Painter of Time

by Matthew O'Connell

  “All right,” grumbled her father. “If you pass out at work and knock over a Rembrandt, don’t blame me.”

  “Dad, there are actually people who fast for several days without passing out. Besides, Rembrandt was post-Renaissance.”

  “Mm,” he grunted without looking up from the paper. “By the way, did you feed Othello yet?”

  “Yes, I fed Octavius when I got up.” She opened the door and stepped out to her car. “I’ll call you when I’m leaving. Shouldn’t be late.”

  “Sounds good. Drive safe.”

  After sleeping on her discovery of the unusual fingers, Mackenzie decided not to say anything at this point and instead finished up her analysis and documentation of the painting so they could get started on the restoration. She wanted to get to work with plenty of time before Anthony showed up so that she’d have everything ready.

  She put in a solid two hours before anyone else showed up and was almost finished with the documentation of the entire painting when something else caught her eye. In the lower right hand corner of the painting was the artist’s signature. That wasn’t unusual because the previous Lippi she worked on had a signature in the same place. Many painters, even up through the nineteenth century, did not sign their works. It was more of a personal preference among artists. Lippi was one of the artists from that period who did sign his paintings.

  His signature was both small and relatively simple. The only thing that might be considered odd about it was the way he dotted his i’s. From her experience, as well as the way she signed her own name, most people with i’s in their names finished them with either a simple dot over the i, or would make a forward leaning slash, like an apostrophe. That was mainly because while you wrote your name you were moving from left to right, and the slash was easier to make leaning forward, towards the right. In Lippi’s case, however, his i’s were finished with backwards slashes. Mackenzie tried writing her own name as well as Lippi’s. Without thinking of it she made forward-leaning slashes. When she tried to make backwards-leaning slashes, she found it to required a great deal of effort. She really had to force herself to write it that way. She could understand if Lippi signed his name leaning backwards, the way some people and especially a disproportionate number of left-handers did. But Lippi signed his name leaning to the right. He must have consciously thought about making the backwards slashes.

  While the backwards slashes themselves weren’t particularly odd, they were, at least from her experience, rare. What struck her as odd was that she had seen the exact same thing before, a little over four months ago. Bernardo Daddi finished his i the exact same way.

  She printed out pictures of the two hands as well as the signatures from the two Lippi’s and the Daddi and laid them on the work surface in front of Anthony, who was at the moment skimming through one of the latest volumes of the Journal of Restoration Science.

  “Anthony, I don’t want to interrupt you, but I’d like you to take a look at these.”

  He set down the journal and then glanced at the five photos without saying anything. For a very brief instant she noticed him purse his lips slightly and the lines around his eyes tightened. He turned to Mackenzie. “So, what do we have here?”

  “I’m not sure,” she replied hesitantly. “I just thought it was odd the way these two artists dot the i’s in their signatures, and even stranger than that is that they both have paintings with a woman with an unusually long little finger. It’s the same finger on the same hand in both of these paintings. Take a look.”

  Anthony moved the mounted magnifying glass closer so that he could focus on each of the paintings. He moved slowly from one painting to the next, carefully comparing each one. Finally he pushed the magnifying glass aside and looked at Mackenzie.

  “I am not really sure what this means either. My guess is that it is just a coincidence. You seem to have stumbled upon some idiosyncrasies from two different artists. I am sure there are a lot of things like this that go unnoticed all the time. The main reason they go unnoticed is because they do not really mean anything.”

  “But don’t you think it’s odd?” Mackenzie interjected.

  “I think a lot of things are odd,” replied Anthony, sounding slightly bored with the conversation. “That does not mean that I spend a lot of time thinking about them, especially when I have other, more important things to work on.”

  He seemed to be a bit edgy. He never really got angry or raised his voice but she noticed that his tone was more clipped and direct. She didn’t say anything while he continued.

  “Mackenzie, while I applaud your attention to detail and what appears to be a real gift for seeing connections between disparate things, we need to get this painting finished in two weeks and we do not even have a finalized restoration plan.”

  “But, I—”

  “I know. It is odd. It is a strange coincidence, I agree with you. What I am saying to you is that we have an important job to get done here and we do not have much time to do it. What you have found is interesting, but it is not helping us move this restoration process forward and that is what I am most interested in at the moment. When we get this done, then you are free to look for women with long fingers and backwards leaning i-’s to your heart’s content. Right now, I want you to focus on finalizing the documentation and getting me a restoration plan.”

  She knew he was right. This wasn’t helping them with their restoration and that was the most important thing at this point. She felt like a silly schoolgirl wasting her time passing notes to her friends. She also hadn’t heard him talk so directly to her since her first week or so on the job and hoped she hadn’t angered him.

  “Anthony, you’re right,” she said apologetically. “I’ll get this finished today and have an initial plan as well as all the documentation in your hands by the end of the day. I guess I just got intrigued by this and it distracted me more than it should have.”

  “Mackenzie,” said Anthony in a much more soothing tone, “there are many interesting and wonderful things in the world that deserve our attention. Unfortunately, we only have time to pay attention to a fraction of them. I am looking forward to getting started on this. It is in pretty good shape right now, but with a little work she will be almost as good as she was when Lippi finished her.”

