Love and Treasure (22 page)

In the case of the brooch, Amitai had discovered the existence of an intact archive of a distinguished Viennese jeweler, and Elek had acquired for him through means not entirely legitimate a digital catalog of all the holdings of the Budapest Bedö-Ház, a museum devoted to the art of the Magyar secession movement, the Hungarian version of the Austrian Jugendstil. Amitai had cross-referenced the two lists. It was meticulous, tedious work, comparing descriptions of rings and brooches, diadems and necklaces. His work was always like this: vast expanses of featureless failure out of which there would appear, from time to time, a solitary
mast flying like a flag, the promise of treasure. Eventually he found in the jeweler’s archive a reference to the sale in 1934 to a Herr Patai Zoltán of Budapest of an exceptionally valuable brooch that matched a description in the Bedö-Ház archive. Then it was simply a matter of tracking down the lucky nephew and convincing the Bedö-Ház that a quick and quiet sale was preferable to a noisy public scandal.

Natalie said, “Well, will it be that much harder to find out what happened to the painting? I mean, if my necklace can lead us to the model?”

“I have been looking for a long time,” he said. “And though I’d hoped your necklace would lead me to the painting, I fear now I’ve learned only that the worst is true. I’ve learned that the painting was likely on the train, and so it’s gone.”

“You can’t know that for sure. Don’t you think it’s worth looking? I mean, since you’ve spent so much time already?”

“I fear not.”

“You strike me as a man who enjoys a lost cause.”

She took him by surprise. How could she know that he always felt most comfortable among the uncomfortable, most at home among the homeless? This, more than anything perhaps, explained the passion of his search for Komlós’s painting. There were many lost paintings, after all, many dead artists. And many of those other lost paintings by dead artists were likely to be more valuable than this particular one. Yet this was the search that consumed him. There was something about Komlós, about the extent to which the man had been so effectively erased from the earth, virtually all shadow he’d cast gone with him, that interested Amitai enough to make him drop everything and fly across the world at the smallest glimmer of hope.

“How do you mean?” he said.

“Well, for three years you’ve been looking for the lost painting of a lost artist on behalf of whom? His lost relatives?”

He had hoped Natalie would not ask him about his client in the Komlós case. It had taken him nearly a year of concerted effort to find any surviving relative on whose behalf he could claim the artwork. Jill Gillette, the widow of a second cousin of the artist, was as close as he had come. Attenuated as the relationship was, Ms. Gillette was in possession of genealogical evidence of the connection, which made her a perfectly adequate client. Still, not one of whom he was eager to brag.

He said, “I know Komlós’s relatives. They’re not lost.”

“Even better. I’ve now given you the chance to search for the lost owner of a found necklace on behalf of a found relative. Simple, right?”

She spoke with her hands moving emphatically in the air. Her cuticles were torn, and she had a hangnail on her thumb. He thought she might be a nervous woman, high-strung. The kind of woman he had sworn not to pursue anymore.

“Right,” he said. “Simple.”

•
16
•

PÉTÉR ELEK WORE HIS
silver hair long, slicked back from his high forehead and falling past his collar. His mustache and beard ended in a hussar cavalryman’s sharpened points. He exuded a kind of vintage urbanity; he was a Budapest flaneur, down to the paisley cravat tied around his throat and fixed with an onyx tie pin. He bent over Natalie’s hand and planted upon it a kiss. She blushed.

“Forgive me for being busy when you first arrived,” he said.

“Did you make the sale?” Amitai asked.

“Did I make the sale, what kind of question is it? ‘Did you make the sale?’ Please.” He winked at Natalie.

“Don’t insult the man,” Natalie said.

“I have time now, if you wish,” Elek said to Natalie, “to examine the necklace more thoroughly.”

Natalie unfastened the pendant and handed it to him.

“Mm,” the elderly man murmured, “such a lovely warmth the gold retains. You must be quite hot-blooded. It’s the red hair, no doubt.”

Amitai laughed. “Oh-oh. Look out,” he said. “I must warn you, Elek is a notorious ladies’ man.”

