The Girl You Left Behind, Page 31

  The rest of the paper is missing, ripped away, or perhaps broken off with age.

  'I will dance with you, Herr Kommandant,' I said. 'But only in the kitchen.'

  And then there is the scrap of paper, in handwriting that is not Sophie's. 'Once it is done,' it reads, simply, 'it cannot be undone.' The first time she read it, Liv's heart had dropped somewhere to her feet.

  She reads and re-reads the words, pictures a woman locked in a secretive embrace with a man supposed to be her enemy. And then she closes the folder and tucks it carefully back under her pile of papers.

  'How many today?'

  'Four,' she says, handing over the day's haul of poison-pen letters. Henry has told her not to open anything with handwriting she does not recognize. His staff will do it, and report any that are threatening. She tries to be sanguine about this new development, but secretly she flinches every time she sees an unfamiliar letter now; the idea that all this unfocused hate is out there, just waiting for a target. She can no longer type 'The Girl You Left Behind' into a search engine. There were once two historical references but now there are web versions of newspaper reports from across the globe, reproduced by interest groups, and Internet chat-rooms discussing her and Paul's apparent selfishness, their inherent disregard for what is right. The words spring out like blows: Looted. Stolen. Robbed. Bitch.

  Twice, someone has posted dog excrement through the letterbox in the lobby.

  There was only one protester this morning, a dishevelled middle-aged woman in a blue mackintosh, who insisted on handing her another home-made leaflet about the Holocaust. 'This is really nothing to do with me or this case,' Liv had said, thrusting it back at her.

  'If you do nothing you are complicit.' The woman's face was hewn by fury.

  Henry had pulled her away. 'There's no point in engaging,' he had said. Oddly, that hadn't lessened her vague sense of guilt.

  Those are the overt signs of disapproval. There are less obvious outcomes from the ongoing court case. The neighbours no longer say a cheery hello, but nod and look at their shoes as they pass. There have been no invitations through her door since the case was revealed in the newspapers. Not to dinner, a private view, or one of the architectural events that she was habitually invited to, even if she usually refused. At first she thought all this was coincidence; now she is starting to wonder.

  The newspapers report her outfit each day, describing her as 'sombre', sometimes 'understated' and always 'blonde'. Their appetite for all aspects of the case seems endless. She does not know if anyone has tried to reach her for comment: her telephone has been unplugged for days.

  She gazes along the packed benches at the Lefevres, their faces closed and seemingly set in expressions of resigned belligerence, just as they were on the first day. She wonders what they feel when they hear how Sophie was cast out from her family, alone, unloved. Do they feel differently about her now? Or do they not register her presence at the heart of this, just seeing the pound signs?

  Paul sits each day at the far end of the bench. She doesn't look at him but she feels his presence like an electrical pulse.

  Christopher Jenks takes the floor. He will, he tells the court, outline the latest piece of evidence that The Girl You Left Behind is, in fact, looted art. It is an unusual case, he says, in that investigations suggest the portrait was obtained by tainted means, not once but twice. The word 'tainted' never fails to make her wince.

  'The current owners of the painting, the Halstons, purchased it from the estate of one Louanne Baker. "The Fearless Miss Baker", as she was known, was a war reporter in 1945, one of a select few such women. There are newspaper cuttings from the New York Register that detail her presence at Dachau at the end of the Second World War. They provide a vivid record of her presence as Allied troops liberated the camp.'

  Liv watches the male reporters scribbling intently. 'Second World War stuff,' Henry had murmured, as they sat down. 'The press love a Nazi.' Two days previously she had sworn two of them were playing Hangman.

  'One cutting in particular tells how Ms Baker spent one day around the time of the liberation at a vast warehouse known as the Collection Point, housed in former Nazi offices near Munich in which US troops stored displaced works of art.' He tells the story of another reporter, who was given a painting to thank her for helping the Allies at this time. It had been the subject of a separate legal challenge, and had since gone back to its original owners.

  Henry shakes his head, a tiny gesture.

