and after three years, I don't have the slightest clue who they are, where they are, or how they found me. At this point, the best I can do is keep my eyes and ears open. I have to get that book back.
I suppose you need a little background.
The book I'm referring to belonged to my great grandfather. His name was Jack. First or last name, I can never remember. My mom used to try to get me excited about our ancestors. She made us all enormous charts one year for Christmas. It was a cute gesture, considering the amount of work it must have taken. But I don't think anybody cared about them. Anyway.
Jack, my great grandfather, was a trench soldier in the first world war. He came back from Egypt without his eyes. I never met the man, so in case you're detecting any emotional attachment, you shouldn't be. But, apparently he never said a word about his time there. Apparently, he just lived the rest of his life as though none of it had ever happened- except for the fact that everything was dark, I guess. Weird.
Was it his book? Briefly. He's an important part of the story, but the book belonged to a man named Alejandro Cabana. Alejandro met my father in a bar in Detroit in 1986. He told my father about a research trip he had taken to Turkey one summer. While he was there, he said he stumbled across an old woman selling a variety of old paintings on the street. He said that one of them caught his attention- a sort of angular oil painting of a man sitting with his back against a tree. He said it looked far more valuable than the woman was asking for it. So, he bought it from her. The guy took it home and started poking around on the internet to see if he could find out how much it was worth. Comes to find out it's some 400 year old painting that's been missing since World War I. Up until then, it had been kept at the Polish National Museum on loan from a private collector in Venice.
Alejandro had some luck that day. Not only was the painting priceless, the thing was an important part of an apparently endless list of conspiracy theories. Allegedly, the painting was commissioned by a pope in the 1600's and lay essentially hidden until Napoleon got a hold of the Vatican archive in Februrary 1810. By the time the vatican got their archive back, it had been seriously tampered with
I suppose you need a little background.
The book I'm referring to belonged to my great grandfather. His name was Jack. First or last name, I can never remember. My mom used to try to get me excited about our ancestors. She made us all enormous charts one year for Christmas. It was a cute gesture, considering the amount of work it must have taken. But I don't think anybody cared about them. Anyway.
Jack, my great grandfather, was a trench soldier in the first world war. He came back from Egypt without his eyes. I never met the man, so in case you're detecting any emotional attachment, you shouldn't be. But, apparently he never said a word about his time there. Apparently, he just lived the rest of his life as though none of it had ever happened- except for the fact that everything was dark, I guess. Weird.
Was it his book? Briefly. He's an important part of the story, but the book belonged to a man named Alejandro Cabana. Alejandro met my father in a bar in Detroit in 1986. He told my father about a research trip he had taken to Turkey one summer. While he was there, he said he stumbled across an old woman selling a variety of old paintings on the street. He said that one of them caught his attention- a sort of angular oil painting of a man sitting with his back against a tree. He said it looked far more valuable than the woman was asking for it. So, he bought it from her. The guy took it home and started poking around on the internet to see if he could find out how much it was worth. Comes to find out it's some 400 year old painting that's been missing since World War I. Up until then, it had been kept at the Polish National Museum on loan from a private collector in Venice.
Alejandro had some luck that day. Not only was the painting priceless, the thing was an important part of an apparently endless list of conspiracy theories. Allegedly, the painting was commissioned by a pope in the 1600's and lay essentially hidden until Napoleon got a hold of the Vatican archive in Februrary 1810. By the time the vatican got their archive back, it had been seriously tampered with
