The Night Portrait, page 31
Dominic stopped. “Miss?”
Edith raised a white hand to her face and dashed at the tears. “I’m sorry,” she said, sniffing. “It’s nothing.”
“Don’t look like nothing,” said Dominic.
Edith grasped her hair in one hand, pulling it back from her face. “Paintings like this were Heinrich’s favorite.” She pointed to the picture of the sea battle, ships firing cannons into the darkness. “I used to bring him into the museum after hours, and we would walk through the empty galleries together. It was . . . lovely.” A smile broke through even as more tears ran down Edith’s jaw to meet at her neck. “He had little understanding of art, but he always loved the dramatic scenes. He could always see when something was beautiful even if he couldn’t understand why. After I started studying, he would tease me for describing everything so . . . what is the word . . . properly, rightly . . . technically.” She sniffed, half smiling. “He used to say that the best beauty was that which was beautiful without trying.” Her voice cracked on the last syllable. She clasped a hand over her mouth and sobbed.
The American placed his hand awkwardly on her shoulder. Edith struggled to find her voice again. “They destroyed everything.” She looked up at Dominic, no longer trying to stop the tears. “Why did they have to take it all?”
“I wish I knew,” said Dominic. Edith heard his voice tighten and thought she saw tears threaten to well up into his eyes, too.
“My father always taught me that art was one of the things that gave people something to live for, and so we have to preserve it, to share it. I never understood why someone could presume to possess a piece of the past like that—a piece of the past that belongs to all of us.”
Dominic collected himself. “Your father sounds like a smart man. I never thought I might risk my life for a picture. But,” he said, “that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for all these months. I’m glad that at least a few people think it was worthwhile.”
“It was worthwhile, Mr. Bonelli,” she said, almost a whisper. “Dominic.”
For what felt like an eternal stretch of silence, the two of them stood achingly close, with only the sound of Edith trying to catch her breath. She felt a stirring in her gut, a feeling that she had not experienced since before that day when she boarded a train for Kraków. She felt strangely secure in the presence of this American soldier. In an instant, she thought, he might pull her tightly to his chest and there would be no turning back. It would be the most natural thing in the world. Part of her wanted to be caught up in the warmth, the security of his embrace. She knew in her heart that if he did try to embrace her, she would not resist.
Instead, Dominic broke the spell. He took a step backward and she wiped the tears from her cheeks with both palms. Edith followed his cue, separating from him. She watched him lace his fingers behind his back and begin pacing the dark room.
Before the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani on the easel, Dominic stopped. He took a step nearer to the painting and gestured to the white creature poised in Cecilia Gallerani’s arms. “That animal,” he said. “It looks like a rat.”
All the pressure that had built up in the room was suddenly released. Edith turned her head, laughing, a relief from the tears. “It’s an ermine.” She shrugged. “But you’re close. It is a kind of rodent.”
“Why would a rich, pretty girl like that carry a rodent around?”
Edith shook her head. “You are funny, Dominic,” she said, her smile half hidden by a swath of hair. “A white ermine is a symbol of purity. Noble people used to trim their robes with their fur. It’s probably a symbol more than an actual pet, although some ladies probably did keep ferrets as pets.”
“Strange pet,” said Dominic. “Still looks like a rat to me.”
Edith laughed and gave his shoulder a shove. “Go finish your sketch and stop bothering me.”
82
Dominic
Munich, Germany
February 1946
DOMINIC WATCHED EDITH’S FINGERS MOVE TENDERLY OVER the edges of da Vinci’s portrait. Her touch was both gentle and sure as she detached it from its frame, inch by careful inch, painstakingly and utterly focused. When she was concentrating deeply, Dominic noticed that she tended to bite the inside of her bottom lip on one side, folding up one corner of her full pink lips. She made no sound, her hands steady, her gray eyes intent on her work. Dominic admired her unvarnished beauty for a few moments before speaking.
“Is that the original frame?”
“Certainly not.”
Edith did not look up as she gently pressed the last corner from its frame. “Very few pictures from the Italian Renaissance have their own frames unless the wood was originally an integral part of the painted wooden panels.” Straightening, she stepped back. Her chestnut hair curled up at the ends; it tickled her cheek now as she examined her handiwork with a critical eye. “Most likely, da Vinci designed his own frame for this picture; it probably looked different from this one. It must have gotten detached from the picture at some point.”
By now, Edith answered Dominic’s questions automatically. It had taken Dominic weeks to work up the courage to show her one of his sketches. Even then, it was not his personal favorite—a drawing from memory of Sally, not her entire face, but just a part of her that he could not forget: the sharp line of her jaw joining to the smooth curve of her neck. Instead, he showed Edith one of his many reproductions of the enchanting girl da Vinci had painted centuries ago. But ever since, Edith had taken his questions seriously. And he had many.
“What kind of panel was it painted on? How come the solvent cleans the painting, but doesn’t damage the paint? How did you learn to restore art?”
