by Dara Horn
“No, I’m not,” he said. “Look.”
Ben flipped through the book until it fell open to the page with the cover image, the floating woman in the sky. The right side of the two-page spread was covered with a wrinkled piece of paper, folded in half. He opened it, slowly, and passed it into her hands.
It was an old letter from an art dealership, one that she knew had shut down years ago. At first she skimmed it, and didn’t understand. Then she read it again, and was astounded. It all made sense now. His mother was an art forger, plain and simple, a plagiarist in every medium. Erica glanced at the address at the top of the page and tried to commit it to memory, wondering if Mrs. Rosalie Ziskind still lived in the same house. If so, mother and son would both pay. In fact, the mother was more dangerous—more experienced, more talented, and at large.
But when Erica read the letter a third time, the words wavered before her eyes. Something didn’t click. She looked up at Benjamin Ziskind and suddenly shook her head.
“It’s impossible,” she said. “It can’t have been forged. That painting passed the Chagall test. We wouldn’t have displayed it otherwise.”
Ben’s eyes bulged behind his glasses. “What Chagall test?” he asked.
She bit her lip, wondering how little she could reveal. “Chagall had a system for marking and identifying all of his paintings,” she said, choosing her words. “A few years after he died, his estate started telling curators and specialists about it, to help identify counterfeits. This letter is dated only a year after he died, and probably nobody had heard about it by then. But that painting had it.”
Ben opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. She wished she could take his hand. “That painting is real,” she said, passing the letter back to him. “If your mother was never paid for it, then it was stolen from her.” She was thinking aloud. “If I were her, I would—” But then she swallowed her words, realizing what she might have done.
Ben nodded, once, a subtle movement that he tried to hide by looking down at the letter again, but Erica saw it. When he knew that she had seen it, he nodded at her again, his soft lower lip glowing in the streetlight as he looked her in the eye. He folded the letter back into the book, and spoke under his breath.
“I know where the painting is now,” he said. “I’m willing to find a way to bring it back.”
It wasn’t a confession, not quite. But for her it was enough. For an instant she looked at his dark eyes behind his glasses and felt something close to pity. Shouldn’t she just let him go? But paintings didn’t belong in closets, no matter whose, and here he was, willing to let it be seen again. The stone wall of the museum was cold against her back as she gulped and listened.
“If I do, though, I need to know that I’m going to be safe,” he added.
She heard a tremor in his voice, and was sure it was honesty. She couldn’t believe her luck. “You’ll be fine. You—I—I promise,” she told him, stumbling on the words. She was surprised by how hard it was to lie to him, or to tell him what she at least hoped was a lie. He was leaning so close to her now that she thought again of the boy from high school, of the touch of pure trust.
But then he straightened in front of her. “You need to prove that to me,” he said. “You need to show me that if I get in trouble, you will, too. You’re going down with me.”
This wasn’t what she had expected. He was a small man, with thin arms and shoulders narrower than hers; otherwise she might have been afraid. Saul had been too strong. “What do you mean?” she whispered.
“If you want your painting back, then you need to go into that museum right now and show me proof that it passed that test. And then you need to give me those stories.”
Stories? “You mean—from the back of the painting?” she stammered.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because then if you try to turn me in, I can show them those papers and prove you were part of it. Accessory to theft.”
Now she was frightened. She leaned against the wall of the museum, trying to steady her legs. “That wouldn’t prove anything,” she muttered. But her voice shook.
“Yes, it would. You just told me that you showed them to another curator. Other people at the museum know those stories were in your files. If you say anything about me to anyone, I’ll just tell them I was working with you.”
She held her breath. Could he be serious?
“But if you don’t, I’ll find a way to bring the painting back, and I’ll give the stories back, too.”
He was serious. But how could she do it? “No,” Erica said.
“Then no painting,” he snapped. “You won’t find it on your own, either. And whatever you want to tell the police about me, I’ll tell them about you. They’ll believe me. They already did.”
