Page 29

SIXTEEN

‘ T o be honest with you, I’m confused,’ James Fraser remarked to Atticus Pünd as they sat in the back of a taxi taking them from La Gaude to their hotel in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.

‘And why is that, James?’

‘Well, it seems quite likely to me that Elmer Waysmith killed his wife – so why haven’t you and Mr Voltaire arrested him yet? As far as I can see, there are no other suspects. It’s not like that business we had with Sir Magnus Pye where anyone could have done it. It had to be Waysmith who went into the Pharmacie Lafayette. He tried to disguise himself with the hat and the sunglasses. He bought himself an extra fifteen minutes by getting poor Alice Carling to come in and ask the time. Maybe he told her it was for a joke or something, but the point was, it allowed him to change his clothes at the hotel and arrive at the gallery by twelve thirty. Things only went wrong when Alice heard that Lady Chalfont had been murdered with aconitine. She put two and two together and realised the part she had played – so he had to kill her too.’

‘There I disagree with you, my friend. If you accept that Alice Carling assisted Elmer Waysmith in the purchase of the poison, are you also suggesting that he was the mysterious “Charles Saint-Pierre” whom Alice hoped to marry after the death of his wife? That seems to me most unlikely, given that he was so very much older than her – old enough, indeed, to be her father.’

‘Well, she was a young country girl. She was out of her depth. She could have been foolish enough to believe it.’ Fraser considered. ‘And if it wasn’t him at the pharmacy, who was it? His son?’

‘Robert Waysmith was on his way back to Nice from Antibes. He could have arrived earlier than he told us.’

‘But Robert had absolutely no reason to kill Lady Chalfont, Mr Pünd. He didn’t inherit very much money from her, and he didn’t need it anyway. That’s the trouble. None of them did!’

Pünd and Fraser did not speak again until they reached the hotel. The taxi pulled in, Fraser paid and a moment later they were walking to the main entrance, a small crowd of porters fussing around them. At the same time, Pünd noticed a silver Peugeot parked to one side. A short, stocky man in a navy blue worsted suit got out and came towards them. It was clear that this was no guest returning to his room. The man had been waiting for Pünd to arrive and wasted no time cornering him.

‘Excuse me, sir. Am I right in thinking that I’m speaking to Atticus Pünd, the famous detective?’ He was American, with a round face, thinning hair and glasses. There was something about him that reminded Fraser of a schoolteacher or perhaps a small-town lawyer. He felt out of place in the glamour of the C?te d’Azur.

Pünd was flattered by the description. ‘I am.’

‘I hope you’ll forgive me interrupting you, sir, but I wonder if I could speak to you confidentially and on a matter of urgency.’

‘I do not think we have met.’

‘My name’s Harlan Scott.’ The man took a business card out of his top pocket and handed it to Fraser. ‘I’ve seen you quite a few times in the last few days. You’ve been in and out of the Chateau Belmar, and this morning you were at the Werner-Waysmith Gallery in Nice.’

‘You have been watching us?’ Pünd asked. He sounded surprised rather than offended.

‘Not you, sir. No. I recognised you the moment I saw you, and I can guess why you’re here. I take it you’re investigating the death of Lady Chalfont?’

‘I am helping the police.’ Pünd was non-committal.

‘I’m hoping you can help me, too. In fact, maybe we can help each other. I’m also a detective of sorts – although my work is a world apart from yours. Even so, it may be that we’re both investigating the same thing. Can we talk?’

‘Of course, Mr Scott. It is a beautiful day. We can, if you like, have tea – or coffee, if you would prefer – on the terrace behind the hotel.’ Pünd looked around him, at the porters and a group of departing guests. ‘The tables are far apart and we are less likely to be overheard.’

‘That would be great, Mr Pünd.’

Without speaking any further, they walked into the hotel and continued through the main lounge into the gardens, where there were several guests already enjoying afternoon tea. They had no trouble finding a table set apart from the others, and after Fraser had placed an order with a waiter, Pünd sat back and waited for Scott to begin.

