Under the Egg

by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

  “Not quite the whole story. The file says he was on a classified mission at some point. Know anything about that?”

  He leaned on his cane and shrugged. “No, I found Jack in a military hospital in France. He was recuperating from a rather daring escape from a POW camp.”

  “Escape?”

  “Yes. As I understand it, he managed to get out somehow and walk back to the Allied line. I was looking for an assistant and heard there was an escapee nearby with art training. He’d sent word to Military Intelligence that he was ‘bored’ and looking for work to do.” Lydon chuckled. “Bored, can you imagine?”

  I thought back to our weekends at home, Jack a perpetual motion machine of chores. “Yeah, I can imagine.”

  “Anyway, he sounded like the kind of man I was looking for, and sure enough, he was itching to get back into the fray. He came on as my assistant, and it was just the two of us . . . well, liberating Europe’s masterpieces.” He tossed the envelope back to me. “And it seems your grandfather may have ‘liberated’ one painting in particular along the way.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Lydon regarded me, then settled himself on a paint-splattered stool with his cane for support. “Let me tell you a story,” he drawled. “In 1798 a Polish prince named Czartoryski traveled to Italy and returned with wagons full of Roman antiquities and two prized paintings: Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine—a truly sublime work, if you haven’t seen it—and a painting by Raphael. A painting believed to be a self-portrait.”

  I squirmed.

  “The paintings,” Lydon continued, “were displayed prominently as part of the family’s museum until 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland. The Czartoryski family whisked away the most valuable works, bricking them up behind a wall at their family’s country estate. Someone must have tipped off the Gestapo, as the items were found and seized almost immediately.

  “The Leonardo and the Raphael were snatched up by the German governor sent to oversee the invasion of Poland. He used the paintings to decorate his personal apartments, but they were later sent on to Germany to become part of Hitler’s personal collection.”

  Hitler’s collection? In the salt mine?

  “It seems Hans Frank managed to get the paintings back to Poland again for a spell, and after the war, the da Vinci and some other pieces surfaced. But to this day, eight hundred and forty-four of the Czartoryski artifacts are still missing—including the Raphael, which would be expected to fetch upward of one hundred million dollars in today’s market.”

  Between the heat, the old paint fumes, and the factors of ten, I felt faint.

  “There is some debate as to whether the painting is a self-portrait or not.” Lydon reached into his freshly pressed blazer and pulled out a folded square of paper. “Now, Miss Theodora, as our resident Raphael expert, what do you say? Does this man look familiar?”

  I opened the paper with trembling hands.

  An elegant young man of the Renaissance era regarded me, a sumptuous fur draped casually over his arm.

  Alone. No Madonna or Child in sight.

  Not my painting.

  I exhaled and handed the paper back to Lydon. “Sorry, haven’t seen him.”

  “Haven’t you?” he said mildly, tucking the paper back in his pocket. “Well, yes, I expected that response. And perhaps you are even being honest with me. But I think we both know”—and here his eyes narrowed at the empty space above the mantelpiece, with its noticeably discolored outline, marking the spot where the painting had long hung—“that you’re hiding something. Something that you believe to be a Raphael. And you may take it as a compliment that you are the only ten-year-old girl I know—”

  “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.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  That 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.

  Chapter Fourteen

  An 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.