by Mary Malloy
“And what about the house and the collection?” she asked. “Will you live there?”
“God no,” he exclaimed. “That old wreck! My wife would never live in a house with an alligator on the ceiling. She prefers a more modern house and so do I.”
“I hope you won’t disperse the collection if you sell the house,” Lizzie said earnestly.
“Of course not. Once you have made it famous with this exhibit and book I might donate it to the government though.” He laughed. “I’m sure that you are suspicious of me—that I would only consider this with some suspicious motives, to avoid taxes or for some political gain, and I admit we Italians play those games all the time.”
Lizzie smiled at him and said in all earnestness, “I don’t care why you preserve it, as long as you do.”
Chapter 32
Museum’s Mummy Murder Mystery” was the closest that any news source got to the story of Greta Winkler Hoffman and her horrible demise. She was never identified in any of the many speculative yarns that got spun on the Internet and in the sensationalist press. Lizzie never even told Detective Ann Crandall who the victim was, and she trusted that everyone who had heard the recording of Patrizio Gonzaga’s confession would keep it confidential. Cosimo’s connections had worked their magic in both Boston and Bologna, and though there was a great deal of curiosity about the story of the young woman whose mummified corpse had ended up in an Egyptian sarcophagus, no answers ever emerged in public sources.
After several weeks Lizzie stopped getting the endless phone calls and emails asking if the mummy would be on exhibit when the Gonzaga show opened, and as the date of the opening approached there was finally more interest in the collection that would be exhibited rather than in the mummy, which would not.
John Haworth’s essay in the catalog had beautifully captured both the importance of the early sarcophagus, and the interesting story of the use of mummies as medicine in the Renaissance. Lizzie was pleased with her own efforts as well. The collection was marvelous and looked it in both the catalog and the exhibit, which she walked through a few days before the opening. The designer had used the 1677 image very cleverly, along with both the old black and white images of the house taken in the 1950s and color photographs that Carmine had taken before they dismantled the library. The three amphora from the original image, along with two of the marble busts that stood on top of the case in that picture, were immediately recognizable. The two big globes were mounted near a photograph of Patrizio’s library, where they occupied their position on the long table.
The modern cases turned out to be very well suited for the ancient objects. In the library at the Gonzaga palazzo they had seemed at home, part of the furniture, and though someone desiring to be astonished could be if she looked closely, it was possible to walk through the room without realizing what treasures were kept in “The Wonder Chamber.” That wasn’t possible here. In this exhibit everything seemed special.
The dell’Arca angel was the very first thing seen upon entering and Lizzie looked at it for a long time. She remembered when she had put her arms around it and lifted it off the altar in the chapel, and then thought about the partner angel on the altar of St. Dominic’s tomb in Bologna. She had decided to be bold in her label and declare that they were a pair, and that the place of this one on St. Dominic’s tomb was now occupied by a replacement made by Michelangelo. She said nothing about the missing partner to that angel.
What had happened to the second Michelangelo angel? She had pondered this question repeatedly since Cosimo Gonzaga had asked her to find it three months earlier.
Walking methodically around the exhibit, she looked again at every item on display and read each label one last time before the public would see them. Jimmy Moe and Roscoe Wiley were cleaning the glass of the cases when she entered, but gradually moved into her wake and followed, first at a distance and then moving closer, like two cats looking to be petted. When she reached the Draco dandinii she stopped. The designer had positioned it perfectly. The creature looked up at them with its big grin. With its extended wings and reptilian body, it appeared every bit like the pint-sized dragon Jimmy had hoped for.
“Where’s the flame?” Lizzie asked, turning to Roscoe.
“What?”
“You said you would add a flame coming out of its mouth when it went on exhibit.”
The momentary look of confusion and fear on the student’s face diffused when Lizzie laughed.
“I have the flame!” Jimmy said excitedly. As his companions turned to look at him he rolled up the sleeve of his tee shirt and showed them a new tattoo. While the Draco dandinii was recognizable, the creature was made more dramatic and more dragon-like by the addition of claws, an arc to the back, and a few tendrils of red and yellow flame being exhaled onto the pale skin of Jimmy’s arm.
Lizzie and Roscoe both howled with delight. “I love it!” Lizzie said. “It’s wonderful.”
“I think you and Roscoe ought to get one, in honor of our exhibit!” Jimmy said. “I told the tattoo guy to save the pattern so that he could make another one, but told him not to give it to anyone but one of you.”
Lizzie was moved by the gesture and said she would think about it.
“You guys have done such a great job,” she said to them, giving each a tight hug. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all your hard work.”
When she left the museum she walked across the campus green. The statue of Paddy Kelliher had worn a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses through most of the summer, but now with the start of the new school year he was dressed in a green “St. Pat’s” sweatshirt.
Entering the library, Lizzie saw Jackie packing up the various folders of Gonzaga material that had been spread across two tables for the better part of seven months. She pulled up a chair and began to help reconstruct the files.
“How does the exhibit look?” Jackie asked.
