Brush With Death

by Lind, Hailey

  “I hate to be a party pooper, Cindy, but I need to get back to work,” I said as we skirted a lush pond dotted with water lilies and edged with aromatic hyacinths. “I don’t want to leave you out here by yourself, though. Why don’t you investigate the crypt tomorrow, during business hours?”

  “What if he comes back tonight to finish the job?”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Aren’t you the least bit curious about what that guy was doing in Louis Spencer’s crypt?” Cindy asked, not slowing her pace one bit.

  “Not if he was communing with the dead, I’m not.”

  “He wasn’t communing with the dead, he was stealing from the dead.”

  “That makes me feel so much better.”

  She ignored me as we picked our way up the grassy hill and through the maze of headstones. Some of the markers were large and ostentatious, featuring sculpted angels and complex family lineages, while others were all the more poignant for their simplicity. When I began working here I had sought out the grave of the columbarium’s architect, Julia Morgan. Morgan had been one of the best-known professional women of her day, and the first ever to be admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Morgan designed hundreds of buildings in the Bay Area, and spent more than twenty years working on the spectacular Hearst Castle on the California coast. In death, Morgan’s name had been simply chiseled into an unpretentious block of granite along with other family members’ names. I had sketched the plain memorial, hoping some of her talent and tenacity might rub off on me.

  “I’ll just wait out here,” I told Cindy when we arrived at Louis Spencer’s pyramid. I was not unduly skittish around the dead—so long as they were ensconced in urns or graves—but I wasn’t as sanguine about the living. Especially when they wore masks and hung out in cemeteries robbing graves.

  Cindy stood at the open gate, crossed her slender arms over her chest, and lifted one eyebrow in what I presumed was a supercool form of “double-dog dare ya.” Apparently we’d time-warped back to the fifth grade.

  “I’ll stand guard if you want to poke around,” I said, sticking to my guns. “But I am not going in there.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  The gate screeched as she swung it wide, and from my position of relative safety I peered inside as Cindy’s flashlight beam swept the interior. On either side of the mosaic floor were two dusty Carrara marble benches flanked by massive bronze urns. Denuded branches bore witness to the long-dead floral sprays that had once filled the urns with symbols of life. Bright Egyptian funerary designs had been frescoed on the crumbling plaster walls. At the rear of the crypt was the lichen-covered sculpture of the boy and his dog resting atop Louis Spencer’s sepulcher of dove-gray marble. Behind the tomb, weeping stone angels in scalloped wall niches watched over the boy, the drooping stained glass window between them. From the ceiling hung an ornate, and very dusty, bronze chandelier.

  Louis Spencer had been a much-loved boy.

  Cindy inspected the marble benches, the bronze urns, the weeping angels, and the sepulcher.

  “No drug paraphernalia, no candles, no animal sacrifices,” she muttered.

  “Animal sacrifices?” I repeated, aghast.

  “Wait a minute—hell-o, Betty . . .”

  “Hello who?” I rasped, hoping she hadn’t spotted something that had once been alive.

  “I found some tools.”

  Curiosity got the better of me, and I slipped inside. On the floor between the sepulcher and the rear wall were a shiny new crowbar, a mallet, a hammer, and a chisel. Scuff marks in the dust and the tattered remnants of once-splendid cobwebs indicated the tools had been placed there recently. I shone my flashlight on the sepulcher. A marble panel on one end was crooked and showed fresh gouge marks, as though it had been removed and replaced.

  “It looks like the box came from the sepulcher,” I said. “See this panel here?”

  The graduate student inspected the pry marks. “I think you’re right. Let’s open it.”

  “Absolutely not. I draw the line at opening graves. Besides, I don’t want to be trapped in here if that guy comes back, do you?”

  “I guess you’re right,” Cindy conceded. “But I don’t want to leave the box here, either.”

  She tucked the metal box under one arm and we hurried out of the crypt. I slung the leather photography bag over my shoulder, Cindy grabbed her canvas carryall, and we wasted no time jogging down the hill to the main gates. Actually, the perky graduate student jogged, while I sort of stumbled, feeling the effects of my earlier sprint. Cindy unlocked the pedestrian gate and held it for me.

