The Night Portrait

Today, Germany is ours / tomorrow, the whole world.

Edith, Heinrich, and thousands of others across the Reich, she imagined, felt helpless, or too afraid of the consequences, to resist.

Would they find each other after their arrival in Poland? What would they find when they returned home, if they returned at all?

Edith hoped that the act of writing might calm her nervous stomach, might relieve some of the trepidation about what lay ahead. Instead, it only unleashed a flurry of unanswered questions in her mind. How had events escalated to this degree so quickly? Why couldn’t she, like Manfred, have foreseen what the museum directors were planning? And how had she—a lowly conservator toiling quietly in a basement conservation lab—been thrust into the middle of this conflict?

Edith felt her heart sink as the answer to the last question crystallized in her mind.

Because I am the one who brought their attention to these paintings. She felt like an idiot for not recognizing beforehand what she was being asked to do. For not understanding what it might mean and what might be the consequences of her seemingly benign research project in the museum library.

Edith pulled out the binder of folios she had made of the art the museum directors wanted to safeguard. She unwound the straps and began shuffling through the pages again. Surely these paintings only made up a small portion of what the Czartoryski family owned.

When Edith reached the reproduction of da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, she paused. I am to blame for putting all these pictures at risk, she thought. It’s my fault that we are on our way to take these pictures from the Czartoryski family. My entire adult life has been dedicated to saving works of art. And yet, in one moment, in the name of doing my job, I have endangered some of the most priceless works of art in the world. Was there a way to undo the damage she had done?

The clack of the train wheels and the short bursts of steam set the pace for Edith’s racing thoughts. Outside the window, the treetops rushed by, a blur of shadows.

Edith’s mind searched for an answer, a way to save da Vinci’s Lady and the other pictures that she had put unintentionally in the line of fire. But as the ragged outlines of the trees disappeared and the sky began to turn black, Edith only felt the weight of despair like a stone on her chest. The paintings, too, had been cast like dice into a game that had spiraled out of her control, a series of events that Edith now felt powerless to stop.

Milan, Italy

January 1490

CECILIA HAD UNLEASHED A SERIES OF EVENTS THAT SHE would be powerless to stop. That’s what her brother had meant, even if he had written it in more eloquent language.

She fingered the broken seal on the parchment her brother Fazio had sent, a missive letting Cecilia know that their mother had arrived safely back home in Siena. Cecilia wondered how long it would take for her mother to speak to her again, if she would hear from her at all, ever.

Cecilia’s mother had understood that the moment when her brazen daughter had not bowed but dared to step forward and bare her teeth to Ludovico il Moro in an unabashed smile, there was no turning back. The Regent of Milan would claim her for his own. No one was in a position to stop him, especially not a portly Sienese widow in a dirt-caked dress. In the end, Cecilia pitied her mother, for there was nothing for her to do but scream, break a plate, rattle away in a carriage, and leave the Castello Sforzesco behind in a cloud of fog and mud.

Cecilia could laugh about it now, she supposed, now that her mother was far distant from the palace. And Cecilia did laugh a little, quietly to herself. There was little else to do as she sat waiting for Ludovico il Moro, running her palms across the slippery silk dress. He should have been here long before now, but she imagined that he had other things to do than come visit her in her new bedchamber.

Ludovico surely was occupied, consulting with his military and political advisers. From her bedchamber window, Cecilia had seen diplomatic liveries cross the courtyard, flying the colors of Ferrara and Mantua. As Regent of Milan, Ludovico faced constant threats from Venice, Cecilia’s brother had told her, and from the French king’s army. Even from his own nephew. Ludovico had already sent his nephew’s closest advisers to the gallows, the dressmaid Lucrezia had told Cecilia as she brushed out her hair in the candlelight. When you were that powerful, the girl told her, anyone might be your friend one moment, and then your enemy the next.

