo, but you did good. Anytime you sell a business for a price with two commas in it, you ought to feel proud. You should take some time and find something to do next that will make you happy.”

  Lyon gave a mock salute.

  “Will do, coach,” he replied.

  Franks got up to go.

  “And save the boat for weekends,” he suggested. “Get yourself a goddamn apartment like a normal person.”

  Lyon sat in the cockpit for a while after Franks left, watching another osprey come in for a landing on a man-made nesting platform among the cattails.

  A normal person, he repeated to himself. Well, I don’t have to get up and go to work like a normal person. Not yet, anyway. I also don’t have to go home to my family like a normal person.

  The bird held a si
lvery fish in her claws and tore chunks from it to feed her chicks.

  Lyon’s mind turned back to his mother’s painting. If she didn’t care about finding it, why should that stop him from looking?

  What if I could sell it for $20 million? he wondered. Hell, even $10 million would be great.

  Lyon went below and opened his laptop on the table. There was just enough WiFi signal from the marina that he was able to get online. He did some more reading about Holocaust-era assets, Nazi art looting and restitution, trying to find a story similar to his mother’s. He couldn’t find any accounts of people searching for missing art and then seeking restitution. It seemed like most of the returned artworks had been either the large collections of famous families like the David-Weills or the Rothschilds or an ordinary person just getting lucky when their missing painting appeared in an auction or at a museum. Finding the Manet was going to be the hard part. Then he could worry about contacting a lawyer to initiate restitution, whatever that process entailed.

  Lyon knew how software worked and how businesses were run, but all he knew about art was what he remembered from his freshman Art History class at BU. Which was to say that he had a hazy recollection that there was such a thing as Impressionism.

  He drummed his fingers on the table, thinking about how he could possibly launch an international art investigation. As he did, he noticed that several of the articles about art looting and recovery were all written by the same person—a journalist named Elizabeth Krasner. He looked at the articles again, scrolling down, looking for an email address.

  There. He copied the address and sent the reporter an email telling the story of her mother’s painting, what happened to her and her family in France—everything he knew. He also attached the picture he took with his phone of the magazine-page Manet.

  Lyon clicked send and sat watching the screen for a moment. He knew better than to expect an immediate reply, but he was starting to get excited. He waited a few more minutes, flipping over to a news site to check the score from last night’s Red Sox game, pretending that he wasn’t waiting for the new email notification to pop up.