A Paradise for Fools Read online

  “I told you. The painting I heard about. I want…”

  “If you’re not working for her, you’re what? A professor? With the IRS? Customs? That program they do in England, Antiques Roadshow? What’s my line? What is it worth to you, this painting?”

  Fred said, “Since I haven’t seen it, nothing. I can’t find it, maybe it doesn’t exist. I heard about it, I’m intrigued enough to spend a day in the back country. I want to look at it, learn the story of where it’s been. I thought, since your name was mentioned, and God knows in Nashua there aren’t a lot of people who would understand…”

  “You got that right,” Z said. “It’s valuable or you wouldn’t be here. I’ll make this easy for you, Fred. If that’s your name. And don’t give me a card. Anyone can print cards. I don’t know a thing about this painting.” Z paused, gazing across the glass where his pale drink clicked its ice. He raised a hand, signaling to someone out of Fred’s line of sight. “As long as you’re buying. You?” Fred shook his head.

  “Who else you got, besides me?” Z asked, as the woman arrived with a repeat of the same setup. She looked toward Fred, who shook her off.

  “Dead end,” Fred said. “The former students I mentioned, for some reason, won’t talk. As far as they’re concerned, they never saw it.”

  “They’ve got their own eco-niche,” Z agreed. “And you won’t tell me where they are. Cute.” He arranged containers and ingredients. The process required his complete attention. When he was satisfied, “So,” he said. “You’re in the art business. Have a gallery? Work out of the trunk of your car? As long as we’re here, as long as you’re buying, tell me more about the picture you’re chasing. To buy it, obviously. What else is there? Sell for a profit. So you buy it cheap, am I right? You married?”

  Fred shook his head.

  “The absolute butt hole of the known world,” Z said. “Nashua. You know what I expected when I came here? From Hartford? Cows and chickens. Gorgeous leaves on the trees in the fall. Grandmothers making apple pies for everybody. The pot of gold. Turns out Nashua, New Hampshire is the absolute butt hole, pardon my French, pothole of the world. That’s how I have to talk to high school students. Thirty years ago with my life spread out in front of me like a gorgeous…me here for a job I figured I’d move on from after three years, move up from high school to college, but that’s not a route people follow.”

  Z reached a finger into his drink and stirred the ice. He sucked the finger. “They trap you,” he said. “Don’t listen to them. You married?”

  Fred shook his head again.

  “Every time,” Z said. “Children?”

  Fred shook his head again.

  “That’s one blessing,” Z said. “Either she couldn’t or she wouldn’t or I couldn’t. Whatever, we didn’t. So, when she walked out she didn’t take the precious burden with her and she didn’t leave me with it, because there was no precious burden.

  “The end of the marriage? I get home late. The note. Joint account empty. Savings. I’ll tell you where to send my stuff, she says, but she never did. New York. You believe it?”

  Z knew what he was doing with his booze. And he wasn’t as good an actor as he hoped.

  “Left me the mortgage and the house to sell she says, we’ll divide that. I get the car free and clear, and the car payments as well. Now the car’s impounded,” Z continued. “You want to know my secret, the Moonglow, this home away from home? They’re so happy to open the door for me? Enough about me. In case I can help. Tell me about the painting you’re looking for, these kids found. That’s the story? These kids found it?”

  Fred said, “The hell of it is, I don’t know much. Maybe you can visualize this. There’s an egg, but it has two heads, legs like a chicken. Supposed to be painted on wood—but something like that can fool you. There should be lots of figures around it; animals, birds. Why I have to see it to know what it is. What looks like an old painting sometimes is a print on paper, glued to a board and varnished. You, with your background, know that.”

  Z drank impatiently and spluttered, “Tell me how you heard about this painting. That you say you haven’t seen. What happened, Arthur drew it for you?”

  “Something like that,” Fred said. “Chewing the fat.”

