Harmony In Flesh and Black (2 page)

Occasionally, as now, the combined forces of luck and intelligence produced strokes of brilliance between them. It allowed them to withstand each other.

Fanny's “lovers,” Clay reasoned, had to be the lost painting by Vermeer that, unbeknownst to Fred, he had been trying to get a line on for years. Clay knew the picture had once been in Boston because it had been exhibited at the Mechanics Hall in the mid-1800s. He had a description of the painting and a rough drawing of it but no name for its owner.

“It makes perfect sense,” Clay said. “Why not let Heade paint over it if she didn't like it? A Vermeer, in those days, was worthless costume drama. It was ballast, like Ming china—and perfect from Heade's point of view, too, since it would present a smooth surface to work on. You wouldn't waste a week sanding down the lumps, the way you'd have to if you wanted to paint over a van Gogh.”

Fred said, “Coincidence or not, this seems a stretch. There was plenty of junk around to be painted over. Why aren't we talking about some bad Victorian—okay,
pre
-Victorian—parlor schmaltz with doves in it? Unless there's something you're not telling me, this Vermeer seems a blue-sky proposition to me, Clay.”

“I do have other evidence,” Clay said. He pursed his lips. “I may or may not share it with you. It will depend upon your need to know. It is of a delicate nature. Suffice it to say I have been hunting many trails that lead in this direction.”

What Clay did not say was that he simply hated to share a research triumph. It was bad enough he had to share coincidence when it was visited upon them by an act of God or serendipity.

In a coincidence by no means rare with such operations—once the broth is stirred, everything from the depths starts visiting the surface—Doolan's, a few weeks later, announced that it would sell at auction, for the (partial) benefit of a couple of hospitals, the residue of the old Apthorp estate. Sure enough, there in the flier, illustrated alongside the blue and white Ming spittoons, was a small, square, indifferent Heade representing haystacks at teatime.

The value of the Heade was well under a hundred thousand dollars. But the Vermeer that might lurk beneath it could be worth eight figures, the high eight figures—miles beyond Clayton's range. Because it was to be offered at auction, the whole thing was a gamble whose outcome couldn't be predicted. Clay couldn't buy the object except by participating in the auction, where wrestling bulls might drive the price up too far for a Heade and hence beyond what Clayton wanted to hazard; because of course there might be no Vermeer under the Heade after all. There was no way to find out beforehand without ruining their chances, for if they even hinted at the wrong question, the tide of excited speculation that would result would blow the painting out of the sale and beyond reach forever.

Clay had to become the owner of the Heade, as cheaply as possible, and then find out.

A project of this magnitude was worth keeping your concentration fixed on. It made Fred uneasy to have Clayton Reed wandering alone into Cambridge, with his codes and secret spy rings, playing games, with so much at stake and so near the goal.

“He's going to screw it up,” Fred said through his teeth, turning his car from Massachusetts Avenue onto Turbridge Street.

2

Turbridge Street was not far from Harvard Square, on the seedy side where rent control kept dwelling units in a condition illustrating the triumph of disappointed private enterprise over democracy. It was a one-way street lined with apartment buildings: three-deckers, some of them wood, some brick. Henry Smykal's was wood, painted yellow long ago.

This being the end of April, vegetable blooms were venturing out even on this side of the square. Magnolias made fat canopies over the daffodils. It was a chilly evening. The chill would make the blossoms hold.

Fred's car fitted into a space reserved for residents of Cambridge. Next to mailboxes with permanently sprung doors, the buzzer alongside “Smykal, Henry” got him a damp snarl and a click that opened the door, and he found his way up two flights of dark stairs to a landing where he was met by the odor of drowned cigar.

Fred told himself he should have noticed the ragged shadows circling the building. It smelled as if Smykal were keeping large birds in his place, buzzards that hunched back out of sight when he opened his door at the sound of Fred's step on the landing.