This last one led to more questions, questions that didn’t always have to do with art. At first, Edith’s answers had been evasive. Quick and patient as she was with answers to his multitude of art questions, Edith had been guarded about her personal life, and when she finally did open up, Dominic saw why. Those gray eyes could turn storm-dark with pain when she was asked about her family. He knew that she lived at home with her sick, elderly father; he seemed to be the only family she had left. When Edith had told him about losing her fiancé in Poland, it had nearly broken Dominic’s heart.
As the weeks, then months, ticked by, Dominic was amazed to learn that Edith Becker, this modest conservator, had not only survived as a personal assistant to the man the newspapers were now calling the Butcher of Poland. She had also personally couriered the portrait by Leonardo da Vinci on trains and armored vehicles across Poland and Germany, multiple times.
Dominic sat on one of the tables of the conservation studio. His job as a security guard was a piece of cake after everything he’d encountered in the field. He watched Edith, wearing a brown canvas apron over her plain dress, lay down gold leaf on a frame with a fine brush.
“You were never tempted to run away with it?” he asked. “Keep it for yourself?”
“No.”
“But surely you deserved to keep at least one masterpiece,” he joked. “You worked so hard to keep the picture safe all that time. You put yourself at risk.”
Her smile faded. “All of us have been at risk, Dominic, whether we liked it or not.”
“Fair enough.”
“This might seem strange, coming from someone who has made a career around art, but I have never wanted to own one of these myself. I only wish to study them, to save them. And now, ultimately, to return them to their rightful places. When I get back to my job at the museum, that will be my mission. To return each work to its original owner. Those who are left.”
Dominic wondered what could be said of the shattered continent, the broken world all around him, blackened by the war. It would take more than art to pick up the pieces of the conflict-torn world. But now he knew that art would play a role whose importance could not be denied.
“You yourself should see that. You have played an important role,” she said.
Dominic shrugged. “We only did what we could to save lives. And to save whatever art we could.”
At that moment, the doors behind them opened, and two men entered the room. Dominic jumped from the table and immediately saluted, recognizing one of them as the director of the Central Collecting Point. “Sir!”
“At ease, soldier,” said the director. “I’m looking for the lady.” He nodded at Edith.
Edith set down her brush and wiped her hands on her apron. “Sir?”
“Fräulein Becker is one of the best art restorers we have,” the director told the other man. “She has been working on the altarpiece as well. Edith, this is Major Karol Estreicher. He is a Polish officer who has been working with us to identify works that must be returned to his country.”
Major Estreicher nodded vaguely, but his eyes were not on Edith. They were set on the rising beauty of the great Veit Stoss altarpiece, now disassembled in the shadows.
The room was far fuller now than it had been when Dominic had first come here almost a year ago. Half of it was occupied by the enormous Veit Stoss altarpiece, a hulking shadow in the dark room. The multipaneled altarpiece towered against one wall, a gigantic collection of painted panels and elaborate sculptures, dismantled into several pieces. Dominic imagined that, fully assembled, it might reach some forty feet in height.
Dominic had already spent hours sketching it, and he’d only managed to finish all the figures from one of the panels. He had recognized the Virgin Mary and most of the apostles, but there were other scenes he could not interpret. He had watched conservators and curators swarming around it for weeks, examining the armatures that held it together, studying it and talking about how it might be safely packed for its return transport to Poland. Edith had told him that it was one of the greatest national treasures of Poland. It had always stood behind the high altar of Saint Mary’s Basilica in Kraków before the Nazis took it.
Now, Dominic watched the Polish officer take a few steps closer to the altarpiece as if in a dream, and he reached out with one hand to touch one of the gilded reliefs. His handsome face crumpled, and tears gathered in his eyes. Turning back to Dominic, Edith, and the director of the Collecting Point, he choked out two words in a heavy accent.
“Thank you.”
Then he removed his hat and fell to his knees, staring up at the altarpiece as if he could drink it all in with his eyes. For a few long minutes, the room fell into a silent reverence that Dominic had not encountered since he saw Vicar Stephany fall to his knees before the relics of Charlemagne in the Siegen mine.
Major Estreicher finally gathered himself and rose to standing. He replaced his hat and swallowed. Red-eyed, he walked back to them, his back rigid and resolute. “I am here to take her home,” he said. “I am most humbled and honored to have been selected for the task. It is one of Poland’s greatest treasures. It is one of the few things my country has left. Thank you for taking good care of it all this time.”
Dominic saw Edith’s composure wobble for a second, but she swallowed it down. “Major, I must introduce you to Dominic Bonelli.” She touched his arm. “He is one of our very best guards. He has done a fine job making sure the altarpiece and other pieces of art are kept safe here in Munich. But also, he is responsible for protecting many works of art across Europe. He even helped to rescue the da Vinci from Hans Frank’s private villa.”
Estreicher’s eyes settled on Dominic. Dominic felt the tall Pole study him, running his intelligent-looking eyes over his short frame from head to foot. “Is that so?” he said. “Then I will make sure that you come with us to Poland to return these works, Mister Bonelli. Clearly, you are the right person for the job. Besides, we will need high security on the train.”
Dominic smiled as his heart sank. Home had never seemed so far away.
