Under the Egg (11 page)

“Thirteen,” I corrected again.

“Thirteen, of course. The only thirteen-year-old girl I know who could actually spot a Raphael. I always told Jack you were our best curator-in-training.”

Um, thank you?

“And if this is the case, the painting in question would be one of rare and immense value. A painting you are putting at untold risk. Chances are great that it is in fragile—probably already damaged—condition. Dear God, the temperature in here alone must be wreaking havoc on the structural integrity.” He mopped his mostly bald head with his handkerchief. “And then there's the risk of theft—”

I folded my arms. “There's only one thief I'm worried about.”

“It's not theft if it's a rescue.” He looked around at the peeling wallpaper and defunct gas lamps. “A rescue operation as real and as urgent as any I performed in the war.”

It's not theft if it's a rescue. The words rang in my ears, and I knew this had been my grandfather's justification, too. But the question still remained: a rescue from what?

The thing is, Jack had left it to me—not Lydon—to find out.

I raised myself up taller. “Get out of here,” I said levelly. “Get out now. Or I yell ‘Fire!' out the front window and bring the whole street running.”

Lydon looked surprised and even a little impressed. “You don't need to make a fuss, my dear. A friend of mine at the club just happens to be a federal judge. I'll be back, but this time with a warrant in my hand and New York's Finest by my side. And then we will search this house from top to bottom until we find—I beg your pardon,
rescue
—whatever it is you're hiding.”

I responded by walking over to the studio door and holding it open for his exit.

Lydon drew himself up and hobbled proudly past me, but when he stopped in the hallway, I was shocked to see tears in his eyes.

“Don't you see?” he whispered fiercely. “Don't you understand, you stupid girl? We're running out of time!
I'm
running out of time. A whole life spent waiting for this moment—for the mere
chance
at such a discovery—and you want to squander it, out of sheer stubbornness?” He grasped my wrist. “Would you really rob an old man of this?”

I pulled my arm away and ducked my head, too confused and ashamed to meet his gaze.

“I see. Well, after all, you are the granddaughter of a thief.”

T
hat night I slept with the painting under my bed.

I didn't like the idea of leaving the painting in Jack's studio anymore, especially knowing that my mom would serve the police tea and give them a house tour. I was going to have to find the painting another home.

Paparazzi or no paparazzi, I was going to have to risk a visit to Bodhi's house.

The next morning, though, I was surprised to find Spinney Lane abandoned except for a meter maid enforcing alternate side parking. I walked halfway up the block until I found 32 Spinney Lane, with its matching façade, except that its bricks had been restored until they were practically gleaming—not crumbling with chunks threatening to fall on your head.

I rang the bell, and almost immediately a gelled young man wearing skinny jeans and a skinnier tie poked his head out the front door. “Yes?”

I pulled self-consciously at my 1970s gym shorts. “Is Bodhi home?”

The guy looked me up and down, then looked up and down the street. The lack of photographers seemed to make my entrance permissible, and he reluctantly opened the door. “Bodhi, you have a visitor,” he called somewhere into the house's recesses as he drifted back to some task that required a laptop, a headset, and two cell phones.

If 18 Spinney Lane was like stepping into a time capsule, 32 Spinney Lane was like a time machine. The house had been hollowed out, stripped of its original details, the rabbit warren of rooms now gutted and ripped away. The ceiling above me had disappeared, sucked straight up into a fourth-floor skylight. The back of the house now consisted of a single, soaring wall of glass, making the house seem at one with the Asian rock garden out back. With white shiny floors melting into white walls, I felt like I was stepping into a giant eggshell.

Throughout this barren beehive buzzed a dozen staffers: operating the high-tech kitchen, barking orders into walkie-talkies, leading sun salutations in the garden. Given the high level of both activity and self-involvement, it was easy to see how Bodhi could wander in and out unnoticed.

“Hey!” Bodhi bounded down a floating staircase that clung impossibly to the wall. “What are you doing here? I was going to stop by your place later.”

I bumped my knee on a near-invisible Lucite coffee table. “I decided to risk the paparazzi.”

