Chapter 1
He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.
—Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Italian painter and inventor
He who hungers most must be most afraid of a buffet.—Georges LeFleur (1932- ), art forger extraordinaire
The sweet-faced boy, one arm curled around his cocker spaniel puppy, paid no attention to the swaying and bobbing of the sagging helium balloons near the doorway. Fluffy brown teddy bears, shiny toy trucks, and wooden alphabet blocks lay at his feet, but Louis Spencer didn’t notice them. He never would.
Louis Jonathan Spencer, “Our Sweet Angel,” had died in 1937 at the age of six.
“I can’t believe his family still leaves toys for him after all these years,” I whispered.
“They don’t.”
The young woman finished measuring the doorway with a heavy carpenter’s tape and jotted the dimensions on a pad of paper. With a delicate frown of concentration, she clicked her ballpoint pen closed, stuck it under the hinge of her clipboard, and stowed the items in a large canvas carryall. Picking up a complicated-looking camera the size of her head, she squatted and began snapping photos of the many offerings to the memory of Louis Spencer.
“The crypt’s not even endowed,” she continued. “That’s why it’s falling apart.”
The camera’s insistent strobe light flashed through the night’s darkness, lending the pyramid-shaped stone-and-concrete crypt an incongruous disco effect. In the sporadic illumination I caught glimpses of the interior beyond the rusty wrought-iron gate. A broken stained glass window in the shape of a cross with a rose in the center bowed under its own weight, and had been protected from further disintegration by an overlay of cheap chicken wire. Despite the damage and makeshift repair, I could easily imagine sunlight cascading in through the window, filling the crypt’s interior with the soft brilliance of fine jewels.
Near the door an intricate floor mosaic was covered with a thin layer of mud and leaves, while bald patches in the abstract pattern revealed that dozens of the exquisite blue and metallic gold ceramic tiles had long since been lost or destroyed. The marble figure of little Louis Spencer, embracing his beloved dog, was missing two fingers and bloomed with a bad case of greenish white lichen. My own fingers itched to restore the water-stained canvas of angels that sagged from the steep ceiling.
“I’m Cindy Tanaka,” the young woman said as she dismantled her camera and packed it, piece by piece, into a large black leather bag. “I’m writing my dissertation at Cal on the phenomenon of public grieving. Louis Spencer’s crypt has become a place for strangers to make offerings to a little boy who died before most of them were even born. What are you doing here at this hour?”
“My name’s Annie Kincaid,” I said. “I’m restoring some paintings at the Chapel of the Chimes next door.”
“That right?” Cindy’s cool, dark eyes swept over me. Her pencil-slim figure was clad in pressed khaki chinos, a crisp white blouse, and spotless striped espadrilles, and her straight black hair was swept off her smooth forehead with a wide pink band. My not-so-lithe figure was dressed in its usual business attire: a paint-stained black T-shirt, faded denim overalls, and scruffy running shoes worn without socks. My curly brown hair was piled in a messy knot on top of my head, anchored by an artist’s paintbrush. My chic friend Samantha, a jewelry designer, had complimented my use of the brush as “fashion-forward,” but the truth was I could never find bobby pins when I needed them.
“Nice to meet you.” As I held out my right hand, I noticed the tips of my fingers were stained a virulent shade from the vermilion I had been using while painting angels’ robes, and my thumb was smeared with the burnt umber glaze I used for antiquing.
Cindy shook my multihued hand with her firm, clean one. We gazed into the crypt, our flashlights illuminating slices of the inky interior.
“What’s with the Egyptian motif? I noticed another pyramid nearby, as well.”
“It was popular in the twenties and thirties, when a lot of the Great Pyramid excavations were going on. I’m trying to decipher some of the hieroglyphs, but I think they’re mainly decorative,” Cindy mused. “It’s funny, there’s something special about this crypt. People bring things here all the time. A lot of them sit for a while, meditating or praying or talking to themselves. Sometimes they let me take their pictures.”
