The maître d’ seated us at the table Röthel had reserved, a small round table for two under a nineteenth-century painting of two water nymphs—romantic, probably Austrian, but the nymphs’ diaphanous robes were painted without fidelity to gravity or lighting, and their hands, so difficult for any artist to paint, were conveniently hidden within the robes’ folds. I hurried through my first course, expecting to make a quick exit as soon as Herr Keller appeared.
Röthel asked, “Do you know why the Louvre has so many great artworks?”
I had never visited Paris and couldn’t have ventured an opinion about any of the great museum’s collections.
He supplied the answer: “Napoleon! Most of that artwork is looted German art. Have you ever thought of working in a museum? Perhaps when you finish up in the army?”
“I’ve only begun my basic training.”
Without apology to Keller, my generous host ordered the next course. He expounded upon four centuries of German art, culminating in the work of Arno Breker, sculptor of impossibly wide shoulders, bursting forearms, and improbably square jaws—all works that were not in my area of expertise, nor aligned with my own artistic taste. Röthel kept quizzing me and feeding me; I had nothing to supply in return, so when the conversation turned briefly to Ancient Greece, I was grateful.
“The Olympic Games and fine sculpture—the Greeks started it all, didn’t they?” Röthel said.
“The two, hand in hand,” I agreed, setting down my fork at last, feeling I should say something rather than just keep shoveling food like the hungry, unrefined soldier-in-training that I was.
“I see we’ve hit upon an interest,” he said, smirking as I wiped my mouth. “Tell me. Don’t be shy.”
“Well, all right—though I don’t know very much.” Saying those words, I heard and saw myself from a distance: the self-educated son of a working-class man, the hesitant laborer and dread-filled recruit, a person who had only a few more chances—maybe only one—to rise above his present station. Sport and art were all I knew. Of those, only the latter could guide my life now, but of course, the art I loved best incorporated both sport and the human form.
I began to explain to Röthel that the first classical statues were kouroi, stiff and unrealistic nude males, copied by visiting Greeks from the Egyptian style in the seventh century B.C. But the classical marble nudes we know, the sculptures we have come to love, were created back in the city-states and inspired by the Greek culture of competitive sports. Later, the Romans would treat sports as entertainment.
“For the Romans, everything was entertainment,” Röthel agreed, flagging down the waiter for more wine.
“But for the Greeks, it was more primal,” I explained, losing any self-consciousness to excitement. “A contest, a struggle, where losing was out of the question. Sports were really a preparation for war. Every citizen had to be prepared to defend his city-state. Athletic victors were allowed to have sculptures cast in their images. Hundreds, probably thousands, of such sculptures were made. Finally—sculptures of real people, not of fertility figures or abstract gods. Methods were improved; standards were established. Realistic sculpting of the human body reached its zenith. So we have a connection between war and sport and art—”
The lozenge of veal that Röthel had ordered for me had gone cold on my plate, under a lid of rubbery sauce. I had gone on too long.
Just then, Herr Keller appeared at the table. The maître d’ rushed to fit in a third chair.
“No, go on, don’t stop,” Herr Röthel urged me, as soon as quick introductions had been made. “This young man was impressing me.” He turned to Keller. “Do you remember in Berlin, the lady documentarian—Leni—who was filming the Games? She kept going on about the athletic Greek statues as works worthy of emulation and acquisition. This generated interest at the highest of levels.”
“Of course,” Keller said, taking a menu. “There has always been interest. That goes without saying.”
When I stood up to relinquish my seat, unwilling to disrupt the lunch party any further, Röthel held onto my wrist. “If I’d had you at my side, a young voice passionate about history, we might have talked some important people into loosening their purse strings.”
Herr Keller, eyes hidden and chin tucked into his neck, grumbled to himself. “Demand is never the question. Supply is the question.”
“Of course it is! We’re not negating the art dealer’s role. But what the Reich needs—outside of the existing museums—is an entirely new apparatus, a small staff to research these issues.”
