The Muralist: A Novel

by B. A. Shapiro

  But I kept my eyes open, watching for possible escape routes as we traveled through a labyrinth of dank hallways. Then we were in some kind of courtyard. Only about half the floodlights were lit, and it was surprisingly quiet with no other soldiers in sight. This seemed odd, ominous even, but I was not about to argue with my luck.

  When we got close enough to a post with a blown light, I ran. I heard shots behind me, yelling, footfalls, the whiff of a bullet. Alizée, I admit to you, I have never been so scared.

  I kept moving, darting, weaving, my eyes always on the barbed-wire fence, looking for a hole. The place was poorly maintained and I figured if I could keep from being shot, I would be able to find a gap in the wire. And suddenly, there it was. A breach in the fence. Between two supports. It was narrow, but I thought I could make it. And I did.

  I spent days working my way on foot through the woods on the outskirts of Paris, hiding in basements and barns and trash receptacles, evading both German soldiers and French police, not trusting even the most ordinary looking peasant. It was not my country anymore, and these weren’t my countrymen. I could not afford the luxury of trust.

  I did not contact anyone, could not contact anyone. Although I knew it would break Tante’s heart and devastate the rest of the family, I could not take the chance of stopping in Arles. The Germans could be there, lying in wait for my arrival, and if I showed up, the soldiers would arrest them all. I felt terrible for leaving them behind to their fates, perhaps securing their fates, but I did not know what else to do.

  I am on my way to Portugal, which thus far has managed to remain neutral. I do not know what will be next. I might try to get to the Dominican Republic or Argentina, both I have heard are accepting immigrants, or maybe Palestine. Although there is nothing more I want than to get away from this wretched continent, I also wonder if I should stay and fight with the partisans. America is also a possibility, but a far-fetched one at best.

  I will write again whenever I can. Try not to despair, as I try, although it is difficult. But please, please, please get the visas for the rest of the family. This is crucial and must happen immediately.

  Ton frère qui t’aime,

  Henri

  Once again, Alizée detached and watched from above as the girl reread the letter. She knew the girl was herself, but also not herself. It was odd, almost as if she were watching a movie or play. The girl placed the letter on the table, got up, and made herself a cup of tea. Her actions were calm, purposeful, yet covered with a patina of worry. The poor thing. What a terrible turn of events. Alizée wondered what would happen next.

  German troops marched down the Champs-Élysées and through the Arc de Triomphe in celebration of their occupation of France. Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars, their French identity cards confiscated. Nighttime curfews were established. Thousands of Jews were rounded up by the SS and French police and imprisoned in Drancy. And this was probably only the beginning. Please, please, please get the visas . . . This is crucial and must happen immediately.

  She raised her fist along with roughly fifty other ANL demonstrators and chanted, “Don’t help Hitler! Save the refugees! Don’t help Hitler! Save the refugees!”

  They sat on the sidewalk in front of the New York office of the US Bureau of Foreign Missions chanting and waving placards that mirrored their words. The building was squat and unassuming and had nothing to do with the granting of visas, but it was the only State Department office in the city, so Gideon figured it would serve their purpose.

  They’d been at it for about half an hour. A couple of bored reporters and a few policemen stood alongside the group; the people walking by threw them curious glances, at most, and moved on. Except for three teenage boys shouting “Heil Hitler!” and thrusting their arms straight out from their bodies. She didn’t know what was more infuriating, the hate or the indifference.

  The only encouraging thing that had happened of late was that Hiram Bingham, the assistant Long had fired, finally made it to New York. He told Gideon and her that Long, illegally and without the president’s knowledge, had been writing memos to his trusted lieutenants with specific instructions on how to keep the maximum number of immigrants out of the country, Jews in particular. This was in direct violation of legislation approved by Congress and signed by the president. Insubordination at the least. Possibly a criminal action.