“Oh, yeah. They're all uptown today. My mom is doing a cameo on my dad's movie.” Bodhi walked into the kitchen and high-fived a sushi chef as she squeezed past him. “Want something to eat?”

When didn't I?

“Daisuke, is the unagi-don ready yet?”

The chef grunted and jerked his head. Bodhi went over to what looked like a seamless wall of white and poked her finger in one spot, causing a door to spring open. She reached in and, pulling her shirt over her hands, withdrew two steaming black lacquered boxes. Another poke revealed the refrigerator, with Japanese pickles, seaweed salad, and two Cokes. Bodhi gathered it all on a tray and led the way back up the magic staircase.

Bodhi's room was a mirror of the house: a stark cube of neutral hues and tightly tucked sheets. Her desk was the only thing that resembled the Bodhi I knew, covered in a jumble of expensive computer equipment and taped-up pictures of Raphael paintings, including printouts of the photos she'd snapped with her phone.

“So, what's up?” Bodhi sat down at the desk and stabbed her chopsticks into the hot bowl of roasted eel and rice. “I was looking into other paintings that have been X-rayed. Did you know they found a Ti—Tit—?” Bodhi furrowed her eyebrows.

“Titian. Pronounced Tih-shun.”

“Okay, well, that guy painted a portrait of a woman with her son, and then someone else repainted the woman to be an angel. They found the woman again by X-ray. True story.”

I picked up the other bowl and sat on the edge of her bed. “I was wondering if I could leave the painting here. For a few days.”

Bodhi looked at me doubtfully. “Listen, I'd love to have the painting here. I was reading online about this blacklight test I want to try. But this house is crawling with people, and they're into everything. They clean my room twice a day, like a hotel. And they would notice something like that,” she pointed her chopsticks at the printouts of the painting. “It doesn't exactly go with the decor.”

“I guess you're right,” I sighed. “But I don't know what I'm going to do.” I gave her the topline on Jack's military file, Lydon's visit, and his promise to return.

“Well, he's already poked around Jack's studio. So maybe that's the safest place to keep it? If he comes back, he'll probably start looking in the other parts of the house first. That would buy you time to move the painting. Maybe to the roof?”

“Maybe.”

I nibbled a pickled plum and wondered how to navigate the fire escape with a hardside suitcase.

“So Lydon knows about the painting then?” said Bodhi.

“I don't think so. He knows there
is
a painting. And I think he knows where Jack got it.”

“From—?”

“Hitler,” I nodded.

“Do you think Jack's secret mission was to steal the painting from Hitler?” Bodhi's eyes glittered, and I could see her already writing the screenplay in her head.

“Maybe so.” I hadn't put those two together until this moment. Had he been busted out of the camp by secret operatives with a plan to steal Hitler's favorite artworks? Didn't seem entirely plausible, but then, neither did anything else I'd found out in the last few weeks. “Before that, he was at a POW camp called Stalag IX-B, but the next three months on his file are classified.”

“Stalag IX-B, huh?” Bodhi put the unagi-don aside and set to work at her computer. “Here it is. It's a POW camp in Germany. It held all kinds of Allied prisoners: American, French, Yugoslavian, Russian. And—oh.”

“What?” I crossed the room to look over her shoulder. “What is it?”

“Just . . . It says here that it was one of the worst of all the camps. Worst conditions, I mean.”

“Oh.” I swallowed. “What else does it say?”

Bodhi scrolled down a bit. “Wait a minute. When was your grandfather missing?”

I thought back over the time line. “Let's see. Eddie said the Battle of the Bulge was right before Christmas. So the few months after that. January to March, maybe?”

“What year again?” asked Bodhi, already typing.

“Must be 1945.”

Bodhi paused to scan a page, then turned back to me. “In that case, I think I know why your grandfather's file was classified.

A
n hour later, we were heading to Staten Island on the ferry (free).

Bodhi's computer skills had solved one mystery that day. Jack wasn't on a secret mission. He was in a secret hell.

But that hell wasn't so secret anymore. The information had been declassified at some point, but while the news found its way to the Internet, it must not have made it to the archives office that assembled Jack's file.

