The Wonder Chamber

by Mary Malloy

  I was visited last week by an S.S. officer named Hoffman, who identified himself as the husband of Greta Winkler, Gianna’s old school friend. He is almost a caricature of a Nazi and looks like one of those big blond handsome men that populate the German propaganda posters. He was friendly enough and brought us some much-appreciated food, but I couldn’t help thinking that he was really looking to gather information. He asked to speak to Gianna, said he had messages for her from Greta, and became quite insistent. I fear that Gianna is becoming too well known for her role in the movement and Archie has certainly been identified as one of the leaders.

  There are mixed feelings here about the armistice with the Allies signed by Badoglio and the king last month. We are in such a squeeze between the Allied advances and the entrenched Germans and there is a general depression on the part of everyone I know. We all want peace, but how shall we get it?

  There was a newspaper in the collection that Roscoe had scanned along with the letters. On September 12, 1943, it announced the German rescue of Mussolini from prison and the creation of a new Fascist state in northern Italy. In the south, the Allies, with the king and Badoglio, were forming another provisional government.

  In this morass of conflicting claims of authority and violent chaos, Maggie learned that her son Adino was shot and killed in Rome on October 13, 1943. “My grief is matched only by my guilt for being angry at him at the end,” she wrote to her brother. “Our politics were so different. I had heard that he approached the king practically as a kinsman, bragging of his noble blood, and then went to the Americans claiming them as his countrymen because he was born in Boston. By trying to gain an advantage from every side he ended up making enemies everywhere and it isn’t even known which faction murdered him—I guess it doesn’t matter now that he is gone. I received a telegram from one of his friends telling me I cannot have his body because there is no transportation available, and he will be buried in Rome. Oh Tommy, how sad is the progression of our lives right now. This morning I sat and looked at pictures of Adino as a little boy and remembered how sweet natured he was when he was my bambino, and the tears flowed.”

  Chapter 23

  Your friend is here,” the nurse at the hospital told Patrizio, fumbling through the English and smiling broadly at Lizzie.

  He greeted her in a very friendly tone. He seemed to understand that Lizzie had visited him before, but he didn’t remember her. They restaged their now familiar routine: she taught at St. Patrick’s College; his grandfather founded it; he went to school there; and then she once again located the copy of Patrick Kelliher, Immigrant Industrialist on his nightstand and handed it to him.

  “You wrote this?” he said enthusiastically. “I love this book.”

  Lizzie decided to try a new tactic. “This is the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the college and we would like to have an exhibit in honor of your family,” she started. “Could we borrow some things from the collection in your house?”

  “Of course,” he said. It was a wonderful idea, how could he help, just tell him what to do. His response could not have been more agreeable.

  “Can I ask you about some of the things in the Wonder Chamber?”

  He repeated the word with glee and agreed. Lizzie started her questions with the alligator and once again he told her it had been captured in Florida and transported on a Spanish ship.

  “How did your family get these Spanish things?” she asked.

  “Through Venice. When my ancestors came to Bologna from Mantua, they developed a network of trade that brought things from Venice into the interior. Bologna had a series of canals then and connections throughout the region. My family owned ships in the Mediterranean and they regularly sailed to Spanish ports.”

  “Is that how the Mexican box got into the collection?” she asked, “and the Marquesan club?”

  Patrizio told her that he had heard that many of the things with a Spanish provenance had come through the same source, a Spanish trader with his own cabinet of curiosities, who traded many specimens with the Gonzagas.

  “Do you know when that was?”

  “I think about 1650.”

  “And do you have a name?”

  Patrizio shook his head and apologized. “I can’t remember things anymore, but I think there might be some correspondence with him in a book in my library at home and when I get there I can find it for you.”

  Lizzie thanked him. “What about the narwhal tusk, the unicorn horn?”

  “That came from the collection of Ferdinando Cospi—there is a document that mentions the trade that got it, and likewise, one of the blowfish was given to my ancestor by Ulisse Aldrovandi.”

  “Excellent! If you don’t mind, I will put them on my exhibit list.”

  Lizzie had not yet gone thoroughly through the bookcase that had the ledger and the bible in it, but she would do so as soon as she returned to the house. She went through several more things on the list and got useable information on about half of them.

  “What about the mummy?” she asked finally.

  “Do you mean the sarcophagus?” he answered.

  “Yes, the sarcophagus,” she said, wondering if he knew there was a mummy in it.

  “It came through Venice, too,” he said. “I don’t remember the date, but it was one of the first things acquired for the Wonder Chamber.”

  “Was there a mummy in it?”

  “I don’t know if there was a mummy in it when it first came,” he said. He seemed to be working to remember something as he spoke, and then shook his head and was silent.

  Lizzie waited for him to speak again.