  That was more like the Anthony she knew. He was task-focused without question, but he was also patient, calm and reserved. She was relieved to hear him say this.

  “Yeah, I agree.” She went back to work on the restoration plan that she had started earlier. It still needed work, and he was right, they didn’t have time to focus on obscure details at this point.

  Chapter 20

  Mackenzie’s father made his way downstairs only to find that his daughter was already up and had the dining room table covered with pictures of old paintings. Her head was buried in her work as she made notes on a pad of paper. Octavius was curled up in a padded chair in the corner of the room. Neither of them heard him come down.

  “Now this is a first,” he said as he stood at the table. “For the life of me I can’t remember when you’ve ever beat me out of bed. What are ya workin’ on?”

  Mackenzie looked up from her note pad, surprised but not startled.

  “Hey Dad, good morning.” She stretched her arms and back as she sat upright in the chair. “I’ve got something that’s been bugging me and I just can’t put it down.”

  Joe couldn’t help but laugh. Every detective in the world knew that feeling. The loose end, the missing puzzle piece, what psychologists called lack of closure. It’s what kept them going, the juice that drove them to work until the crime was solved, the last tile that completed the mosaic. Mackenzie was definitely his daughter, he thought. She had always been like this, even as a little girl. She not only liked putting together puzzles, she liked making them. When she was eleven, she had a Jackson Pollack painting matted onto cardboard and then meticulously cut it into a three-hundred-piece puzzle with some stencils she made and an e
xacto knife. She spent the next two days putting it together. He tried to work on it with her, but it was so abstract that he found it impossible. Even when it was completely finished it looked to him like a garbled mess of spilled paint. She told him it was considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest paintings. Wherever she got her appreciation and understanding of art, it certainly wasn’t from him. He liked paintings that actually looked like something. Edward Hopper was as abstract as he was willing to go. Beyond that, it was like some smart ass kid was playing a joke on everyone and waiting for the hidden camera to appear so they could laugh at all the idiots who thought this crap was actually art.

  Mackenzie’s mother hadn’t been particularly artistic either, but her father had been. Grandpa Enis was a decent sketch artist back in his day. Of course, he’d done it as a hobby instead of trying to earn a living at it. Mackenzie had been only twelve when Grandpa Enis passed, but the two of them had formed a strong bond. He’d seen her talent from an early age. Heck, everyone saw her talent. She had been the best painter in every school she went to right up to college, and one of the best there as well.

  Mackenzie and Grandpa Enis used to sit together at the dining room table, the same one she was sitting at now, and draw or paint for hours at a time, just the two of them. He had encouraged her from a very young age to draw, to paint and to sketch everything that interested her. He would tell her what he liked about her sketches and paintings and point out where she could have improved them. He’d be firm and objective, but gentle and nurturing at the same time.

  Grandpa Enis had been a good man. Joe had always respected him. Like much of his generation, he grew up during the depression and then went to serve his country in WWII. He saw some bad stuff over there, but he never talked about it. Killing a man wasn’t something to brag about or to take lightly, he had once said when Joe first joined the police force. And it never left you, no matter how long you lived.

  Joe himself knew that to be the case as well. He had spent four years as a marine in Vietnam during the late sixties. It helped prepare him to become a police officer. While he didn’t regret anything he did there, the pointless loss of life he saw was something that still haunted his dreams.

  Joe looked down at the table. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “I don’t know really, but something just doesn’t seem right with two of the artists we’ve been working on.”

  While he didn’t know anything about art, he sure as hell knew about solving problems. It’s what he dedicated his entire life to doing.

  “Let me get a cup of coffee and then we’ll see if a retired cop can bring any insights into your conundrum.”

  When he returned, she explained what she had found, showing him the various long fingered women from the paintings as well as the similarities in the two signatures. Joe listened attentively, reflexively took some notes on a piece of paper ,and occasionally asked clarifying questions. After finishing up, Joe sat back in his chair and absentmindedly rubbed his chin in silence.

  While he was pondering it all, she added, “I’m not sure if any of this means anything or whether I’m getting myself worked up over nothing. The worst part is that I think my curiosity just got the best of me and I made a fool of myself in front of one of the senior restorers.”

  Her father leaned forward, put his hands flat on the table and said, “I’ve had my share of feeling like an idiot, and sometimes it was well deserved, but lot of times it wasn’t. Would this senior restorer be this Anthony guy you’ve been talking about, the superstar from Italy?”

  Mackenzie blushed. “Yes, one and the same.”

  “Did you show these irregularities to him?”

  “Yes, well, some of them, not all. I didn’t really have time to lay out a good solid case because I’m still not sure what I’ve found. I told him about the ladies with the long finger and also about how it was odd that Daddi and Lippi wrote their i’s in almost the exact same manner.”

  “And what did he say?” asked her father, gently stroking his unshaved chin.