Apparently Jack had been transferred out of Stalag IX-B to a slave labor camp called Berga. Now, I'd read about Hitler's gas chambers, but I didn't know that the Nazis had another approach to killing prisoners: working them to death. Jack was one of 350 soldiers sent to Berga, and three months later, with the European war at an end, just 277 of the 350 men survived. They had been kept in appalling conditions and beaten, starved, worked until they dropped. The entire incident was deemed embarrassing to the U.S. victors, and on their discharge, the men were asked not to reveal the location or details of their internment.

It was hard enough discovering that Jack had been in the war in the first place. But it was near impossible to imagine my grandfather—a man who stood over six feet four in his eighties, who commanded the sidewalk with every stride, my hero, my protector—as one of the skeletal survivors who appeared on the web page. “It's not on his record,” I protested as Bodhi pulled up the Wikipedia page on Berga. “It could still be a secret mission.”

I remember that Bodhi looked at me with a hint of pity before she began silently typing on her computer again. A few minutes later, she hit print and said, “Well, there's one person who could clear this up.”

• • •

And that's how we found ourselves on our way to the Sinai Retirement Home of Staten Island to meet Morris Novak, Private First Class, 28th Infantry Division, and subject of the
New York Times
article Bodhi had found called “The Missing Men of Berga.”

The old folks home was air-conditioned, but that was about the only thing inviting about it. The shuffling overweight nurses first glared at, then ignored us, while a janitor attempted to mop right under our feet. Abandoned wheelchairs (many still containing their frail passengers) lined the cinder-block hallways. Up until this point, I had thought of Jack's death as a tragic event. But it occurred to me that he'd probably have preferred it to this fluorescent-lit existence.

Bodhi played the role of a Novak grandchild convincingly enough to get Mr. Novak's room number. After taking something called a Shabbos elevator that stopped at each of twelve floors, we finally found room 1211. I knocked, and with no answer, pushed opened the door, hoping not to find any sponge baths in action.

The room was sunny and surprisingly homey, with plants and Mets pennants and a family photo collage that took up an entire wall. Bodhi and I tiptoed in and found a shriveled old man dozing in a wheelchair, a yarmulke bobby-pinned to his few remaining strands of white hair. A TV was tuned to championship surfing.

“Should we wake him up?” I whispered.

“Won't he wake up eventually?”

We waited.

He didn't wake up.

Bodhi broke the silence. “Is he alive?”

“Of course, he's alive.” I didn't know one way or other, actually. “Go put your hand under his nose and see if you can feel his breath.”

“He's got a tube in there!”

So he did. A tube snaked under his nose and over his shoulder to an oxygen tank on the floor.

“And why me, anyway?” Bodhi complained. “He's
your
granddad's friend.”

“Who says? We don't even know if Jack was there—”

“Are you my great-grandchildren?”

Morris Novak was looking straight at us, his body still slumped in the chair but his chin lifted.

Bodhi and I waited for the other to speak. “No,” I finally mumbled.

“Good. I'm pretty sure they're all boys. You're girls,” he looked at Bodhi's khakis, “right?”

“Yes. I'm Theo—well, Theodora Tenpenny, and this is my friend Bodhi.” We took turns shaking his limp hand. “We're here to ask about a friend.”

“A friend?” He craned his neck and looked around the room. “I haven't seen any little girls around here, but I've been asleep.”

“No, not a friend of ours. A friend of yours. My grandfather, Jack Tenpenny.”

“Who?”

“Jack Tenpenny. He may have been in the war with you. Maybe somewhere called,” I hated to say the name out loud, “Berga?”

His eyes grew dark, then brightened. “Oh, Jack! Yes, of course. Member of the Twenty-eighth. Haven't seen him since the war. How is the old man?”

“Dead.”

“In the war?”

“No, last month.”

“Well, that's not so bad. Every day aboveground is a good one, I say, and it sounds like he had almost as many days as me.” He turned his wheelchair toward us and shakily motioned for us to have a seat.

“Turn that TV off, will you? I must have fallen asleep during the baseball. What was your name again, sweetheart?”