“Is it open to visitors?” I asked, nodding at the bouquets of flowers and small toys strewn about the floor.
“No, they throw those things through the bars. Bayview Cemetery keeps the crypts locked. There’s no telling what would happen if they didn’t. Speaking of which, how did you get past the front gates?”
“I’m working nights, so I’ve got a master key,” I said, playing my flashlight’s beam across the interior of little Louis’ sepulcher. “I was taking a break when I noticed your light up here on the hill and got curious. But what are—”
I squeaked, jumped, and dropped the light.
“Something wrong?” Cindy asked, frowning.
“Sorry, I thought I saw something move.” My heart pounded as I bent to retrieve the light from the lap of a drooping Raggedy Ann doll. I pointed the beam through the gate but everything was still. “Guess it’s just my imagination.”
“Cemeteries at night,” Cindy said with a shrug as she crouched down to zip up the camera bag. “A lot of people get jumpy. It was probably just a rat.”
“That’s a comforting thought,” I murmured.
“Don’t worry, it’s locked up tight,” she said, with a hint of condescension. She grabbed the gate and rattled it to prove her point. “Believe me, no one could possibly—”
Something leapt out from behind the bronze urn next to the sepulcher. I caught a glimpse of a distorted green face and shrank against the cold stone wall as a tall figure barreled toward us. Throwing one shoulder against the wrought-iron gate, the ghoul burst through, knocking Cindy flat on the ground, and tore down the curved access road, its long, dark cape flapping in the breeze. Swearing a blue streak, Cindy scrambled to her feet and gave chase, all five feet, one hundred pounds of her. Graceful as a gazelle, she took off like a cross-country runner, leaping over grave markers and zigzagging around monuments until she was nearly abreast of the fleeing creature. Scampering onto the roof of a burial chamber burrowed into a hillside, Cindy hurled herself onto the ghoul’s back, sending them both sprawling into the shallow drainage ditch at the side of the road.
I sprinted toward the dark forms as they thrashed and rolled and emitted muffled shrieks. Cindy seemed to be holding her own, but when I was still twenty yards away the ghoul broke free and half ran, half hobbled toward the main gates, shielding its face with the cape.
“Cindy! Are you all right?” I cried as I helped her to her feet.
“Go after him!”
“Are you insane?”
“We can’t let him get away!”
“I don’t think—”
“Dammit!” Cindy swore as we watched the ghoul disappear into a grove of fragrant eucalyptus trees at the edge of the cemetery. She was covered in mud and grass stains, and her pink headband had fallen out. A green rubber Halloween mask of an elongated, howling face dangled from two fingers. “Shit! Why didn’t you follow him?”
“Because he was hiding in a crypt!”
“Did you at least get a good look at him?” she asked, her lips pressed together in dissatisfaction.
I closed my eyes. “Tall. Thin. Green.”
“I know that,” she said waspishly, shaking the Halloween mask at me.
“I think he had white hair,” I offered, recalling a glimpse of stringy hair on the neck of the retreating figure.
“Are you sure it wasn’t a wig?”
“I guess I wasn’t, um, focusing,” I said. My artist’s eye usually took note of anatomical details, but during midnight encounters with graveyard ghouls all bets were off. I looked at Cindy warily. What kind of a person tackled a ghoul in a cemetery?
“I’d like to know what he was up to,” Cindy muttered, brushing dirt from her blouse.
“You said people liked to hang out here,” I replied, rescuing her pink headband from the ditch and shaking off some leaves. “Isn’t that what you’re writing your dissertation on?”
“Respectable people hang out at crypts in the daytime. At night you’re looking at a whole different breed. We’re talking druggies or Satan worshippers.”
Ick, I thought.
“Still,” she continued. “Junkies and Dark Lord types don’t wear cheesy Halloween masks and capes.”
“What’s that?” I asked as my flashlight beam illuminated a rectangular object the size of a shoe box lying in the grass a few feet away.
