Under the Egg (6 page)

“Nice tattoo.” Bodhi pointed to the baroque symbol on his wrist.

“Thanks!” Eddie's volume dial seemed stuck at eleven. “That's my band's logo. We play thrash ska on Tuesday nights at the Snake Pit. It's sick! You guys should come—wait, you aren't twenty-one, are you?”

We shook our heads.

“Never mind. Anyway, what are you guys looking for today?”

“We're doing a project,” I said.

“For school,” chimed in Bodhi.

“Yeah, summer school.” I pulled out my notebook. “We need to get books on—let's see here . . .” I glanced at Eddie. “You ready?”

Eddie smiled and positioned his hands at the computer terminal like a virtuoso. “Ready.”

“Okay, we need books on the Italian Renaissance in general, probably the Northern Renaissance too—Flemish, German, Dutch . . .”

“. . . German, Dutch, got it . . .” Eddie's fingers flew over the keyboard.

“Specifically books on Raphael, both biographies and monographs. Also books on art fakes and forgeries, stolen art . . .”

Bodhi poked me. “Rubbing alcohol.”

“Oh yeah, something on, I guess, paint chemistry? Or how paint works? Or dries?”

“. . . Paint chemistry . . .” Eddie repeated and peered into the computer. “Okay. Are you ready for a Dewey decimal avalanche?” He hit print and unleashed a sheaf of paper our way.

“All righty! Take that, summer school!” Eddie got way more pleasure out of the online catalog than any librarian I'd ever seen. “You'll need a shelving cart just to get that to the circulation desk!”

“Oh.” I'd almost forgotten. “But there's one problem . . . It's a book. A library book. I can't find it anywhere—”

“Gimme your card,” interrupted Eddie.

I placed my library card on the desk and watched him swipe and scroll. “It's
Franny and Zooey
. I know I had it, but. I've looked and looked . . .”

“Whoa, you're one of our frequent fliers!” he observed, glancing through my record. “I should've guessed.”

“Yes, see, I'm here all the time. I've never had so much as a late fee—we can't really afford late fees—but even if we could, I'm very diligent about—”

Eddie jabbed the keyboard commandingly a few times and hit return. “Done. The New York Public Library system has absolved you of your sins.” He made some semi-magical signs in the air.

“That's it?”

“That's it.” Eddie winked again. “Just make sure
these
don't go disappearing. Now, what's next? Modern animatronics? History of the hot dog?”

“No, I think we've got everything.” I started to gather up the stack with its columns of call numbers. “So, you are sort of a research . . . specialist, right?”

“You got it. MLIS, Master's of Library and Information Science—with an emphasis on information.”

“Do you know anything about military records?”

“Not much myself, but let me introduce you to my dear friend, Google.” Eddie was back at the keyboard again. “You want to find someone's record?”

“My grandfather's.” I pulled the Veteran's Affairs letter out of my bag and handed it to Eddie. With the discovery of the painting, I wasn't willing to leave any questions floating around unanswered.

Eddie tickled his keyboard some more, referring to the letter here and there. “Okay, here's his draft record.”

“What, just like that?”

Eddie grinned. “Just like that. See for yourself.” Bodhi and I leaned over the desk. “There's the serial number, there's where he enlisted—here in New York, right after Pearl Harbor—see, December 11, 1941. He was eighteen years old; occupation: artist; and he lived in New York. Class: Private.”

“So he served in the army?” This was news to me. “Where did he go? Did he fight?”

“Doesn't say. This is just the draft record, which tells us he enlisted but doesn't say which division he got assigned to. For that, you have to submit an application to the National Archives.” Eddie jumped ahead a few screens. “You can do it all online. There's just a twenty-dollar fee.”

My heart sank. Twenty dollars meant a week's worth of groceries, or keeping the lights (and fans) on for another week, or a dent in my mom's mounting bill at the tea shop—not the beginning of a wild-goose chase.

Another card hit the desk, but this one was shiny and silver. (“Platinum,” Bodhi would later call it.) “Let's do it,” Bodhi said.

Eddie looked skeptical. “Your parents okay with this?” He glanced at me. “Are
you
okay with this?”

