Claire imagined a group of artists advanced into battle wearing smocks and waving paintbrushes. "What was that?"
"MFA&A was part of the Army. Its job was to protect the art that had survived the war and return it to its rightful owners. My grandfather spent a year working for them in a place called Berchtesgaden, just outside Munich." Dante rolled the r of "Berchtesgaden" in the back of his throat in a way that reminded her of Charlie. Clearly his grandfather had taught him as well as his grandmothers. Claire realized she was enjoying herself.
"So he tracked down missing tapestries?"
"That and a little bit of everything else. A lot of tapestries didn't make it through the war. They were too heavy to carry and too bulky to hide. Not like jewelry, which can be slipped into a pocket. And as the war went on and on, beauty became more of an abstract concept. He said it wasn't unusual for refugees to saw apart a Gobelin tapestry and use it for blankets."
Between sips of cappuccino, Dante painted a picture of a country in chaos. Jewelry and silver were hidden and then forgotten about. Art vanished into the hands of neighbors, refugees, the secret police, soldiers on both sides, and people who simply saw an opportunity and grabbed it. Things were available for the taking, even more so after Germany lost the war.
"My grandfather said the Russian DPs were the easiest to work with because they always crossed themselves when they saw pictures of the Madonna, and did not dare touch religious works. And when they broke into museums they usually limited themselves to taking the more useful costumes."
"So your grandfather traced art back to its original owners?"
"He spent most of his time there worrying about what to do with Goring's estate."
"Goring!" Claire started. "My roommate is eighty-three, and originally from Germany. She's Jewish, and they tried to bribe their way out with an old family painting that was supposed to be a Rembrandt. But the person who took their painting gave them papers that were no good and they were arrested. Charlie lost her whole family in the camps." Claire thought of the little boy whose name Charlie never uttered. It was as if she could not bear to pull him into the world again. "She told me they traded the painting to someone who worked for Goring."
Dante tapped his heavy white mug with his index finger. "My guess would be that whoever gave them false papers did it without Goring's knowledge. Hitler was never too particular about the provenance of his art, but Goring wasn't a thief. Of course, he didn't have to be. People were eager to do him favors, and it was known he collected art. He especially liked early German and Dutch Old Masters." They both glanced at the photos of Claire's painting, clearly something that would have interested Goring. "Sometimes he bought things for ridiculously low prices. More often they were given as 'gifts' that were really bribes—like the deal your roommate tried to make. He let several art collectors smuggle out their collections in return for a prize painting or two. They say that by 1940, he had the most important art collection in Europe."
Dante told Claire about Goring's collection, which bordered on obsession. The walls of his estate were hung so thickly with hundreds of paintings that their frames touched. He lounged on 500-year-old hand-carved furniture, walked on rare tapestries, ate off plates made from silver and gold. "He had a vase filled with diamonds, and while he was thinking he liked to pour them from hand to hand. By the end of the war, he was wearing red velvet robes covered with jewels."
"He sounds a little crazy."
Dante nodded. "Probably more than a little. But he was a crazy man with excellent taste. My grandfather used to get all worked up when he told me about what happened to all those beautiful things."
"What happened? Were they bombed?"
Dante explained that at the end of the war, a worried Goring packed a train full of his precious art and then tried to find a safe place for it. First it went to Berlin, but the Soviet army threatened it. Then the train tried and failed to make it to his county home near Berchtesgaden. When the Americans and the French swept in, they found an abandoned train on a railway siding. They didn't know what they had until Goring's art adviser gave himself up.
"My grandfather made it to Unterstein—the little spot where most of the train cars ended up—too late. He said from a distance it was as if the people were streams of ants. When he got closer, the streams of ants turned into people fighting to get into cars and then fighting to get out of them again, only this time with their arms full. Children were running between people's feet, grabbing what fell. The station was littered with broken bottles of wine, enormous paintings, statues that had turned out to be too heavy to carry. He cried when he told me about how he found a group of men tearing up a tapestry because it was too big to carry in one piece. He chased them off by giving them some food and wine he had found in one car." Dante shook his head. "Even after all that looting, there were still more than six hundred paintings left on the train. But a lot of Goring's collection had vanished."
"Wasn't Goring hanged after the war?"
Dante shook his head. "Two hours before he was supposed to be hanged, he committed suicide by swallowing cyanide capsules he had smuggled into his cell. His ashes were thrown into the last incinerator in Dachau."
They were both silent for a minute.
Claire set down her mug. "Did they ever find the stuff that disappeared from the train?"
"My grandfather spent a year dressed in lederhosen roaming the villages around Berchtesgaden, attempting to recover items from reluctant locals."
"Did he succeed?"
"Only to a degree. He also had to cope with our own soldiers, who weren't any better. You probably remember the story about the guy from Kentucky."
"Was that the one who sent home a bunch of things that had been hidden?"
Dante nodded. "Treasures from a cathedral stored for safekeeping in a cave. One of the items he helped himself to was a fourteenth-century painting of the Christ child. He knew that it must be valuable because it had these big emeralds and rubies set around the frame. I don't know how he thought he was going to turn up with a six-hundred-year-old painting and pass it off as something that had been in his family all along."