“Really?” Natalie said. “And who’s going to warn me about you?”

Elek pulled a square of black velvet from the hip pocket of his suit pants and spread it across the top of one of the glass cases. He aimed a task lamp at the cloth and positioned the necklace at the center of the bright bluish spot of light. He screwed a jeweler’s loupe into his eye and examined the pendant, angling it this way and that.

“As I told you when you first showed me the necklace, my dear, I would call it more Art Deco than Jugendstil, although the enamel work, the use of semiprecious rather than precious stones, this is indeed emblematic of the Art Nouveau.”

“Can you tell who made it?” Amitai said.

“The enameling reminds me of some of the early work of Lajos Kozma, before he devoted himself to architecture. You see how the peacock is made of geometrical patterns? This is very typical Kozma. The
subject matter is unusual, though. In Hungary the peacock feather is an omen of ill fortune, and so one doesn’t generally see it used decoratively. The colors are also not Kozma’s. He most often worked in yellow, blue, red, and gold. I have never before seen him use purple, white, and green. They are not so beautiful, these colors together, I don’t think. Not harmonious. So they must mean something, no?” Elek continued examining the pendant, flipping it over, bringing it close to his eye and away again. “But Kozma, he is a man who likes to sign his work, so if it is his, where is the signature?”

Elek reached beneath the counter. He dug around in a drawer until he found a leather case in which were arrayed a selection of tiny screwdrivers. Moments later he grunted “ah!” and held the pendant out for the other two to see. The back and front were separated, joined by an infinitesimal hinge. It was not just a pendant, but a locket. Inside the locket was a tiny photograph.

Amitai laughed, delighted both by the intricate workmanship and by Elek’s skill in discovering it.

“As I thought. Kozma,” Elek said. “See, his signature is here.”

Elek passed the loupe to Natalie and directed her attention to a swirl of calligraphy on the inside of the locket, opposite the photograph. In spidery letters it read
KOZMA LAJOS
, surname written first in the Hungarian manner.

Natalie peered at the photograph on the other side of the locket. After a few moments she offered Amitai the loupe, and he held it to his eye. The tiny sepia-toned photograph depicted what Amitai took to be a woman and a child in front of a glass-fronted building draped with flags. The child, a girl in a ruffled white dress, had been posed standing on top of a wooden box. On either side of the figures dangled two long white banners inscribed with characters too small for Amitai to make out, even with the loupe.

“I can’t read what’s on the banners,” he said.

Natalie took back the pendant and the loupe. “One’s in Hungarian, so I don’t know, but the other’s in English. It says
SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE CONGRESS, JUNE 15–20, 1913
.” She brought the tiny photograph closer to the loupe, squinted. A tendril of hair fell forward, and she jammed it impatiently behind her shell-pink ear. “I thought it was a little girl.”

“It is a little girl,” Amitai said.

“I don’t think so,” Natalie said. “She has a big head, an adult-sized
head, and her hair is up in a bun. A little girl wouldn’t have worn her hair like that. She’s a dwarf.”

Amitai and Elek each took another look and agreed with Natalie’s revised assessment.

“Sharp eyes,” Elek said, with only a hint of lechery.

“This will make our search much easier,” Amitai said. “We just go to the National Széchényi Library and ask to see the archive of the Suffrage Congress of 1913. Surely there was no more than one dwarf in attendance.”

He took a closer look now at the other woman, whom at first he had taken for the mother of the child. She was thin and fair haired, and possibly quite beautiful.

“Do you think that’s her?” Natalie said. “The model in your painting?”

“It’s hard to tell, since she has the head of a pretty girl and not a peacock. But it’s certainly not impossible.” He handed her the necklace. “A very good day’s work.”

As Natalie reached back to reclasp the necklace, Amitai saw that the skin on the underside of her arms was pale and smooth. No freckles.

He continued, “Justifies a celebratory dinner, don’t you think?”

“All right,” she said. “Sure. Mr. Elek, I hope you’ll join us?”

“I’m afraid not, madam. As much as I would love to. My wife waits for me at home.”

“Well, you could bring her, too,” Natalie said.

