Free The Old Boys by Charles McCarry

exclusively, but primarily, yes,” Hawk replied. “It couldhardly be otherwise since Jews owned a disproportionate number of the best European paintings and sculptures. Most of the rest were in America.”
    For which Hawk had not yet been asked to prepare an inventory.
    Heydrich sent Hawk to his own tailor for uniforms, then to an SS officers’ training camp for several weeks of military basic training and indoctrination plus instruction in secret police arts. He returned to Berlin inspired and ready to go to work. Hawk was allowed to hand-pick a small staff. The best art experts in Germany were Jewish, of course. He gave Heydrich a list of candidates for the project, all of them scholars of the first rank. Heydrich arrested the ones that were not already in custody and provided a large sunny workroom in Gestapo headquarters, complete with a firstrate library. According to Hawk, his helpers were quite happy in their work. It was infinitely less frightening than the fate they had imagined for themselves when the Gestapo knocked on their doors. Though young, Hawk was a genuine scholar, a rare bird among Nazis, and he took certain measures to keep up morale— for example, not wearing his SS uniform during working hours and letting his helpers wear ordinary civilian clothes rather than prison clothes. He also arranged for family visits and kosher meals.
    Kosher meals in a Nazi prison?
    “Heydrich had given me absolute authority, in writing, to manage the project as I thought best. His signature and stamp made anything possible.” Hawk started to smile in fond memory, caught himself, but could not resist the pleasantry that had popped into his head. “We just ordered the arrest of a Jewish cook or two,” he said. “Heydrich was a man who thought in spirals but acted in straight lines.”
    The lists of art objects for France and the Low Countries, complete with estimates of current market value, were completed in a couple of months. The combined value of works of art in private hands ran into hundreds of millions of reichsmarks. Heydrich ordered Hawk to form his own personal special unit ofSS troopers and began training them to locate the houses where the paintings on Heydrich’s list were hanging, and to know these pictures when they saw them. Hawk’s men spent their days memorizing works of art in the way that Luftwaffe trainees learned to recognize the silhouettes of Allied aircraft. When the war came, they would be among the first German troops into the target cities, and also among the first out as they sped back to Berlin with truckloads of treasure for Heydrich’s art collection.
    It was from one of his Jewish scholars, a specialist in ancient manuscripts who had done groundbreaking work in Jerusalem and in the Vatican library, that Hawk first heard about the possible existence of Roman manuscripts secreted in amphorae by confidential agents of the emperor for shipment back to Rome from the far corners of the empire.
    “This man had a sort of informed obsession that such manuscripts must still be preserved in amphorae that had gone to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea as a result of Roman shipwrecks,” Hawk said.
    Hawk kept this fellow upstairs for a few more days after the other scholars had been locked up. After exhaustive conversation and much consultation of Latin sources, Hawk made a trip to the Vatican library. There he found plausible evidence in ancient records that amphorae had in fact been used as moving dead drops aboard Roman ships, and that certain of those ships had sunk— many of them in relatively shallow waters off Crete while bound for Ostia or Brindisi from ports in Egypt, Phoenicia and Samaria.
    “Any such manuscript would, of course, be a thing of great beauty as well as an object of inestimable value,” said Hawk.
    Hawk took his findings to Heydrich, who was tremendously pleased by his news.
    “He saw the possibilities immediately,” Hawk said. “Beyond that, he was quite moved by