Death of a Young Lieutenant

PROLOGUE

Y es, I knew Wilbur Wright, the white-haired, blue-eyed old man said as he reached for a beer and then sat back in his chair, pushing back the dark cowboy hat draped across his head in the process, and Orville, for that matter. In fact it was Wilbur who taught me how to fly. I was the only American he taught while he was traveling through Europe. Let me see, it was… uh… in 1908 I think. Yep…1908.

We sat on the east side of his beautiful ranch home protected from the murderous glare of a Kansas sun in the deep shade of the wide veranda. An ice cooler filled with freshly chilled beer sat at our feet. He sat in the canvas of a folding wooden chair with a cold brew in one hand and a smile on his handsome, weather-creased face.

I knew he was somewhere around eighty or more.

But to look at him and to listen to his stories it was impossible to believe he was much past fifty. The man's hair was absolutely white. His eyes were a mesmerizing gunmetal color that seemed to change from gray to blue depending on how the light reflected on them. There was a fire in those eyes. A fire of deep intelligence and singularity of purpose which became quickly apparent the first moment you laid eyes on him. He was tanned to a chestnut brown and fit and vibrantly alive.

"Now if you ask me if I liked the uppity son of a bitch, I’d have to say, ‘Hell no!’ He was a priggish little son of a straight-laced minister who never drank, never smoked, and never uttered a profane word in his life. He believed cleanliness was next to godliness, and he damn well expected the rest of us to be as godly as possible."

I was captivated by this man’s hubris the moment he walked into a room. There was something about his personality that made you both instantly relax and trust him all at the same time. The more I talked to him, the more I found myself admiring this unique character. I have often thought how it was a stroke of divine providence which brought the two of us together in such a spurious fashion.

But let me tell you, Wilbur and Orville were probably the two most hated men in all of France back in 1908. You could not believe the vilification these two bicycle mechanics aroused! My god, thinking about the passion the Wrights inflamed in the hearts of the French seems hilarious today. But fifty years ago, it could almost get a man killed.

I grinned and shook my head. The old man was unbelievably amazing.

It is even more amazing to realize this man was at one time the world's greatest art thief. Not just an art thief of pedestrian qualities and arcane abilities. But a world class thief of unparalleled panache.

Yes.

I know.

Hard to believe.

I know skepticism fills anyone reading this claim. But I have listened to this man's stories and I have seen this man's evidence. Frankly there is no room to doubt his veracity. Jake Reynolds was, and might still be, the world's greatest art thief.

What evidence persuaded me to this conviction?

I have seen his collection of the world's greatest masterpieces. I have seen the originals. Yes, I said it–the originals. Hanging in some of the most prestigious art museums in the world are his copies of the originals. Copies so precise in detail and composition no one in the first fifty years of the Twentieth Century has suspected otherwise.

They still hang today in those same galleries. Museum curators are absolutely convinced they are the originals. Thousands of people file through the corridors of these illustrious museums to admire these glorious creations. They see but they do not observe. They are thrilled at the colorful visions before them. But none realize what they are admiring are the most cunningly created copies ever to be created by a master of forgery. The true originals hung for a number of years in his home hidden away in a secret vault under lock and key. No one knew about this deeply personal secret. It was a secret he had kept to himself for more than half a century. He told no one, until by a stroke of unanticipated fortune, he began talking to me on that one fine summer's afternoon after I had driven up from Wichita on an innocuous mission to interview him about his participation in World War One.

At one time I was a newspaper reporter. In 1964, as a cub reporter for The Wichita Eagle, a moderately sized morning newspaper for the largest city in Kansas, my editor wanted to find someone who had survived the first months of the First World War and interview him. It was going to be the fiftieth anniversary of this somewhat forgotten conflict and my editor wanted an up-close and personal interview with a survivor. He thought it would be a great lead-in piece for the paper’s planned edition of that part of the Twentieth Century. I had no idea what I was getting into when someone suggested I should talk to an old horse rancher who lived a hundred miles north of Wichita on a ranch just outside of a town called Salina, Kansas. He called himself Jake Reynolds. The tipster told me the old man was a much-decorated war veteran and one hell of a story-teller. He was correct on all accounts. Jake Reynolds turned out to be the most intriguing individual I have ever met.