‘I described myself as a detective,’ Scott said. ‘But that’s not quite accurate. In fact, I began life as an art historian. I studied at Yale and ended up at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and I would be there now except that ten years ago I was asked to join the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives programme, which was being run by the army. I was one of three hundred and forty-five volunteers who came to be known as “the Monuments Men”, although there were plenty of women among us too. Our job was to help track down and return around five million artworks stolen by German forces during the war. These included paintings, sculptures, jewellery and rare books, the great majority of them seized from the Jewish families who were then wiped out.’ He paused. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Not at all.’ Pünd was intrigued. He watched as the American took out not a cigarette but a small cigar, which he lit, sending clouds of smoke into the air.

‘The MFAA was disbanded a few years after the war,’ Scott went on. ‘But you could say I got hooked on the work and I decided to stay on in a private capacity. There are still many thousands of artworks that have never been recovered and I’m now employed by some of the survivors of the families who still hope to get their property back. I’d like to give you a bit of background to what I do, Mr Pünd, if you’ll allow me. I’m sure you’re a busy man, but I believe it will prove relevant to you and, in particular, to the death of Lady Margaret Chalfont.’

‘Please, continue.’

‘Very well.’ He drew on the cigar. ‘As early as 1938, Hitler had his eye on the art collections of Europe and had a determination to make them his own. His main reason was ideological. Take a nation’s art and you take its soul – something Napoleon had already figured out. The Louvre is full of German treasures the emperor snatched in his time, and now it was Hitler’s turn. He had plans for a gigantic art gallery he was going to build in Linz, in Austria – the Führermuseum. At the same time, he was going to destroy all the art he considered degenerate – cubism, Dadaism and pretty much anything that was too modern. He said it was the duty of the state “to prevent a nation falling under the influence of spiritual madness”. He wrote that in Mein Kampf .

‘But there were other Nazi leaders who had less high-minded reasons for getting their hands on all the loot they could grab. Goring had a hunting lodge called Carinhall, north of Berlin, and he filled it with works by Matisse, Renoir, Dürer, Holbein, Cranach and so on. By the end of the war, he had over a thousand pieces of art, worth around two hundred million dollars. Goebbels had a taste for German expressionism. Von Ribbentrop snapped up works by Manet. And many other high-up Nazis were playing the same game.

‘There were no fewer than three government branches involved in the confiscation of art. One was the Kunstschutz , controlled by the Wehrmacht. Then there was the German embassy in Paris, led by a guy called Otto Abetz, who cheerfully went round the country plundering anything he could get his hands on in the name of war reparations. But the most active and the most avaricious organisation was the ERR – or, to give it its full name, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die Besetzten Gebiete , which was secretly controlled by Goring. And once the Nazis had decreed that the Jews shouldn’t be allowed to own anything with cultural significance, it was open house. A hundred thousand pieces of art were stolen in France alone.’

The coffee had arrived while he was talking. He stopped for a moment and added three sugar cubes to his cup, then stirred it as he continued.

‘What I’m talking about here is a free-for-all,’ Scott said. ‘Everyone was at it. There were huge profits to be made from buying and selling art – even so-called degenerate art, which the Nazis were happy to turn into cash. Museums in Düsseldorf, Essen and other German cities seized the moment to enlarge their collections. Supposedly respectable French art buyers and dealers came rushing in like sharks. Remember, the Nazis had banned the exportation of paper money, and there was very little to buy in Europe anyway. It wasn’t as if anyone was going shopping for new cars or clothes. Suddenly art was everything. Buy it, sell it, barter with it, hoard it, enjoy it. And when the war was over … if you had it, you were made.

‘And then there was Switzerland …’

Scott’s cigar glowed red, a single devil’s eye. He exhaled and smoke wreathed itself around his head.

‘Nazi art dealers loved the Swiss. The Swiss had more money than they knew what to do with. They were neutral, which gave them complete freedom of movement. And they were, to all intents and purposes, amoral. All their biggest galleries worked hand in hand with the Nazis. The Fischer Gallery in Lucerne, the Neupert Gallery in Zurich, the Dreyfus Gallery – they turned themselves into an open market for stolen works.

‘And there was another, smaller gallery based in Geneva that had a very profitable relationship with Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring, no less, and it was run by a man called Erich Werner – and that name may be familiar to you.’

‘Werner-Waysmith!’ Fraser exclaimed.

