The Girl in the Face of the Clock (20 page)

Jane found herself worrying again whether this was a good idea. She still didn't know what Valentine was really up to, and Willie Bogen, according to Perry Mannerback at least, was some kind of monster. It didn't seem likely that any harm could come to her in such posh surroundings, but after recent events she wasn't sure of anything. How had she let herself be talked into this, she wondered, pressing the doorbell.

“Jane,” said Valentine, opening the door. He had on a gray sweater and looked gangly, goofy, and happy to see her.

“Hi.”

“So good of you to come,” he said, taking her arm and leading her from the vestibule into an elegantly appointed suite, all French furniture and endless views of Central Park from picture windows. “I'd like you to meet. …”

This was as far as he got. The answer to all Jane's questions was sitting on a tufted sofa by the baby grand piano. He was a round little man who looked as if he might make his living helping Santa.

Jane blinked, expecting the illusion to disappear and be replaced by a fire-breathing dragon. It didn't. The man's cheeks were still chubby and dimpled and red. His nose was still a cherry. The heavy black frames of his glasses magnified eyes the color of robin's eggs. A fringe of grayish hair stopped an inch above his pink little ears.

The butterball was in movement the instant they came into the room, leaping up from his perch to greet them, happily pumping Jane's hand, all the while bouncing up and down like a six-week-old puppy.

“Welcome, welcome, welcome!” said the elf, speaking as rapidly as a machine gun in an accent somewhere between British and Yiddish, his face crinkled in merriment around an enormous smile. “Valentine, dear boy, now I can see why you were so impressed. Such a beautiful creature, a goddess, an ethereal goddess. Such skin! Such a face!
Sheyna punim!
That means ‘pretty face' in Yiddish, which is obviously not your native tongue, you vision of loveliness and grace. And you found her on an airplane, Valentine, you clever boy? Oy, such a doll! But here I am going on without even properly introducing myself. William S. H. Bogen, investment counselor and financial manager
extraordinaire
, at your service—but you, my tall and gorgeous darling, you may call me Willie!”

“The name wasn't originally Bogen, of course,” said Willie the Weasel, munching a smoked salmon canapé, one of an assortment that room service had provided, along with several chilled bottles of Piper Heidseck. “It was Katzenellenbogen. Papa had to shorten it when he embarked upon his stage career in Berlin before the first war. Try fitting Katzenellenbogen on a marquee.”

“Your father was an actor?” asked Jane, intrigued.

“My father was everything. You name it, he did it. Song and dance. Knife-throwing. Female impersonation. Papa was a riot. European Jewry's answer to the
Ziegfeld Follies
. In 1925, he moved to Budapest, so he could get into the movies. He ended up playing László, the Hungarian cowboy, in a whole series of silent pictures. Yippie-eye-o-kai-yay!”

Jane was trying not to fall under the little scoundrel's spell, but it was difficult. Willie Bogen was charming, funny, and ridiculously generous—at least as far as hors d'oeuvres were concerned. There was enough smoked fish and caviar in the spacious suite to feed a significant portion of New Jersey.

“I was named after the famous American silent movie cowboy, William S. Hart, Willie rattled on after taking an appreciative sip of champagne, “but the Katzenellenbogens are actually a rabbinical family of great importance. They were descended from twelve Jews who settled originally in the town of Katzenelenbogen in Germany in 1312. The family moved to Padua toward the end of the fifteenth century and then to Poland a few generations later. I'll have you know that Karl Marx was a descendant of Aaron Lvov of Trier, who was married to the daughter of Moses Cohen of Luck, who had married Nessla Katzenellenbogen and—”

“This is all very interesting, Mr. Bogen,” said Jane politely, “but I don't see how it has anything to do with me.”

“Ah, but it has everything to do with you, dear girl,” said Willie, his eyes twinkling. “In that article about your father in the
New York Times
which Valentine so kindly brought to my attention, did I not read that the name of your paternal grandmother was Luria?”

“Yes, but …”

“In the sixteenth century, Isaac Katzenellenbogen married the daughter of Zeisel and Eliezer Shernzel of Lvov. Zeisel was the daughter of Jehiel Luria, whose family were descended over the previous two hundred years from none other than Mattithiah Treves of Provence.”

Jane stared blankly at him.

“Don't you see?” demanded Willie. “The Treveses, the Lurias, the Katzenellenbogens. We're all related! In fact, each of our three families can trace its respective line back to Rashi, the famous Talmudic scholar, whose lineage, it is well documented, goes back through the great rabbi, Hillel, to King David, and ultimately back directly to Adam!”

“Fascinating, isn't it?” said Valentine Treves, flashing an amused smile. “Genealogy is one of Willie's hobbies.”

“I know what you're thinking,” said Willie, raising his hand. “But I want to reassure you, Cousin Jane—may I call you Jane?—I want to reassure you, Jane, that I cannot believe that you and Valentine will have idiot children should you choose to marry, which seems a reasonable possibility judging from the way that Valentine is admiring you at this very instant. No, the genetic connection is simply too remote.”

