Under the Egg (9 page)

N
o matter how urgent your medical emergency or dire your prospects, the ER staff always made sure you spent plenty of time in the waiting room. But for us it was time needed for Bodhi to explain her latest theory. And her unhinged arm.

I found us some unoccupied plastic molded chairs in one corner, which was lucky because some drunks had claimed the other rows as beds. “Okay,” Bodhi sat down, arranging her right arm on her lap and checking her phone one-handed, “what do you know about La Fornarina?”

I placed the Samsonite heavily on the floor. “Wait a minute. What happened to your arm?”

“Sit down. I'll get to it. But what do you know about La Fornarina?”

“What do
you
know about La Fornarina?”

“Well, tonight after dinner I was Googling Raphael-plus-all the different conservation technologies, to see if anyone had found any clues that way—you know, through infrared or whatever. And I found this one article.” Bodhi was swiping and poking furiously with one hand at her phone's screen.

“Okay, check this out. Do you know this painting?” The phone in my face showed the same topless painting I'd just flooded with tea.

“Sure, that's Raphael's famous portrait of La Fornarina.”

“Right. So a few years back they were restoring it, and they X-rayed it for some reason—”

“Probably to see if there are original sketches underneath. Or changes that were painted out. Jack said artists sometimes make changes along the way, so the X-ray can reveal what their original intent was.”

“Well, check out this original intent. They X-rayed La Fornarina and found this.” Bodhi zoomed in on the image and held it up for me to see.

There, on Margherita Luti's ring finger, on the left hand that lay demurely on her lap, was the outline of a ring.

“It's a ring with a square red ruby. Painted over, probably by Raphael's student,” Bodhi checked the article again, “Giulio Romano, who sold the painting after Raphael died.”

I blinked. “It's on her wedding finger.”

“Exactly!” Bodhi bounced in her chair.

“But they weren't married. He was engaged to someone else—”

“—who he strung along for seven years, remember?” Bodhi had read the article and everything. “Now we know why.”

“So Raphael had to hide his marriage to La Fornarina because . . .”

“No,” Bodhi huffed impatiently, “you aren't paying attention. Raphael painted the ring in. He
wanted
it there. After Raphael died, his
student
is the one who painted it out. Right before he sold it.”

“Because—”

“Because what would a painting by the recently deceased superstar of the art world sell for if it showed he was married to the daughter of a baker?”

I didn't know what surprised me more: the revelation of the ruby ring, or Bodhi's transformation into a Raphael expert. Or how irritated I was that she'd made such a brilliant discovery.

“So you got me out of bed—”

“You weren't in bed.”

“I was going to bed,” I pouted. “You dragged me out of bed, got out my,” I lowered my voice, “
suitcase
, made me sit here in this creepy waiting room in the middle of the night—just to show me that article?”

“No, stupid.” Bodhi pointed to her arm. “How else are we going to X-ray our painting?”

• • •

The ER night shift was skeptical of Bodhi's arm injury, and at least wanted to wait for her parents to show up before green-lighting any expensive medical procedures. But after Bodhi squeezed out two fat tears and whispered, “I don't want them to hurt me again,” the head doc went ahead and sent her for X-rays, with me for moral support, while they scrambled to find a social worker.

I had to admit, Bodhi had a certain talent—and not just for popping her arm out of its socket at will.

“Okay, so what do we do next?” I whispered as Bodhi was wheeled toward the X-ray room.

“Shut up, I didn't think we'd get this far,” Bodhi said between clenched teeth.

“You didn't think we'd
what
?”

I switched the suitcase to my other sweaty hand and fumed all over again. Having a partner in crime is nice and all. Except when they add medical insurance fraud to your list of crimes.

But as they wheeled her into the X-ray lab, I saw Bodhi relax and smile. I followed her eyes to a copy of the
New York Post
, opened to Page Six, on the technician's console. She composed her face back into that of a helpless waif and turned around to the orderly.

“I'm scared. Is that social worker here yet?” She blinked rapidly and summoned a fresh tear to trail down her cheek.

“Lemme go check, hon. You'll be okay with Larry here.”

As soon as the door closed behind the orderly, Bodhi jumped out of the wheelchair and yelped as she popped her arm back into the socket, much to Larry the X-ray technician's surprise.

“Okay, Larry, here's the deal. My arm is fine. We need you to X-ray something else.”

Larry, a pasty man who'd apparently spent too much of his life in dark rooms, stopped his Krispy Kreme in midbite. Bodhi kicked my leg and gestured to open the suitcase.

“It's this painting. If we do this fast, you won't get in trouble. Just one good image is all we need.” By now, I had the painting out, and Bodhi was directing me to position it against the wall. “Okay, let's go. That orderly will be back any minute.”