  “My mother took me and Archie to Egypt after the war,” he said, breaking the silence unexpectedly and excitedly. “We saw hundreds of mummies there. When we came back I took a class on Egyptian archaeology with Agostini, who had been a student of my father. I considered becoming an Egyptologist.”

  Lizzie wondered if maybe he had acquired the mummy then, and put it in the sarcophagus. But why would he glue it shut? Perhaps it was to keep the young Cosimo from playing with it—Cosimo had told Lizzie that Patrizio beat him once when he found him touching the case. Or maybe Patrizio had stolen the mummy from the University’s collection; in the aftermath of the war, it would be difficult to know where missing artifacts had gone.

  “I’ve heard that your family had a marble carving by Michelangelo,” she asked finally.

  “An angel holding a candlestick,” he said. “It was stolen during the war. My mother should have hidden it in the cellar, but it was a favorite of my father and she couldn’t bear not to be able to see it, especially at such a hard time.”

  “Did you try to recover it?”

  “My mother knew who stole it and said she would take care of it herself. I promised never to speak of it.”

  He was as good as his promise because at the end of the sentence he clamped his mouth shut and would say no more, not even a “ciao” when Lizzie finally left the room.

  Chapter 24

  I am a much better tour guide than any of the locals I have met,” Lizzie announced to Martin as they drove into the city. She had rented a car to pick him up at the airport and to make it possible for them to drive out into the countryside if the opportunity arose, and the Sunday traffic was easy to negotiate. “Both of the Bolognans who have driven me around, Pina Corelli and Cosimo Gonzaga, are very lazy about pointing things out and my Roman friend, Carmine, is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the city, but we have only walked around our own neighborhood.”

  “I know he can’t show you around the city,” Martin said, “But what about the old man, Patrick, has he improved on knowing him?”

  “He is an absolutely essential source for me on understanding the collection, but unfortunately he has lost most of his marbles and is very unpredictable. He has never recognized me, not once, unless he thin
ks I’m some girl who went to school with him seventy years ago.” She told him that she had given him the same copy of Patrick Kelliher, Immigrant Industrialist at least five times.

  “I don’t suppose you could just pretend to be that girl he knew,” Martin said, half joking.

  “I’m ashamed to admit it, but I tried that,” Lizzie confessed. “At one point he started to apologize for having fallen in love with somebody else and I realized I was in over my head.”

  As they came into the city she gave him an orientation around the Medieval Walls, pointed out the porticos, especially the long covered walkway that went up to the top of a hill where there was an eleventh-century church. “It is the Madonna di San Luca,” Lizzie said, “and they have a Byzantine painting there which is supposed to be a portrait of the Virgin Mary, painted from life by St. Luke. There is an eighteenth-century basilica there now and it is an important place of pilgrimage.”

  “Have you seen it?” Martin asked.

  “No, that is a pleasure that I saved to share with you.”

  “I know the story about Luke painting Mary, because it is the subject of a couple of great Renaissance paintings.”

  “Carmine, the conservator I’m working with, tells me there are at least forty paintings in Europe that are said to be the painting painted by Luke, but that any known dates make all the attributions impossible. And Luke was born after Jesus, so he certainly couldn’t have painted him as a baby.”

  Martin bent his head down to look up to the top of the hill through the windshield. “It looks like a beautiful church and you know I am always ready to visit a beautiful church.”

  Pina had given Lizzie the code to the garage and she turned into the Piazza Galvani and entered it on the keypad to lift the gate and open the garage door. “I haven’t spent any time down here,” Lizzie said when they got out of the car in the garage, “but if you don’t mind I’d like to take a quick look around. In her letters, Maggie said that they used this as a bomb shelter during the war, and hid their collection down here behind a brick wall.”

  There were only a few bare-bulb light fixtures hanging in the space, but Lizzie and Martin each had a fairly powerful flashlight application on their cell phones and they used them to bring light into the dark cellar as they moved around the space.

  “These boards must have been used to shore up the walls when they were afraid of bombs taking them down,” Martin said, running a beam of light up a two-by-four and across another board that ran along the ceiling.

  “And here are the last vestiges of the false wall they built,” Lizzie said. “Maggie wrote that they hid their collections behind it, by which I assume she meant paintings, silver and other valuables, and maybe some of the cabinet of curiosities, though I doubt they were very worried about the Germans running off with their alligator. Unfortunately, the best piece of all, a small Michelangelo sculpture, did not get hidden and was stolen during the war.”

  “Wow! How come this is the first I’m hearing of a missing Michelangelo?”

  “The details are only now beginning to fall into place, and I’m not sure I’ll ever have more information about it because Patrick won’t talk about it. I’ll ask Cosimo when the time is right.”

  Martin asked how extensively the city had been bombed. “That’s a pretty good way to destroy both works of art and their documentation.”

  “According to Maggie’s letters, the center of the city was hit several times, and she had more than a hundred people living in the house whose own homes had been destroyed.”

