Madonna of the Apes (8 page)

Chapter Eighteen

It was almost ten by the time Fred reached the alley from which he could overlook the entrance to the Pekham Street building. There was a smell of spring in the air, from the river, stronger even than the smell of the alley. It was raining again or, more exactly, a fine mist hung in the streets, collecting the city’s lights and diffusing them. If he stayed in the alley all night he was going to be wet by morning.

“The man was out of his depth,” Fred muttered. “Even so, he was too docile. He wants the chest back but he’s not desperate for it. If he knew what it was, he’d be desperate. Ten thousand bucks isn’t much to offer for something that’s worth the gross domestic product of Tasmania.”

The windows were lighted on Franklin Tilley’s floor. Cracks of light showed around the closed blinds on the Pekham Street side. Fred rang the bell for number 2. No name there. Persons living in Boston were apparently as skittish about revealing their surnames as the city fathers were about committing the names of streets to signs.

The street door opened on Franklin’s anxious face, floating above that same blue suit. “I was passing by,” Fred said.

“Fuck you. I’m expecting…”

“Yes?”

“I have guests,” Franklin said, shoving at the door.

Fred reassured him, “I love meeting new people.” He was moving Franklin backward into the hallway while he spoke. “Let’s go up and talk about that chest you want.”

Tilley hesitated and a confusion of expressions writhed across his face. “Not really a good time,” he protested.

“Why waste the opportunity?” Fred asked reasonably. “As long as I’m here. This time tomorrow we could all be dead.”

“Jesus!” Franklin seemed to make his decision while they climbed the stairs. “Don’t mention the chest. I’ll get rid of my guest.” The door to his apartment was ajar and as it opened a young woman looked up from her spot on the rug.

“Wrong guy,” Franklin told her.

The little black dress she wore had not been designed to handle the proprieties of sitting on the floor, but she was doing her best, arranged in that way women have that begins in a kneeling position but allows gravity to settle the buttocks on one side or the other of the bent thighs and calves. There was a lot of thigh, and a lot of calf, all in black net stockings—and there was a lot of blonde hair also, in a cloud around a charming, inquiring face. She’d taken her shoes off—house rules—and they sat, black with extravagantly high heels, next to the door, their toes pointing at an angle toward each other.

“Fred,” Fred said, striding across the rug in his loafers and sticking out a big right hand like a man at a Rotary convention. She held a snifter in both hands, in which amber liquid slopped light. She had to put it down to accept Fred’s hand.

“Delighted,” she said, lighting the room with a dazzling smile.

“And you are? Beyond delighted…?” He kept the hand, looking frankly into her large blue eyes.

“Sorry. Suzette Shaughnessy.”

“Please, your shoes,” Franklin Tilley tried.

Fred gestured him to silence, sat next to Suzette Shaughnessy and looked at the walls. Was there less here than there’d been? More? Was it all the same stuff? The not-Cézanne
Bathers
was in the same place it had been. That had not been the package under Franklin Tilley’s arm earlier. Or if it had been, he’d brought it back. The three million dollar not-Mantegna was also where it belonged.

“And Frank’s letting you dip your beak into some of his famous brandy,” Fred said. “Good boy, Franklin.”

Franklin explained, crossing to the sideboard in his stocking feet. “The famous brandy’s gone. There’s Armagnac, Drambuie…”

Fred gestured the offer away and settled back, stretching his legs and looking at the walls he wasn’t leaning on. Seen for the second time, the mixture was if anything more baffling. With a few odd additions, it was like what you might find in a museum in a large French city in the provinces. For the most part the good stuff was in Paris, where the good people were: the stuff Napoleon stole, or that had been left to the sudden new Republic by a headless count.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” Fred told Suzette Shaughnessy. “You staying in town?”

Chapter Nineteen

“At the Ritz,” she said. So she wasn’t local. Fred, without changing his expression, registered his lucky guess. She palmed her hair back from her face and took a sip from her snifter. Franklin stood with his, looking down at the seated couple.

