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.”
&n
bsp; “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.”
Chapter Twelve
One 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.”
&nb
sp; “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.”
Under the Egg Page 10