  “And now you’re interested. Sorry, can’t help you. I’ll ask around, see what I find out. There are people in town think they know about art. Don’t waste your time. Give me your number. Tell you what. You know so much about that class, the class Arthur graduated with? Where’s Arthur now? Tell me this. Where’s Ruthie Hardin? Did you talk to Ruthie Hardin about this business? For your so-called article, whatever it is you are up to? What’s her angle? Have you interviewed Ruthie Hardin?”

  “Who?” Fred said.

  “Ruthie Hardin. She was in Arthur’s class. While we’re at it, where is Arthur Schrecking?”

  Fred shook his head. “I keep my sources confidential.”

  ***

  When Fred left the building half an hour later Z angrily refused a ride home, instead signaling for a new drink.

  Fred sat behind the wheel and did a quick inventory. What he had gained so far: There was or had been a painting, old, on wood, which two men in Nashua were familiar with. Kenzo Petersen, by the quality of his proclaimed disinterest, admitted his knowledge, as did Zagoriski, the art appreciation teacher from Hell. Neither, apparently, knew where the painting was. Or what it was. Though Kenzo’s inadvertent mention of “another” art dealer in the mix, and Zagoriski’s disingenuous denial of knowledge, combined with his self-pitying declaration of impending divorce, left interesting questions. If Z knew nothing about the painting, why did he immediately suspect his estranged wife when he had cottoned to Fred’s interest?

  What else had Fred learned? Arthur’s original patronymic was Schrecking. The adopted alias, Pendragon, was for romance.

  Zoltan Zagoriski would like to know how to find Ruthie Hardin, and did not know that she had changed her name. Fred had referred to her only as Kim.

  The high school was closed up tight. Fred stopped in four diners before he found one whose phone book had not been ripped from its chain. No Hardins were left in town. “Schrecking” gave him the address of a pocket-sized house on a street lined either side with pocket-sized houses stamped out by the same die and painted in similar peeling pastel colors. A rusting white van with the company name Schrecking Electric “if it don’t work we can fix it” sat on blocks in the bib of dirt that set the house off from the road and from its neighbors.

  A hefty man, shrugging into an undershirt in response to Fred’s knock, answered Fred’s question with almost commendable brevity. “I do not know where Arthur is, I do not care where Arthur is. Arthur moved out, I can’t help you.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The dress—would a woman call that a jumper?—was the same green one today, but she’d changed the shirt under it to a short-sleeved one of deep yellow. “Chrome,” Fred said.

  Molly looked up from the desk where she was standing. “I’m sorry?”

  “That yellow,” Fred said. “Chrome yellow turns up in a painting, you know the painting can’t be older than 1797. Frenchman named Vauquelin discovered you could make paint with chrome, but it didn’t catch on until the early nineteenth century. If someone tries to sell you a painting by Vermeer and the woman in it has a shirt like yours, chrome yellow, don’t buy it. It’s a fake.”

  “I’ll remember,” Molly said. “Given Vermeer was dead by, what, 1675? Fred, I picked up something for you. In case…”

  Fred said, “This is going to seem off the wall. There’s no chance your library is going to have it. By the time I got to thinking about it, it was too late and I was on the road back already. Can you get—no rush—do they do interlibrary loan between states? Without driving up there again, can I get copies of the yearbooks from Nashua’s Cent
ral High School going back three, four, maybe five years?”

  Molly said, “I’ll look into it. What I picked up…”

  “There’s no chance the Boston Public Library would carry such a thing,” Fred said. “Chances are, even in Nashua, nobody cares.”

  Molly said, “It might go quicker—Nashua’s what, an hour and a half away? somebody’s got to be working in the high school—the office, the library—that you could ask.”

  “Thanks. There are many things on my list ahead of a second trip to Nashua. To be truthful, I wanted…”

  “It’s a good thing since, if you didn’t come in, what was I going to do with this?” Molly reached under the counter and fumbled, her eyes on Fred. “Walking over, with time to kill, I was browsing Out of Town News. My eye fell on…wait.” She bent to peer under the counter and pulled out, “Today’s Nashua Sentinel. They had the one.”

  Local Man in Hit and Run, blared the large headline.