“No, I can’t,” Erica said. There had to be another way, she thought. But she already knew the police would never believe her, that no one in the museum would ever believe her, either, that everyone thought she was crazy, and that perhaps she was—that in the over fifteen years since the file claimed that Rosalie Ziskind had sold the painting to the Russian museum, she might be the only person who had cared. But Benjamin Ziskind was already sliding the letter out of the book and folding it into his pocket. He pressed the book into her hands.
“I’m glad you liked the book,” he said. Then he turned around and began to walk away.
Erica watched his rigid back as he stood just past the curb and waited for the light to change, even though no one was on the street. She wondered if he was waiting for her to change her mind. She looked down at the book, and then opened it. Inside, she leafed through the first few pages, scanning the pictures in the dim light. But what she was looking for wasn’t there. Again she had been tricked.
“You didn’t have your mother sign it for me,” she called to Ben’s silhouette.
The light had changed, but Ben stood still on the asphalt. She watched as he slowly turned around. When he looked at her, she saw the face of a different man. “I’m sorry, she couldn’t,” he said. “She died six months ago.”
Erica looked at the woman floating on the cover of the book, then looked back at Benjamin Ziskind. And her anger disappeared. “I’ll do it,” she said.
“WE CAN’T GO in that door. The camera,” she told him. She had wanted to catch him on camera with the painting, but now she had changed her mind. Was she making a mistake? As Ben stepped back onto the sidewalk and toward the museum door, she had realized what she needed to do. He had his hands in his pockets now, and she reminded herself that she had seen what was inside them and wasn’t afraid. “The staff entrance has a camera, too. We have to go another way. Come.”
She began walking down the street, crossing against the light and heading along the park, away from the museum. She glanced behind her and saw Ben’s anxious expression as he hurried to catch up with her. She almost offered him her hand.
“Where are we going?” he asked. It was a nervousness she recognized from when he was sitting in her office. Other people’s nervousness made her feel more secure. She was in control.
“In,” she said.
They stopped walking about two blocks away from the museum, along the wall that held in the park. Erica stood in shadow near the wall and saw Ben illuminated in the streetlight, glowing orange and strange, like a painted figure in one of his mother’s books. She peered at the street around her, and waited for a bus to pass. Then, with quick movements, she bent down until she was squatting next to a small metal grate in the ground, one of the ignored basement doors and subway vents that line the sidewalks of New York. But there were no buildings on this side of the street, and no subway line, either. She felt Ben watching her as she took a key chain out of her purse, fumbled through it in the dark, and began jiggling a key in the tiny keyhole. With his eyes on her back, she twisted the key until she heard a clank, and then reached down and pulled open the doors in the ground.
She looked up, wondering what
he thought. But when she saw him, she almost laughed. His mouth hung open and his eyes bulged, as though he were absolutely certain that he was about to be killed. The maw of the sidewalk opened up like his own grave. Inside there was a narrow wooden ladder hanging from the edge of the grate, leading down to somewhere invisible to his eyes, and then nothing.
She grinned at him, sliding the book into her bag. He watched in horror, shaking his head. His fear emboldened her. She slipped her legs into the opening and then climbed down quickly, lowering herself along the ladder until she had almost disappeared into the abyss.
“Come on,” she said, motioning with her hand as she stood one step short of darkness, the top of her head level with the street. “I thought you were going down with me,” she joked.
“No!” he whispered.
His fear made him more handsome, she thought. She didn’t need him to follow her; in fact, she had been frightened that he might. But now she saw him from the ground up, and was surprised to find that she wanted more than anything for him to follow her.
“Fine, stay there,” she said, and clanged the grate shut behind her.
