Trophies of War Page 3

  This is silly, he told himself and pressed the power button.

  The stripers were coming into Long Island Sound with the warming spring water. Lyon stood on the bow of the Shark Byte with a line in the water, looking back to where the river emptied out into the Sound. The lighthouse on the Saybrook breakwater stood out but the rest of the shore was just a green line on the horizon.

  This was the spot where he used to take Sarah and Megan. Sarah would sun herself while he and Megan fished. Lyon was thinking about how Megan must have been five or six when she caught that big blackfish on her Dora the Explorer rod. A sailboat is not a good boat for sport fishing and he had tripped over every winch, handrail and cleat on his way around the boat trying to land the damn thing for her. The look on her face when she saw what had been on the end of her line had made him feel like Super Dad.

  Lyon’s phone trilled, telling him he had a new email. With his free hand, he took it out of his pocket and tapped the screen. It was a reply from Elizabeth Krasner.

  Mr. Lyon,

  Thanks for writing. Your mother’s story is heartbreaking and I can understand why you’d want to try to find her painting for her. Here are some websites that may help you:

  Lyon scanned the list — they were all sites he had happened upon in his web searches.

  Though it pains me to say it, I think the likelihood of your finding your mother’s Manet is very slim. Most art restitution, whether from the Holocaust or just simple theft, only happens once the work has been located. To make matters worse, I’ve done some searching and there is no record of Manet ever painting purple flowers and a lemon such as you described. He was a famous artist while he was alive, so his works are well catalogued. I don’t doubt that your mother had such a painting, but often family legends are just that and when a work’s provenance is researched, the truth is quite different. It could have been a work by an unknown artist or it could have been a fake.

  Not to pile on here, but another possibility is that your mother’s painting could have been destroyed in the war. Many works were lost in the fighting from bombing, fire, wanton destruction, etc.

  All of that said, I think you’re doing a good thing for your mother and I wish you the best of luck.

  Sincerely,

  Beth

  P.S. If you don’t get anywhere with the online resources, you might want to try digging through wartime documents. Since your mother is French, your best bet is to go to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

  Lyon had already thought of all those reasons why he would probably fail, but Beth’s confirmation made it worse. Searching through original documents sounded interesting, but why would French records be in US archives? He tapped Reply and asked her. She must have been online because no sooner had he hit send than the phone beeped again.

  That’s where they keep the records of the Army’s Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section: the Monuments Men.

  -Beth

  6

  Paris, France

  September, 1944

  All 2nd Lieutenant James Clark wanted was a typewriter. Not a tank, a plane or a truck—just a typewriter—but he was having no luck with the Army quartermaster. The two men squared off over a counter in the makeshift office at battalion headquarters.

  “I’m sorry, sir. As I said, without a requisition, I can’t do anything.”

  The quartermaster was a captain, but still he called Clark “sir” as if he was unable to get past the fact that he outranked the much older man with the graying hair. This got under Clark’s skin as it just highlighted that he was a 42 year old man begging a what? … 28 year old? … for a damn typewriter so he could do his job.

  As a member of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section, he technically wasn’t assigned to any Army unit, which made his trips to the quartermaster an exercise in frustration. He could hardly get paper, much less a typewriter. And he could forget about a car or gasoline.

  “And as I said, I don’t have anyone to write requisitions for me. I’m on my own out here. Please, I have hundreds—thousands—of art objects and sites to report on and I can’t do it all with paper and pencil. Look, I have a copy of General Eisenhower’s order right here.” Clark produced a worn, folded-up piece of paper.

  The quartermaster read the document and slid it back across the counter.

  “Sir, this order is about not destroying historical monuments,” he said. “It says nothing about giving out materiel without a requisition.”

  “Oh, for the love of God,” Clark groaned.

  A pudgy major walked in from another room behind the counter. He must have been listening because he nodded at the captain and pointed a thumb at the back room. The younger man looked grateful as he left.

  “Look, Major, all I’m asking for is …” Clark began before the man cut him off.

  “Save it, Lieutenant,” he said and bent down to get something behind the counter. He came up with a wooden box marked ‘Typewriter - Portable’ and pushed it across the counter to Clark.

  “I guess you’ve never heard about vinegar, honey and catching bees?” he asked with a wry look. “Good luck with your Michelangelos.”

  Clark struck a match on the doorjamb and lit a candle on a table just inside his room, electricity being unreliable at the Hôtel Madeleine. He placed his new prized possession on a paper-covered desk and pulled the Royal portable out of its box.

  What a goddamned embarrassment, Clark thought with a sigh. Prostrating myself for a typewriter.

  As the curator of French paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he was used to being an important man. Maybe the common person didn’t know or care who he was, but in the art world, he was respected. He used to have so many requests to attend symposia, sit on panels or give lectures that he had to turn most of them down. Here, he was an annoyance. It was ironic—the war had given him a job that was important and urgent, but everyone treated him like he was just getting in the way.