“Mr. Bogen …” sputtered Jane, struggling for words.

“Willie, please call me Willie,” he said, pronouncing it with more of a “V” than a “W.” “Everyone calls me Willie. Don't be shy. We're
mispocheh
.”

“
Mispocheh?
”

“Family,” interpreted Valentine. “The extraordinary thing is that somehow Willie manages to be related to practically everyone he's ever met. No one in my family even knew that Grandfather John had been born a Jew until Willie rooted out the birth record.”

“Now, Valentine,” said Willie, shaking his finger. “How many times have I told you? Connections between people are a blessing from God. We need to find the things that bring us together, not lead us apart. You have to forgive Valentine, my dear. He has an overdeveloped sense of irony because his mother named him after a song. Her funny Valentine. What kind of name is Valentine for a nice Jewish boy, I ask you?”

“What kind of name is William S. Hart?” replied Valentine in a mild voice.

“Mr. Bogen,” said Jane. “Villie. Willie. I'm sure that whatever may have happened in the thirteenth century is all very interesting, but it's not what I came over here for. If you want to tell me about connections, why don't you start with how you're connected to Isidore Rosengolts?”

“I will tell you anything you'd like to hear, anything,” said Willie. “Are we not
mispocheh?
”

“The truth is all I want.”

“And so you shall have it, my dear, so you shall have it,” said Willie, rapping the table decisively with a knuckle. “But first have some fish.”

He picked up a tray of appetizers and held it out to her.

“Mr. Bogen, please,” said Jane, pulling back.

“I can see why you like her, Valentine,” said Willie. “She's relentless, just like you. The two of you will have wonderful fights in your old age. Come on, my dear, just a little piece so it shouldn't go to waste.”

Jane reached over and begrudgingly popped a piece of salmon into her mouth.

“Okay?” she said, her mouth full.

“Good, isn't it?” said Willie. “And please try the champagne. It's very nice.”

“Delicious,” said Jane, taking a gulp. It was.

Willie winked at Valentine, then sat back on the couch, making himself comfortable for what apparently would be a long story.

“Okay,” he began. “So here is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I met Isidore Rosengolts in the Swiss detention camp where I spent most of World War Two. William S. Hart notwithstanding, my father had wanted a more stable life for me than the theatre, and I had begun apprenticing as a watchmaker with a cousin of my mother's. Somehow I had managed to get a visa and was in Switzerland buying mainsprings when the war broke out. I never heard from anyone in my family again, but this is another story.”

He paused, matter-of-factly took a sip of champagne, then resumed.

“The course of Isidore's life had been interrupted by events far beyond his control, too, so we had a certain amount in common. We were both young, both displaced in a strange land, and we spoke a common language: Yiddish. We became fairly friendly, as friendly as you can become with a person like Isidore.”

Jane heaped a generous helping of caviar onto a little toast round and added some chopped hardboiled egg. Willie beamed and continued.

“The Swiss in their typical fashion had figured out how to make a profit from their refugees. Rather than murdering Jews as the Germans did, the Swiss put us all to work building roads, maintaining farms, this sort of thing. It was hard work, but a considerably better fate than what would have befallen me if I had stayed in Hungary. It was with a pickax in my hand that I first heard from Isidore about a very special ceramic clock, decorated with back-to-back handless faces, that his grandfather had made for a physician in Antwerp just before the war began.”

Jane stiffened.

“Mr. Rosengolts didn't seem to think it was all that special,” she said.

“Mr. Rosengolts is a big fat liar,” Willie replied with a smile. “Izzie was always a big fat liar. He once convinced me that butterflies had pupiks.”

“Bellybuttons,” said Valentine, who seemed to have absorbed a significant amount of Yiddish on the job.

“Another time,” Willie went on, “he had me believing that every Catholic in Belgium had a twelve-foot-high cross in his upstairs closet that had to be shpritzed with red wine twice a week to symbolize the suffering of Christ. After a while I stopped believing anything Izzie said. I was sure he was lying when he told me about the clock for the first time, it was such an unlikely story. You can see why I was more than a little skeptical when two Sundays ago he rings me up out of the blue, after I hadn't heard a word from him in twenty years, and offers to sell me this very same clock.”

“He didn't have it,” said Jane flatly.

“And I didn't believe it even existed,” said Willie, nodding happily. “Then the next day, Valentine rings me from Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. So we're chatting about this splendid Simon Willard lighthouse clock that I have practically stolen from underneath the
goyische
nose of Peregrine Mannerback, the famous American idiot. I tell Valentine about this make-believe clock that Rosengolts now proposes to sell me. Valentine tells me to pick up a copy of that Sunday's
New York Times
. In it, he says to my amazement, is a painting with just such a handless ceramic clock.