"I don't remember what happened to him." When Claire had read about the case, she had never guessed that it might someday be of personal interest to her.
"He died not long ago. There was a lot of controversy when the German government bought the painting back from his family for several million dollars. Last I heard, the IRS was slapping his estate for back taxes. And they were considering criminal charges. But now that he's dead, who knows what will happen? At least he didn't pry the jewels out of the frame. During the war, the average soldier didn't care too much about art. My grandfather used to cry when he told me about what he had seen over there. Soldiers smashed or shot at sculptures. People used Renaissance Limoges enamels as plates and then threw them away. If a soldier did have an appreciation for art, he simply took what he liked and sent it home through the military field post."
"Aunt Cady mentioned something like that in her diary." Dante sat forward. "Your aunt kept a diary when she was stationed in Germany?"
Claire nodded. "I was reading parts of it last night." "Where is it now? In your hotel room?"
"Actually, I have it right here in my backpack. Before you hijacked me, I was planning on reading it while I had my coffee."
"Would you mind if I looked at it? It might tell us exactly where that painting came from."
Claire wasn't sure how she felt about it. Was it right to share Aunt Cady's musings, her fears, her desires, with a stranger? Claire had a connection to the woman, memories that helped her understand her attraction to Rudy. She didn't want Dante to judge her aunt.
He was still looking at her expectantly, so she showed him what she thought were the relevant parts—the day Aunt Cady had met Rudy, the description of the warehouse that Rudy had been set to guard. Dante eventually took the diary from her hands and read to her.
***
July 17,19
45
A radiant summer day. The German housewives have been busy, dusting, wiping and scrubbing. When you go outside you hear the sounds of carpet-beating, sweeping, hammering. Munich is being cleaned up. Children look washed again. Everywhere you see refugees on their way home, family groups with little handcarts piled high with sacks, boxes, suitcases. Many of the carts are pulled by women or boys with ropes over their shoulders, followed by children or a grandfather pushing the cart from behind. Atop almost all the carts either children or very old people sit huddled among the baggage. These old ones, whether men or women, look awful—gray, emaciated, already half dead, listless bundles of bones.
This morning I saw a garbage truck belonging to the city of Munich. On it were six coffins, one of which the driver used as a seat. The garbagemen were having their breakfast up there. The sun sparkled off the beer bottles they raised to their mouths.
After breakfast, Frau Lehman, our cook, told me about what happened to her younger sister. Last year, when she was seventeen years old, her leg was torn off by shrapnel when she got caught outside during a bombing raid. She bled to death. Her parents buried her in their garden behind some red currant bushes. For a coffin they used their broom cupboard.
Tried to extract from her the German word for dream. By paraphrasing it in various ways such as "a movie in the head," "seeing pictures with one's eyes closed," and "not-real things taking place in one's sleep," I finally succeeded. Traume. It sounds a lot like the English word "trauma."
I dreamed about Rudy last night. I dreamed we had just finished making love and I was lying on my back with my eyes closed. I opened them, only a little bit, and he was watching me with a look, his eyes flat and his face expressionless. He didn't say anything, just watched me, but for some reason when I woke up I was frightened.
***
"Dante!" A man in his mid-fifties had entered the cafe and now came straight to their table, waddling a little because he was extremely fat. His bulldog face was split by a grin.
"Hello, Uncle Alfonso."
He turned to give Claire a frankly appraising glance from eyes nearly buried in folds of flesh. "So who's this you have with you? Have you been keeping something from the family?" His growling voice gave a special emphasis to the word "family."
"I'm Claire. Claire Montrose." She held out her hand. "I only met Dante a few days ago, at the Met."
His grip was soft, but with a surprising underlying firmness. He gave Claire's hand an extra squeeze before releasing it. "The Metropolitan Museum of Art?" He curled his lip when he said the word art, then appealed to Dante. "When are you going to join the business? Family is family."
Dante's answer was soft, but Claire saw a pulse in his jaw. "I like what I do, Uncle Alfonso. You know I'm not cut out for all that."
"You should give up this nonsense. Stop being afraid of getting your hands dirty."
Claire, who felt as if she had stepped onto a movie set, was finally putting it all together. What was all this talk about the family business? Dante was Italian, wasn't he? And wasn't New York home to the five families, the mob bosses who ruled the Mafia?
She shook her head, realizing she was letting fantasy overtake her.
Chapter 21Claire sat on the bed in her hotel room and laced up her Nikes, the new ones with an extra-cushioned midsole. They were embarrassingly white, with a brilliant aqua stripe. Anyone looking at them would think she had never run before.
It was still early, just after seven on Sunday, but it seemed wrong to be sleeping away her last day in New York City. In twenty-four hours she would be back in the Custom Plate Department, listening to Frank describe his weekend in excruciating detail.
