Silver by Steven Savile Read Free Book Online Page A

expression, even the damage where Judas had been tearing his hair out. They were all classic representations of shame. The difference between this and the original lay in the coins. In the original Judas had been painted as unable to look away from the silver. In this, he offered the blood money up to Mary Magdalene, looking at her with hope, even love, in his eyes. He wasn’t groveling for mercy. Instead, there was a discomforting beauty and truth to the painting that had owned Sir Charles’ soul since he first laid eyes upon it.
    He was a boy when his father had taken him to see it hanging in Jacques Goudstikker’s Gallerie in Paris.
    It had hung there until the German occupation when, like so many other works of art, it was spirited away into Hermann Göring’s personal collection and thought lost forever in the many vaults beneath the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich.
    After decades of litigation, threat and negotiation, a number of paintings had been recovered, but the process was made all the more difficult. Jacques Goudstikker had left his widow, Marei, a typewritten inventory, but without death certificates the Swiss bankers refused to turn over the treasures gathering dust in their vaults.
    Of course, Auschwitz, Belsen and Treblinka hadn’t been in the habit of issuing death certificates for the Jews they gassed.
    It was all a face-saving exercise for the Swiss, who of course, vociferously denied any wrongdoing.
    Sir Charles had managed to secure a copy of Marei Goudstikker’s list. The interpretation of Judas Repentant , known as The Adoration of Silver , or more simply, Silver , wasn’t on that inventory. Its absence had, in part, been the reason behind his obsession with lost treasures.
    It had taken him the best part of a decade to grease the right palms, who, in turn, knewe="Georgiht vault to crack open. Smuggling the Rembrandt out of the country after that had been a comparatively easy task. And now it hung above his desk, a constant reminder that there were two sides to every story, even the best known of all. He had made arrangements for the painting’s return to the heirs of its rightful owner upon his death. That, too, was the kind of man he was.
    The rest of the room was dominated by a huge orthopedic bed. Again the mahogany frame was scarred where the chair had caught it again and again. Angels, demons and so many creatures of nightmare were beautifully rendered in the frieze that decorated the headboard. Sir Charles had discovered the carving in Palermo and had it shipped to Nonesuch, where he had employed a seventy-year-old artisan to craft the art from a thing of curious beauty into the bed where he intended to die.
    There was a green oxygen tank beside the neatly made bed, a clear, plastic mask hanging from the closed valve. The third wall was dominated by more books. Beneath the window an exquisitely hand-carved globe caught the moonlight. It was the oldest thing in the room, the contours of its map hopelessly wrong in this world of GPS and satellite navigation. It was filled with places that had long since slipped off modern maps and into mythology: Hy-Brazil, Hawaiki, Nibiru, Lemuria, Ys, Thule and more. Places that were filled with mystery and promise, lost, like Rembrandt’s Silver .
    Perhaps, he thought, and not for the first time, they too could be found? There was something curiously soothing about tilting at windmills like Quixote.
    Sir Charles angled the chair between the bed and the wall, fastened the mask over his face and breathed deeply as the pure oxygen flooded into his lungs. After several purifying breaths he shut off the valve and hung the mask up again. He closed his eyes. He had always intended that Orla would head up the investigation in Israel. Anything else, as she had so vehemently put it, was a waste of her talents—but he was all too aware of what had happened to her out there. It had to be her choice to return to that forsaken land.
      The old man drummed his fingers on