Seeing a painting where he usually saw body parts finally roused the technician. “Hold on, what's going on here?” He put down the doughnut and reached for the phone. “I'm calling Dr. Chen.”

Bodhi left the painting and sprung across the room to the technician's station. “Wait a minute, do you know Jake Ford? The actor?”

Larry's interest was piqued. “Yeah, of course. So what?”

“What about Jessica Blake?”

A twinkle of excitement appeared in the man's dull eyes. “Jessica Blake? Sure!”

“Would you like her autograph?” Bodhi rummaged in a tote bag I hadn't noticed before and pulled out a glossy head shot, which she dangled over the buttons and knobs of the man's desk. Then she whisked it away. “Or maybe you'd like something . . . more valuable?”

The technician's eyes stayed fixed on the head shot. “Like what?”

Bodhi turned the head shot over and grabbed a Sharpie off the desk. “This is the number of the editor of Page Six,” she muttered with the Sharpie cap between her teeth, jotting a series of numbers on the back of the photo. “You call her in the morning—she won't get in before ten—and you tell her that Jessica Blake will be at this address,” more jotting, “at this time tomorrow. Trust me, she'll be very grateful for the information.
Very
.”

Larry nodded slowly. “Okay. Okay, yeah, that sounds . . . doable.” His sticky hand reached for the head shot, but not before Bodhi could yank it off the table again.

“First, let's take some pictures.”

I'd never had the misfortune of needing an X-ray, but in my head, I thought they used some big machine and an hour later you got some film that the doctor held up to a lightbulb to read.

But it seems that X-rays have gone the way of Bodhi's phone, with computerized functions, on-screen zooms, digital enhancements. Luckily Larry was as good at his job as he was at putting down doughnuts. He zoomed in on La Fornarina's ring finger, and by adjusting the contrast, color spectrum, and a bunch of other things I didn't understand, was able to find what had been hidden for five hundred years.

There on his computer screen, sketched lightly in white against the dark gray of the third finger, was a ring with a square-cut stone.

“It's there! It's there!” Bodhi hugged me with her left arm and started jumping up and down. “I knew it! It's a Raphael for sure. I told you it was!”

“You never—”

“Oh, shut up. It's a Raphael, okay? You're rich!”

Larry looked up. “You're what?”

I started jumping along with Bodhi. “We did it!”

“Do you guys need these files?” Larry started dragging files around on-screen.

“Yeah, burn us a CD. And we need hard copies, too!” Bodhi turned to me. “Eat our X-rays, Gemma! Am I right?”

“Bodhi, that orderly is going to be back any second. We'd better get packed up.” I moved to grab the painting, but Bodhi stopped me.

“Wait a second. Larry, let's get one more shot of the whole picture.” She looked at me. “Hey, maybe there's some more original intent under there.”

Larry zoomed out, made a little more dashboard magic, and brought the entire canvas in view on his screen.

It was strange to see the painting, with its intricate coloring, reduced to a grayed-out skeleton sketch of images.

But it was even stranger to see a ghostly apparition lurking behind the Madonna and Child.

• • •

The city was just coming to life by the time we made it out of the hospital, the official X-ray films hidden in the Samsonite along with the painting and the CD in Bodhi's back pocket.

“How's your arm?” I asked Bodhi as we grabbed a window seat at the diner. (“Breakfast is on me,” said Bodhi. “Eggs?” I shook my head. “Pancakes.”)

“S'okay.” Bodhi rubbed her right shoulder. “It hurts when I pop it in and out like that. But it was worth it.”

We laid out the X-ray films on the Formica, careful not to splash our bottomless cups of coffee.

“So it's a person?” Bodhi yawned.

I held the film up to the window for a better look. “A man. It must have been painted out, too. Maybe at the same time as the ring.”

“That's weird.”

I thought for a second. “Not necessarily. Raphael painted some Holy Family paintings—you know, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus together. Maybe that student, Romano, who painted out the ring—maybe he thought it would be worth more with just Mary and Jesus.”

I hauled out the trusty monograph again and found a few examples of Holy Family paintings clustered together toward the back of the book. “See, it's a pretty common composition. There's Mary sitting with Jesus. And then Joseph is usually standing behind them, kind of looking over them, like our painted-out man is. Joseph usually has this staff or cane or big stick of some kind.”

Bodhi snatched up the X-ray. “I can't tell a lot from this, but there's definitely no stick.” I took it back and looked, too. It was true. The man behind the Madonna and Child held nothing, resting one arm on the Virgin's shoulder and the other reaching toward the Christ Child.

“There's something else weird,” I ventured. “No beard.”

“What are you talking about?” Bodhi tapped at the man's outline. “There's a beard right there.” She was right. The man sported the outline of a mustache and closely cropped beard, which matched the dark hair that he wore in a pageboy parted down the middle.

