Under the Egg (7 page)

The waitress came back and placed a slice of pie, a generous slice of warm, flaky pie overstuffed with glistening cherries, in front of Bodhi.

I rattled my free ice cubes. “Well, I've been doing a lot of research, too. Listen to this.” I laid out the whole conversation with Sanjiv, strengthening my grasp on the science as I reviewed it point by point. The more I talked, the more convinced I became.

Bodhi looked skeptical. “No offense to Sanjiv, but do you think Cadwalader's is going to accept expert testimony from the Toasty Nuts guy?”

“Who cares what they think? If the bottom layer of oil paint is as old as Sanjiv says it is, we know Jack didn't paint it himself. It's not a fake. Gemma was wrong. About that, at least.”

“Welllll, maybe.” Bodhi chewed thoughtfully, then stuffed another bite of pie in her mouth while I gnawed my ice cubes. “I would want to see an infrared reflectogram before I came to any conclusions. And what about the missing provenance? Did you find any reference to the painting, any list of former owners?”

The atmosphere in the booth shifted, and separated by the formica table, we suddenly felt more like rivals than teammates.

“What's going on?” I said, maybe a bit too defensively. “You're the one who said, ‘Oh, this thing's worth thirty-seven million.'”

“That's before I did my research. Based on the evidence, I think it's pretty unlikely that you're going to suddenly find a Raphael or a Leonardo or even a Fra Angelico”—now she knew about Fra Angelico?—“just sitting around your house. I mean, these were big-time artists. They didn't just go around misplacing paintings.”

“You sound like Gemma.” Now I was the one spitting out her name.

“Well, that's a low blow,” said Bodhi calmly. “I'm just telling you what my research is showing, and it's pointing—”

“Yes, and I'm telling you what
my
research is showing. And my research hasn't been spent on”—I hitched my chin at the phone cradled in her palm—“that thing. It's been spent
really
looking at
real
paintings by
real
painters in
real
museums. You've never even
seen
a Raphael. A real one, I mean,”

“And you have?”

“Sure, plenty of them. At the National Gallery. At the Frick. At the Met—”

“Okay, show me then.” Bodhi's fork clattered to the table.

“Show you what?”

“A real Raphael. The Met's here in New York, right?” She threw some bills on the table, then scooted out of the booth, smearing a line of cherry juice across her white button-down. “Let's go check it out.”

“What, right now?”

“Why not?” Bodhi looked down at me with a smirk. “Unless you've got something else on your agenda today?”

She knew I didn't. With one last look at the half-finished pie on the table, I slid out of the booth and followed Bodhi out the door.

O
ur debate-filled subway ride ($317.50) was interrupted by two separate mariachi bands, and an hour later we arrived at the Met. I wanted to head straight for the Italian Renaissance gallery, but Bodhi stood in the middle of the marbled main hall and declared that she wanted to see everything.

“Everything?” My head swiveled around to take in the North, South, and West entrances and wobbled briefly to imagine what lay behind them. “That would take weeks. Months even. I came here every single week, sometimes twice or even three times a week, with my grandfather, and even
I
haven't seen everything.”

“Well then, we'd better get going.”

I led Bodhi to the admissions desk, where I handed over my usual penny ($317.49) and Bodhi put the full, recommended amount on her Platinum Card. We affixed the green metal “M” buttons to our collars and headed straight for the perennial tourist favorite, the Temple of Dendur.

Bodhi was fascinated by the temple. She insisted on viewing it from every angle, she snapped photos of the hieroglyphics and tried to decode them via an app she downloaded then and there. She was particularly taken with the eighteenth-century graffiti. “OnDa1 would not believe this!” she said as she took another photo and sent it off to her rapper friend. “We did a whole unit on graffiti trends as part of my history of hip-hop study.”

When she finally grew tired of the temple, she wandered over to the wishing pool and flipped in a coin.

“Guess what I wished for?”

“I don't know, what?”

“Nah, I can't tell you or it won't come true.” She arranged her braids behind her ears. “Okay, what's next?”

It seemed that the research Bodhi had performed over her vacation had not only made her a self-styled expert on art authentication, but had also sparked a love of art in general.

Bodhi's enthusiasm was infectious, and I found myself racing to show her all my favorite spots in the museum. The room-sized optical illusion of the Gubbio Studiolo. The Chinese garden. The giant Buddha and his outsized sense of peace. The psychedelic “figure five in gold.” The Islamic prayer niche, like a stained-glass window in tiles, festooned with actual prayers. The two self-portraits of French women painters, canvases hung side by side, shown at their craft in the dead middle of a museum full of craftsmen. Crafts
men
.

Bodhi developed her own way to experience the museum. For example, taking on the pose of a Greek statue and waiting for a tourist to bump into you. Or loudly browsing the galleries like a rich housewife. (“How much for the Warhol? Nah, I'll wait for the sales.”) She invented an elaborate scavenger hunt that involved finding items in paintings whose first letters spelled out a secret message. And came up with a game called Attack!, which involved nothing more than hiding behind the suits of armor and jumping out to yell “Attack!” at each other.