  “He told me that I needed to focus on getting the restoration plan completed because we have a tight deadline, which is very true.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He said that there were a lot of odd things that he’d encountered over the years, but that he hadn’t focused a lot of his time on them because they didn’t have anything to do with restoring paintings.”

  “Did you detect any defensiveness in his response?”

  “No, well, maybe a bit at first,” she admitted reluctantly. “But mostly I got the feeling that I was wasting his time and potentially putting the project in jeopardy.”

  Joe grunted. “What do you know about this Anthony guy?”

  “Nothing really, only that in the words of my boss, ‘Anthony Bataglia is a true artist.’ When he finishes a restoration, even when the original was terribly damaged, it’s impossible to know that it was ever touched by anyone except the artist himself.”

  Her father nodded. “What did you say his last name was?”

  “Bataglia, Anthony Bataglia,” replied Mackenzie.

  † † †

  Later that afternoon, while Mackenzie was at her yoga class, Joe called a number that he hadn’t called in over a year.

  “Detective Angstrom, how can I help?” came the reply on the other end.

  “Yes, Detective Angstrom, this is Joe Ferrara. I hope I’m not interrupting you from catching bad guys.”

  “Holy shit! How the hell are you, Joe? It’s great to hear your voice!”

  “It’s good to hear your voice as well, Chris. You keepin’ the city safe?”

  “As you know, the beauty of New York is that there is always plenty of work to keep us detectives busy. Good for job security. But at the moment, it’s a pretty quiet day. No decapitated bodies washing up at the port or anything like that. I imagine you didn’t call to ask me about my case load or what an asshole the captain is, so what can I do for you?”

  “No, you’re right about that. I already know the captain’s an asshole. He was ever since he was walking the beat, and I imagine a good while before that.” They both laughed. “I’m trying to find out something about a guy that works as a restorer over at the Cloisters. There’s something odd about the guy, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “What are you thinking? Forger? Art thief?”

  “No idea, probably just a reach. But something about him raised my antenna and I’ve learned that it’s a good idea to pay attention to your antenna.’

  “Amen to that,” agreed Chris.

  “I hate to ask, but do you think you could dig around a bit and find out anything you can about him? I know you’re busy, but if you’ve got any time on your hands, I’d really appreciate it.”

  “Whatever I can do for the esteemed chief detective Ferrara,” replied the man with a laugh. “Seriously, I’ll see what I can do. What’s the guy’s name?”

  “His name is Anthony Bataglia. He currently works as a restorer at the Cloisters. Supposedly, he also worked at the Ufizzi in Florence, but I have my doubts.”

  “Sounds like my ex-partner isn’t able to completely give up the job after all. Give me a week or so and I’ll see what I can find out. You think he might be mobbed up?”

  “At this point, I’d just like to learn a bit more about him.”

  “Okay. I’ll let you know. Take care.”

  “Thanks, Chris. I really appreciate it,” he said again.

  Joe hung up the phone, sat back in his chair, and wondered what it was that bothered him about Anthony Bataglia. Maybe he was just being an overprotective father. That was certainly part of it, he had to admit. But there was something that bugged him. Mackenzie wasn’t sharing everything with him. Was she falling for this guy? Whatever it was, Joe was going to find out as much as he could about him. He took a sip of his coffee and looked out the window. Sometimes he wished he was a bit more trusting of his fellow man. It was a trait he had admired in his wife
. But thirty years on the force had jaded him. He was always looking for the viper in the weeds, because the ones you didn’t suspect were the ones that bit you.

  Chapter 21

  Anthony left the Cloisters at 6 p.m. It was a warm summer evening and it would be light for at least two more hours. The Hudson, densely lined with verdant green trees on both sides, glistened as it flowed slowly on its way to the Atlantic. Birds chirped loudly in the trees and visitors left the Cloisters and walked south through the park. Anthony loved warm summer nights. They reminded him of growing up in Italy and walking in the Tuscan countryside alongside rows of cypresses that gently swayed in the breeze and orchards heavy with olives, apricots and chestnuts. It would take him almost forty-five minutes to walk to his apartment, but to be outside, walking through the great park, along the mighty Hudson, was something he relished.

  There was very little traffic in this northwest corner of Manhattan. It was actually hard to imagine that it was still part of one of the most densely populated cities on earth. The soft breeze that blew in his face from the south brought fragrant smells of honeysuckle and gardenia. He passed a few people, who had probably stopped to visit the Cloisters, or maybe just to see how far north Central Park actually went, but other than that he was by himself. It was probably as alone as you could get and still technically be in Manhattan.

  As he made his way farther south, the number of people increased exponentially. Summer was the time for softball leagues and soccer games. Musicians played together in ad hoc groups. Lovers walked hand-in-hand, meandering along the myriad trails, stopping along the many bridges to look onto the ponds. The large art deco apartments on Central Park West marked the western boundary of the park. He left the park, walked under the stone underpass, and made his way to the entrance of his building. The doorman stood watch, dressed in a crisp blue suit with gold stitching around his sleeves and at the edges of his collar, matched by two gold buttons in front. If you didn’t know better, you might mistake him for an officer in the U.S. navy.