Trophies of War Page 21

  The three Russians stopped among the trees, coming as close to the castle as they dared. They watched the two Americans walk around the outside of the building, disappearing behind the far side.

  Now, The Anvil told himself.

  He jabbed one of the agents in the shoulder with his finger.

  “You, go around the front, there,” he ordered. The surprised look on the man’s face showed his confusion at taking orders from a mafia hitman. Before either could object, The Anvil grabbed the other agent by the sleeve and pulled him in the opposite direction. “You are with me.”

  The FSB men seemed to understand that the Anvil was planning a trap—they would come at the Americans from two directions on the far side of the castle.

  That was not his plan.

  “Any idea what the penalties are for trespassing in Austria?” Lyon asked.

  “Relax,” Beth replied. “We’ll just play the dumb tourist card if we get caught.”

  Lyon grabbed the stone ledge outside a window and pulled himself up to look in the window. It was a bedroom. So were the next two. They came to the last window before another long stretch of blank stone.

  “This should be it,” Beth said.

  Lyon hoisted himself up again, thinking about bourbon again as his hands throbbed. He peered into the room. It was a home theater—a flat screen television covered almost the entire wall on one side faced by three rows of leather stadium seats. No sign of the false wall or anything else from 1945.

  As soon as the first FSB man stepped out of view, The Anvil snapped a pencil-sized branch from the trunk of a fir tree.

  In a single motion, he stepped behind the other agent, one hand covering the man’s mouth while the other stabbed the jagged end of the branch into his throat. He aimed behind the windpipe, hoping to puncture jugular and carotid alike.

  He pushed the branch through until the tip came out the other side and then pulled it back in a quick sawing motion, noting with satisfaction the arterial blood that spurted from both wounds.

  With a quick choking cry, the FSB agent fell to the leaf-covered ground.

  Careful to avoid the blood, The Anvil reached for the man’s waistband and pulled his Yarygin PYa pistol from its holster. He hefted the 9mm gun in his hand and found the safety, flipping it down into the ‘ready to fire’ position.

  Again, he wished he had his knives, and not this loud gun which would attract attention if he had to use it.

  I will only need it for the other agent—not for the Americans, he thought. Especially not the man. I will smash his skull in with my fists.

  As The Anvil was about to step out of the woods, the other FSB agent appeared, running between the sports cars at the castle’s entrance. He darted around the near corner just as the two Americans emerged from the rear of the stone building.

  Beth spoke to her friend Michael on the phone while Lyon checked out one of the cars parked in front of Schloss Grasberg. When he was negotiating the sale of his company, he had often fantasized about buying some impractical sports car as a present to himself. These cars looked like he might not have any money left if he bought one.

  “ … not that we expected to find anything after sixty years,” Beth was saying. “Yeah, go ahead, I’ll wait.”

  She walked over to Lyon and tapped the screen to put Michael on speakerphone.

  “OK,” he said. “After Zharova writes about finding American soldiers in the castle, the next few pages are lists of what she found stored there and how they loaded it all up into their truck to drive back to Vienna. Then she says ‘I was suspicious of the Americans, especially these two with their flimsy story about Nazi hunting.’

  “ ‘So far, everywhere I’ve gone, with the exception of the Dresden Gallery in Cotta, Americans have been there first. At Schloss Grasberg, they did get here first, but I stopped them before they could make off with the treasures. I let them go, but then I found the opened crate with a painting missing and it made me uneasy. Should I send Chuzhoi in the truck to chase them and search their car again? Should we interrogate them?’ ”

  Zharova stood at a window in Schloss Grasberg’s great hall, looking out over the road that led down the hill toward Altmünster. She couldn’t get the opened crate out of her mind.

  Had there been three canvases inside or only two? It doesn’t seem possible that the two Americans managed to smuggle a painting out with them. They weren’t carrying anything and Chuzhoi’s men had searched their car.

  If they had managed to take that one canvas, what was so special about it? Why that one work out of all the others in this castle?

  The road to Altmünster curved left behind a small forest. The Americans’ black Mercedes had turned and disappeared behind the trees several minutes ago. Zharova watched the stretch of road where it came out from behind the woods, waiting to see the car come back into view.

  It was taking far too long to come out the other side.

  Something was wrong.

  “Chuzhoi!” Zharova shouted. Even with the cache of artworks she would be sending back to Moscow, she had an uneasy feeling about those two Americans and what they might have taken.

  Chuzhoi appeared.

  “How much longer until your men have returned with the truck?” Zharova asked.

  Chuzhoi looked at his watch and shrugged.

  “What’s the hurry?” he asked. “It’s a beautiful day, we have a full wine cellar … ”

  “It’s those two Americans,” she replied. “They’re up to something. We need that truck so you can go after them and bring them back to me.”

  Zharova was about to suggest that Chuzhoi go after his men and motivate them when the long convertible re-appeared on the road, heading out of the forest onto a straight stretch of road that passed a white stone farmhouse. The Americans weren’t speeding down the pavement, but were tooling along like tourists.

