False colors (2 page)

I had been waiting for a chance like this ever since the time, back in college, when Sheldon took my girl away from me. "You're just upset," I said, "because she wants me to stick around and wants you to beat it. Don't feel badly, Sheldon. It's not that I'm lousy with money. It's just that she likes me better."

2.

Sheldon looked at me as if I had gone crazy. Then he shrugged and said good-by to Nancy and walked away. Of course I hadn't been serious when I made that remark to him. There may be a guy around town who can take a girl away from Sheldon, but I don't see him looking back at me when I shave in the morning.

The girl said, "I think we're going to be friends and I'm going to call you Pete. Hello, Pete."

I grinned at her stupidly. "Hello, Nancy."

She had a trick of looking at a guy as if he were so special he ought to charge admission. For a moment I almost took that

personally. Then I remembered the guy she was seeing. He was tall and sort of loose-fitting, like an easel that hasn't been tightened properly. His features would only get a passing mark if the light was dim. He had sandy-red hair that insisted on looking windblown even in a flat calm. His best efforts to cultivate an alert expression only produced a worried look, as if a traffic cop had just asked to see his driving license and he couldn't find it. If the guy Nancy was looking at ever charged admission, the customers would want double their money back.

She said, "I bet you're a much better art expert than you claim to be."

"You heard what I told Sheldon. I don't have any national reputation."

"You could be very good and still not have a big name. How did you happen to get into art?"

"Well, in World War Two I went into the army, and when the war ended I was assigned to something called Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Subcommission of the Allied Commission in Italy. Not as an expert. Just as an interpreter, because I could talk a few languages. I didn't know anything about art at first, but it was fun tracking down masterpieces that the Nazis had grabbed, and so I began studying art and the Commission started giving me assignments of my own. I did temporary duty in France and Germany and the Low Countries. That went on a couple of years and then I spent another year playing around museums in Europe and writing a book about how we tracked down stolen art and—"

"A book?" she cried. "But then you must have a reputation!"

"Nobody would publish it."

"They were wrong," she said firmly. "It was probably a wonderful book. So then what did you do?"

"I came back home and tried to get a job in an art museum, but the Metropolitan thought Francis Scott Taylor was doing pretty well as curator and I couldn't seem to jar Fiske Kimball loose as director of the Parkway Museum here. So I opened an art store. You've been in it. Art supplies, picture framing, a

stock of good prints. Now and then I sell some original art. Now and then somebody calls me in to play art detective."

"Sheldon said you have a gallery?"

"I fixed up a room back of the shop so I can give one-man shows."

"Just what I'm looking for," she said happily.

I flinched a little, thinking of her pictures.

"Oh no," she said, catching my thought. "I don't mean me. It's for somebody else. He does wonderful work. And some of the best of it is right here in the Clothesline Art Exhibit."

"1 haven't looked at everything here," I said doubtfully, "but what I saw didn't look very good."

"Well, then, of course you didn't see his paintings. Come on. I'll show you."

"You're going to leave your paintings here? Don't you think they might be stolen?"

"That would be a wonderful compliment," she said, "but I don't think anybody will pay it to me. What I want you to see is over here."

She led me toward the part of Rittenhouse Square where they have the bronze goat that all the kids love to pat. I hadn't looked at the paintings in this section, so I felt a little more hopeful about what she wanted to show me. Frankly, I wanted to find some merit in her friend's stuff. If it would give me an excuse to hang around her longer, I might be tempted to see merit in doodles on a telephone pad.

"Oh dear," she said suddenly, grabbing my arm. "Don't tell me that man is going to buy one of Nick's paintings!"

She must have spoken loudly enough for the man to hear, because he turned. My eyes popped a little. Maybe I was being taken to see doodles on a telephone pad. But if so, and if the man ahead of us was going to buy one, doodles on a telephone pad were a coming thing in the art world. The man was Lud-wig Lassiter, of the Lassiter Galleries. A lot of people have never heard of the Lassiter Galleries, but that's because they don't have a few million bucks and don't collect art. Lassiter is one of the country's top art dealers. And right at the moment

he certainly looked ready to buy something. In fact, I thought I had seen him opening his wallet. But it didn't seem to be in sight now.

