Ludwig laughed heartily. “You? You hesitate to do something rash? What about the Swallow’s Resurrection?”
“I am afraid of disappointing genius. I know nothing about music, so I have to figure out a way to get your symphony to earth, get it discovered and attributed to you, and played the way you want it to be.” Raphael, bowed courteously, and in an instant was in Death’s dining hall seeking information about an art and an artist about whom he knew next to nothing.
****
“There’s some genius that cannot be contained,” Death said. “Even in death, it’s larger than life. Beethoven is one of those who grows more talented with the passing centuries.”
“What am I to do? I’ve heard the piece and know it must be heard. Art is meaningless if it is not shared.”
“Meaning ceases when I take away the breath of life….”
“It hasn’t ceased for Ludwig. He longs to play before the crowd and hear its acclaim. Perhaps his talent feeds on fame.”
“For some, fame is the dessert of ambition. For Ludwig, it’s daily fare. He’s starved for the company of human admirers. Not unlike you, eh, Guardian? So, look to yourself for inspiration.”
Had Death read his mind? Acclaim was one of the pleasures of the flesh for talented people. What was the reincorporation power for if there were no circumstances that required it? “You think I am using Beethoven’s music as an excuse, don’t you?”
“I see Charles’ handiwork in this temptation. Of course the symphony must be taken to earth, but you’re not the only postman available. Examine your motives closely. If you find that you are more interested in Maddie hearing the symphony than in giving it to the world, send someone else.”
As he rode Credo home, Raphael decided Death was right. He must examine his motives. To do that he would have to recognize them, and that meant a visit to the Rector’s. “It’s time for me to reclaim my protégé,” he told Angelico.
Another Task
Dear Mr. Rector:
The Chinese Office of Cultural Affairs has been advised by the 9/11 Memorial Art Commission that it does not have the funding necessary to purchase your commissioned art work. It has suggested that we might be interested in seeing your work for possible inclusion in our newly-leased office space in the 4 World Trade Center to open in October, 2013. We are acquainted with your work and desire to make a bold statement that will capture the essence of the 9/11 catastrophe. We are willing to discuss a generous advance...
Whatever imagined unseen force he might have dreaded meeting was at least looking after his interests. He wouldn’t have to sell The Red Parasol to finance his impending fatherhood-times-two, or regret his $500.00 investment in a drawing board.
The painting that Maddie called Abandoned gave him the title for the design sketch that had taken him forty-eight hours of frenetic energy to create. It wasn’t finished yet—it would need faces he was sure would be revealed to him to match the bodies in the four airplanes, like cracked eggs, that exploded on a cityscape shaped like the Pentagon. He wouldn’t replicate studio portraits or enlargements of family snapshots of the victims, but display the raw horror of the hopeless and helpless in the last seconds of their lives plowing into other, equally terrified, others. Here would be Truth. A close, personal experience of the collision of lives, unknown to each other at birth, that were fated to die together.
"Tell them I've no room for a 10X16 sixteen foot canvass," Alby explained to his agent. "I need a studio. A big one."
By the time the lawyers were through Alby could afford to move Maddie to Mission Hills, buying a Spanish stucco just up the hill from Bazaar Del Mundo. The house had four bedrooms, and two guest rooms that Alby transformed into a huge studio by taking out the wall between them. He also replaced the four, 3X5 foot windows with ceiling to floor ones that covered the entire length of each of the three walls that let in blessed light. The gray velvet drapes were hardly ever closed. At night he would awaken and take his coffee into this spacious den and watch the moonlight pass over its contents like a giant eye taking inventory, eventually turning on a small lamp attached to the canvass and painting as though the rest of the world no longer existed.
And Maddie fell in love with hired-help motherhood, decorating and sharing baby-first stories with her mini-van friends. He'd given her everything he'd ever wanted, including replacements for him. His investment paid handsomely. At the request of President Hú Jǐntāo, his Chinese patrons shipped Abandoned to Beijing's newly constructed Museum of Modern Art and commissioned a second painting. In three years he'd leapt from obscurity to renown, and he could see red and green again. Especially green.
****
“Keep the kids out,” he warned the nanny and the housekeeper, “I don’t want them tumbling through the screens when the windows are open.” Yes, he loved them, so much he didn’t want them to see the pictures of horror he continued to paint in the early morning hours. Though all of the genres he tackled, portraits, murals, land and seascapes, sold well, it was his dream pictures of contorted bodies and tortured souls that were most popular with the galleries and private collectors. These were the ones that regularly commanded six-figure prices.
“Where do you get your inspiration?” San Diego View magazine reporter, Shelly Hernandez, asked him as she recoiled from a 6 x7 foot canvass of a meeting in hell entitled Convocation of the Devil’s Concubines.
Surrounding the horned beast were vampire women adoring his phallus with offerings of stolen babies—their umbilical cords still attached—as young women tied to marble pillars wept in agony. “It’s so…so ugly. Yet so real,” Hernandez said. “I can almost feel the heat of the flames.”
