Brush With Death (3 page)

“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—might 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

—Philip Guston (1913-1980), Canadian painter

—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.”

“You're going to
what
?”

“I said—”

“I heard you. Are you nuts?”

“What could possibly go wrong? There's nobody
real
there, right?”

Nobody but grave-robbing ghouls,
I thought with a shudder. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Mary about tonight's encounter, but given her current state of mind I feared the chance of confronting a green-faced goblin would make her all the more gung ho.

“It's against the rules to be in the cemetery at night. Besides, they lock the gates at sundown. How would you get in?” I didn't mention that my master key to the columbarium also opened the cemetery gates.

Mary rolled her eyes, shoved the last bite of burrito into her mouth, and gazed at me as if I were the dimmest bulb in the chandelier. “
Hell-o-o?
Climb over the wall?”

I am a woman of considerable imagination, but scaling a ten-foot wall to spend a night in a cemetery would never have occurred to me, and not just because I was decidedly less athletic than my twenty-four-year-old assistant. I had spent a memorable, miserable seventeenth birthday in a Parisian jail, and most of my adult life had been focused on distancing myself from my grandfather Georges LeFleur's world of felonious forgers. I was still recovering from an incident last Thanksgiving when, through almost no fault of my own, I had been busted for smuggling drugs. I gave the police a wide berth these days.

“Mary, the cemetery people don't want strangers traipsing around the grounds at night. You never know what could happen.”

“You're such a wuss, Annie.”

“I am not a wuss!”

“Yes, you are. But that's one of the things I love about you.”

“Mary, I'm serious—”

“Fear not, dear friend and employer,” she said, gathering the foil wrapper and napkins to sort for the recycling bin. “I'll bring Dante with me.” Dante was Mary's very large, very scary-looking boyfriend.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“All right. But for the record, I think it's a bad idea.”

“So noted, Ms. Law-and-Order.”

Now, that made me smile. “Be sure to bring a sleeping bag. It gets cold in Oakland at night.”

“I'll put it on the list, right after vino and smokes,” Mary said.