Man With a Squirrel (9 page)

Fred drove up 140, watching the road as best he could while at the same time visualizing, without arriving at a concrete image, a Copley painting that was made up of combined elements of Copleys he could think of (a standard way for the forger to work—a pastiche made by copying fragments of known pictures by the forger's victim-model).

The squirrel and chain he had; and the feet placed in such a way as to indicate a posture like John Irving Junior's (but facing the opposite direction). The head, body, and arms could come from John Hancock (reversed); and the table could be borrowed from Mrs. Ezekiel Goldthwaite, complete with—why not—the plate of stuffed fruit. The painting Fred envisioned, using this method, could not help being two-thirds forgery. He could not see a hint of the truth established by the bit of the room's interior, the floor, on which the shaft of light defied the forger's servile invention.

“Clay's going to have a fit,” Fred said, avoiding Taunton by leaving 140 and taking 24 north. “My surrendering the fragment to Roberto without negotiating about it with Clayton for two weeks beforehand. But he's not going to use his delaying tactics on this one. This is my baby.”

*   *   *

Terry and Sam, when Fred got back to Arlington, were playing catch in the street in front of Molly's house. Fred eased his car around them and put it in the driveway, leaving room for Molly to get into the garage. Arlington's laws forbade anyone to park all night in the street.

It was six o'clock and still light. Molly was not home. Fred climbed out of his car and watched the children. Sam threw the ball hard, to make it sting his sister through the glove. Terry threw high to make Sam jump and barely miss.

“How about three-corner catch,” Fred said, “until your ma gets back. Where is she, shopping?”

“For Froot Loops if she knows what's good for her,” Terry said.

The kids were dressed alike by accident, in jeans and red sweatshirts and sneakers. The coincidence had produced a fight at breakfast, but neither wanted to be the one to back down and change.

Fred put the fish in the fridge, the bread on the kitchen table, and came out again, telling Sam, “Throw to me and I'll throw to Terry. But Sam, ease up some since I don't have a glove, and Terry, see if you can get the ball down. It's showing a tendency to ride high.”

“How come you don't have a glove, Fred?” Terry asked.

“Too much to keep track of,” Fred said.

“Fred travels light,” Sam said, “according to Mom.”

Fred tossed the ball to Terry. That was a bitter edge in Sam's voice. Was it an off note in Molly's voice Sam had picked up? Terry threw the ball at the center of Sam's chest, forcing him to dodge in order to catch it without being hit. Sam burned one at Fred.

“It's like you don't live here,” Terry said. “You really live some other place where you keep your piano and your pet fish and everything, and here it's a hotel where we live.”

Fred tossed the ball high, to be fielded as a pop-up. He rubbed his stinging left hand. “Ease up, Sam,” he said.

Terry tossed the ball to Sam's left, making him reach and stumble. “Bring your glove,” Sam said. He burned one at Fred as Molly pulled her Colt into the driveway. Sam marched into the house while Fred and Terry unloaded groceries. Molly, in Sam's red jacket, took one load in and disappeared upstairs to change into jeans and a red sweatshirt, it turned out.

“The Riley uniform of the day,” Fred said, when Molly came in to start supervising the putting away.

“What?” Molly said. She hadn't noticed.

Fred took off his coat and tie to take upstairs later, and set about preparing the fish. “We will have mackerel à la Fred,” Fred said.

“What's à la Fred?” Molly asked. “Fried or broiled?”

“The latter,” Fred said. “But with the added secret ingredients of salt and pepper.”

“And lemon, I hope.”

“Each customer will be permitted to apply his own,” Fred said. “Ad libitum, ad labias, or al dente. A la table.”

Molly said, “Must I change into something more chic?”

Terry escaped to the living room with the Froot Loops.

“Sam's pissed at me,” Fred said. “Or else you are and Sam's smarter than I am at seeing it.”

Molly started cutting cabbage for slaw. Fred had potatoes boiling already, and the broiler heating. Something about Molly's activity brought Louis XVI to mind. “What did Sam say?” Molly asked.

“Blamed if I understand it. He told me to get a glove,” Fred said.

