Stealing the Mystic Lamb (28 page)

Another weekend detective contemporary to Bernauw who wrote a book on the Judges theft, Maria de Roo, claimed that Lievens was the man with the pointy beard who returned the John the Baptist panel via the Brussels rail station luggage check. She argued that he was the only one who ever confessed to the theft—to a blind man from the town of Schellebelle, near Wetteren, shortly before he died. De Roo also said that Lievens died in his home outside of Schellebelle “with an egg in his left hand, the phone off the hook, and the walls spattered with blood. As cause of death, an ‘ulcer’ was listed.” The source of de Roo’s information is not stated.

Bernauw noted two things Goedertier had said, which Goedertier’s wife recalled after the fact. These quotations were never considered by the police. If real, then they are indeed telling.

Though Goedertier’s wife claimed that she had no idea whether her husband was guilty, she never denied that he might have been. According
to her, he had made two comments that could have been relevant to the case:

It had been suggested that the panel was hidden somewhere in plain sight, in the Ghent city center, on the left-hand side of a prominent building. For the sake of convenience of theft, transport, and the return of the panel after a ransom payment, the panel may never have left the premises of Saint Bavo Cathedral. The Judges may have been removed from its frame and simply hidden elsewhere inside or outside the cathedral. This would explain why no trace of the panel was found in or around Goedertier’s home.

The second quotation could explain Goedertier’s rationalization of the crime. He didn’t steal the panel. He simply displaced and hid it on the premises, where it was still on the property of its owner, the bishopric. This may be why Goedertier had sent away the priest Father Bornauw, saying that his “conscience was at peace.”

Larger questions are raised, however, if the above hypotheses are a legitimate possibility.

What was the motive for the theft? Even in the time of recession and with his company bankrupt, Goedertier had plenty of money. The ransom was for a sum insufficient to help a government or the king.

Why the inept, laissez-faire police investigation, leaving a group of lawyers to run their own inquiry for a month before the police began theirs? The ransom negotiations were run in an acceptable manner, thanks largely to Attorney de Heem, but afterwards none of the leads was convincingly followed up.

Why the seeming lack of enthusiasm from the bishopric? Why the pressure from the government for the case to be settled, but no governmental offer of aid?

Most importantly, where is the panel now? If it was hidden and then removed by those “four individuals” when no ransom was forthcoming, where was it taken and by whom?

The mysteries of the theft of the Judges remain unsolved.

Several of these points would be contested by a brilliant investigator, chief of the Ghent police from 1974 to 1991, Commissaire Karel Mortier. His dynamic investigation, which he undertook privately, as the case was officially closed, was the first to operate without the murk of conspiracy and ulterior motive.

Commissaire Mortier, a man whose kindly face is offset by dramatic, inverted-V eyebrows that make him look forever in stern thought, pursued the case as a hobby, out of fascination. The tantalizing final letter, suggesting that the panel was hidden somewhere prominent, where no one could retrieve it without attracting public attention, was a lure too great to resist.

Mortier studied the case from 1956 onwards but began his investigation full-time in 1974. His search for the lost panel led him to look for the case file of Heinrich Köhn, a Nazi art detective sent by Josef Goebbels to find the Judges as a gift for Adolf Hitler. The file was thought to have been lost, but Mortier found it in the possession of Köhn’s widow, back in Germany. The file indicated that it was the Nazi occultist and leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, who most fervently spurred the Righteous Judges investigation. When Köhn failed to locate the stolen panel during the Second World War, he was punished by being sent to the Eastern Front. Yet even with Köhn’s file in hand, after years of pursuing a seemingly endless stream of false leads, Mortier finally gave up. He wrote four books about his investigations, the most recent in 2005. To date none are published in English translation. Although the mystery remained unsolved, Mortier reached some dangerous conclusions as to why this was so.

He noted that only one justification could explain the slipshod police work, defiance of standard procedure, and roadblocks placed in the path of anyone else, himself included, who sought answers: There was a conspiracy to hide the truth.

Commissaire Mortier gathered a dossier of convincing evidence. Potentially the most fruitful was an account taken down by police in 1947 but strangely ignored, perhaps because the case was officially closed or perhaps for the same reasons that the investigation was mishandled in the first place. It seems that there was an eyewitness to the theft, one who not only saw a light in the Vijd Chapel but saw two thieves and their get-away car—and recognized them.

Caesar Aercus, a small-time crook from Dendermonde, Belgium, was arrested thirteen years after the Judges theft. In a plea-bargain attempt, he revealed what he saw on the night of 11 April 1934—an account that Mortier and others believe but that was oddly dismissed by police at the time.

In the dead of that April night, Aercus claimed to have seen a black car loitering suspiciously along Kapittelstraat, the street that runs parallel to the nave of Saint Bavo. A portly man in a dark hat and overcoat waited beside the car, pacing nervously. Suddenly a second man emerged from the shadows of the cathedral with what Aercus described as “a plank” tucked under his arm—or at least something plank-like, as it was covered in a black sheet. It was 12:30 AM. The second man put the plank in the backseat of the car and climbed in the passenger’s side. The first man attempted to start the car, but it would only sputter and cough.

