So much time has passed.
“Tell me everything,” she says, pouring strong black coffee into teacups for each of us.
“Well, you know about Isaak’s arrest. Have you heard that a British Air stewardess was arrested in Amsterdam?”
“No.” She drops cubes of sugar into her cup. “That’s not good, is it?”
“No.”
I sigh, feeling my belly roil. “And this morning, an agent came to the apartment to talk to me. I wasn’t there, obviously.” I’ve already filled her in on Sam, and the thought of my niece is a weight pulling all my thoughts into it. I force myself to refocus. “But Willow said he was very interested in Isaak’s painting, the one of the dove.”
“Isaak’s painting?” She frowns. “That’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, why? He’s never been known for his own work. Or at least original work.”
“Right. I don’t know, unless he just knew that was Isaak’s work, and if so, it’s a definite connection to me.”
“Which they probably already know, or they wouldn’t have bothered to show up in the first place.”
“Yes.” I stare out the window, watching a woman do a series of yoga poses in a modern, glass-walled apartment across the street.
“What do you have to worry about, Gloria? You didn’t do the forgeries.”
The woman across the street bends over into a triangle, lifts one leg. The thing is, none of the others know the full story. They all think they bought lost paintings for a song, paintings hidden away by the Nazis and then recovered through an art-theft ring in Israel.
Miriam knows the truth. A few paintings were discovered, and Isaak was involved in the sale of them, but then he had a very, very wicked idea: What if he painted fakes that were supposedly lost masterpieces? And what if I then carried those paintings around the world and delivered them to the buyers? I should not have offered them to my friends, but once they caught wind of the cover story, they were all eager to get in on it. Their husbands could more than afford it, and I . . . let them. They should not be in any trouble now—it isn’t against any law I know of to buy a painting that looks like the painting of a master. Even Isaak’s painting of them is in a gray area—he didn’t actually forge any known work, only offered work that seemed as if it could have been a lost masterpiece.
“It seemed like such a lark,” I say and rub my forehead.
Miriam stirs her coffee, picks up one of the sandwiches I brought over. “I think you need a lawyer, darling. A criminal lawyer, and a good one. Do you know anybody?”
“I found someone. Dani’s husband referred him to me.”
“Does she know the truth, then?”
I shake my head. “They’re all going to be so pissed off at me.”
She lifts a shoulder that’s still straight and square. “They shouldn’t have been buying stolen art.”
“Reproductions,” I say. “Maybe I need to let them know?”
“Might be dangerous to bring anything to light right now. As it stands, no one is going to realize any of them are connected. Better they should just lie low.”
“You’re right.”
“Why don’t you focus on getting your house in order, find a lawyer, and for God’s sake, make sure that if they get a search warrant, there’s nothing for them to find.”
Ice water pours through my body, giving me a shudder. I think of the small, exquisite landscape in my parlor. “Yes. I’ll do that.” I swallow, meet her eyes. “I’m going to have to get out of New York.”
Her eyes are suspiciously bright. She covers my hand. “I know.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Willow
I’m sitting in one of the chairs in Sam’s room when Gloria returns. She is as impeccably groomed as ever, but I notice that she’s forgotten to reapply her lipstick, and the lines around her eyes are more pronounced. “Come sit down,” I say, patting the chair next to me.
She settles her oversize bag on the floor between us and sinks down. “How is she?”
“Okay. Her fever is better, actually,” I say. “She was awake for a while when I first got here—and oh my God, guess who’s her doctor?”
She shakes her head. “Who?”
“Eric.”
Her eyes narrow. “No!”
“Yeah. He’s a virologist, right? Isn’t that the weirdest coincidence?”
“I hope that doesn’t bring them back together.”
“Ugh.”
From the bed, Sam says, “I can hear you.”
“I don’t care,” I say. “He was very, very bad for you.”
Gloria stands. “How are you, sweetheart? Do you need anything? Some tea? Something to eat?”
Sam smiles very faintly. “No. I’m good right now.”
I stand too. “Maybe some yogurt?”
She shakes her head. Tired, but a little color is returning to her lips. “I’m good. Really.” She looks at me, at Gloria. “I’m so sorry I talked about selling the apartment, you guys. Seriously. I didn’t mean it—I was just—”
“You were just coming down with meningitis,” Gloria says. “Nothing to worry about.”
Sam nods as if she’s agreeing to a tall tale. Is there something going on with her that she’s not talking about, in addition to the meningitis? I hate that she might have a burden she can’t share. That Gloria won’t talk either.
How will I get these two to open up?
Gloria sends me home to rest, and I go without argument, feeling the short night in the graininess beneath my eyelids.
As I leave the hospital, it starts to rain. This time, I have my good coat, but I still don’t have my umbrella. Again. I can’t afford to take a cab, and I’m feeling strung out and emotional and a little bit lost. It scares me that Sam is so sick.
She’s always been prone to colds and flu, falling sick whenever her father was a particular bastard or when she was struggling with some social thing in her life. When Eric broke up with her, she was sick off and on for months. I worried so much that I came home from the Ren Faire to try to cheer her up.