  “Gilly, your colleague’s, still out sick?”

  “Yes, but they have to give us a half hour for lunch,” Molly said. “I can push it to forty-five minutes.” She corrected for apparent eagerness. “I didn’t mean…”

  Large grainy photo of Mr. Z’s square face and excessively styled exuberant white hair. The sub-headline: “Beloved teacher from Central High.”

  “What time?” Fred asked. “Tell me what you like. I’ll get us a sandwich. We can eat by the river.”

  Molly reached the newspaper toward him. “I brought stuff in a sack,” she said, “that nobody would want to eat.”

  “That doesn’t disqualify you from picnicking. What time?”

  Molly held out the newspaper. “Eleven forty-five?”

  “Here? Or out front?” Fred took the paper. Quick scan of text. Z hadn’t been the driver. He’d been killed. “If I bring chips will you accept one?”

  “I’ll fight for my share,” Molly said. “The articles never tell you anything, beyond the name of the mayor and so forth, but sometimes you get local color from the advertisements. Meet me out front in that park. You’ll recognize me by my chrome yellow shirt.”

  “I’ll be carrying a copy of the Nashua Sentinel,” Fred said, “for which I owe you thirty-five cents.”

  “I’ll take it out in chips.”

  ***

  “Reckon we’re all beloved once we’re gone,” Fred said, taking possession of a ragged wooden bench under a maple tree in the park where the assignation was scheduled. The newspaper article attempted to make up, with breathless brevity, for what it lacked in substance. Zagoriski, “known to generations of students as ‘Mr. Z,’” had been hit by heavy moving machinery, hard enough to cause multiple trauma from which he had “expired” before help reached him, close to midnight, in a part of Nashua known for its historic mill buildings—an area that was not much frequented because it was presently being developed. Zagoriski was said to live alone. The photo was credited to Nashua Central High School archives. Someone from the paper had raised somebody over there. Beyond the “victim’s” home address in an outskirt of Nashua that meant nothing to Fred, there was no further information.

  “Merits thought,” Fred said. “Any coincidence does.”

  This bit of Cambridge was an oasis. The shade of the park protected against the day’s heat. Harvard University and its museums, which congregated toward the nearer corner of its campus, made a blockade not only against the river—whose nearby presence was not discernible except for occasional seagulls overhead—but against habitations. An institutional pall discouraged human propagation, despite the fact that the city’s big public high school sat next to the library and shared the park. The high school, like Nashua Central, was open for business, with people of both student and faculty ages appearing from time to time. They moved between pools of shadow and sunlight in the same way as the birds did, but haunted by the proximity of large buildings whose presence discouraged liveliness.

  “Coincidence, hell!” Fred said.

  He worked his way through the newspaper as if preparing for a quiz. Issues of city sanitation, liquor licenses, an appeal for a large “water park” possibly in trouble, bond issue concerning the construction of a new elementary school to replace the one damaged last fall by fire. Advertisement for an upcoming pancake breakfast at a Baptist church; a chicken fry at a VFW hall; so-and-so’s used cars—in fact, so many so-and-so’s used cars that the only way they all could possibly subsist was by selling used cars to one another. Insurance brokers. Magander’s House of Rest, a funeral home. Hospital, car wash, seven pizza joints, and a dozen restaurants offering “something extra” in the way of romance. A retirement village, Bide-a-Wee, “Where Life Begins!” Get that one past the truth-in-advertising people.

  Not much in the way of bookstores, but lots of movies, though they tended to stack up one on top of another, so that you could spend a week of entertainment without leaving a single complex. Move Magander’s House of Rest into the same building, you’d never have to step out of the complex again until the mortal portion of you exited by way of the chimney in a bad puff of smoke.

  “Did I stir something up?” Fred said. “Or was something already stirred up, and I stepped into it?

  “Events do not conspire. Nor do they have a purpose, a reason, or a cause. I do not accept coincidence as a naturally occurring phenomenon. Hit and run. Small world. Zagoriski and a moving vehicle at the same place at the same time. Who’d have thought? Sure. Happens all the time. But events do not conspire. People do.”

