Maria Dolon
| #chernaya_polka | #black_shelf Women's thriller. Eksmo. Moscow 2018. 345 pages. |
Inga Belova has just been dismissed from the glossy magazine QQ because of a scandal and has to accept another blow: TV anchorman Volokhov, her old friend and teacher, has died. Heart attack is the official version. Inga is in a desolate state. When she learns from Volochov‘s widow that an expensive book – the libretto „Parade“ by Jean Cocteau with the author‘s autograph and original drawings by Pablo Picasso – has disappeared from the apartment, she no longer believes in a heart attack. A forensic scientist friend of hers confirms that he was murdered, because tiny traces of an injection were found on the back of Volokhov‘s head. Since the police remain inactive, Inga pushes the investigation of the death of Volochov herself. She learns of his close relationship to a young poet. But shortly before he can provide her with information, he is run over in front of Inga‘s eyes. The license plate leads Inga to the Bolshoi Theatre and to one of the set designers. He confesses to the hit-and-run, but dies himself trying to escape from Moscow. It was murder again – someone hacked into the on-board computer of the getaway car and manipulated it. The perpetrator obviously unscrupulously tries to eliminate witnesses. Soon Inga finds the link between Bolshoi Theatre, poet and Volochov. It is the famous German collector Otto von Meier. On his behalf, the poet stole the libretto „Parade“ (Volochov decidedly refused to sell), and the set designer stole original drawings and decorations by famous artists from the Bolshoi Theatre and replaced them with copies. Meier operates in Russia through a member of the Cultural Committee, who not only helps with art theft, but also organizes an exhibition in honour of Meier‘s father – a man who had saved 150 Jewish families at great risk in the 1930s. But the exhibition, which is supposed to be Otto‘s triumph, becomes his funeral. The young American Michael, who has been working with Inga in the background for quite some time, appears at the funeral. He comes from a German-Jewish family that once turned to Meier senior to help them escape from Nazi Germany. In return, the family had bequeathed all their art treasures to Meier. But Meier wrote a denunciation to the SS, just as he had done hundreds of other times and thus came into possession of a huge art collection. The first 150 families actually rescued had served him only as bait. This is told in flash- backs to Germany in the 1930s and to the USA in the 2000s. After Michael has made everything public, the collection is confiscated immediately. Meier‘s henchman from the Culture Committee can set off for London.
In the end, however, it turns out that this story has nothing to do with the murder of Volochov. Volochov was murdered by an elderly journalist who was terminally ill and who had decided to take a whole series of former world stars to the afterlife before his own death. Not without first leading interviews with them to his own fame, in which he even recorded their deaths on video. In the end, he also places his own video con- fession on the Internet.
A multi-layered, fascinatingly dense thriller with a series of unexpected twists. Step by step, the loose threads of several crimes are linked together to surprise the reader once again at the end: two overlapping but independent circles of perpetrators and motifs whose associated crimes happen to benefit each other. The subject of art auction trading in conjunction with the robbery and restitution of Jewish art collections gives the novel a factually well-researched international framework.
