Madonna of the Apes (11 page)

Chapter Twenty-six

“I reckon Franklin hasn’t told you everything,” Fred said. “People don’t. Or they lie. Good. Here’s the meatloaf. Thanks, Carol. Maybe some ice? I’ll drop it in my tea and that will make it cooler.”

“You’re already working with Franklin,” Suzette guessed.

“The main thing is, according to Reed, the chest is already out of circulation,” Fred said. “Off the market. It’s gone into a private collection and it’s not coming out again.”

Suzette teased her coleslaw with her fork before putting some into her mouth. “I don’t know how far I can trust you,” she said, after chewing deliberately and swallowing.

“I wouldn’t,” Fred said.

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Wouldn’t trust me. Why trust anyone? Do you trust Franklin Tilley? Did he tell you that he and I already reached an understanding? Tell you I’m working with Gingrich?”

“What?”

“So all in all it’s a confusing business, in addition to which you can’t believe what anyone says anyhow, according to you, since everyone lies.”

Suzette eyed him over her next three forkfuls of slaw. Fred attacked the meatloaf plate, whose fixin’s included canned cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes that had been powder until very recently.

“My offer is twenty thousand dollars,” Suzette tried. “For yourself. Commission. Once we get the chest.”

“We,” Fred said. “We as in you and Franklin Tilley? You and Agnelli? Or We as in you, singular? If I can get hold of it, which I haven’t said I can. Gingrich says it’s in a private collection. Any offer you make me, I have to measure against something I heard last night. An extremely attractive woman in a see-through nightie told me, ‘I can make promises but not commitments.’”

“That was our first meeting,” she said. “This is our second. And it was late.”

“Our second meeting, actually,” Fred corrected her. “This is the third. It doesn’t matter. What matters is, the chest is no longer in play. It’s out of reach. The collection it went to—I won’t say it’s the Agnelli…”

“What?” she exclaimed.

“My lips are sealed,” Fred said before he proved the opposite by inserting a chunk of meatloaf.

“Agnelli wouldn’t…Tony would never,” she said. A real emotion showed itself in those lovely eyes. Panic, was it?

Fred swallowed. “Because my lips are sealed. So, as far as the ownership of the object is concerned, there may be no further play. I’ll live longer if I skip dessert. Don’t let me stop you.”

Suzette Shaughnessy shook her head. She had not gotten to the bottom of her coleslaw. Grandma made it with iceberg lettuce instead of cabbage.

“However,” Fred said, speculating as he put together a last bite of meatloaf, peas, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. He ate it deliberately while his partner watched and waited. “There’s the question of provenance,” he continued. “The initial purchase may have been hasty, and the subsequent sale hastier still.”

“Agnelli screwed me,” Suzette said. “I was right. Cut me right out.”

“I haven’t said who the end user is,” Fred reminded her. “I note in passing that you aren’t actually on Agnelli’s payroll. That was just a little shorthand on your part, that suggestion? In all fairness. Don’t jump to conclusions. What I was going to say—where was I?”

“Starting with ‘However,’” Suzette said.

“Right. Though I can’t make either a promise or a commitment, I can make a suggestion. My take is that the collector would be happy to purchase the provenance to go along with the object. How much he or she might be willing to pay…”

“You want me to tell you where it came from,” she said.

“The collector prides herself or himself on his or her research, according to what Reed Gingrich told me. He or she or (if it’s a collection,
it
) would be pleased to have the item’s history, and would likely pay a fee. Trying to be helpful here. Since Gingrich acted hastily and bought the thing without either description or history, just on impulse, as long as you and Franklin are working together, if you want, why don’t you ask him and if you can, get a package together. Name of the seller, when the work came into the collection, exhibition history if any, customs declarations, all that.”

Suzette Shaughnessy had gone an interesting shade of gray that went badly with the blonde hair and the beige suit. “Where has it gone?” she said.

“I’ve already told you more than I know,” Fred said. “More than I even guess. In this business everyone lies anyway. Talk to Franklin. Maybe he’ll have something. You know where to find me. Well, actually, you don’t know where to find me. But you’ll be at the Ritz, I guess. Or—where are you when you’re not at the Ritz?”

“Customs declarations?” Suzette asked.