  “What do you suppose is in the box?” I asked as I shut and locked the gate behind me.

  “Beats me,” she said with a shrug, popping the trunk of a yellow Volkswagen Cabriolet parked at the curb. “It’s locked. We’d have to break into it to find out.”

  Our gaze held for a moment.

  “That wouldn’t be right,” I said, superstitious enough to fear a curse from beyond the grave but rational enough to hide my fear behind ethics.

  Cindy nodded. “Well, whatever it is belonged to little Louis. It’s probably just an old G.I. Joe or something.”

  “G.I. Joes weren’t made until after World War Two,” I said, recalling last summer’s “Toys Toys Toys!” exhibit at the Brock Museum in San Francisco. “More likely it’s a Shirley Temple doll.”

  “Even for a boy?”

  “Lead soldiers, maybe.”

  “A petrified gum ball, or whatever.” Cindy wrapped the metal box in a bright orange beach towel emblazoned with the grinning face of Garfield the Cat, and nestled it between her camera bag and a cardboard file box. “I’ll bring it to the cemetery office in the morning. They’ll probably want to call the police.”

  I reached into my pocket and extracted one of the business cards I was so proud of.

  TRUE/FAUX STUDIOS

  ANNIE KINCAID, PROPRIETOR

  FAUX FINISHES, MURALS, TROMPE L’OEIL

  “NOT FOR THE FEINT OF ART ALONE”

  “True/Faux Studios, huh?” Cindy said, pronouncing the name correctly.

  “I’m restoring some paintings at the columbarium,” I said. “Chasing goblins through graveyards is just a sideline.”

  “Really?” Her dark eyes assessed me. “Can I ask you a question about art?”

  Artists—especially those who did restoration work— often felt a bit like a doctor at a cocktail party: complete strangers did not hesitate to demand instant, free appraisals. The sad truth was that most artists were not well schooled in art history, much less in the chemistry of paint, and seldom knew anything more esoteric than how to maintain a red sable paintbrush. (Rinse thoroughly with mineral spirits, wash with mild soap and water, apply brush conditioner, and never, ever lend it to your young nephews, even if they swear “to be supercareful this time, honest.”)

  “Shoot,” I said.

  “What do you know about a painting titled La Fornarina?”

  “Raphael’s La Fornarina? It’s one of his most famous pieces, a portrait of his mistress, though some believe she was one of his patron’s lovers. A couple of experts attribute it to his student, Giulio Romano, and not to Raphael at all.”

  I knew La Fornarina well, though not because of my academic training. In 1966, my illustrious scalawag of a grandfather, Georges François LeFleur, had been arrested for forging the Raphael masterpiece while working in Florence as an angeli del fango, or mud angel, on an otherwise selfless mission to save the city’s art treasures from the flooding Arno River. Georges’ last-minute escape from the clutches of the Italian Ministry of Culture—a swashbuckling tale involving a bighearted hooker, a sinister mime, and a hot-wired Ferrari—had established my grandfather as a player in the world of art forgery. As a child, it had been my favorite bedtime story.

  “Interesting,” Cindy said with a dainty frown. “But I was wondering if the Fornarina hanging in the columbarium— the one labeled a copy—migh
t be genuine.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m serious.”

  “La Fornarina is one of Italy’s national treasures,” I replied. “It hangs in the Barberini Palace in Rome, under tight security. I haven’t seen the columbarium’s copy, but there’s no way it could be genuine. Not possible.”

  “How can you be so sure? People screw up all the time.”

  “That’s true, but—”

  “What about da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder, which was swiped off the wall of a Scottish castle during an estate tour a couple of years ago? Or those Qing Dynasty vases at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, which were left on a windowsill and smashed by a visitor tripping over his shoelaces?”

