The Secret of the Nightingale Palace by Dana Sachs Read Free Book Online Page B

that.”
    â€œMata Hari,” said Anna, who was starting to feel suspicious about the prints.
    â€œHer family was extremely elegant and refined. You can’t even imagine. Japanese royalty. Most of what I knew at that age I learned from them. Remember,” she said, veering to her own history. “I came from nothing. I dropped out of school after eighth grade. I needed guidance.”
    Anna and Sadie were listening closely because the conversation was quite unusual. Goldie seldom strayed from the topics right in front of them—the restaurant, your clothes, what looked good on a menu. “When the announcement came that Mayumi and her family would have to leave their home, she turned to me as her only friend. Could I keep the artwork for her?”
    Anna still couldn’t conjure any of the images from memory, but she had learned something about Japanese art in college. “Who was the artist?”
    â€œYou think I’d remember the names after fifty years? There are two different series. One of landscapes and one of Japanese ladies.”
    Sadie pressed forward. “So what happened?”
    â€œWhat happened? The war happened. I had the pictures. Mayumi went to the camps. Then I married Marvin Feld, he died, I ended up in New York. What a mess!”
    â€œAnd?” Sadie asked. You had to be careful with Goldie, so Sadie’s more important question was implied: Why do you still have that woman’s prints? And Anna knew what her sister was thinking: What had Goldie done?
    Goldie seemed to understand the implication. “Don’t you know what happened to me then? I almost died of poverty. Do I have to remind you of that? I was pregnant with your father. I had to keep my wits about me, save myself and my son. I could have died—like a hobo!—in the street.”
    Anna and Sadie gazed at each other. In front of them lay a transgression that dated back half a century already. Goldie had accepted a treasure for safekeeping and never returned it. Anna, to whom the pictures had, long ago, given so much happiness, felt implicated as well. “So you want us to take the artwork back?” she asked.
    â€œOf course,” Goldie asserted.
    Though the details of this conversation filled her with concern, Anna felt a sense of excitement as well. The reappearance in her memory of the art, her grandmother’s sudden, belated need to return it, and Anna’s own sense of complicity stirred something unexpected in her—an awareness of knotty predicaments beyond the saga of her own widowhood. And so, in a burst of enthusiasm that would, over the coming weeks, cause her all manner of consternation, she said, “We have to return it.”
    Sadie looked completely agitated now. “Do you even know this woman’s still alive?”
    Goldie reached under the napkin on her lap, opened her evening bag, and pulled out a newspaper clipping that she had neatly folded in half. “Look at this,” she said with the air of a lawyer presenting irrefutable evidence. It was an advertisement for an auction at Sotheby’s, “Treasures of the Nakamura Collection.” Goldie said, “I saw this in the New York Times the other morning, and that’s how I had my great idea. Nakamura must be her brother—how should I remember his first name?—but I’m sure that’s him. He established a big antique house in San Francisco. So when we get out there we’ll find him and give it back.” She fell silent, letting the extent of her own cleverness sink in.
    â€œWhy not just go to the auction at Sotheby’s, then, and hand it over?” Sadie said. “Or ship it?”
    This question made Goldie pause, but only for a moment. “Did you listen to anything I said, Sadie?”
    â€œThere are tax incentives to being out of New York,” Anna reminded her sister. “Anyway, this is about more than the art. This is penance.”
    Luckily,