The Devil's Madonna

by Sharon Potts

  “Danke,” she said, curtseying. “Danke schön.”

  Graeber held the car door open for her. It was a conservative, old-model black Horch. Although clean, it was practically invisible amongst the sea of brand-new, flashy roadsters and cabriolets pulled up in front of the theater.

  Leli sat in the back, the flowers on her lap. The first time Graeber had accompanied her to the premiere of one of her movies, he had acted as though he expected her to sit up front with him. But she had waited by the rear door until he took the hint and opened it for her. Just because Herr Doktor Altwulf had sent Graeber as her escort didn’t mean she had to like him. Maybe if Graeber didn’t look at her with such an odd intensity, she would have been friendlier. After all, he wasn’t that different from Leli, an artist trying to break out, with Dr. Altwulf his teacher and mentor. But Leli sensed on a visceral level that there was danger in getting too close to Graeber.

  Graeber drove through the flashing lights of the theater district, then down tree-lined Unter den Lindenstrasse where the more upscale clubs and restaurants were located. He pulled up to a burgundy awning, stopped the car, then came around to help Leli out.

  “He’s waiting for you,” Graeber said.

  “Thank you.” Leli climbed out of the car, leaving the flowers on the backseat so as not to attract any additional attention when she entered the club. Dr. Altwulf preferred things that way.

  The maître d’ led Leli through the smoky lounge to a table that was set back in a darkened alcove. It wasn’t readily visible to the other patrons, but it had a perfect view of the high-ceilinged two-tiered room, the small orchestra off to the side, a singer near the shiny black piano, and the well-dressed couples sipping cocktails at their tables or dancing too close on the parquet dance floor.

  Dr. Altwulf rose as she approached, made a bow, and then kissed her hand. He was wearing an old-fashioned dinner jacket that smelled of mothballs.

  “You look exquisite, my dear,” he said, as the maître d’ pulled out her chair and helped her arrange herself comfortably.

  She draped her white stole over the back of her chair. “Thank you, Wulfie. I feel wonderful.”

  He sat down catty-corner to her, his walking stick resting against the edge of the linen tablecloth. He patted his graying goatee. It was a self-conscious gesture. She knew how awkward he felt being here amongst the well-heeled and sensed he was doing it for her.

  “So the premiere was a success?” His blue eyes were bright behind his wire-rimmed glasses.

  “The audience responded favorably.”

  “You’re too modest. I’m sure you were sensational. Just like in the first two films.”

  A waiter brought over a bucket of ice and a bottle of champagne. They waited as he popped the cork, then poured the bubbling liquid into the crystal champagne flutes on the table.

  Dr. Altwulf raised his glass. “To my dear Leli. Much success.”

  They clinked glasses and Leli took a sip. It tickled her throat, but she’d learned to love the taste of champagne. “It’s as much your success, Wulfie. I never would have gotten here without you.”

  He shook his head, as though discounting her words. “I happen to have a friend in the entertainment ministry. Lots of people have friends. But your success is due to your talent and beauty, not because of what I did for you.”

  “Look who’s being modest.”

  He smiled back at her. How lucky she’d been to meet this kind, generous man who doted on her like a precious daughter.

  A waiter went by carrying a tray of pastries intended for another table. Leli strained her neck to see.

  “Would you like something sweet?” Altwulf asked.

  “I wish, but I can’t.” She patted her tummy. “Can’t afford to put on even an ounce. I’m screen testing for a new film. Don’t want that Susi Lanner to get the part.”

  “Ha. She has nothing on you, my dear.”

  Leli leaned back against her chair and fidgeted with the edge of her ermine stole. “I wish you’d come to the premieres with me, Wulfie.”

  “So do I, my dear. But I enjoy seeing your movies as just another admiring fan.”

  “But the premieres are so exciting.”

  “I’m sure they are. But we don’t want people wondering what you’re doing with a doddering old professor hanging on. You need to appear like an angel to your public—aloof, unattached, unattainable.”

