The Big Hit Read online

  “No, it’s not the medic—”

  “I just thought maybe you were Catholic,” she explained.

  “Yes, I am, but that’s not—”

  “Or are Catholics the ones who drink in church? That would liven things up,” she said. “My church bores the hell out of me. But problem solved.”

  “The problem of drinking in church?” I asked.

  “No, silly! Go ahead and drink in church, just like Jesus did!”

  “Jesus—”

  “I’m talking about your thing. You can get to my house before everyone else comes, and I can show you around so you know about it, and if you get bugged out by all the people later, you can go up to my room. I won’t use it for sex that night, because my father has a king-size. I like to spread out.”

  I thought for a second. Ok, I would try it. “Sounds good,” I said.

  “Yeah, I really like to roll around,” Tatum agreed.

  “No, I meant how you said I could come early and then have a place to hide out, if I need it. Thank you.” I was thanking her for how she had very, very kindly offered to accommodate me and my issues, without making it seem like a big deal at all. “Thank you very much.”

  She had to go, because she had a dinner with her father before he flew off to Europe. “To make sure that I understand the rules for while he’s gone,” she told me, and laughed. “See you Saturday!”

  I sat and looked at the dinner I had cooked, noticing that it was kind of congealed and no longer very appetizing. I didn’t care. I smiled down at the cold chicken, pretty happy about going to my first college party, and even happier about making a friend, too. The phone dinged with a text in the yoga girls’ chain from Benedict Arnold, and I eagerly read her message.

  ∞

  On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I worked in the college’s Art Conservation Department, and they were my favorite days of the week. I always leaped right out of bed instead of doing the stretching and dawdling routine I performed on other mornings. I was so lucky—I felt like everyone in northern Michigan was lucky—that we had anything like an art conservation department at our small college. It was centered around a collection donated by Herbert Whitaker, a member of the extremely wealthy family that owned/ran/built about half of our area of Michigan. Herbert Whitaker had traveled throughout Europe and Asia before World War One and bought whatever art he liked. A whole lot of whatever he liked, like thousands of paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, photographs, and a lot of books and documents that related to art, also. And then he kept buying throughout his lifetime, filling his house in Harbor Springs, filling several storage areas, too.

  When he died, his nephew had donated all of his collection to the college, and because no one really knew what to do with it other than say “thank you,” it had sat in storage there, also, for years. It wasn’t until his great-grandnephew, Luke Whitaker, further donated a ton of money to start up the Art Conservation Department that anyone really looked at what Herbert had given to the school. The department (which was actually just one professor and me, the intern) became a full-on museum-style operation, devoted to preserving, restoring, researching, and cataloging his amazing collection.

  I was learning to do those things, anyway, with Professor Amico teaching me. Luke Whitaker had convinced him to come out of his Florida retirement to take over the new department (convinced, I thought, by offering the professor more money than he could have shaken a stick at). I happened to have been the only person who responded to the hand-written index card Professor Amico had pinned up on the library bulletin board, asking if there was anyone interested in art, so I got the job.

  The entire collection had been literally piled in heaps in the college’s basement, crates stacked next to where students and teachers took cover if there was a tornado warning, before the professor came on the scene. And we had so much more to do—at our last estimate, we had only uncovered about 5% of what was there. I literally could have worked for years on Herbert Whitaker’s donation.

  Yes, I could stay and work at the college forever, I thought happily, then reminded myself that no, I couldn’t. My heart sped up as it always did when I thought about the future. I lived cheaply and I worked at the library, but the art conservation was just an unpaid internship. I was still taking money from my brother—Dylan was the one paying for me to attend Emelia Schaub College so that I didn’t take on debt. I didn’t want to be a drag on him, when I was fine now, pretty much fine. I realized that I was breathing faster and tried to slow down. I was on track to graduate in fewer than four years, and then I would find a good job. I would live independently from my brother, if that meant that I had to leave home, leave Michigan…

  And then the wave of fear and panic hit me, crashing like a fist into my chest. I tried to use the tools I had learned in therapy—breathing, calming thoughts, muscle relaxation, all of it. My heart raced and I shook so hard my knees started to give out, so I let myself slide to the floor. I stayed there for a long time, sweating and pushing down the nausea. Then I forced myself to get up and go for a walk, because I knew it would help, and I didn’t let myself do what I really wanted: to curl up in my bed for the rest of the day, maybe the rest of the night, or the rest of my life. I wasn’t dying; it was anxiety. And I had to work through it to live the way I wanted to.