“It’s delicious,” Suzette told Franklin. “The Armagnac. But it goes to my head. In a minute I’ll start telling secrets.”

“We’re all friends,” Franklin said. He tried for the laugh that went with Fred’s Rotarian handshake. “Seriously, though, the offer’s good until Sunday. If you can produce. After Sunday I can’t promise anything.”

“He’ll be here Friday, we’ll likely come by Saturday,” Suzette said. Her dazzling smile promised half of everything that had ever existed in the world. In a remarkable feat of gymnastics she rose from the floor in a single fluid movement that managed both to preserve her modesty and to promise the other half. “Mitchell is obviously not coming tonight,” Suzette said. “I can’t wait. Fred, lovely to meet you,” she said, taking his hand again as she swung her bag over her bare shoulder. “My coat,” she commanded.

“Give me a half hour,” Tilley pleaded. “He gets distracted. He’ll be here.”

“In that case call me,” Suzette said. “I’m out of here. Get my coat.”

Franklin disappeared into the bedroom and Suzette repeated to Fred, “At the Ritz. Room 503.” She gave him a moment’s searching glance that went vapid as Franklin came back into the room with a black raincoat, which he helped her get into. “Without it, I don’t think he’ll be interested, but I’ll call you,” she told Franklin. She stepped into her angled shoes without moving them, which made a sort of dance step that kept both men’s eyes firmly on her body until the door had closed behind it.

The men were left staring as if the sun had suddenly been replaced by some unpleasant damp alternative. He’d stood to see Suzette off. Now Fred sat again in this chairless conceit of a room. He reached for the glass she’d left on the floor and took a sniff before he drank.

“I expect people to lie to me,” Fred began. “It’s what people do. It’s easy, it’s obvious, it’s normal. So I don’t mind.” Tilley found a spot on the wall perpendicular to Fred’s and sat where he could lean against that. Above him a portrait of a man in a red waistcoat looked Dutch or English, maybe seventeenth century. The man, whoever he was, had money enough to have his portrait done. Or he was dead and his wife wanted to remember him in his red waistcoat.

“What did she say?” Franklin protested.

“I’m not talking about the woman,” Fred said. “What she said isn’t my business. No, what bothers me is not understanding a person’s motives. There aren’t many motives to choose from, after all. There’s envy, greed, hunger. There’s always sex. This whole thing…” he gestured around the room, “I just don’t understand it.”

Franklin fiddled with his snifter. He unbuttoned his suit jacket. He stroked the fish on his necktie.

“If it’s a stage set, what’s the play?” Fred pushed on. “I don’t understand. If you have all this money, why not be comfortable? If you want to have people over, nice people, like that lady, who have coats and shoes, and matching socks, why not be able to offer them a chair? Is it about sex or is that a side issue, maybe an avocation? You pretend the stuff is yours and you don’t want to sell, but everything here has a price tag on it. If you’re just fronting for all these paintings…”

Franklin said, “I didn’t ask you to come. You came. You want to talk about the chest. Talk. Can you get it? I have to tell you, I’m—I more or less have to have it back.”

“For example, talking of motives—my motive, coming here alone, is—I’m curious,” Fred said.

Franklin stroked his fish. “It took me two hours to clean that gun,” he said. “You didn’t have to do that. Grandstanding for the other guy. What did you do next, go back to his place and let him suck you off?”

“I’m curious about your motives,” Fred continued evenly. “Someone make a better offer? You sell it to one man for five, buy it back for ten, sell it again for twenty? Am I warm?”

Franklin stroked his fish, then he adjusted the knot, allowing his neck more room. “You have a suggestion?” he asked.

