The Chrysalis (18 page)

“Yes.”

“I agree.”

twenty-two

HAARLEM, 1661

J
OHANNES CLEANS HIS BRUSHES ONE BY ONE. HE TENDS TO
them every day, each time with the same attention and care. He tests the sharpness of his metalpoint. He arranges his palette again, the circle of lead white, topaz, cerise, sapphire, fir, slate, and ebony. All the while, he keeps his eye on the door, waiting for Burgomaster Brecht.

He surveys the studio, then checks the setting again and again. He adjusts the drapery of the tapestry covering the table. He repositions the globe, the porcelain bowl of ripe fruit, and the urn of tulips, all motifs of the burgomaster's wealth, power, and fecundity.

His eyes register the lines of perspective defining the room: in the rays of sunlight, in the right angles of the furniture, in the black-and-white, geometric design of the floor tiles. They guide the destiny of the as yet unbegun painting.

From the soft rumblings in the front entryway and the low murmur of Pieter's voice, Johannes guesses that the burgomaster has made his entrance. Johannes raises himself up to his full height as Pieter leads the official into the studio and prepares to greet his town's austere leader.

A hawkish nose rounds the corner in advance of its prim owner. The burgomaster does not bow but offers his bony hand to Johannes in the royal custom. He has changed the commission from a pendant to a family portrait and now beckons his family to enter the studio. They form a somber sea of black and white: a wife, two sons, and a daughter. The decision to do a family portrait is a boon for Johannes, a rare chance to display his varied talent on each subject and to earn much-needed guilders.

Johannes gives silent thanks that protocol demands he bow low. For this protocol prohibits him from looking directly at the burgomaster's daughter, except as she poses for the portrait. He cannot trust that he will not stare. Her lucency pierces through the black clouds of the family that swirl round her.

The burgomaster permits Johannes to lead his family to their appointed seats and to begin arranging them like flowers in a vase. There is no discussion about the group's composition; the burgomaster seems in accord with Johannes's unconventional approach and surrenders himself as a sitter. The burgomaster need not fear for his portrayal, though, for Johannes has made a promise to Pieter to find the most flattering likeness, to utilize the most conventional arrangement, and to disregard the dark realms of the soul that his brush might find. The studio cannot afford to highlight them.

Johannes settles the burgomaster in the location that accords with his societal position—a central wooden armchair so high of back and so intricately carved that it resembles a throne. His wife takes her place at his side in a lesser version of his seat. He guides the two sons to spots flanking their parents, the elder at his father's side and the younger at his mother's. So alike despite the divergence of years, the brothers favor nothing so much as bookends, necessary bolsters for the family, and assurances that the Brecht tree will grow. Johannes gestures for the daughter to take her traditional place behind her mother.

The burgomaster clears his throat. “Do you know why I chose you for this commission, Master Miereveld?” he asks.

Johannes is unsure how the burgomaster wants him to respond. “No, my lord.”

“My dear friend Jacob Van Dinter knew your Master Van Maes very well. He tells me that, having been raised in the home and studio of the late master, you must be the most Calvinist of painters. That is why I chose you.”

Having shared the nature and breadth of his charity, the burgomaster's conversation is complete. Johannes, cognizant of his place, steps back to assess his handiwork. The composition is somehow unbalanced, wrong. It is the daughter. She is too substantial, too vital to be relegated to the back row. Yet where shall he place her? He assesses her peripherally, afraid to look at her face directly, fearful he will reveal himself. Through a sideways glance, he spies a lock escaping from her scalloped lace cap, the gentle curve of her neck against her stiff ivory collar, the glint of a golden earring, and an impression of her face muted by shadow.

Johannes requests the burgomaster's permission to approach. Afraid to touch the daughter, he nevertheless reaches out to square her shoulders and move her forward, closer to her mother's side. He feels her warm skin through the heavy brocade of her somber dress.

He returns to the safe haven of his easel. Hidden behind his work, Johannes allows himself to take full account of the incandescent Amalia.

         

Johannes sits in the darkening studio, re-creating the day in his mind. Imagining Amalia's face, he rises and walks to the space she inhabited during the long afternoon. He runs his fingers along the chairback where she rested her elegant virginal-player's fingers.

“Did you see her, Pieter?” Johannes asks the footsteps at the back of the studio.

“See who?” Pieter's tone makes clear that he knows the answer.

“The daughter.”