“Theo Tenpenny.”

“Doesn't matter. I'll just forget it again. The old short-term memory is shot.” He scratched under his yarmulke. “But I can remember something that happened fifty years ago like it was yesterday.”

Bodhi and I exchanged a look.

“That's why we're here.” I switched off the surfing and pulled up a chair. “I just found out that Jack—that's Jack Tenpenny, remember?—was in the war. Maybe in the Berga camp. I'm wondering if you were there together.”

“Well, sure. We were the only New Yorkers in our platoon, so we hit it off right away—even though he was a Yankees fan. I was a Dodgers fan, but when they left for Hollywood, I switched my allegiance to the Mets.” He gestured to the pennants over his bed. “Do you know the score of the game, by the way?”

Bodhi checked her phone. “6–2, Red Sox. Tough luck, Mr. Novak.”

He sighed. “Red Sox. How did their luck change all of a sudden? Hey, call me Mo, why don't you? My grandchildren do.”

“So, Mo,” I broke in, “you were with my grandfather when he was captured?”

“Yep. We got picked up trying to scout a better position for the Krauts to shell us.”

“Were you sent to the POW camp then?”

“Yes, but that was Stalag IX-B. Nice accommodations there. Two hundred and fifty men to one drafty wooden barracks. Cracks an inch wide in the middle of January. And some of our boys without overcoats.”

“No coats? How did you—”

“How did we stay warm? We didn't. We froze our
tuchuses
off. A couple of times a day we got some coffee made out of acorns and some ‘grass soup,' we called it. And once a day we got a loaf of bread to share among four men: a paperweight made of flour and sawdust.” He shuddered to remember it. “And you wouldn't believe the folks here who complain about the turkey tetrazzini.”

“That sounds awful.”

“The turkey tetrazzini? Nah, it's not so bad.”

“No, the food at the camp.”

“I tell you what was awful. That soup moved right through you. Two hundred and fifty guys with dysentery to one latrine. You couldn't even call it a latrine—just a hole in the ground. No baths. No showers. Not even toilet paper.”

Now I shuddered. “But you didn't stay there?”

“No, not long. After about a month, the guards told our officers to turn over any Jews in the camp. Our guys told them where to go, of course. Word spread not to answer any questions about your religion. Some Jewish guys buried their dog tags. Our dog tags had an
H
on them for “Hebrew,” you see. But then the guards started pulling anyone with a name that sounded Jewish or anyone who looked Jewish and moving them to a separate barracks. I went ahead and volunteered.”

“You
volunteered
?”

“Yes, I did. I went in the army as a Jew. I fought for the right to be a Jew. If I was going to die, it was going to be as a Jew. And honestly I thought, how much worse could it be?”

“But Jack isn't—wasn't—Jewish. How did he end up with you?”

“The guards didn't have enough Jews to fill their quota, so they added in some troublemakers, and then just pulled men at random. I think Jack was one of the last recruits.

“They loaded us into boxcars. Five days with no heat, no food, no water. Only the snow that fell through the barred window.

“When we finally got to Berga, it looked like the same kind of setup we were used to, except there were these inmates at this camp; we called them ‘zombies.' They looked like the walking dead. Like skeletons in pajamas. One of them wandered up to me and asked me a question. I answered him without even thinking about it, and then I realized we were speaking Yiddish. He was a Jew, like me. That's when I understood what was happening to the Jews of Europe. And what was going to happen to us.”

“But isn't that why you enlisted?” I asked. “To fight for the Jews?”

“Bring me another oxygen tank, will you, honey?” Mo gestured to a collection of tanks in the corner, and I dragged one over. He labored to breathe as he made the switch. “We knew the Jews were being persecuted under the Nazis. We'd heard about some synagogues and businesses being burned. But we didn't know they were being slaughtered. We didn't know the plan was to work us to death.

“See, the Germans were getting desperate. They needed labor to work the mines up in the mountains there. That's where we came in. And those inmates in pajamas? Transfers from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. We didn't know about those places yet either.