  Hiram said he would do everything he could to get one of the memos to ANL, but he made no promises, citing myriad difficulties. If he was successful, the plan was for Alizée to get it to Mrs. Roosevelt, who would then give it to the president. Hiram was convinced FDR would fire Long immediately. Who knew, maybe he’d even be arrested.

  “Clear the sidewalk!” a cop yelled through a bullhorn. “You’re trespassing on public land. Clear the sidewalk or you’ll be arrested!”

  Gideon climbed the steps at the front of the building and pulled out his own bullhorn. “This is a peaceful demonstration against the State Department’s policy of systematically denying entrance visas to European refugees!”

  Alizée threw an arm around the shoulders of the boy to her left and the girl to her right. They did the same, and more did the same, and soon they were all linked physically as well as politically. It was as if they were one body, one force, a powerful momentum of fair-mindedness, of honor, building and growing, making itself heard. And she was within it, absorbed by it, not a single person anymore but a piece of something much greater than she ever was or could be.

  “This property belongs to the City of New York,” the policeman said. A dozen additional cops materialized and stationed themselves at strategic points around the group’s perimeter. “You and your group have no permit. Therefore your occupation is a violation of the law. You have one minute to disperse or you will be arrested!”

  “We are citizens of the City of New York!” Gideon cried. “We are citizens of the United States of America! And we will exercise our First Amendment right to protest the policies of a nation that willingly allows the slaughter of innocents!”

  “You have one minute to clear the sidewalk or you will be arrested!” the policeman yelled. “One minute. Sixty seconds!”

  Gideon raised his bullhorn. “Fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven,” he began, and they all joined in, taunting the cops. “Fifty-six, fifty-five—”

  Two policemen stepped out of the door behind Gideon, and one of them hit Gideon on the back of his head with a billy club. The bullhorn flew from Gideon’s hand, and he dropped straight down to the concrete.

  Alizée roared out her rage along with the others. As a single organism, they raced toward the building. Up the steps. At the cops. How dare they beat a man leading a peaceful protest? A college professor? Had everyone gone mad? Merde.

  Suddenly there were as many police as there were demonstrators, maybe more. Cops with their billy clubs swinging, hitting, kicking. Dragging those on the edges by their feet toward paddy wagons, which appeared from nowhere. Alizée flew to the top of the stairs, dropped to her knees next to Gideon.

  He was bleeding badly. She ripped off her sweater, pressed it to the wound just below his hairline. “Help him!” she screamed. “He needs a doctor!” But her voice was lost in the cacophony.

  Sirens. More cops. More beatings. Handcuffs. It made no sense. No sense. No sense. All this to punish them because they wanted to save blameless people? No sense.

  After two medics put Gideon on a stretcher and rushed him to a waiting ambulance, she scrambled to her feet, for a moment an island of stillness within the melee. Alone. Horrified. Only barely able to grasp what had happened. What was still happening. Police rounding up protesters as if they were criminals. Beating them. Hurting them. It was the cops who were criminals. That was for certain.

  She went to help a woman who had fallen. But before she got there, she was hit by a hard blow to the stomach. She was flat on her back. Gasping for air. Which was nowhere to be found.

  Lee hurried toward Alizée’s apartment.
It was her lunch hour, and she hadn’t seen Alizée since she was arrested two days earlier. The bust-up at the rally had made all the newspapers. There was even a blurry photograph of Alizée lying on the sidewalk, a stunned expression on her upturned face. The caption read, Alizée Benoit, an Americans for No Limits agitator, was arrested along with 51 others during a riot at the US Bureau of Foreign Missions.

  Fifteen people had been taken to the hospital, fortunately none with serious injuries. Mark said Alizée was thrown into a Black Maria and tossed into a cell with a dozen other girls. She was booked, held for hours without access to food, water, or a toilet, then released, all charges dropped. Although her injuries were minor—apparently the police were told to use rubber truncheons on the girls and hit them in the midriff so no bruises would be visible—it was abundantly clear that this was neither the best nor the healthiest way for Alizée to get her family out of France. Lee figured Alizée would now see it that way, too.

