The Wonder Chamber

by Mary Malloy

From the Entrance Hall to the Yellow Salon, Patrizio kept up his constant stream of information, talking about the paintings, the tromp l’oeil and plaster decorations, and the furnishings and decorative objects. The table in that room, much smaller than the table in the dining room, but ample for eight or ten people, had come from Mantua, the only item thus far that Lizzie had heard of in Bologna from that great collection of the Gonzaga’s more famous relations.

  When she brought up a picture of the Chinese Salon, he pointed first to the harpsichord. “There is a signature in it, of Giuseppe Verdi, the great composer,” he said. “He once visited the house and played the instrument and someone asked him to sign it as a reminder of his visit.” He gave a low rumbling laugh. “My mother told me a funny story about it, that when she first came to live here, she saw that signature and immediately translated it into English. She asked my father ‘Who’s Joe Green?’ It was one of their favorite jokes.”

  He spoke of the wallpaper and of the vases, which he had pointed out to her on her first day in the house, before his outburst. She looked at him carefully to see if he might have any memory of that episode, but it was clear that he didn’t.

  The dining room picture, unfortunately, was missing the most important feature in the room, the painted ceiling, and Lizzie moved quickly past it. With a deep breath, she pushed the button that brought the library onto the screen. She braced herself for an outburst, but it never came. Instead Patrick pointed out several pieces and gave her anecdotal information that would be useful in her exhibit labels and catalog.

  She felt very fortunate to have gotten so much information, but it was obvious that he was tiring, and she closed her computer and began to put it in her bag. Patrizio’s eyes were closed and she thought he had fallen asleep, so she packed her things as quietly as possible. Before she rose from the chair he opened his eyes and said, “Did you ask about Greta?”

  “Yes,” she whispered hesitantly.

  “I loved her, you know. I really loved her.”

  Lizzie paused indecisively. “But she was German,” she whispered.

  Patrizio nodded.

  “A Nazi?”

  “She married Hoffman, that Nazi bastard.”

  Again his eyes were closed and Lizzie waited several minutes, finally convinced he was no longer conscious of her presence. She rose very softly and almost missed the last thing he said: “She informed on Gianna and got her killed.”

  Chapter 20

  The death of Gianna Gonzaga Cussetti had been described by Tony Tessitore as an execution, and that word stayed with Lizzie, nagging at her with its horrific implications. What had her last moments been like? And how had the knowledge of the manner of her death haunted her husband and mother and brother?

  It was difficult to reconcile the image of Gianna as a broken corpse being thrown out of a truck with the picture of her as a vivacious Juliet, standing in the arms of her mother and smiling at her lover and her brother on the courtyard staircase. Lizzie looked again at all the photographs of Gianna in the collection on her laptop.

  Wanting to see again the picture of Gianna on the Resistance monument, Lizzie put on her coat and walked across the Piazza Galvani and alongside St. Petronio’s to the Piazza Maggiore, and across the square to the collection of photographs mounted on the wall. She was struck by how young and innocent Gianna looked in this picture and realized that she was only 21 when she was murdered in October 1944.

  There was a café at the corner of the Piazza Maggiore, and Lizzie chose a seat where she could look past the Neptune Fountain at the wall with the photographs. Though she couldn’t actually see Gianna’s face on the wall from this distance, she knew exactly where her picture was and she continually looked up to visually mark the spot as she drank a cup of coffee. She had brought her book bag with her e-reader and she took it out to look again at Maggie’s letters. She wanted to know more about how the progress of the war had impacted the Gonzagas, and of the sequence of events that led to Gianna’s horrific death.

  Though Patrizio had told her that his father died in 1941, and though she had read that date in several other locations, the fact of it, and of the impact his loss had on Maggie and her children, had not really occurred to Lizzie until she read an account of his illness in one of Maggie’s letters to her brother.

  November 21, 1941

  Dearest Tommy,

  I’m sure you read about the progress of the war in all the papers there. The unholy alliance between Mussolini and Hitler has dragged us into such a chaos of fighting in Greece and North Africa. If the U.S. enters the war, which it must at some point, then I will be put in the extraordinarily difficult position of having my native country at war with my adopted country and I cannot tell you how painful that prospect is. At this point I can only be thankful that none of my sons are involved in active fighting and I pray to God every day to keep them out of it.

  Margherita gave birth to a little girl yesterday and having our first grandchild has given Renzo and me some hope for the future. This is good, because Renzo’s health has not been well. He has a deep cough that does not seem to go away and fear of the war finding us here has dispirited him, as it has all of us.

  The next letter was dated a week later and it was not in Maggie’s hand or on her usual plain stationary. This paper was edged in black and embossed with a crown at the top. Lizzie looked quickly to the signature before reading it. It was from Adino Gonzaga, Maggie’s son, and he wrote to inform his uncle of the death of his father. “My mother is disconsolate,” it said, “and we are somewhat concerned about her. My father died of pneumonia, and the doctors do not think there is any possibility of my mother having it, but she lies in bed much of the day, which you know is not at all like her usual self. We do not expect any of you to come from Boston for the funeral, especially with the conflicts currently disrupting travel in the Mediterranean, but details were sent to you by telegram, which I expect you have received by this time. My mother has specifically requested that you keep Patrick there, and she asks that you have a special mass said for my father at the College, so that Patrick and her American relations can attend.”

