Jamie carried the journal through to the spare room that doubled as a home office and rummaged beside his desk until he found what he was looking for. It was a scrapbook he’d started when he had been commissioned by Emil Mandelbaum to find the Rembrandt. He quickly turned the pages to three cuttings from a Sunday colour supplement on the world’s top ten missing works of art. There, among the Cézannes, the Degas and the Picassos, was a single work by Raphael.
Portrait of a Young Man. Painted in oil on wood panel and regarded as one of the sixteenth-century Italian artist’s finest works. It had been the prize exhibit at the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow, hanging alongside Leonardo’s Lady in Ermine, and another Rembrandt, Landscape with Good Samaritan, until the first week of September 1939, when, along with the rest of Poland, the museum had found itself under new management.
Even before the invasion of Poland, Hitler had decreed that the great artworks of Europe should be confiscated to hang in a grandiose Führermuseum at Linz, his birthplace in Austria. Teams of collectors followed the Wehrmacht’s armoured spearhead like hunting dogs, sniffing out paint and marble. One of them, Kajetan Mülhmann, an SS officer and the Nazi Special Delegate for the Securing of Art in the Occupied Territories, had tracked the three paintings to their hiding place on the Czartoryski estate. Later, they had become the subject of a three-way tug-of-war between Hans Posse, Hitler’s art curator, Hermann Goering, who naturally wanted them for himself, and Hans Frank, the governor of Poland. Perhaps surprisingly, Frank won the contest and had hung the paintings in the Wawel Castle where he could enjoy them as he organized the massacre of the Polish intelligentsia and the enforced segregation of the millions of Jews under his control.
When Hans Frank left Poland in 1945, a few steps ahead of the avenging Red Army, his paintings went with him. But after his capture by the Americans in Bavaria only the Leonardo and the Rembrandt were among his hoard of looted treasures. Frank claimed he had given the Raphael to Reinhard Heydrich early in 1942, but despite confessing to war crimes and converting to Catholicism before he was hanged in 1946, his interrogators refused to believe him. There was no record of Heydrich ever possessing the picture.
Portrait of a Young Man was the most important masterpiece still missing from the Second World War. According to the article it had a potential value of one hundred million dollars but that had been three years ago. Jamie reckoned that, given the way people were now pulling their money out of plummeting shares and investing in art, it was certain to be a great deal more.
Somewhere in Matthew Sinclair’s journal were the only known clues to its whereabouts. It was all there. A portrait by one of the big three, the one Leonardo feared. Oil on wood. One of his later works.
Jamie felt as if his heart might burst; an almost sexual feeling of anticipation. With shaking hands he picked up the book and flicked through the remaining pages . . . only to find what he least expected.
Twenty leaves at the end of the journal had been carefully removed.
XII
HIS HEAD FELT as if it was about to explode. For a few frustrating moments he had been within inches of one of the world’s greatest missing artworks and a coup that could have made him a fortune and restored his battered reputation. Just as quickly, it had been stolen from him.
After the shock, came the questions, so many of them; like an avalanche. Who had – so carefully, with scalpel or razor blade – removed the key pages? Not Matthew, who had somehow safeguarded the journal through six years of war and kept it secret all this time. His mother? Had she found it and read it; discovered some awful family secret? If she had wanted to hide something why not destroy the whole book? And if it had been someone else, why leave the journal behind with all its tantalizing clues? The more he considered it, the greater became his certainty that those final pages contained some momentous revelation.
In an explosion of sublime clarity he felt the old man’s presence beside him and he understood. The journal had always been meant for him.
Now he found himself able to look at the blue leather volume in a different way. If Matthew had always wanted him to have it, did he not also want him to have the treasure at its very heart: the Raphael? Perhaps there were other clues he’d missed. He would read it again with fresh perspective, go through it line by line. Matthew Sinclair’s life had been changed irrevocably by his meeting with Walter Brohm and that was where the key to the mystery lay. Poor Stanislaus Kozlowski could have given him the answers he needed. Now there was only one road to follow. To understand Matthew, he must understand Walter Brohm.