So Cecilia waited. She had already gone over every inch of the bedchamber several times. There were so many books. A cabinet held stacks of folios stitched together with linen threads, long cords of vellum, and leather bindings. Some of the volumes were covered with stiff pasteboards and hinged spines. She had spent hours poring over the brown ink on parchment. She even found a lady’s book of secrets, a sort of recipe book with beauty concoctions like the one she had endured under Lucrezia’s insistence to remove every last hair on her body. She had looked and looked again at the painted images on the wall, paintings that brought to life the stories in many of those books—ancient tales of love, betrayal, battle, death, redemption. She had picked up each glass vial and gilded box on the table, watched the morning fog roll across the gardens outside the window, and tried on every dress of silk and velvet hanging in the wardrobe. She had let herself disappear into the piles of woolen and silk bedding and curtains draped around the high bed. From the open window, the aroma of rice cooking in diced onions and butter wafted into the room.

“My daughter is going to the convent. It is already decided!” Her mother’s words filled her head again, unbidden. “Otherwise, she goes back to the country with me. That is the choice.”

“And what will happen to her there?” Fazio had said. “If I had been home with you, maybe things would have been different, but as it stands, thanks to my brothers, she no longer has a dowry to marry her to a decent family. She will be nothing more than a country peasant. A spinster. Here she will be given riches and status. It is not forever, Mother.”

“And what convent will want her after she has lost her virtue?” her mother had challenged, her hands on her hips. “No man has touched her! You know it as well as I do.”

“I know it sounds strange,” Fazio had said, pacing before the window, “but being His Lordship’s inamorata will afford Cecilia a higher status than she has now. Even the nuns will respect it.”

Cecilia had watched as her mother’s round face reddened. “I refuse to leave my daughter here, with that … that little pompous ox.” She gestured as if to measure Ludovico il Moro’s stature with her hand. “He is too sure of himself, is he not? He will use her and throw her away. And then what will we have to show for it?”

Cecilia had begun to feel red anger swell inside of her own chest. How dare they act as if she was not in the room? How dare they act as if she was still a silly child with no thoughts of her own? She could, and would, make her own decisions.

“I am staying here,” Cecilia had said quietly.

“You will be a whore!” That was when her mother had thrown the plate, shattering it against the tiles.

“No, Mother,” Cecilia had said, as calmly as possible. “I will be a lady. I will be the head of this castle. You will see.” For a moment, she had seen an expression like pity on her brother’s face, but she couldn’t fathom why.

Her brother had told her that, after her vocal performance, Ludovico Sforza had been determined to bring Cecilia into his household. That there was something about Cecilia that he could hardly put into words. There was no deterring him on the matter.

Fazio had laid out Cecilia’s choices in clear terms. There were only two ways to stop His Lordship’s orders, he had told her. Cecilia could decide to preserve her maidenhood and return home with their mother, a choice that Cecilia could hardly bear. She could join the sisters at Monastero Maggiore, an even less desirable outcome in Cecilia’s eyes, even though her mother and her brother begged her to consider it again. But if she decided to stay in His Lordship’s care, Fazio told her, then there was no reversing the decision. And, he added, she would have to live with the consequences. At that point, there was little her family could do to help her and anyway, it was out of their hands.

But to Cecilia, only one thing mattered. Ludovico Sforza, Lord of Milan, wanted her and he could give her everything she ever wanted. In one second, he could transform her from a penniless country girl into a duchessa. At least she imagined so.

“I am staying,” Cecilia had whispered.

That was it. The turning point. And now here she stood, clad in silk in this beautiful bedchamber. There was no doubt in her mind that she was right where she was supposed to be. They would see.

At last, the door creaked open and Cecilia stood. She was ready, but the moment His Lordship entered the room, she felt her resolve waver. As much as she was resolute in her decision, she suddenly felt nervous being with him alone in this room. After all, he was a stranger. She could not show the turbulence that roiled through her veins.

Slowly, he walked toward her. She watched his eyes flicker in the lantern light. “It was a good decision to stay,” he said. “I can assure you that you will be adequately rewarded.”

