Nightingale by Aleksandr Voinov Page A

to do.”
    His French was passably fluent. And he was holding something large and flat and square, wrapped in paper and held together with twine. More canvases. Yves had examined the others in their brown paper, and the wooden frame and weight and size gave them away. Paintings.
    Yves glanced into the man’s eyes, but the driver merely lifted the paintings with one hand and with the other closed the door after Yves, just this side of rude.
    “Thank you.” For the ride if nothing else.
    He took them upstairs and placed them gently on the table. He sat down, the lunch heavy in his stomach. These were worse than Harfner’s skull-adorned hat that had slept in his wardrobe like a time bomb. With the hat at least, he’d known how it had come into his possession, and to whom it belonged. With these canvases, nothing was clear.
    He wished he could simply pick up a cognac or whiskey to settle his nerves, but opted for water. He gulped down a glassful, then returned to the living room and stared at the squares wrapped in brown paper. Misshapen puzzle pieces that would never fit.
    “Unless you open them,” he muttered, clenching and unclenching his hands.
    Spoken out loud, it made sense. Heinrich wouldn’t mind. They might be paintings he’d picked up in any of the galleries, paid for after the vastly inflated exchange rate of reichsmarks to francs. Yves wouldn’t have touched any of the packets if there had been just one or two. But now he had five.
    They’ll be cheap views of the Eiffel Tower. Watercolors. Something any street artist could put together in an hour.
    Yves picked up the sharp letter opener from the desk and sat down, pulling the largest canvas closer. He cut the twine and balled it up, then placed it to the side. His hands were surprisingly steady, although he felt like a thief as he unfolded the paper. He then gently turned the canvas around.
    And almost dropped it.
    It was an oil painting. Expressionist. Jagged lines, flat, two-dimensional colors. He had to put it down, because the flat blotches of color made no sense from this close. He propped it up against the couch and stepped away. It became clearer.
    The brown flats were meant to be earth. The black lines, intense like Japanese calligraphy, formed barbed wire fences. The pale blue—not unlike von Grimmstein’s eyes—was sky reflecting in water. Black scrawls looked like swastikas, but upon closer inspection, they were people. Soldiers, more twisted than the landscape, and more barren and hopeless too. The title was scratched into the paint in the corner: Still Life 1916 . The artist’s name scrawled underneath. It looked like J. Brasche.
    Yves stared at the painting. It was so primal and raw it felt like a frozen scream in his living room. There was nothing pretty about it, nothing calm or quiet, despite the name. Still Life . Who could bear to make something like that? He breathed against the pressure from the painting, then took it, put it face down on the table, and wrapped it again.
    Above all, why had Heinrich acquired this? He’d been there. Dug himself into that same loamy brown earth—God help him—hung in that barbed wire. Been twisted like any of the other human figures in the distance. On the canvas, none of them had had a face. They’d become just irregular patterns in a landscape that defied all patterns, that had been reduced to non-shape, something worse than a desert, and much less pure. It was a landscape that shouldn’t exist, couldn’t exist, because that was clearly madness.
    He lit a cigarette, trying to chase the painting from his mind. And what it said about Heinrich, who kept it. Why would anybody do that?
    He returned to the table, not wanting to risk looking at another one of the paintings, but unwilling to leave it at Still Life 1916 .
    He opened the next one, turned it slowly around. His first impression was a riot of colors—blues and reds clashing, blending. It looked like abstract fire and waves, but the blue