  Tony Tessitore had said that one of his earliest memories was of the funeral of Lorenzo Gonzaga, and that he had seen the coffin with a crown on it. Lizzie suspected that must have been Adino’s handiwork. From everything Lizzie had read and heard, Maggie did not subscribe at all to the trappings of nobility, but she had mentioned in an earlier letter to her brother that both Adino and his younger brother Cosimo supported the monarchy.

  Lizzie’s suspicion was confirmed in the next letter, which Maggie wrote on December 16, 1941.

  Dear Tommy,

  What a terrible series of disasters has befallen us, both inside and outside of this house. I am only now beginning to get my bearings and consider what my life will be like without Renzo, my partner, confidante, lover and friend of almost thirty years. My comfort in the last few weeks has been Gianna, who has frequently slipped into bed with me when I stayed there for too many hours, and the baby Anna. One of the last things Renzo said was that the baby made him feel there was a future to look forward to, past whatever difficulties we might currently find ourselves in. I try to keep that thought with me as we head into war.

  Of course I heard about Pearl Harbor with terrible dismay, and the declaration of war against the United States by Hitler and Mussolini pulled me finally from my bed. I’m not sure how much longer I will be able to write to you without censorship or suspicion, but with the loss of my husband, I need you my dear brother, and look to you more than ever for counsel and consolation. I am disappointed in my older sons. Adino has tried to take charge in a most officious and irritating way. Renzo’s funeral was full of the royal fripperies, which he would have despised, and I blame myself for not taking a bigger hand in it.

  I think Adino would turn me out of this house as his inherited property if his f
ather had not specifically willed it to me for the remainder of my life, and for any of my children who might be living with me at that time. At 26 he is already arrogant and grasping and Cosimo follows his lead. It is terrible to be saying these things about my own sons, but I cannot afford to be blind to their faults at this serious time. They have allied themselves with the Fascists, and in that I oppose them. I’m glad Pat is still in Boston and wonder if he can be kept there for some time after graduation. I am concerned not only about his safety, but of the influence that his older brothers might have on him if he were home.

  Do not worry too much about me. Many families are divided in time of war, both by politics and by exigent circumstances.

  There were only a few letters from 1942, which Lizzie presumed was caused by the disruption of the postal service or by the censorship that Maggie had feared. She managed to inform her brother of Gianna’s marriage and of another baby girl for Margherita. She spoke of Archie, her new son-in-law, in the warmest terms. She didn’t quite come out and say that he was a member of the growing resistance against Fascism and the Nazis, but in retrospect, Lizzie felt she could read that between the lines.

  On February 19, 1943, Maggie wrote again. “I feel very fortunate, my dear brother, to be able to write you a real letter and put it into safe hands for delivery. One of our local priests is traveling to Switzerland and will post this to you there.”

  The loss of Italian troops in Russia has led to conscription here and I fear for the safety of Pat and Archie. I wish Pat had stayed in Boston, but if he must be influenced by one of the men in this family I’m glad it’s his brother-in-law and not one of his brothers. Neither Pat nor Archie will respond to a draft; they are very active in the Resistance, as is Gianna, and to my great concern she plays it like a game. She often goes to meetings dressed as a man and calling herself “Balthazar, a young lawyer from Bologna,” in reference to the disguise used by Portia in “The Merchant of Venice.” I have absolutely forbidden her to go on patrols. Archie tells me they frequently have no orders, no recognizable superiors, and among the resistance there are factions that do not work well together. Some declare their allegiance to the King, some are ardent Communists. Whenever Gianna and the boys come back to the house I go to the chapel and thank God.

  In anticipation that Bologna might be bombed when the Allies finally get here, the churches are removing stained glass windows and other treasures and moving them into their cellars. We have moved the most valuable parts of the collections in the house down to the basement and built a brick wall in front of them. We have also reinforced the walls with boards and put buckets of sand, bottles of water, bedding and food down there, in case we need to move there to protect ourselves. I should hide the Michelangelo angel that was in the chapel in the house, but I find I cannot bear to be without it and have moved it into my bedroom.

  Today as I walked across the Piazza Maggiore, just a few blocks from my house, I saw workmen dismantling the gigantic statue of Neptune from the fountain on the square. They tell me it will be stored in the communal laundry.

  “Michelangelo angel,” Lizzie said softly, then repeated the two words several more times. There had been two angels on the altar in the house chapel in 1677; there were none there today. She knew that one of them was the dell’Arca angel at St. Pat’s that would appear in her exhibit. Was this the other one?

  She looked again at Neptune, standing on the top of his fountain just a few yards from where she sat. She tried to imagine what it must have meant to Maggie to see one of the great icons of the city being dismantled, and to face the prospect of impending bombs. “But she could not bear to hide the Michelangelo angel,” Lizzie said softly to herself. “So where is it?”