“I thought that guy dropped something,” Cindy said, picking it up.
It was a dull gray metal box, rusted in spots, with a small, keyed latch. The sole embellishment was a simple cross with a rose in the center, echoing the design of the stained glass window in Louis Spencer’s crypt.
“Is it—um—an urn or something?” I quelled a desire to flee as I envisioned a tornado of ashes bursting out of the box and devouring us.
“I doubt it. I’ve never seen an urn like this.”
We stared at the box for a moment.
“Let’s go back and check out the crypt,” Cindy said with a determined look on her face. She started marching up the hill toward Louis Spencer’s final resting place.
I reluctantly fell in step. For the past few weeks I had been restoring two murals in the Chapel of the Chimes Columbarium, adjacent to Bayview Cemetery. As I learned only after I accepted the job, a columbarium is similar to a mausoleum but holds urns of cremated remains, known in the business as “cremains.” Designed in the early twentieth century by the renowned architect Julia Morgan, Oakland’s Chapel of the Chimes was a glorious Romanesque-Gothic building decorated with fabulous mosaics, colorful murals, and elaborate carvings.
One of the commission’s stipulations was that I paint at night to minimize the disruption to the columbarium’s visitors. Disconcerted at the idea of working in the midst of grieving families, I had been happy to oblige. But adjusting to the swing shift had been more of a challenge than I’d anticipated, and halfway through the evening I often fought waves of drowsiness. Twenty minutes ago I had taken a break from the neck-breaking work to get some fresh air. I had not bargained on encountering Cindy— much less a masked ghoul—and at the moment wanted nothing more than to return to the restoration. Paint, unlike so many other things in my life, was eminently predictable.
“I hate to be a party pooper, Cindy, but I need to get back to work,” I said as we skirted a lush pond dotted with water lilies and edged with aromatic hyacinths. “I don’t want to leave you out here by yourself, though. Why don’t you investigate the crypt tomorrow, during business hours?”
“What if he comes back tonight to finish the job?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Aren’t you the least bit curious about what that guy was doing in Louis Spencer’s crypt?” Cindy asked, not slowing her pace one bit.
“Not if he was communing with the dead, I’m not.”
“He wasn’t communing with the dead, he was stealing from the dead.”
“That makes me feel so much better.”
She ignored me as we picked our way up the grassy hill and through the maze of headstones. Some of the markers were large and ostentatious, featuring sculpted angels and complex family lineages, while others were all the more poignant for their simplicity. When I began working here I had sought out the grave of the columbarium’s architect, Julia Morgan. Morgan had been one of the best-known professional women of her day, and the first ever to be admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Morgan designed hundreds of buildings in the Bay Area, and spent more than twenty years working on the spectacular Hearst Castle on the California coast. In death, Morgan’s name had been simply chiseled into an unpretentious block of granite along with other family members’ names. I had sketched the plain memorial, hoping some of her talent and tenacity might rub off on me.
“I’ll just wait out here,” I told Cindy when we arrived at Louis Spencer’s pyramid. I was not unduly skittish around the dead—so long as they were ensconced in urns or graves—but I wasn’t as sanguine about the living. Especially when they wore masks and hung out in cemeteries robbing graves.
Cindy stood at the open gate, crossed her slender arms over her chest, and lifted one eyebrow in what I presumed was a supercool form of “double-dog dare ya.” Apparently we’d time-warped back to the fifth grade.
“I’ll stand guard if you want to poke around,” I said, sticking to my guns. “But I am not going in there.”
“Suit yourself.”
The gate screeched as she swung it wide, and from my position of relative safety I peered inside as Cindy’s flashlight beam swept the interior. On either side of the mosaic floor were two dusty Carrara marble benches flanked by massive bronze urns. Denuded branches bore witness to the long-dead floral sprays that had once filled the urns with symbols of life. Bright Egyptian funerary designs had been frescoed on the crumbling plaster walls. At the rear of the crypt was the lichen-covered sculpture of the boy and his dog resting atop Louis Spencer’s sepulcher of dove-gray marble. Behind the tomb, weeping stone angels in scalloped wall niches watched over the boy, the drooping stained glass window between them. From the ceiling hung an ornate, and very dusty, bronze chandelier.