The two men exchanged a glance. Between a sharp-eyed jeweler and a gray-market art dealer much can be said without a word being spoken.

Elek said, “You are very kind. Indeed my wife, when properly rested, can be quite a lively dinner companion, but she will be tired at the end of a long day of working. I will see you again, perhaps, before you leave Budapest. When it is time for you to purchase a souvenir of your visit, you will return, yes?”

“Of course!”

Amitai steered Natalie out of the store. He flagged down a cab. “Please take us to the Hotel Gellért,” he told the driver.

“To the hotel?” Natalie said, nonplussed, whatever flirtatious tone she had previously allowed herself now gone.

“They have a very fine restaurant,” he reassured her.

•
17
•

THE STUFFED CABBAGE
for which the hotel restaurant was justifiably famous tasted fine, better even, from a room-service tray. They ate in bed, the tray balanced on a pillow between them. Modest after the fact, Natalie twisted the white sheet around her body, covering her breasts. Her curls, liberated from their restraining clip, dangled fetchingly around her face.

If Amitai had thought their quest was anything more than a mutual fools’ errand he would not have complicated their relationship with sex. But as it was, there was no point in denying himself the pleasure. Even so, it was unusual for him to have brought a woman to his own room. After his divorce, he had come to value his privacy obsessively, and made it a point always to go to a woman’s apartment or hotel room rather than invite her to his. The home he had shared with his ex-wife, like the homes of most of the members of the close-knit community of Syrian Jews in Midwood, Brooklyn, was always spilling over with relatives and friends, friends of relatives, relatives of friends. When Jessica was not entertaining all of her female cousins over Turkish coffee and pastries or hosting a baby shower for a sister-in-law, she was serving dinner to thirty members of her immediate family. He and Jessica had been expected to report at least once a week to the respective homes of her parents, her aunts and uncles, and at least one of her seven siblings. And on the rare Sabbaths or holidays when Jessica’s family did not demand their presence, his own extended family did. Even more than escaping the suffocation of a marriage to a woman with whom he had nothing in common beyond the accident of their mutual Syrian Jewish ancestry, he had longed to get away from the crush of familiar humanity in Midwood. The delightful solitude of his Manhattan bachelor’s apartment was still, three years after his divorce, a singular pleasure. He had never once allowed a woman even to visit. When traveling, he generally extended this prohibition to include his hotel rooms. And yet he’d invited this young woman to his room without any hesitation at all. Moreover, he thought, she appeared
to be preparing to stay the night. He tested out the idea in his mind. Why, he wondered, didn’t it bother him?

“Eating in bed always makes me think of my grandfather,” Natalie said. “When I was a little girl, I would stay with my grandparents at their summerhouse in Maine. My grandfather used to wake me up every morning with tea and toast on a tray.”

“You miss him very much,” Amitai said.

“Yes.”

“You were very close?”

“Yes. Unusually so, I guess.” She took another bite. “My husband used to hate it when I’d eat in bed.”

“You are only recently separated, yes?”

“How did you know?”

“You called him your husband.”

“Oh. Right. What about you? How long have you been divorced?”

“A few years,” he said.

“How long were you married?”

“Also a few years. And you?”

She shrugged. “Well, that’s a difficult question to answer.”

“How can it be difficult?”

“We got married in June.”

He raised a quizzical eyebrow. “This past June? Half a year ago?”

“Nearly eight months,” she said defensively.

“And how long have you been separated?”

“Five months.”

“You were married for three months?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“But we were together for twelve years before we got married. We met in college.”

“Ah.”

“Yup,” Natalie said. “Together for twelve years. Married in June. And in September he left me.”

“For another woman?”

“How did you know?”

“This is often why men leave, I think.”

“Is that why you left?”

He considered this. There had indeed been other women, but he had
assuaged his guilty conscience by considering them the result of the unhappiness of his union, rather than its cause. Eventually he had used the excuse of infidelity to end his marriage, but upon engineering his escape had immediately broken off with the woman with whom he had happened to be sleeping at the time. He said, “My wife and I didn’t like each other much.”