“I was honored by your offer,” Cecilia said, casting her eyes to the floor.

His Lordship approached close enough so that she could smell the dank scent of his hair and beard. He took another calculated step toward her, closer than any man who was not her father or brothers had ever come. Then he set his eyes on her. They were as black as coals, so dark that she could not make out the pupils. She felt her stomach flutter as if it were full of moths. Their faces stood at the same level.

“You are a lovely woman,” he whispered in his deep voice, thick with its Tuscan tongue, tinged with the strange Milanese accent. She felt his hot breath near her neck and she fought against the tingle that ran up her back.

Cecilia cleared her throat. “I am also learned,” she said, taking a step back. There was still a quake up her spine, making her feel unsteady and unsure, but she did not want him to perceive the power he held over her. “Maybe you have heard.”

She thought she detected a teasing smile cross his face, but it was difficult to tell in the shadows, under the thick beard. The idea that he might be mocking her infuriated her, and she took another step back.

“Tell me more,” he said. She felt his fingertips grasp her hand, then move lightly up the silk sleeve of her dress. His eyes burned hot and focused.

“So much to tell.” She hoped he could not hear her voice waver. She wished that she had had even a little of the diplomatic training of her brother; only now did she realize that she did not know what to reveal and what to withhold. She was only sure that it was important to know the difference. “I can read and write in Latin. My father made sure that I had a good tutor. The best one in Siena. I can calculate numbers. I write verses. I can sing—you already know that. And I play the lute and the lyre. I play other stringed instruments, too, well, a little bit …” Was she already talking too much? Lucrezia had warned her.

Ludovico listened halfheartedly. His hand was gathering together the heft of her skirt, pulling it up toward her thigh.

“Is it true what I’ve heard? You still are virtuous? No man has touched you before?” His voice rose barely above a whisper.

Cecilia swallowed that truth like a stone and nodded. Of course this was why she was here. This is what a mistress did, why she was allowed to stay here in the castle with all these beautiful things at all. It had been her decision.

She swallowed hard again, then mustered her courage. “How … how much will you wager that I am smarter than any woman of this castle? Smarter than any mistress you have had before me?”

He barked a loud laugh. “I hope you are,” he said, but then she felt his hot breath on her neck, his beard against her jaw. She closed her eyes; she could not help it. His mouth seared her skin with heat as his hands continued their way up under her skirt.

“I … I want to be the lady of this castle,” Cecilia gasped the words out as his fingers found their way under her skirts and to the linen ties of her undergarments. She knew what was about to happen to her and in a moment of clarity, she realized that she didn’t want to just be a mistress. Before he could have her, before he could use her up and throw her out, she wanted his word.

“I want to be your wife,” Cecilia blurted.

A deep, rich laugh reverberated from his core. He pulled away and looked her in the eyes. There was something there more than fire, more than a burning, but Cecilia, in her inexperience, did not understand it fully.

“My dear girl,” he said. Then he pushed her toward the bed and turned her roughly onto her stomach.

Eastern Belgium

September 1944

DOMINIC STARED OUT OF THE OPEN SIDE OF THE QUARTERTON truck as it rumbled through the countryside. Countryside was the wrong word, he thought. Once, this part of Belgium must have been beautiful. Even now, in the treetops, the fragments of autumn pushing through the warm blanket of late summer held the promise of coming splendor. But the landscape was marred by the still-smoking remains of little villages. Dominic’s heart tightened at the sight. The earth was scarred and blackened in places, fields trampled by tank treads, shell casings, and scattered pieces of equipment strewn everywhere. An orchard stood in tattered ruins, the charred branches of fruit trees twisted and broken against the blue sky.

Paul Blakely tightened his hands on the wheel as they drove into the rubble. The truck crawled through the main street of what was, until recently, a village. Only its church steeple was left, teetering precariously on its half-ruined foundation. The cross at its tip was a brave and tragic silhouette that made Dominic’s fingers itch to sketch. But the rest of the town was anything but picturesque. Blackened shells and broken walls were all that remained of the houses and shops that had once lined this street. The truck detoured around a fallen lamppost and labored through the pockmarked road.