“There is work being done in Berlin.”
“Must everything always be done in Berlin?” Röthel pointed to the bag beneath my feet, my parcel of paper and pencils, which I had been unwilling to have checked because I wanted to be able to make my exit freely, without fuss. “Tell me again, who is your commanding officer? How much longer do you have to serve in the Wehrmacht Heer? How would you like to meet some interesting people?”
I said I would, and Röthel would go on to prove himself and his connections, many times over, as I knew he would. As I recalled our fortuitous encounter later that night, lying on my bunk back at our guarded compound, I already felt more free.
And what happened to Ackerman while I was away from camp? A little skirmish, but he had fought back and achieved some sort of tense stalemate with our comrades. What bothered me most upon my return to camp was how he tried to thank me for the meager warning, as if I’d done him some favor. If anything, I’d learned the wrong lesson: that a middle ground—dare I call it a pose?—between paralysis and action was possible.
My antiques job with Betelmann had never impressed my father. My new job, to which I reported barely a week later thanks to Röthel’s apparently effortless pulling of strings, most definitely did impress him. He would have much preferred me as a top athlete, but second to that, a government career wasn’t bad—especially when I explained to him how the top Nazi officials were art collectors.
“Really? All of them?” he asked.
“Yes. Each wants to imitate the other, to see who can collect the most,” I replied. Well, this sort of basic competition my father could understand.
“Your luck has turned, my son,” he said, sounding the happiest I’d ever heard him. This was perhaps the only moment when his hand on my shoulder felt non-threatening, like a simple exchange of joy and warmth. “A little dignity and reward for the Vogler family, at long last.”
CHAPTER 7
“Can’t we go any faster?”
“No. We’ll miss something.”
“But the faster we go, the faster we can get to his girlfriend’s farm and wake him up and be done with all this.”
“He isn’t at the farm.”
“How do you know that?”
“He isn’t sleeping.”
Cosimo spotted the shrine we had passed the night before and made a swift turn. But once stopped, he seemed hesitant to open the door.
“This morning,” he explained, “I walked up toward the main road, away from where we parked—I was just off the shoulder, taking care of morning business—and I saw a red car go by.”
“Interesting,” I said as flatly as possible.
“He did not see me. He did not see the truck.”
“Which he?”
“Keller. That was his prize car that I saw. His red Zagato Spider.”
“And the Roman truck, too?”
“No. He told us they were suspekt. But maybe that was only to get us away from them, traveling the road alone, so that he and any others he has hired could take the statue without being seen.”
While I skeptically resisted absorbing this news, Cosimo opened his door and gestured for me to do the same. We walked past the shrine to a water spigot that had been dripping slowly, dampening the dusty ground. He leaned down to pick up a cigarette butt, squeezing the end between his fingers. Thirty or forty of them littered the ground.
“At least three or four men waited here
last night for us to show up.”
“Or one chain smoker.”
But Cosimo was serious. “He would need that many to move the statue. Keller assembled a team to take the statue and to sell it to whatever buyer is waiting.”
“A team of four.”
“Or five.” He returned my stare. “My brother could never have afforded that engagement ring.”
“He said that Keller paid him for helping to choose a new car.”
“Keller paid my brother enough to buy his own car. My brother bought an expensive ring. He can’t even afford a good pair of shoes but suddenly—diamonds. Don’t you see?” Cosimo sniffed his fingertips: “Turkish tobacco.”
“We should fear the Turks, now?”
He gave me his heavy-lidded look. “Many German smokers prefer Turkish tobacco.”
“And many Germans,” I countered, “don’t smoke at all. We’re discouraged from it, as a matter of fact. It’s not even allowed in our offices. You Italians light the second before you throw away the first.” A ridiculous argument, but I still didn’t want to believe. “Even if Keller were in charge, even if this were his own private heist, wouldn’t he have mostly Italians helping him?”
Cosimo began to swear, cursing Keller’s name again.
