Authors: Karen Swan
Flora sighed, dropping her head in her hands and staring desperately at the screen. It had stopped at one of the bedrooms in the apartment downstairs, showing a close-up of the bed, the painting
and the large crate it had come in.
Natalya Spiegel’s beautiful face stared impassively back at her, revealing none of the horrors of dealing with a double-crossing Nazi who had sent her to her death. Why had he kept this
picture down here? Why just this one?
Of all the paintings they’d found in the apartment, it had been the one worth the least had it gone to market – an unknown subject captured by an unknown artist – and yet
ironically it now stood the most chance of retaining some worth, trading not on name or prestige but beauty alone. Certainly, for Flora, it was the one treasure which had bewitched her. Had Natalya
been even more beguiling in the flesh, she wondered. Had Von Taschelt been in love with her, was that it? Had she rejected him, and he’d thrown her into the path of the SS, keeping the
portrait for himself as some sort of memento?
She stared at the photo of the crate it had arrived in – levered open, wooden splinters on the floor, the crowbar on the bed. An A5 sheet of paper was stapled to the inside of the crate,
the contents invisible from this distance except for the distinctive red oval at the top which always ringed that dreaded name, Franz Von Taschelt. It was stamped on the outside of the crate too,
in big black letters:
F.V.T.
– loud and proud to be officially sanctioned, an authorized dealer for the Third Reich.
She frowned, then cocked her head.
Caught her breath.
Held very still as a thought – an outrageous, improbable, unthinkable thought – grew from bud to bloom in her mind. Had she got this all wrong? Been looking at it the wrong way round
from the very beginning?
She had been quick to accept the facts as they were presented to her, but if she was to rewind events, would the story be the same? She frowned hard, pulling apart the given narrative and going
back to just the facts: everything had been kicked off by those urban explorers finding Apartment 6 and sending a letter to Travers et Fils. The pro-forma docket stapled to the inside of that crate
gave them a name, and one quick internet search would have revealed that Travers et Fils were the notaries for the Von Taschelt estate. So far, so logical. Why, then, had that letter been forwarded
to the
Vermeils
? That docket showed only that the painting belonged to Von Taschelt, yet the unsuspecting junior clerk had forwarded the letter to the family, leading them to assume that the
entire apartment and its contents were theirs.
But what if they were wrong, working on a false assumption? What if the office junior had made a colossal error and, tracking back through the archives for this historic client, had pulled out
Vermeil instead of Von Taschelt? After all, in an alphabetical filing system, they would likely be next to one another. Human error: it happened. But given that the docket showed the painting had
been sold to Von Taschelt, wasn’t it more logical to assume that the apartment belonged to him too? Wouldn’t it make more sense of the fact that every painting they’d investigated
so far was registered to him?
She shook her head frustratedly. No, that didn’t make sense. Travers would have picked up such a huge mistake immediately. As he’d told her himself, he had returned early from
holiday to take over the situation, even scanning the very envelope the letter had come in. He wouldn’t have let his most important clients linger in the mistaken belief that the apartment
and its contents was theirs.
So then,
why
were the Vermeils still involved? And why was Travers in possession of a codicil that stated the apartment – that very one – should not be opened until after
François and Magda’s deaths?
Magda. Flora was suddenly struck by the incongruity of the name. Certainly, it wasn’t French. Dutch perhaps? German?
The codicil had been written in German. Not German German. Not Swiss German . . . But Austrian German, perhaps?
Austria . . . ?
Flora’s terrible theory took shape. Breath held, she entered another search into the computer, but even as her fingers flew over the keyboard, the clues were beginning to download in her
brain: Blumka Von Taschelt 1934–1938, the Anschluss 1938; Travers et Fils; the empty drawers . . .
‘So Flora, what have you got for me?’ Angus asked cheerily, throwing his feet up on the desk as he plunged his sterling silver ‘office’ fork into a
superfood breakfast pot.
‘Travers’s father was Von Taschelt’s notary.’
She might as well have just shot him. Angus immediately spluttered, coughing on a pomegranate seed. He opened his mouth to protest but she held up a hand to stop him.