“Other motives,” Fred mused. “Thinking of you still. Fear is a good motive. People will do a lot when they are inspired by fear. But they don’t necessarily do it well. Fear closes the mind. Whereas curiosity, which opens the mind, might win the prize as the predominating human motive. Curiosity begins before sex, lasts longer, and when you come right down to it, a lot of the sexual instinct is curiosity anyway. Some of the sexual instinct involves issues of domination, true. As well as the internal itch. But curiosity is, of its nature, innocent, don’t you think? It makes us human. Hunger comes and goes, and even plants experience hunger and thirst. After we get so old and sick that hunger and thirst are long lost memories, and even in the face of that last mortal fear, we have to be curious about what’s coming next.”

“What comes next is nothing,” Tilley said. “The fact you are curious doesn’t mean there’s anything to be curious
about.
A person’s hungry, the hunger has an object, like a ham sandwich, that will answer it. But hunger doesn’t make the ham sandwich happen. It’s a lucky accident. Your curiosity wants to know what it’s like after you die? Sorry, there’s no ham sandwich waiting. What happens, you turn off.”

“Another thing I’ve noticed,” Fred said. “When you ask a person a question, you put yourself in his power. You ask, ‘Did you go home with him and let him suck you off?’ you reveal interests of your own. If I ask you, for example, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ I express vulnerability. Now we both know I’ve gotta go. And I have given you the power to mislead me. You point to the left and I stumble into the bedroom. No ham sandwich, do you see? My curiosity is disappointed.”

“Your curiosity let you down,” Franklin said. He swirled the contents of his snifter, took a drink, and eyed the bar.

“No,” Fred said, “it wasn’t my curiosity that let me down. The mistake was to express that curiosity in the form of a question. The question signals I’m interested, and especially when you are talking to an adversary, it’s stupid to give away your interest. You notice I don’t ask you ‘Who’s Mitchell?’ even though I know you are expecting something; and now I also know you are also expecting someone. Mitchell might therefore be carrying what you are expecting.

“About you, I know you want the chest back. So you feel you made a mistake. I don’t ask you why. Because then I put the ball in your court, do you see? When I babble philosophy with you, and raise the hypothetical question, Where’s the bathroom? your face changes.”

Franklin Tilley stroked his fish and, absently, began to twist them.

Chapter Twenty

“I understand the change,” Fred said, “because I noticed a good deal of cash mixed in with your dirty shorts and socks, in that wicker hamper, last Sunday night.” He finished his drink, stood, and crossed the room to place his snifter next to the bottles. “If I wanted to waste time asking questions, you can imagine what they might be. But a reason I don’t ask the obvious questions is I don’t care what the answers are. Other less obvious questions, I’d get lies too. It takes too long to figure out what the lies mean.”

Franklin had risen when Fred did, his face pale. “You didn’t touch the money. Bastard. I looked after you left. Crazy I didn’t look before. I was upset. What you did with my gun. Threatening. Bastard. Who are you? What do you want? What do you want with me? You want to play games? I’ve got to have it back. Listen, it isn’t my money,” he said.

“That’s an answer to one of the questions I don’t ask, that fits into the category of I don’t care what the answer is,” Fred said. “So. Three tomorrow. If he comes. Incidentally, speaking as one human to another, you might want to think about whatever it is you’re doing. There’s a lot of fear in this room, and I didn’t bring it with me.”

He left Franklin standing in the doorway, in his socks.

***

Boston’s Ritz Hotel had for generations striven to serve as a living answer to the question, How old and rich can you be and still not take a bath? But some months ago it had begun a general facelift, and that had involved extensive cleaning, inside and out. Scandalous vandalism, some protested. It was like scraping the patina off the Parthenon. The outside of the hotel bristled with scaffolding. Inside was a chaos of work in progress even though, this close to midnight, no work was actually being done.

Fred took the stairs to the fifth floor and knocked at the door to 503. The smile of Suzette Shaughnessy lit the corridor when she opened the door far enough on its chain to see that Fred stood outside. “You didn’t call,” she said, taking the chain off and letting him in.