  Professor Amico was waiting for me when I arrived at his cramped office in the eaves of Butterfield Hall. That in itself was strange, because he generally slept late, then wandered in with a specialty coffee drink in his hand and more of it spilled on his shirt. Not only was he there early, but he had also forgotten the clip-on tie he perpetually wore, and his white hair stood up in little peaks on his head instead of being forced into submission with a hair oil that reeked to high heaven.

  “Daisy!” he exclaimed. “Thank God!” He held out his hand to me, and it was trembling.

  I grabbed it. “What’s the matter? Is it your daughter? Your grandson? What’s wrong?” All at once, my heart pounded again.

  “No, no! I have good news! Wonderful!” He let go of me to rummage around on the desk, knocking over piles of documents and spilling the liquid contents of an old paper cup. I winced. “There!” He held out a piece of paper, rattling it so that it was hard to read.

  I took it and glanced at the words. I could see that it was a letter, addressed to him at the college, but that was all I could really get out of it. “Um, is this in Italian?” I asked.

  Professor Amico snatched it back. “Oh, you don’t read Italian, either. It’s a shame, but you can learn.” He looked me in the eyes. “All right, Daisy, you’ll need to sit down. Try to remain calm, even though this is the biggest thing that could have happened. I’ll break it to you slowly.” I started to sink down to sit on top of a pile of books in the chair, but he couldn’t contain himself. The words shot out of his mouth before I was all the way on my butt. “We may have a Pisanello,” the professor announced. He shook the paper again and his voice was trembling, too. “A Pisanello!” He waited expectantly, watching my face.

  “Um, that’s awesome, professor. Are you talking about us having something good in the collection? And Pisanello was…” I trailed off, to give him the room to explain a little more. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but clearly he thought I should. I was studying art history, but there were definite gaps in my knowledge.

  He sank down too, disappointed. I had ruined his moment. “Daisy, you must know Pisanello, the Renaissance painter, the medal-maker, the frescoist! He was a master! His work is in the Louvre, the Met, the National Gallery in London. If we have one of his paintings in our collection…and a portrait of Filippo Maria Visconti, at that…” Now he trailed off, staring at the ceiling, lost in thought.

  “And how does that letter relate to the artist, Pisanello?” I asked, pointing to the paper he had crumpled in his excitement.

  “I received this certified letter from Enrico Visconti.” He waited again for my reaction, then threw up his h
ands when I didn’t have one. “Visconti, the famous Italian water polo player!” I shrugged. Nope. “Your ignorance astounds,” the professor said, but he was resigned to it by now. He shook his head sadly at me. “Major European sports figures of the twentieth century. I will add it to the list of topics we need to study.”

  In the time I had known him, we had already covered the health benefits of green tea, major figures in Viking history, what “NASDAQ” stood for, the development of the bicycle, and the ruse of Piltdown Man, among many other topics. “Domenico, about the letter?” I prompted again. “It’s from a water polo player?”

  “Yes, Enrico Visconti. He lives in California now, but they’re originally from Brescia, in Italy. The Visconti family was hugely important in Milan and what’s now northern Italy, beginning in the Middle Ages. They held the title of Duke of Milan until the rise of the Sforzas.”

  I made a mental note to add Italian history in the Middle Ages to our study list.

  “Pisanello was, for a time, in the court of Filippo Maria Visconti, the third duke. This Visconti who writes to me,” he shook the paper, “this Enrico Visconti, has been tracking a portrait that Pisanello may have painted of his ancestor.”