  Lee had trouble believing that the worst rumors out of Europe were true. Although she was aware of what had happened during Kristallnacht, she had to believe Hitler was more interested in conquering the world than harassing Jews. Why would he bother? What were they to him? It wouldn’t be easy for Alizée’s family in occupied France, for anyone over there, particularly the Jews, but anti-Semitism had existed throughout history, and somehow the Jews had managed to survive. They would survive this madman, too. Lee glanced at a clock over a jeweler’s and picked up her pace.

  She found Alizée painting. Although she looked tired and painfully thin, she was in better shape than Lee had feared. “Hi,” Lee said, giving her a hug. “Looks like you’re bouncing back just fine. Guess you’re tougher than those coppers expected.”

  “It takes more than a blow to the stomach to keep me down,” Alizée said, but Lee detected a note of falseness in the bravado.

  “Does it hurt?”

  Alizée shook her head, but when she placed a hand on her stomach, there was a cautiousness in her touch. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “Assholes,” Lee said.

  “That, too.”

  “You feel up to going to the Jumble Shop? Taking a break? We could grab some drinks and dinner. See the gang.”

  “I’m up to it, but I’ve got to keep working. Get some money for the visas.”

  Lee paused. “I thought that the guy said his boss wouldn’t do it.”

  “That’s not what he said,” Alizée protested. “He said he was still working on getting the director to agree to it.”

  Lee didn’t know what was more absurd, Alizée’s assumption that she would sell enough paintings to pay for the visas, that the director would take the money if she did, or that the visas would be of any use in German-occupied France. But she said, “Good to see you focusing on getting the visa money and staying away from that crazy ANL lot. You’re not going to be involved with them anymore, right? Now that you’ve seen what can happen. Those people could get you in serious trouble. Have gotten you into serious trouble.”

  Alizée nodded as if she agreed, but Lee had the impression that, as was so often the case, her friend was not being completely forthcoming.

  23

  DANIELLE, 2015

  Aside from the specifics of Alizée’s diagnosis, the result of my visit to Wellspring Ranch was primarily confusion. A patient with symptoms of depersonalization, mania, melancholia, hysteria, paranoia, and delusions of grandeur would never have been allowed to leave after just two days. Something fishy had definitely gone on. There had to have been some kind of cover-up. But cover-up of what? Side effects from electroconvulsive therapy? Mistreatment? Death? Grand-père must have visited Bloom during his search; he was a doctor and wouldn’t have been easily fooled. Some kind of conspiracy then? Right, an unknown twenty-one-year-old painter caught up in clandestine intrigues. I was clearly watching too much television.

  It saddened me to think that Alizée had been so sick, and yet it also felt like an affirmation of her talent. There she was, committed to a mental institution along with all her genius friends. But the others had managed to get out, gone back to their lives for however short a time. She’d never returned.

  Although I doubted it held any secrets, I searched Turned for the answer: the devastating emptiness at its core, the vortex that swallowed itself and everything else, then spit it all out in a different form. I recognized that it was about the run-up to World War II, about children and families who might not survive the war. But could Alizée have also been referring to her own situation? Pointing to potential causes of her demise? Her feeling that she, too, might not survive?

  It occurred to me that in some ways the painting was similar to Guernica—although it wasn’t nearly as large—for Turned also told a story, could almost be considered a mural. I conjured the three squares at Christie’s, and it suddenly became clear. The squares weren’t separate paintings; each was a piece of a greater whole, possibly huge. And together they told a different story. But if I was right, where was the rest of the mural, and why the hell had it been chopped up in the first place?

  One night, after I made sure both Anatoly and George had left, I stayed late at the office. The notion that the squares were dismembered pieces of a larger mural intrigued me. And mystified me. Obviously, I had no idea how big the original might have been, but if it existed that meant more squares were out there. Or had once been out there.

