Brush With Death

by Lind, Hailey

  The artisan bakery turned out mediocre bread but filled the air with delicious aromas, and my stomach growled as I climbed the wooden outdoor stairs to the second floor, yanked open the sticky exterior door, and proceeded down the hall to my studio, number 206. I walked in to find Mary snoring on the red velvet sofa while Pete, a big man with kind brown eyes, cleaned out the espresso machine in the studio’s tiny kitchenette.

  “Annie! How are you?” Pete called out as he dried his large hands on a towel embroidered with a garish Santa Claus. “How does it go in the moratorium?”

  “It’s a mausoleum, Pete,” I said with a smile. Pete had emigrated from Bosnia at the age of fourteen, and his enthusiasm for new words, combined with his lack of formal education, created an entertaining take on American English. The other evening he had offered me a cup of “decapitated” coffee. “Where in the world did that ugly towel come from?”

  “My mother, she makes it and sends it to you.”

  Oops. Once more I reminded myself to engage my brain before engaging my mouth. “Oh! How sweet of her. It’s just lovely!”

  He beamed. “My mother, she is so gladdened about the restoration you achieved she begs you to join us to dinner on Sunday!”

  Last month Pete had asked me to restore a cherished family portrait that had suffered extensive smoke and water damage during the family’s difficult journey from Bosnia. I had been happy to do so, but refused to accept payment from a friend. Ever since, I had been dodging rapid-fire dinner invitations. I didn’t want to hurt Pete’s feelings by rejecting his family’s hospitality, but the memory of his signature hot dish, which he brought to every potluck and Mary had dubbed “the Cabbage Rolls of Death,” made me hesitant. But Pete was undaunted, and his persistence was wearing me down.

  “I have wanted you to taste our cousin—I mean our cuisine—from the gecko, and now is our chance!” Pete continued.

  “You mean ‘from the get-go,’ not ‘from the gecko,’ ” I corrected him, praying I was right. Bowing to the inevitable, I crossed my fingers that Mama Pete’s cooking had nothing in common with her bachelor son’s. “Dinner on Sunday sounds lovely, Pete. Thank you.”

  Mary awoke with a loud snort, sat up, and squinted at us. “New guitar player,” she explained with a jaw-cracking yawn as she stretched her long arms over her head with cat-like grace. Living with a constantly shifting circle of bandmates in a run-down Victorian flat, my assistant didn’t get a lot of rest.

  “Why don’t you crash on the futon in my apartment until we finish working at the columbarium?” I suggested.

  “Thanks,” she said with another yawn. “But I’m gonna sleep in the cemetery, ’member?”

  Pete frowned. “Have you heard this plan? This does not sound wise to me, Annie. She portends to sleep without a man.”

  “I thought Dante was joining you,” I said to Mary.

  “Wrestling tournament in Reno.” She shrugged. “Evangeline’s coming instead.”

  “I offered to accompany her,” Pete said. “But she won’t have me.”

  “Don’t worry, Mary will be fine,” I assured him. “Evangeline’s rather formidable.”

  Pete’s Old World gallantry was offended, but I heard him repeating “formidable” to himself as he returned to his task at the sink. “Cappuccino?” he called out.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Double for me,” Mary piped up.

  “Annie,” Pete said, his booming voice drowning out the spitting of my cranky garage-sale espresso machine. “I stopped by today because my mother, she believes there may be Ibrahimbegovics in the cemetery where you are working.”

  “Sounds like some kind of toxic waste,” Mary mumbled.

  “Play nice, Mare,” I warned as I started sorting mail at my desk.

  “They are my family, the Ibrahimbegovics. Perhaps even Hadzipetrovics. My mother, she is so gladdened to think this.”

  “I didn’t know you had family buried around here, Pete,” I said.

  “Oh yes, the brothers Ibrahimbegovics left our town of Varcar Vakuf in 1862 and came to California in search of gold. Of course, in 1924 Varcar Vakuf was officially renamed Mrkonjic-Grad in honor of the ‘old king’ Petar Karadjordjevic and to venerate his Chetnik exploits under the hajduk name Petar Mrkonjic, during the 1875 uprising on the border between Bosnia and Lika, in Crni Potoci. The king’s Chetnik exploits did not last long, nor were they esteemedly glorious, but—”

  “Oh my Gaaaaaaawd,” Mary groaned as she fell back onto the sofa and clutched a tasseled purple satin pillow over her head. “Make him stop, make him stop!”