Smykal was about Fred's height but noticeably older, maybe the same weight. Fred's weight was muscle, though, in back and shoulders. Smykal was thin on top and heavy below, a pear past its time and settling. His color was waxy gray, with a blue cast reflected from the suit he had been wearing day and night for years, since he found it at the back door of a funeral home. Smykal had taken special pains to trim the native hair on the face of a head and body that otherwise were redolent of intimate personal neglect. He sported a nasty ingrown off-white goatee and a sparse mustache curled upward at the ends and stained with tobacco. He put a twisted mini black cigar into the middle of it, stared at Fred, and puffed.

“I've come for the painting,” Fred said.

Smykal flinched. People often flinched the first time they saw Fred. He was large and had a face that made people remember things they wanted to forget.

“Arthurian sent me.”

“Come in,” Smykal said, leading the way and sniffing—an act Fred would avoid if he could, here. Inside, the smell was worse: Smykal's cigars and what Fred thought was male cat, though he didn't see the cat.

The room Smykal led Fred into, a sitting room, was overstuffed with Victoriana: furniture and bookcases filled with magazines, books, and whatnot. Heaps of magazines and papers lay on the floor. Dust was thick over all. But what you noticed were the walls, which blared with black-and-white photographs lovingly framed. Apparently abstract, they quickly resolved into close-ups of selected portions of human female bodies. They looked hung out to dry: something to feed the buzzards. The pubic region especially seemed to command Smykal's attention. The feel and odor of the air alone were enough to account for Clayton's unease; it was not, overall, his kind of place.

“Please,” Smykal said, motioning toward a chair. “Make yourself at home. I was about to indulge my taste for sherry. You will join me?”

Fred shook his head, standing. He didn't want to put anything in his mouth here. “I can't stay. I'd like to take the painting. I'm pressed for time.”

“I assured Mr. Arthurian that with an eye such as his, he must have talent.” He sniffed. It wasn't just the dust, and fungus, and filth, and cigar smoke. It was nose candy working, eating into the septum. “I thought he might return himself. I teach, as well as being a creative person in my own right,” Smykal said, gesturing toward the walls.

The photos of female crotches were Smykal's own work, then, which he justified as art. A pile of it cackled on the floor when Fred brushed against it by accident, as if the man's buzzards were sharing a private joke in poor taste.

The cigar trembled in Smykal's face.

“I offered him my standard arrangement,” Smykal said. “I provide camera, studio time, instruction, models, everything. Everything is in-house, even my darkroom. Total, total privacy. Such a good eye he has, I was impressed. Amid all this he spotted the painting right away. I sensed his native talent. Like many, he is shy of his indwelling potential. I'll telephone him. I mislaid his number.”

Fred thought to himself, Clay, I forgive you, if the painting's any good. The man, the place, the circumstances were so appalling, anyone could allow intrigue to replace good sense.

“He'll be in touch himself,” Fred said. “When he is ready.”

Smykal sniffed. The blue suit was almost shiny enough to reflect his pitted face.

Fred said, “I'm in a hurry.”

“Another time, then,” Smykal said. “For the sherry. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. I'm wrapping it in the studio. Would you care to visit my studio? What may I call you, sir?” He opened a closed door off the sitting room, revealing a brief and surprising expanse of white clarity. Fred shook his head.

“I'll wait,” Fred said.

Smykal closed himself into his studio.

You don't need to wrap a painting to carry it, but Smykal wouldn't understand that. Half the people who own them don't know about paintings. They have them, but it's like a gorilla trying to take care of a baby bird. Let the man wrap his painting if he wanted. If the person's leaning in your direction anyway, don't push.

Fred sat in an armchair of abused velour. He listened to Smykal grunting and wrapping in the next room. He'd be later getting to Molly's, that was all.

On the gray wall opposite Fred's chair, over a bookcase crammed with magazines and bottles, was a horizontal stain of absence on faded wallpaper that, between the gynecological displays, was dotted with crimson roses anyone's granny would enjoy. The disembodied crotches looked wise and solemn, omniscient, indifferent, like visitors from outer space. The velour on his armchair began crawling.

If that stain was the size of what Clay had bought, the canvas Smykal was wrapping was roughly two by three feet. Fred saw a handy toolbox in red plastic on the floor under the vacancy, and picture hooks lying ready, and several of Smykal's framed prints waiting to take advantage of the opening.