“You knew something was wrong last night,” I reminded him. “You knew it as soon as you saw the ring. You knew when Enzo told you, ‘Don’t worry, go along.’ Why didn’t you do more?”
Cosimo inhaled deeply. “I hoped he would change his mind. I could not change it for him. But now it is bigger than that. I fear, Mister Vogler, that it is bigger than both of us.”
Back on the road, we traveled in silence to the Monterosso turn-off, and I kept my eyes fixed on the di Luca guide in my lap, fingers tracing the embossed letters on the thick, green leather spine while Cosimo, driven with what I hoped was only paranoia, steered us ever farther from the main road.
Goats bleated from the shade of a chestnut tree. Above us in the hills, a rooster crowed its dawn alert several hours too late. Just one of many reasons not to live in the countryside.
“I need to visit the bushes,” I said.
When I walked back to the truck, Cosimo was sitting with a photograph balanced against the steering wheel, studying it as his lips moved silently—seeking comfort or guidance, it seemed, which was only further proof that Cosimo was taking his own dire premonitions too seriously.
A raven-haired woman stared back from the center of the curling photo with one blurry hand lifted to her forehead, sweeping back a piece of hair. She had prominent cheekbones, a wide mouth, and an impatient but somehow not off-putting expression, like someone who didn’t want to be photographed. That explained the blurry hand. This woman, attractive as she was, had no desire to be admired, or to wait for a man’s approval.
“Rosina. She would know what to do,” he said, acknowledging my presence, eyes still focused on the curled image in his hand.
Rattled by Cosimo’s superstitious gloom, I feigned a lighthearted tone. “I wouldn’t say it if Enzo were around, but she is much more beautiful than Farfalla.”
When Cosimo responded with a dismal expression, I continued uncertainly. “Intelligent eyes, a wonderful smile.”
“She isn’t smiling.”
“But she wants to smile; she is considering, but perhaps she isn’t easily persuaded.”
“Trust me,” he said, “she isn’t a woman who can be persuaded about anything.”
The more I looked, the more I saw it. In the photo, the woman appeared undecided about whether to berate the photographer or burst out laughing.
“I’m not teasing you, if that’s what you think. I’m trying to make you feel better. You haven’t broken it off with her, have you?”
“No,” he said, pushing the photo back into his pocket. “I see her all the time.”
“Well, then—one ray of hope in dark times, yes?”
“Mister Vogler,” he said, starting the truck again, tapping the gas until the guttering roar eased back into a steady rumble, “she is my sister.”
We saw a young boy tugging a goat alongside the road, the animal’s satiny blue collar glinting in the sun.
“There.” Cosimo swung toward the shoulder, jumped out of the truck and stood next to the boy, questioning and pointing while the boy pulled his goat nearer.
“We’re close,” Cosimo explained, back in the truck.
“To the farm?”
“No.”
“What did the boy say?”
“I gave him a coin and I asked him if he saw a yellow sports car early this morning. He said yes, maybe. I asked him if he saw a silver sports car. Yes, also. And a blue one—that, too.”
“You paid him. He was trying to please you.”
“But when I asked him if he saw a red car early today, he said, ‘Assolutamente no.’ The problem is not that I paid him. The problem is that someone else already paid him more.”
“But surely you’re not going to take a little boy seriously—”
“You think I was only listening? I was looking. I saw the collar on the goat. The boy told me he has owned it since the goat was born.”
“So?”
“It was Enzo’s necktie.”
I hurried to look over my shoulder at the boy, getting smaller on the road behind us. It was possible that the tie had fallen from Enzo’s jacket pocket the night before, while he was riding. But Cosimo was impervious to doubt. Tense with dread, he was sitting up so straight that no part of his spine touched the back of the truck seat, and he was driving slower yet, at barely more than a brisk walking pace.
“This is very important,” he said after a while. He instructed me to look on the right side of the road; he would search on the left. “If we find his scooter on my side, he was coming back from the farm. If we find it on your side, he never made it.”