“Maybe I jumped to a conclusion,” Fred said. “A chest that size, and that old, it had to be somewhere else before Franklin Tilley got hold of it. If Franklin wasn’t the owner, and we think he wasn’t, who was? So if you, or Franklin, or both of you, can get me that information, I’ll take it to Gingrich and see what he’ll pay for it, and we can split the fee. After he sees what his client will pay, which will depend on how good the information is, after he sees it.”

“We have to know who the client is,” Suzette decided. “If there’s anything we can do. When you say ‘Split the fee…’”

“Two ways,” Fred said. “Half for me, half for your team. You’re only asking Tilley what he already knows.” He stood, took a twenty from his wallet and secured it under the warm glass of weak tea.

“Why don’t
you
ask him, since you and he have an understanding?” Suzette demanded.

“My understanding with him doesn’t match yours. I’ll drop by tonight, maybe tomorrow; see what you’ve got. Give me your card.”

Suzette stared at him for thirty seconds before she concluded, “In my other purse.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

One fifteen. The street was crowded. Tourists, in town for Boston’s spring, poked or jostled along the sidewalk looking into shop windows or selecting places to eat that were not Sylvia’s Kitchen. Here and there the darling buds of May, most of them tulips and daffodils, found places to push forward in the small plots allotted to them. The leaves on the trees, flatter and wider each second, were also a deeper green each second. A damp breeze made them flutter. It was a good afternoon to stretch his legs, and to sort his head out at the same time, if he could. Fred walked across Boston Common, muttering.

If Franklin Tilley and Suzette Shaughnessy were blind weavers, weaving, together, this “tissue of lies,” could the fabric hold together? Could it hold the new lies Fred was dropping into it? The lies in themselves were seductive, and threatened to distract from the end at which Fred wanted to aim: protection of his unwitting client, and the discovery of further information about what he had purchased, which had no business even existing, much less being purchased.

Tilley’s only hope of retrieving the chest lay in the fact that the man he called Reed might turn up for the three o’clock appointment. So Franklin would be there. He’d have to be.

Halfway down Pekham Street, there was Franklin Tilley, dressed in that same blue suit, coming down the front stoop of his building. Fred slipped into the alley in time to let Franklin go on his way without interruption. The man was walking with such speed that the chances were good he would not notice Fred in any case. He had turned uphill, in the direction of the State House, and in five minutes was out of sight.

“Might as well wait inside,” Fred said. “He can’t say he’s not expecting me. Or, well, he’s expecting Clayton.”

After he’d rung Tilley’s bell to no response, the front door opened to him with relative ease, as did the door into Franklin’s quarters. The emptiness of the apartment was speedily confirmed; an emptiness accentuated by the smell of dead cigarette smoke. Fussy as the management was about shoes being worn in the premises, did nobody care what cigarette smoke could do to a painting? There was less on the walls of the big front room, though the change was not significant. Fred noted two empty hooks, one of them in the place where the not-Cézanne
Bathers
had hung: the one thing Franklin had said he couldn’t sell.

This was Fred’s first opportunity to look the collection over without interruption, and he took his time, starting next to the entrance door where the painted chest had been until early Monday morning. Here hung a watercolor as aggressively Northern European as it was nineteenth century, representing a port scene with sailing ships at anchor, with stevedores busy either loading or unloading casks. Because the action was frozen in time, like that between Leonardo’s infant and the ape, it was not possible to be certain in which direction the casks were passing. Just as, in the busy crucifixion scene, an oil painting two pictures over, one could as easily assume that those soldiers and the mob were a well-meaning group which, coming upon three men on crosses, was hastening to cut them down as gently as they could, and carry them to the nearest hospital.

The watercolor was executed in a variety of browns and tans, with an occasional hint of vermilion. It was signed, with a signature that would be legible only by someone who already knew what it was. The painting, in its mat and frame, occupied almost two by one-and-a-half feet of wall. Its glass looked dusty on the inside, and its mat was stained and foxed. Therefore it had not recently been jazzed up, cleaned, and re-housed for the kind of sale that might call on a decorator as intermediary.

