Under the Egg (10 page)

O
ne summer, when I was around seven or eight, I was hanging around the museum, waiting for Jack to get off work so we could get an ice cream on our walk home. I was debating cherry versus chocolate-dipped when I turned the corner and saw Lydon and my grandfather talking. As they finished, Lydon pulled himself up tall and gave Jack a full military salute. Jack seemed mildly annoyed, but when he saw me over Lydon's shoulders, his face darkened. He looked back at his boss and shook his head almost imperceptibly. Lydon looked back at me and dropped the salute immediately, rumpling my hair as he walked away.

I thought nothing of it at the time. Jack had always shown a combination of grudging respect and open irritation around Lydon. “Even Michelangelo needed the Medicis,” he'd sigh whenever I suggested he quit his job at the Met. He needed the job to support us and to support his painting. But it was like something bound him to Lydon despite their different values, positions, personalities. Like brothers.

Brothers in arms, I now knew.

I wished I could go back in time and see how this strange alliance began. And thanks to Lydon, in a way, I could. Jack's dense military file contained Lydon's field report, an incredible tale of adventure and audacity that showed just what united these two men, for the war and for the rest of their lives.

As Lydon recounted in those official typed pages, he and Jack made their way from France through Germany and into Austria, one step behind the advancing Allied forces the whole way. They drove their open jeep past grateful French survivors and weary inhabitants of bombed-out German villages, hoping that the woods weren't filled with soldiers intent on defending their land to the death. Mostly though, the German soldiers they encountered were all too happy to exchange their guns for a hot meal.

Their little jeep climbed up into the Austrian Alps, which had been happily spared the violence of war—except in one capacity. Under the surface of the peaceful alpine villages hid a treasure trove of Nazi loot. As the Nazis plundered Europe, they evacuated their choicest finds farther and farther into the mountains for protection. These mountains possessed salt mines that had provided the villagers a livelihood for centuries. They also provided perfectly calibrated temperature, light, and humidity levels: ideal for storing valuables. Their location miles under the surface of the earth protected their contents from bombing raids.

In just one salt mine in Merkers, an American fighting unit stumbled upon the Third Reich's entire gold reserve: row after row of gold bars and sacks of coins.

Military intelligence turned up evidence that Hitler's personal art collection had been deposited in a salt mine near Altaussee. But they also turned up Hitler's “Nero decree.” As the German troops retreated, Hitler had issued a directive to destroy “all military, transportation, communications, industrial, and food-supply facilities, as well as all resources within the Reich which the enemy might use” before the Allies could reach them. The decree was mostly ignored by the fleeing Nazi officials. But some loyalists swore to fulfill Hitler's mission, no matter what the cost to their country or countrymen.

It was a race against time. When Jack and Lydon finally reached Altaussee, they immediately located the town's salt mine, plunging themselves down its long, dark tunnel, only to discover their worst fears had been realized. A quarter of a mile down, the tunnel was blocked with a wall of fallen rocks. The villagers had dynamited the mine.

But the locals were quick to explain their actions. Their district governor, a Nazi fanatic, had ordered eight boxes labeled “marble” loaded into the mine. Inside lay five-hundred-kilogram bombs, waiting to be detonated should the mine's contents fall into Allied hands. But the local miners didn't care about politics
or
art. They only knew that, with the mine destroyed, their livelihood would be destroyed with it.

In the dead of night, sympathetic guards looked the other way as the miners carefully removed the bombs and hid them in the forest. They then detonated a “palsy”—a controlled blast meant to seal off the mine's entrance so that no one else could get in.

Once they were assured that the Allies would protect the mine and its contents, the villagers were happy to help break through the rubble and open up the mine again. Inside, under the flickering light of lanterns, Jack and Lydon found an art collection that rivaled the Louvre, the Met, and London's National Gallery. Here was Van Eyck's
Ghent Altarpiece
. There was Michelangelo's sculpture, the
Bruges Madonna
, abandoned on an old mattress. Not one, but two Vermeers. And room upon room with racks upon racks containing thousands of other paintings, sculptures, drawings, and tapestries.