He wasn’t coming, she saw. She would have to go herself, and hope he would still be waiting for her when she returned. And it was too late now to give him another chance. She sank down the ladder rung by rung, moving deeper and deeper into the darkness. One step more and her glimpse of him would disappear, the last glowing light of his figure in the shadows rising above the line of her vision through the iron bars. Suddenly she remembered arriving at her parents’ house one night almost a year ago—rushing to make the train, pacing the train’s aisles as it raced out of the city, running from the little local station past houses and trees, resting for a split second, gasping for breath, running again until she reached the house, dashing up the driveway, and then seeing her brother appearing slowly, far too slowly, in the doorway—how she had known in that instant that she had come too late, that she had missed the entire world by a hair.
But then she heard the thief’s voice. “Wait for me,” he called, and pulled open the door, climbing down after her.
THE LADDER WAS broken off at the bottom. It vanished about two rungs before Ben seemed to have expected, and he hung suspended in air. She watched as he stepped down, one foot groping wildly in the void until the other foot slipped, leaving him dangling in the darkness between heaven and earth.
“Just let go,” she said behind him. “You’re closer than you think.”
He seemed afraid to believe her, but his grip was slipping and his sweat decided for him. He fell from the ladder and landed with a splash, his feet slamming and then sinking into a thick, heavy layer of slime.
The faint sounds of the street had vanished, replaced with the primeval sound of water droplets falling into quiet puddles on the ground, like the plucking of tiny strings. The air was cool and thick and furry with odors, damp cement and the faint smell of rot. His eyes hadn’t adjusted yet, Erica could tell. Between the squares of light from the opening, she saw him squinting at the space in front of him. He groped in the dark, near where she stood in the shadows, afraid to step forward. A hand touched her breast, and she trembled as the hand jolted off into the air, as if jumping from an electric shock. She stood still, and her skin mourned. The hand had been perfect.
“It’s only muddy by the ladder, because of the rain a few days ago,” she said, trying to dispel the touch. She was surprised that her voice was shaking. “If you move away from it, there’s no more mud.” She stretched a hand into the light, beckoning him toward her. He stepped away from the ladder, slowly, and into the shadows. “I’m sorry about the ladder,” she said in the dark, pleased that she had steadied her voice. “It was like that when I found it. The bottom rungs must have broken off at some point, or rotted away.”
Now they were both standing in total darkness, and in the black ink air she felt a hand brush against her arm. An old fear rose in her throat. She fumbled in the dark for the zipper of her bag and then desperately began to rummage through it, fingertips searching for hard metal. The jangling metal rang like a tiny bell as she pulled her key chain out into the dark. Her fingers jittered, and suddenly the space beneath the street lit up, illuminated by the tiny flashlight attached to her key chain. Her hands gleamed in the dark for the briefest of instants. Then she turned the beam toward him, blinding him, disorienting him. She refused to be the one who was afraid.
“Where are we?” he asked. The lenses of his glasses gleamed.
Her light moved, slightly, shaking in her hand and falling to his chest. “Have you ever been to the Touro Synagogue?” she asked.
“The what?”
She remembered his business card for American Genius and was surprised he hadn’t heard of it. For an instant she came close to making a joke about the show, but she refrained. “It’s in Rhode Island. It’s the oldest standing synagogue in the United States, from the 1700s. The people who built that synagogue were so convinced that they were going to be persecuted in America that they dug a secret passageway from the sanctuary leading underground and out of the building, so that if they were ever trapped there, they’d have a way to escape.” She shifted the light, raising it to his face again. She didn’t want him looking at her eyes. “The building where the museum is now used to be the home of a Sephardic family in the nineteenth century. I guess they probably felt the same way. This is an underground passageway leading out from the museum building and into the park.”
Ben’s eyes squinted behind his shining glasses, blinded in the bright point of Erica’s flashlight. She moved the beam down quickly, crossing his chest and his hands until it shone against a wall, then glided to the floor, and down the floor over thirty feet where the beam faded, and then off the ceiling. They were standing in a tunnel, its floor covered with smooth cobwebbed stones and its walls and ceiling long and empty. The flashlight beam failed to reach the end. She heard Ben breathing in the dark: short, nervous breaths.
