Treasure Templari Read online

  He took a deep breath. “You’re talking about people I meet in business, people who are my competitors. Trying to take what is mine, or keep me from taking what is theirs. That’s called capitalism. Nice doesn’t matter when it comes to them.”

  As a young man, Bruce had viewed himself as a character in an Ayn Rand novel—noble, idealistic, ruthless. Capitalism was a game played for keeps, with the only rule being not to get caught breaking the rules. Once you entered the game, he would do everything he could to destroy you. It was why he had been able to steal art without remorse—in his mind, the other collectors (and he made it a point not to steal from museums) were competitors who knew the risks of the game when they began collecting. Bruce considered most collectors, in fact, to be contemptible, egocentric megalomaniacs, acquiring masterpieces and then hiding them from public view like Dickensian scrooges locked in rooms alone with their sacks of gold. So they deserved to be preyed upon, and worse. As he got older, he became a bit less ruthless and a lot more law-abiding, but only, Shelby believed, to placate her. The irony was that, having spent three decades winning the game, having stolen the art and accumulated the wealth, Bruce had just stashed the money in the bank. He took no real joy from the wealth, other than in an abstract sense. If he was accumulating money, he was winning. And that’s all that mattered to him. That and doing what he could to make sure art remained in the public realm.

  Shelby had read a couple of Ayn Rand novels and thought the author, like many zealots, fell into the trap of overstating her case. Shelby, in turn, had fallen into the trap of falling for one of Rand’s acolytes. And here they were. “Nice does matter when it comes to my friends,” Shelby retorted.

  “Fine,” Bruce conceded. “He’s not competing with me, he’s helping me. So I’ll play nice.”

  She patted his hand playfully. “Good boy.”

  They’d had this same fight dozens of times. Neither expected to win, so they moved on. “You didn’t tell him where I got the painting, did you?”

  Shelby chuckled. “How could I? You haven’t told me.” He rarely gave her details of his work.

  “Right.” He looked out over the harbor, as if considering a weighty matter. “Okay. It’s a fun story. About 20 years ago I helped a guy sell a painting his grandmother gave him so he could pay for music school over at Berklee. Mitchell Klein. Fast forward to last year, he calls me again to help him sell more stuff. He was just out of jail—dealing drugs, I think—and he needed some cash to pay off a supplier he had stiffed. The guy’s basically a fuck-up, but lucky for him the grandmother died, and it turns out she had a whole collection of Dutch Masters artwork—some pretty good stuff, pieces that had been thought lost during the war. She kept the paintings in a meat locker her husband built into a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan. I saw it; it was hidden behind a bookshelf.”

  “A meat locker?”

  “He was a butcher.” Bruce poked at the chicken. “Not sure how he got the thing into the apartment, but I guess they figured it would keep the paintings safe in case of a fire.”

  “Wait, so how does a butcher and his wife end up with all this artwork?”

  “During the war. Part of my fee is helping my clients establish the provenance of the paintings. We went over to Amsterdam and figured out his grandmother’s father was an art dealer in the 1930s. Apparently, he saw the writing on the wall and just packed up whatever he had in his gallery one day and hightailed it out before the Nazis invaded. Came to America with his wife and little girl. When he died, my client’s grandmother, the little girl, ended up with the art.”

  She tried to picture the couple, living in Manhattan, trudging off to the butcher shop every morning knowing they hid a fortune in art in their apartment. “I think if I were them I would have sold some of the art and retired.”

  “They did sell some of it. Like I said, that’s how I first met my client. Anyway, one of the pieces in the collection turned out to be the Just Judges panel.” He shook his head. “My client just found it a few months ago, hidden in the back of the meat locker, wrapped in that same brown paper they use to wrap pastrami. I was actually with him when it happened, helping him do an inventory. Lucky bastard. It’s stolen, so obviously no way will any auction house take it. The Belgian government would file a claim on day one.” Bruce shrugged. “But, you know, not all paintings are sold through auction houses.”

  She stopped mid-sip. “You’re not going to try to fence a masterpiece, Bruce?”