"Hello, Mr. Lassiter," I said. "Buying something?"

He was a big solid guy built along the lines of a steel filing case. I never looked at him without thinking of a certain portrait by Franz Hals. It's called "Laughing Cavalier," although the Dutchman in the picture isn't laughing, and you can't figure him breaking into a grin over anything less than a burning at the stake. For some reason Lassiter's face got red.

"Buying something?" he said. "Here? Ridiculous."

He brushed past us and marched stolidly away, heading for the big old mansion facing the square which houses the Lassiter Galleries.

"Well, I never!" a woman's voice said angrily. "He takes up a person's time and then walks off like that."

I glanced at the woman who had spoken. She wasn't talking to me. She was addressing the world at large, and she looked as though she often found reason to give it a piece of her mind. At a guess, the world had been doing annoying things in her presence for fifty years or so. She was sitting on a folding chair beside a row of paintings.

I said to Nancy, "Where's this fellow Nick you mentioned?"

"He isn't here. But these are his paintings. The woman runs a rooming house on South Twenty-second Street where Nick lives. Take a look at the paintings, Pete."

There were nine of them, all oils. I worked down the line slowly. Several landscapes, showing hints of post-Impressionist style. Four city scenes done as almost pure abstractions. A couple of portraits in flat planes of color that reminded me of Cezanne. Both portraits were of the same young man, and might be self-portraits. The guy had a dark lean face and his eyes looked hot and angry.

Xancy asked, "What do you think of them?"

"Well, he has a lot of ability. But right now he's still playing around with the techniques of other painters. There are traces of three or four schools of painting in these. The guy hasn't

worked out his own style yet. Maybe he'll be good. Maybe not."

"But if he becomes famous, collectors would be interested in his early work, wouldn't they? Because it would show how he developed?"

"Yeah, sure. If he becomes famous. But that's a thousand to one shot. It's—" I stopped. Lassiter had been snooping around these paintings, and he wasn't noted for taking wild gambles. He might give you nine hundred bucks for a portrait of Grover Cleveland, but only because it was engraved on a thousand-dollar bill. I muttered, "I wonder why Lassiter was looking these things over?"

"Who, Pete?"

"That was Ludwig Lassiter who was here. The owner of the Lassiter Galleries."

"Oh, Pete! Then he must think Nick's going to be famous! He was going to buy these and put them away and later on make a fortune on them. But he didn't want you to suspect what he was doing and—"

"Why would I scare him off?"

"He might want to see if Nick has other pictures worth buying. He might be afraid you would get there first."

"You have art and gold mines mixed up. A geologist can look at a hunk of rock and prove it's filled with gold. But nobody can prove that the work of a half-trained painter will pay off."

"Then why was Mr. Lassiter interested?"

"It's got me." I turned to the woman camped beside the paintings, and said, "About that man who just walked away. Did he act as if he wanted to buy all these?"

"No," she said. "He was just going to buy one."

"Which one?"

"This here," she said, lifting a canvas that had been leaning against her chair. "I was going to wrap it up for him when he walked off without so much as a never mind."

I stared unbelievingly at the picture she held up. Either my eyes or Lassiter's head ought to be examined. If I saw correctly, this wasn't a picture at all. A lot of weird paintings have been done by the surrealists and abstractionists and the non-objec-

tive boys, but this thing made them look as normal as calendar art. The canvas was filled with swirls and eddies and lightning bolts of color: chrome yellow and vermilion and ultramarine blue and oxide of chromium. The pigment looked as if it had been almost thrown onto the canvas and then slashed around with a palette knife. There wasn't a hint of any plan or thought behind it.

And yet there was an odd thing about the painting. It got something across to me. It was as if the guy had distilled onto the canvas the pure essence of rage and hatred and disgust.

"Awful, ain't it?" the woman said.

Nancy said, "That can't be one of Nick's. I never saw it before. It's like nothing else he ever did."