  Chuzhoi pointed at the car.

  “If they’re up to something, they seem to be making a poor job of it.”

  Zharova said nothing.

  Am I just being paranoid?

  As DeLuca drove, Clark turned his head just enough to look back at Schloss Grasberg, but not make it look like he was looking. No one was following them and there was nothing ahead but open road and a farm by the roadside.

  “Okay,” DeLuca said. “Now can you tell me what you found that was so important?”

  Clark smiled and took hold of a corner of the brown paper, the same corner he had pulled back before tossing the painting out the castle window—just enough to catch a glimpse of the canvas.

  “It’s incredible … ”

  Matthias sat in his upstairs bedroom, waiting for his mother to finish her chores in the barn. He had already collected all the eggs and weeded the potato patch. Soon it would be time to help prepare dinner.

  The only food they had to eat was what they could grow on their small farm. With the farmhands all gone, and his father long dead in the war, it was only Matthias and his mother left. There was a limit to what the two of them could do and so they were often hungry. Matthias was sick of eggs.

  Upon turning ten last fall, he had been drafted into the Hitler Youth, which had provided him with some extra food to send home. But now that the war was over, it was back to what they could provide for themselves.

  Matthias’ stomach growled and he forced himself to stop thinking about food.

  He sat at his open window, watching the Mercedes staff car come closer, its top down. He could see the two men inside—American soldiers. Matthias remembered his lessons on how to identify enemy soldiers by their uniforms. These were definitely Americans.

  The car got near enough to the farmhouse that Matthias could see their faces. The tall, lanky one in the passenger seat smiled at the strong-looking soldier who was driving. A private? Yes, the driver was a private.

  The passenger looked like an officer, but Matthias couldn’t tell his rank. Yes, the smiling one was definitely an officer.

  Ma
tthias leaned on the windowsill, watching them come closer.

  He pushed his right shoulder forward, anticipating the recoil, and pulled the trigger on his Karabiner 98k rifle.

  “It’s incredible,” Clark said. “I can’t believe it … ”

  He held the unwrapped painting in his hands and was about to show it to DeLuca when his mind registered three things simultaneously: a loud crack, the sight of the sky where the road had just been and a feeling like he’d been kicked in the chest.

  Then … pain. Pain and confusion.

  Thoughts came and went in rapid flashes.

  Why am I slumped over onto Paul?

  I can’t move.

  Is that my blood?

  I’ve been shot.

  If I’m here to realize that I’ve been shot, I’m okay.

  Now he felt like he’d been running, and couldn’t catch his breath. He tried to take a deep breath, but felt like he was sucking through a straw.

  No, I’m not okay.

  DeLuca was wide-eyed and pale, yelling something and struggling to keep the car on the road as he floored the accelerator.

  No, not okay.

  If I’m dying, this is it.

  This is the end.

  No sense fussing about it now.

  I thought it would be worse, but it’s not so bad.

  Then—a flash of Lilly telling his daughters that he would not be coming home.

  Oh … Lilly … oh, no … my girls …

  No …

  The world went gray.

  Then black.

  Zharova watched the black Mercedes careen across the road, at one point nearly rolling over as it went off the pavement into a ditch. Only one of the two Americans was visible. She assumed the shot from the farmhouse had hit the other one—the one in charge.

  “We should go down there and clear that farm,” Chuzhoi said, also watching the scene at the bottom of the hill.

  Zharova knew what that meant. Everyone would be killed and burned along with the house and barn. She had seen the small blond head in the upstairs window. She had seen his rifle and the smoke from its barrel.

  Well, I suppose that’s that. No sense in chasing the Americans down now—not worth the trouble. If they snatched something, they can have it.

  “No,” she replied. “We don’t need to pass that way. We will find another way back to Vienna.”

  Chuzhoi looked disappointed, but said nothing as he turned back to readying the artwork for transport.

  24

  Altmünster, Austria

  “ … and that’s it,” Michael explained over the speakerphone. “Everything after that in the diary is about taking the art from Schloss Grasberg back to Vienna and putting it on a train to Moscow with some other objects Zharova found along the way. Plus all the usual stuff about sticking it to that Veselovsky guy.”

  “OK, thanks Michael,” Beth said and tapped the screen to end the call.

  Lyon slumped against the Mercedes, still parked outside the castle.

  “Well, shit,” he exclaimed. “She didn’t send her guys after them, so if they did have the Manet, it’s long gone. And we don’t know who those two American soldiers were. Another dead end.”

  Beth drummed her fingers on the hood.

  “But remember what Zharova said about them. She was suspicious of them and thought they might have been trying to sneak off with some of the art.”

  “And?” Lyon replied. “They could have been souvenir hunters. Lots of that went on all through the war.”

  “Maybe,” Beth allowed. “But from her description it sounded like they knew what they were doing. They didn’t just open the first crate they saw—they picked the red G46 crate. And if your mother’s painting was in there, that’s the one they took. Not the actions of souvenir hunters.”