How did I know he was a thief? Why would I believe the tall tales this grand old man wove for me hour after hour as I interviewed him? What proof did he offer, other than the paintings, for his outrageous claims? True. He could have made copies of the originals and claimed them to be the originals. But he knew too much. He knew details and individuals intimately. Too intimately to be mere creations of his imagination.

Jake was like no other person I have ever met. Strong, lithe, with a quick wit and a dry sense of humor, he certainly did not act like the usual octogenarian. First of all he lived in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was a wide, spacious sandstone, with natural hardwood paneling and brightly polished hard wood floors. I never found out how Jake met America's most famous architect. Or how this uniquely designed home did not eventually find itself placed on some national register. But that was the modus operandi of this old man. In that house and tucked behind a fireplace which, to a casual observer, seemed to be one entire living room wall, was a secret vault only a few people knew existed. In that room were many of the world's greatest paintings of antique and modern masters.

Not the fakes, mind you. Originals.

Monets, Raphaels, van Ecks, da Vincis, Picassos, Degas – names which reverberate throughout the art world were all represented. Hanging in columns of five or more paintings, one above the other, each framed in simple oak frames and lit by soft indirect lighting, were more than sixty of the world's most treasured originals. Originals housed in a private collection reserved for only the eyes of a single solitary person to admire. Art so wonderful and so rare they took my breath from me the first time I followed him into his treasure vault. Even now, thinking about it all these years after the old man's death, my pulse is beating rapidly, and I am finding it difficult to breathe.

Each original had a story. A story Jake was more than happy to relate. He consented to dictate into my tape recorder his entire life as an art thief. At eighty he perhaps knew he wasn't going to live much longer. I am sure he wanted to leave behind some record of his accomplishments when he began dictating his life’s story. I agreed to remain silent until he died and his last two surviving relatives, two cherished nephews, passed away as well. With this agreement consummated by a firm handshake, this fine old man began relating to me the most unbelievable series of stories ever to be set down for posterity. To back up his otherwise preposterous sounding claims were the paintings—those beautiful, breathtaking paintings.

One painting, set in the corner of the room on a fine old Louis XIVth table particularly caught my attention. The painting was actually three large oak panels, the wood split with antiquity, with each panel showing some scene of the Madonna and Christ child. Although I was not an art historian, I did remember my college days and the Art Appreciation classes I took. It seemed to me these wooden panels looked familiar. On that afternoon, as we sat in those comfortable deep leather chairs on that wide, spacious veranda drinking beer and talking about art, I made a casual remark about those wooden panels and how they reminded me of the painting style of Jan van Eck.

Ah, you are quite right. It is one of Jan van Eck's earliest masterpieces. Hmmm, interesting. You came up to interview me about my war record. Well, would you like to hear the real story? The truth, as this old man saw and lived it? Yes? Very well. You’ve noticed this painting by van Eck. Would you believe that in the opening weeks of the Great War, when all of the Allied armies were being pummeled mercilessly by the Kaiser’s armies, I lifted this piece from under the noses of an entire German army? Care to hear about it?

I most assuredly did want to hear his story. I recorded the story on my trusty tape recorder and then patiently waited for almost thirty years to fulfill my promise to him. With the release of my promise I decided to publish this man's incredible story. It is an amazing story about an amazing man, living an amazing life in the first part of an amazing century.

1

Ahot summer sun. Interminable heat.

Gray smoke, from raging fires of burning farmsteads, lifting into the air.

He grinned and ran an oil-stained hand through his curly hair. Standing up, straddling the heavy German motorcycle, he half turned and stared at the burning bridge and the wide canal it once spanned. A wide canal cutting through the flat Belgium countryside. A piece of serendipity if he ever saw one.