“Man, would you look at that …” Paul sat at Dominic’s side, gazing ahead to the wasted landscape, the strap of his helmet swinging with the motion of the truck. Dominic shifted his rifle, wishing he could lay it down, but this territory remained unfriendly. He had to be ready for action at any moment. Now, three months after landing on Omaha Beach, watchfulness had become automatic. His nerve endings felt frayed and electrified, ever on high alert. He wondered if he would ever lose the feeling that there were enemies stalking him.

Before he sent Paul and Dominic off with the empty deuce-and-a-half truck, a Military Police transportation officer had briefed them on their mission. “This new assignment is something different,” he had said. “You two will still be on security detail. But you’ll be part of a squadron of men with a unique job. Yes, we’re fighting Nazis, but we’re also trying to preserve as much as possible of this culture that’s so damned bent on destroying itself.” He gestured at the ruined landscape. “There are important buildings, monuments, and works of art everywhere you look. This war could be the end of all of it—priceless stuff, masterpieces we need to try to save at the same time that we’re trying to save our own asses.”

Dominic had leaned forward, his interest piqued. In his determination to beat the Nazis, to simply survive and go home to his family, he hadn’t considered the war’s impact on art and architecture.

“So we’re supposed to avoid damaging old churches and other monuments,” the officer had gone on. “That should be clear enough. But we’re also looking for paintings, sculptures. This regime has been stealing works of art all through the war, carrying them off to be displayed in their houses like trophies.”

“You mean they’re keeping them for themselves?” Paul had asked.

“Yep. Our intelligence is telling us that some of the highest-ranking Nazis are even hanging up da Vincis inside their own homes.” He had paused, and Dominic let that sink in. For years, he had been reading the news reports of the horrors of the Nazi death camps, of Hitler’s unceasing determination to take over the world. He felt stupid that he had not considered that they were also taking whatever they wanted, raping the countryside for treasures that they had no right to take—even priceless works of art.

The officer had continued. “Some things have already been destroyed, either by the Nazis or even by us. Accidentally, of course. Let’s face it, some destruction is just unavoidable, right? But the president has created a commission called the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program—the MFAA. Monuments Men.”

“Monuments Men …” Dominic said.

“Mostly museum folks, art historians, people who know about that stuff. Our mission is to protect these works and to get them back from those Nazi bastards so that the works can be returned to their rightful owners after this fiasco is behind us.”

Dominic could hardly believe his ears. How could the American president be worried about paintings and sculptures when thousands of people were losing their lives? But at the same time, he couldn’t deny his wonder. “You mean these … Monuments Men … are just focused on saving art? How are they doing that?”

The officer shrugged. “There’s no guidebook for this stuff. We are looking at aerial photos, marking churches, bridges, monuments to be saved. And we’re going inside to see what’s left, what we can salvage. We’ve already found a bunch of important paintings and portraits, especially, some by the great masters—Rembrandt, Titian, big guys.”

Dominic sat back abruptly, awed. Faced with the prospect of possibly seeing some of those masterpieces, he couldn’t help but feel a thrill of excitement. He thought of da Vinci’s works bombed out and destroyed by the war, or hanging in Hitler’s palace, and bile rose in his throat.

“So your job, fellas, is to protect these Monuments Men,” the officer had continued. “They put themselves at risk daily. They go into some dangerous places to get that art back—and you two are here to watch their backs while they do their jobs. They’ve been waiting for MPs—and especially transport—for weeks now. We finally got the authorization.”

