Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [14]
“As for what’s inside the barn,” I tell them, “it’s the worthless secret of a silly old man, as the world will discover when I have gone to the big art auction in the sky.”
5
ONE ART PUBLICATION claimed to know exactly what was in there: the very greatest of the Abstract Expressionist paintings, which I was keeping off the market in order to raise the value of relatively unimportant paintings in the house here.
Not true.
After that article was printed, my fellow Armenian in Southampton, Kevork Hovanissian, made a serious offer of three million dollars for everything in the barn, sight unseen.
“I wouldn’t want to cheat you that way,” I told him. “That would be un-Armenian.”
If I had taken his money, it would have been like selling him Brooklyn Bridge.
One response to that same article wasn’t that amusing. A man whose name I did not recognize, said in a letter to the editor that he had known me during the war, which he evidently did. He was at least familiar with my platoon of artists, which he described accurately. He knew the mission we were given after the German Air Force had been knocked out of the sky and there was no longer any need for the big-time camouflage jokes we played. This was the mission, which was like turning children loose in the workshop of Father Christmas: we were to evaluate and catalogue all captured works of art.
This man said he had served in SHAEF, and I must have dealt with him from time to time. It was his belief, as stated in his letter, that I had stolen masterpieces which should have been returned to their rightful owners in Europe. Fearing lawsuits brought by those rightful owners, he said, I had locked them up in the barn.
Wrong.
He is wrong about the contents of the barn. I have to say he is just a little bit right about my having taken advantage of my unusual wartime opportunities. I couldn’t have stolen anything which was handed over by the military units which had captured it. I had to give them receipts, and we were visited regularly by auditors from the Finance Corps.
But our travels behind the lines did bring us into contact with persons in desperate circumstances who had art to sell. We got some remarkable bargains.
Nobody in the platoon got an Old Master, or anything which obviously came from a church or a museum or a great private collection. At least I don’t think anybody did. I can’t be absolutely sure about that. In the Art World, as elsewhere, opportunists are opportunists and thieves are thieves.
But I myself did buy from a civilian an unsigned charcoal sketch which looked like a Cezanne to me, and which has since been authenticated as such. It is now a part of the permanent collection of the Rhode Island School of Design. And I bought a Matisse, my favorite painter, from a widow who said her husband had been given it by the artist himself. For that matter, I got stuck with a fake Gauguin, which served me right.
And I sent my purchases for safekeeping to just about the only person I knew and could trust in the whole United States of America anymore, Sam Wu, a Chinese laundryman in New York City who was a cook for a little while for my former master, the illustrator Dan Gregory.
Imagine fighting for a country where the only civilian you know is a Chinese laundryman!
And then one day I and my platoon of artists were ordered into combat, to contain, if we could, the last big German breakthrough of World War Two.
But none of that stuff is in the barn, or even in my possession. I sold it all when I got home from the war, which gave me a nice little bankroll to invest in the stock market. I had given up my boyhood dream of being an artist. I enrolled in courses in accounting and economics and business law and marketing and so on at New York University. I was going to be a businessman.
I thought this about myself and art: that I could catch the likeness of anything I could see—with patience and the best instruments and materials. I had, after all, been an