If there is one thing that Jack always told me, it's that Tenpennys pay their way. Tenpennys owe nothing to anyone. Tenpennys do it themselves or do without.

“Yes,” I said decisively. “Thank you,” I mouthed to Bodhi.

Bodhi shrugged and slid the card across the table to Eddie. “So, how long to get the records?”

Eddie checked the website again. “Anywhere from ten days to six months.”

I groaned. “Six months?”

“Don't worry,” Bodhi patted my back consolingly. “It'll take you that long just to read all these books.”

B
odhi's mom wanted her to fly out to Morocco and meet some Sufi mystic-to-the-stars, so Bodhi headed off for two weeks with a laptop under her arm. “I'll handle the Internet research,” she said the next morning as she headed for the airport, her head poking out of the taxi's window. “I'll have a lot of downtime once our camel caravan gets to the monastery. They have Wi-Fi and a pool.”

That was fine with me. The minute Bodhi saw the stack of books on my reading list, she took care to inform me that she was “more of a kinesthetic learner.” And frankly, as much as I loved the library, the less time I had to spend around the creepy guys at the computer terminals, the better.

No, I would spend the following week where I felt most at home: alone with my books and my paintings. After my morning chores, I'd walk the length of the island to the Met or the Frick, exploiting their pay-as-you-wish policies to trade a penny for a few hours with their Renaissance collections. In the late afternoons, I hunkered down in Jack's studio, sweating over the reading, paging damp fingers through biographies and histories and the For Reference Only monograph Eddie let me smuggle out: three-hundred-some pages of every painting, sketch, and poem to ever leave Raphael's hand.

When I wasn't reading, I was looking, just like Jack always told me. For a man who found something (or someone) to complain about wherever he went, you would be surprised how much Jack looked for beauty in the world. It was like an effort of forced optimism in the face of his own cantankery. He'd stop me in the middle of the street to check out the filigree work of a manhole cover or call me up to his studio to watch the golden-pink sunlight settle over Wall Street's towers. “If you stop and look,” he once told me as we gazed at a fireworks display of cherry blossoms on East 11th Street, “you will be amazed at what you find.”

So I spent those two weeks really looking. I looked at Michelangelos and Leonardos, of course, but also Peruginos, Bellinis, Titians, Georgiones, Simibaldos, Lottos, Pintoricchios, Solarios, Tifernates, Botticellis, Ghirlandaios, and all the Fras (Fra Bartolommeo, Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Lippo Lippi, Fra Angelico).

And the more I looked, the more the painting in Jack's studio looked like a Raphael.

But this was a problem in and of itself. For one thing, the more likely it was a Raphael, the more likely it was stolen.

Still, if there was one thing I'd learned from the books on art fakes that Eddie found for me, it was that the best way to “find” an Old Master painting is to really, really want to find one.

For example, there was this guy in 1940s Holland who specialized in forging Vermeers. Everyone wants to find a Vermeer—there are only about thirty-five known canvases in the world, and each one is worth a fortune. So experts fell all over each other to authenticate this one fake religious painting—even though it was a subject Vermeer never painted, in a size he never painted, and in a style that looked
nothing
like his other paintings! But everyone wanted to discover a Vermeer, so a Vermeer it became. For a while, at least.

I had to focus on the hard facts, like when Raphael might have painted this particular Madonna and Child. So when the light faded in the studio each night, I headed down to the kitchen and strained my eyes to read one more book. It was one recommended by Eddie, who had called it “a backstage pass to the Italian Renaissance”:
The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
by an artist named Giorgio Vasari.

Imagine for a minute that you attend Great Painters of the Italian Renaissance High School. Like any high school, you have cliques, rivalries, and big personalities. Vasari is the school gossip. Vying for valedictorian you've got Leonardo da Vinci, the quirky supernerd, and Michelangelo, the angry but brilliant loner. Then you have the guy everyone wants to be seen with: the star quarterback who's been elected both Class President and Most Popular.

That's Raphael.

You could also add “Class Flirt” to his list of titles. According to Vasari, Raphael was a “very amorous person, delighting much in women.” He strung along an engagement to the niece of a powerful cardinal for seven years while he fooled around with his mistress, even refusing to finish the Pope's frescoes unless she was brought to his villa for “inspiration.” Vasari records his early death at thirty-seven as due to “sexual excess”—a medical condition that I'm pretty sure has since been disproven.

