Lost Children

by Willa Bergman

  It was over two years ago that we had to pack all this up and as we start to go through it all I wonder why we bothered keeping half of it. The first thing I open is a box full of old, moth-ridden dresses. As we work through the other boxes it doesn’t get much better. There’s a box of old photos which is a nice nostalgic find but doesn’t help us. In another box there’s a small collection of books (a couple of novels, one on Buddhism and another on yoga), an old set of cutlery for some unknown reason, a small music box which plays Beethoven’s Fur Elise, a couple of pieces of cheap jewellery and a pair of quite nice looking copper candle holders.

  We keep on looking but as we work through more and more of the boxes I begin to think this is a lost cause. The problem is we don’t even know what it is we’re looking for.

  I’m just about ready to give up when finally I come across something which I think might be useful. At the bottom of one of the boxes there is a small black leather bound notebook that’s worn around the edges. I take it out and flick through the pages. It’s some sort of notebook that my mother has filled with all kinds of different things. There are mundane lists of errands to do, next to sketches of Jack and I when we were kids, next to small watercolour landscapes she’s painted from our time in France. There are pages of philosophical ramblings which she seems to have written in some sort of Joycean stream of consciousness. And amongst all this miscellany there also seem to be words she’s written akin to journal entries, selectively entered, without any dates, when she had something she wanted to write about. I can’t work out exactly when she started writing it but there’s definitely things in it from when we were still in France.

  There are pages and pages of notes in it and it’s quite possible none of it makes any mention of the painting, but it’s the only thing I’ve found that has looked like it could be in any way helpful to us, so I decide to take it upstairs and settle in for a long read. Jack says he’ll keep looking through the last of the boxes while I get started on the notebook, which I’m more than happy to leave him to. I take the notebook, the Fur Elise music box and the copper candle holders (to see if I can get a few more home comforts past the room décor police) and head back upstairs.

  When I’m back in daylight with the good weather outside I decide it would be nice for my mother to get out into the open air, so I put her in a wheelchair and we head towards the nearest park which is just a couple of minutes’ walk away. I find us a quiet spot in the shade of a large oak tree and make us comfortable. A few teenagers are kicking a ball about nearby but we otherwise have the park to ourselves.

  As I start to go through the notebook it feels strange to be reading my mother’s private thoughts, and even stranger to be doing it with her sitting next to me. But if she’s not able or willing to help me find the painting herself then this is the only option I have. And she probably read my diary when I was a kid so maybe this is karma.

  The notebook is a mess. A lot of the thoughts in it are garbled non-sequiturs and the parts that aren’t I can’t read half of it because of my mother’s scrawled handwriting. Her thoughts and words are mixed, sometimes sad and sometimes playful. I find myself laughing out loud at a poem she’s written about her gaining weight, based on Hamlet’s ‘what a piece of work is a man’ speech which she starts with ‘I have of late but wherefore I know not gained all this girth’. She always had a nice way with words. There are some oblique references to the abuse she suffered from Arnaud but she never speaks about it directly. It’s like she can’t even bring herself to be open about it in her own diary.

  After the better part of an hour of reading I come to a passage I have to re-read several times. My eyes tear up as I read it.

  Still don’t feel any better. Too many things I need to get done. After everything that’s happened I’m just living day to day now. I can’t look any further ahead than that. And I can’t forgive myself for what’s happened.

  I’ve failed Eloise and Jack. When it came down to it I just wasn’t strong enough. I just hope that this is at least something I can do. I pray Carlos can help us.

  I have to go over and give her another hug. The words aren’t much but it feels like they’re something. What she’s saying ‘after everything that’s happened’ and the way it’s written, she must have written it shortly after we left France. I don’t know who Carlos is though. Maybe she sold the painting to him. Or maybe he helped her sell it, my mother was no master art thief and she wouldn’t have known the first thing about how to sell a stolen painting. Or maybe it’s nothing to do with the painting. I can’t be certain, but what she’s written fits with the timeline I’ve been building in my head, when she left us after France for those couple of weeks.

  I keep reading for another hour but I don’t find anything more. Begrudgingly I accept this is all I’m going to get and start packing things up to head back to the care home. I had hoped for more, but I’ve worked through less than half the notebook, it’s more than possible there’s something in there that’s going to send me in the right direction. But the day has left me feeling empty. Today was a day I needed my mother, but she wasn’t there. Most days when I visit her I can close my eyes to that fact, her physical presence and being able to interact with her in some way is enough. But today I needed to ask her something and she couldn’t help me, I can’t escape that fact. The body is still there but the soul is not. My mind goes back to the empty painting frame in the basement, it seems an apt metaphor.

  Jack is waiting in our mother’s room, his energies expended from the search. He says he didn’t find anything of interest in the remaining boxes he looked through. He asks me if I found anything in the notebook. I show him the only thing I have for my efforts, the passage about Carlos. I hand him the notebook and he reads it carefully.

  “It’s not much, but I think she must have written it shortly after we left France." I tell him.

