The Chrysalis (13 page)

Mara concluded with her trump card. “Finally, Your Honor, even if I'm wrong, even if the Nazis poached
The Chrysalis,
and even if Hilda Baum searched with reasonable diligence for the long-lost painting, the law says that once you've waived your rights to a piece of property, you can't later seek to recover it.”

The screen displayed a magnified and highlighted version of her prize possession: the German Art Restitution Commission release. “Discovery showed that in the late 1940s, Hilda Baum filed a claim for her family's lost artwork with the German Art Restitution Commission, including
The Chrysalis.
When she received a payment from the commission, she signed a release, waiving all future claims based on those paintings. Take a look at the translation: ‘For
The Chrysalis
…I have submitted no other applications for compensation…be it on my own behalf or through any institution, organization, or authorized agent, nor will I do so in the future against this entity or any other.' This waiver prevents her from pursuing a lawsuit now to regain
The Chrysalis.
The case law refutes any argument by the plaintiff that this release does not apply in the United States as well as any contention that the release applies only between plaintiff and Germany, not between plaintiff and defendant. And think about the impact of the release on her desire to ferret out
The Chrysalis,
Your Honor—if you've already been paid for a painting and you've released your rights to it, would you really invest a lot of time and energy searching for it?”

Mara filled in the broad outlines of her argument with the finer points of the law for nearly an hour. Exhausted, she finished and sat down to give the plaintiff a chance to reply.

Hilda Baum's ancient attorney struggled to stand up and then hobbled over to the podium. For a moment, his seeming frailness buoyed Mara's spirits. Until he spoke.

“Well, well, well, Your Honor. It seems that the defendant, Beazley's, wants to make my client, Hilda Baum, a victim of the Nazis once again,” he declared, his voice surprisingly strong and commanding. “Let's see what Beazley's is asking Ms. Baum to give up.”

He lifted his hand to signal a colleague, and the lights dimmed in the courtroom. He made another gesture, and new images appeared on the screen: the photographs of the young Hilda Baum and her parents, surrounded by art. “Your Honor, I think you'll agree that Beazley's is asking Ms. Baum to surrender more than just the painting you see on the wall of her family home. Beazley's is demanding Ms. Baum relinquish the only keepsake she may ever have of her parents.”

He then launched into a response anticipated by Mara: strident claims that a gap in the title existed, which “proved” that the Nazis took the painting from Erich Baum's aunt in Nice. Desperate assertions that
Scaife
applied, and even if it didn't,
DeClerck
said a claimant must undertake a sensible investigation to find the painting—not an exhaustive one—and that Hilda Baum's quest, limited as it was to Europe and Russia through the 1950s, sufficed. Tortured arguments that the German Art Restitution Commission release signed in the Netherlands did not apply in the United States or to Beazley's, and finally, heart-wrenching pleas to return
The Chrysalis.

Mara stood up and took her last turn at the podium. She inhaled deeply and delivered an impromptu speech, an attempt to defuse the empathetic images imprinted onto the courtroom by Hilda Baum's counsel. The remainder of her extemporaneous reply was easier, as she had predicted the bulk of the plaintiff's legal argument. Then she rested.

The courtroom held its collective breath as Justice Weir pulled himself up to his full height, such as it was, and prepared to speak. He was known for delivering a forerunner of his final opinion at argument's end. “Ms. Coyne, I will not deny that I entered the courtroom today firm in my conviction that Beazley's motion for summary judgment should be denied, and certainly Ms. Baum's attorney made a persuasive presentation to that end. However, your argument, which took your written words to a higher plane, has caused me to question that conviction. My clerks and I will have work to do before I render judgment.”

As the judge droned on about the procedures and timing—it would be three to four weeks—surrounding his decision, she averted her face from Harlan. Regardless of the judge's favorable forecast, she knew that Harlan would be furious; her argument deviated from the approved script. Not to mention Michael's reaction. Worse, it actually played to the sympathetic nature of Hilda Baum's loss, something they had worked hard to avoid. Yet, in that split second before she began her argument, Nana, the Schwarzes, the Sterns, the Blumers, and all the others like them loomed before her, and Mara felt compelled to make room for her conscience amid all her professional maneuverings.

But she was wrong. Once the judge finished and they all rose for his exit, Harlan slapped her on the back. “You had me scared there for a minute, Mara, with that new opening and all. But you really turned this thing on its head. Nice job, using the natural sympathy for the plaintiff as a weapon against her.”

A wave of nausea assaulted Mara. She had expressed an empathy that any normal human being would experience in the face of Holocaust tragedies, and Harlan assumed she had simply been exploiting the plaintiff's plight. She could understand his fury at her script deviation, but she could not comprehend his utter lack of compassion for the people underlying the case. He seemed devoid of natural emotion altogether.

Watching Mara falter, Michael diverted the conversation. “I believe a congratulatory drink is in order.”

The motley threesome ambled over to O'Neal's, the famous courthouse watering hole. Secure at a table near the bar, the three recapped the day's events. Their analysis of Mara's argument relaxed her. Harlan was well pleased. So was Michael. She tried to let her courtroom victory, with its attendant prizes, triumph over her disgust at Harlan's reaction.

A voice bellowed across the bar, directed at Harlan. “Hey, you old scoundrel, is that you?”

Harlan hoisted himself up and waddled off, greeting with surprising warmth an old colleague or adversary—Mara and Michael could not tell which. But as Mara watched him shuffle across the room, she saw the chubby young boy desperate for friends behind the self-protective adult heft. Lonely then by stigma, lonely now by choice, marrying work rather than a wife, and spawning cases and money rather than a family. For the first time, Mara felt sorry for him and understood why he was so closed off to any emotion.