“I was in the storage room at the museum about a month ago, and I was moving some things around when I found a key on the floor,” Erica said. Her voice seemed to warm the cold air, making it familiar. “It was underneath a loose tile. I had to move the tile when a piece of cloth we had for an exhibit got caught underneath it. The tile came out, and underneath it I found this key.”
She swiveled away from the corridor as she jangled the key chain, twisting the rings so that the light flashed against the small metal key. One of her fingertips glowed red as the light pressed against it. In the glow of her finger she could see Ben watching her, his eyes soft behind his glasses in the dark. “Come,” she said. When she turned around and stepped forward, she felt him moving behind her and wondered what he was thinking.
The air was thick and cold, becoming colder as they moved deeper into the abyss. He had caught up with her now, and walked beside her. For a moment, she imagined that this was normal, that they were out for a stroll, a visit to a museum. “This is like a catacomb,” she heard him say.
“A what?” she asked.
“A family crypt.”
She winced for a moment, feeling the embarrassment she had often felt in the past year whenever someone too casually mentioned death, as if it were a joke. But then she remembered the book in her bag, and all the other books that his mother had rescued from the library burial vaults, and smiled an invisible smile. “Wait until you see,” she said.
They walked slowly, side by side. In the afterglow of the flashlight beam she could see Ben’s silhouette moving, black on grayish black in the dim outline of the cave. He walked haltingly, stumbling on loose stones in the invisible floor, but Erica walked with sure, dignified steps, moving underground like a queen. Soon she could see the end of the tunnel in front of them, a flat circle of light where the flashlight beam landed against a wall some twenty feet ahead. As they moved closer, the lines on the wall emerged in the light and it became clear that it wasn’t a wall, but a door—a large metal door that she
was now proceeding to open with her single key. The door clanged, then rattled as the latch unlocked. She struggled to open the door, but it was stuck. She leaned back and pulled, the flashlight beam dangling down toward her feet. But the door did not move. She pulled harder, puffing in the dark, staring at her illuminated feet. But then she saw sandal-strapped toes on either side of her feet, and felt arms enveloping her, reaching around her until two gentle hands rested on hers. She closed her eyes and leaned back in the dark into his chest, shocked at how thrilled she was, how completely unafraid, leaning into him until the door came open. Then they separated, each silent, as if they had never touched.
Behind the door was what looked like another wall. But Erica knew it was a giant canvas, stretched on a frame that completely covered the door. Ben stood holding the metal door open as Erica lifted the canvas from its sides, slightly, shifted it over, slightly, until there was an opening in the wall. And she slipped out of the tunnel and into the space through the slot in the wall, with Ben close behind her.
“Now, this,” she said, “is the family crypt.”
THEY WERE STANDING in a vast room, filled with yards and yards of metallic shelves and glass cases that stretched out in front of them like a vault, or a library, reaching as far as Erica’s flashlight beam could see. On the shelves were endless rows of objects that glinted in the tiny light. The first things that emerged in the light were the paintings: rows and rows of paintings of all sizes and styles, filed vertically on giant rolling racks one after another so that only the ones on top were visible, gaping eyes and mouths and shapes and letters and patches of color staring at them under the thin beam of yellow light. Past that, on the shelves, a few sculptures revealed themselves in the shadows, abstractions mostly, dull, stolid cubes and twists of angry rusted metal. But most of the shelves nearest to where they were standing were filled with silver pieces—candlesticks, wine goblets, tiny filigreed boxes for spices, larger house-shaped boxes for collecting coins for the poor, crowns and breastplates and miniature hands made for dressing and reading Torah scrolls. Beneath those were endless rows of scrolls of every kind, single and double spirals of parchment unwinding in sequence at the level of their waists, words undulating inside them to the interrupted songs of the silent room. And beneath those were shelves filled with piles of papers—heavy, dark papers that glinted in the brief and dancing light, the occasional gold-leafed Hebrew word leaping to life from the shadows. She heard Ben holding his breath.