The Last Judgement

‘It just crossed my mind.’

‘I want to get to the bottom of this.’

‘In that case you’d better hang on. Anything I can do?’

‘One thing,’ she said, looking at the meter ticking away. ‘A phone call to Ellman. It didn’t come from Paris, apparently. I asked Janet to contact the Swiss, but could you put a bit of pressure on them as well?’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

‘Well?’ asked Argyll as she emerged.

Flavia thought carefully. ‘He’s absolutely adamant that I should carry on. Very keen to continue the investigation,’ she said. ‘Absolutely essential, he reckons.’

‘Oh,’ he replied, a bit disappointed. There was an auction sale just outside Naples the next day he’d been hoping to get to. ‘So I suppose we do, then.’

‘Yes. No choice. Sorry.’

‘We are running awfully short of money, you know.’

‘I know. We’ll just have to improvise.’

‘How do you improvise about money?’

‘I’ll think about it. Meantime, I want to go to this documentation centre. You coming?’

So they walked south, back into the proper, tourist, Guide Michelin part of the city, away from the run-down streets, the hordes of lost and sad-looking inhabitants, across and through the sweat-shop district of overworked women from Asia on whose shoulders rests the city’s reputation for haute couture, and then again east into the ever more elegant Marais, long since shorn of the down-at-heel occupants who once gave the area its charm.

In this part of the world lay the Jewish documentation centre, because that was where the Jewish quarter once was, until the combined efforts of Nazis and, more recently, property developers reduced it to a couple of streets.

The Rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier was not a major street in the tourist itinerary. One building of considerable beauty, a concrete memorial to the deported of the war, and that was about it. The rest had been flattened to make way for something. No one seemed too sure what it was. Even in the sunlight it seemed forlorn and half abandoned.

There was a minor debate as the pair of them stood outside, trying to decide who should take on the task of going inside and searching for useful information. Flavia particularly wanted to go in; she felt as though she should turn her mind once more to the attempt to give form to this hodge-podge of miscellaneous information.

‘So, you or me?’ she said, when her train of thought petered out. ‘Personally, I think I’d be better.’

‘OK. I’ve thought of something else to do anyway. I’m off to see about paintings. See you later.’

Flavia went into the building next to the monument to the deported, checked that Janet had, after all, phoned to say she was coming, signed in and then began making earnest enquiries. The woman at the desk was perfectly happy to help — there was almost nobody else in the building, after all — and she was shown to a vast cabinet full of filing cards. The name Jules Hartung was there, and a dossier number, which she wrote on a request form and handed back in. At the same time, the archivist recommended another series of dossiers on confiscated and looted property. If Hartung was rich and dispossessed, then there might well be some account of him, if only a brief one, in that as well.

She thanked the woman, sat down and waited, filling up the time by reading a pamphlet the dear lady brought to her on the confiscation of property during the occupation. She read it with considerable attention, having half formed in her mind the theory that Hartung’s art collection might be at the bottom of this somewhere.

It was a reasonable hypothesis, after all. Since the Berlin Wall had come down, long-lost treasures had been popping up in the basements of obscure East-European museums like mushrooms. Hundreds of paintings, looted in the war and never seen since, were now giving curators major headaches and exercising the minds of diplomats. Was it possible, she thought as she read, that all this business was stimulated by the possession of a major art collection?

Not that she knew anything about it, she realized as she ploughed her way through the pages. She’d never conceived that the looting was so well and bureaucratically organized. Extracts of letters from a secretary at the German embassy in Paris detailed how a special art force, the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, methodically arrested people, searched houses, confiscated goods and transported the product of their labours to Germany. An interim report of 1943 announced that it had confiscated more than 5,000 paintings. By the time its labours were interrupted by the untimely arrival of the Liberation, it had shifted nearly 22,000 articles to Germany. With the diligence of the committed thief, the plunderers made meticulous notes of their labours. None the less, the article concluded by announcing that a large proportion had never been seen again.