“All the work we had done through the years didn’t mean shit,” Tandy said, and Lizzie could tell he wished they hadn’t found the paintings this way—he viewed it as cheap, lucky—he almost wanted the mystery back. “It’s always the girlfriends. They’ll turn on a dime.”
Lizzie pulled Oscar tighter. She started to cry. Oscar pushed a wet fist into her mouth, rooting around for her teeth. Now she was laughing and crying.
“We’ll need you to come in and identify them. You and your sister,” Tandy was now saying. “There are details to be worked out, of course; but the important thing is we’ve got them back.”
“We’ll be there,” Lizzie said.
16
Los Angeles, 2008
Rose remembered when she and Thomas were waiting, grimly, for the first biopsy report. “We need to prepare ourselves,” she recalled him saying. “If it looks like a horse and acts like a horse, it’s probably a horse and not a zebra.”
“But I want a zebra,” she said to him. “I demand a zebra.”
By the time the pancreatic cancer was diagnosed, metastases had already taken root in his liver and lungs. He was gone within nine months, an awful, harrowing time. And yet Rose would gladly relive any one of those days to have him again. Nearly fifty years they had been together. She had been uncommonly lucky. When Thomas died, she told herself that it was a gift to have his body at all, a luxury to be able to decide where to bury him, to have a burial, a headstone, a spot of her own choosing, one that she could visit, that would be tended to, not vandalized or ignored.
But she wanted more. After all those years of feeling as if she didn’t deserve happiness, that she was snatching bits of goodness wherever she could, that one day she would be punished for surviving—after all of that, she was left wanting, wishing for more.
Getting older meant facing loss, over and over again. Its presence was not limited to one’s spouse. People got sick; they suffered; they died. Turn left, turn right; there was a former colleague of Thomas’s, murdered in his Laurel Canyon home by a meth addict; Rose’s dentist, guffawing at her last cleaning, asking about her summer plans, nearly mute six months later when he told her his seven-year-old had lymphoma; five Amish girls shot and killed in their school by a truck driver; hundreds dead from a heat wave in India.
Rose, of all people, understood that devastations occurred all the time. But that didn’t mean you got used to them. Or accepted them. Almost four years after Thomas’s death, his plastic reading glasses remained on his nightstand. She still couldn’t sleep on his side of the bed. As Rose got older, she was surprised less by tragedies than by the absence of them. Life was fragile—what else was new?
But what to do with an actual astonishing turn, something that presented indisputably good news? “They found The Bellhop,” Lizzie said on her voice mail, and it took Rose three more vertiginous listens, rewinding and replaying with shaking hands, to come close to understanding.
She called the detective Lizzie cited in her message. He told her about the former cop who had once worked with Joseph’s friend Max, how he had been hired by Joseph to steal them. “Not unlike what I had always thought,” the detective offered. “The deal went bad from the beginning.”
“Can I see it? When can I see the painting?” The details he was telling her were not insignificant, but for now, she only cared about one thing.
“Why don’t you come tomorrow afternoon with Ms. Goldstein?” He gave her the address and she repeated it back to him twice, still in disbelief that any of this was happening.
She called Gerhard. “That’s not possible,” he said.
“But it is,” she said, laughing a little. “It’s in police custody. Here in Los Angeles. You should come. You need to.” If there were ever an instance where he would hop on a plane a day later and fly the more than five thousand miles between them, shouldn’t this be it? “I can see it tomorrow, but I will wait if you can come. We can see it together.”
He signed. “I can’t leave Izzie. And she can’t fly.”
Then Isobel got on the phone and, lowering her voice, said, “I wish I could be there, but I can’t leave your brother. And he simply isn’t strong enough for the long flight.”
But Harry, who was wrapping up a film in Vancouver, was ready and willing. “I always knew it would be found,” he declared. “I told you last year, when I read that script involving Modigliani, that it meant something. I had this feeling—”
“You were right, Harry, absolutely,” Rose said. Even she couldn’t deny him his flights of fancy that day.
Harry drove them downtown in Rose’s car. As traffic slowed on the 101, Harry kept chatting, about his current director’s penchant for multiple takes—“he thinks he’s Kubrick but he’s not”—his ex-wife’s refusal to support their daughter taking a year off from college to teach English in Guatemala. (On this, he sounded very like Isobel: “She’s nineteen, for God’s sake! Why shouldn’t she explore?”) At the LAPD’s glass tower in the Civic Center, she and Harry passed through security, stepped into a lurching elevator. As she pressed the button for the seventh floor, Harry was still talking: “It is such a crazy story; if only the canvas could talk—”
“Harry, can you please be quiet?”
Out of the elevator, Rose knocked on the door to suite 703, and a short young man opened it. “I’m looking for Detective Tandy,” Rose explained.
“Tandy!” he yelled.
Detective Tandy, wearing a brightly colored shirt and no tie, appeared. “It’s good to meet you both,” he said, and ushered them inside. The large office thrummed with activity: people milling about, odd assortments of furniture—scratched-up file cabinets and desks, a battered refrigerator, green and red tinsel twisted limply above a whiteboard filled with scrawl—“57?” It was a corner space filled with light, but the windows had gone gray with grime.
“Rose,” she heard a familiar voice. There was Lizzie near the file cabinet with her sister. It was unquestionably her, but she looked different, Rose thought, her hair longer, spilling past her shoulders. Despite the tailored blazer she was wearing, she looked younger, and for a brief disorienting moment, on the cusp of seeing The Bellhop, Rose thought, Time is going backward.
“Lizzie,” Rose said, and she was pulling Lizzie into a hug.
“Rose,” Lizzie said, her voice cracking. Rose felt her limbs stiffen, then undoubtedly loosen. Rose held on tight.
After a moment, Tandy cleared his throat. “It’s a small space; I’ll take you in two by two.”
Lizzie pulled back, wiping her eyes. “You go first,” she told Rose.
Tandy led Rose and Harry through the maze of his office into another room guarded by a man in uniform, who handed Tandy latex gloves. He snapped them on. They made his hands look bulbous, fishlike.