This true love of Raphael's, a local girl named Margherita Luti—nicknamed “La Fornarina” or the “Baker's Daughter”—pops up throughout his work. Raphael adored the plump brunette and used her again and again as a model. Many of those famous Madonnas are based on her.

He painted her portrait, too: once as an elegant woman in sumptuous robes and a modest veil (
La Velata
) and once in a pose better suited for a girlie magazine, topless except for a transparent wisp held coyly to her chest.

Now some scholars deny these two paintings are of the same woman. Some even say that La Fornarina was a myth. But Renaissance artists loved nothing more than to leave little clues and riddles in their paintings, and Raphael was no different. So put the portraits side by side and look for yourself. Why are the women in the exact same pose: half profile, their right hand held lightly to their left breast? Why do they have the same almond-shaped dark eyes, the same Roman nose, the same full lips and dimpled chin?

And why did he add a dangling pearl ornament in the exact same place on each woman?

Because the Latin word for pearl is
margarita
.

Margherita. As in Margherita Luti, La Fornarina.

Which brings us back to the painting upstairs in the studio. Big-eyed beauty? Check. Right hand also held to her left breast? Check. Pearl in hair? Check. I held my breath as I put down the monograph: the resemblance was undeniable. There was just one question. Why was the Madonna in my painting so forlorn and Raphael's Fornarina always so radiant?

• • •

A few days later, I found a slip of paper under my front door from Bodhi: “K's diner, 10:00
A.M.
? PS: Get a cell phone.”

Bodhi was back. It was time to compare notes.

I grabbed a few of the most relevant library books, ready to debate the finer points of the School of Raphael vs. Style After Raphael. But there was one puzzle I hadn't been able to crack: the paint itself.

I was still stumped by why the rubbing alcohol had removed the top layer of paint while leaving the bottom intact. I'd been dipping in and out of a book called
The Chemistry of Paint and Materials for Working Artists
. But I could never get more than a few pages in without admitting defeat. Seventh-grade biology hadn't given me much of a basis for advanced chemistry.

At ten minutes to, I left the house, the books straining my sweater bag and my eyes glued to
The Chemistry of Paint
(with the occasional glance at the sidewalk to avoid stepping in anything).

“Look out, miss. This is how you are going to get hit by a car.”

Without looking up, the scent of roasted vanilla told me I had reached Sanjiv's Toasty Nuts cart.

“You want the toasty nuts today? Cashews are very good today.”

The smell, so seductive on a cold winter's day, was overpowering when it mingled with the smell of smog and urine rising from the hot sidewalk. Despite my hunger, I shook my head.

Sanjiv sighed. “Yes. No one wants the toasty nuts in the summer. In Mumbai it would not make a difference. In Mumbai I would be reaching for my—”

“Yes, reaching for your sweater, I know.” I smiled kindly as I cut him off. Some days, this little joke accounted for my only human interaction, even though Sanjiv had been on Jack's list, something involving permits and the legally restricted vendor space on the sidewalk. But since Jack died, this small exchange had become something I looked forward to, despite—or maybe because of—its predictability.

But today I had a mission and, what's more, a real, live friend waiting for me.

“Yes, you have heard this one.” Sanjiv sighed again.

“Well,” my eyes automatically went back to my book as my feet started moving again, “stay cool, Sanjiv.”

“Ah, I see you are now a chemist like me.”

“What?” I stopped.

Sanjiv pointed at the book. “You read about chemistry? This is what I teach, back in India. At my school, you know?” He gestured at the picture next to the empty coffee can marked
DONATIONS PLEASE
, where Toasty Nuts customers were encouraged to drop a few coins for the school where Sanjiv once taught. Twelve or so high school kids were posed around a single Bunsen burner, proudly wearing the safety goggles Sanjiv had sent them.

“Oh yeah, that's right. Maybe you could explain some of this to me.” I handed him the book. “But it's about paint chemistry, so—”

“Yes, paint, I know about paint. Before I became a teacher, I worked in a lab in a big chemical company. They made roof coating, waterproofing materials, paint . . .”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, I am serious. Why would I joke about this?” Sanjiv looked confused.