  When he finishes he looks up at me and says, “I know who Carlos is.”

  “What? Who is he?” I say in stuttered shock.

  “He came to visit us in France a couple of times. He was one of Mum’s friends from when she was travelling around Europe. He was from Portugal I think, about her age, quite short, long black hair.”

  “I don’t remember him. What else can you remember?”

  “I don’t know, nothing. It was a long time ago and I must have been, like, ten. Why can’t you remember him?”

  I don’t know why. There were so many people that came to visit us over the years. But if Jack remembers him I don’t know why I don’t. I don’t get to dwell on the question though as an idea pops into my head.

  “The photos in the basement, maybe she has a picture of him.”

  We hurry back down to the basement and retrieve the box of old photos and bring it up to her room. There’s a good few hundred photos but they’re just about all from after France (the result of both a desire to forget and the need to keep as little evidence of our past as possible).

  I can filter through some of the photos but it’s Jack who has to see them. He looks carefully through each of the photos but he can’t see the man. My initial excitement from Jack knowing who Carlos is, is starting to fade. I’m not sure if him recognising the name in the notebook actually helps us at all.

  Deflated I go over and slump into the armchair in the corner taking the small music box from the dresser next to me. I hold it in my lap, winding the mechanism. The small metal cylinder starts to rotate and begins to play its spooky little tune. The box has some quite ornate detailing carved into it. It’s a pretty little thing but it’s worn with age. The exterior is scratched quite deeply in a couple of places and the inner lining of the lid is coming loose in one of the corners. I thumb at the lining to see if I can make it stick but as I do so I can see there’s a small white corner of something poking out from behind it. I pick at it a little and realise that behind the lining there’s an old Polaroid photograph. I pull down the lining and take out the photo to look at it. Its colours have f
aded with time but it’s a picture of my mother with a man I don’t recognise. It must have been taken after we’d left France because her hair is cut into a severe bob and she’s dyed it black. She did that the second night we arrived in Alleghe, I think as some sort of attempt at a disguise.

  As soon as I see the photograph my mind starts racing. Maybe this is him, maybe this is Carlos. I rush over to Jack to show him the picture.

  “Is this him? Is this Carlos?” I ask him with eager expectation.

  “Yes, that’s him!” He says excitedly. “Where did you find it?”

  “It was hidden in the back panel of the music box we found in her things.”

  The man looks like he’s in his forties in the picture, with long black hair and he looks short standing next to our mother, just like Jack had said.

  We both look at the photo to see what we can make of it. They’re standing outside on a street somewhere, just the two of them. I can’t tell where it is but it looks like they’re in America. I’m not quite sure what makes me think it’s America; there’s nothing particularly distinctive about the street they’re standing on, there aren’t any street signs or cars or anything like that, but it just somehow looks like they’re in the US. Whoever took the photo was standing quite far away from them for some reason given it’s just a picture of the two of them, but as a result you can see a bit more of the buildings behind them and they’re big. They look like they’re in that plus sized style of all things American. There’s a red brick building which looks like it might be one of those old factory buildings and just in the corner out of shot there’s something that looks like black wrought iron, maybe one of those external staircases a lot of the older US buildings have to have.

  “Do you think it’s America?” I ask.

  “It looks like it. If she went to America to sell the painting, she probably went to New York, right? I don’t know much about the art world, probably about as much as she did, and that’s where I’d go if I was trying to sell it.”

  “That’s not good enough. Maybe it is New York, but it could also be one of twenty other cities in America. I’m not even certain it’s America. Why couldn’t it be Vancouver or Toronto?”

  “Let me see the picture again.”

  He takes the photo from me and looks at it intently for a few moments. He looks up and stares in silence briefly before he takes out his phone and seems to do a quick search for something.

  “There you go, it’s New York.” He says.

  “What?”

  “You can see there’s a bit of a fire hydrant in the bottom left hand corner of the picture. US cities all have different styles of fire hydrant. That’s a New York fire hydrant.”

  He shows me his web search of ‘Manhattan fire hydrants’ and then a few others for Chicago, Boston and Atlanta. I don’t believe him and search for more: Los Angeles, New Orleans, Baltimore and San Francisco. They’re all different. He’s right.

  “You’re right… great job.” I say somewhat patronisingly.

  “You don’t need to sound quite so surprised.”

  I get more excited still though by our next realisation. This photo must have been taken in those few weeks when our mother said she had to leave us. She never travelled after France, that time away from us is the only time the picture could have been taken. She must have gone to America in those few weeks and why else would she have done that, paranoid of being caught, unless it was to sell the painting.

  We now have a journal entry from my mother saying Carlos was her last hope and a picture of her with Carlos in New York, which must have been taken in the three weeks she left us after France. This changes everything, but I want even more. I take the picture and show it to our mother.

  “Mum, who is this?”

  She looks at the photo but says nothing. I ask her again, firmly. Quietly she says, “Carlos.”

  “Carlos who? What’s his surname, his full name?”

  “Carlos.” She says again. It’s all she can say.

