by Larry WithamA WAR CORRESPONDENT'S ART NOIR STORY IN EASTERN EUROPE
THE ART HISTORIAN Lynn H. Nichols is not a novelist. Since 1994,
however, quite a few novelists have been in her debt.
Nichols wrote
The Rape of Europa. It is the single
best book on the Nazi looting of European art. And among her grateful following
is novelist Dan Fesperman, who takes us into the Balkans and incorporates the
WWII art-looting legacy into his unique detective novel, Lie in the Dark (1999). It may be the single best novel on the
1990s civil war in Bosnia (at least to this blog), thanks to its art world
elements.
As a war
correspondent in Bosnia, Fesperman gained real-life observations of the military,
political, and cultural clashes of that time. He has used that knowledge to
create an evocative backdrop for what begins as a murder investigation.
The story
takes place in Sarajevo amid a four-year siege of the city (1992-96), a bitter
part of the armed strife between ethnic Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, and Muslims
after the breakup of Yugoslavia. During the siege, the Serbs are seeking to capture Sarajevo, a Bosnian government
enclave.
Siege or not, life and crime go on. One night the local police chief, Esmir Vitas,
is shot and killed by the river. Vitas is an honest cop dedicated to
cracking down on gangsters who control various neighborhoods. Still, the
Interior Ministry suspiciously concludes that Vitas was struck by an errant sniper bullet. It sends
Inspector Vlado Petric—our hero and one of two city homicide detectives—to wrap
up the case and file it away.
At the
morgue, however, Petric obtains a scrap of paper from the victim’s
pants pocket with a name and address. When he goes to this address, the real
story, told by a former Yugoslav museum official named Milan Glavis, begins
to unfold.
The story
is this: At the end of WWII, representatives from countries invaded by the Nazis
went to “collecting points” in Allied- and Soviet-occupied Germany to reclaim
stolen art. The two men in charge of Sarajevo’s National Museum made this
reclamation trip with a criminal plan in mind: to take paintings that are not
really theirs.
Using blank
slips, they forged bogus art claims on hundreds of works, spiriting them back
to Sarajevo, a kind of looting in reverse. The museum was too small, so they
farmed out the paintings, mainly to offices and homes of the new Communist Party
elite. To keep track of these transfers of art, they produced a “transfer file”
with a card and notations for each artwork.
“We knew
all along where everything was,” the former museum director tells Inspector Petric.
Now, in the
chaos of the Sarajevo siege, a district warlord, Commander Zarko, has
used his control of a city sector to round up the “transferred” art to sell it
on the black market. Once Zarko is killed, however, a small group of
high-ranking Interior Ministry “special police” and a few military men decided
to take over the art smuggling ring. They send the art to Frankfurt for illicit
sales in the West.
To pull
this off, the corrupt officials have engaged in a lot of “sweet-talking UNESCO
underlings and blue-helmeted shipping officers” who oversee the UN-controlled
airport—the only way to ship materials out of Sarajevo.
Gradually, Inspector
Petric realizes that his
government superiors had probably killed Vitas to protect the
smuggling operation. To investigate further could mean his own death, and yet Petric continues to dig deeper into the maze of corruption. His
investigation takes him across dangerous check points and into some of the
worst zones of the city. More than once, he takes a car or taxi down “Sniper
Alley,” with fingers crossed.
For example, he heads
for the notorious neighborhood of Dobrinja: “If Sarajevo had become a sort of
hell on earth, Dobrinja was it innermost circle of despair and isolation.” The
driver must avoid “shell holes and torn metal without slowing down enough to
invite gunfire.” Serbian snipers are on three sides.
When the museum director-informant also shows up dead at the morgue, Petric knows he can no longer trust his police superiors (or even his partner, who tries to kill him in the end). So he hooks up with British war correspondent Toby Perkins. Toby’s got an
armored Land Rover and UN press pass to get through check points. “An art
smuggle operation,” Toby realizes. “And with some very big fish involved.”
Petric also
has a female ally, Amira, a “farm wife” who came to the city to survive as a
prostitute outside the military barracks. She was a witness to the Vitas shooting.
She ends up offering a safe house for Petric and Toby (and a place to hide
paintings and the transfer file).
In this
novel, artworks are not described, except for focusing on an “impressionist
masterpiece” of a “field of lilies” hung in the apartment of Petric’s informant.
In the last pages, this is the painting that Petric finds on its way to Frankfurt, where he hopes to use it as proof of the art crimes swirling about Sarajevo.
Readers of
detective noir will find Lie in the Dark
to be a familiar friend. It evokes the dark atmosphere of works such as Martin Cruz
Smith’s Gorky Park, Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios, and Graham
Greene’s The Third Man.
In the last
chapter, we find Petric inside a crate with one of the paintings being shipped
to Germany (indeed, the very same impressionist lilies). The crate is almost
opened by guards, but since a corrupt police official knows the crate contains
his latest stolen cache, he tells the guards to pass over it. This is the novel’s
last satisfying twist. The plane, with Petric, is off to Germany.
The story
began with Inspector Petric seeing gravediggers on a snowy hill, and in flight,
he looks out a crack in the crate and sees the same snowy hill, soon to have
its gravediggers at work again.
No comments:
Post a Comment