Missy - Time travels to WW2 and steals the Reissman Collection

The graffiti taxidermist, Tanksy, had been lured out of retirement on his private Spanish island to curate a series of masterworks depicting Modern Urban Poverty. Guests were supposed to be greeted by ‘Cerberus’ – a three-headed dog made out of three pickled Rottweilers.

Only there was no trace of Tanksy’s exhibition behind those doors. Instead the walls were covered with paintings. Old-fashioned, simple, beautiful paintings. Paintings showing smiling women, brave men, dead birds and fruit decaying in bowls. All the paintings were at least a hundred years old.

At first no one knew what to make of the paintings. Luckily, the art critic of a newspaper had turned up (there’d been a spare ticket and her editor hadn’t found anyone famous to go).

The art critic pushed her way through the throng. A minute before, she’d been rather intimidated by all this celebrity. Now it was as though they’d all melted away. She stared up at the paintings – at beautiful boats sailing into sunsets; at noble Romans dying nobly; at shoemakers laughing; at vases of flowers – and she just couldn’t believe it.

‘The Reissmann Collection,’ she started yelling, over and over.

Eventually, someone Googled it on their phone and gasped. Two minutes later, everyone in the entire room was an expert on the Reissmann Collection.

Back in the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of precious artworks were stolen by the Nazi Party from doomed Jewish families. After the Second World War, grieving relatives set about trying to recover them, but the process was long and difficult. Occasionally a petitioner would strike it lucky – perhaps they’d be having a meeting with a bureaucrat about a certain work of art and realise it was on the wall. Mostly, it was all very mysterious and murky.

For years, the Reissmann Collection had topped the list of mysterious murkiness. All that remained of a family with exquisitely good taste was a group of amazing paintings – believed to have vanished into a Swiss vault. The Swiss banks had professed themselves entirely innocent. By complete coincidence, Lord Ascot owned a Swiss bank. He’d once told a journalist that he’d love to help, but his bank had never had any Nazi clients, and, even if they had (which they did not), they’d now be long dead. Under the terms of their account, the contents of their private vaults would have been emptied, and he would have, naturally, returned the artworks to their rightful owners.

Only here was the entire Reissmann Collection, adorning the walls of the Ascot Gallery. Alongside framed photos of Lord Ascot posing with some of the more remarkable works of art. Here he was with a Goya, there with a Van Gogh, ah, and pretending to dance with a Michelangelo statue. In each picture, Lord Ascot was wearing SS uniform.

Five minutes later, the waiting photographers were treated to the sight of Lord Ascot running from his own gallery, out into the terrible red rain, rain that had soaked into the walls of his building and was now splashing around in scarlet puddles.

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The Missy Chronicles: Dismemberment