‘And before you say it – no, it’s not a coincidence.’
‘It’s not?’ he croaked hoarsely, thumping himself several times on the chest to dislodge it.
‘It would be if there ever had been a man called François Vermeil. But I’ve just searched the death records in the national archive and no one called François Vermeil,
married to a woman called Magda, with a son called Jacques, died in Paris in 1943.’
There was a very long silence, Angus’s face completely devoid of colour. ‘What are you saying, Flora?’
She held up the fingers of one hand and began counting them off. ‘I’m saying that if we looked in the national archives of Austria, we’d find a marriage licence between a woman
called Magda and Franz Von Taschelt.’
Angus burst out laughing but there was no mirth in his eyes. In fact, he looked scared. ‘Maybe we would. Maybe it’s a common name there. But why would we look in Austria?’
Flora held up her second finger. ‘Because before Galerie Von Taschelt opened in Paris in 1938, it operated in Vienna as Blumka Von Taschelt. It closed when they fled Vienna the year of the
Anschluss, and reopened as Galerie Von Taschelt when they settled in Paris. You may recall the codicil was in German. Well it was actually Austrian German. Odd, for a Frenchman, don’t you
think?’
She held up a third finger. ‘After his death in 1943, the gallery reopened in the South of France as Attlee and Bergurren. Bergurren is Magda’s sister’s married name.
It’s on a letter I found in the apartment.’ She couldn’t believe she hadn’t made that connection before now, the letter forgotten and still in her jeans pocket.
She held up a fourth finger. ‘The initials. F.V.T. and F.V. Hardly a world away. She just . . .
Frenched
his name. It’s easier to keep a lie if you keep it as close as
possible to the truth.’
Angus looked as though he was going to pass out and she felt genuinely relieved that he was already sitting down. ‘Flora, I don’t . . . ’ he mumbled, his voice barely
coherent.
‘Angus, listen to me,’ she said, knowing she had to spell it out. ‘There’s no birth
or
death record of a François Vermeil, and this French family’s
will is written in German, not French. The business is now in Magda’s sister’s name in the South of France, ten miles from where Magda is still alive and well and living in Antibes. You
know what I’m telling you here. François Vermeil didn’t deal with a Nazi. He
was
the Nazi. He’s Franz Von Taschelt.’
Flora stood on the steps of the town house, looking up at the tall silvered windows that reflected the neighbouring buildings back to themselves, the lives it contained and the
secrets they owned safely hidden behind the glass. How was she supposed to say what had to be said to these people? Why did it have to come down to her to reveal that their elite social standing
was built on corruption and ruination? That there was blood on their hands? That they would be damned to hell once this got out? And it would.
If
she
could find it out, anyone with an agenda against them would cleave it wide open in half the time it had taken her.
But there was no one else to do it. Even Angus, never slow to cross the Atlantic in a single bound, couldn’t get here in time for this meeting.
The butler had already opened the door and was standing inside, the hole like a yawning black chasm in the grand Haussmann frontage. Slowly, she walked up the steps and into the mirrored hall.
She had been here several times now in the past couple of weeks but familiarity with the surroundings didn’t make them any less imposing and she found she couldn’t meet her own eye in
the many reflections winking back at her. How was this a home? There was more heart in the Louvre.
She walked with her face down, anticipating the butler taking her to the formal salon where Lilian and Jacques received most of their guests, so she was surprised when he headed right instead
and led her down a wide pale-grey corridor along which ornamental pear trees were dotted. They entered a room that wasn’t a room, more a holding chamber lined with a hand-painted silk Chinese
garden scene and a large round table in the middle, adorned with tumbling white orchids. Behind it, on the opposite side, was a glossy chestnut-coloured door, firmly shut.
Flora looked at the butler. ‘Here?’
‘
Suivez-moi, s’il vous plaît
,’ he intoned, leading her to the door.
Flora swallowed nervously, just able to make out Jacques Vermeil’s languid drawl on the other side of it.
She rolled her lips together, took a deep breath and squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, the door was open – and the entire Vermeil family, along with Lionel Travers, was
staring at her.
Her stomach plunged.
