Madonna of the Apes Read online

  “I don’t ask your permission, because I don’t ask permission. But I am going to do what I can to find out what’s going on. While I’m at it, why shouldn’t I watch your back?”

  “Do what you wish,” Clay said. “As long as I am insulated from further contact with this matter. Much as I hate the fact, I see that circumstance has placed me in your hands. I cannot keep you from going back. I shall be occupied. I must understand my painting. I shall undertake to establish its provenance otherwise, working beneath the surface, starting when it was made. In any case, I won’t keep the appointment. The man is insufferable. Take care. Since I do not expect to see you again, if you don’t mind—on your way out—I’d like to thank you again, and shake your hand.”

  Fred took the offered hand and slipped out the basement door into a brilliant May morning, fragrant with the caresses of the spring breezes.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Suzette, in her room, answered the house phone at whose other end, in the Ritz lobby, Fred was standing. “Fred?” The brilliant smile lit up the phone line and made it tingle. Ten minutes later she joined him in the lobby, wearing a beige suit, and balancing a handbag taken from the back cover of Vogue. “You found it,” she said. The tone of her exclamation was impossible to read. It lay somewhere between “You good boy,” and “Die, alien!”

  “Let’s go somewhere and talk,” Fred suggested.

  “You’ve seen it, at least?” Suzette demanded. “Come up to my room.”

  “There’s a place on Newbury Street,” Fred said. “I was just headed there for an early lunch, late breakfast. Join me? It’s a nice morning. Flowers, wind; and the rain is over and gone.”

  The cloth of her tailored skirt was of a light enough material that the sun, shining through it, after traversing the plate glass of the lobby’s street-side wall, made the morning even nicer.

  “I’ll take that lunch,” she decided.

  “I know a place,” Fred had implied; but he didn’t really know Newbury Street that well. He walked her along the sidewalk, therefore, until a likely looking window offered GRAND OPENING! Sylvia’s Kitchen, promising “Meals like Grandma used to make.” The concept was staggeringly out of place for Newbury Street’s pretensions.

  It was almost noon but, aside from a meager staff, they had the place to themselves. The hostess, struggling to use Suzette as bait, tried to make them sit in the window, but Suzette insisted on a table. “Out of the light. My eyes,” she explained.

  Grandma had specialized in macaroni and cheese, liver and onions, tuna casserole, and meatloaf with all the fixin’s. “Grandma was from Toledo, I guess,” Suzette said. “Yes, look, for dessert you can get Jell-O or apple pie or chocolate cake. No junket, but that may be too 1940s, even for Grandma.”

  “You’re not from Toledo,” Fred said.

  The waitress hovered. Fred ordered a draught beer and she shook her head. “No license,” she said. “They’ve applied.” At this rate Grandma might last a week before she had to close out of sheer loneliness.

  Suzette told the waitress, “I’ll bet you could make me a salad? I don’t see one on the menu, but there must be a salad that comes with some of these orders. That’s what I’d like. With a diet Coke.”

  “Diet Pepsi,” the waitress corrected her. They’d forced her to wear a dress of vertical pink and white stripes, along with an apron arrangement that Grandma’s Grandma would have called a pinafore. “I’ll ask them about the salad. You, sir?”

  “Meatloaf,” Fred decided. “And iced tea.”

  “Excellent choice,” she approved. “I’ll ask if we have iced tea.”

  “If the chef has ice, he’ll figure it out,” Fred reassured her.

  “All right. Let’s talk,” Suzette said briskly, as the waitress disappeared into the kitchen. “You’ve found it. You’ve seen it. You’ve made a deal on your own. With Reed. Typical. Cutting me out.”

  The waitress reappeared. She’d put on a nametag that gave her name as Carol. “We can do iced tea,” she crowed. “It’ll just be a minute. About the salad. What we do is coleslaw. A side of coleslaw. Would that be all right?”

  “Sure thing,” Suzette told her.

  “Excellent choice! I’ll get your drinks.”

  Fred said, once the coast was clear, “You have Reed Gingrich’s name from somewhere.”

  “The man’s a fool,” she remarked. Her eyes neither blinked not widened as she registered and salted away the prize she’d surprised out of him: Reed’s last name, Gingrich.

  “I won’t argue,” Fred said. “My hasty impression of Reed…”

  “Not Reed. I don’t know Gingrich. Franklin Tilley.”

  “I get the impression he’s out of his depth,” Fred agreed.

  “Whatever you paid, we’ll raise,” she said. She paused, fooled with her fork, and added, “Then add a commission for you.”

  “We?” Fred asked. He could not make the syllable last as long as he wanted, but he did what he could.

  “This morning we had a frank exchange, Franklin and I, and decided that we had a common interest,” Suzette said. “We are working together, just on this one project.”

  “Common cause,” Fred said, then looked up and left off as the waitress leaned toward them with beverages. Suzette’s soda clinked with ice. Fred’s tea, in its glass, was pale and thin, and warm, and carried a fingernail of ice in the thin film of scum on its surface.

  “There was ice at first,” Carol apologized. “It probably melted.”

  “Grandma’s not from Toledo,” Suzette remarked behind Carol’s retreating back. “Toledo may not be Savannah, but in Toledo we do know how to make iced tea.”

  “Relax,” Fred said. “You’re not from Toledo yourself. Not anywhere near.”

  “Where you from, big boy?” she asked. She sipped from her drink, dark with its diet caramel coloring. “What is this, a truck stop?”

  “So, you and Franklin Tilley and the Agnelli Collection all have the same interest? I can negotiate with any one of…”

  “You talk to me,” she said briskly. “Franklin’s a fool. Tony’s not here, and in any case I represent Tony’s interests. Where appropriate.”

  Carol came back. She carried two shallow dishes of coleslaw and a plastic basket of rolls that Grandma would have recognized from the cover of a 1950’s Family Circle magazine as able to emerge from a tube in order to imitate something served at the Parker House. The rolls she put in the center of the table. She put one dish of coleslaw in front of Fred, and the other in front of Suzette. She studied the arrangement, pouted, and shook her head.

  “When you get a chance, would you bring me a glass with ice in it?” Fred asked.

  Carol adjusted the dish of coleslaw in front of Suzette, putting it off to the side. “That way you have something to eat while the gentleman has his entrée,” she explained.

  “Something to look forward to,” Fred said.

  “Excellent choice,” Suzette said. “Fred, are you with me?”

  “With you and Franklin Tilley and the Agnelli Collection? I don’t know. That’s some party.”

  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 t
he 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.”