  “Mistakes happen. . . .” I trailed off. Art security could be shockingly inadequate, but it was ludicrous to think La Fornarina—or any Old Master painting—was hanging in our local columbarium. In fact, it was strange that Cindy even knew what La Fornarina was. Most people’s knowledge went only as far as La Giaconda—the Mona Lisa— and even then they would never assume what they saw was genuine outside of the protective, legitimizing casing of the Louvre.

  On the other hand, she seemed to have a rare knowledge of the art world. How many people were familiar with the details of the shattered Qing Dynasty vases?

  “Cindy, are you an art historian?”

  “No, someone I know told me it might be real, and asked me to check it out. I did a little research on it, but I don’t really know what I’m looking at.”

  “I really doubt—”

  “What could it hurt to look at it?”

  I shrugged. Why not?

  Cindy reached into the trunk and extracted the clipboard from her tote, flipped up several sheets of paper, and pulled out a folded map of the columbarium’s convoluted floor plan. Resting one foot on the car’s bumper, she smoothed the map over the makeshift table of her elevated knee and pointed to an area highlighted in hot pink. “It’s in the Alcove of the Allegories, past the Hall of the Cherubim, through the Corridor of the Saints, next to the Alcove of Tranquility.”

  Her cell phone rang out harshly in the night, and she pulled it from her pants pocket. Surprised at the sound of a giggle, I looked up from the map to see Cindy’s serious face transformed into that of an ingénue. She turned her head away and murmured, giggled again, and hung up.

  “I’m late. I was supposed to meet someone fifteen minutes ago. Why don’t you take a look at the painting and we’ll talk tomorrow?”

  “Okay, but I guarantee you the Chapel of the Chimes does not have a multimillion-dollar masterpiece hanging on its walls. This place can scarcely afford my artwork, much less the great Raphael’s.”

  She slammed the trunk shut. “Want me to see you into the building before I go?”

  I had thirty pounds, several inches, and more than a few years on this young woman, yet she was offering me protection. I decided I liked Cindy Tanaka, despite her propensity for running after graveyard ghouls.

  “Thanks, I’m fine.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, then.” She climbed into the Cabriolet, started up the engine, and disappeared down Piedmont Avenue.

  Time to return to my work in the house of the dead.

  Chapter 2

  The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. . . . It is not physically there at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic.

  —Philip Guston (1913-1980), Canadian painter

  If art is but illusion, why is art forgery a crime?

  —Georges LeFleur

  “Did you get lost again?”

  Perched on ten-foot scaffolding in front of a half-circular lunette mural, my assistant Mary Grae held three paintbrushes in one hand and a smeared paint palette in the other, and cradled a cell phone to her ear with her shoulder. She interrupted her phone conversation to shout at me as I walked through the Chapel of the Madonna’s carved stone Gothic archway.

  “You said you’d be right back! I was totally freaking out!”

  “Keep it down, Mare,” I said, cringing as her voice bounced off the tiled floor and stained glass ceiling. For some reason—I’m sure a physicist could explain it, though I’d probably get bored halfway through—sound was magnified within the columbarium’s alcoves but became lost or distorted around corners. Thus the tinkling of the garden fountains could be heard throughout the cloisters, but Mary and I had once gotten separated and couldn’t find each other even though it turned out we were in chambers only a few yards apart.

  Mary snapped her cell phone shut, set down her paint and brushes, and scampered down the scaffolding, landing light as a cat. “You left me here surrounded by dead people!”

  “They’re not dead people,” I corrected. “They’re ashes. A bone fragment or two at the most.”

  “Eeeeew. But they used to be people, right? And they’re dead now, right?”

  Busted on a technicality. The rooms of the columbarium were lined with thousands of small compartments that, to an apartment-dweller like me, resembled nothing so much as glass-fronted mailboxes. Each compartment held urns or decorative containers—some were ornamented ceramic vases, others were bronze cast in the shape of a book, as in “the story of one’s life”—that stored the cremains. Here and there larger and more richly decorated “feature niches,” glassed in on two sides, created windows between the alcoves.