Perfect.

If he could get across himself.

Blipping the throttle of the cycle nervously he turned again and looked over his right shoulder. A mile away the ghost-like apparition of a company of German cavalry. A Hussars company wearing the incredibly large, furred hat called a colback and dressed in field gray with bright yellow braided loops around their right epaulets, caused him to say a few choice profanities under his breath. The Boche horses were sweating and covered in the light-colored Belgium soil. Signs they had been ridden hard.

The horsemen looked unshaven and equally unkept. He watched, standing and straddling the bike, as the whole company of Hussars materialized out of the darkness of the mass of trees like forest wraiths. A number of them began to look at the ground intently while others scanned the distances in each direction. One of the horsemen stood up in his stirrups and pointed toward his direction. As if moved by one hand the two hundred or so horsemen altered course and began whipping their steeds even more in an effort to reach the captain before he escaped.

A grin spread across his thin lips again just as a lock of curly hair fell across his right eyebrow. A boyish, mischievous grin. A grin which made women want to cuddle and forgive him of his sins. A grin which made even hardened old soldiers—pessimists to the core—nod their heads and grin back. A grin which could make even a serial killer want to become a close bosom friend.

It had always been that way with Jake. That grin. A sudden impish smirk lighting up his face and melting even the coldest of hearts. Because of that grin he could make friends with anyone. Make’em good friends. Life-long friends. Friends that would do anything for him.

He blipped the cycle’s engine a few more times as he turned to look at the burning bridge again. He was in the flat irrigated low country of Belgium. Barely five miles away from the French border. On either side of him was an expanse of rolling farmland burnt brown from the incredibly hot summer’s sun. In front of him was the irrigation canal. Eyeing it, he thought it was maybe twenty feet wide which cut the country neatly in half for more than two miles in either direction. The water was deep and tepid. The perfect obstacle to stop advancing cavalry if one could figure out how to get over to the other side. Almost everywhere one looked, towering columns of black smoke from burning farms and destroyed villages twisted and billowed into the wind as they rose into the sky. They were grim testaments of the approaching Teutonic war machine as it continued to sweep through the Low Countries.

The opening three weeks of the war had not gone as planned for the Allies. At the start both the French and the British collected their armies and went strutting through the countryside singing patriotic songs and acting as if this war was going to be a summer’s vacation and nothing more. With an unbelievable elan and incredible naivete the Allies gaily hurled themselves into the advancing iron fist of the Kaiser’s field armies. The French in particular thought Gallic bravery, and thousands of eager infantrymen, would be more than enough to blunt the thrusting arms of the Boche armies.

They were wrong.

What they ran into was a masterful display of Germanic planning and use of new technology. Army units equipped with copious amounts of machine guns, and backed up by superb usage of artillery, shredded the woefully and inadequately equipped French. In a span of barely three weeks all the front-line units of the French armies suffered incredible losses. Wave after wave of French infantry went gallantly charging across Belgium fields only to be mowed down in droves. French army units, wearing the dark blue tunics and red trousers of an era from out of the era of Napoleon, showed the world how to die in mass numbers. They did nothing to slow the Teutonic determination to capture Paris before summer’s end.

No commander knew in what direction their flanks might lie.

No one knew what lay in front of them. Nor behind them.

No one knew anything other than an overwhelming urge to get back to France and regroup. This pandemic uncertainty was the reason why he was here, hurriedly surveying the countryside and the burning bridge itself, astride the back of a stolen German Army Signal Corp’s motorcycle and wondering whimsically what a Boche prisoner of war camp might be like. His squadron, one of the first to be organized in the newly created Royal Flying Corps, was three miles away on the other side of the canal. His commanding officer asked him to go out on a one-man reconnaissance party. Since there was no contact whatsoever with army headquarters, the squadron was hanging in limbo and dangling by a thin thread over a cauldron of German fury ready to be severed by a Boche’s bayonet.