“So you know about oil paint, for example?”

His laugh was almost a sneer. “Yes, miss, I know about oil paint. This is a very important kind of paint! But I want to know—what do
you
know about oil paint?” He handed me back the book.

I told Sanjiv about the painting: the rubbing alcohol, the top layer coming off in strips, the bottom layer pristine. “So what I can't figure out is why the alcohol removed one layer but not the other.”

“Okay, this is easy. You say your grandfather painted over the first painting? That is why the top layer came off. This top layer was young. It was painted later.”

He scooped a few cashews into a small paper bag and handed it to me. “The bottom paint was much older. It would have to be very old if your rubbing alcohol did not harm it.”

I nodded, chewing slowly on the cashews. “My grandfather used to say that the best thing about oil paints is that they took a long time to dry. So he could work on a painting slowly and change things over time.”

“Not dry, no.” Sanjiv wagged his finger at me. “Oil paint does not dry. It reacts with the oxygen in the air and hardens. ‘Polymerize' is the word in English, I think. But your grandfather was right, it takes a very, very long time before the paint is hard enough to resist a solvent like turpentine or rubbing alcohol.”

“How long?”

“Maybe one hundred years?”

My voice shook slightly with excitement. “So if you rub alcohol on some—let's say—forty- or fifty-year-old oil paint, it will just come off, right?”

“Eh, this I am not so sure.” Sanjiv rubbed his smooth chin as if searching for a beard. “It would smudge, yes, but wipe off so easy? I do not know about this.”

We stood thinking, over the steaming sweet cart, sweat droplets trickling down our temples as if we squeezed them out with our brain power.

“But maybe your grandfather uses another kind of paint: maybe acrylic, maybe something else. Something that is not so stable as oil paint.”

Something engineered to be easy to remove, I thought. “But whatever he used on top, whenever he painted it—the bottom layer would have to be old? If it didn't peel off?”

“If it is oil paint, then yes, at least one hundred years. Maybe two hundred.”

“Maybe five hundred?”

Sanjiv laughed. “Yes, yes, my friend, maybe five hundred. Maybe one thousand. Maybe it is a painting from the cavemen.”

“Okay, okay.”

“You think it is valuable, yes? You should sell it, and then you would have enough money to buy toasty nuts.”

I dug out a dollar (bringing me down to $320) and handed it to him. “Sanjiv, if this painting is what I think it is, I'll buy the whole cart.”

• • •

“It's real! It's real!”

I attracted the attention of half of Katsanakis's Diner—except Bodhi. Her head was down, as usual, over her phone, the white line of her part stark between the two tight braids. “What's real?” she mumbled.

I rolled my eyes as I slid into the booth. “The painting, of course.”

“What painting?”

My head spun. “What painting? Are you kidding me? The painting in my—”

Bodhi looked up with a grin, her face tan against her white button-down. “Gotcha. Did you really think I'd forget? C'mon, this is my new independent study project. I take that very seriously. And I got a lot of digging done on the retreat.”

Oh. A joke. I settled back into the vinyl, relieved. “How was Morocco anyway?”

“Hot. How was New York?”

“Same.”

A waitress stopped by and dropped two menus on the table. “What can I getcha?”

Bodhi looked at me. “Pie?”

“No, I just ate.” I handed one of the menus back to the waitress. “Just ice water for me.” The waitress frowned, but I didn't want to get into a habit of Bodhi paying for things. Or worse yet, to be expected to pick up the check next time.

“Okay,” Bodhi shrugged. “One piece of cherry pie for me.” She handed the menus back. “And water,” she called after the woman's swishing backside before turning to me. “So what makes you say it's real?”

“Well, it's real old, that I know. See—”

“Did you look into hyperspectral imaging?” Bodhi cut me off.

“Well, no. It's just—”

“Or X-ray fluorescence mapping?” She was back tapping her phone again. “Or maybe dendrochronology, since it's painted on wood.”

“Dendro-wha—no. What did
you
do—get a forensics degree? I thought you were camped out in some Moroccan monastery.”

“I was. With Wi-Fi, remember? And since my mom spent most of her time whirling with the dervishes, I enrolled myself at the University of Interwebs. Learned a lot about the dating techniques that are out there.”