“Hey, girls, knock it off! This is a museum, not a playground.”

I recognized the Trinidadian accent and turned around to see Bernadette, one of the guards who'd worked with my grandfather.

“Theo, is that you? Come over here and give me some sugar, girl.”

Bernadette wrapped me in a warm embrace, her buttons cold against my cheek, like Jack's.

“If I'd known it was you, I wouldn't have talked so rough. But you got to keep it quiet. The muckety-mucks are punchy these days.”

“How come?”

“I'll tell you how come.” Bernadette looked around and then leaned in. “A painting's been stolen.”

Bodhi and I froze.

“Really?” I whispered. “When did that happen?”

Bernadette savored the piece of news in her mouth like a slowly melting chocolate. “About a month ago. Maybe even longer. They don't really know, you see. The painting had been sent down to storage a while back, but when they went to collect it for some exhibition—poof!—it was gone.”

“Poof, huh? Just like that?” Bodhi looked at me.

“Just like that. So now they don't want no funny business in the galleries. You girls keep it down, you hear me? And Theo, baby girl, don't you be a stranger. I miss your grandpa. He was a tough old nut, but he was a good nut, still.”

• • •

Bernadette's news had a sobering effect on us, and without exchanging a word, Bodhi and I both directed our feet to the task at hand.

In the Met's Italian Renaissance rooms, we passed Ghirlandaios and Mantegnas and Botticellis and soon found ourselves in front of the Met's only resident Raphael, the
Colonna Altarpiece

We stood there for quite a while, frozen in a hushed awe.

“Wow,” Bodhi finally murmured.

“Yeah,” I responded.

“It's so . . .”

“Yeah, so . . .”

“So . . .”

“So . . .”

“Eh,” Bodhi finally pronounced.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Eh.”

“I mean, it's—”

“Beautiful,” I nodded.

“And—”

“Refined.”

“And—”

“Ethereal.”

“I was going to say boring,” said Bodhi. “But I can see ethereal.”

“It's just that
our
painting,” by now it was known as ours, “is so—”

“Deep,” mused Bodhi.

“And—”

“Sad.”

“And—”

“Real.”

“I was going to say complexly nuanced,” I said, retrieving a phrase from some book somewhere. “But real is right.”

We fell into silence again.

“I know you don't want to hear this,” Bodhi finally ventured gently. “But I know you see it, too. The painting in your attic does not look like this one.”

I readjusted the strap of my sweater bag, which was digging into my shoulder. “I know. But—”

“But nothing.” Bodhi pointed at the altarpiece, with its serene Madonna and bouncing baby Jesus and John the Baptist, and its grave and pious saints. “This is, you know, so still and . . . well, flawless. Ours has . . . edge?”

“Soul,” I corrected her.

“Yeah, soul,” Bodhi nodded.

Bodhi was right.

But I knew I was, too.

“You know, this altarpiece is a perfect example of something that's been bothering me.” I plunked myself in the middle of the floor and laid out the books from my bag. “Stylistically, our painting is a match. The brushwork, the coloring—the technical aspects, Jack would call them, the ways that the painter actually designed the painting and applied the paint. They look just like this altarpiece.” I flipped around the books until I found reproductions of Raphael's famous Madonna and Child compositions, side by side. “But in tone, it's no match at all. See these Madonnas? Just like the altarpiece, right? They're perfect. They're perfectly loving, perfectly peaceful—”

“Perfectly boring,” said Bodhi, who was now crouching next to me.

“Well, you could say that. They're idealized, is what they are. They aren't meant to look like real people. They're meant to be—what's the word?—inaccessible. They're supposed to be otherworldy—literally from another world.”

“You mean heaven?”

“Exactly.” I grabbed another book out of my bag. “Now look at this one. This painting is by Raphael, too. It's a noblewoman named,” I checked the bottom of the page, “Elisabetta Gonzaga.”

The face looking out from the book seemed to regard us with disdain, her lids lowered, not even a hint of a smile on her lips.

Bodhi whistled. “She looks like a real—”

“I know. Doesn't she look like someone you would actually meet?”

“She looks like someone I would avoid.”

“Right! You get a sense of her whole personality, warts and all. Or look at this one.”

I found an ancient, bearded man, cloaked in red.

“That's one craggy dude,” offered Bodhi.

“That's Pope Julius II, Raphael's most important patron. He died shortly after the portrait was painted.”

“Are you sure he didn't die
while
the portrait was painted?”

“He looks exhausted, right? Beaten down. Not what you'd expect in a portrait of the most powerful man in the world.