Alby hastily threw a drape over the picture, and ushered Hernandez out of the only dark corner of the studio. “Please, sit down and join me for a coffee,” he said.
“I want to get a shot of that hellish picture before I go,” she responded, reluctantly letting him steer her towards the café table and chairs that formed the nucleus of a seating area. She sat down, unable to keep from turning towards the corner.
“I don’t allow photographs of any of my undisplayed work. The client who commissioned this piece wants to be the first to show it. Of course it’s vanity, but the privilege is what makes the price steeper. This buyer is an editor who wants the picture for a book cover. You understand marketing.”
Hernandez sighed and took the steaming cup from Alby’s hand. “I don’t like it, but I do understand a business decision. But I want something striking for my cover shot.”
“You have the cover assignment?” Alby sat down with her, excited about the prospect of being the main attraction.
“The way my managing editor works is that every writer has the option of submitting a cover photo with the story. Then he makes the decision which story and cover leads. If I had something to knock his socks off...”
“How ‘bout I sit on my painters stool next to this?” Alby went to another painting and let Hernandez see a full-length portrait of an artist sitting at an easel, a gold and crimson clad angel standing at his shoulder as he contemplated a blank canvass. He pulled a stool next to the easel and struck the same pose as the artist in the painting, only this time he was contemplating the picture he painted, a reference to the eternity suggested by a photograph taken with a mirror, but with his face turned towards the camera.
“It’s beautiful!” Hernandez said as the breath swiftly left her lips. She drew close to the painting to get a better look at the ethereal being that seemed to be tracing an outline on the canvass with a piece of white chalk. “The garment looks soft enough to touch. How do you get it to look translucent?”
Alby didn’t answer. He picked up his pallet and a brush and held it like himself in the picture. “How’s this?” He and the picture were in front of his artist’s clutter, as though he and the golden angel had emerged from its shadowy disarray.
“That’ll definitely do it.” Hernandez began snapping pictures from different ang
les. Just hours after the edition hit the magazine racks, Alby had bid calls from around the world.
****
“Baron Karl Maria von Manstein called me from Berlin” he told Maddie at dinner. “He’s invited us to stay at his estate. He said tell the Chinese to jump in the lake, and wants me to bring The Golden Angel to him personally, and paint the Manstein ancestral home.”
Though she believed international acclaim was long overdue for Alby, Maddie was still impressed. “Is he a real Baron, do you think?” she said, looking over the map Alby spread before her.
“He had me checked out. I had him checked out. He’s for real. The family went into a sort of exile after World War I, and settled in Venezuela. Karl's allegedly the last of the line even though he was supposed to have married a South American woman named Concepcion de la Vargas. Supposedly, they had a daughter together, but who knows? He’s in Germany now. Single, rich, and handsome.”
“Were they Nazis?”
“I don’t know. It's not polite to ask. But they had sense enough to stay in Venezuela ‘til the war was over. A distant cousin I think, Erich von Manstein, was a Nazi Fieldmarshall. He got lucky. Only served four years of an eight-teen year sentence for war crimes.”
Maddie went to the computer. Manstein’s phone call seemed to have sent Alby into a nether world. He was excited as the twins were with their new puppy. “Geez, he is a handsome fellow,” she said as Manstein’s picture popped up. The web site included pictures of the Manstein estate, and Maddie was enchanted. “Look, Alby. The house looks like something out of Pride and Prejudice, only way bigger.
Alby stared at the screen, analyzing the best angle for a painting. It faced east—would he paint it in morning light or evening?
“What about the children?” Maddie said, interrupting his thoughts. She was still staring at Manheim’s stately, stern face with its neatly trimmed red beard. “They can’t come with us, can they?”
“Sure they can. Lupe can come and look after them while I work and you amuse yourself with Prince Charming. I’m sure the Baron won’t mind.”
“You won’t be the slightest bit jealous?”
“Of course I’ll be jealous. But he has fabulous, fun, and very rich friends that you can wow.”
Maddie knew she had lost him already to the thrill of another commission. She was amazed that their good fortune allowed them entrance into California’s glitterati digs, but wasn’t prepared for royalty. Alby naturally belonged at the top of the food chain though they both started out as working-class beach kids. The thought of being on her own with prospective clients scared her. It was time for her to be an asset to her husband’s career and she wasn’t sure if she was up to the job.“Yeah, I’ll wow them alright.”
****
The Manstein estate was located near Malbork, the historical headquarters of the Grand Master of the Order of the Teutonic Knights who conquered the territory in the 13th century. Baron Karl’s bloodline extended back to the Junker aristocracy that dominated the heavily wooded area near the Baltic Sea, part of which was ceded to both Poland and Russia following World War II.