  'M'lord, I will now hand round copies of this newspaper article, dated the sixth of November 1945, entitled "How I became the Governor of Berchtesgaden", which, we contend, demonstrates how Louanne Baker, a humble reporter, came, by extremely unorthodox means, to own a modern masterpiece.'

  The court hushes and the journalists lean forwards, pens readied against their notebooks. Christopher Jenks begins to read:

  'Wartime prepares you for a lot of things. But little prepared me for the day I found myself Governor of Berchtesgaden, and of Goering's haul of some one hundred million dollars' worth of stolen art.'

  The young reporter's voice echoes across the years, plucky, capable. She comes ashore with the Screaming Eagles on Omaha Beach. She is stationed with them near Munich. She records the thoughts of young soldiers who have never before spent time from home, the smoking, the bravado, the surreptitious wistfulness. And then one morning she watches the troops go out, headed for a prisoner-of-war camp some miles away, and finds herself in charge of two marines and a fire truck. '"The US Army could not allow even the possibility of an accident while such treasures were in its custody."' She tells of Goering's apparent passion for art, the evidence of years of systematic looting within the building's walls, her relief when the US Army came back and she could relinquish responsibility for its haul.

  And then Christopher Jenks pauses.

  'When I left, the sergeant told me I could take with me a souvenir, as a thank-you for what he said was my "patriotic duty". I did, and I still have it today - a little memento of the strangest day of my life.'

  He stands, raising his eyebrows. 'Some souvenir.'

  Angela Silver is on her feet. 'Objection. There is nothing in that article that says the memento was The Girl You Left Behind.'

  'It is an extraordinary coincidence that she mentions being allowed to remove an item from the warehouse.'

  'The article does not at any point state that the item was a painting. Let alone this particular painting.'

  'Sustained.'

  Angela Silver is at the bench. 'My lord, we have examined the records from Berchtesgaden and there is no written record of this painting having come from the Collection Point storage facility. It appears on none of the lists or inventories from that time. It is therefore specious for my colleague here to make the association.'

  'It has already been documented here that during wartime there are always things that go unrecorded. We have heard expert testimony that there are works of art that were never recorded as having been stolen during wartime that have later turned out to be so.'

  'My lord, if my learned friend is stating that The Girl You Left Behind was a looted painting at Berchtesgaden, then the burden of proof still falls on the claimants to establish beyond doubt that this painting was actually there in the first place. There is no hard evidence that it formed part of that collection.'

  Jenks shakes his head. 'In his own statement David Halston said that when he bought it Louanne Baker's daughter told him she had acquired the painting in 1945 in Germany. She could offer no provenance and he didn't know enough about the art market to be aware that he should have demanded it.

  'It seems extraordinary that a painting that had disappeared from France during a time of German occupation, that was recorded as having been coveted by a German Kommandant, should then reappear in the home of a woman who had just returned from Germany, was on record as saying she had brought home with her a precious memento from that trip and would never go there again.'r />
  The courtroom is silent. Along the bench, a dark-haired woman in lime green is alert, leaning forwards, her big, gnarled hands resting on the back of the bench in front of her. Liv wonders where she has seen her before. The woman shakes her head emphatically. There are lots of older people in the public benches: how many of them remember this war personally? How many lost paintings of their own?

  Angela Silver addresses the judge. 'Again, m' lord, this is all circumstantial. There are no specific references in this article to a painting. A memento, as it is referred to here, could have been simply a soldier's badge or a pebble. This court must make its judgment solely on evidence. In not one piece of this evidence does she specifically refer to this painting.'

  Angela Silver sits.

  'Can we call Marianne Andrews?'

  The woman in lime green stands heavily, makes her way to the stand and, after being sworn in, gazes around her, blinking slightly. Her grip on her handbag turns her oversized knuckles white. Liv starts when she remembers where she has seen her before: a sun-baked back-street in Barcelona, nearly a decade previously, her hair blonde instead of today's raven black. Marianne Johnson.

  'Mrs Andrews. You are the only daughter of Louanne Baker.'