‘
Entrez
, please,’ Lilian entreated warmly, motioning for her to enter as Flora found her feet wouldn’t move. The sight of Natascha and Xavier – both of them
sprawled on the sofa like teenagers at an Xbox – made her feel ambushed. Why were
they
here? Why today, at this meeting? All the courage she’d been trying to build up in the cab
on the way over deserted her as she walked in, a weak smile plastered on her face.
The room was no less grand than any of the others she had seen but there were no mirrors in here; there were more photographs, the fabrics heavy-duty linens rather than brocaded silks, the
colour palette a more contemporary graphite and white, thick plumes of white hydrangeas sitting like giant snowballs in their vases. It wasn’t ‘cosy’, per se, but it was a vastly
more private, intimate space than the formal salon and she realized she had been admitted to the inner sanctum. They considered her, if not a friend now, certainly an ally, someone on their side.
She could almost cry from the irony alone.
Natascha, sitting huddled and sideways on the sofa, burrowing her bare feet into the cushions, watched her suspiciously, one eyebrow arched disdainfully as she took in Flora’s conservative
clothes. (Flora would like to know what she’d wear for a meeting with her mother, in the same circumstances.) By comparison, Natascha was wearing ripped-at-the-knee skinny jeans and a thin
vest – no bra of course – threaded bracelets stacked up her arms, her fingernails painted olive green, her long hair piled on her head in a messy topknot.
Xavier, beside her, was no better. In jeans and a linen shirt so crumpled that it looked as though he’d driven over it on his bike, one ankle thrown over the opposite knee, his arms spread
over the back of the sofa, he seemed to take up half the space – if not all the air – in the room, watching her cross the floor and take her seat, the way a lion watches an
antelope.
‘Don’t look so scared, Flora,’ Lilian laughed as she and Jacques rose to shake her hand. ‘When I spoke to Angus the other day, he said we had made the deadline for the
Christie’s sale so we thought it would be good to share this happy news with Xavier and Natascha. They have been so interested in the discovery, wanting to know all about it, as you know
–’ she smiled, somewhat apologetically, Flora thought – ‘so we thought it would be better if they heard what you have to report directly.’
‘Of course,’ Flora nodded, trying to smile, her mouth suddenly so dry that her tongue felt it would stick to the roof of her mouth. ‘Yes. Uh, do you mind if I . . . ?’
she asked, indicating the jug of iced water and glasses on the coffee table. There was a bottle of Laurent-Perrier champagne in an ice bucket next to it but Flora couldn’t even bear to look
at it. They wouldn’t be opening that today, that was for sure.
Quickly she poured herself some water, aware of a bemused expression on Jacques Vermeil’s face as she drank it down in great gulps. She replaced her glass and pressed the back of her hand
to her wet lips and waited a moment, knowing from the expectant silence that they were all waiting for her to begin her presentation. Had they noticed she was empty-handed? Did they suspect her
lack of props indicated that something was amiss?
She looked over at Travers for help, guidance,
something,
but he held her gaze for only a moment before turning away and a shot of anger arrowed through her. It gave her courage.
She sat in the only remaining armchair, back straight, ankles together, like a Victorian schoolmistress. ‘Does the name Franz Von Taschelt mean anything to you?’ she began, keeping
her gaze squarely on the senior Vermeils but noticing in her peripheral vision how Lionel Travers’s head whipped round at the sound of that name.
Both Jacques and Lilian shook their heads, faces blank but curiosity piqued. ‘
Non.
Who is he?’ Jacques asked, his brown eyes alight.
‘He was an Austrian art dealer who left Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938 and relocated to Paris.’
Jacques shrugged. ‘I have never heard of him.’
‘Well, his name kept coming up in our preliminary searches – the Renoir, the Faucheux, the more minor Picasso and Matisse sketches . . . he was the last-known, proven owner of the
paintings.’
‘Proven?’ Lilian squinted, clearly not liking the sound of the word, nor the way Flora placed a stress on it.
‘Proven in that there was no further paperwork showing that he had sold the paintings
on
,’ she explained hesitantly.
Frowns buckled every brow.