The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [123]
From the start, Piller’s interest in Van Meegeren had more to do with collaboration than with art. Van Meegeren lived in style, and he had no obvious means of support. How had he managed it? Operating with virtual carte blanche, Piller set off to find out. Van Meegeren didn’t help his cause by sticking to his usual vague story about where his Vermeer had come from. A well-off family fallen on hard times had enlisted his help. The family’s name, please? Their connection with you? Your connection with Goering?
To his infinite regret, Van Meegeren said, he was unable to provide more help. He had promised confidentiality to the family that owned the painting, and a promise was a promise. He had nothing to do with Germany or Goering. How the painting had ended up in Goering’s hands he had no idea. Piller suggested that Van Meegeren think harder.
Piller returned a few days later to ask the same questions more urgently, and Van Meegeren delivered the same non-answers. On his own say-so, Piller arrested Van Meegeren and tossed him in a prison cell in the hope of jogging his memory. Convinced that Van Meegeren had been up to something ugly and illegal during the war years—perhaps dealing in property stolen from Jewish families—Piller and his men searched Van Meegeren’s house. Nothing at first, and then someone thought to pry up the floorboards. They quickly found hoards of jewelry and great bundles of cash. Where had all this come from? Van Meegeren refused to say.
But Piller held all the cards. Snatched without warning from a mansion and flung into a jail cell, deprived of the cigarettes and sleeping pills and morphine he had come to rely on, and dependent on the whim of a cop with a free hand, Van Meegeren was in real trouble. If he had indeed gotten hold of a treasure that belonged to the Dutch people and sold it, in war time, to a mortal enemy of the state—and Hermann Goering was the man who had rained bombs down on Rotterdam—then he was guilty of treason. The penalty for treason was death.
Piller, who was both a Jew and a resistance fighter, had every reason to despise Van Meegeren. Remarkably, though, the two men struck up a kind of friendship. Van Meegeren was a good talker, and Piller had endless questions about his war time activities. Policeman and prisoner spent hours together in a way that would have been impossible in ordinary times. Piller would fetch Van Meegeren from his jail cell and the two men would walk the city streets, or Piller would bring Van Meegeren with him to his weekend cottage on a lake near Amsterdam. Piller’s aim was partly to break Van Meegeren and find out what he was concealing, but he genuinely found Van Meegeren intriguing, too. Who was this complicated man?
In the course of these long conversations, Piller returned again and again to the question of finances. Van Meegeren was clearly that rare thing, an artist with no financial worries. Where had the money come from? Piller would recall, years later, that Van Meegeren told him he had spent the better part of 1944 in nightclubs. “But what sort of nightclubs were open in Amsterdam in 1944?” Piller would ask. “Nightclubs frequented by the Germans, by the army or the SS, not by ordinary Dutch citizens. In the first place, ordinary Dutch citizens didn’t have any money to spend. The only Dutch citizens who were there were automatically suspect. But he was there every day and every night!”
Piller had unimpeachable testimony that Van Meegeren not only had Dutch Nazi friends but had himself been in and out of the main office of the SS in the heart of Amsterdam. For six weeks, Piller pressed Van Meegeren for an explanation, without result. But every lead bolstered the investigator’s suspicions. He found that Van Meegeren had published a lavish book of drawings, in 1942, with oversize