  “That he painted during the Renaissance.”

  “Of course, during the Renaissance! It doesn’t appear in the official catalog of Pisanello’s works, but they have family documentation and have done extensive research to prove that such a portrait exists. The Viscontis have been searching for years. And now, he comes to me, because we may have it. A Pisanello. A portrait!” He jumped up from his chair and ran his hands through his hair. It stood up even higher.

  “I’m guessing it’s worth a lot,” I hazarded.

  “Daisy.” The professor sat down heavily in his cracked leather desk chair and leaned forward to grasp my hands. Papers and books slid off his crowded desk. “Of course, it’s very, very, valuable, but that’s not why this is so important. To think, after all the years I’ve spent in this field, that I could be part of finding a lost painting like this…” I thought he almost teared up. “We have to find it. We’ll start by looking in the catalog we’ve completed so far for anything that could be Italian Renaissance portraiture. We may have miscategorized it, as well.” He gave me the eye and I knew who he meant when he said “we.” I stuck out my tongue at him, just a little.

  We had both gone over everything we’d already cataloged with a fine-tooth comb, and I was fairly certain that a valuable Renaissance portrait of this duke person wasn’t in there, mislabeled or somehow missed. But there was another problem with our catalog…I looked at some of the papers that had spilled onto the floor. There it was, or part of it. Professor Amico didn’t like computers, not since his ancient IBM had once been stolen out of his office. Stolen with it was a book he had been writing and had saved on a big floppy disk, still stuck in the giant disk drive as it went with the thief out of his first-floor window. He’d been heartbroken—the book had represented years of work. Domenico had also lost his wallet during the theft, because he’d left sitting out on his desk, and he had never bothered to replace his driver’s license after it happened. In 1983.

  Because of that incident, we did things like write real letters and make calls instead of sending emails, and I typed the catalog of the art collection on an actual typewriter, an old one that dinged a little bell when I got close to the edge of the paper. I was always having to replace the black ink ribbon and untangle the flying metal hammer things if I hit two keys at once by accident. I would sit for hours and peck around typing, then dabbing at the paper with white-out to cover the multiple mistakes that didn’t magically correct themselves like on a normal computer.

  Then, whenever I could, I secretly input the data from the catalog into my laptop. That was, whenever I could physically wrest the catalog away from him, because he liked to keep it close. Professor Amico loved his hard copies, but then did things like spill a caramel, pumpkin-spice coffee drink with extra whip on the pages. Or he let them fall on the floor and stepped on them, like he was doing right now.

  “Well?” He was looking at me as I stared woefully at the now-dirty papers under his shoe, representing what I’d typed up on Wednesday.

  “I’ll get right on it, Domenico,” I assured him, and bent to tug out the catalog pages from beneath his scuffed penny loafer. He jammed quarters into those shoes, in case he needed to use a payphone (and could find one).

  I spent the morning getting the paper catalog back into its binder, as he tried to help me and generally made things worse. He also translated the letter about the Pisanello portrait so that I could read it for myself. When it was finally late enough in the day to put in a call to California, he talked for hours in Italian with Enrico Visconti. I didn’t understand what they were saying until I heard the professor mention the word “email,” and he frowned. Domenico didn’t use his college-issued email address for anything, and neither of us knew the password to access it. He held his hand over the receiver and whispered to me, “Daisy, do we have a fax machine? He wants to send me scans of some of their original documents.”

  “There may be an old fax machine in the basement of the library. I’ll see if I can dig it out this afternoon. I have an email address, if you’d be interested in using that instead,” I suggested.

  “No, no,” he shook his head. Computers were not to be trusted. A fax machine was definitely pushing it, but this Enrico Visconti must have insisted. So I had to wait until I went out to get us coffee to secretly check the version of the art catalog that I’d put on my laptop, using the handy search tools to quickly hunt for any hint of a Renaissance portrait of Filippo Maria Visconti. There were several portraits, but of women, or from the wrong time period. If we had it, it wasn’t in the catalog because we hadn’t found it yet.

