Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [123]
“Real estate.”
“It was business?” Arkady asked.
Schiller sipped his tea. The cup was porcelain with a gilded rim. “Before the war, we had our own bank in Berlin. We’re not Bavarian.” He cast a concerned eye on his grandson. “That’s Peter’s problem; he’s not bred to be a drunken lout. Anyway, the family lived in Potsdam, outside the city. We also had a summer home on the coast. I’ve described them to Peter many times. Beautiful places. We lost them all. Bank and houses, everything ended up in the Soviet sector and then in the Democratic Republic of Germany. We lost them first to the Russians and then to the East Germans.”
Arkady said, “With reunification I thought private property was being returned.”
“Oh, yes. The former East Germany is haunted now by Jewish ghosts. But we weren’t helped because the new law excluded properties confiscated from ’45 to ’49, which was when we lost ours. Or so I thought until Benz appeared at my door.”
“What did he say?” Arkady asked.
“He represented himself as some sort of real estate agent. He informed me that there was some question about exactly when the Potsdam house had been seized. When the Russians were in charge, many estates simply stood empty for years. Records had been lost or burned. Benz said he might be able to provide me with the proper documentation to help my claim.” Schiller turned stiffly in his chair. “It was for you, too, Peter. He said he might be able to help us with the summer house, too. They could all be ours again.”
“For how much?” Peter asked.
“No money. Information.”
“Bank information?”
Schiller was offended. “Personal history.” The banker shook off his slippers. His feet were mottled blue, with yellowed nails. Two toes were missing. “Frostbite. I should live in Spain. Peter, you know where the brandy is. I feel a chill.”
Arkady asked, “What did you do on the Eastern Front?”
Schiller cleared his throat. “I was with a special detachment.”
“How special?”
“I understand what you’re saying. Other special detachments rounded up Jews. I did nothing like that. My detachment gathered art. My father wanted to keep me out of the front line, so he got me attached to a group of SS who followed the advance. I was a boy, younger than either of you. He told me that I could protect art. He was right; without us, thousands of paintings, pieces of jewelry and irreplaceable books would have disappeared into knapsacks, been burned, melted down or completely disappeared. We were literally rescuing culture. The lists were already drawn up. Göring wrote one list, Goebbels another. We had teams of carpenters, packers, our own trains. The Wehrmacht had orders to keep the tracks open just to send our cargo back. It was an enormously busy fall. When winter came we stalled outside Moscow, and that was the war right there, though we didn’t know it.”
With brandy, the tea was better. The banker shifted in his chair. It occurred to Arkady that for the older man every movement involved pain.
“This is what Tommy wanted to ask you about?” Arkady asked.
“Some of the same questions,” Schiller said.
Peter said, “You told me you were captured outside Moscow and spent three years in a camp. You said you surrendered when your rifles froze.”
“My feet froze. To tell the truth, when I was captured I was hiding in a boxcar. The SS men were shot on the spot. I would have been shot, too, if the Russians hadn’t opened some cases and found icons inside. There was some interrogation of me, which was not delicate. I agreed to make lists of what we’d taken. Then the whole war went in reverse. I was never in camp, not for a day. I traveled with the Red Army, first searching for what the SS had shipped. Then, as we moved further west, I was as an adviser to special troops from the Soviet Ministry of Culture, helping to locate and send German works of art to Moscow. Stalin made a list, Beria made a list. We sent even more because we found what the SS had taken from different countries—the Koenigs drawings from Holland, the Poznan paintings