The Baron looked more Scot than German. He wasn't the blonde-haired blue-eyed Nordic ideal of human superiority, but tall, thick, ruddy and brindle-bearded. Maddie referred to him as the “real Barbarossa”. Alby called him “the Viking”, and was more interested in the Manstein coat of arms over the entrance to the estate that contained a Maltese cross and a bearded man who looked like Vlad the Impaler. The Baron welcomed them congenially enough, and assured them the children would be safe even though the house was undergoing renovation and was filled with workmen who didn’t fit anyone’s idea of human superiority.
Maddie decided they would be better off at the hotel in the village, and Lupe and the children were installed in a first-story suite near the wading pool and the playground. “We can visit them anytime, and I can spend the night at the hotel if they get too much for her,” Maddie told Alby as they drove into the village. Alby agreed. The children were still too young to appreciate scenery, and preferred Disney videos to history lessons.
“I want the house memorialized on canvass because it's being changed again,” the Baron explained. The façade, beautiful as it is, is dangerous. The mortar is old, and the terrace statues won’t look good on a visitor’s head. And the gardens have to be redone. Too expensive to keep up. The maze is being replaced by a fountain and a wisteria-covered promenade. A year from now, I hope to have tourists hungry for an Old World experience spending New World wealth to help support my art collecting.” His candor was refreshing, convincing Alby he was dealing with a realistic businessman not a prima donna, a role so many in the art world played.
The two of them inspected the estate for possible vantage points on horseback. Alby chose the view from a grassy knoll that extended out from a glen about a quarter of a mile from the front gate, and decided morning light was best. Manstein agreed the view was good, but asked how Alby could detail the facade from so far away. They rode towards the house until Manstein was satisfied, and marked the spot with the Baron’s blue sash. Busy as they were overseeing the erection of an “artist’s tent” for Alby to make his sketches, they left Maddie to her own.
They didn’t know she was lost in the corridors of the big house, gazing at the hundreds of paintings that graced its hallways.
A Realization
As Raphael watched Maddie’s now-thin frame navigate the hallways of the Manstein estate, he felt Fate drawing them together. At every picture she stopped, and searched the canvass for—what? Finally, she stopped and stretched out her hand and ran her fingers over the bottom of a canvass. He drew near, and saw his name—Raphael—scrawled in a corner. As she stood there, staring, he incorporated, almost falling to the floor with the unaccustomed weight. “Excuse, Ma’dam,” he said in a thick Italian accent.
He'd startled her, and she pressed her hand to her heart. “Oh, hell-o. I was just looking at the Baron’s collection. It’s wonderful.” Raphael appeared as a workman, in soiled white coveralls and a blue shirt. In the shadows, his face was unrecognizable."It’s too bad the hallways are so dark. The pictures are barely lit and difficult to see.”
“That’s why the Baron is renovating. With the right heating and air conditioning, he can make these walls disappear and let in the light. The German winters are no threat to his comfort anymore, and these pictures will be seen in their original glory.”
“What a wonderful day that will be,” Maddie said returning her eyes to the shadowy figure.
“Wonderful and sad.”
“Why?”
“The Baron has impeccable taste, but he's bought some rather bad copies along with his originals.” Raphael moved out of the doorway, and stood next to her. “Take this Raphael,” for example, he said pointing to the corner of the canvass. “You see this brush work here? This painting had no such stroke.”
“How do you know?” Maddie said quietly.
“I studied these works when I worked at the Vatican. I inspected the greatest paintings in the world. I know this one well.”
Maddie drew closer to the canvass and squinted in the dim light to see the strokes to which the workman referred. “Will you tell him before he opens up the estate for a showing? He’ll be humiliated. If a workman can tell the forgery, he should have been able to.”
“Not I. He wouldn’t listen to me. But, I believe your husband is an expert.”
“You’ve recognized him—Albion Rector. He’s here to capture the estate in oils. Perhaps.”
“I know his work well. You might suggest he take a look at some of these paintings and give the Baron the benefit of his expertise.”
“I ought to make a list.”
“I’ll get paper and pen from the desk,” Raphael said, disappearing through the doorway. He returned and handed Maddie a small clip-board that held a tablet and a plumed pen. “This Raphael, for sure, is a forgery.” They walked further, and he stopped at a version of Bruegel�
�s The Triumph of Death that made Maddie shudder. It reminded her of Alby’s dream painting, displaying the sense of futility and cruelty in its depiction of torture and execution. “This is a copy,” Raphael said. “Look careful in the right hand upper corner.” Maddie’s eyes traveled to a headless figure seated in what looked like a wagon wheel atop a long pole, a raven perched on the wheel rim. “In the original, the raven had a beak.”
“So, maybe he didn’t give the raven a beak in this version,” Maddie offered.
“All the others in the picture have beaks.” Raphael pointed to the three ravens in flight. "The copyist left the beak off on purpose. He wanted to be discovered….probably thought the notoriety would make him famous.”
They walked on a Tintoretto’s Flight Into Egypt at the end of the corridor. It hung above a sideboard where a statue of a reclining cupid stared down the dark hallway. Raphael stopped.
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