“I trust I made the right decision,” Smykal called from the studio. “We artists are not suited to the marketplace. I could undoubtedly have sold it for much more if I had held out. I am an innocent. We artists are. God must care for us.”

Fred stared at his knees. They were nicer than anything else here: hard knobs in brown twill.

Smykal stuck his head out of the studio, his mouth, between the hair, making words and pursing between them for emphasis. “Arthurian's interest in fine art could be so easily extended to the film.”

Smykal said “the film” the same way some people say “the dance.”

Fred stood up, looking at his Timex.

The package, when Smykal brought it out of the uneasy starkness of the back room, was, as Fred had guessed, about two by three feet, bulky at the edges on account of a paste frame that Fred could feel crumbling behind the newspaper. It was bound like a mummy in string and tape. Fred took hold as soon as he could because Smykal was having trouble with it, sliding it along the floor and making tracks in the greasy dust of a rug whose generic color Fred classified as Barbizon, or Blakelock.

Smykal wagged the stump of his cigar. “Mr. Arthurian must call me. I found him an interesting person. So cultured. But a man of the world. He was taken with my work. We are soul mates. I felt him responding.”

He leered. The cigar had gone out between his lips. Anything would. “Perhaps you yourself, even,” he suggested. “You won't believe how easy and releasing it is. I am arranged for total privacy.…”

“For God's sake, give it up,” Fred said. “Arthurian knows how to reach you if he wants to make prints from your hired vaginas.”

Smykal gulped and blushed, spluttered, looked from side to side, said, “For goodness' sake, we don't think of it like that…,” and saw it was no use, Fred was moving. Smykal waved forlornly. “Farewell, then, little one,” he said. Fred gave a start. Then he understood that Smykal was talking to the package, the painting, telling it good-bye.

As Smykal opened the door to the landing, he looked as if he might try to snatch the package back. “Why should we even think of money? God must take care of us,” he said. “Like the birds of the field, or the lilies of, the lilies of—” He hesitated.

Fred said, “I'm off.”

He reached the sidewalk and breathed in again, but the smell followed. It was embedded in the package Smykal had made, a crumpled oblong wrapped in newspaper that smelled of bacon grease and old dust, crotches and cigars.

*   *   *

Fred, being a lapsed bachelor right now, was living outside Boston, in Arlington, with his friend Molly Riley and two children. The house and children were Molly's. Fred was liking being there, despite it being a big change for him, and they seemed to be glad to have him around. Molly, alert and protective of her children and her turf, was fond of him, and Fred thought he was getting somewhere with the eight-year-old girl, Terry. Terry would take his hand, even, sometimes, without thinking. The boy, Sam, twelve, was harder.

Fred hadn't thought to be attached to anyone, to anything, again. If he looked at it, he couldn't understand it, nor could he trace how this had come about from the first pleasure he had found, more than a year ago, joking with the nice woman behind the reference desk at the Cambridge Public Library before going back to sleep on the mat in Charlestown in the bare room in the house he had bought—was still buying—with the other guys.

Fred saw the guys still. He occasionally played chess there in the evening. And he paid his share of the mortgage though he wasn't using his room now and he knew someone else was sleeping there regularly. All he needed the place for now, it seemed, was for somewhere to keep a locked box of things he didn't want at Molly's. And it made a home base to return to if it came to that in the future. He paid more than his share since he was making money and others could not. The guys could use the help, and there wasn't much coming from anywhere else, whether out of the Veterans Administration or from the alumni association of unmentionable clandestine activities.

He was late, and he was getting to like the feeling of being expected by a woman and two children. Fred had his own primary objective, and he wasn't going to let Clay's business crowd in front of anything as fragile as what he was working on with Molly and the kids. It was going to be tough to find a safe corner at Molly's to keep a picture, what with bicycles, hair dryers, fishing rods, the portable TV, and the rest of it; and he didn't really like mixing Clay's business into that part of his life. But Clayton would have to take his chances.