“Any friend of Franklin’s,” Fred said. The room was decorated as Laura Ashley’s mother would have done it, in a manner that explained, almost condoned, the excesses of the Laura Ashley rebellion. Stodgy didn’t begin to cover it. Suzette, on the other hand, was decorated in a way neither Laura Ashley nor her mother could have imagined. She’d de-accessioned the basic black dress, and the net stockings, and the matching underwear (how could it not match?) and was now draped in a transparent fiction made of smoke and sequins. A cigarette burned in an ashtray next to the chair where she’d been sitting watching something in black and white on the TV. Something with Cary Grant.

“I had them bring up champagne, just in case,” Suzette said, suppressing the TV with the remote while, with the other hand, putting the cigarette to her lips for a fleshy drag. “My only vice,” she apologized, and put it out, smiling through smoke. “I was going to give up at midnight and drink it myself or, I don’t know, just leave it in the bucket. Will you open?”

“Being the
MAN,
” she did not say.

Fred obliged. The business let him look around the room. Her clothes were out of sight, as were her suitcases. So she was neat or she had really expected him. Or someone. If she was reading anything, a book or magazine, it was hidden, maybe under a pillow. The bed was slightly disarranged. Fred poured into the two glasses and offered her one. She crossed a leg and wriggled the toes of the raised bare foot in pleased anticipation. She lifted her glass, higher than her foot.

“Appropriate sentiments,” Fred offered in toast, raising his glass to touch hers.

“Appropriate sentiments,” she echoed, and drank, her breasts moving under the transparent garment, and eying Fred as if they were her mildly interested pets.

“So he’ll be here Friday,” Fred started.

Suzette nodded and held her glass to a level that let her test the fizzle of the bubbles with her nose. “He won’t want anything there. He’s looking for names.”

“Mantegna’s a name.”

She shrugged. “Two million? Even if it is a Mantegna, which it isn’t. It’s one of the also-ran Italians nobody knows and nobody cares. De Predis? Who cares? He won’t.”

“Two million,” Fred said. “Franklin offered it to me for three, but I wouldn’t take off my shoes. So you get a discount. Five hundred thousand per shoe. But you have nice feet.”

“There was one thing I wanted,” she said. “After courting Franklin for two weeks. And it’s gone.”

“Gone,” Fred repeated.

“So, Fred, tell me about yourself,” she said. She settled into a more alluring slouch.

“No hidden depths,” Fred said. “What you see is pretty much what you get.”

“You’re in the business?”

“I do this and that,” Fred said. “These days more this than that.” He took a drink and considered. “Though, to be honest, I still do enough of that to keep my hand in. I try to.” She’d emptied her glass and held it up. A summons. “You’ve done well,” Fred told her, and rose to fill it again.

“When you walked into Tilley’s place, I wondered, Did he sell it to you?”

“What?”

She studied him over the fizzle before she decided to proceed. “He had a painted box. It had angels and flowers on it.”

Fred shook his head.

“Franklin Tilley won’t tell me anything,” she complained. “Par for the course in the art world. Everyone lies. If they tell you anything, which mostly they don’t, that’s when you know it’s a lie. If you’re in the art world, Fred, which to me seems like a safe guess, even though you look like you drive a truck, you may take that as a personal insult.” Again, her brilliant smile added new sparkle to the bubbles in her glass.

Fred said, “That’s what your guy collects? Painted boxes? You said he wants names. Now I’m confused.”

Suzette studied the conflicting themes and found no way to resolve them. Instead she stood and allowed the light from the hotel’s table lamp to make a mockery of her covering. She stretched and yawned. “Champagne does something to me,” she confessed. She crossed to stand next to Fred and put a hand on the hair he cropped short so he wouldn’t have to think about it. “My principal,” she said, “the man I work for, will pay good money for that chest. I know his taste.”

“I guess I could look around.”

She stroked the side of his face, bristling now at the day’s end.