“For a moment only. What of it?”

“Wasn't she luminous?”

“I suppose, for a burgomaster's daughter.” Pieter shakes his head. “To even think of it is folly.”

Pieter scurries off to answer the knock at the front door. He bears a letter upon his return. “For you, Johannes.”

Johannes uses the sharp edge of his palette knife to loosen the sealing wax. He holds the rough material up to the lamplight, poring over it with care. He stops, his hands release, and the creased letter flutters to the floor, covering the carpet of fallen tulip petals.

He stumbles to the door.

“Johannes, what is it? Where are you going?” Pieter cries. But the door slams. Pieter grabs the letter from the floor and recognizes the script of Johannes's father from long ago. Johannes's mother has passed on.

Pieter chases after him, but Johannes manages to wander alone down the inky-black streets. He turns down an alleyway; it seems familiar, and yet he cannot place it. Running his hands along its rough, narrowing walls, he discovers that the path ends. He peers through a gateway into a tiny slit of a window, dimly lit with candles. Pushing the gate aside and passing under a gentle arch to the interior, he recognizes the place, from rumor, from others like it: a Catholic church, its identity as concealed as the allegories in his paintings.

The congregation looks up, startled at his interruption of the Mass. They ready themselves for repercussions for their forbidden worship. But Johannes only stands in the shadows, inhaling the familiar aroma of the incense, a tonic for his heart. He wanders toward the farthest, darkest corner and lowers himself into a pew.

On the altar, the priest raises his arms, offering the bread to God. He pours wine into the chalice, then lifts it high to the Lord. The remembered rituals wash over Johannes.

The priest imparts a farewell blessing:
“Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus sanctus.”
The congregants file out of the little church, staring at the trespasser. The place of worship empty, the priest returns to the altar, replacing the precious chalice and its linen purificator in the sacristy.

“Father, I seek confession,” Johannes whispers.

The priest, a Jesuit by his garb, turns from his sacred task toward Johannes, wary after so much persecution. “Do I know you, my son?”

“No, Father. I am a stranger to you, but not to the Church. It's been many years since my last Mass, but I seek to return.”

“The apostle John tells us that Jesus is a shepherd; he always welcomes lost sheep back to the flock. Where did you worship, my son?”

Johannes describes the house of his furtive childhood worship. From the set of the priest's shoulders, he senses that a test has been passed.

“I would be pleased to hear your confession.”

He leads Johannes to the confessional and notices that Johannes hesitates before the two doors—one for the priest, one for the penitent. “Are you unfamiliar with the sacrament?”

“Yes, Father.”

“But I thought you were a member of the Church.”

“I know the Mass, Father, but I have never taken the sacraments.”

“I see. Well, the sacrament of penance is not one that requires initiation.” He gestures toward the sinner's door.

Closing it tight behind him, Johannes genuflects onto the hard kneeler. The priest lifts the screen separating cleric and repenter, God and man. “Father, I ask forgiveness for breaking the fourth commandment: I have not honored my mother.” Johannes cries.

twenty-three

NEW YORK CITY, PRESENT DAY

M
ARA AND LILLIAN NEEDED TIME AND SECRECY. FIRST, THEY
placed a near-exact copy of the Strasser documents in Michael's safe but kept the original set as well as another working copy. Then Lillian scattered her researchers to the wind in a variety of remote, purportedly urgent activities so that she was left essentially alone.

For Mara, time and seclusion were more difficult to secure. She navigated the minefields of the office, where her every minute was measured and invoiced, and of Michael.

Harlan didn't care a whit for the excuse Mara offered of lengthy depositions on other litigations; he expected her to be as responsive as ever to his needs. Nor were the other partners she served appeased by the pretext of Harlan's demands; they were tired of his tyrannical domination of the associate pool, even if his client load justified it.

So she tore into the office first thing, answering e-mails and calls, drafting briefs, and conducting meetings with furious abandon. Then she darted off to Beazley's under the ruse of a conference or court appearance. She sprinted back to Severin as night fell and Beazley's closed up, to fulfill her shirked duties. In between, she prayed that no Severin partner or client worked too hard to find her.