  'Ms Andrews. I am a widow. And, yes, I am.' Liv recalls that strong American accent.

  Angela Silver points to the painting. 'Ms Andrews. Do you recognize the painting - the copy of the painting - that sits in the court before you?'

  'I certainly do. That painting sat in our drawing room my whole childhood. It's called The Girl You Left Behind, and it's by Edouard Lefevre.' She pronounces it 'Le Fever'.

  'Ms Andrews, did your mother ever tell you about the souvenir she refers to in her article?'

  'No, ma'am.'

  'She never said it was a painting?'

  'No, ma'am.'

  'Did she ever mention where the painting came from?'

  'Not to me, no. But I'd just like to say there is no way Mom would have taken that painting if she'd thought it belonged to a victim of those camps. She just wasn't like that.'

  The judge leans forward. 'Ms Andrews, we have to stay within the boundaries of what is known. We cannot ascribe motives to your mother.'

  'Well, you all seem to be.' She huffs. 'You didn't know her. She believed in fair play. The souvenirs she kept were things like shrunken heads or old guns or car number-plates. Things that nobody would have cared for.' She thinks for a minute. 'Well, okay, the shrunken heads might have belonged to someone once, but you can bet they didn't want them back, right?'

  There is a ripple of laughter around the courtroom.

  'She was really very upset by what happened in Dachau. She could barely talk about it for years afterwards. I know she would not have taken anything if she thought it might be hurting one of those poor souls further.'

  'So you do not believe that your mother took this painting from Berchtesgaden?'

  'My mother never took a thing from anyone. She paid her way. That was how she was.'

  Jenks stands. 'This is all very well, Ms Andrews, but as you've said, you have no idea how your mother got this painting, do you?'

  'Like I said, I know she wasn't a thief.'

  Liv watches the judge as he scribbles in his notes. She looks at Marianne Andrews, grimacing as her mother's reputation is destroyed in front of her. She looks at Janey Dickinson, smiling with barely concealed triumph at the Lefevre brothers. She looks at Paul, who is leaning forward, his hands clasped over his knees, as if he is praying.

  Liv turns away from the image of her painting, and feels a new weight, like a blanket, settle over her, shutting out the light.

  'Hey,' she calls, as she lets herself in. It is half past four but there is no sign of Mo. She walks through to the kitchen and picks up the note on the kitchen table: 'Gone to Ranic's. Back tomorrow. Mo'.

  Liv lets the note fall and releases a small sigh. She has become used to Mo pottering around the house - the sound of her footsteps, distant humming, a bath running, the smell of food warming in the oven. The house feels empty now. It hadn't felt empty before Mo came.

  Mo has been a little distant for days. Liv wonders if she has guessed what happened after Paris. Which brings her, like everything, back to Paul.

  But there is little point in thinking about Paul.

  There is no post, except a mail-shot for fitted kitchens, and two bills.

  She takes off her coat and makes herself a mug of tea. She rings her father, who is out. His booming answer-phone message urges her to leave her name and number. 'You must! We'd LOVE to hear from you!' She flicks on the radio, but the music is too irritating, the news too depressing. She doesn't want to go online: there are unlikely to be any emails offering work and she is afraid to see something about the court case. She doesn't want the pixelated fury of a million people who don't know her to slide across her computer and into her head.

  She doesn't want to go out.

  Come on, she scolds herself. You're stronger than this. Think what Sophie had to cope with.

  Liv puts on some music, just to take the edge off the silence. She loads some laundry into the machine, to give a semblance of domestic normality. And then she picks up the pile of envelopes and papers she has ignored for the last two weeks, pulls up a chair and starts to plough through them.

  The bills she puts in the middle; the final demands to the right. On the left she puts anything that is not urgent. Bank statements she ignores. Statements from her lawyers go in a pile by themselves.

  She has a large notepad on which she enters a column of figures. She works her way methodically through the list, adding sums and subtracting them, scoring through and putting her workings on the edge of the page. She sits back in her chair, surrounded by the black sky, and stares at the figures for a long time.