  Lyon thought for a moment.

  “Monuments Men,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “But we never found anything in the records at the National Archives. If they found the Manet, surely they would have included it in one of their reports.”

  “Maybe not if one of them was shot dead in front of that house down there. And we don’t know what happened to the other one, the driver.”

  They both looked at the farmhouse by the side of the road, its white stone gleaming in the fading daylight. It looked just as it must have in 1945, except for the satellite dish on the long, sloping roof and the modern sedan parked out front.

  “You don’t have to say it. I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Let’s go knock on that farmhouse door. We’ve got nothing to lose.”

  Beth put her hand on the door handle, then froze when she saw the Russian with the tattooed face coming out of the trees.

  “David!” she yelled, pointing.

  Lyon turned around just in time to see another Russian—one of the men from the Ritz Carlton lobby in Moscow— step out from behind a sandstone spire.

  With the two Russians approaching them, both Lyon and Beth scrambled to get into the Mercedes. Diving into the driver’s seat, Beth put her foot on the brake and jabbed the engine start button. The engine came to life and she slammed the shifter lever into Drive.

  The Russians sprinted to the car, both producing pistols which were now aimed at Beth and Lyon. The Russian in the suit shouted something at them. The way he gestured with the gun made it clear he was ordering them out of the car.

  Lyon was about to tell Beth to floor it when the Russians began yelling at each other. The killer from the Beer Tower, his face still bloodied from Altausee, showed no expression as he squeezed the trigger twice, hitting the other Russian—once in the right cheek and again above his left eyebrow.

  He stepped in front of the Mercedes and pointed his gun at Beth through the windshield. He said something in Russian, but again its meaning was clear. Beth slowly put the car back into Park and held up her hands. Lyon did the same.

  The killer came around the driver’s side and opened the door. He trained the gun on Lyon as he grabbed Beth by the hair and pulled her out, tossing her to the ground. He gestured for Lyon to get out.

  Standing beside the car, Lyon looked around for anything that could help him. His first thought was of the other gun —the dead Russian’s—but the body was too far away.

  The Anvil noticed the American’s quick glance.

  I see you. I can read your little rabbit mind.

  He walked over to the dead FSB man and took the pistol from his hand. He stuck it in his waistband and then held the other gun at an angle and began racking the slide, ejecting round after round from the Yarygin, smiling as he did so.

  I don’t need this clumsy weapon to kill you. I won’t be doing it from far away. You will feel my breath on your face as you die.

  When the slide locked open on the empty magazine, he tossed the pistol into the grass. He pulled out the other gun and emptied it too, tossing it into the trees when he finished.

  The Anvil held up his fists in an exaggerated boxer’s pose, smiling broadly.

  Lyon felt almost mesmerized by the man’s giant fists, tattooed across the knuckles with Cyrillic script. Expecting a punch to the face, he was surprised when the bigger man dropped to the ground in a flash and, kicking out with his leg, swept Lyon’s feet out from under him.

  The back of Lyon’s head was the first part of his body to hit the ground. He lay stunned, eyes blinking against the bright sky.

  The Russian’s face appeared above, still smiling that awful smile.

  Beth sat up in the grass and looked at the pistol lying on the ground where the Russian had thrown it. Several rounds were nearby, the brass glinting in the sunlight.

  She made a mental note to thank her old roommate for dragging her to the shooting range when they were at law school.

  Lyon felt the Russian’s hands close around his throat as he leaned in until their noses were touching. He tried to pull the man’s hands off him, but the killer only laughed.

  He couldn’t breathe a
nd his vision was getting foggy.

  Beth picked up the Yarygin. With its slide locked open on an empty magazine, the chamber and barrel were exposed through the ejection port. She picked up a round from the ground and placed it into the chamber.

  Not wanting to make a sound, she held the gun in this open position until she was right behind the Russian, who was straddling Lyon and strangling him.

  With her thumb, she pressed hard on the slide lock lever, snapping it closed with a loud metallic clack.

  The Russian must have known instantly what that sound was because he let go of Lyon’s throat and tried to jump up.

  Beth pointed the gun at the back of his head and pulled the trigger.

  Lyon sat up, catching his breath and rubbing his throat where the Russian hands had been. Beth helped him push the dead man’s heavy body aside. She examined the tattoos on his bloody face.

  “Prison tattoos,” she noted. “Definitely Russian mob.”

  “No shit,” Lyon replied, struggling to his feet.

  Beth put an arm around his shoulders to steady him.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Let’s check out that farmhouse and then get the hell out of here.”

  25

  Altmünster, Austria

  Lyon winced as he rapped his sore knuckles on the dark wooden door. He could hear music coming from inside the house, but couldn’t make it out, just the beat.

  He knocked again. The music stopped.

  A middle-aged woman opened the door, holding a highball glass, ice rattling. She had squinty hazel eyes and gray hair that was cut short in a stylish way.