“Let him come,” he said. “I’m ready for him.”
“I’d like to avoid a confrontation,” she said. “If anyone comes to the door, we run out the back.”
He gave her a wry smile. “You run, I’ll cover you. What d’ you mean the thief didn’t know any better?”
“These paintings aren’t real. They’re good reproductions, but not valuable.”
Nesha shrugged. “I don’t know anything about art. I’m going to take a look around.” He disappeared into one of the bedrooms.
Suddenly tired, she leaned against the small round table in the centre of the dining-room. “I don’t understand any of it,” she said out loud to herself. Sitting down, she lay one arm along the cool shiny surface of the burled wood. What exquisite taste he had for a man who repulsed her.
She looked up at the drawings she hadn’t seen before on the wall opposite. They were religious sketches of saints and angels, possibly studies drawn before a painting in oil. She tried to cross one leg over the other under the table, but there wasn’t enough room beneath the wooden apron skirting the tabletop. Her leg had elicited a dull thud from below, making it apparent that a panel closed off the bottom of the apron. Then where was the drawer? There was more than enough room for a drawer, but there was no drawer. She poked her head beneath: there were no openings, no latches, no knobs. What was she looking for?
She knocked the flat of her fingers gently against the underside of the table, like somebody’s belly. Hollow. She moved her fingers further to the left. Hollow. She moved to the right. Not hollow. She struck it again. The table resonated. Definitely not hollow. Something was inside that section of the table. She bent down on one knee to examine the apron. It was divided into four quadrants, each ending with a seam at one of the legs.
She pulled at the quadrant that echoed with its elusive contents. No movement. Maybe she was wrong. She pried around its edges trying to loosen any joints. She pulled at it again. Nothing. This time she took off her shoe and banged it around underneath the apron.
Nesha emerged from the bedroom. “Are you crazy?” he said under his breath. “There might be people upstairs.”
Rebecca tugged at the quadrant of wood once more. To her surprise it pulled out easily. Inside lay an album of some kind. Nesha came closer as she lifted the plastic cover. Each page contained two plastic sleeves for photos, one above the other, set into a wire spiral. The first photo was a likeness of a Claude Monet painting of lilies. A very good likeness, the swirling violets and greens approximating summer in Giverny. Inserted into the sleeve below was a typewritten card: Alfonso Hauptmann, Avenida Arboles, 124, Buenos Aires, 467-9342. She flipped to the next page. A photo of a crowd scene by Renoir. The women in hooped skirts and flounced hats, the men cavalier in their boaters. The card below read: Victor Ocampo, Calle Cordoba, 56, Buenos Aires, 921-0743.
“This is a waste of time,” Nesha said impatiently, and returned to his search through the bedrooms.
She kept flipping the plastic-sheathed photos, mesmerized by the beauty of the paintings. What could such a catalogue mean and why was he hiding it? All the addresses on the cards were from South America. Then she came upon an extraordinary picture. It was labelled Portrait of a Young Man, by Raphael. Good God, she thought. Raphael. They really picked the best ones. The painting was a tease — a young nobleman with dark hair curling over shoulders that blended, in the shadows of the photo, into a rich robe. Wistful eyes beneath perfect feminine brows watched sideways, averted from the viewer. She froze when she read the card below: Max Vogel, 103 Northgate Cres., Toronto, Ontario.
How did Vogel know Feldberg? And what did this picture mean? She pried the photo and address card from their plastic sleeves. Then she replaced the catalogue into the quadrant of wooden apron beneath the table and pushed it back into place as quietly as she could.
She knew a little about Raphael from her undergrad art history courses, that he was overshadowed in the Italian Renaissance by the giants da Vinci and Michelangelo. He was famous for his dewy, graceful Madonnas, but it was his secular portraits that lingered in the memory for the depth of their feeling.
Had she seen this particular portrait before? She approached the oversized art book that lay on Feldberg’s coffee table. It was a good compendium of art history from prehistoric times to the present. She looked up Raphael in the index at the back. There was reference to a Portrait of a Young Man in chapter eight. She quickly turned to the page where the title was narrowed down to Portrait of Bindo Altoviti. The arrogant young man there looked quizzically over his shoulder, his neck adorned with reddish-blonde hair. The elegant narrow shape of the head was similar but the two young men were miles apart in character. This one lived at the National Gallery in Washington. Who knew how many portraits of young men Raphael had painted. What was she looking for anyway? She’d have to wait to speak to Vogel.
She crept into the small bedroom at the front of the flat, listening for sudden noises. A bare clothes dummy stood in one corner, a tiny delicate size that probably suited both Chana and Goldie. There were two dressers, a wooden chair, its seat covered with a homemade cushion, and a table that looked like it had been a stand for Chana’s sewing machine.
Rebecca began to open the drawers of one of the dressers, painstaking in her attempt at silence. Cuts of neatly folded fabric lay stored inside, awaiting the seamstress. Each time Rebecca made a noise, she stopped and listened, waiting for someone to come through the door and discover them.
The top drawer of the other dresser was filled with spools of thread of all shades. In one corner of the drawer lay a cookie tin. She opened it, thinking to find sewing paraphernalia. Instead, she found a mound of pale blue airmail envelopes, much like the ones she had confiscated from Goldie’s apartment. Only these were from Goldie to Chana. Rebecca pulled out the top letter. No use. She had to find Nesha.
She tiptoed toward the light in Feldberg’s bedroom. With each creak, she stopped and waited, adrenaline on alert. The room was empty. The bed floated beneath a down-filled black and blue duvet, its headboard and dresser a rich mahogany. There was very little surface clutter, everything orderly.
She heard a sudden scrape of metal on metal coming from the den. When she got there, Nesha stood near the open drawer of a small desk, absorbed in some kind of ledger. He’d broken the lock.
“Could you read this?” she said, holding a page in front of his face.
When he looked up his eyes were distant, but he took the page from her. His lips began to move silently. “This is an old letter Goldie wrote to her sister,” he replied, still reading. “Nostalgic, but not useful, I think.”
“Could you...?” Rebecca said.
He glanced at her briefly, then began. ‘”Chanele, I’m so glad you are still in touch with our cousin in California. Our dear cousin. How strange and wonderful to think of someone who brings to mind our life from so long ago. Memories both painful and happy. Happy because life at home was good; Mother, Father, our sisters and brothers, all happy memories of those poor sweet souls. What I can’t bear to think about is leaving them behind, never seeing them again. The grief never goes away. It is good to know there is one last person still living who has some connection to our dear family.’”
Rebecca felt a trembling come over her. She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “It doesn’t sound like the same person. She’s so articulate in Polish. I never knew that side of her. I never really knew her at all. It was always such a struggle for her to communicate in English.” She felt her eyes tear over, quickly forced herself past the moment, unwilling to lose control in front of a stranger.
“What about the others?” she said, pulling out a few of the letters.
He scanned them quickly. “Same kind of thing. Domestic details. Goldie telling her she