  Granted, if Zagoriski had continued down the same road Fred had left him on in the early evening, by midnight he should have been pie-eyed. Well, so what? According to the scrap of phone call Fred had overheard, he was scheduled to meet someone.

  Fred had put questions to him and Z had dodged away from them. When Fred had left him, Z had been well into dodging mode. Granted, his coordination might not have been at peak level to avoid a moving vehicle. Especially one that had taken aim.

  “Not that it’s any of my business,” Fred said to himself, or to the birds, or the dusty shade under the maples, “and not that I care how that calculating fellow met his appointed destiny, not my business, but I notice that I assume that his death was purposeful and malicious. My curiosity was piqued already. It remains piqued.”

  Was it part of his dodge, or had Z actually wanted to know where Ruthie Hardin was? Z hadn’t known enough to ask the accompanying question, “Who is Ruthie Hardin now?” since Z appeared not to know of Ruthie’s change of name.

  “Which allows my curiosity a certain latitude,” Fred decided. “Next thing I do, I talk to Ruthie, who has become Kim, administration at my hairstylist. That painting’s somewhere. Next thing, I talk to Kim.”

  After lunch.

  First things first. Fred turned his full attention to the prospect of luncheon on the grass with Molly Riley.

  A painting is only a thing. It could wait. Although this one might not be his business, he was interested anyway—more so when a variety of people set out to hide it from him. Zagoriski, also not his business, beyond the fact that he had been a fellow human, would not become any less defunct, nor any closer to being Fred’s business, if Fred took time for lunch with Molly.

  And he faced a serious test in which he would prefer to earn a passing grade. By his own act, he had condemned himself to choosing the chips.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Across the street from the park, the Broadway Supermarket offered a depressingly large variety. How make the choice? How define the overriding tactic?

  Dismiss, at the starting line, the mischievous temptation to buy two little bags, perhaps even two brands, and offer Molly a choice. Such a move would declare Fred to be indecisive, ungenerous, and spendthrift: worse, too dull-witted to take a hint. It might suggest that he was not inclined to share, or declare that Fre
d suspected that Molly herself was greedy and indecisive, pretending to want not some, but all of a pack.

  Her proposition had introduced the possibility of shared intimacy. Hold on to that. One bag, one serving, to share.

  Next question. Baked or fried?

  A baked potato chip is an abomination, a hypocrisy, proof of the persistence of the delusion that one can have one’s cake and eat it. The only excuse for a baked chip is to allow the client to pretend that there is no caloric consequence. Worse, sometimes they hold the salt.

  What did Fred know about Molly? Damned near nothing. As far as her own prospective lunch was concerned, all he knew about that was what she’d said: that she had “brought stuff in a sack” that “nobody would want to eat.” That could mean leftover macaroni-and-cheese from last night, or a ritual penance of carrot sticks and yoghurt, because she was critical of her mass. Suppose she was, like many women in the West who are not suffering from immediate poverty, slimming?

  Well, what if she was?

  Offer a baked fry, he’d suggest the condemnation, “You’re too fat.” Nothing Fred might ever say afterwards would make up for the implied insult. The fact that he found her delicious—not his business—would not come up. How could it? It would be offensive to signal his appreciation of her physical presence. Not gallant. In fact, obnoxious. Let that be assumed, not stated or implied.

  Whatever chip he selected would be, more than a signal of his reading of his luncheon partner, a self-portrait. By their chips shall you know them. Molly would appreciate genuine flavor. Her eyes had lit up at the prospect of chips. Nobody’s eyes light up at the prospect of baked chips. Her mouth wanted sparkle, crunch, and flavor. That meant fat and salt.

  No dodges and no frills.

  Lurking somewhere out of sight and out of hearing, exactly where he could not find them, were lines that obliquely justified his choice: I have no cunning in protestation…these fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into ladies’ favors, they do always reason themselves out again. What! A speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad…