The Rembrandt Affair

33

MENDOZA, ARGENTINA

Gabriel and Chiara drove out of the vineyard, trailed by a cumulus cloud of butterflies, and returned to Mendoza. That evening they had di

"You liked him, didn't you?" asked Chiara.

"Voss?" Gabriel nodded slowly. "More than I wanted to."

"The question is, do you believe him?"

"It's a remarkable story," said Gabriel. "And I believe every word of it. Kurt Voss was an easy mark. He was a notorious war criminal, a wanted man. For more than twenty years, the fortune was sitting in Landesma

"And a fortune of looted Holocaust assets vanished into thin air," Chiara said bitterly.

"Just like the people it once belonged to."

"And the painting?"

"If Landesma

"Did he know about the list?"

"In order to find it, he would have had to pull apart the two canvases and look inside. But he had no reason to do that."

"So it was still inside the painting at the time of the 1964 sale?"

"Without question."

"There's one thing I don't understand," Chiara said after a silence. "Why kill Carlos Weber? After all, Landesma

"Perhaps it was because Weber's visit was quasi-official. Remember, he was representing not just Voss but the government of Argentina. That made him dangerous." Gabriel paused. "But I suspect there was something else that made Weber even more dangerous. He knew about the Rembrandt and the list of account numbers hidden inside it. And he made that clear to Landesma

"And Landesma

Gabriel nodded. "Obviously, Landesma

"Why didn't he just go back to the Hoffma

"Because in Switzerland, a private sale means a private sale, even for the likes of Walter Landesma

"And Martin?"

"I suspect that, at some point, the father confessed his sins to his son, and Martin took up the search. That Rembrandt has been floating around out there like a ticking time bomb for more than forty years. If it were ever to come to light..."

"Then Martin's world would be shattered in an instant."

Gabriel nodded. "At the very least, he would find himself swamped by a tidal wave of litigation. In the worst-case scenario, he might be forced to surrender hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars in compensation and damages."

"Sounds to me like a rather strong motive to steal a painting," Chiara said. "But what do we do now? Walter Landesma

"Maybe Carlos Weber can help us."

"Carlos Weber was murdered in Zurich in 1967."

"A fortunate occurrence from our point of view. You see, when diplomats die, their governments tend to get a

"There's no way the Argentine government is going to give us a copy of the inquiry into Weber's death."

"That's true," said Gabriel. "But I know someone who might be able to get it for us."

"Does this someone have a name?"

Gabriel smiled and said, "Alfonso Ramirez."

AT THE conclusion of the meal, as the subjects were strolling hand in hand across the darkened plaza toward their hotel, a digitized audio file was dispatched to the headquarters of Zentrum Security in Zurich along with several surveillance photographs. One hour later, headquarters sent a reply. It contained a set of terse instructions, the address of an apartment house in the San Telmo district of Buenos Aires, and the name of a certain former colonel who had worked for the Argentine secret police during the darkest days of the Dirty War. The most intriguing aspect of the communication, however, was the date of the operatives' return home. They were scheduled to leave Buenos Aires the following night. One would take Air France to Paris; the other, British Air to London. No reason for their separate travel was given. None was needed. The two operatives were both veterans and knew how to read between the lines of the cryptic communiques that flowed from corporate headquarters. An account termination order had been handed down. Cover stories were being written, exit strategies put in place. It was too bad about the woman, they thought as they glimpsed her briefly standing on the balcony of her hotel room. She really did look quite lovely in the Argentine moonlight.

34

BUENOS AIRES

On the night of August 13, 1979, Maria Espinoza Ramirez, poet, cellist, and Argentine dissident of note, was hurled from the cargo hold of a military transport plane flying several thousand feet above the South Atlantic. Seconds before she was pushed, the captain in charge of the operation slashed open her abdomen with a machete, a final act of barbarism that ensured her corpse would fill rapidly with water and thus remain forever on the bottom of the sea. Her husband, the prominent antigovernment journalist Alfonso Ramirez, would not learn of Maria's disappearance for many months, for at the time he, too, was in the hands of the junta's henchmen. Had it not been for Amnesty Inter national, which waged a tireless campaign to bring attention to his case, Ramirez would almost certainly have suffered the same fate as his wife. Instead, after more than a year in captivity, he was freed on the condition he refrain from ever writing about politics again. "Silence is a proud tradition in Argentina," said the generals at the time of his release. "We think Senor Ramirez would be wise to discover its obvious benefits."

Another man might have heeded the generals' advice. But Alfonso Ramirez, fueled by rage and grief, waged a fearless campaign against the junta. His struggle did not end with the regime's collapse in 1983. Of the many torturers and murderers Ramirez helped to expose in the years afterward was the captain who had hurled his wife into the sea. Ramirez wept when the panel of judges found the captain guilty. And he wept again a few moments later when they sentenced the murderer to just five years in prison. On the steps of the courthouse, Ramirez declared that Argentine justice was now lying on the bottom of the sea with the rest of the disappeared. Arriving home that evening, he found his apartment in ruins and his bathtub filled with water. On the bottom were several photos of his wife, all of which had been slashed in half.

Having established himself as one of the most prominent human rights activists in Latin America and the world, Alfonso Ramirez turned his attention to exposing another tragic aspect of Argentina's history, its close ties to Nazi Germany. Sanctuary of Evil, his 2006 historical masterwork, detailed how a secret arrangement among the Peron government, the Vatican, the SS, and American intelligence allowed thousands of war criminals to find safe haven in Argentina after the war. It also contained an account of how Ramirez had assisted Israeli intelligence in the unmasking and capture of a Nazi war criminal named Erich Radek. Among the many details Ramirez left out was the name of the legendary Israeli agent with whom he had worked.