The Doomsday Testament(6)
He shook his head at the memory and, still carrying the album, climbed the narrow stairs past the row of plaster flying ducks that guarded the hall like a flight of Spitfires. He knew he should be doing something more productive, but he was unable to break the lethargic grip of the past.
Matthew’s bedroom door stood ajar and he walked through with the feeling of a child entering a forbidden garden. It was years since he’d been inside this room. Perhaps fifteen feet by twenty, the only furnishings were a white melamine dressing table, a shallow cupboard where the old man kept his shoes, and an enormous, clumsy oak wardrobe that must have come from a second-hand shop. The room still carried a faint, sweetish scent of ill-health and when he lay back on the quilt he was surrounded by Matthew’s presence. He felt a sharp prickle behind his eyes. Pull yourself together, Saintclair.
He sat up and reopened the album. A newspaper cutting with a photograph of an adult Jamie holding a small painting in a gilt frame. Had he really made them proud? He supposed the cutting was proof that he had, but it was a pride built on false pretences. When his mother heard he had set up his own business after eight years jobbing for Sotheby’s and moved into an office in Old Bond Street, she’d insisted on opening a bottle of her carefully hoarded Asti Spumante. He’d never invited them to the office and hadn’t had the heart to reveal it was little more than an extended cupboard with a posh address. A decanter of whisky stood on a bedside table. He smiled as he heard Matthew’s soft voice – ‘purely medicinal, my dear boy’ – and poured himself a small glass. He studied the photograph more closely. The painting had brought him short-lived fame, and even shorter-lived fortune.
It was one of Rembrandt’s earlier works, a portrait of some rosy-cheeked Dutch merchant and not a particularly impressive one, but a Rembrandt nonetheless. Until 1940, it had hung in solitary splendour in the Paris mansion of the Mandelbaum family, cloth exporters for five generations and proud of it. Over the centuries the Mandelbaums, French Jews of German extraction, had weathered many storms, but the hurricane that blew in from the Third Reich that summer had well and truly sunk them. Monsieur Mandelbaum, who had waved away offers of sanctuary from his customers in England, took one last look at his Rembrandt on Friday 14 June as the Germans marched into Paris, then blew his brains out, leaving Madame and five little Mandelbaums to be evicted, registered, classified and eventually deported, via the transit centre at Drancy, to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. By the time the fighting ended, only a single little Mandelbaum, Emil, had been left to emerge miraculously from amongst the corpses and the living dead, like a ten-year-old version of one of Lowry’s matchstick men.
After the war Emil was claimed by relatives in the United States and he spent the next sixty years trying to forget the screams, the sight of hanged men and women and the never-ending stink from the crematorium chimneys. But a year earlier he had been tracked down by the son of an old business acquaintance of his father’s who suggested he reclaim the Paris property and asked what had become of the celebrated Rembrandt. Emil had only a vague memory of the painting, but by then being a retired stockbroker, he certainly knew its potential worth.
For a successful art dealer, tracking down stolen property, especially property stolen half a century earlier, is the professional equivalent of walking blindfold through a minefield. So it was unsurprising that Emil had trouble finding someone reputable to help him seek out the Rembrandt. At the time, Jamie was conspicuously lacking in obvious signs of success and the jury was out on his reputation after a series of auction ambushes that had left both him and his clients out of pocket. The two men had been introduced by Simon Marks, a merchant banker and former Cambridge classmate of Jamie’s, who had watched and despaired at his friend’s pitiful efforts at building a business.
‘Either do it to make money or don’t do it at all, old son,’ Simon had advised him. ‘Emil is rolling in cash, he’ll pay you a daily stipend and your expenses while you look for the bloody thing, and a whacking great finders’ fee in the unlikely event that you ever lay hands on it.’
Luck, his languages and what he liked to think was a modicum of good judgement had all played their part in what followed. As he told Simon: ‘The Nazis were just as efficient at cataloguing what they pinched as they were about everything else. Emil’s Rembrandt was one of thousands of artworks hoovered up by Hermann Goering’s Reichsleiter Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories. Once I discovered that, there were three possibilities. First, it could have been destroyed during the war: possible, but most stolen artworks survived. Second, some resourceful, high-ranking Nazi could have smuggled it out as working capital using one of the Odessa escape pipelines: again possible and if that’s what happened the most likely route was by Spain or Switzerland to South America. The third option – less likely – was that it ended up stored in a big cave in the Bavarian Alps and some enterprising GI lifted it to take home to his ma in Pittsburg.’