  When he started in on Bosnian history Pete was inclined to run off at the mouth, but since I had the same tendency when discussing art, I was more tolerant than Mary. Besides, I had a serious caffeine addiction and the man whipped up a wicked espresso. It would take a lot more than a little boring conversation to turn me against my supplier.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much about Bayview Cemetery’s history,” I said to Pete. “Why don’t you tell your mother to talk to one of the docents? They give tours and everything. Wait a minute, I may have something you could show her.”

  I dug a crumpled Bayview Cemetery brochure out of my backpack and flipped through it. I noticed that leading the list of the cemetery’s more illustrious “residents” was Josiah Garner, Aaron Garner’s great-grandfather. According to the brochure, Josiah settled in the East Bay during the gold rush and made a fortune in construction. Business boomed after the 1906 earthquake, when nervous San Franciscans pulled up stakes and fled to the comparative safety of the East Bay. Garner’s ostentatious tomb was built into one of the hills, not far from little Louis Spencer’s final resting place.

  Once again I was reminded of a certain graduate student. I checked the studio’s message machine. Josh had called twice, “just to check in,” his voice sweet and familiar. Nothing from Cindy. I cursed myself for not getting her number last night. Handing Pete the brochure in exchange for a frothy cappuccino, I powered up my computer and Googled Cindy Tanaka—157,000 hits. This will take forever, I thought as I sipped. There must be a better way.

  “What department would someone studying ‘public mourning’ be in?” I asked no one in particular. “Sociology, maybe? Anthropology? Religion?”

  Mary and Pete looked blank.

  “It could be an interdisciplinary degree, I suppose,” I muttered.

  “It’s almost like she doesn’t need us,” Mary said to Pete, who nodded solemnly and sank onto the chair facing the red velvet sofa, coffee in hand.

  Apart from the seating area, my disheveled desk, and the kitchenette, the studio was given over to art. Three huge windows along the back wall and two skylights high above suffused the studio with light, even on the grayest of days. Four easels held canvases in varying degrees of completion; mismatched bookshelves were filled with supplies ranging from mineral spirits to broken tiles; and the huge worktables were piled with half-finished projects, including one hundred linear feet of fluted curtain rods and five hundred rod rings that Mary and I were painting, gilding, and distressing for a showroom at the San Francisco Design Center.

  I reminded myself that the curtain rods were due the day after tomorrow as I started calling departments at the University of California at Berkeley, known locally as “Cal.” On the third try I reached a secretary in the Anthropology Department who recognized Cindy’s name. She explained that there were 142 graduate students in the department and she couldn’t be expected to know where they all were, now, could she, but agreed to leave a message in Cindy’s mail cubby. She also volunteered that Cindy’s dissertation adviser, Dr. Gossen, would be available during office hours tomorrow from eleven to one.

  I hung up, turned back to the computer, and brought up an image of La Fornarina. She gazed at me serenely but refused to share her secrets. I searched for fake Raphaels but found only a reference to the legend of the great master himself perpetrating a fraud on an innkeeper by dashing off a table
top trompe l’oeil (literally, a trick of the eye) of a napkin holding several coins to pay his tab. The story might well be apocryphal, but many revered Old Masters had indulged in a spot of forgery when it suited their purposes. Michelangelo in particularwas fond of fakery, and had recently—five hundred years after his death—been accused of forging an ancient Roman statue. Given our modern standards, the attribution sent the statue’s value sky-high since a work by the incomparable Renaissance artist was far more desirable than yet another anonymous Roman relic.

  Next I checked the art crime registries and museum security networks for chatter about La Fornarina. Italian authorities had stored the painting during World War I, but ever since it had been on display in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica at the Barberini Palace, seldom allowed out on tour. Crispin Engels’ 1879 copy had been catalogued in the same storage facility, along with numerous reproductions by lesser artists. Except for a brief mention of my grandfather’s 1966 scam, there was nothing about known forgeries of La Fornarina. But as an eminent New York museum curator once told me, we only notice the bad forgeries; the good ones go undetected.