“A glove?”

“Baseball glove.”

“Ah,” said Molly.

11

From the feel and the heft of it, the wood from which the offending frame had been constructed was a cross between Styrofoam and pine.

The back of it bore a purple stamp,
HECHO EN MEXICO
/ 20 × 20. Fred looked at it in hatred, assigning it primary blame for the violation performed on the painting. He was sitting with it in the subway, riding outbound from Charles Street station after an uneventful Monday. He'd put the puzzle out of his mind during the weekend. On the way in this morning he had confirmed what the Yellow Pages told him, that there was no place in Harvard Square to get a frame for anything other than a poster or photograph. Molly said he'd have better luck at Porter.

So now, with the Procrustean object in his lap, he bounced noisily through Harvard station, swayed, and indulged the moaning complaints of the line of cars. The frame was joined in Mexico and shipped north, with a cavalier stick-something-in-this approach. And if it doesn't fit, cut off a piece that will.

The frame's face was harder than plastic, and more gold and swirly than the most opulent music box ever imagined. It made Fred recall the ovoid chapel at Versailles—hadn't Molly been talking of Versailles the other day?—which Fred always referred to in his mind as the Eye of the Needle.

Porter gave you a choice between cardiovascular stimulation and one of the lengthier escalator rides on the East Coast. Fred chose the latter and arrived at street level to find bald, cold sunlight glaring midafternoon onto the semimall and complex intersection, presided over by Susomu Shingu's stubbornly stable red mobile, threatening the citizens of Cambridge with politically correct public art as determined by committee.

Fred slid the frame into the shopping bag he'd been carrying it in. Molly was right. Ahead of him was a line of shops—Allrite Liquors, Phast Photo, E-Z Tanning Salon—nestled along a parking lot. Across the street, next to an Indian restaurant, was Kwik-Frame. Fred crossed both parking lot and street and had a look. Walking past bins of backed posters in acetate and shelves of precut kits, he headed for the remainders, against the right wall, in front of the desk separating the showroom area from the broad tables in the workspace.

Kwik-Frame was having a sale to rid itself of its line of Mexican frames. The brothers and sisters of the one in Fred's bag, identical in finish, in various dimensions, were specially priced (on red tags pasted across their former wishful thinking) from $6.95 up to $15.00 for the largest, sofa-sized model.

“You're not going to see a deal like that every day,” the woman in back of the counter said. She wore a striped apron of ticking, carried a head of short red curls, and looked at Fred belligerently from a gray face dismayed by most of her forty-some years of living in the world.

“True,” Fred said.

No doubt the frame he carried was from here; the stretcher was from the Bob Slate down the road a block, on the other side of the street. Having come this far, it was not clear what his next move should be. He wanted something this place might lead him to, but if he advertised his interest to the potential seller things might get complicated. The key to successful buying is to be visibly not in the market, just as the key to successful selling is to be owner of something that is not for sale. It is why the successful dealer, striving to represent both sides honorably, is properly regarded as a lying snake.

“Can I help you?” the woman asked, tormenting a paper clip that had betrayed her in the past.

Fred said, “A lot of framers carry these Mexican prefabs?”

“We're dropping the line,” the woman said. “NAFTA. It's not worth it.”

“I wondered, are they widespread and common?” Fred said.

“The frames? Kwik-Frame has three hundred franchise outlets nationwide,” she said. The phone rang on her desk. She picked it up. It was pink. She said into it, “I know.” She repeated the phrase six times, with pauses in between. Then she called into the workspace behind her, “Manny!” A young man put down the glass he was cutting and picked up the shop extension.

“People think we're making donuts,” she told Fred. “They don't understand the art business.”

Fred said, “If I brought in a loose canvas, you people could frame it for me?”

“You mean like a piece of fabric? Sure,” the woman said. “Bring it.”

Fred was watching the young man in back talking into the phone, saying, “I know.” Something about the man was off, wrong, or familiar. He was beefy and quick, dressed in a white T-shirt with a Mickey Mouse head grinning on the front and much-worn blue chinos. Something walked along Fred's spine. He'd seen Manny somewhere.