The men called in reinforcements, and for two weeks they worked to catalog the holdings. They calculated it would take a year to properly conserve, prepare, and move the artwork to the newly established processing center in Munich. But they didn't have a year. They had four days. Four days until the village was transferred into the Soviet Zone of Occupation—and Stalin's greedy hands.

The team worked sixteen-hour days, in relentless rain and fog, making do with the mine's nonfunctioning lights and antiquated mining trolley carts, thanking the slow-turning wheels of international politics for every delay in the handover process. In the end it took one month and eighty trucks to evacuate the mine. Jack and Lydon put themselves in the last truck, ready to unpack and reverse the whole process in Munich, where they would stay until all the artwork had found its way home again.

Two years later, they said their good-byes in Munich. Though both were headed back to Manhattan, they must have believed their journey was at an end, as Lydon headed uptown to his new job at the Met, and Jack returned to his Spinney Lane studio. But just a few years later, Jack answered a want ad for a museum security guard. The men's fates were again entwined, and now I was tangled up in it, too.

• • •

The foyer seemed as dank and motionless as ever when I got home, but as I closed the door, I was surprised to hear the creaking of floorboards and overlapping voices above me: one high-pitched and wavering, another—a male voice—melodious and soothing. Two settings of Mrs. Tenpenny III's tea service sat abandoned in the parlor, the still-full cups of Earl Grey lending a hint of citrus to the room.

Clutching the manila envelope, I took the stairs two panicked steps at a time, following the voices all the way to Jack's studio. Bursting in, I found my mother sweating through her bathrobe as she struggled to make conversation with Lydon, who was using his cane to flip through Jack's canvases.

I'd never been so grateful for that Samsonite suitcase, currently hidden behind a pile of tarps in the far corner.

My mother looked so happy to see me she got tears in her eyes. “Theodora!” she heaved. “Mr. Randolph says he's a friend of Jack's? From the museum. He wanted a . . . a . . .”

“Well, just a visit to see how you two are holding up. I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I'd pop by—”

“I thought it was you knocking, that you'd forgotten your key,” she whispered. “I wanted to tell you we're out of Darjeeling.”

“I
told
you no more—” I hissed.

“I didn't realize how much you liked tea,” Lydon broke in, “or I would have brought you this unusual Mariage Frères I picked up last time I was in Paris. But your mother has been such a delightful host, sharing her Earl Grey with me, giving me the grand tour.”

“He wanted to see Jack's studio. I told him I was in the middle of an equation,” she grabbed two fistfuls of her cornhusk hair, “but he didn't listen. He just came right up.”

“I can take things from here.” I took a firm hold of Mom's arm and steered her to the door. “You go back to work.”

“You see, I'm in the middle of a very important derivation . . .” She continued her insistence all the way down the stairs.

“You should've waited for me.” I turned back to Lydon, still hugging the envelope to my chest.

“Come now, your mother was quite welcoming and helpful for my purposes. All I need is a quick peek around.” He resumed his hunt through the studio's contents without the pretense of a social call.

“This is private property. I should call the police right now. It's . . . it's . . . breaking and entering.” No, that wasn't right. “Unlawful entry.”

Lydon smiled placidly. “I don't think you will, my dear. Unless you'd like
them
to confiscate your precious stolen Raphael.”

“It's not stolen.” I snapped.
I think
, I added internally.

“I know,” said Lydon as he moved on to the next stack of canvases. “At least, I know it's not stolen from the Met. After your eventful last visit, I checked the museum's records, and there are no Raphael paintings or sketches unaccounted for. So, on that front, it seems your grandfather is in the clear.”

“Well, you said it yourself. There's nothing here that concerns the Met,” I replied. “So what do you think you're doing here?”