“Or look at this one.” I showed Bodhi a fat man whose wandering eye was only somewhat masked by the way he gazed up at heaven. “Raphael didn't ‘fix' any of these people's flaws. He presented them as they were. Not perfect, just human.”

“Well, it's no wonder they all look like real people.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jeesh, who's the art expert now?” Bodhi cocked her head and looked at me. “They
are
real people. All of these paintings you just showed me are portraits.”

Of course. They weren't models, airbrushed into saints and angels. They were real people. These were portraits.

So did that mean that our painting was also—

“Why, can this be the fair Theodora Tenpenny squatting in our midst?”

Bodhi and I looked up to find a tall but stooped elderly man in a starched linen suit leaning over us, his hands clasped around a silver-topped cane.

“Mr. Randolph!” I pulled Bodhi to her feet and made her stick out her hand. “Hi! I was just showing my friend Bodhi here the wing.”

“How do you do, Miss Brody?” The man shook her hand importantly, but before Bodhi could correct him, he turned to me with his arms out. “Now, Theodora, who is this ‘Mr. Randolph'? How many times do I have to tell you to call me Uncle Lydon?”

I submitted to a limp-armed hug, my face crushing the fresh pink carnation in his lapel. As the head curator for the European Paintings collection, Lydon Randolph had been Jack's boss at the museum. But for some reason, Lydon preferred to think of himself as an important patron of Jack's career, providing the day job that allowed him to keep painting.

As I retreated from the hug, Lydon caught my hand in his. “My sweet Theodora,” he purred in the nurtured accent of the displaced Southern aristocrat, “how sorry I was to hear of your grandfather's passing.”

I thought back to that stain on Spinney Street, and the term, “passing,” didn't seem to capture it.

“He was as much a fixture of this wing as a Rembrandt. As were you, come to think of it.” He dropped my hand and gestured at the marble floor. “I can't tell you the number of times I found you in just that position, hunched over your crayons. But no more crayons, I see,” he said, his eye landing on one of the books at my feet. He leaned over with effort, plucking up the volume while using his cane for balance. “
The People and Portraits of Raffaello Sanzio,
eh? An excellent resource, though better in the original Italian.” He handed the book back to me. “A bit of light summer reading?”

I stuffed the book in my bag and quickly gathered up the rest of the books scattered on the floor. “Well, like I said, I was just showing my friend Bodhi here around.” I turned to Bodhi and raised my eyebrows in warning. “Mr. Randolph—I mean, um, Uncle Lydon—is the head curator for the European Paintings wing,” I said emphatically.

“Emeritus,” Lydon proffered with a gracious bow.

“What does that mean?” Bodhi picked at a mosquito bite.

“In layman's terms, my dear,” Lydon tried the same bow again, “retired.”

“So why are you here?”

Lydon coughed up the faint laugh that adults use when they actually find you annoying. “Yes, well, one of many perks of five decades' employment at the Metropolitan Museum is an office onsite for ongoing research and mentorship.”

Bodhi's face lit up, and I knew immediately that no good could come from whatever she was going to say.

“Fifty years? That's a long time. You must know everything about this place.”

He chuckled. “Well, I'm not sure that my oversight would extend to—”

“Like, you would know if a painting had gone missing or something.”

I raised my eyebrows at Bodhi and again attempted to telegraph S-H-U-T U-P.

Lydon drew up his lean frame a bit. “The Metropolitan Museum has not had a painting stolen since its opening in 1872. Now the Gardner Museum in Boston, there's a fascinating tale—”

“That's not what I heard.”

Lydon looked silently at Bodhi, then even longer at me. “I beg your pardon?”

“I heard”—Bodhi shot me what she must have thought was a secret wink—“
we
heard that you're missing a painting. Any ideas what happened to it?”

With a glance around the room, Lydon snapped, “Come with me, girls,” and turned on the heel of his freshly polished shoe, striding briskly—more briskly than you would expect of a man with a cane—out of the gallery.

“What are you doing?” I hissed to Bodhi as I trotted behind him, just out of earshot.

“We can tease out how much he knows!” Bodhi hissed back.

“It doesn't matter what he knows. Now he's going to know how much we know!”

“Whoops, didn't think about that.” She shrugged. “Sorry.”

We followed Lydon through galleries, elevators, semi-hidden doorways, and institutional-looking corridors, until we arrived at a book-lined office with a sweeping view of Central Park and Lydon's name in brass on the door.

Lydon gestured for us to sit in two straight-backed chairs and took his place behind an imposing mahogany desk.

“Now, girls,” he produced a fountain pen and rested it under his chin with a composed smile, “what's all this about?”

I put my hand firmly on Bodhi's arm before she could speak. “Nothing. We just overheard some guards talking about a missing painting. That's all.”

Lydon shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Well, then, you know better than to believe rumors.”

“Sure, yes, just a rumor,” I agreed quickly.

“People—employees especially—like to gossip. Turn a minor misunderstanding into something notable, something salacious.”