“We were sent to these mines to break rocks, shovel debris, hand drill holes for dynamite. We carried rocks and dug holes with our bare, chapped, bleeding hands.” Mo lifted his wrinkled hands and looked at them. “No gloves. No masks. Just breathing that dust filled with rock particles, in and out, ten hours a day. That's probably how I ended up with this thing.” The oxygen tank gave off a clang as he flicked it with his finger. I realized that Jack's asthma wasn't something that kept him out of the war—it was something he'd brought back from it.

“If you moved too slow, you got a beating. If you dropped a load of rocks, you got a beating. If you stopped to catch your breath, you got a beating. Trouble was, we were on starvation rations. Even less food than we got at Stalag IX-B. None of us were in any condition to work at all, let alone hard labor. So you could count on a beating every day.

“We were all starving, all the time. But lucky for us, Jack and I got pulled up for kitchen duty. That's why we survived, I'm sure of it. The work was still tough: it took four men to pull these wagons with fifty-gallon vats of soup down a steep hill to the camp, and then back up the hill again. If you spilled any—”

“You got a beating,” finished Bodhi.

“Right,” said Mo, and he smiled a bit to see that we were actually listening. “But it was worth it. We got a bit of extra food here and there. And the best part was that, when we were pulling the cart, we could actually talk. Three of us, at least. The other guy only spoke Serbian.”

“But the other three of you spoke English?”

“Yep. Mostly we talked about food. Meat loaf and pot roast and pies and my grandma's kugel and Thanksgiving turkey and fresh-split watermelon. And coffee, real coffee.” Mo seemed lost in a reverie, but then remembered something. “You girls want some cookies?” He produced a tin lined with waxed paper. “My niece brought rugelach. Cinnamon.”

I could relate to Mo's food fantasies. Even with a belly full of beets, I thought constantly of the foods I wanted but couldn't have. I also understood Jack's lifelong obsession with our pantry's state of readiness. As I eagerly selected a flaky pastry, Bodhi elbowed me. “The painting.”

I'd almost forgotten. “Did Jack ever talk about a painting?”

“No,” said Mo as he helped himself to a rugelach. “No, that was Max.”

“Who's Max?”

“Oh, I haven't mentioned Max?” Mo brushed the crumbs off his stubbled chin and clapped his hands together. “Max Trenczer. Everyone knew Max. He practically ran the camp.”

“He was a guard?”

“No, he was a prisoner! A real
wunderkind
, this one. Polish by birth, I think, but he'd been some rich big shot in Paris before the war. He spoke a bunch of languages, all of them fluently. He would joke with the guards in perfect German, and they'd laugh and look the other way when he slipped extra bits of food in his pocket. He knew how to keep them happy, you see. If you had something of value—some of the prisoners still had watches or rings or even money somehow—you'd bring it to Max, and he'd trade it to the guards for extra food or cigarettes or clothing. He'd take a little off the top, sure, but he always made a fair trade.”

“But he talked about a painting, you said?”

“Yeah. When we weren't talking food, Max and Jack talked art. Max had had a gallery in Paris before the Nazis got it. So Max and Jack talked about the paintings in his gallery, the ones he'd seen in all the big museums. And there was one in particular he talked about a lot.” Mo's voice trailed off.

“Could you describe it?” I nudged gently.

“Sure I can.” His voice caught in his throat, and he turned toward the window, with its view of a neighboring brick wall. “See, we were surrounded by ugliness. Up to our ankles in waste, surrounded by beatings and hunger. This was part of the Nazis' plan, do you see? To make even us believe that we had no place on this earth. But then the ugliness, the brutality would be pierced by this ray of beauty, and you'd think . . .”

He began again. “I remember in this painting there was a bird, a bird flying. And one day, as Max described it for the hundredth time, I heard a songbird up in the trees—maybe a lark? I don't know; I'm a city boy, I only know pigeons. But whatever it was, this bird sat and sang on that tree as the snow dripped in the sun, and there was spring in its song. Spring was coming, and I saw that if I could just make it till spring—well, the Allies were closing in. So every day, as I was pulling this wagon of slop, I would listen for that bird. And I would tell myself, ‘Just one more day.'”