She worried about running into Sophia. Once Sophia had revealed that there was a limit to her support, she became a threat. Sophia could endanger Mara's progress on
The Chrysalis
either by playing on her feelings of loyalty or by revealing her secret to someone who could stop her. Each time the two passed in the halls, the library, or the elevators, the coldness that had developed between them seemed to keep Sophia at bay. Mara marveled at the drastic change in their relationship since their first day at Severin, when they had come to the orientation knowing no one. After standing alone, like stiff wallflowers at the prom in their new navy suits, they gravitated toward each other and instantly felt such a strong sense of familiarity. Now they were like two ships in the night.

One time, Sophia attempted to thaw the ice. Alone in an empty hall in the chilly midnight hours, she asked Mara if she was continuing with her expedition. She begged Mara to end it, reiterating how far off course Mara had veered. But Mara remained resolute.

Still, despite the difficulties, work presented the least explosive of her challenges. More troubling, she had to disarm Michael upon his return from Europe.

Mara crossed her fingers that she would not run into him in Beazley's hallways or that he would not make an uncharacteristic visit to the library, where she and Lillian camped out. She prayed that the pretext she offered him for her absence—lengthy depositions for another client—would go over better than it had with Harlan.

At night, she created more inventive excuses, and despite her best efforts, they succeeded only for a bit. Besides, while Mara needed time to work with Lillian, the women also needed Michael to believe that his relationship with Mara thrived, or he might start to feel suspicious. So on Saturday, Mara had no choice but to meet Michael in a favorite local French bistro. Despite her promises to herself to remain clearheaded, Mara bolstered herself for the meeting with a few glasses of wine.

As she approached the bar, she forced herself to smile in his direction. He beamed back, and she saw him as if for the first time. Though he was still disarmingly handsome, his grin now seemed the bared teeth of a dog on the heels of his prey.

“God, Mara, I've missed you.” He breathed into her neck. For a moment, she felt herself warm to his touch and sensed her body surrender.

She held on to that sensation throughout the dinner, to keep her façade intact. They chatted about the past days' activities, real and imagined, and she giggled over his jokes and even stroked his hand. All the while, she moved her steak frites round and round on her plate, unable to ignore the leaden feeling in her gut. Her sense of sinking increased as the hour grew late, and she faced her biggest challenge, an act for which she numbed herself with more wine. The only way left to buy the time she and Lillian needed was to let go of her body.

When she awakened, it was still night. She peeled Michael's arm off her and stumbled naked to the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, she saw a stranger, a mercenary, someone who had so cut herself off with drink that she had had sex with a man she despised. A man who had betrayed her. A man who felt no compunction about continuing to deceive countless others, people already victimized, all for his own benefit.

She smelled Michael on her. She had to wash him off. Turning the shower on hot, she stepped in and scrubbed her skin until it was red and raw. As tears streamed down her face, she prayed he would not hear her sobs.

IN THE SHELTER OF BEAZLEY'S LIBRARY, MARA AND LILLIAN
made proficient use of the time they procured: Lillian with the remaining twenty-three provenances and Mara with
The Chrysalis
and Strasser himself.

Black-and-white photographs were propped up on Lillian's library desk like tombstones; among them were a pensive Morisot woman in white before her vanity, a disturbing van Gogh still life of creeping flowers and jagged greenery, and a bleak Sisley winterscape with smoke billowing over the fields as a reminder of the encroaching industrial revolution. Their heartbreaking stories cried out from the provenances Lillian prepared with archaeological patience.

The sound of a chair scraping over the library floor broke the silence.

Mara looked up to see Lillian standing by the French doors, shaking her head as she stared out at the park. “What is it?” Mara asked.

“This poor painting. Worse, its poor owners.”

“Which painting are you talking about?”

“The Rembrandt.”

“You mean the
The Portrait of the Elderly Jew with a Fur Hat
?”

“Do we have any other Rembrandts?”

Mara knew the answer to Lillian's snide rhetorical question. Of course they didn't have any other Rembrandts; the Nazis coveted Rembrandt's work and normally would never have parted with one of his treasures to a dealer like Strasser. Some high Nazi official would have made it the centerpiece of his Berlin office. The subject of this particular Rembrandt, however, made it repugnant to the Nazis.

“No, of course not.”

“It turns out that the Rembrandt was part of the Schultze family collection,” Lillian said, and Mara understood the reference. By the 1940s, the Schultze family, French-Jewish industrialists, had amassed a renowned collection of more than 300 paintings, modern and Impressionist pieces mixed with seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch masters. The Nazis were eager to get their hands on the collection, particularly since it contained the northern European pieces preferred by Hitler and Göring. When they eventually unearthed it from hiding, the Nazis took the loot and the Schultzes' lives. The surviving Schultze relatives had managed to recover 140 of the pieces and were still hunting for the rest.