“I believe my years of scholarship and service qualify me as an unofficial citizen-investigator.” Lydon stopped to take in one of the larger abstracts. “I'd forgotten how sophisticated Jack's work was. Quite good, some of these.”

I decided it was better to distract him with what I knew than to allow him to keep poking around. “Did you know his work before? Before the war?”

He looked at me a long time, weighing what to reveal himself. “No, I met him during the war.” He turned back to the paintings. “I thought your grandfather didn't want you to know about all that.”

“Well, I do now.” I tossed the envelope to him, knocking over a Maxwell House can filled with paintbrushes.

He rescued the envelope from the clutter and glanced through its contents. “Well, this looks like the whole story here.” He stopped and chuckled. “You even have my letter recommending him for a promotion. He turned it down, you know.”

“Not quite the whole story. The file says he was on a classified mission at some point. Know anything about that?”

He leaned on his cane and shrugged. “No, I found Jack in a military hospital in France. He was recuperating from a rather daring escape from a POW camp.”

“Escape?”

“Yes. As I understand it, he managed to get out somehow and walk back to the Allied line. I was looking for an assistant and heard there was an escapee nearby with art training. He'd sent word to Military Intelligence that he was ‘bored' and looking for work to do.” Lydon chuckled. “Bored, can you imagine?”

I thought back to our weekends at home, Jack a perpetual motion machine of chores. “Yeah, I can imagine.”

“Anyway, he sounded like the kind of man I was looking for, and sure enough, he was itching to get back into the fray. He came on as my assistant, and it was just the two of us . . . well, liberating Europe's masterpieces.” He tossed the envelope back to me. “And it seems your grandfather may have ‘liberated' one painting in particular along the way.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Lydon regarded me, then settled himself on a paint-splattered stool with his cane for support. “Let me tell you a story,” he drawled. “In 1798 a Polish prince named Czartoryski traveled to Italy and returned with wagons full of Roman antiquities and two prized paintings: Leonardo da Vinci's
Lady with an Ermine
—a truly sublime work, if you haven't seen it—and a painting by Raphael. A painting believed to be a self-portrait.”

I squirmed.

“The paintings,” Lydon continued, “were displayed prominently as part of the family's museum until 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland. The Czartoryski family whisked away the most valuable works, bricking them up behind a wall at their family's country estate. Someone must have tipped off the Gestapo, as the items were found and seized almost immediately.

“The Leonardo and the Raphael were snatched up by the German governor sent to oversee the invasion of Poland. He used the paintings to decorate his personal apartments, but they were later sent on to Germany to become part of Hitler's personal collection.”

Hitler's collection? In the salt mine?

“It seems Hans Frank managed to get the paintings back to Poland again for a spell, and after the war, the da Vinci and some other pieces surfaced. But to this day, eight hundred and forty-four of the Czartoryski artifacts are still missing—including the Raphael, which would be expected to fetch upward of one hundred million dollars in today's market.”

Between the heat, the old paint fumes, and the factors of ten, I felt faint.

“There is some debate as to whether the painting is a self-portrait or not.” Lydon reached into his freshly pressed blazer and pulled out a folded square of paper. “Now, Miss Theodora, as our resident Raphael expert, what do you say? Does this man look familiar?”

I opened the paper with trembling hands.

An elegant young man of the Renaissance era regarded me, a sumptuous fur draped casually over his arm.

Alone. No Madonna or Child in sight.

Not my painting.

I exhaled and handed the paper back to Lydon. “Sorry, haven't seen him.”

“Haven't you?” he said mildly, tucking the paper back in his pocket. “Well, yes, I expected that response. And perhaps you are even being honest with me. But I think we both know”—and here his eyes narrowed at the empty space above the mantelpiece, with its noticeably discolored outline, marking the spot where the painting had long hung—“that you're hiding
something
. Something that you believe to be a Raphael. And you may take it as a compliment that you are the only ten-year-old girl I know—”