This is worse. She is paler than her sheets, as if she’s been painted on the bed. She can’t stay awake, and she’s . . . actually been kind of nice to me. That’s scary.
What the hell was that bastard Eric doing in her room? And what happened between her and Asher?
Asher has been part of my life as long as I can remember. He’s just always been there, a fixture, Sam’s best friend. When I was little, he let me curl up next to him when they watched movies and were supposedly “babysitting” me while my mom was at a gig or out partying with her friends or just out cold in another room. Sam was never the warm and fuzzy type, but Asher was like my older brother. He played tricks on me with rubber spiders, but he also made sure we ate, bringing things from home that his mother had cooked for us, sweeping us back to his apartment on 72nd, where he lived with his family. His whole family—mother and father and five siblings and grandmother—and more books than I’d ever seen in my life, stacked in every room, lined up on a hundred shelves and piled up beside chairs. I loved it there. Loved everything about the big family: the noise, the fact that you were never alone, the smells of food cooking, the debates about politics or the news of the day. His mother taught English lit at City College, and his father ran a warren of a bookstore, three floors of magic below the apartment.
It was one of my favorite places in the world, and they accepted Sam and me as if we were naturally meant to be sitting at their crowded table. By then, Gloria lived with us and filled the apartment with her friends and music and energy, but it wasn’t the same as a mom-dad-kids kind of family. I felt like I was living a TV show in their apartment.
Sam and Asher clicked because they were so weird, each of them in their own way. Asher a classic shortsighted nerd with troubled skin, a little bit of a belly, and a complete inability to play any kind of social game. Sam was too tall and too skinny and didn’t care what people thought of her. She had weird allergies�
��like to marshmallows and avocados and latex, for example—and she hated the sounds people made when they chewed. Then as now, she was prickly and too truthful, and in Asher she had the kind of friend we all dream of.
As I’m watching the rain pour down outside the hospital door, I wonder if I should call him. See how things are between them, what happened.
Or maybe it’s none of my business. I don’t want Sam to get mad at me.
I should, however, make a point of going to see Asher’s mother, Deborah. She’d never forgive me if I came home and didn’t stop by.
As I’m debating whether to buy another umbrella in the gift shop for zillions of dollars or just try to run to the train, my phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out and look at the screen, pleased when I see who it is.
“Josiah,” I say. “Hello.”
“Hello.” The voice is even better than I remember, as rich as butter. “How’s your sister?”
“Terrible! Josiah, you will never believe it! She’s in the hospital, with meningitis.”
“For real? I had a student in one of my courses a couple of weeks ago with it. Must be going around. Is she going to be okay?”
“Yeah.” My stomach hurts a little. “I think so. I hope so. I’m at the hospital right now—just came down from seeing her.”
“Hey, well, maybe you’re not in the mood, but I was going to suggest this afternoon might be a good time to jam.”
The most urgent need I feel right this minute is to get online and start googling this whole art story. I’m anxious about G, about what might be bearing down on us, and I need more information.
But my stomach is upset from tension, and one thing I know is that I can’t live on my nerves when both Sam and Gloria are in full-on freak-out mode. One of us has to keep it together. I know from experience that an hour of music will do more for my clarity of thinking than anything else.
I’ll spend an hour with Google, then an hour jamming, then head back up to the hospital. Sam says she doesn’t want anybody there, but that’s a lie. She always thinks she has to do everything alone.
“I have to go back to the hospital later, but we can jam for a bit. Around two?”
“Great. I’ll see you then.”
When I get home, soaked to the bone, Jorge says, “Sweetheart, you forgot your umbrella!”
“I got used to Southern California.” I give him a wry grimace and exaggerate swiping water off my face.
He reaches behind the desk. “Package for Miss Gloria. Hand delivered.”
It’s a big cardboard tube, with stamps and labels slathered over it. The tension in the back of my neck rachets up another two hundred million notches. “Thanks. I’ll make sure she sees it.”
Upstairs, the first thing I do is find my umbrella—the big black one—and prop it against the door so I don’t forget it again. Shivering, I skim out of my wet clothes, take a hot shower to warm up, and dress in an oversize sweater and leggings and thick wool socks. The cats swirl into the kitchen with me, tails high, noses hopeful, and I put the kettle on to boil while I feed them their evening wet food. They have kibble all the time in the pantry, but twice a day, they get the good stuff. I stroke each high tail, gently tugging each one’s feet off the floor, which they love. They’re focused intently on the wondrous deliciousness of Fancy Feast, and I leave them to it.
I carry the mug of tea into the parlor and prop open my laptop on my knees. Google waits patiently as I try to think of the best search terms. Finally, I settle on arrest in the art world and hit enter.
The results are copious. Who knew how many art thefts and cons there were? I look around at the paintings in the room, the modern and the old, the sketches and watercolors and tiny scenes tucked in between the others. I’ve never thought to question any of them before, and now they’re all suspect. That bold abstract—who painted it, and why did my mother buy it?
Or at least I think my mother bought it. I don’t know, really, which ones she bought and which ones Gloria brought with her when she came to live with us after my mother died. I was only nine, so I hadn’t paid any attention to the walls before that.