“If we find his scooter at all. If it isn’t parked safely up some dead-end road kilometers from here,” I added, but Cosimo showed no sign of hearing.
In some places the shoulder was clear and climbed directly up to farmlands or dry, unplanted hills. In other places there was brush and high grass. I scanned with concentration, arm hanging over the sun-beaten windowsill, sweat tickling my neck. But we found no sign of anything in the next two minutes or in twenty.
And of course, this search was taking us farther away from the bigger road along which we’d been traveling. We were losing time. Even the addled roosters had stopped crowing, silenced by the day’s building heat. Our benzina supply: diminishing. Our own energy for the long drive still ahead: draining away. This was idiotic. We were going the wrong way, damn it all. We were digging ourselves deeper.
“Anyway, is there a difference?” I finally asked. “Does it matter, if he was coming or going?”
Cosimo would say no more.
Irritated as I was, I was not immune to the contagion of his superstitious imagination. As the hot, slow minutes ticked by, the paired possibilities took shape in my mind: Enzo making it to the village, halfway through his future in-laws’ celebratory dinner, making a grand entrance, being enfolded by the arms of Farfalla’s brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. Fitting an extra chair at the table. Bringing another plate, another glass. Enzo apologizing for his appearance—the dirt of the road, the golden hair standing on end. And then toasting and dancing for the bridal couple. Enzo cornering Farfalla’s father, and then returning to the table and tapping a glass. A proposal to the bride’s younger sister. I imagined her saying yes, and everyone turning a blind eye when Enzo fell asleep not in the main parlor, where a half-dozen male relations shared a nest of blankets, but somewhere else—a cellar perhaps, or a farmer’s shed. Somewhere with Farfalla.
But that was only the first possibility. The second possibility was a night ride, dusty eyes straining to see the outline of road, an obstacle—rock or stick or wild animal—and then the spinout of scooter against chalky road. The scooter sliding toward the shoulder and into high
grass. No party, no Farfalla. No memorable night in the cellar. At the last minute, in that coldest part of the night just before dawn, a thought sent out into the starry ether, toward the only person who could receive it.
(Did I believe that twins could be connected in such a way? Given my own genetic anxieties, I had to believe it was possible. Do I still believe, a decade later? If the world holds no mystery at all, no romantic possibility, then my second trip to the Piedmont is futile—so yes, I choose to believe. War takes away nearly everything, but perhaps not that final illogical tendency that allows us to continue living.)
Scanning the road for any sign as the truck continued along at its creeping pace, I weighed the scenarios, wondering which was better or worse: to leave behind a ruined woman, following a night of pleasure; or to miss that night, but in missing it, to spare her considerable grief.
“Where are you hoping to find him, Cosimo?”
“To anyone who has felt love, it is clear.”
It wasn’t clear to me.
There was a long pause as Cosimo stewed before surrendering the answer. “Left side. Coming back. To have one night with her at least. To have one night with a wonderful, beautiful woman. Of course I must wish this for him.”
The truck swerved and braked. Ignoring my questions, Cosimo jumped out and paced along the left side of the road, where he’d evidently glimpsed something. I copied him, pacing along the right. But he seemed so certain that I couldn’t stop looking over my shoulder, watching as he pushed a long stick into what looked like a trampled stand of thick roadside grass. He crouched. Dropped the stick. Reached a hand into the grass, near the ground, and left it there.
Even from across the road, I recognized the look on his half-turned face: the same look that Greta had worn the day I’d come home from my part-time job with Betelmann and she’d come to the hall, holding a handkerchief that had belonged to our mother. “The doctor just left. Vater isn’t back yet, he doesn’t know. You should go see her now, have your own moment, before he gets back and turns the place upside down.” But it was hard to take the next step. “Go now.” It was hard to move from that in-between realm of knowing and not knowing, accepting and not accepting; that frozen place from which every step is a step toward unhappiness.
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