  The labyrinthine floor plan of the Chapel of the Chimes Columbarium had been designed to create a series of intimate spaces, each unique and elaborately adorned, to allow family and friends to visit their lost loved ones and reminisce in solitude. Alcoves and passageways branched off into more alcoves and passageways, some opening onto cloistered hallways or courtyard gardens, others leading to dead ends. When I first started working here I spent twenty minutes at the beginning of each painting session wandering around, turning this way and that, ducking down one blind alley after another until stumbling, seemingly at random, upon the Chapel of the Madonna, where Mary and I were restoring two water-damaged lunettes. I now had the route memorized, and only took a wrong turn when distracted.

  “This place is creepy,” Mary said, pawing through her backpack until she found a foil-wrapped burrito.

  “This place is beautiful. It’s also a great commission. And you shouldn’t eat in here.”

  “That manager guy, Troy Whoozits, said I could.”

  “His name’s Roy, not Troy, and he only said that because he thinks you’re cute.”

  She shrugged. “He’s kinda creepy too.”

  “No, he’s not,” I said, wondering why I was arguing. The columbarium’s manager, Roy Cogswell, was kind of creepy. “Let’s take your burrito into the garden, okay?”

  Our footsteps tapped down the tiled halls until we reached a courtyard garden complete with a gurgling fountain, miniature palm trees, and a birdcage with two sleeping canaries. Three stories above us stars twinkled through the retractable glass roof. On nice days you could sit by the fountain, listen to the birds sing, enjoy a pleasant breeze from above, and imagine yourself in a sunny courtyard in the south of Spain.

  Until you remembered all those “cremains.”

  Sinking onto a marble bench, Mary unwrapped her whole-wheat vegetarian burrito and took a healthy bite. My assistant’s outfit tonight consisted of a short black skirt over ripped black jeans, a black lace camisole topped by a ripped see-through gauze tunic, a black-and-silver studded leather belt with silver chains, and black fingerless gloves. The sole exception to Mary’s monochromatic look was her long blond hair, which hung loose down her back, and her bright blue eyes, outlined with a thick line of kohl.

  Mary was nearly six feet tall, wore heavy motorcycle boots, and could kick some serious butt. Yet this Goth girl was afraid of cemeteries.

  “I have got to get over this,” she mumbled around a mouthful of beans and cheese. “It’s so embarrassing. My friends think it’s totally fly I’m working here, but it scares the snot out of me.”

  “ �
��Fly’?”

  “It means ‘off the hook,’ or ‘cool’ in Old Fogey.”

  Only eight years separated my assistant and me, but the cultural divide was huge. I had spent a good part of my formative years learning art forgery from my grandfather in Paris, Brussels, and Rome. I could rattle off recipes for crackle glazes and sixteenth-century egg tempera, recite the dates that various pigments and canvas linens had been introduced in Florence versus Amsterdam, and expound ad nauseam on the relative merits of seccatives, turpentine, and rabbit-skin glue.

  Mary, in contrast, had grown up in America’s heartland. She spent her childhood piercing her body in odd places, dying her hair colors never seen in nature, and experimenting with innovative ways to outrage her staid elders. The day Mary turned eighteen she hitchhiked to San Francisco, where her native shrewdness helped her to survive on the streets until she joined a band and moved in with the drummer. I often called upon Mary to translate contemporary slang and modern mores.

  “I only need you for a few more nights. Then you can go back to avoiding cemeteries and mausoleums,” I said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Americans are the most talented people in the world at pretending death doesn’t exist.”

  “Thanks, but I’m Goth, Annie. I have to conquer this,” she sighed. “It’s not, ya know, consistent. Dried mango?”

  I took a piece and munched. Consistency was low on my list of Things to Fret About. I spent my time worrying about staving off creditors, figuring out how to input numbers into my new cell phone, and wondering if exposure to toxic lead white oil paint would turn me into one of those artists who thought smearing cow dung on parking meters was “public art.”

  “So how are you going to conquer your fear?” I asked.

  “I’ve been giving that some thought. I know there’s nothing out there, not really. I just need to prove it to myself. So I decided to spend a few nights in the cemetery.”