“It is absolutely fabulous,” Lizzie said, though she knew she did not sound as enthusiastic as she should.
“Is there something wrong?” Jackie asked.
“Just the usual post-project depression. It is always hard to say goodbye to an enterprise that has provided so much excitement, and this has been a great one. What a collection! I’m not kidding, Jackie, even without the Michelangelo, this is absolutely the most astonishing assemblage of great stuff!”
“What about the Michelangelo? Did anything more ever turn up about it?”
Lizzie answered regretfully, “It seems that the only people who ever knew anything about it were the thief and Maggie, and she never mentioned it again after saying that she was keeping it in her bedroom rather than sending it into hiding during the war.”
“She never talked about it in any of the later letters?”
Lizzie froze. When she spoke again her voice was a squeak. “What later letters?”
Jackie picked up a stiff envelope from the table. “It’s right here. Gonzaga Correspondence, 1954-1959. This came in about the same time as the photographs and the list. It has been sitting here on the table for several months.”
She handed the envelope to Lizzie who pulled a few dozen sheets of paper from it.
“This is the first time I am seeing these,” Lizzie said, “and the exhibit catalogs just arrived at the warehouse. They’ll be here tomorrow. I hope there isn’t anything here that I will wish I knew two months ago.”
She wondered aloud why Roscoe hadn’t included them in the correspondence he scanned for her early in the process.
“In Roscoe’s defense, he scanned the first box of letters as soon as I took it off the shelf, and I didn’t find this until later,” Jackie said. “Either you or I have to take responsibility for this.”
“I thought I had looked at every piece of paper on this table,” Lizzie said in response.
“I thought you had too.”
There was
nothing to be done now but read the letters and a quick scan through them revealed that all were written by Maggie to her brother Tom in Boston. The first several were about family matters, the relationships and occupations of adult children and the frolics of new grandchildren. Maggie worried about Archie’s health. “He has never recovered from Gianna’s death,” she wrote, “but there is something else at work here which we fear is tuberculosis.”
“You’re turning too fast,” Jackie said to Lizzie. “I think there was something interesting there about getting the house back in order.”
“Here,” Lizzie answered, handing her friend half of the pages. “You take these and I’ll read the later ones.”
“She mentions here that she and Patrick are making an inventory of the collection in the library as a project to keep him busy. From the way she describes him he might have been fairly loony even when he was young.”
“What date is that?” Lizzie asked.
“November, 1954.”
“I’m sorry we don’t know Cosimo Gonzaga’s birthday. Patrick said that Archie murdered Greta on the day Cosimo was born.”
Jackie rose from the table and went back to the computer on her desk. “He was born on May 29, 1955,” she said, returning to the table. “I have the pages around that date.”
“We should start at least a few months earlier, to see if Maggie says anything to her brother about expecting Greta to visit.”
The two women sat close together and started with the first letter written in 1955, on February 28.
“Move on,” Lizzie said, urging Jackie to turn to the next page.
On March 18, 1955, Maggie wrote the letter they sought.
“I have received an unexpected communication today,” she wrote, “from Greta Winkler, who was Gianna’s friend from school. It sat on the table in front of me for more than twenty minutes before I could open it. You may remember that she married the Nazi who murdered Gianna. My hand is shaking even to think about him and I cannot write his name, yet I have to tell you this important news. She has my Michelangelo angel, it was her husband who stole it.”
Lizzie gasped as she read it and Jackie made the same sound a moment later. They could not read fast enough.
“I had suspected he was the thief—he stormed through the house looking for Gianna just before it went missing—but I never accused him because it was so shortly after that episode that his crimes became so much more vile and horrific. When this monstrous rapist and murderer was himself gunned down by Archie, I did not know what could have happened to my angel.”
Lizzie ran her finger under the next lines and read them aloud: “I quietly approached the Allied officers who brought works of art back to Italy after our liberation, but there was nothing like the Michelangelo that had been identified in the various salt mines and hunting lodges where the booty was stored that Hitler and Göring looted from us.”
“Oh my God!” Lizzie said softly but intensely. “It must have been in Greta’s trunk when Archie and Patrick abducted and killed her.”
They read quickly through the next few letters, where Maggie described Greta’s plans to bring the angel to Bologna, and about her inability to meet her at the train station. “The timing is unfortunately so awkward. Cosimo and Isabella insist that I must be at the birth of their first child, and as Isabella is already thirty years old and extremely frightened by the whole prospect, I do not feel that I can refuse.” She wrote what Lizzie had heard from Patrick, both in person and in his recorded confession, and what Maggie had said in earlier letters, that Archie believed Greta had informed on Gianna’s activities in the Resistance. “I still don’t think this happened,” she wrote, “and I have said it many times to both Archie and Patrick.”
Through several more letters over many months, Maggie lamented that Greta had not kept her word and brought her the Michelangelo angel, and that all subsequent letters to her had been returned. She speculated that Greta had been unable to face her after all. If she suspected that either her son-in-law or her son had killed the woman, she never admitted it to her brother.