  “You’ve said so before. And I understand. But must you always send Graeber to be my escort?”

  “What? You don’t like Graeber?” He looked amused.

  Leli shrugged.

  “But he’s so young and handsome. And such a talented artist. You should see his paintings sometime.”

  “He’s not my type.” Leli didn’t want to say anything negative to Dr. Altwulf about Graeber. After all, her dislike of the man was personal and she had no desire to hurt Graeber’s career chances with his professor.

  “You’re very discreet, my dear. Another of your many charms.”

  She sipped her champagne and watched the couples spin across the dance floor. The singer shimmered in her tight gold dress and had a deep, throaty voice.

  Leli never went out on dates anymore, which suited her. The men in the movie industry were all egotistical peacocks. Nothing like Dr. Altwulf.

  She looked over at him, but his spine had stiffened and his eyes were focused on something behind her.

  Leli turned her head. There was a commotion at the door. Four men in SS uniforms had entered the main room. The maître d’ was issuing instructions to waiters and there was a good deal of fuss as they brought a table to the edge of the dance floor, then set it for the four Nazis.

  “I hate them,” Leli said under her breath.

  “What’s that, my dear? You hate someone?”

  She had to be careful. You could never be sure what anyone’s true loyalties were.

  “The SS men. They’re so arrogant. They think they can just barge in and have their way.” She took out a cigarette from her silver case, then put it back, remembering how Wulfie disliked when she smoked.

  “They have an important job to do.”

  “What? Enforcing foolish laws that keep people from working?”

  “The laws don’t seem to have hurt you, my dear.”

  She sipped her champagne. She was thinking about her father and the letter she’d gotten from her mother about the new restrictions at the university where he taught, but she was reluctant to reveal this to Altwulf.

  “You’re right, of course,” she said instead. “I just question why people aren’t allowed to express their beliefs just because they’re contrary to Hitler’s.” She knew she sounded bitter, but Altwulf was smiling.

  “You don’t agree with what the Führer’s trying to accomplish?”

  “I just hate rules and restrictions.”

  “Of course you do, my dear. That’s natural. You’re young. A child doesn’t like to be told to go to bed or eat his vegetables either, but that’s a necessary part of the child’s health and well-being.”

  The SS men were laughing too loudly, their voices carrying above the singer’s.

  Leli took another sip of champagne. “Would you tell me what you really think, Wulfie? Everyone’s so afraid of speaking out. Of telling the truth. If you could design your ideal world, how would you arrange things?”

  He sat back in his chair, a thoughtful expression on his face. His fingers thrummed against the tabletop.

  “An ideal world.” His voice was wistful. “In my ideal world, I’d be an art professor and a respected painter. And I’d be sitting in a dark, smoky nightclub sipping champagne across from the most beautiful girl in the universe.”

  The beeping sound began again—shrill, ugly, eternal.

  21

  Kali felt like a Peeping Tom watching her grandmother sleep. How exposed Lillian was—this proud, self-aware woman who never allowed anyone to see her unless she was perfectly coiffed and dressed. Yet here she
was in a wrinkled hospital gown, hair disheveled, forehead bandaged, mouth open, and making tiny snoring sounds when she inhaled too deeply. Someone had taken the oxygen plugs out of her nose, which gave her a little dignity, but Lillian would be devastated if she knew anyone was seeing her like this.

  Kali found a comb in the nightstand and ran it through the tangles in Lillian’s shiny white hair. It seemed strange to Kali to be touching it. Her grandmother had always been aloof, just as Kali’s mother had been, and Kali was suddenly aware just how much she missed having a physical connection. Ironically, now that Lillian was unable to respond to her, Kali felt closer to her than she had ever before.

  Kali worked out a clump of coagulated blood. The brown crust against the silky white hair was disturbing. She removed the clot, then washed off the remaining traces of blood with a washcloth that she’d taken from the bathroom. She worked to control the revulsion she felt as the smell of blood rose.