83
Dominic
Munich, Germany
April 1946
HIS RUCKSACK WAS A ROUGH SURFACE FOR SKETCHING, but Dominic had learned to draw on just about anything—the dirt, his knees, even the stock of his bolt-action rifle. His pencil worked quickly across the paper, pulling together the shape of a young woman. His unsuspecting model stood on the train platform in the crisp chill of the spring morning, the light behind her silhouetting her curves; the gentle slope of her hip in her long wool skirt, the flip of her hair at her chin.
Edith was chewing the inside of her lip again. She clutched a wooden clipboard in her arms, heedless of the cold that tugged at her wool jacket as she checked the shipping manifests for the hoard heading back to Poland. The line of freight cars seemed endless; it stretched into the distance, the sight of the boxy silhouettes still twisting Dominic’s stomach a little. Much as he had enjoyed working at the Central Collecting Point, he was not sorry to be leaving Munich. Hopefully, he was approaching his last stop in Europe.
He turned his pencil sideways a little in a grip Edith had taught him, adding light and shadow to the sketch. It was one of the last blank pages left in his sketchbook. The book contained dozens of copies of Lady with an Ermine, whom he had greeted privately early that morning. She was one of the very few things he would miss about Europe. She was not, however, the only lady he knew he would be missing, a thought that he pushed aside.
Instead, he thought of the letter from Sally that he kept tucked in his shirt pocket, close to his heart. The best thing about the end of the war so far was the mail running again. He had sent so many drawings to Sally, showing her his life in charcoal and paper; drawings of the men, the buildings, and mostly, the art. Tucking each of them neatly into an envelope, writing his home address on them and sending them back to America felt like perhaps home was real after all. Like it hadn’t just been a happy dream in the past that he’d woken up from into a chilly and inhospitable real world, where he was shunted from place to place on the whim of those in command.
He was pleased to be leaving Munich, but every part of him screamed that he was heading in the wrong direction. Instead of westward and home, this train was taking him east—to Poland, with a line of freight cars that would return the nation’s treasures. He knew from the frantic script and teardrop stains on the paper that Sally was suffering just as much as he was.
Dominic took one last look at the quick study he had made of Edith. He wanted to remember her like this: smart, efficient, naturally beautiful. He folded it and held it in one hand as he tucked the sketchbook neatly into his pack with the other.
Leaning against a wall in the shadows of the train station, he watched as workers carried the last few items once held at the former Nazi headquarters. They had spent days carefully packing up the paintings, sculptures, books, and manuscripts into padded crates and loading them tenderly into the train cars. All these were treasures that the Nazis had cruelly robbed Poland of; all of them were headed back home. Dominic wished he could be headed home, too.
It had been almost two years since he’d landed on the beach at Normandy. Cecilia would be running around by now. He had missed all that: her first words, her first steps, her development from tiny baby to a little human being with her own thoughts and ideas and expressions. With a pang, he realized he had never heard his almost three-year-old daughter speak. He closed his eyes tightly, remembering the words of Sally’s last letter to him.
Cecilia asked when Daddy was coming home yesterday, she had written. I can’t wait to have an answer for her.
Dominic looked up. The wind caught at Edith’s skirt, pressing it against her shapely figure; he allowed his eye to run down the curve of her hip. It was time to let her go, to leave her here in her homeland; she wanted life to return to normal just as much as he did. Major Estreicher approached her on the loading dock, carrying a manifest of his own. They consulted each other’s papers and nodded to each other. Dominic knew that that was his signal to go. Major Estreicher turned and beckoned to him, then headed to the train to give the go-ahead for departure.
Dominic checked around himself to ensure none of the pages had fallen out of his sketchbook and approached the train. Edith stood on the loading dock, the manifest hanging from her hand. Suddenly the look in her eyes was desolate as she watched him coming nearer. She stood forlorn and alone.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Cecilia will be in good hands. You can trust me.”
“I already trust you with Cecilia,” she said. “You saved her once. I know you will get her home.”
Dominic’s duffel bag had already been loaded on the train. He glanced west once before turning to Edith. For a few long moments, the two stood in awkward silence. At a loss for words, Dominic finally held out the folded sketch in his hand.
She took it from him, unfolded it, and studied it. She always had something to say about his sketches; for every compliment there was a balancing criticism, pushing him to do better. But not today. She smiled up at him with tears in the corners of her eyes, trapped by the soft prison of her lashes.
“It’s perfect,” she said.
She had been his friend in a dark time. But Dominic’s heart was yearning to be back home, to a girl who had been raising two babies without him, a girl who had been waiting patiently for years. He held out his hand to Edith and watched her smile turn sad.
“Travel safely, soldier,” she said. “I hope you get home to your wife and your daughters soon.” Then, Edith reached into the pocket of her coat and produced a small, brand-new pad of paper. “Here’s a little something to occupy you on the train,” she said. “You should keep drawing, you know.”
Dominic thought his voice would fail him if he spoke now. So he just nodded and smiled at Edith. Then he turned away, jumping up into the train as the whistle blew. As it rattled away down the track, the rhythmic clank and chuck of its pistons driving them ever farther, his last impression of Munich was of Edith’s silhouette on the train platform. She looked just as he had found her on a Bavarian hilltop all those months ago. All alone. Strong. And brave.
