“What do you mean?” Rose asked, suddenly alert. “Lost art?”
“That’s what the item in the paper today was about. During the war, so many things went missing—‘looted’ is the better term, of course. And apparently Douglas Cooper was sent to Switzerland a few years ago, and in just a few weeks he was able to turn up dozens of pictures and valuables that had been stolen from their rightful owners and sold by the Nazis—many to people who claimed, cravenly, that they had absolutely no idea what the Nazis were doing. The paper called him a British hero. Douglas Cooper! I tell you. I never would have guessed it. Thoroughly astounding.”
“That does sound astounding,” Rose said. Gerhard was sipping his whiskey, leaning back in his chair. Was he not going to say anything? His ice cubes clinked, he drained his glass, silent.
Isobel was still speaking. “How amazing: to find a canvas that had been missing for more than five years. The paper said that France has set up a commission to find the art too, and all that they do find they store in the Jeu de Paume until they find the owners. Has either of you ever been there? Oh, Gerhard, we must go one day. It’s such a lovely little museum, right on the edge of the Tuileries.”
Rose heard Isobel but her particular words did not register, because she felt a flare of possibility. Everything was gone, Gerhard had told her, Vienna was not the same. Perhaps, just perhaps, he wasn’t right.
Now Isobel was talking about the Rothschilds, and how the patriarch of the family, now living in Toronto, had tracked down his Vermeer, which had been sold to a dealer in Lucerne. A woman had gone into an antique shop here in Knightsbridge and spotted her mother’s Limoges sixty-piece dinner service, hand-painted with her family’s initials.
“You know, Isobel,” Rose started to say, her heart resounding, “our family owned some pictures. One in particular that our mother loved very much. By a painter named Chaim Soutine.”
“But we aren’t Rothschilds, and that’s not a valuable painting,” Gerhard said.
“Why does that matter?” Rose retorted.
“Really, Gerhard,” Isobel said. “There might be something we could do. Why would you not tell me such a thing?”
“It’s in the past,” Gerhard said. “So many things, they’re in the past.”
“But that doesn’t mean they have to remain there.” Isobel said this firmly, but Rose wasn’t sure she heard her correctly. She felt a quickening, a fluttering rise. In her mind’s eye, she saw the red of the Bellhop’s jacket, the thickened paint strokes, she saw her mother, seeing those things.
“Could you write to Douglas for us? Could you ask him about the Soutine?”
“Why, it’s not a question. Of course I will.”
“It’s a waste of time,” Gerhard said. “You don’t know.” His voice deepened, but the words sounded brittle. He grabbed his glass and stalked out of the room.
Her brother’s anger only fueled Rose’s certainty. Isobel poured herself water and spoke: “You shouldn’t mind him. But I suppose you know that better than I.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Rose said. She was somewhere else entirely. It was The Bellhop she was thinking of, those dark eyes that gave nothing away. I will find you, she thought. And for the first time in years, she felt as if it were a promise she had a chance of keeping.
9
Los Angeles, 2006
Lizzie hadn’t asked Rose for her approval. She told herself that she didn’t need it. She was gathering facts. What was the harm in being informed?
Plenty, she could hear Rose retort. But Rose was full of protestations. She couldn’t always mean them. This was what Lizzie thought as she read online about the 1999 Washington Conference on Nazi-Confiscated Art and the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. It was easy to pretend, as she kept scrolling, that The Bellhop was like the other artwork in question, languishing in a private collection or a museum somewhere, its provenance suspicious and light on details. But The Bellhop wasn’t missing because of the Nazis. Lizzie imagined Rose saying, That’s precisely why you want to know about restitution: so you can forget that night. Still she kept searching.
On a Harvard law school syllabus, she read the language that the Nazis had used to codify the seizure of artwork. They had gone to the trouble to make it legal. The law, established in 1938, stated that “products of degenerate art that have been secured in museums or in collections open to the public . . . may be appropriated by the Reich without compensation.” Lizzie read about New York’s 1963 Menzel v. List case that had established the demand and refusal rule, which stated that the limitations period begins once the owner makes a demand for the return of the property in question. She read about battles over Monets and Matisses, the stonewalling by prominent museums that insisted there was no plundered artwork hanging on their walls; she read many a reference to Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.
“The prospect of attempting to claim seized art is daunting, arduous, expensive, and byzantine at best,” an attorney by the name of Michael Ciparelli was quoted as saying in one news account. His name sounded familiar. She looked him up. He was an expert in the field of art restitution, and she saw that he had been an associate at Paul, Weiss years earlier, as had her boss. Perhaps Marc could put her in touch. What’s he going to tell you? She could imagine Rose scoffing. We don’t know where The Bellhop is. How can it be claimed?
I don’t know, Lizzie told Rose in her head. That’s why I’m going to ask.
None of this she told Rose that afternoon. The plan had been for another walk. But after they left Rose’s apartment in the late afternoon, the wind kicked up—it was cooler than either Rose or Lizzie had expected—and the streets felt emptied out, desolate. “I could use some coffee,” Lizzie offered, but as they headed to the café, Rose looked at her watch: “Corman!” she declared happily.