  He tilted his head non-committedly. “My client wants to get some expert to appraise it, but I told him to sit tight. The more people who see it, the more chance there is the police will come knocking on his door. I’ve been advising him.”

  “What’s to advise?” She held his eyes. “Give the painting back to the Belgian government so they can return it to the cathedral it was stolen from.”

  He flipped the meat again. They both knew they were getting into an area where they disagreed, and that these disagreements often led to arguments and even fights. “The morality isn’t as clear-cut as you make it out to be. Why should Belgium get it? Before World War I, most of the Altarpiece panels were in Germany—the Germans were forced to turn them over as reparations after the war. Why should Belgium have a stronger claim than Germany?”

  “That’s what happens in war. To the victor belongs the spoils.”

  “Okay. But now you sound like me. That’s not a moral argument, it’s a recognition of a changing balance of power. Under that argument, why shouldn’t my client be allowed to sell his panel if he wants? His family saved it, kept it away from the Nazis.”

  “But it was stolen, Bruce. The law is clear on this.” The statute of limitations laws for stolen art were complicated and varied, but the bottom line was that this work legally belonged to the pre-theft, 1934 owner.

  “But the law isn’t always right and just. It’s just a set of rules.” They’d had this conversation before. “Three strikes and you’re out. That’s the law, the rule. But there’s nothing magically just about it.”

  “This isn’t baseball, Bruce, it’s stolen art. In this case, the law is just, is moral.”

  “Really? Let’s talk about morality: The painting was commissioned for display in a Catholic cathedral around the time of the Inquisition. Don’t you think a lot of the Church’s money back then was dirty? I mean, filthy dirty—the Inquisition wasn’t just about torture, it was about confiscating property and wealth also. Not to mention the Church pillaging the Middle East during the Crusades.” She nodded for him to continue, conceding the point. “And what about the Jewish and Muslim citizens of Belgium? Should they have to go into a Christian church to see their national treasure?” He held up his hands. “All I’m saying is that the morality is cloudy with all this.”

  She took another sip of her wine. They had gone round and round on this stuff for decades. She had to admit that Bruce had, over the years, worn down her defenses. “So, what are you going to advise your client?”

  “I’m going to walk through all the possibilities with him.” He shrugged. “You know how I feel about this: Art should be out in the public, for all to see. But right now, it’s in a meat locker. Anything’s better than that. So I’m not going to preach. If he decides to try to sell it on the black market, I’m fine with that.”

  She clenched her teeth and let out a long sigh. She knew that, ethically, Bruce was within his rights as an attorney. An attorney could not assist in the committing of a crime and was required to report to the authorities any knowledge of a crime that might lead to death or serious injury to someone. But there was nothing requiring Bruce to blow the whistle on his client for asking for legal advice regarding stolen artwork. “Maybe that’s fine for you. But you’re asking me to get Cam involved.”

  “Trust me, Cam will have nothing to do with selling any stolen art. He’ll never even see it—in fact, I’ve only seen it once myself, the day my client found it.” Bruce explained that he didn’t want to take the ri
sk of being accused of being an accessory, so he had kept his distance from the painting since, working from high-resolution photographs his client took. “I’m just asking Cam for his help figuring out the painting.”

  She walked over to the sliding glass door and stared at the ocean. She knew how Bruce’s mind worked. He would be tempted to help sell the painting, but he would be careful to stay on the right side of the law—not because he was law-abiding, but because he didn’t want to go to jail. But, in the meantime, there was another play, something perhaps even more lucrative than the artwork itself. “I think I get it now,” she said, re-crossing the room. “Your plan is to go looking for this Treasure Templari, or Holy Grail, or whatever it is that is hidden, while your client figures out what to do with the painting.”

  Bruce nodded, smiling. It was the type of smile that came from the soul; the fact that he almost always saved it for her made it even more of a gift. “The thought had crossed my mind,” he said. “Selling something like this will take months. Or longer. Why not use the time productively?”