It was then that Aercus, who had been lurking on the opposite side of Kapittelstraat, crossed the street and offered to help. He had, after all, some experience with cars and thought he could get the engine started. He also recognized at least one of the two men—the portly one who had been waiting by the car. Aercus referred to him, at first, as “Den Dikke,” which translates roughly as “the fatty.” Aercus’s offer of engine assistance was waved away, and the car finally grumbled into ignition. The two men and their black-shrouded plank drove off. Aercus was left to return to the activity that brought him to Kapittelstraat in the first place—he had been stealing cheese from the shop across the street.

Aercus was the cheese thief whose activities were considered sufficiently diabolical that Chief of Police Patijn left the scene of the Righteous
Judges theft in order to pursue him. When Aercus was finally arrested for another crime (he got away with the cheese theft, presumably by eating the incriminating evidence), he tried to amend his plea bargain, claiming not only that he recognized Den Dikke, as he had first stated, but later adding that he recognized the second man, as well. Now that Aercus was in jail, he tried to parlay his recognition of Den Dikke into a shorter sentence and identified him as one Polydor Priem, a Belgian smuggler who had lived in the United States and maintained criminal contacts there.

Aercus’s recollection must be taken with a shovel full of salt: It was, after all, a plea bargain attempt, and the convict had incentive to provide useful information that would put him in a good position to negotiate. The word of a career thief like Aercus, whose professional and personal life was knotted with deceit and double-cross, might reflect grudges or opportunism.

Even so, either this follow-up to the investigation was curiously ill-handled by the police, or their work was obstructed. Though the 10 June 1947 police document noted Den Dikke, who Aercus claimed was the mellifluously named Polydor Priem, it failed to note the name of the second man whom Aercus said that he’d recognized.

It was only during Commissaire Mortier’s private inquiry that the full extent of the strange investigative procedures undertaken on all sides came to light. In addition to this key eyewitness account, which attests to the involvement of multiple thieves, Karel Mortier made the following discoveries about the Judges case:

Despite these key observations, Mortier could not solve the mystery. His best guess was that the Judges had been hidden somewhere behind the medieval wood paneling that runs throughout Saint Bavo Cathedral. In 1996, with a half million francs in funding from the Ministry of Culture, Mortier and a team of technicians began searching the inside of the cathedral with x-ray equipment. But after little more than a week, the tests yielded nothing, only a portion of the vast cathedral had been searched, and the funds were already running dry. The investigation was halted.

Many of the theories that have risen from this crime sound far-fetched. But such is the nature of unsolved mysteries, the documents and files for which have disappeared. Bernauw, perhaps the widest-read scholar of the Judges mystery, believes that Goedertier and the two accomplices he named, de Swaef and Lievens, were acting as Nazi agents. Hitler came to power in 1933, mere months before the Judges was stolen.
The Lamb
was one of Hitler’s top targets in his sweeping theft of Europe’s finest artworks, as will be discussed in the next chapter.

One of Hitler’s motivations was the desire to right the perceived wrong of the wing panels having been forcibly repatriated to Belgium from their display in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum through the Treaty of Versailles. Bernauw believes that there is a link between
The Mystic Lamb
and the famous relic of the Holy Blood that has been kept in van Eyck’s hometown, Bruges, since it was brought from the Holy Land by Thierry d’Alsace, the Count of Flanders, in 1149. Knights Templar are also depicted, Bernauw thinks, in the Knights of Christ panel of the altarpiece. There may have been, he suggests, an actual object or document hidden inside the physical panel on which van Eyck painted the Judges. Bernauw’s
theory posits that Goedertier and the thieves were killed after they stole the panel and delivered it to a Nazi agent. Though the involvement of de Swaef and Lievens is far from certain, the possibility of Nazi murder is very real. Georges de Vos, the only man privy to Arsène Goedertier’s last words, died unexpectedly on 4 November 1942 in a Ghent cinema—shortly after speaking with the Nazi art detective Heinrich Köhn, telling him what he knew of the lost panel.

Dutch author Karl Hammer proposes a theory that Hitler was after
The Lamb
not only because of his interest in stealing art and as revenge for the Treaty of Versailles, but because the painting was thought to have contained a coded treasure map that led to the
Arma Christi
, the instruments used at Christ’s Passion, which might include the nails, the sponge, the Spear of Destiny, Christ’s robe and reed, the column and scourge from the Flagellation, the Holy Grail, and the Crown of Thorns. Hitler’s interest in the occult and the interest of many of the Nazi leaders (Himmler foremost among them) are well documented, as are the Nazi expeditions launched through the Ancestral Research and Heritage Group, the Ahnenerbe, which might be described as the Nazi supernatural research center. Hitler ordered expeditions to Tibet in search of the yeti, to the Holy Land to find the Spear of Destiny with which Longinus pierced Christ’s side as he hung on the cross, and to the Languedoc to find the Holy Grail. The Nazi Party itself began as an underground occult confraternity.