“So I get the article, and sure enough, there is a picture of a clock exactly like the one Isidore had described to me in Switzerland more than half a century ago. And the article says that the painter of this picture had a mother who fled Antwerp just about the time that Izzie Rosengolts's grandfather is supposed to have made his clock.”

Jane glanced over at Valentine. He winked, licked his lips, and popped a canapé in his mouth. Flustered, Jane returned her attention to Willie.

“This past Thursday, I hear from Izzie again,” the little elf went on cheerfully, not having missed the exchange. “We have spoken a few times on the telephone in the meanwhile, but now he actually shows up on my doorstep, demanding to know if I am going to purchase his clock. I am interested, I say, but by this point you, Jane, have come to England and have claimed to Valentine that the clock is in your possession. So I tell Izzie that I do not believe he even has this clock. He gets very insulted. He will produce something that will prove he has the clock, but there will be a price. There is always a price with Izzie. He swears that now he will never in a million years sell me the clock unless I pay him five thousand pounds that very day for this.”

Willie reached into his pocket and held up a shiny object. Jane gasped. It was her mother's dragonfly cross.

“By this point, the existence of the clock seemed more believable because of a certain document that had turned up,” said Willie. “I wasn't sure who had the clock, but sometimes you have to take a gamble in life. So I paid his little extortion.”

“I guess Mr. Rosengolts's dragonfly medal wasn't as precious to him as he said,” said Jane.

“Medal?” said Willie with a laugh, following Jane's eyes to the object in his hand.

“He said it was a medal his grandfather had won at some decorative arts fair,” said Jane. “I always thought it was a cross.”

“Well, then, I am pleased to enlighten you,” said Willie. “It is not a medal, and it certainly is not a cross. It is a key. A clock key.”

“A clock key?” exclaimed Jane. “How can it be a clock key? For what clock?”

“Why, your clock, of course,” said Willie. “The small end sets the time, the large end winds the clock.”

“But my clock is just a glazed piece of ceramic!”

“I'm not talking about the ceramic clock,” said Willie with a chuckle. “I'm talking about the real clock. The clock inside the clock.”

“Inside?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Willie excitedly, “that's the whole point. Izzie's grandfather had created a ceramic shell to conceal a very valuable, very wonderful clock, so your family could smuggle it out of Belgium. That was the crazy story Izzie had told me in Switzerland in 1943. He said he had seen the real piece in his grandfather's workshop before it was encased. That was why I thought he was lying back then. What he described to me could only have been a portico mystery clock. What kind of fool did he take me for?”

“Portico mystery clock?” Jane repeated, staring blankly at him.

“You are not a clock person, are you?”

“I can barely tell time at this point,” said Jane, dazed from the unsettling events of the day, not the least of which was what she was hearing now.

“Valentine,” said Willie, looking over at Valentine, who was sitting on the couch looking very relaxed. “Why are you being so quiet? Tell your lovely cousin, Jane, about Cartier mystery clocks. Show her how brilliant you are, as well as good-looking.”

“Cartier, of course, is the famous Paris jeweler,” said Valentine, not missing a beat. “Its golden age was between the world wars, when under the direction of Louis Cartier, grandson of the founder, the house created some of the most spectacular and beautiful objects of the twentieth century. Among the most remarkable of these were their famous mystery clocks.”

“What's the mystery?” asked Jane, wondering what wasn't a mystery at this point.

“The central dial of a mystery clock is transparent, made of quartz or rock crystal,” said Valentine. “In this crystal, the clock's hands hover, seemingly unattached to anything, yet they keep time.”

“But each hand is actually attached to an equally transparent crystal disk inside the crystal dial,” said Willie, unable to contain himself. “That's the trick. The works are in the base of the clock and are connected to the disks by gears in the frame, so the mechanism that makes the hands turn is invisible.”

“The first mystery clock,” Valentine continued, “the Model A, was sold to J. P. Morgan in 1913. Cartier made about one mystery clock a year until 1930. Queen Mary and King Farouk each owned one. Hermann Goering, the swine, bought his in 1940. In 1945, Charles de Gaulle presented Stalin with a lapis lazuli mystery clock. After World War Two, they were produced again until the late 1970s.”

“The later ones are not nearly as desirable,” added Willie.

Numb, Jane took a sip of champagne and tried the whitefish. Not a bad way to have dinner.

“The largest, the most spectacular, and the rarest of the early clocks,” Valentine went on, “were the so-called portico mystery clocks, made between 1923 and 1925. These were crafted from black onyx and rock crystal, with a splash of jade and coral for color. Each had two tall pillars with a crosspiece at the top. From this crosspiece hung suspended either a twelve-sided or a hexagonal rock crystal dial, in which open diamondwork hands kept time without visible explanation. The works for these clocks were in the crosspieces at the top, which were crowned with a Buddha or Chinese lion carved from rock crystal. In form, the whole affair resembles a freestanding Oriental archway, hence the term ‘portico.'”