Ahead, on the scorched horizon, the gray encampment seemed almost as much of a blemish as the bombed-out buildings; rows of drab and uniform tents stood between watchful tanks. Paul switched off the truck’s engine, and rifles still held close, he and Dominic disembarked. Soldiers lounged between the sagging tents, their dirty uniforms smelling of unwashed men and gunpowder. At the sight of the truck, several of the men stirred, looking at Dominic and Paul with hopeful expressions. The ground was trampled and littered with shell casings and cigarette butts. Like all encampments, it was a mixture of strict discipline in the tight lines of the tents and messiness in the posture of the exhausted men. But to Dominic, it was beginning to feel more and more like home.

An officer approached but spared no pleasantries. “It’s about time you got here,” he said. “That’s your commander. Captain Walker Hancock.” He turned and walked into the encampment. Exchanging a brief glance, Dominic and Paul followed.

Even from a distance across the dreary camp, Dominic could see that Captain Hancock was as out of place as a mare among mules. Tall and lithe, his uniform draped elegantly over his lean frame. He looked like he should have been wearing a suit and swirling a glass of sherry instead. His piercing blue eyes were watchful as Dominic and Paul followed the officer over to him.

“Hancock’s not just a soldier,” the officer told them as they walked. “He’s some kind of famous sculptor, too.”

The educated, refined man seemed utterly incongruous here in this bitter and charred landscape, but with a shock, Dominic realized that he must have been commissioned as well.

The officer stopped and saluted; Dominic and Paul followed suit. “New men for the security detail, sir.”

Hancock turned and studied the men. Seeming to register the large white MP stamped on their helmets, he nodded. “Good,” he said. “We’ll need more of them as we move toward Aachen.” He drummed his fingers on the barrel of his weapon; Dominic could imagine them grasping a chisel. “Get them settled in.”

“Yes, sir.” The officer turned to lead the men away, but Dominic’s curiosity was getting the better of him.

“How will you go about finding these works of art, sir?” he blurted. He looked at the officer as he spoke, too nervous to meet Hancock’s eye, but the men all knew to whom the question was directed. Hancock merely quirked his other eyebrow and turned away.

The officer saved Dominic from his embarrassment. “A bunch of professionals in Europe and the US have been working on this thing ever since the war started,” he said. “Museum curators and such. They’ve been using their own research to make lists of these works and maps for where we might …”

The officer’s words were lost in a thunderous sound that electrified Dominic’s whole body. Bullets tore into the nearest tent, sending canvas flying in all directions. Shouts and gunfire filled the encampment and, in slow motion, Dominic saw Hancock turning, saw machine-gun fire tearing into the ground ever closer to him.

By sheer instinct, Dominic lunged forward and threw his short frame into Captain Hancock. He felt earth splatter on his boots from the spray of bullets, curled himself determinedly around the commander, and rolled behind the cover of the giant rubber tire of their two-and-a-half-ton. Bullets whined as they ricocheted off the hub. Dominic gripped his rifle, waited for a break in the thunder and returned fire, his gun kicking back against his shoulder. He emptied the magazine until he heard a scream and the gunfire abruptly ceased. A few long moments stretched, followed by the shuffle of boots, and then silence.

Panting, Dominic lowered his gun. As the smoke cleared, Dominic saw two German uniforms, bodies lying still at the edge of the encampment. Some Americans groaned among the tents, too, other men hurrying to their aid through the clearing smoke. Dominic was relieved to see Paul’s tall frame sprinting toward the injured soldiers.

Captain Hancock was sitting up, brushing dirt from his uniform. There was a smear of mud across his cheekbone. He studied Dominic, wide-eyed.

“Are you hurt, sir?” Dominic asked, reloading his rifle and stepping cautiously out from the cover of the tire. The encampment had the burnt, smoky smell of recently discharged guns, mixed with the salt tang of blood, a smell Dominic had come to know and hate. But both Americans who had been shot were stirring and swearing. Good news.

“No.” Hancock crawled out from behind the tire. Dominic extended a hand and pulled him to his feet. Hancock returned his grip and met his eyes, his face suddenly splitting into a dazzling smile. He squinted at the name on Dominic’s uniform.

“Bonelli, huh?” He pumped Dominic’s hand with a tight grip. “Welcome.”