“But not the right kind. Joseph is supposed to have a long, gray beard and a bald head. It's part of his iconography.”

“What's that?”

“You doofus, didn't you hear anything Reverend Cecily said?” It thrilled me a little to have a friend I could insult so casually. “Iconography. Like, every saint or figure has things that identify them. So John the Baptist is always wearing animal skins, because he wandered the wilderness. And Saint Peter always has keys, because he holds the keys to heaven. And the Virgin Mary is always wearing blue, because it was the most expensive color in the artist's paint box. They made the paint out of crushed jewels.”

Bodhi took a slurp of her coffee.

“Well, our Virgin isn't wearing blue. She's wearing gray. Gray and white.”

Bodhi was right. A drab gray dress with white sleeves.

“And another thing,” Bodhi peeked at the monograph again, “these guys in the book are wearing—what are those? Togas?”

“Yes, togas. It was part of the whole Renaissance obsession with classical Greek and—”

Bodhi tapped the X-ray and the window behind it again. “Well, there's no toga here. No toga, no long beard, no stick.”

There was something familiar about the specter behind the Madonna and Child. The way he gazed directly at the viewer with his large, round eyes. The familiarity of the hand on the Virgin's shoulder. The hair and the beard and the—

“Oh. My. God.”

I dropped the film and paged frantically through the monograph, stopping at a painting of two men.

“What's that one called?” Bodhi asked.

“It's a painting called
Self-Portrait with a Friend
.” I propped up the book for Bodhi to see. “Look at the man standing in back.”

“Self-portrait?” Bodhi's eyes widened. “That's . . . ?”

“Yes,” I nodded. “That's Raphael himself. And so,” I held up the X-ray again, “is that.”

I
t wasn't a Madonna and Child. Or even a Holy Family. It was a family portrait.

A family portrait of Raffaello Sanzio, his secret wife, and his sleeping child. Making this the only painting—the only record of any kind—that proved the existence of Raphael's family.

Suddenly everything made sense.

It explained why the woman and child looked so human, so complex, and nothing like gods.

It explained why Margherita Luti—not the Virgin Mary—was identified with the pearl (
margarita
) in her hair.

It explained the hand on the boob. For once my mother was right: Raphael was trying to tell us—across three different paintings—that she was not just a mistress, but a mother.

But I still didn't understand what had transformed the sexy and sensuous Fornarina into such a melancholy figure.

And I was haunted by an even bigger question: What happened to the child? Vasari never mentions him—or her, for that matter—and he tells us that, on his deathbed, Raphael sent his mistress away, “leaving her the means to live a good and decent life.” According to the monograph, records show that Margherita Luti entered a convent four months after his death—alone.

So was the child left in an orphanage? Made the charge of a powerful cardinal's household? Was he or she given a new name and some money and stashed with a bankrupt aristocrat?

Even three cups of Mr. Katsanakis's coffee couldn't revive us enough to tackle these questions, so Bodhi and I parted ways, me heading home to tend the chickens, the garden, and the teapot, and Bodhi to make sure her mother was photographed at 4:00, leaving the Kabbalah Centre instead of her plastic surgeon's office.

• • •

A thud at the front door woke me sometime in the hot, drowsy afternoon. I stumbled downstairs expecting another revelation by Bodhi, but found only a hand-written note from Madame Dumont (“I have not forgotten this rude business with the eggs. Nevertheless, I consider legalle action with my council . . .”) and a thick manila envelope slid through the mail slot.

Return address: National Military Personnel Records Center.

I tore open the envelope right there in the hallway, pulling out a sheaf of papers and a cover letter introducing the military record I had requested for “Private First Class John Thornton Tenpenny V.”

Some of the pages were stamped “CLASSIFIED” and then “DECLASSIFIED” with a date. Some had lines or words blacked out with marker. Most were filled with sections like this:

Hq. 1704th SU, Ft. Hamilton Ny From 21 SEP 1943 to 30 NOV 1943

Assd 69ID 423IR CQM 1 DEC 1943

632 135, CTST, Httsburg Miss. From 2 DEC 1943 to 11 JUL 1944

Tfr 28ID 321IR BQM 12 JUL 1944

POE Boston Ma, USS Yarmouth From 18 JUL 1944 to 23 JUL 1944

South. Cmmn, Eng., C18 From 23 JUL 1944 to 18 AUG 1944

I had a better chance of decoding Latin on my own. Once again, I was going to need a translator.

• • •

“Sweet! You got it!”