  Lizzie led him to the elevator. “It will be easiest to just take your bags up to the third floor, where we sleep, but the first view into the courtyard really is a grand one from the front entrance.”

  “From what you’ve already told me, to see it first from the balcony of the dining room might be even more impressive, and I’m keen to see the Carracci fresco on the ceiling.”

  “Excellent idea! We’ll view the courtyard from the dining room, and then I’ll show you what I have been working on.”

  The courtyard perspective gave Lizzie a chance to describe the Shakespeare plays that Maggie had produced, and to point out the staircase on the opposite wall, where the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet” had been staged. She had to compete for his attention with the ceiling of the room, and it was only by promising that he could come back and lie on the table and view it to his heart’s content at a later time that she got him to move on to the ballroom.

  Martin’s artist’s eye was always useful to Lizzie, especially on projects like this one, where she wanted the exhibit to have a strong visual impact. The great accumulation in the ballroom impressed him just as Lizzie hoped it would, and after looking at the whole of the collection he began to suggest juxtapositions of certain artifacts that she found inspired. When evening had come along and the natural light was fading, they walked through the rooms he had not yet seen. Lizzie went first and turned on the chandeliers in the Chinese Salon, Yellow Salon, and Entrance Hall so that he could have the full effect.

  In the Yellow Salon he turned around and around the room, a puzzled look on his face. He walked up to and backed away from several paintings. “Where’s the Ruysdael?” he asked finally. “And the Backhuysen? I saw them in that photograph you showed me, but they’re not here.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, pointing out the plasterwork and painting that surrounded each frame. “I hadn’t looked for them, but you’d have to replace any painting here with something exactly the same size.” She was disappointed in herself that she hadn’t noticed this first and explained that she hadn’t paid attention to this room because she didn’t plan to use anything here for her exhibit.

  Martin looked closely at one of the frames. “They did a good job matching the size here,” he said, indicating the line around an oval frame of substantial size, “but it isn’t exact.”

  “Are you suggesting that something isn’t kosher here?”

  “Not at all. I don’t know why paintings would be swapped, but it seems like there are more legitimate reasons for doing so than suspicious ones. They might have needed money, who knows? I was just looking forward to seeing those two paintings and am a bit disappointed.”

  The next morning, with the light of day, Martin and Lizzie went back to the Yellow Salon with Carmine and compared the pictures on the walls with those that appeared in the 1959 photograph.

  “You’re certainly right that several of these frames are not the ones that were here when the fresco around them was first painted,” Carmine said. “And some of the background painting has been altered.”

  Martin looked from the picture on Lizzie’s laptop to the paintings on the wall several times. “If you ask me, the most valuable paintings are gone, replaced by secondary works by secondary artists. There is more Italian stuff, and less of the Dutch and Flemish work than was here before.”

  Carmine agreed. “I’ve never seen anything in the recent literature about the Gonzagas selling off any portion of their collection, but they might have replaced things discretely after the war, when everyone needed money.”

  “I don’t know when these photographs were taken,” Lizzie said, “but I think it was long after the war. Maggie Gonzaga sent them to the college in 1959.”

  As this was not a puzzle that could be solved by discussion, and as Martin was eager to see the conservation work that Carmine was doing, the three walked back to the ballroom. “What’s happening with the mummy?” he asked Carmine. He had already heard everything Lizzie knew about it.

  “I think I will make a packing case for the mummy itself and just push it back against the wall. It isn’t going to Boston and it seems to be in pretty stable condition, so I am not going to worry about it. As to the sarcophagus,” he continued. “It has the usual problems of painted wood of such antiquity, but is overall in remarkably good condition. It will still require t
he greatest amount of my time of anything in the exhibit, though.”

  “Ah, the challenges of the conservator!” Martin responded with a smile.

  “Do you know that I read about one of your murals in the very first conservation class I ever took? And the story has stayed with me ever since because it raised such interesting questions.”

  Martin chuckled. “Oh no! That damned mural on the wall of the community college in L.A. You cannot imagine how that thing has haunted me since it got written up in that conservation journal.”

  Carmine confirmed that was where he had learned about it.

  “I hope you understand that it was my very first commission,” Martin said, “and that I knew very little about the chemistry of paint at the time. All the big sections of color were done with latex interior house paint, and it simply couldn’t stand up to being outside for twenty-five years. Good Lord! I never thought the thing would last that long anyway!”

  “Ah the challenges of being a famous artist!” Lizzie said mockingly. “If the value of your work hadn’t gone up so much they probably wouldn’t have worked so hard to save it.”

  “So I’m sure you know from the article that when I learned the college had gotten a grant of more than twenty thousand dollars to conserve the thing, I thought it was just absurd. They only paid me five hundred bucks to paint it in the first place!”