Only one serviceable aeroplane was left. One out of the fifteen assorted machines the squadron had started out with only three weeks earlier. This last machine, in the colonel's opinion, was far too valuable to send up to look for the enemy. He wanted to send it back to France. To a place where it would be safe. But where? Before he could do anything to save men or material, he first had to know how close the enemy might be. He had to know from what direction or directions they were coming.

So he, Jake Reynolds, agreed to go out and find the Germans. And here he was. In the middle of open country with a company of angry German Hussars riding furiously toward him determined to capture him and send him back to a POW camp. Grinning, he decided he had better things to do than eat cabbage and potatoes behind a barbed wire fence. Using the sleeve of his right arm to wipe the rolling sweat off his dirty face, he took a quick glance at the conflagration consuming the bridge and made a decision. Slapping the cycle’s gearbox into gear, he gunned the engine and kicked up dust as he spun around to his right and raced back down the road and toward the hard-riding cavalry.

The narrow bridge was burning fiercely and making a lot of rolling smoke in the process, but it was burning only in the middle span of the bridge and nowhere else. Both sides of the bridge’s approaches slanted upward toward the middle, giving him, in other words, a perfect ramp to jump the cycle through the flames and over the burning section if he could get the small cycle up to speed in such a short space. The problem was he would have to race back around the curve and approach the on-coming Hussars before turning around and gunning the engine for all its worth back toward the bridge. Quickly assessing other possible options, he saw there were no other viable choices available. It was either succeed in this one attempt or spend the rest of the war as an uninvited guest of the Kaiser.

Sliding around the curve, going in the opposite direction he had just traversed, Jake twisted the cycle’s throttle wide open and bent low over the handlebars as he aimed the front wheel toward the approaching cavalry. Ahead of him the German cavalry saw him coming at them and they began to shout in glee. Their euphoria changed to consternation when they observed the madman on the motorcycle aiming directly at them and accelerating at the same time. Horsemen and cyclist closed in on each other at a furious pace. Cavalrymen sat up in their saddles and started shouting at each other to warn their comrades of this crazy Englishman! Just as it looked as if the cyclist was going to drive right through the middle of the cavalry, the cycle slowed and suddenly its rider was twisting the cycle around and around in the country lane, throwing up a gigantic curtain of dust and almost running over several horses and men in the process.

Horses and riders galloped in every direction to get away from the madman. Some horses began bucking and threw their riders off before galloping off, their reins flapping in the dust as they disappeared back down the road. The dust was thick, making men choke and eyes water, and still this madman continued circling his cycle around and around in the dirt. Finally, just as several of the Hussars retrieved their rifles slung around their backs and began to aim at the insane cyclist, the British officer gunned his machine loudly and shot off down the road toward the burning bridge in a blinding blur of motion!

Jake, grinning from ear to ear, deftly leaned to one direction or the other in order to slip past a horse and rider as he leaned forward over the cycle’s handlebars. The sharp crack of several Mauser rifles firing close by did not bother him as he and his machine shot through the ball of hanging dust and sped into clear space. Accelerating rapidly, he soon left the befuddled horsemen behind him. Leaning into the curve, he used a boot again to keep him upright, and then, with the burning bridge directly in front of him, he twisted the machine’s throttle open for all its worth. At forty miles per hour the stolen German Signal Corp’s cycle and its rider hit the inclined approach of the bridge and went airborne almost immediately.

Through smoke and flame the machine and Jake flew. He was vaguely aware of a sudden hot sting of flame on the back of his leg. But then they were descending rapidly and he had no time to think of anything else. Lifting the nose of the machine up slightly, he brought the machine down directly in the middle of the approach on the far side and landed perfectly! Gunning the engine wide open again, Jake sped off into the Belgium countryside at a high rate of speed, leaving behind him a company of angry Hussars who could only sit in the saddles of their mounts and watch the madman disappear into the heat’s shimmering haze.

When he arrived back at his squadron, he found the personnel in the unit running about like disturbed ants in