"You know him, do you?" the woman said. "Well, this is his, all right. Last night I heard him doing a lot of shouting and so I dumb up to his room to tell him he was making too much noise and he was standing in front of this and he says to me, 'Mrs. Jennings, this is the best thing I ever done.'"

"As a matter of fact," Nancy said, "it does have quite an effect on me."

"On me too," I said. "But I'd rather get seasick in a boat."

"It can't be that bad. Mr. Lassiter was going to buy it."

"Maybe he wanted it for the cellar, to scare away rats."

Nancy set her jaw. She turned to the woman and said, "I want to buy these. All of them."

"What do you want to do that for?" I said.

"You listen to the young man," Mrs..Jennings said. "He's got your best interests at heart."

"Do you want to sell these or don't you?" Nancy said. "And if you don't, why did you bring them here?"

"I guess I brung them," Mrs. Jennings said gloomily, "to prove to myself I was a fool to take 'em in payment for back rent. One hundred and fifty dollars that Nick Accardi owed me up to last night. Nobody in their right senses would pay that much good money for little dabbings of paint like these."

"I'll take them," Nancy said.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Have you any right to sell these,

Mrs. Jennings? I know you can hold personal property for nonpayment of rent, but are you allowed to sell it the next day?"

"I have a bill of sale here, all right and proper," she said. She dug out a grimy sheet of paper and handed it over. It was written in ink and said: "I owe Mrs. Jennings $150 for back rent and I am turning the following paintings over to her to pay it." Then there was a list of titles and the signature: "Nick Accardi."

"There are only nine titles here," I said. "You have ten paintings."

"That nasty looking one is the tenth," Mrs. Jennings said. "After he wrote out the list I remembered he said that was the best thing he ever done, so I told him I'd take that along too."

"Then you don't have any right to sell it."

Nancy said angrily, "I'll buy them all or I won't buy any."

"All right," the woman said, "but it's throwing money away." She peered at me and added, "Took the words right out of your mouth, didn't I?"

She had, so I kept quiet.

Nancy said, "Is a check all right?"

"How do I know it's any good?"

"I live just off the square on Delancey Place, between Eighteenth and Nineteenth. I'll go around the square with you and find a park guard if you like. Most of them have known me since I was a little girl."

"I guess you don't have to do that. I'll take a check."

Nancy got a blank check from her handbag and borrowed my pen and filled it out, and Mrs. Jennings made out a bill of sale on the note written by Nick Accardi. Then Mrs. Jennings got up heavily from her folding chair and said, "The way I feel about that nasty picture, I'd keep it turned face to the wall if I was you. It might ward off the bad luck."

She was taking more words out of my mouth. "What bad luck?" I said sharply.

"It's just a feeling I get sometimes about things," Mrs. Jennings said, and picked up her folding chair and waddled away.

I looked at Nancy and saw that she was peeking at me warily, the way a child might look at her parents after announcing

that she had just brought home a cat with four kittens. "I don't want to pry into your personal affairs," I said, "but why are you so interested in this guy? I mean as an artist."

"Because he has talent. Because he needs help."

"How did you meet him?"

"He was sketching here one day and I stopped to watch and got talking to him and—"

"Do you often pick up strange guys on the street?"

"It wasn't on the street. It was here in the square."

"That made it all right, did it?"

"He looked very young and unhappy and I wasn't worried about talking to him at all. Then one day after I knew him better I went up to his room and—" She caught the look on my face, and said in a warning tone, "Were you going to comment on that?"

"I was, but I decided not to."

"I went up to his room and looked at his paintings and liked them. I wanted to help some way but he's horribly proud and until today I couldn't figure how to do it without hurting his feelings. I knew he would never let me buy any pictures, or lend him money."

"Do I gather that the guy doesn't have a job?"

"Well, yes and no. What he does for a living is fight. I mean professionally. In the ring."

"I never heard of a fighter named Nick Accardi."

"He hasn't been in any main bouts yet. But he will be, as soon as he gets a break."