‘The very same,’ Scott said. ‘Werner went into partnership with an American dealer called Elmer Waysmith, and although he’s now retired, Elmer is still active on his behalf with galleries here and in London selling one piece after another stolen during the war and kept quietly locked up ever since.’

He stopped and drank some of his coffee. A waiter was serving tiny sandwiches cut into triangles to a family at the next table. It was hard to reconcile the sun-filled terrace and the elegant facade of the hotel with the dark story being told.

‘I only became aware of Werner-Waysmith very recently, when I received a tip-off from someone connected to the family,’ Scott explained.

‘And who was that?’ Pünd asked.

‘You’ll have to forgive me, Mr Pünd, but I might get them into serious trouble if their name were to become known.’

‘And you will have to forgive me, Mr Scott, but I am investigating what may turn out to be not one but two murders. If we are to help each other, I must know everything that you know, and you must trust me to keep this information to myself.’

‘What about Voltaire?’

‘Monsieur Voltaire and I are equal partners and I will have to inform him of anything that is relevant, but I can assure you he is entirely discreet.’

Scott scowled briefly, then came to a decision. ‘Very well, Mr Pünd. I will tell you the name, but I would ask you – all of you – to protect my source.’

He drew a breath.

‘The lady I’m talking about, Béatrice Laurent, was working for a Jewish family in Paris at the start of the war and was present on the day their house was raided. The family was arrested and their extensive art collection seized. One painting in particular she remembered clearly. It showed a vase of tulips on a table. She didn’t know the artist’s name or the title of his work, but she recognised it instantly when she saw it again, thirteen years later, on the wall of the grand salon in the home of Elmer Waysmith, where she is now employed as the femme de ménage . As you can imagine, the sight of it filled her with horror. She felt powerless. What should she do? To go to the police was unthinkable. She didn’t even know if a crime had been committed, and anyway, she liked Lady Chalfont and didn’t want to hurt her. Elmer Waysmith is a wealthy, respectable art dealer. There were all sorts of different ways to explain how the painting could have landed in his hands.

‘This all happened a few weeks ago, just after the family arrived at the chateau for the summer season. As it turned out, Béatrice knew somebody who had worked as a secretary for the MFAA and she had the good sense to tell her friend what had happened. The MFAA has been disbanded, like I said, but the friend had my telephone number and put her in touch with me. It took me very little time to work out the connection with Erich Werner and to identify the painting: a masterpiece by Paul Cézanne painted in 1890 and titled Spring Flowers .

‘So, a couple of weeks ago, I visited the Werner-Waysmith Gallery and managed to talk my way past the old dragon who guards the place. Elmer Waysmith wasn’t in that day, but I spoke to his son, Robert, who runs the place with him. I was in a tricky position. There are still hundreds of thousands of stolen objects scattered across Europe and, by and large, the galleries, museums and dealers don’t want to talk. They’ll pretend they don’t know where the pictures came from or they’ll say they bought them in good faith. And I’m not a policeman. I’m not a detective. I don’t have any authorisation to go blundering around the place, making accusations that I may not be able to prove. At the end of the day, I just have to get people to cooperate. If a man like Elmer Waysmith is found to have been in cahoots with the Nazis, it’s not going to look good on his résumé. The original owners of Spring Flowers , Mr and Mrs Steiner, were gassed to death. That’s not something you want on a painting’s provenance.

‘Anyway, I spoke to Robert Waysmith, who was completely shocked by what I had to say. Either that or he’s a first-class actor, but I’d like to think I’ve conducted enough interviews to know when someone is pulling my chain. He told me that he had no dealings personally with Erich Werner, but that his father would never have gotten his hands dirty with stuff like that. He invited me to meet Elmer Waysmith at the Chateau Belmar, where the Cézanne was temporarily on display. He was sure it was all a misunderstanding and that it could be sorted out.’

‘He invited you to his home?’ Pünd was surprised.

‘It’s like I said, Mr Pünd – he seemed a decent sort. I was a bit surprised myself, but it’s not every day someone walks into your gallery and accuses your dad of being a crook. We made an appointment for the very next day and I turned up at eleven in the morning, as agreed.