Sorting through the Google results, I click on the stories about what’s happening right now. It’s pretty straightforward: a guy was arrested a few days ago on charges of fraud and forgery of masterworks.
Heart in my mouth, I add Gloria’s name to the search, and as the wheel spins as it collects my results, my chest aches.
Nothing.
I let go of a breath, then pull out the artist’s name. Isaak Margolis. I click on images to see if there are more photos of him. There aren’t that many. One is the arrest photo, and he looks blandly away from the camera, as if he’s a sophisticate forced to wade through the masses. He’s wearing a crisply ironed shirt and slacks, and his hair is truly magnificent, thick and curly, not entirely white.
His story is more interesting. Born in Israel to a mother who was a refugee from the war, he was a talented artist who attended the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv, then traveled to France to see if he could make his mark. He had several shows and a lot of critical acclaim but never seemed to click with buyers.
I am far more familiar with that scenario than I would like.
A few of his paintings show up under Images, a handful of dark landscapes, some scenes of a Middle Eastern market, and several portraits of women, clothed and half-clothed and entirely nude.
More than three-quarters of them have a face I recognize. My hands start to shake.
Gloria.
Gloria at the full apex of her beauty, buxom with a tiny waist and wide hips and red hair tumbling over white shoulders. She is utterly astonishing, and without prejudice, the paintings of her were his best work, especially a partial nude of Gloria looking over her shoulder with a whimsical smile, looking tousled and happy and ready to make a joke, but also very sexy. Her skin is infused with light, her eyes shining.
The evidence that she’s connected to Margolis makes me feel sick to my stomach. I think of the woman in Amsterdam who was arrested. Will Gloria be arrested too?
Esme jumps up beside me and butts her head against my elbow. “Wow, baby,” I say, skimming a hand over her back, “your mom was a bombshell back in the day.”
Although Gloria didn’t come up by name, her link to the artist is unmistakable and direct. Gloria was obviously important to him at some point, and I look back at the paintings around me on the walls. Are any of these his work? Does it matter? If he painted his paintings and they landed on the walls here, that wasn’t a crime. Why would the agent want to talk to Gloria?
Aside from the little matter of the Renoir, of course.
I suddenly remember the mysterious package that was delivered today. By hand. I hop up, dislodging Esme, who stomps away in a huff, and go to the foyer, where the tube is propped against the wall. Rain is pattering on the skylight, and the clouds make the colored lights dim. I turn on the light to examine the tube more closely.
It’s about four feet long and made of heavy-duty cardboard. Words in Hebrew are stamped along one side. One postmark says Tel Aviv, and another says Paris.
Tel Aviv. That’s where Margolis is from. Did he send this? How could he have done it if he was arrested?
From my pocket, I take my phone and shoot a photo. This arrived by messenger for you, I text to Gloria.
When she doesn’t immediately respond, and let’s be honest, she can ignore a text for centuries, I send another: Also, where are you? Can we touch base?
Nothing. For a moment, I wonder wildly if she’s been arrested at the hospital.
That seems unnecessarily dramatic. The agent this morning didn’t seem particularly threatening. I’d guess he was trying to get some evidence without having to go through the bother of a search warrant.
I’ll try her again in a little while.
One thing I can do right now is get some of this art out of sight. I start with the dove in the foyer and take it off the wall. It’s surprisingly heavy, the
frame from a previous style era, thick and baroque. For a moment, I can’t think what to do with it; then I carry it to what would be a maid’s bedroom, smaller than the others, with only a single long window. No. Too plain. Across the hall is Sam’s old room, which is just an ordinary guest bedroom now. The closet is deep here, though, and I yank open the door, tug the string for the light, push past old coats and abandoned fashions to the very back, and tuck the painting behind everything in the deepest recesses. For a minute, I’m worried that maybe bugs or rodents could get to it, but it won’t have to stay long.
Once I have the hiding place, I round the walls of every room, looking for the signature that means it was painted by Margolis. Gloria said there were four. I find another one in the parlor, a small but surprisingly light-filled street scene that makes me think of the Orientalists with its splashes of red and figures in Middle Eastern dress. It is hung too high for me to reach without a ladder. A third is tucked above where the Renoir—a freaking Renoir!—was, a portrait of a woman staring directly at the viewer, her face and head covered except for her eyes. I’ve always liked this painting; the turquoise of her head covering contrasts beautifully with the depth of her fathomless, mysterious, and—how do painters do this?—slightly amused gaze.
I take it down and carry it into the closet.
No matter how I look, I don’t see the fourth one. I take a slow turn around the music room, checking all the paintings again. Who knows when the FBI guy will come back?
The light is gray and soft, and I swear I can hear my mother playing a melancholy tune on the piano. I sit on the bench and wait for it, but the notes fade away, leaving only the sound of rain pattering at the windows and the soft fuzz of treetops in the distance. I think of my aunt looking over her shoulder at her lover, and my mother writing her song, and my sister sick, broken up with her very best friend, and for a minute I wonder what any of this is all about. It makes me feel hollow.
Write My Name Across the Sky Page 15