  Eventually she leans back, gazing up through the skylight. It is as dark as if it were midnight, but when she checks her watch, it's not yet six o'clock. She gazes at the straight, blameless lines of David's creation, the way they frame a huge expanse of glittering sky, whichever angle she chooses to look from. She gazes at the walls, at the thermic glass interlaid with special sheets of impossibly thin insulating material that he had sourced from California and China so that the house would be quiet and warm. She gazes at the alabaster concrete wall on which she had once scrawled 'WHY DON'T YOU BUGGER OFF?' in marker pen when she and David had argued about her untidiness in the early days of their marriage. Despite the attentions of several specialist removers, you can still make out the ghostly outline of those words if the atmospheric conditions are right. She gazes out at the sky, visible through at least one clear wall in every room, so that the Glass House would always feel as if it were suspended in space, high above the teeming streets.

  She walks through to her bedroom and gazes at the portrait of Sophie Lefevre. As ever, Sophie's eyes meets hers with that direct stare. Today, however, she does not appear impassive, imperious. Today Liv thinks she can detect new knowledge behind her expression.

  What happened to you, Sophie?

  She has known she will have to make this decision for days. She has probably always known it. And yet it still feels like a betrayal.

  She flicks through the telephone book, picks up the receiver and dials. 'Hello? Is that the estate agent?'

  27

  'So your painting disappeared when?'

  '1941. Maybe 1942. It's difficult, because everyone involved is, you know, dead.' The blonde woman laughs mirthlessly.

  'Yeah, so you said. And can you give me a full description?'

  The woman pushes a folder across the table. 'This is everything we have. Most of the facts were in the letter I sent you in November.'

  Paul flicks through the folder, trying to recall the details. 'So you located it in a gallery in Amsterdam. And you've made an initial approach ...'

  Miriam knocks on the door and enters, bearing coffee. He waits as she distributes the two cups and nods apologetically, backing out again,
as if she has done something amiss. He mouths a thank-you, and she winces.

  'Yes, I wrote them a letter. What do you think it's worth?'

  'I'm sorry?'

  'What do you think it's worth?'

  Paul looks up from his notes. The woman is leaning back in her chair. Her face is beautiful, clear-skinned and defined, not yet revealing the first signs of age. But it is also, he notices now, expressionless, as if she has grown used to hiding her feelings. Or perhaps it's Botox. He steals a glance at her thick hair, knowing that Liv could detect immediately if it was entirely her own.

  'Because a Kandinsky would fetch a lot of money, right? That's what my husband says.'

  Paul picks his words carefully. 'Well, yes, if the work can be proven to be yours. But that's all some way off. Can we just get back to the issue of ownership? Do you have any proof of where the painting was obtained?'

  'Well, my grandfather was friends with Kandinsky.'

  'Okay.' He takes a sip of his coffee. 'Do you have any documentary evidence?'

  She looks blank.

  'Photographs? Letters? References to the two of them being friends?'

  'Oh, no. But my grandmother talked about it often.'

  'Is she still alive?'

  'No. I said so in the letter.'

  'Forgive me. What was your grandfather's name?'

  'Anton Perovsky.' She spells out his surname, pointing at his notes as she does so.

  'Any surviving members of the family who might know about it?'

  'No.'

  'Do you know if the work has ever been exhibited?'

  'No.'

  He'd known it would be a mistake to start advertising, that it would lead to flaky cases like this. But Janey had insisted. 'We need to be proactive,' she had said, her vocabulary skewed by management-speak. 'We need to stabilize our market share, consolidate our reputation. We need to be all over this market like a bad suit.' She had compiled a list of all the other tracing and recovery companies and suggested they send Miriam to their competitors as a fake client, to see their methods. She had appeared completely unmoved when he had told her this was crazy.

  'You've done any basic searches on its history? Google? Art books?'

  'No. I assumed that was what I'd be paying you for. You're the best in the business, yes? You found this Lefevre painting.' She crosses her legs, glances at her watch. 'How long do these cases take?'