Louis Spencer had been a much-loved boy.
Cindy inspected the marble benches, the bronze urns, the weeping angels, and the sepulcher.
“No drug paraphernalia, no candles, no animal sacrifices,” she muttered.
“Animal sacrifices?” I repeated, aghast.
“Wait a minute—hell-o, Betty . . .”
“Hello who?” I rasped, hoping she hadn’t spotted something that had once been alive.
“I found some tools.”
Curiosity got the better of me, and I slipped inside. On the floor between the sepulcher and the rear wall were a shiny new crowbar, a mallet, a hammer, and a chisel. Scuff marks in the dust and the tattered remnants of once-splendid cobwebs indicated the tools had been placed there recently. I shone my flashlight on the sepulcher. A marble panel on one end was crooked and showed fresh gouge marks, as though it had been removed and replaced.
“It looks like the box came from the sepulcher,” I said. “See this panel here?”
The graduate student inspected the pry marks. “I think you’re right. Let’s open it.”
“Absolutely not. I draw the line at opening graves. Besides, I don’t want to be trapped in here if that guy comes back, do you?”
“I guess you’re right,” Cindy conceded. “But I don’t want to leave the box here, either.”
She tucked the metal box under one arm and we hurried out of the crypt. I slung the leather photography bag over my shoulder, Cindy grabbed her canvas carryall, and we wasted no time jogging down the hill to the main gates. Actually, the perky graduate student jogged, while I sort of stumbled, feeling the effects of my earlier sprint. Cindy unlocked the pedestrian gate and held it for me.
“What do you suppose is in the box?” I asked as I shut and locked the gate behind me.
“Beats me,” she said with a shrug, popping the trunk of a yellow Volkswagen Cabriolet parked at the curb. “It’s locked. We’d have to break into it to find out.”
Our gaze held for a moment.
“That wouldn’t be right,” I said, superstitious enough to fear a curse from beyond the grave but rational enough to hide my fear behind ethics.
Cindy nodded. “Well, whatever it is belonged to little Louis. It’s probably just an old G.I. Joe or something.”
“G.I. Joes weren’t made until after World War Two,” I said, recalling last summer’s “Toys Toys Toys!” exhibit at the Brock Museum in San Francisco. “More likely it’s a Shirley Temple doll.”
“Even for a boy?”
“Lead soldiers, maybe.”
“A petrified gum ball, or whatever.” Cindy wrapped the metal box in a bright orange beach towel emblazoned with the grinning face of Garfield the Cat, and nestled it between her camera bag and a cardboard file box. “I’ll bring it to the cemetery office in the morning. They’ll probably want to call the police.”
I reached into my pocket and extracted one of the business cards I was so proud of.
TRUE/FAUX STUDIOS
ANNIE KINCAID, PROPRIETOR
FAUX FINISHES, MURALS, TROMPE L’OEIL
“NOT FOR THE FEINT OF ART ALONE”
“True/Faux Studios, huh?” Cindy said, pronouncing the name correctly.
“I’m restoring some paintings at the columbarium,” I said. “Chasing goblins through graveyards is just a sideline.”
“Really?” Her dark eyes assessed me. “Can I ask you a question about art?”
Artists—especially those who did restoration work— often felt a bit like a doctor at a cocktail party: complete strangers did not hesitate to demand instant, free appraisals. The sad truth was that most artists were not well schooled in art history, much less in the chemistry of paint, and seldom knew anything more esoteric than how to maintain a red sable paintbrush. (Rinse thoroughly with mineral spirits, wash with mild soap and water, apply brush conditioner, and never, ever lend it to your young nephews, even if they swear “to be supercareful this time, honest.”)
“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.