  Taking a few pieces of airmail paper that he had begged from a group of GIs down in the lobby, he sat down to test the machine with a letter home.

  Dear Lilly,

  So much to tell you now that I have a minute to write it all out. In the fields of Normandy and on the road to Paris I was so busy I never had time to do more than write to let you know that I am fine and thinking of you and the girls.

  I’m sure you’ve heard all about D-Day by now. I was still in England at Shrivenham during the landings, but I followed close behind the fighting and had to get right to work. What a sight! Do you remember the beaches of Bologne-sur-Mer? Imagine that with men, tanks, ships, landing craft, crates, and more crates everywhere! The beaches of Normandy have been turned into a bustling industrial port, but with no place to put anything.

  The destruction is impossible to describe. In many places it is total, in others barely visible. No pattern or reason, just houses and barns blown apart and piles of brick and stone everywhere. This is where I must do my work. The lists of protected sites we provided Bomber Command and the US Army Air Forces seem to have done some good. I have personally seen two cathedrals untouched amid a field of rubble. Many of the smaller churches and historical sites I’ve visited have been in various states from slightly damaged to completely leveled.

  The volume of work is about what I expected: stupefying. I worked on the lists, I know how many sites there are, however in many of the Normandy sectors, I am the only Monuments Man to do the work. I record the condition of what I find, supervise any repairs that must be done right away and do my best to ensure no further damage is done. I quickly learned that putting up “OFF LIMITS – Historic Monument” signs was having no effect, so I started using white tape instead. Our combat engineers use it to indicate unexploded mines. Ha!

  Now that I am in Paris, I am in my element. There are plenty of buildings and historical sites to attend to, but now I have the great museums under my purview. Tomorrow I start at the Louvre! I will be cataloguing any damag
e done to the museum and the collections and documenting the deeds of the Nazis. I hear stories about them and what they have done to the cultural patrimony of this great country and it’s shocking. War is one thing, but the Germans have been stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.

  As Ike said, we are fighting a war for our civilization and that’s what I think about when things become overwhelming. Without someone to protect these works, what civilization will be left for our four girls and their generation?

  Please kiss the children for me and know that I miss you all terribly. Everyone is saying the war will be over by Christmas. I hope they’re right and that I’ll get to see you soon.

  Love,

  Jim

  Clark folded up the letter and went to bed. He dreamed of chasing his daughters around their backyard in Brookline while Lilly hung wash on the line. They were all laughing in the sunshine with the thumping of artillery in the distance.

  The last time Clark had visited the Louvre, it was with Lilly. She had joked that an art museum curator taking his wife to the Louvre on their honeymoon was like a plumber taking his bride to a boiler room. What a honeymoon it had been. London, Normandy, Paris, Venice, Rome—like the Grand Tour of a century ago, courtesy of Lilly’s parents.

  Walking up to the Louvre now, Clark smiled as he remembered Lilly feigning interest in the Pre-Raphaelites and the rise of realism. Midway through his lesson on Courbet, out of the corner of his eye, he had caught her stifling a yawn. He had pretended not to see it, and she had pretended not to be bored. Still, he had stopped lecturing. Even today, twelve years later, Clark wondered what it was that made the pretty Irish redhead from Dorchester pick him. Long and lanky, he barely filled out a suit—or an Army uniform. When they read Washington Irving in grade school, he had lived in fear that the other children would catch on that he looked like a pale, blonde Ichabod Crane.

  Like most of central Paris, the Louvre saw little damage during the German occupation and the recent fighting. As he walked across the main court, Clark’s eyes scanned the palatial exterior of the museum and saw nothing more than bullet holes here and there.

  Inside, though there was no physical damage to the great museum, to Clark the view was depressing nonetheless. Of the hundreds of thousands of paintings, sculptures, drawings and other objects that he knew were part of the Louvre’s collection, not one was visible. In 1939, museums all over Western Europe had evacuated their collections out of fear that war would destroy their priceless treasures. At the Louvre, anything that could be physically transported was carefully packaged up and sent to repositories around the country.

  Clark walked down the long hall of the Grande Galerie and, even though the knew that the missing works had been removed for their own protection, he was still shocked by the sight of empty frames leaning up against the wall and rectangular marks where paintings had hung, their names written in chalk on the wall. Now his task would be to ensure that all the evacuated works were safe and accounted for and that the museum was ready to reclaim them.

  Clark noticed a civilian standing in the gallery, looking at him. The man had black hair brushed back from his forehead and wore a pressed blue suit.

  “You are an American?” the man asked in French.

  “Yes,” Clark replied.

  The man nodded. “I watched you come in and I see you are saddened by what you see here, so I think you and I will be friends.” He extended his hand. “I am Jacques Jaujard. Director of National Museums.”

  “Ah! Monsieur Jaujard. I am Lieutenant James Clark.”

  Jaujard pointed a thumb at the wall behind him.

  “Let’s bring her home,” he said and indicated for Clark to follow him deeper into the museum.