  I logged into Christie’s database of artworks owned by museums and collectors and searched for paintings by Rothko, Pollock, and Krasner. There were hundreds all over the world. The artists’ respective catalogues raisonnés contained even more extensive listings. But I couldn’t just walk up to curators and millionaires and ask them to check for a two-by-two-foot piece of canvas attached to the backs of their masterpieces. Maybe someone higher up could do it, but not lowly me. And obviously neither George nor Anatoly would be willing to help.

  Then the real problem struck me. Any painting by artists of this caliber would have been well vetted prior to entering a collection. Probably multiple times. Every time it was sold. Every time it went out on loan. Every time it was returned. So I wasn’t going to find squares behind any of the works in the database. They would only be hidden behind paintings owned by someone who wasn’t an active participant in the art market. Someone who might have no idea they even owned a valuable painting. And how the hell was I going to find any of those?

  Later, as I sipped my wine and ate my Indian take-out, it occurred to me that the reason I hadn’t found any information on Alizée was because I didn’t have access to the richest data sources. As a Christie’s employee, I could log into all kinds of information not available to the general public—such as the database on art owners I’d accessed earlier—none of which would show up through the simple Google searches I’d been using. Same for academics with access to expensive research journals only a university could afford. Same for journalists.

  Even better, my closest childhood friend, Diane Arenella, wrote for the New York Times. Plus, she was well versed in my Alizée obsession as we’d lived next door to each other through high school, and she’d listened to me blather on about my aunt for years. When I finally caught up with her, she got a good laugh out of my request, but I immediately heard the sound of keys clicking.

  Diane whistled. “Bingo. Right here in the inner records. A photo even. Who would’ve thought?”

  “Of Alizée?” I couldn’t believe this.

  “It says under the picture: ‘Alizée Benoit, an Americans for No Limits agitator, was arrested along with 51 others during a riot at the US Bureau of Foreign Missions.’ Really bad-quality PDF, though. Can’t see much of anything. Can’t read much of the article either.”

  Agitator? Riot? Arrested?

  “June 26, 1940.” Diane continued typing.

  “She’s real,” I breathed.

  “Of course she’s real, you nitwit. You already knew that. She’s your aunt.”

  “Yeah, but
somehow, somehow . . . What else does it say?”

  “I just emailed it to you. But there’s another hit here. Something about Walter Winchell. It looks like he might have mentioned her in a column.”

  “Walter Winchell?” I echoed. “The gossip guy? That doesn’t make any sense. Alizée wasn’t a movie star.”

  Click. Click. “Shit,” she said. “It’s coming up empty. Nothing’s here.” Click. Click. “These damn databases. Sometimes I think they put links in to pretend that there’s stuff there when there’s not. Like someone’s getting paid by the link. Or it’s a hacker who wants to make journalists’ lives miserable. As if we weren’t miserable enough already.”

  “What’s Americans for No Limits?”

  “Maybe in our outer records,” Diane muttered. “Or Lexis Nexis . . . Lots of times it’s just not there. Nineteen forty was a long time ago. Bad records. Bad record keeping. Bad microfiche. Bad links.”

  “Maybe it’s the wrong Alizée Benoit,” I suggested. “It sounds like an unusual name to us, but maybe it’s not all that uncommon in France . . .”

  The typing stopped. “You don’t want it to be her?”

  “Well, yes, of course I do,” I said. “I asked you to do this, didn’t I? I just can’t believe she was famous enough to get into the newspaper and no one in the family knew anything about it.”

  “Were they reading the Times in 1940?”

  I hesitated. “Alizée was the only one in the States then. Everyone else was in France.”

  “There you go.” Click. Click.

  My computer beeped, and I opened Diane’s email. Incredibly grainy photograph, impossible to read the article. Except for the caption.