  Chapter 21

  Carmine found Lizzie at the café and told her he had been doing some research on the cement that sealed the coffin and had come up with a plan for removing it. He sat down and she shifted from coffee to wine.

  “I was just reading about the dismantling of this fountain during the war.” She indicated the Neptune fountain as she spoke. She wanted to burst out that the Gonzagas had a sculpture by Michelangelo, but decided to wait until she knew more.

  Carmine said that he had seen pictures of the process. “Where are you reading about it?”

  “In Maggie Gonzaga’s letters to her family in Boston.”

  “Does she give information about the collection?”

  “When I first started reading them I thought she might, but then I just found I liked her, and now I’m getting caught up in the progress of the war in Bologna.”

  “Can you put it aside for a while and let me talk to you about some of the arrangements I’m making?”

  Lizzie agreed and the two walked back to the Palazzo Gonzaga.

  Carmine had created a bar-code cataloging system that would allow them to affix an inventory sticker to each piece. “And these are designed to come off without leaving any mark on the artifact,” he said, looking at the sarcophagus with its tenacious glue. “I’ll start on this tomorrow if you will mark each of the other pieces and start the data entry.”

  “Absolutely,” Lizzie said enthusiastically. “I’ll even buy the coffee!”

  “And do I need to know anything more about Cosimo’s nephew? I think I heard him say that he’s going to be here when the collection is shipped?”

  Lizzie answered that Justin hadn’t been much help so far. “I can understand why Cosimo thinks this is a good job for him, I mean he does go to the college, and this collection was made by his ancestors. But beyond finding a way to declare himself a prince, I haven’t found that Justin, aka Beppe, has much interest in the project. Don’t let him touch anything, and don’t let him enter anything into the computer, as we are likely to lose valuable work.”

  “So what can he do?”

  “I think that he could operate a clipboard and check off boxes as they get loaded into a truck.”

  Carmine gave her a puzzled look, but said he would manage, and Lizzie was glad to transfer the responsibility.

  The next morning they began early, with Lizzie describing, measuring, photographing and marking the more than two hundred pieces on her list, and comparing each piece to the ledger and subsequent inventory lists. Every piece of information that had been noted on the various sources now came together on the same page. Carmine worked on the sarcophagus, sitting on a rolling chair so that he had the seam between the bottom and the top of the box at eye level, and looking at the work he did through a magnifying lens.

  It took three days for him to remove the glue on the box and he called out to Lizzie at the far end of the ballroom when he finished. She was carefully placing barcodes on glass jars full of plant and animal material.

  “I’m done,” he said.

  “Now what?”

  “Let’s open it.” He gave her a pair of latex gloves and showed her where he had placed several small wedges as the glue came out. Moving from one side to the other and from the top to the bottom, he replaced each wedge with a larger one, inching the box open and allowing him to make sure that all the glue had been removed and that there was no damage to the wood or the paint in the process. Eventually they felt the lid shift and as the first air was exchanged between the box and the ballroom they had a strong whiff of pine pitch.

  “Is that from the wood?” Lizzie asked.

  “No,” Carmine answered. “It’s from the mummy.”

  As he spoke they lifted the top off the box and moved it to the separate table that he had prepared for it. Lizzie then went back and looked into the sarcophagus at a perfectly intact mummy.

  “I’m astonished,” she said. “I was so prepared for there to be either no mummy or only bits and pieces. Is it possible that this has been in this case since the seventeenth century?” She thought about that for a moment and then added, “or the Eighteenth Dynasty?”

  “I have
no idea. You’ll need an Egyptologist for that.”

  “Fortunately, I have one,” Lizzie said, taking out her camera. “I will send him pictures right away.”

  “Of course you also have a problem.”

  Lizzie gave him a quizzical look.

  “Do you want to ship the mummy to Boston in the sarcophagus? It might require some specialized conservation.”

  “Hmm. My colleague John Haworth told me that for any human remains I would need a whole different import license, and I don’t think I really want to go through the paperwork necessary to ship a corpse back and forth across the Atlantic.” She thought about what a mummy would add to her exhibit. “It would be cool to have the mummy, but I think not.”

  Carmine ran his gloved hands along the dark linen wrappings of the coffin’s occupant. “It seems pretty stiff. Let me set up another table and we can move it out of the box.”

  The corpse was petite, not more than five feet long, and it wasn’t particularly heavy. After they had moved it to a new table, Lizzie walked along the length of it and examined the wrapping, which was very tightly wound around the body and soaked in a resin that still retained its pine-pitch smell.

  “I’m amazed at how strong the scent is of the pitch after what, three thousand years? If I remember correctly, the Eighteenth Dynasty was around 1300-1500 B.C.”

  Carmine agreed that it was surprising. “Look at some of these black spots,” he said, pointing to a large patch on the feet of the mummy. “It looks like it’s been burned.”

  “At what point in its history do you think that happened?”

  “Again, you need your Egyptologist. What I can tell you is that this box was glued in the twentieth century, not the seventeenth and certainly not the thirteenth B.C.”