  Inside the small, empty square on the wall was written ‘La Joconde’, the name the French had given to the Mona Lisa.

  Jaujard and his staff kept meticulous records on what had happened to each object that had been removed five years ago, making Clark’s job much easier as he wrote his reports on the status and current location of the Louvre’s collection. After a few days of this work, while Clark was sharing a cigarette break with Jaujard, he told the museum director of a rumor he had heard from a fellow Monuments Man.

  “Our Office of Strategic Services is forming a special unit to investigate Nazi art looting in occupied countries,” he said. “The OSS wants to collect evidence against prominent Nazis and do whatever we can to recover stolen works.”

  Jaujard leaned against a filing cabinet and pulled on his cigarette.

  “What they’re most worried about,” Clark continued, “is that the Nazis may be sending art, gold and other assets abroad to drag the war out or finance a Nazi Resistance after the war is over.”

  Jaujard nodded, but said nothing.

  Clark was puzzled by the museum director’s silence.

  “I’m still here to help protect French art—nothing’s going to change that,” he said. “But we might be able to accomplish both goals: safeguard art and monuments and prevent the Nazis from building a secret war chest. This could be a way for us to help defeat them.”

  Jaujard stubbed out his cigarette in a heavy glass ashtray.

  “It’s time I took you to the Jeu de Paume and introduced you to Rose Valland,” he said.

  The Jeu de Paume Museum, built during the reign of Napoleon III as a royal tennis court, stood at the end of the Tuileries Garden. As Clark and Jaujard walked the short distance from the Louvre, past the barbed wire-lined trenches the Germans had dug in the historic garden, Clark could see the Place de la Concorde through the trees, with its hieroglyphic-covered Luxor Obelisk. In the distance, the top of the Eiffel Tower was visible against the summer sky.

  On the way, Jaujard explained that during the four-year occupation, the Jeu de Paume had become the central art clearing house for the Nazis. Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi party’s chief ideologue, had, on Hitler’s orders, formed a special organization, the Einsatztab Reichsleiter Rosenberg dedicated to looting the cultural property of Jews in the occupied countries. In France, the ERR had used the Jeu de Paume as its collection point, processing thousands of works from the great collections of the Rothschilds, David-Weills and other families. Works by every known artist passed through its doors: Vermeer, Dürer, Cézanne, Goya, Rembrandt, Titian—the list went on.

  Art that was considered by the Nazis to be ‘degenerate’ was given special treatment: burned if they were the work of Jews or set aside if they had market value. The ‘degenerate’ room of the Jeu de Paume housed great works by Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne and others as they waited to be sold on the open market. Nazi officials, especially Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, used the proceeds to buy art for their personal collections. If the Nazis liked the works plundered by the ERR, they simply took them home.

  “Unbelievable,” Clark said, shaking his head.

  “Yes,” Jaujard replied. “They would come to Paris and act like any other tourist, coming to see the art museum. Everything on display was stolen, of course. Or, ‘ownerless’ as they would call it, since Jews were prohibited by law from owning property. Agents for Hitler himself would have railcars full of packed crates sent off to Germany. Here we are.”

  They had reached the front of the long, rectangular building. Jaujard held open the glass door and they went in.

  Rose Valland, the curator Jaujard had selected to work with the Germans, was an older woman with round glasses and dark hair pulled back into a bun. As Jaujard made introductions and they engaged in some small talk about museum acquaintances they had in common, Valland maintained a serious demeanor. She never smiled and her dark eyes bore into the two men as she spoke to them. Standing in the sunlit hall of the museum, Valland’s bearing was more that of a soldier than a museum curator.

  Clark liked her immediately.

  “Tell us again what you told me about this art looting investigative unit,” Jaujard said.

  Clark repeated the rumor he had heard and aga
in made the case that more than just safeguarding French art, they could work to deny the Nazis an important source of cash to continue the war.

  Valland and Jaujard shared a look.

  “As soon as I told Jacques about this, he mentioned your name right away,” Clark said to Valland. “Why?”

  Again, the two French curators looked at one another. Jaujard nodded as if to give Valland permission.

  “I have spent the last four years watching the Nazis loot the cultural heritage of my country and her people,” she said. “Some of it was in the name of their fascist ideology against any work by Jews or Bolsheviks. Most of it was simple greed. I don’t know where they could have possibly put what they took—there was just so much of it. Thousands of objects. Goering must have an immense palace if he planned on displaying everything he stole. And that’s just what came through the Jeu de Paume. I can’t imagine what else he has plundered from the other occupied countries.”

  Clark nodded. For the first time, he noticed that he no longer felt shocked by these revelations. The scope and scale of German crimes was making him numb.

  “The reason Jacques has brought you to me,” Valland continued, “is that my entire purpose for being at the Jeu de Paume, why Jacques put me here, was to observe and document everything the Nazis did. Every work of art that passed through these doors, everything they destroyed, sold or took home.”

  Clark was stunned. “Were you able to do it? Did you record everything?” he asked.