  I was about to log off when my eye caught a reference to an Italian fake buster named Donato Sandino. “Donato, you sly devil,” I muttered. “Are you by any chance ‘Doughnut Spumoni’?”

  I kept reading. After outing Grandfather’s forgery of La Fornarina in 1966, Donato Sandino had accepted a position in the Italian Ministry of Culture. According to an article in Curator’s Monthly, in the early 1980s Sandino and “an unnamed American woman” had raised questions about the authenticity of the Barberini’s most famous Raphael. Shortly afterward the inquiry had been dropped, and Sandino left the employ of the Italian government to become the director of the prestigious Dietrich Laboratories in Germany. Dietrich Labs had a well-deserved reputation for uncovering art fakes of all kinds. And now Donato Sandino was after my grandfather.

  It had never occurred to me to ask Georges what had happened to his 1966 forgery. Could the Barberini Palace’s Raphael have been stolen and replaced by Grandfather’s copy? Assuming it was possible, why would the original wind up in Oakland, hanging unprotected in a columbarium and labeled a nineteenth-century copy? And assuming that was possible, who would have replaced it with a computer-generated copy? And where was Crispin Engels’ painting?

  I rubbed my forehead, fending off a headache.

  Speaking of headaches . . . six months ago Michael X. Johnson had been driven away from a crime scene in the back of a police car, and I hadn’t heard a peep from him since. I had assumed he was languishing in prison somewhere, and had even worried about him. Clearly that concern had been misplaced.

  “By the way,” I said to Mary, “I thought we agreed that you would never reveal my personal information to the enemy, aka Michael Johnson.”

  “This you know I never would do,” Pete said. “I honor and esteem you, Annie. You are to me the most transfigurent of women.”

  “Thank you, Pete,” I replied. “I aspire to transfigurence. But I was talking to Mary.”

  Mary put a pillow over her head and pretended to be asleep. Her snore sounded a lot like a Bronx cheer.

  I pulled out Michael’s business card and typed in the URL. The Web site opened with exploding multicolor graphics, a blaring musical score of Beethoven’s Fifth set to a hip-hop beat, and a string of black-clad women high-kicking across the top of the screen. With a jolt I recognized the women as Whistler’s Mother. Directly below the octogenarian chorus line, in a screaming eighty-point font, a fuchsia sentence took shape against a black background: What’s in your grandmother’s attic?

  Whistler’s mothers cha-cha’d off the left side of the screen, and a more sober Web page loaded. A Biography section described Michael X. Johnson as “an internationally recognized art expert” with “decades of experience in all aspects of the professional art world,” whose “extensive hands-on knowledge of the world’s finest art collections” put him on a first-name basis with “the leading curators and collectors in Europe, the United States, and Asia.”

  From a “profound love of art and artistry,” the Letter from the Expert page explained, the “fabulously successful and recently retired” Michael X. Johnson had launched this Web site to provide “low cost!” assessments of art and artifacts, and invited viewers to send in photographs of their art objects for a professional evaluation. Don’t be fooled by greedy art dealers and collectors, the Web site warned. Go straight to the source! Let my wealth of experience and intimate knowledge of the mysterious world of art work for you!

  I stared at the screen, impressed and appalled. Michael X. Johnson knew everything there was to know about art theft and the art of seduction. He knew nothing about authenticating art and artifacts. What in the world was he up to this time?

  The Contact Me! page listed an e-mail address and a post office box in Cupertino, which I recalled was somewhere in the South Bay, but no street address or phone number. After a few minutes of silent debate I sent Michael an e-mail to call me ASAP. I wanted to find out what he might know about Grandfather and Donato Sandino. In addition, his mere presence lent a whisper of credence to Cindy’s tale of an errant multimillion-dollar painting.

  I logged off the computer and started working my way through a stack of bills. Paying my debts was usually enough to send me into a downward spiral of fiscal shame, but Aaron Garner’s checks had fattened my bank account, as had a long-overdue payment for a mural in an upscale home in Piedmont. And for the next four Saturdays I had a paying gig teaching a faux-finishing course to do-it-yourselfers at the Home Improv store in the City. For the first time in a long, long while I had some financial breathing room.

  I breathed deeply, enjoying the sensation and figuring it wouldn’t last.