“Thanks,” Fred said. He turned for the door. The colors visiting the inside of his skull were those of an unspecific danger.

We're only talking about a picture that's been violated, Fred told himself in the street. Not danger.

He started walking along Mass. Ave. toward Harvard Square, looking to bypass it and get to Molly's library. He'd catch a ride to Arlington with her and leave his car at Alewife until tomorrow.

No, he thought, he'd better keep access to his independent wheels. He took the stairs down into the bowels of the Porter station and rode through Somerville to Alewife and his car.

He had a location to work out from—Porter Square—and could fairly assume, as a starting point, that the person who owned, or found, or stole, or bought, and massacred the painting whose bottom portion was laid out under Roberto's eye had a routine that took him or her through Porter.

Why not ask the discouraged lady in the striped apron, Did you people recently put a frame on a squirrel? Because once he asked he was committed to that approach. He could always ask later, but he couldn't withdraw the question. His vague recollection of the young man in the Disney T-shirt raised a warning he couldn't read but wanted to respect.

From Alewife station he called Molly and asked her to meet him at Porter after work.

*   *   *

“Walk in the place, buy a frame for one of Terry or Sam's school portraits, and look at the guy in the back,” Fred said. Molly had found an open meter in front of Bob Slate and crossed the street to meet him. “He wears a Mickey Mouse T-shirt.”

Molly was in black pants and Sam's red jacket this cold day. The scarf around her head boasted Eiffel Towers: a present from Ophelia, which one of her admirers had given her.

Fred looked over the menu in the Indian restaurant while Molly did his business.

She came out.

“I know I've seen him,” Fred said.

“Is it urgent?” Molly asked. “Can it wait till we get home and I confirm it?”

“I'm behind you,” Fred said.

*   *   *

“Were at the park til super,” read Terry's note, obviously written under duress applied by Sam. The note was stuck to the fridge with a magnetic ladybug.

“They must be freezing,” Molly said. “You want to find something for super while I poke through the recycling?”

“How about Spaghetti al Fred?”

“If that means fried or broiled, maybe not.”

“The package suggests placing it in hot water.”

“Try that way,” Molly said, “but first remove it from the box.” She went out to the garage, calling back over her shoulder, “Give me a yell when you are about ten minutes from the moment of truth and I'll go get the kids.”

Fred heard Molly's exclamation of triumph while he was opening the jar of generic red sauce. “Got it,” she called. She came in with a section of newspaper and showed him the photograph he had been looking at a couple of days earlier: Cover-Hoover surrounded by a small crowd of people, from whom she seemed somewhat distanced by a husky male.

“He's the one on the right.”

Wearing a white shirt, necktie, and sport jacket instead of Mickey, the man looked different. He sported a crop of light curls—too short for an opponent from the avenging powers of darkness to get a grip on. “He's moonlighting as Cover-Hoover's bodyguard?” Fred asked.

“That's what it looked like. In her talk she claimed death threats are widespread and common against a person doing her kind of rehabilitation and to her present, former, and future clients.”

Molly went for the children. Fred watched the red sauce throb in a saucepan. He put plates on the table, stirred the spaghetti in its boiling water, and brought out the remainder of Molly's coleslaw from the previous evening along with the cheese that Molly and the kids called “Protestant.” “Small world,” Fred muttered. He had a man to think about, or ask about now, in connection to the crime of altering an old canvas. He had a man to ask, Who did you stretch and frame that fragment of a painting for? Where's the rest of it?

It was not amusing that the same road led to Cover-Hoover's operation. That was a can of ugly worms, which he would as soon not think about.

Molly and the children came in, the kids throwing wet sneakers and baseball gloves into the corner near the dryer.

*   *   *

“How come you're following that guy?” Molly asked, after they had eaten.

“It isn't that. I'm looking for the rest of the picture.”

“That leads to Cover-Hoover?”

“To Kwik-Frame,” Fred said. “Where by coincidence Manny works, at a task for which he is physically overqualified. That's where my piece was framed, I'm certain.”