  As long as Bruce wasn’t actually fencing the painting himself, she couldn’t really find grounds to object. And Cam was a big boy—if he didn’t want to get involved, he could say no. She sighed. “So, what’s a van Eyck painting worth? Millions?”

  “Many millions. Maybe even hundreds. Especially since this painting has such a fascinating history. But, like I said, everyone knows it’s stolen. So the only way to sell it would be to some private collector.”

  “Or to some treasure hunter.” She paused. “Who might not know the treasure had already been found a few weeks earlier. By you.”

  Nodding, he turned off the burner. “All set. Dinner is served.”

  She didn’t move. “Bruce, is this safe?”

  He made a joke. “It’s chicken. I cooked it through.”

  She glared at him.

  He replied. “Safe? Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “You’re going to go look for the Holy Grail, of all things. A quest.” She held his eyes. “I can’t imagine that whoever has it is just going to open the door, invite you in for cookies, and hand it over.”

  Chapter 2

  Katarina Waldburg sprinted the final few hundred yards of her eight-mile morning run along Boston’s Esplanade park, her long, toned legs pounding the pavement as she focused on finishing the final mile in under six minutes. She reached the Fiedler Footbridge and clicked her smart watch—5:54. She allowed herself a rare smile and a short fist pump.

  Named for the famous East German figure skater, Katarina Witt, Katarina had a lot to live up to. She had not disappointed. A world-ranked tennis player as a German teenager, she had quit the tour to attend Harvard Medical School and, in her late twenties, cofounded with her brother Detlef a biotech firm—Hildegard Scientific—which produced some of world’s most promising anti-aging drugs. As a girl, Katarina had stumbled upon the writings of the 12th-century abbess, Hildegard of Bingen. Known mostly for being a Christian mystic, Hildegard had also written a series of books on holistic and herbal healing. It was these books, and the age-old secrets contained in them, which Katarina had used to make her breakthrough medical discoveries. Now 33, Katarina was worth hundreds of millions, lived in a spacious brownstone in Boston’s Back Bay, and remained as physically fit as she had been as a tennis star. In fact, her recent training in martial arts had toughened her body in a way that tennis never had. She boasted a body like an Amazon warrior, a face which rivaled her namesake in beauty, and an IQ in the 160s. Hitler would have held her up as a model of Aryan superiority. She only wished she could have met the man.

  Not that she agreed with his whole Final Solution obsession. Hitler’s preoccupation with eliminating the Jews and other undesirables had been a waste of time, diverting valuable resources which were desperately needed elsewhere. A distraction from the crucial task of defeating Allied forces across Europe. People of Katarina’s generation forgot how close Hitler had come to succeeding. Not her. He had been a great man, a great leader, but not flawless. But for his one misguided obsession, he—and the German people—likely would have ruled the world.

  But the fates had given the Aryans a second chance. And Katarina did not plan on failing as Hitler had.

  Katarina began to cross the footbridge across Storrow Drive, the Friday morning rush-hour traffic crawling along beneath her. From her vantage point she could see Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Business School, the Massachusetts State House, the MIT dome, and the office tower housing Fidelity Investments. Some of the best minds in the world, concentrated here in Boston. Many of those minds, she conceded, were Jewish. Hitler had been wrong to try to wipe them out, letting his hatred cloud his judgment. In fact, he had—tragically, it turned out—ignored research on the development of nuclear weapons, disdaining theoretical physics as “a Jewish science.” It would have been better—in fact would be better—to use the Jews to one’s advantage.

  Her watch buzzed, signaling a new message. Deidre, her cousin from Dresden. She was a few years older than Katarina, and not nearly as accomplished, but what she lacked in intelligence and grace she made up for with loyalty and tenaciousness. Katarina’s uncle, Deidre’s father, ran a lucrative business selling stolen artwork to collectors behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. The family continued, legally now, to deal in fine art. I, too, am hearing that the painting has been found. Details are sparse. I will keep digging.