Michael murmured, “May I invite you back to my place for dinner tonight? It's just a warm-up—I have a real celebration planned for tomorrow evening.” He drew circles on her knee.

She couldn't suppress a little intake of breath, and she looked around to make sure Harlan had not seen the gesture. “I'd like that.”

“Why don't you give me a few hours after we wrap this up? Do you want to meet at my place at eight?”

“Sure,” she whispered, as Harlan returned to the table. After a few more drinks, Mara and Michael made their way to separate cabs, back to their own offices, keeping alive the subterfuge.

seventeen

HAARLEM, 1658

T
HE NEW PARTNERSHIP OF VAN MAES AND MIEREVELD CANNOT
keep up with the blaze of commissions. The craze for their portraits has spread among the town's wealthy burghers, with the burgomaster's imprimatur fanning the flames.

The enterprise doubles its work as it serves two distinct clientele: those who ask for Master Van Maes and those who request Master Miereveld. This suits the master just fine; he continues to drown his grief in labor. For those subjects who seek a traditional likeness, with a simple composition and a few symbolic props conveying the message dictated by the customer, Master Van Maes is unparalleled. For those willing to surrender the conventional, Master Miereveld paints like no other. He uses a dramatic chiaroscuro, so Calvinist in its depiction of the irreconcilable nature of light and dark, heaven and earth, the likes of which few have attempted before. Johannes works without a set framework; he varies brushstroke and combines different composition types—a customary portrayal inside a genre painting, a still life containing a portrait, an architectural view surrounding a subject—to tell poignant stories about the essence of his sitters, and he never allows his subjects to script the outcome.

The master, having long ago fired Hendrick, lets Lukens and Leonaert go as well. Neither has learned to tolerate Johannes's new status. At Johannes's insistence, Pieter Steenwyck joins the partnership as an equal of sorts. More than a journeyman, though not yet an official master, he serves in all capacities: assistant, painter, manager, and comrade—to Johannes, at least.

The master tutors the friends in the business of art. The Guild of Saint Luke, he explains, must be appeased because it controls the art market. Membership and good standing are necessary to sell. Portraits should be the venture's focus because they publicize one's name in social milieus and promote careers. Genre paintings and architectural interiors are fine, and should be undertaken upon request, but they do not garner the same exposure as portraits. Religious paintings must be avoided at all costs, not just because the pictures themselves sin against God but also because they alienate clients of the true faith.

Free from his apprenticeship, Johannes finally has the liberty to travel to his parents, but the commissions are too many and the distance is too great. Instead, his few visits grow scant and then stop. Over the years, the master becomes father as well as partner, and Pieter becomes brother as well as colleague. A family and an enterprise grow together.

As the burgomaster's darlings, the Masters Van Maes and Miereveld, sometimes with Pieter in tow, attend banquets and balls, entertain visits by cultivated gentlemen on connoisseurs' tours of preeminent studios, and regale fellow guild members with insiders' tales of the courtly life in exchange for ribald marketplace gossip. Days are spent in the studio and evenings building business. Only in the late-night hours, when lips are loosened by wine, does the master lament the lost beauty of his young bride and the wasted promise of his infant son. Otherwise, the years pass by idyllically.

         

Then the master dies, and like orphans, Johannes and Pieter unravel in their sorrow. They leave commissions unfinished, supply accounts unpaid, and guild duties untended. The master's extensive holdings, his family home, its luxurious appointments, his inventory of paintings, even his library of engravings used by Johannes and Pieter for training, are auctioned off to pay wine merchant bills and gambling debts—part of the master's secret nightlife of mourning. Clients tending toward Master Van Maes's portraits go elsewhere, and even those favoring Johannes's innovative style chase other, less beleaguered artists. The studio fails.

The enterprise maintains precarious solvency thanks to the largesse of one wealthy patron, the linen merchant Carl Jantzen. He floats the venture, lending money and making advances for future commissions in exchange for preemptive rights over Johannes's output, though he dares not dictate the nature of all of Johannes's pieces. And so Johannes carries on, making painting after painting that are seen by no one but Jantzen and circulated nowhere but Jantzen's private
saal.
The patron is equal measures curse and blessing.

Johannes pores over the account books, drawing on the master's commercial tutelage in an effort to gather enough guilders together to purchase costly pigments and hairs for brushes. He trims all fat, letting journeymen and apprentices go, keeping only himself and Pieter to maintain the studio of Van Maes and Miereveld, a title Johannes continues to use in honor of the master.

As he balances the ledger again and again, hoping to see numbers overlooked and pathways to more projects, Pieter rushes into the studio, throwing open the door with a slam. “What say you to a commission?” he exclaims.

“Another Jantzen commission?” Johannes replies, without even lifting his eyes from the page. He will welcome the money but knows it will never garner more clients.

“No.”

“Who, then?”

“A commission from a new client.”

“Who?”

“The new burgomaster.”

Johannes looks up in wonder, and Pieter greets him with a smirk.

“The new burgomaster? Come now, Pieter.” Johannes grows impatient with his teasing.

“Yes, Johannes, the burgomaster Brecht.”

The two men grin at each other in amazement and relief. As they wander off in search of an inn still open to share a
pasglas,
they speculate about how they were selected. A painting for the new burgomaster would have widespread exposure, and praise from the official would yield commissions from his elite and monied circle. Jantzen would not dare exercise his preemptive rights to the painting; his linen venture depends on the burgomaster's support as well. Perhaps the purgatory of Masters Van Maes and Miereveld is ending.