  The studio door banged against the wall as Evangeline Simpson strode in, a thin cardboard box held aloft in each hand. Last fall Evangeline’s sculptor boss had gotten mixed up with some unsavory characters and nearly ended his days as a human sculpture exhibit, and since then she’d been working at a pizzeria in the Mission. She had the strong, square body of an East German shot-putter, and today was clad in a motorcyclist outfit of silver-studded leather pants and matching black jacket.

  Evangeline and Mary had hit it off from the gecko.

  “Pizza!” she called out in her upstate New York honk. “I got one Veggie and one Super Meat Lover’s. No anchovies, Annie, sorry. Too stinky.”

  Happy to abandon my paperwork, I joined the impromptu pizza party around the old steamer trunk that I’d found on the curb next to my “new” television. As I lay sprawled on the floor with Pete, Mary, and Evangeline, it occurred to me that I should always keep such company. My jumbo-sized companions made me feel downright petite. Then I remembered the elfin Cindy Tanaka and the fact that I couldn’t inch my favorite jeans past my increasingly dimpled thighs, and decided against a third slice of pizza.

  “Annie, tell Evangeline about the painting. About Fornie,” Mary said, and took a huge bite of pizza redolent of cheese and garlic and loaded with luscious vegetables.

  “La Fornarina means ‘little baker girl’ in Italian,” I said, delighted at being asked to pontificate. Generally my audiencehad to be held captive in some fashion. “It’s a portrait Raphael painted shortly before he died on his thirty-seventh birthday. Some think the subject was Margherita Luti, the daughter of an Italian baker. Rumor has it that Raphael was so obsessed with Margherita that he was unable to complete the frescos at his patron’s Roman estate until she was brought to the villa.”

  “That’s so awesome,” Mary sighed.

  “It created quite a scandal because Raphael was already engaged to the niece of a Vatican cardinal. The painter delayed the nuptials for six years, dragging his feet until his betrothed finally died.”

  “Bummer for her,” said Evangeline, stifling a belch.

  “Others believe La Fornarina was another woman, whose portrait had been commissioned by Raphael’s powerful p
atron, Agostino Chigi, at whose villa Raphael and Margherita lived. Chigi married his longtime mistress, Francesca Ardeasca, in a ceremony conducted by the pope in 1519. Still other art historians argue that Raphael didn’t paint La Fornarina at all, and that it should be attributed to his student, Giulio Romano.”

  “But, Annie,” said Pete. “If she is lovely, this painting, what does it matter who the woman was or who painted her?”

  “Because if Raphael didn’t paint La Fornarina, then it’s just a nice Renaissance painting,” I insisted. “It isn’t a genuine Raphael.”

  “Can’t argue with that logic,” Mary said. “Annie, tell them the best part.”

  “There is more?” Pete asked as Mary handed him a slice heaped with what appeared to be half a pound of cured meat, glistening with oil and dripping with mozzarella. Now that I was sated, just looking at all that cholesterol made me wish for a bowl of oat bran.

  “There’s some speculation that Raphael and Margherita were secretly married,” I continued. “La Fornarina has an expensive pearl bauble on her turban, a jewel that was much too pricey for the daughter of a mere baker. It would, however, be an appropriate wedding gift from the great Raphael. And here’s the best part. ‘Margherita’ means ‘pearl’ in Italian.”

  “Hol’ on. I thought a margarita wuz a drink,” Evangeline interrupted. “We had a coupla bitchin’ pitchers of margaritas with our fish taco platters at Chevy’s last week.” She and Mary whooped and high-fived. Pete looked impressed.

  “The drink was named after a woman, who was named after a pearl. Or a daisy. Same word in Spanish and Italian. Do you guys want to hear the story or not?”

  “Yes, please, Annie,” Mary said with a wink.

  “Yes, please, Annie,” Evangeline echoed with a giggle.

  In the past few months Mary and Evangeline had become fast friends, and in the process regressed a dozen years in maturity.

  “Okay, then,” I continued, mollified. “There are other clues supporting the secret marriage theory. For one thing, Raphael signed the painting on the woman’s blue armband, indicating a possible attachment to her. During the romantic age of the late 1800s, the story caught the public imagination. The artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted five different portraits of Raphael and La Fornarina. The French writer Balzac wrote about the love affair. And Pablo Picasso did a series of erotic drawings of Raphael and his lover caught in flagrante by the pope.”