But at the end, it was a wash. They unearthed a total of three sniper paintings beside the one of Viktorvich bringing death, one of them even a woman sniper, in a snowy setting somewhere, moving into position to pick off some hun.
The young curator arrived exactly as they were returning the last of the paintings to their bins. “You know, I had a thought,” he said.
“Wonderful,” said Reilly. “We’re fresh out of them.”
“As I say, I took over in ’07, but the man I replaced had been here for over thirty years. And he was the mentee of the man before him, who founded the museum in ’46 and had been in Bak’s partisan army. It occurred to me that the founder might have taken or hidden these ‘suppressed’ paintings you’re looking for—that is, instead of burning them, as NKVD demanded. He was a Ukraine patriot, after all, and not a fan of the Russians. Besides, the Russians had condemned Bak’s army and declared all in it enemies of the state. That was before Bak was officially reformed, when Ukraine became an independent state. At any rate, I called, and yes, he does have some paintings from the founder, though he has not looked at them. I will give you driving instructions.”
“You are so helpful,” Reilly said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
* * *
Just as a precaution, Swagger did not take the directions that the curator had provided, but charted another course. They got there to discover a feisty white-haired old lion who had nothing but contempt for his successor—“Young idiot, not even Ukraine!”—but he did have some paintings, which had been rolled into tubes, wrapped and forgotten. He told a long story that Bob pretended to listen to, as the old guy seemed under the impression that Bob understood him. But after a bit, it was time.
On his dining room table, he unwrapped an old, old package as dust rose and the senior curator’s wife clucked and twitched at the defilement of her home, to her husband’s utter indifference. One roll, five oils on canvas were unveiled; he delicately unscrolled them and peeled them free, one at a time. It was clear why the Stalinists thought they’d be better off destroyed; they told too much truth for totalitarian minds. They were far from socialist-realist glory. The first was a somewhat crude evocation of the SS shooting the Jews outside of either Kolomiya or what used to be called Stanislav, though it made no difference, as actions had occurred at both places. The second was a starved farm woman, her face crushed in grief, warding off nurses who’d come to feed and rescue her. She was clearly too weak to care and would die soon. The third was a burning village, bodies all over the ground. Yaremche? Probably not, as no mountains were visible. It could have been any place in Ukraine in any year from 1941 to 1944. The fourth was five partisans hanging at a gallows, no other details. And the fifth was the mass execution of some German prisoners of war, by partisans. It was squalid, for the men begged even as the gunners sprayed them.
“Nothing,” said Swagger. “And that’s it?”
The old man answered. “Paintings, you said. Yes, that’s it for paintings. However, there are some items with pictorial representations on them. Folk art, they would be called, certainly not a part of the formal socialist-realism tradition. You know, peasants or soldiers who scribbled something on something. A textile, a piece of pottery, a gunstock. I have a few. It’s not much.”
“We’d like to see them.”
He brought out an old leather suitcase, much battered, sealed off by straps. It took a second or two for him to unlock and uncinch the thing and open it. He brought out the objects one by one and placed them on the table. It was a collection of the shabby and the forlorn, most crude and earnest, by amateurs. They even had an American Indian feel to them, like those images of the Little Big Horn from the Sioux point of view, both childish and gory.
Two pictorial weavings, musty of smell, which appeared to show pictographs of partisans and Germans shooting at each other. A ceramic pot with a German tank burning on it. A heroic triumvirate of Ilyushin Sturmoviks flying in tight formation, on a plate, poorly drafted. And finally, another plate.
Bob looked at it, struggling to make sense of the lines, which were messy, and the jumble of the composition, which was uninformed by any sense of perspective, but ultimately he found the right angle from which to view it and saw that it depicted a rifleman hunched in trees, bent over, concentrating on, giving himself to a generic rifle; far off, some kind of netting bore three figures while fluffy clouds rose around it. Loki shoots at Thor in Valhalla? William Tell updated to gun guy taking out Geisler in Switzerland? What could it be?