“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 from Poland. We stripped the Dresden Museum, the Prussian Royal Library, museum collections from Aachen, Weimar, Magdeburg.”

“In other words, you collaborated,” Peter said.

“I served history. I survived. I was hardly the only one. When the Russians arrived in Berlin, where do you think they went? While the city burned, while Hitler was still alive, they were in the museums. Rubenses, Rembrandts, the gold of Troy disappeared, treasures that have never been seen again.”

“Were you there?” Arkady asked.