  An irritating beeping was coming from the machine that monitored her grandmother’s vital signs. Her grandmother’s breathing was labored; her face a mask, practically unrecognizable to Kali. There was a tiny scar on the underside of Lillian’s chin that Kali had never noticed before.

  Lillian’s muscles relaxed and she smiled slightly, as though she was having a pleasant dream.

  Kali wondered if she could smell the flowers Mitzi had brought by earlier. A beautiful arrangement of wildflowers.

  Lillian’s lips were moving. “Danke,” she seemed to be saying. “Danke schön.” Her face opened into a full smile, just like the other morning when she had curtseyed for Kali.

  But then the smile faded. Lillian began taking labored breaths, no longer resembling the beautiful, proud woman Kali had always known, but rather looking like an old woman in a hospital waiting to die.

  Kali tucked in the blanket, then stood up to leave for her studio. It was three days since she’d found Lillian lying unconscious on her bathroom floor. Although she woke up from time to time, she was either confused or frightened, and then she’d doze off again.

  Lillian’s face changed. “Ah, voolfee,” she said, then mumbled something in German. She shook her head, as though angry, and opened her eyes.

  She stared directly at Kali and began speaking in German.

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Kali said. “I don’t know German.”

  Lillian blinked a few times, looked around the room, then back at Kali. “I thought you were the singer,” she said in unaccented English, though her speech was slightly slurred.

  “What singer?”

  Lillian seemed more alert than the other times she’d awakened. This was also the first time she’d spoken English. Kali pressed the button to alert a nurse.

  “At the club. She was wearing a tight gold dress, but she had a beautiful voice. Very deep, almost like a man’s.”

  Kali sat down on the chair beside the bed. “A nightclub?” She was wondering if her grandmother’s dream had some connection to reality.

  “Oh yes. One of the finest. But then—” She shook her head and took another look around. “Where am I? What is this place?”

  “Mount Sinai Hospital. You fell and hit your head. Do you remember?” Kali wasn’t sure if she should mention the stroke. Let the doctor deal with that.

  “The flowers. I dreamt about wildflowers.”

  “Mitzi brought them this morning.” And in case Lillian wasn’t tracking, she added, “Seth’s mother.”

  “I used to go hiking with my mother and father in the mountains near Baden bei Wien.”

  Kali felt a charge of excitement. Maybe Lillian would talk about her past some more. “Isn’t that near Vienna?”

  “Not too far.”

  “Well, look who’s up,” said the nurse standing in the doorway. “How are you feeling, Mrs. Campbell?”

  “What am I doing here?”

  The nurse went over to the bed, put a blood pressure cuff around Lillian’s arm, blew it up, then released the air. “One twenty over sixty. Pretty good. I’ll let the doctor know she’s awake,” she said to Kali, then removed the cuff and left the room.

  Lillian was looking after the nurse. “Why do people talk like I’m not right here in the same room as they are?”

  “That was rude of the nurse,” Kali said. “So you were telling me about Baden bei Wien and Vienna. Is that where you grew up?”

  “I hate when people treat me like I’m invisible. I’ll make sure the doctor knows what I think of the service here.” She closed her eyes and lay back against the pillows. She still looked like an old woman, but a strong-willed, dignified one.

  Kali couldn’t help but smile. Score one for Lillian.

  22

  Judging from the hunger pains in his stomach, it was sometime in the evening, but with the blinds closed in his home office, Javier never knew whether it was day or night. The stainless-steel ashtray was overflowing with butts, but Javier lit another cigarette. He’d cued up the Beethoven playlist on his hard drive and Symphony No. 5 in C minor thundered in the background.

  Javier had been working feverishly since the order for the three Leli Lenz films came in on Wednesday. He’d shipped the films to the Miami Beach address, noting that it was next door to the home of that old woman—Lillian Breitling-Campbell, then he began the process of learning exactly who Neil Rabin was. The order for these particular videos couldn’t be a coincidence. The leading men and ladies in the three films were all different, as were the directors, so the only common element was Leli. This man had to have some connection to her.

