The English Assassin

for newspapers and trade publications and five years earlier had coauthored a well-received book on the subject. Despite the pleas of his publisher, he had steadfastly refused to reveal his personal motivation for pursuing the topic. Gabriel was among the handful of people who knew why: Julian Isherwood had lived through it.
    “In 1940, London and New York didn’t matter,” Isherwood began. “Paris was the center of the art world, and the center of the Paris art scene was the rue de la Boétie in the eighth arrondissement. The famous Paul Rosenberg had his gallery at number twenty-one. Picasso lived across a courtyard at number twenty-three with his wife, the Russian dancer Olga Koklova. Across the street stood the gallery of Étienne Bignou. Georges Wildenstein had his gallery at number fifty-seven. Paul Guillaume and Josse Hessel were also there.”
    “And your father?”
    “Isakowitz Fine Arts was next to Paul Rosenberg’s. We lived in a flat above the main exposition rooms. Picasso was ‘Uncle Pablo’ to me. I spent hours at his flat. Sometimes, he’d let me watch him paint. Olga used to give me chocolate and cake until I was sick. It was an enchanted existence.”
    “And when the Germans came?”
    “Well, it all came crashing down, didn’t it? The invasion of the Low Countries started on May tenth. By June fourteenth, the Germans had entered Paris. Swastikas hung from the Eiffel Tower, and the German General Staff had set up shop at the Hôtel Crillon.”
    “When did the looting start?”
    “Two days after Hitler’s victory tour of Paris, he ordered all works of art owned by Jews to be transferred to German hands for so-called safekeeping. In reality, the plunder of France was on.”
    “If I remember correctly, Hitler set up an organization to oversee the looting of France.”
    “There were several, but the most important was a unit called the ERR: the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. It was a formidable enterprise. It had its own intelligence service for hunting down works of art, a strike force for raids and seizures, and a staff of art historians and appraisers. My God, it even had its own carpenters for crating looted works for shipment to Germany.”
    “The rue de la Boétie must have been their first stop.”

    “The ERR went after the dealers and the collectors. The Rothschild collections were seized along with their residences. So were the collections of the Jewish banking magnate David David-Weill and Jacques Stern. All the Jewish-owned galleries on the rue de la Boétie were raided and their collections seized, including the inventory of Isakowitz Fine Arts.”
    “Did your father manage to protect any of his works?”
    “Most dealers, my father included, tried to protect their most important pieces. They hid them in remote chateaux or bank vaults or shipped them out of the country. But the unprotected works were quickly snatched up by the Germans. Before the invasion, during the drôle de guerre, my father rented a villa in Bordeaux and moved his most important pieces there. We fled there as the Germans closed in on Paris. When France was divided into the Occupied Zone and the Unoccupied Zone, we ended up on the Vichy side of the line. But in the autumn of 1940, an ERR strike force with a French police escort broke down the door of the villa and seized my father’s paintings.”
    “How did the Germans find his collection?”
    “He’d made the mistake of telling a French dealer what he planned to do with his paintings. The Frenchman turned over the information to the ERR in exchange for a payoff of five percent of the value of my father’s collection. C’est la vie. ”
    Gabriel knew what had happened next, and he had no intention of allowing Isherwood to tell it again. Shortly after the Germans moved into the Unoccupied Zone late in 1942, the SS and their allies in the Vichy government began rounding up Jews for internment and deportation to the death camps. Isherwood’s father hired a pair of Basque smugglers to take young Julian over the Pyrenees into the sanctuary of Spain. His mother and father stayed behind in France. In 1943 they were arrested and sent to Sobibor, where they were immediately murdered.
    Isherwood shivered once violently. “I’m afraid I feel a drink coming on. On your feet, Gabriel. Some fresh air will do us both some good.”
     
    THEYwalked around the corner to a wine bar in Jermyn Street and settled next to a hissing gas fire. Isherwood ordered