When she had returned to her hotel room, after having spent most of the day with Dante, Troy had called. He was all apologies for his behavior the night before, calling himself boorish. And partly it was Troy's use of the word boorish—a word that no one she knew would ever use—that had made Claire relent and agree to let him take her out to breakfast before she left. But she had decided she would go as Claire Montrose, not some woman in a too-sexy dress. It was too much work to be anyone but herself.
To Claire's surprise, Fifth Avenue was practically deserted. Seven- fifteen in the morning on an October Sunday, and the greatest city in the world looked almost unpopulated. The pavement was wet from an overnight shower, but the clouds had retreated and were now scudding high overhead. She braced her hands against a wall and began to stretch out her legs. Rather than rinsing the air, the rain had released all the smells of the city, so that the stink of garbage and gasoline and urine and the perfume-scent of a basement laundry hung all mixed together in the air, acrid and steamy.
Claire had read that the portion of the brain responsible for processing smells was one of the more primitive parts, making it the sense that aroused the most emotions. The same article had talked about what smells people associated with their childhoods, saying that people over fifty associated being a kid with natural scents, like bread baking or the sweetish smell of manure, while anyone younger than fifty thought of childhood when they smelled artificial smells, like the scent of crayons or Play-Doh. For Claire it happened when she smelled a particular kind of cheap plastic—a reminder of a doll that had miraculously materialized under the Christmas tree straight from the pages of the Sears Wish Book. Or sometimes at work when she ripped open a freshly printed pack of forms she would be back in fifth grade again, sniffing the milky scent of mimeograph paper.
She hit the button on her black rubber wristwatch and set off. New York didn't look so unconquerable when seen at this hour, in this place. Without the streams of honking cars and sidewalks full of rushing people, Claire was free to glory in the buildings that stretched up to the sky and the wide wet street that ran between them as straight as a ruler. She felt a surge of energy rise from her belly to her chest, a wordless joy at life's possibilities. It was hard to believe that a single phone call from her mother had led her here.
As she ran, she passed an old couple in their Sunday best, speaking what she thought was French. Taking no chances on the overcast sky, they shared the shelter of an oversized black umbrella. The doorway of a sub shop held a bundle of rags that proved to be a sleeping human being. A Lycraed woman Rollerbladed past Claire, her taut figure belied by her middle-aged face. While the gutter held scraps of paper and an occasional pile of dog droppings, Claire thought the city was remarkably clean. People had obediently filled the street-corner wastebaskets with paper cups and candy wrappers and discarded yellow and black Playbills left over from the night before.
Claire settled into an easy pace. On these flat streets she could run forever, at least until she ruined her knees by pounding on pavement. She thought about Troy and Dante. Her last meeting with Dante had ended awkwardly, with her promising to call him when she got back to Portland, promising to think about lending him the painting so he could arrange to have it tested, while thinking to herself she didn't know what she would do. She needed more time to think, to weigh the various opinions Troy and Dante had offered her.
The two men were so different. Dante clearly wanted her painting, while Troy claimed to want her. But Claire wondered how much Troy's fascination, too, lay not in her but in a foot-square painting of a woman with a letter in her hands and an unreadable expression on her face.
Troy surprised Claire by showing up minus a limousine or even a car. They walked a few blocks to a deli he suggested, which was again a surprise. The people who filled it were mostly tourists, and Troy, in his dark, fashionably cut suit, stood out among them like a swan among seagulls.
Over bagels, cream cheese and lox, they spent more than an hour exchanging stories. Or, more accurately, Troy regaled her with tales about some of Avery's famous clients. A rock musician who snorted cocaine off the viewing room's table. An actor who bought an abstract painting for several million only to hang it upside down. She told a few stories of her own about Custom Plates, but mostly she just listened, aware of the
minutes slipping by. She was Cinderella watching the clock edge toward midnight, and tomorrow the drudgery would begin again.
Finally she said, "I really have to get back to my hotel if I'm going to make it to the airport on time."
"No—is it that late?" Troy looked at his watch. "Damn—I forgot I had promised to call someone this morning. Would you excuse me for a moment?"
Claire studied him as he used a phone in the lobby. He was so different from any other man she had ever known. Then she amended that. So different from the men in Portland, at least. Dante was in many ways like Troy. Both were strikingly handsome. And both were smart. Only Troy moved through the upper strata of New York City's society—while Dante looked as if he might know the city's underbelly.
Claire watched as Troy punched a series of numbers into the pay phone, listened, punched in some more numbers, then finally hung up. Voice mail hell, she guessed. She was familiar with it herself from work. Every day, it seemed, she was forced to listen to a woman's voice—complete with a false note of sadness—saying, "I'm sorry. That is not a valid option or password," when Claire had been trying for neither, but simply to leave a message for another state employee. The thought of state employees reminded her that she had one more task to fulfill before she boarded the plane. She was ordering a dozen bagels from the man behind the counter when Troy rejoined her.
"Don't trust plane food?"
"There's an unwritten social contract at work that anyone who goes on vacation has to return with an edible souvenir. It was either this or some of those big pretzels they sell on the street."