  I ended up leaving the office late because the professor kept thinking of one more thing and then another that he needed me to do, which meant that I had to run to get to my Greek Art and Architecture seminar class. I arrived just as it stared and had to take a seat in the middle of the row of desks instead of near the window, like I preferred. After two hours in the crowded, hot room with the guy next to me encroaching with his elbows and books into my personal space, I didn’t feel my best. I finished the sandwich I’d brought for lunch and dinner, shoving it in my mouth as I hurried back across the quad to my job at the library, and it made me get queasy.

  Solomon, the other library assistant, had already grabbed the book cart, my squeaky friend, so I had to work on the list of book requests. These were volumes that people wanted but that we stored in the basement archives because they were too infrequently used to sit out in the stacks—somehow, the book that Tatum had found, Marsupial Mating in the Cenozoic Era, had been popular enough to stay aboveground. Solomon hated going down into the basement on Friday book search day, so he always raced to get to the library before I did. He liked to pretend that he just happened to get the re-shelving cart first.

  “Oh, Daisy, I guess I’ll take the cart around,” he said, very casually, as if it was total coincidence that he came 15 minutes early on Fridays, not at all that it was in order to beat me there.

  “Ok,” I told him. “Then I guess I’ll take my fifth turn in a row and go down to the basement instead of you.” I needed to look for the fax machine there, anyway. “I hope I come back out. You never know what will happen when you take a trip into the basement.” I raised my eyebrows at him. “Right?”

  “I’m not scared, if that’s what you’re implying,” he told me, frowning severely.

  “Not at all,” I answered, and paused. “Boo!”

  He jumped a little, then shot me a dirty look and huffed off. Solomon was training to cage fight, mixed-martial arts, so if anyone didn’t need to worry about going into the basement, it was him. And honestly, I didn’t worry much either, except that it was pretty quiet down there. Silent. I usually listened to music while I hunted around the jumble of books and materials. Someone p
robably should have gotten working on a serious, thorough organization of the basement shelves, because they were a mess, with most things improperly ordered and a lot of books missing. But since that “someone” was me or Solomon, neither of us had ever suggested it.

  I took a moment to calm down after the class and the run and the sandwich. Then I put in my earbuds and I went down the stairs. The lights in the basement were all motion-detected and the one above my head flicked on as I pushed open the door into the cavernous room. That was one of the things that freaked out Solomon: the lights malfunctioned sometimes and went off on their own, turning on in a part of the basement where there shouldn’t have been any movement. It had scared me too the first time I had seen it, but now I was used to it. But the last time Solomon had done the requests and a light had come on, he had come streaking up the stairs, practically wetting his pants, which was why I had been working in the basement each Friday for more than a month.

  We weren’t the most technologically advanced library, so all the requests for stored books were done by hand, on individual squares of paper. I struggled to read the writing on the first one to get the title. I’m A…what was that? I turned on the flashlight on my phone to see it better. Oh, I’m a Fun Guy: The Life and Times of a Mycologist. I could understand how maybe that wouldn’t have been one of the library’s more checked-out items. I walked through the aisles, pushing aside crates and furniture, squeezing past towering piles of boxes. This was the other reason that Solomon didn’t like to come down here. With his broad shoulders from all his workouts, he barely fit down the aisles. I was a lot narrower.

  While I hunted around, I thought about the letter about the missing painting. I had looked up Enrico Visconti on my phone, because I’d had my doubts about whether he was legit, but Domenico had been right. Enrico Visconti was real, and had been an athlete, and was now some kind of multi-billionaire, international businessman. And everything the professor had told me about the family’s history and about the artist, Pisanello, had been accurate, too. I had read the translated letter, and with that and with what I had read about the Viscontis, it seemed like it was the real deal. At the very least, this Enrico Visconti seriously believed that we had the painting of his ancestor, even if I still doubted it, because it just seemed so farfetched and remote to me.