  Using his investigative tools and accessing governmental and private databases that he had successfully infiltrated, Javier found that Rabin was thirty-two and a history professor at UCLA, but had grown up here on Miami Beach. Then Javier had dug into the man’s roots, learning that Rabin was an only child and had no children of his own. His mother, Susan Rabin, was still alive but currently in an assisted-living facility that specialized in Alzheimer’s patients. When Javier searched further, he discovered that Neil’s maternal grandmother had been Austrian and was a Holocaust survivor.

  Was it possible? But records showed that the grandmother, Gussie Stein Lowell, had been born in 1923. Javier ruled her out and investigated the other side of the family.

  Neil Rabin’s paternal grandmother had been born in 1915—close enough to be a match—but in Poland. Javier had been momentarily disappointed until he recalled that sections of Poland had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1918. So there was a good chance that this young man’s paternal grandmother was the woman he was searching for. But Sophie Delanski Rabin had died in 1985. If she was dead, would her grandson know about the painting?

  The idea that he may have hit a roadblock was troubling in itself, but Javier felt enormously let down that he might never get to meet the woman who had become so prominent in his life.

  Leli Lenz.

  He took one of the films that he’d converted to DVD format and popped it into the player, remembering the moment when the devil had led him so decisively onto the wrong path.

  Since the afternoon that Javier had seen the hatred in his classmates’ faces, Javier had been working diligently to win their acceptance.

  Javier was a natural athlete and once muscles filled out his gawky frame, he became a bit of a hero amongst his peers. He cursed the Nazis and the Germans louder than anyone. Javier had learned his lesson. His father was a leper with a past that Javier dared not share with anyone, lest the stigma cling to Javier himself.

  One night, his father came home from the photography shop he owned. “There’s something I want to show you,” his father said, turning off the TV that Javier had been watching.

  Javier had his feet up on the coffee table in front of the couch. He was sixteen and still sweaty from the football game he’d played in that afternoon.

  His father set up the film projector on the living room table and pulled down the screen he viewed his old movies on.
<
br />   “This film was made in 1938,” his father said. “It was the last one she was in.”

  “I’m not interested in your Nazi crap,” Javier said.

  His father turned to face him, his distorted iris a mirror image of the one in Javier’s eye. Without warning, he struck Javier across the bridge of his nose.

  Javier felt a burst of pain and saw a flash of light as he heard the crack of cartilage. Warm blood streamed into his mouth, over his chest.

  “You’ll watch and you’ll listen,” his father said. “And you’ll learn the truth.”

  Perhaps it was fear of the bigger man that made Javier remain seated on the couch as blood drenched his shirt, or maybe in his subconscious Javier was hoping there would be something in these films that would bring his beloved father back to him.

  His father handed him an icepack and sat down beside him. “The first time I saw her,” he said, “I thought she was too beautiful to be of this world. An angel, perhaps. How could I have known she was the devil in disguise?”

  His father played the film. Then another. The pain in Javier’s nose throbbed. He half listened as fury and hatred for his father boiled inside him. More lies.

  But Vati spoke in an awed voice about the remarkable man he had been privileged to serve. About the tiny painting and its cryptic signature. He described the work in exquisite detail—the perfection of each of her curls, the glow on her face, the grace of her miraculous arms. The beauty, its overarching significance.

  Javier was struck by the idea that the woman seemed to mean even more to his father than the Movement.

  When the last film reached its end, his father leaned back against the couch. He looked drained. “After she ran off,” he said, “I went to her apartment and searched. I found a letter. I used it to track down her family. Her real name was Ilse Strauss. She was a fraud.”

  His father closed his eyes and shook his head. “We must find her and the painting,” he said. “We must recover what has been stolen.”

  “We?” Javier stood up. His shirt was completely soaked in blood. “I don’t give a shit about this woman or her painting, or any of your fucking crap.”