  Could it be? Hitler had been obsessed with finding the Arma Christi. The Fuhrer was not a Christian himself, but he recognized the power—some would say magical power—of the artifacts which had given rise to the most powerful religion in the Western world. Hitler believed the miracles which Jesus performed were too widely witnessed and too numerous to be dismissed as mere religious fervor. The Fuhrer believed that Jesus had, somehow, harnessed some divine power. A 1933 Nazi stamp featured a chalice and is captioned with the name “Parsifal,” the Arthurian knight famous for questing after the Holy Grail. That Hitler ordered the stamp’s image demonstrated his belief in the power of the Holy Grail.

  And if Jesus had harnessed the power of the Holy Grail, Hitler believed, he could as well. The key was to locate the Arma Christi. The key to that, in turn, was to be found in the lost Just Judges painting.

  Katarina stopped to stretch her legs. She again studied the Boston skyline. A modern skyline, a modern city, a leader in science and technology. Technology would, of course, help determine the outcome of the next global conflict. But so would knowledge of the ancient ones and their secrets.

  Which turned her thoughts back to the Just Judges painting. Like Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS and second in power in Nazi Germany, also had an obsession with the stolen panel. But his obsession had nothing to do with Christianity or the Holy Grail. Himmler believed that the painting was an encoded map leading to an underground cavern, probably in Scandinavia, containing artifacts from the lost civilization of Atlantis. These artifacts, he believed, included ancient technology which could be weaponized and—in logic similar to Hitler’s—used to defeat the Allies. Katarina could still hear the voice of her grandfather, a loyal lieutenant to Himmler who had escaped to Argentina after the war, telling her stories of the Nazi glory days and of what a great man Himmler was. “He was close to finding the secrets of Atlantis,” he had told her. “That would have changed things.” But it was more than just the weaponry, her grandfather (whom she called ‘Opa’) had explained to her. Himmler wanted to replace Christianity, which he believed to be weak. “Turn the other cheek?” Opa had asked mockingly. “Why would anyone do that? If someone hits you, you need to hit them back harder. Christianity is too weak, too passive.” He had shaken his head. “Himmler understood we Germans needed a new religion, one based on strength and power and discipline. And one not tainted by any Jewish roots.”

  In the distance, the iconic, mirrored Hancock Tower rose above the Victorian-era brownstones. In her mind’s eye, Katarina could see the
Romanesque Trinity Church vividly reflected in the Hancock Tower’s massive windows, the modern starkly contrasted against the classical in what, for many Bostonians, was a defining image of the city. Not her. She wished they had destroyed the church when they built the tower. Opa had been right to reject Christianity. Hildegard had eventually been canonized, but during her day she was largely ridiculed and demeaned by the male-dominated Catholic clergy. Never mind that she was twice as smart, and three times as pious, as any of them. The Church was weak, and made weaker by its misogyny and its condemnation of women healers as being agents of the devil. At one point, Church elders accused Hildegard of stealing penises from men who opposed her and keeping the phalluses as pets or houseplants, to pleasure her and her followers as needed. It was a common charge of the time, usually made against suspected witches by ignorant men who didn’t understand that there were a dozen better ways for a woman to satisfy herself. She recalled the picture of a medieval witch harvesting penises, which she had recently emailed to her cousin Deidre with the caption, “Your side of the family, not mine.”

  Katarina shook her head. It was a good reminder how dangerous and misguided misogyny—and not just Christian misogyny—could be. How could a religion which demeaned half of the human population, and demonized nature and science, expect to be the spiritual guide for a strong and healthy society?

  But the Church, flawed as it was, would not go away easily. Recently Katarina had watched a documentary on British television entitled, The Nazi Quest for the Holy Grail. She had saved a summary of the show on her phone as a reminder that, almost a century later, she was facing the same challenges as the great SS leader. She reread it now as she neared the terminus of the footbridge, the morning sun on her face:

  “For Himmler and his cronies, Atlantis was the perfect solution. At the heart of the Nazi creed was the conviction that the Aryan race, from which true Germans were said to be descended, was superior to all others. Yet there was one huge stumbling block. No one had ever uncovered any temples, scriptures or artefacts to prove this ancient civilization existed. But if they found the evidence of Atlantis, the Nazis could establish their own religion to replace Christianity.”