‘The meeting did not go well. Elmer Waysmith was nothing like his son. He was polite for approximately five minutes, defensive for another five and then outright aggressive. We met in their grand saloon and sure enough, the picture was on the wall. If I’d been him, I might have tried to hide it. But he was shameless. He accused me of being a crook, trying to blackmail him, threatening to damage his reputation if he didn’t pay up, that sort of thing. He was shouting at me and Robert had to calm him down … It wasn’t easy.

‘In the end, it was Elmer who threatened me. I had no right to be in his house, asking him these questions, and if I didn’t back off, he’d have his lawyers onto me before I could blink. He said that it was Werner who had bought the painting and that he had no reason to doubt his partner’s word. Then he started quoting Swiss law. After five years, if a dealer has bought a painting in good faith, the painting is his – and if the family wants it back, they have to pay for it. Not easy when the whole lot of them are dead! He had never been so insulted in all his life and all the rest of it. And with that, he threw me out.’

‘And that was the end of it?’ Pünd asked.

‘I don’t give up that easily, Mr Pünd. Since then, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the Werner-Waysmith Gallery, at the same time looking at some of the major sales they’ve made in both London and Nice in the last few years. The art world is a closed circle. There are good dealers and bad dealers, but it helps me that most of them know each other. I’ve already found two other paintings that definitely have Nazi connections, and only last week, Waysmith delivered a landscape by Alfred Sisley to a collector in Antibes. I followed him there and I got to see the canvas. I recognised it straight away. Fortunately, there are photographic records and it was stolen from the collection of Paul Rosenberg, a prominent Jewish dealer in Paris who managed to flee the country after the invasion. Goring was very fond of Sisley.’

‘Did you follow Robert Waysmith when he left Antibes?’

‘No. It would be too easy for him to spot my car. Anyway, I was more interested in the painting. I managed to get Lucas Dorfman – the collector – to show me the work and I’ve already contacted the Rosenbergs in New York. I’m waiting to hear back from them.’

Pünd thought for a moment. ‘You said that we might be pursuing the same investigation, Mr Scott. Are you suggesting that the art thefts – if that is how they can be described – and the death of Lady Chalfont may be connected?’

‘Art thefts are definitely what they are, Mr Pünd, and you could add that Elmer Waysmith and his partner in Switzerland are complicit in war crimes. As to Lady Chalfont, when I heard that the police had begun a murder investigation, of course it occurred to me that there must be something in the timing. I also wondered if it was something connected to art that had brought you to the South of France.’

‘There I must disappoint you,’ Pünd replied. ‘I knew nothing of the Cézanne before I arrived in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, but from what you have told me, it is almost certain that Lady Chalfont heard the conversation between you and her husband and it was for this reason that she turned to me.’

‘Her balcony is just above the room where Mr Scott met Elmer Waysmith!’ Fraser exclaimed.

‘That is correct. And you will recall, when we were in her bedroom, we were able to overhear the child, Cedric Chalfont, arguing with his father,’ Pünd reminded him.

‘So Margaret Chalfont heard them …’

‘And that is why she wrote to me: “ I overheard something that shocked me to my core. ” She was accusing her second husband of being at the very least a collaborator in an act of great wickedness.’

‘Did he kill her?’ Harlan Scott asked.

‘Everything would suggest so, Mr Scott.’

‘It was the reason she was going to change her will,’ Fraser said. ‘She’d been married to him for six years without realising he was a crook.’

‘Yes …’ But Pünd sounded unsure. ‘Where can we find you, if we need to speak further, Mr Scott?’

‘I’ve written a phone number on the back of my card. I have a small apartment on the edge of Nice and the concierge takes messages for me.’

‘Are you planning to make any further move against Elmer Waysmith or his son?’

‘I have no interest in Robert, and there’s very little chance that I can take any action against his dad. All I can hope for is the return of the paintings to their rightful owners. It’s a strange sort of crime, Mr Pünd, where the criminals are immune and the victims are powerless. But even so, I believe that in my own way I’m fighting for justice, and I suppose that puts us on the same page.’

He stubbed out his cigar. ‘Thanks for the coffee,’ he said. ‘Let me know if there’s any news.’

There was to be news soon enough. But it wasn’t anything that either of them would have wanted to hear.