In the last letters in the folder, she wrote of Archie’s death from tuberculosis and Patrick’s increasing mental instability. This is what led Maggie to document the collection through an inventory and photographs, and to send them to Boston as a record in 1959.
“Wow,” Jackie said, sitting back in her chair and looking at Lizzie. “Wow, wow, wow! What happened to the statute?”
“Did Patrick say anything about it in that recording?”
“I don’t remember. I only heard it that once and I was so astonished at the confession that he had murdered and mummified a woman that I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what happened to her luggage!”
“Me either,” Lizzie said. “I transferred the recording from my phone to my computer, which is a good thing because either Cosimo or Father O’Toole erased it from my phone. If we listen to it now, can you translate it?”
Jackie had to admit that her Italian wasn’t quite as good as she had claimed earlier. “I think we need to ask Tony again,” she said, “and make sure we get it right.”
“I’ll call him and see if he remembers,” Lizzie said. “Would you mind making a scan of these letters? I’ll send them to Cosimo.”
She stepped outside the door of the library to make her call, looking at the statue of Paddy Kelliher and wondering what he would think if he knew of the antics of his heirs.
Tony answered immediately.
“Hi Tony, it’s Lizzie Manning.”
“Lizzie,” he said, “how delightful to hear your voice.”
“I’m sorry that I’m not calling on a happy subject,” she said. “It’s about that recording that you translated for me.”
“Oh,” he said, his voice losing its happy tone. “Did they arrest him?”
He seemed relieved when Lizzie told him that Patrick Gonzaga had not been arrested for the murder. She asked if he remembered what had happened to Greta’s luggage.
“They threw it into the canal. Patrizio said she had a big trunk that was heavy to shift, and that he and Archie threw it into one of the canals.”
“I don’t remember seeing a canal in Bologna.”
“Most of the old canals are covered over now. I remember a lot more of them when I was a boy than you can see now, but they are a relic of medieval times.”
Lizzie swallowed hard and asked him if Patrick had mentioned specifically where they dumped it.
“No,” he answered.
“When did they cover the canals?”
“Starting in the 50s,” he said. “It was after the war.”
“And there were a lot of them?”
“I think something like fifty miles of canals at one time.”
She thanked him and turned off her phone. Jackie would be waiting to know what she knew, and she would have to tell Cosimo very soon that his priceless Michelangelo “Angel with a Candlestick” was lying at the bottom of an unknown Bologna canal, possibly under some street or building. She sank down to sit on the library steps and looked again at the sweatshirt-clad statue of the college founder. In three days they would celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his gift, her exhibit would open, and her book would be launched. She felt like a chip of wood in a fast-flowing stream.
Chapter 33
The Wonder Chamber of the Gonzagas” exhibit and catalog were both launched successfully. The story of the unusual circumstances surrounding the mummy in the sarcophagus continued to bring attention, but didn’t overwhelm the fascination that the rest of the collection inspired. Lizzie, a glass of champagne in hand, followed along as first Father O’Toole, then Jim Kelliher, then Cosimo Gonzaga toasted Patrick Kelliher, Maggie and Lorenzo Gonzaga, and themselves for being so generous and inspired.
An hour before the official festivities began, Lizzie gathered a small group of f
riends and family to thank them and give them copies of the book. She presented the first two to Jimmy Moe and Roscoe Wiley, for having been so dedicated to the project. To each of them she also gave a framed copy of the 1677 image, on the mats of which Martin had drawn comical dragons and alligators, inspired by the ones in the collection.
Carmine had come from Bologna for the launch and she gave him the next copy, then proffered copies to Jackie, Rose, and Tony. Rose immediately saw the dedication: “To the memory of Margaret Kelliher Gonzaga, who connected a family on two continents and cherished this collection.” Below that Lizzie had written in Rose’s copy: “You were right. She led a much more interesting life than her father.”
In Jackie’s copy she wrote: “To my dearest friend, who knows better than anyone the mysteries that lurk in libraries.” Martin had received his copy the day before, when Lizzie opened the first carton of books, but she gave them, along with warm hugs, to John Haworth and her friend Kate Wentworth.
Lizzie had also prepared a special copy in advance for Cosimo. “Only one piece missing,” she wrote, “and now you know where it is.”
She signed books, pointed out special features of the collection, and talked to members of the community for an hour before Cosimo asked if he could speak to her outside. They walked from the museum to the green and sat on the base of the statue of Paddy Kelliher.
“Your great-grandfather,” she said, nodding her head to the statue. “I hope this is a good day for you. I think it certainly would have been for him, and for your grandmother.”
He agreed. He still had a glass of champagne in his hand and he finished it and set the glass on the grass beside him.
“So you found the Michelangelo,” he said. “I told you I would pay you handsomely to do that.”
Lizzie laughed. “I wouldn’t say I actually found it since you can’t recover it simply by knowing it was tossed into a canal.”
He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to her. “Nonetheless, I’m glad to know what happened to it.”