Eddie did a celebratory 360 in his desk chair. “You juiced my interest, you know, and I started looking into military records. Do you know how lucky you are? There was a fire in their archives in 1973, and the government lost most of its World War II–era files. I thought your granddad's file was a goner for sure.” He grabbed the papers out of my hands and held them aloft over his head. “But it's alive! It's aliiiive!” A few patrons shot annoyed looks at Eddie. “Sorry, dudes, this is big,” he announced.

I watched him thumb through until he reached some kind of career summary.

“Okay, here's the name, rank, serial number. . . . Now look here. As we already know, he enlisted right after Pearl Harbor. He joined up with the New York 69th Infantry. They did their training in Mississippi—”

“Mississippi?” I tried to imagine Jack, who dreaded even leaving the island of Manhattan, traveling south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

“Yup, Hattiesburg, it says. Then he got transferred to the 28th Infantry and was shipped over to England before finally hitting the European theater in August of 1944; looks like they acted as replacements for some of the boys who went in on D-Day. Went through Northern France—wow!—saw the liberation of Paris, then headed into Belgium. And look here—he was captured!”

“Captured? By who?”

“By who? By the Germans, that's who! See, it says he was sent to Stalag IX-B.”

“Where's that?

“Well, ‘stalag' means camp or prison. This must have been a POW camp.” Eddie took in my blank expression. “Prisoner-of-war, that is.”

POW? It was one of those terms I'd heard somewhere before, but couldn't exactly picture it. And honestly, I wasn't sure I wanted to.

“What's this part that says ‘classified'?”

Eddie studied the paper again. “Hmmmm, ‘Classified January through March 1945.” He looked up. “I don't know. There are a lot of reasons why the information might be classified. He could have been on a secret mission—”

“Like a spy?”

“Maybe. Maybe just pulled the short straw for some classified maneuver. Wherever he was, he turns up again in a French military hospital in April of 1945. Doesn't say what he was treated for, just that he was released into a different division a couple of weeks later—let's see, the Civil Affairs division as part of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program? Wait a minute, is that—” Eddie entered the term into his computer. “No way!”

“What is it?”

“Your granddad wasn't just a soldier. He was one of the Monuments Men!”

“The what?”

“Hold on. This is indisputably rad. Like, historically rad.” He seated me at a nearby table and came back ten minutes later with a stack of books from the history section.

He opened one of the books to a glossy middle section filled with black-and-white photographs. “These were the Monuments Men. A bunch of artists, curators, architects, scholars, some just regular soldiers, who worked to rescue the great art of Europe from the destruction of the war.”

In the pictures, they looked like any old soldiers. But instead of holding guns, they held some of the world's most famous artworks. They posed next to sculptures, or in front of half-bombed churches, or with General Eisenhower as he reviewed what looked like hundreds of paintings.

“These guys were on the front lines, right behind the infantry. They drew maps of every European town showing the most important monuments—famous art museums, cathedrals, palaces—so our guys wouldn't bomb them by accident. And as soon as the Allies took a location away from the Nazis, the Monuments Men would go in and secure any endangered works of art. Make sure they were structurally sound, protected from further damage, or safe from looting.”

“Looting by who? The townspeople? Or—,” I gulped, “the American soldiers?”

“Both, I guess. But no one looted like the Nazis. The German leadership—Hitler, Goering, the whole lot of them—they were all art-obsessed, and they snatched up everything they could get their hands on. They stole from museums, estates, even private homes. And especially from the Jews that they shipped off to camps.”

We'd covered a bit of the war in school: Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the concentration camps. I guess I never thought about great art in the midst of it all. But in the pages of the books Eddie laid out in front of me, I could see it. Stained-glass windows shattering. Historic buildings bombed. Paintings carefully packed and loaded out of a house as its occupants were hustled away at gunpoint.

“And then when the war was over, it fell to the Monuments Men to figure out what to do with all this stolen art. They established a collection point in Munich, and they spent the next few years cataloging everything and trying to send it back to where it came from.” Eddie guided a snake-tatooed finger over Jack's archive file. “This says your grandfather worked there until nineteen forty-seven, when he was honorably discharged by his commanding officer.”

I looked at the book's photographs again. Could that be Jack in the background, behind a Michelangelo? Or working to prop up a splintered cathedral? Maybe so, but then, every soldier looked the same in their regulation uniform and cap pulled low.

“I can't believe it,” I mumbled. “He never said anything.”

“That's a shame. Maybe you can track down someone in his division. You have all the info here, and some of these old-timers are even online now. Right, Stanley my man?” Eddie gave a fist pump to an oblivious elderly man hunched over a nearby computer terminal.

“Yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea. I'd like to know more about,” I cleared my throat, “what my grandfather was up to in those days.”

“Here's a good place to start.” Eddie slid the file back over to me. “The record lists the commanding officers by name. That's the CO who signed off on your grandfather's discharge. A guy named,” Eddie peered at the papers, “Lydon Randolph.”