“Well, the bill of sale that Edward gave me stated that Beazley's bought the Rembrandt from a Belgian art dealer, Alain Wolff, another dealer whose documents were conveniently destroyed in the war. Edward also provided me with a bill of sale demonstrating that Wolff purchased it from Lucien Schultze in the early 1940s. Since the title appeared clear, we sold it to Chad Rosenbluth, who was an important collector of Dutch and Flemish art in the forties, fifties, and sixties. In the seventies, he bequeathed the work to the Reeve Museum of Art, where it hangs on the walls today.”

“What do the Strasser documents show?”

“Well, the bill of sale you found in the safe shows that Beazley's bought the Rembrandt from Strasser. When the Nazis took the Schultze collection, they must've tossed the
Elderly Jew
Rembrandt to Strasser, and Edward must have forged the Wolff-Schultze bill of sale from scratch.”

“Would that explain why the Rembrandt doesn't appear in any of the Nazi art records?”

“Yes, it would.” Lillian's eyes began to well with tears, so she turned away to face the park. “I can't believe Edward made me an accomplice in all of this duplicity.”

“I'm so sorry, Lillian. I know exactly how you feel.” Mara rose and stretched her hand out to Lillian's shoulder in a gesture of consolation.

But her emotion was too raw for Lillian, who shook off Mara's touch and changed the subject by pointing to Mara's table, with its tangle of boxes and papers. “So, what have you learned about
The Chrysalis
or Strasser from that mess?”

Mara walked over to the boxes of still-classified World War II documents and picked up a particularly dog-eared report. “Listen to this. It's from the Compendium of the Art Looting Investigative Unit's Detailed Interrogation Reports: 24 November 1946. ‘With respect to the history of the complex web of art looting and acquisition spun by the Nazis, Kurt Strasser was one of the most important German figures based in a neutral country, Switzerland. He does not seem to be a leading force in the art-looting activities, but he was willing to profit from them. His level of culpability in the events is difficult to ascertain. It may be said, however, that during World War II, Strasser actually made financial gains from the misfortune of others.”

“That sounds like our man.”

“It then goes on to describe just how he perpetrated his schemes.” Mara grew quiet as she reread the report to herself.

“Well?” Lillian faced Mara, her face dry and her curiosity piqued.

“It seems that old Kurt, having been a German soldier in World War I, was something of a German nationalist and Nazi supporter. He even contributed to the Nazi Party from time to time, although he never joined. The report says that he described himself as ‘consultant and expert' to dealers rather than a dealer himself.”

“That's all well and good. But what about his trafficking in stolen art?” Lillian was impatient with Mara's meandering.

“I'm getting to that, but this background is critical. He seems to have had a whole network of German art cronies who were linked to the Nazi Party, connections that stemmed from his own military days. Like his pal Walter Andreas Hofer, who was the ‘director of the art collection of the reichsmarschall.' And he also had a whole network of art dealers in France, Switzerland, and Germany who were known Nazi sympathizers.”

“Come on, Mara.” Lillian was antsy.

“Okay, okay. Strasser's system worked like this. Somehow, he would land upon an old master or a Germanic painting preferred by the Nazis, then go to one of his usual cast of characters, a fellow collaborationist dealer or a Nazi contact like Hofer, and exchange the painting for a number of ‘degenerate' pieces, valuable paintings that the Nazis loathed. Strasser would then transport these paintings to the United States for sale via an American army officer, who could spirit away the paintings courtesy of the military mail.”

“Is that what happened with
The Chrysalis
?”

“I can't say for sure, but it makes sense.
The Chrysalis
's subject must not have been to the Nazis' liking for some reason, despite its lauded Germanic origin—much like
Elderly Jew
—so once they stole it in Nice, they must have palmed it off on Strasser along with some of the ‘degenerate' pieces he really wanted, such as all of those Impressionist paintings you've got propped up on your desk. Strasser then got the paintings to the United States, most likely through that mysterious American officer. And Edward somehow got the paintings from that connection.”

Lillian grew silent. Mara said, “Lillian? I think we should follow up on that.”

“Follow up on what?”

“On this American officer. This report never says anything more about him, not even his name; it just cites another interrogation report. The referenced report isn't here, and I'd really like to track that down.”