  My heart sinks a little. A small piece of me always hopes for more from her; like this is just some sort of trance she’s in and one day she’s suddenly going to snap out of it.

  It was too much to hope for more, but this is real progress. I now have a trail of breadcrumbs to follow and more importantly it’s one that Geoffrey Webb and his team don’t have. I start collecting my things, I want to get back to the office so I can think properly about what this all means. I suddenly feel like there are hundreds of things to do and I don’t know what to do first. Do I focus on Carlos now? Did my mother sell the painting to him or did he sell it to someone else for her? Do I tell Kim what I’ve found? How will I explain it to her without arousing suspicion?

  As I ask myself all these questions one thing becomes crystal clear in my mind. If I’m going to find this painting then I’m going to have to follow it to New York. But I can’t get there without Masoud’s blessing as it will be a significant hike in the expenses for the commission. I need to speak with him. I decide it’s better if I call Masoud from the office so I tell Jack I want to go there to think some things through. He wants to come with me, he’s excited by what we’ve found too and doesn’t want to stop. But I tell him I need to do this next part on my own and reluctantly he agrees. We say our farewells to our mother and then Jack and I go our separate ways.

  By the time I arrive at Roth most people have already left for the day. I head straight to my office and try to work out what I’m going to say to Masoud. I have to be careful here, I obviously can’t reveal the actual source of my new lead but if I’m going to get him to sign-off on a trip to New York then I need to give him a credible enough reason for him to send me there. I decide to go with a slightly skewed interpretation of the data that Kim’s pulled for me from the databases. I’ll tell him the research shows a strong trail for the painting being moved to New York and that we need to focus our efforts there. If anyone was reading the information impartially that Kim has so far pulled together for me they’d never conclude that the next place to go was New York, but I don’t trouble myself too much with that fact or the ethics of lying to my client. I’ve crossed far too many red lines for this already. And besides, New York is the place I need to go, it’s just not the databases that are telling me to do it.

  I call Masoud and he answers directly, he seems pleased to be hearing from me so quickly. After a few brief pleasantries I cut straight to it.

  “I’ve found something.” I tell him.

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “But to continue further I need to move the investigation to New York. It would be myself and one of my team.”

  Part of me is hoping that this is going to be a sticking point. He thinks the cost is prohibitively high so we shake hands, everyone agrees to call it quits and all of this somehow just magically goes away.

  “Okay, so what have you found?” He asks simply.

  I begin to talk about the data analysis but even as I say it the words sound hollow and false in my ear. I’m deeply regretting not having come up with a better lie.

  There’s a painfully long silence at the other end of the phone. Then to my genuine surprise he tells me he’ll approve the trip. He tells me that when they decided to fund the investigation they’d considered the possibility that the painting had been sold outside of Europe and that if that’s where the evidence is pointing then that’s where I need to go. In an almost automatic response I tell him I’ll make the necessary arrangements and that I’ll be on a flight to New York within twenty-four hours.

  I hang up the phone and take a deep breath to try and calm all the thoughts racing through my head. I sit back and pause for a moment. This is only the start but it feels like everything’s suddenly moving very quickly. It wasn’t so long ago I had every intention of never finding this painting, a week ago Joseph Masoud hadn’t even walked into my office, and now I’m flying across the Atlantic in a race to find it.

  I need to lie down so I stumble over to the
sofa in the far corner of my office and collapse into it. After everything that’s happened today it’s nice to be able to just lie there in silence and let my mind calm down a little. It’s late and the office is empty but I’m in no hurry to get home. I’ll get more peace here than in the flat, Jack is going to start harassing me as soon as I walk through the door. I fall asleep right there on the sofa and before I can blink two hours have passed without me realising. I think this sofa may actually be comfier than my bed. When I wake the office is dark, with only the intermittent sound of cars passing below to keep me company. I stare into the dark and think with a renewed clarity and perspective. I remember something very important. The little rushes of excitement I’ve had today from finding these small pieces of the puzzle have made me temporarily forget the bigger issues at play here. I fell back into the routine of it all, the investigating, the problem-solving, all the things I enjoy, the things I’m good at. But this isn’t an ordinary commission. I don’t know what it is, but I do know that much and I need to be very, very careful because there’s too much at stake for me to get this wrong.

  I start to think about Mr. Joseph Masoud. His background checks all came back clean, nothing to suggest he isn’t exactly who he says he is. But there’s something not right about him, I can feel it. In a place like Roth there are two types of buyer that walk through the door: traders and collectors. Traders are only in it for the profit, the art is purely a commodity to them. The collectors buy to accumulate, to possess. For them, more is always more. They are the real market. Joseph Masoud is neither a trader or a collector. He says he wants to profit from the painting but he also wants to collect it. He could have picked any number of paintings to buy for profit, but he says his fund chose the Lost Child for the love of the painting. His motives are mixed and imprecise and you don’t have mixed emotions when you’re talking about buying a five million dollar painting, no matter how rich you are. There’s something he’s not telling me. I just don’t know what it is.