“Whatever it is, it’s the genuine article,” Fred concluded. He took the picture down from the wall and turned it over. Its brown paper backing was splotched and dark, nicked here and there with dings where it had been bumped against sharp corners. It carried an old label from a London gallery, on which the artist’s illegible name had been recorded in a spidery script, along with the painting’s title,
Shipping, Dordrecht.

The painting might have a soul back of all that dust, but Fred did not feel it burning or struggling in his grip. The workmanship seemed more a matter of schoolboy obedience than the disciplined rebellion that had gone into the work Clay was convinced was Leonardo’s. “Shouldn’t I be stunned and amazed,” Fred asked himself, “at the idea that an unknown Leonardo sits ten minutes’ easy jog from here? It’s as if we’d discovered a new planet, and stuck it in the fridge. What’s wrong with me, that I don’t stutter and stumble with excitement? And what a cool customer Clay Reed is, isn’t he, so cool that a stroke hasn’t carried him off. Instead, as if I’d been used to handling such things all my life—it’s like slapping a fistful of plutonium in your pocket—I have been speculating over the painting as if it had no more significance than what I’m holding. Sure I’m amazed, but it’s the painting that amazes, not who it might be made by.”

A Leonardo, to accomplish the intimate finish of a painting like Clay’s
Madonna,
or the Louvre’s
Virgin of the Rocks,
needed months, even years, of well-protected and well-fed man hours, during many of which he was spending much of his time and mental energy thumbing his nose not only at the competition, but also at those who were protecting and supporting him. And, as the day spent reading up on him in the library had confirmed, Leonardo was forever going off on tangents, inventing this or that machine that wouldn’t work unless someone else invented the internal combustion engine.

With the brown English watercolor still in his hands, and still looking at its back—an approach to the study of paintings that had never occurred to him until he saw Clay Reed working the room three days ago—Fred ruminated on the size of his ignorance of what went on in the commerce involving works of art. He’d fooled himself up to now, allowing his interest to be limited to the face, the form, the structures, and what he thought he could grasp of an artist’s spirit while he looked into a painting, whether in a museum or a shop. Often, when he found himself with the opportunity to stand entranced, and even lose himself in a painting, he’d been recovering from an exercise that craved to occupy his entire consciousness for the rest of a life that threatened to be brief. That day in the Louvre, as he recalled, when he had allowed himself to be sucked into Leonardo’s
Virgin of the Rocks,
he’d been a week out of the hospital, and moving around with a good deal of discomfort.

What had entranced him? A rage that was either his, or the painter’s, or that might be shared, in the same way as a jolt of electric force leaps out of the earth to meet the stroke of lightning. It had nothing to do with commerce, or so he had thought until now, holding this object in his hands, he considered, “Whether the picture’s good or bad, in its day, and even now, it has been and it can be reckoned in terms of hundredweights of turnips, or spare parts for assault helicopters, or raw furs. It has a history, and part of that history is commerce. One day it was wet and being worked on. One day it was dry and the painter’s wife or mistress said, ‘Willie needs shoes.’ In the two hundred fifty years between then and now, where has the watercolor been? Who framed it? How many times has it been framed? What is this London gallery? Was the owner of the shop a friend of the painter’s? What’s his story? Who bought it? Or was it still in the painter’s estate when he died in a ditch, or was hanged for some crime, or poisoned by his lover, or drowned in Dordrecht harbor?”

The Grand Street Gallery in London must have a history also. Its label signified something. Did its presence not add reassurance to the picture’s initial buyer, like the presence of the Treasurer’s signature on a bank note? Even to today’s buyer—supposing Fred decided that he wanted to own a dismal scene of Dordrecht Harbor to give class to the vestibule of the place in Charlestown, if he asked Franklin Tilley to give him a price on this picture, wouldn’t he himself be reassured to find this old label fixed to a work so firmly that its seals (in a manner of speaking) had not been broken? But if he asked for a price, how much would he not have to know about the commerce in works of art, before he could judge whether the price demanded matched the going rate for such objects in the world at large?

Clay Reed had made a truly remarkable leap of courage, trusting in his own eye, disregarding all appearances, proceeding past the double-triple fake of Franklin’s subterfuges, and exchanging currency for what might still turn out to be no more than what it seemed to be, a box with an odd top.