A Paradise for Fools Page 13

  “I’ve been thinking, Fred,” Kim said. “And what I want to know is, you sneaking around, and everything you said, one minute it’s Tippy Artoonian, but you couldn’t care less about that skank, who could? And then that terrible newspaper, and you’re not the cops, and the rest of it, and I’ve been thinking, and what I want to know is, what in the fuck do you want?

  “And also, no. You are not gonna get a drink, and we are not gonna smoke a joint, so don’t ask.

  “Next question, and I decided: What in the fuck do you want?”

  “And say it straight, no tricks,” Claire chimed in.

  Fred had chosen one of the oversized chairs. Kim sat at the other end of the couch, with Claire. Its rich gray cover set off the early sixteenth-century colors on her legs. The painting itself might be dirty, but Arthur had found a way to compensate, rendering the colors as clear and fresh as they would have been five hundred years ago, when Bosch painted the original. What looked like a Judgment of Paris on the top of her left thigh, three naked goddesses standing, impatient, demure, all outlined but tinted with the coloring of Kim’s own skin. They were set off, not by the Trojan prince whose job had been to choose among them, but rather by a fourth woman, also naked, but clad in a rich black skin. She held—what was it? A fish? A small bird? Not the prize golden apple, anyway. The figures were about six inches high, clean, clear, with a suggestion of bright green grass around their feet. Enough green to capitalize on Kim’s own coloring. Arthur was a genius, or certainly Bosch was a genius.

  Fred said, “There’s too much happening at once. I can see that.”

  “And don’t tell me it’s a coincidence, either,” Kim said.

  Arthur had been careful. Everything on the legs—the thighs, calves and knees—at least what appeared while Kim was seated—had been drawn in appropriate scale. Baboons dancing in a ring; a fish blowing a trumpet; birds; was that a camel?

  “When I saw Zagoriski,” Fred said, “he mentioned that he wondered where you were. When I say you, who he asked after was Ruthie Hardin. I didn’t tell him.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “Him and I,” Kim said, “We never had…”

  “Who is Ruthie Hardin?” Claire demanded. “Slow down. Kim, you don’t have to tell this guy anything. He can’t make you…”

  On the right calf—Kim crossed her leg to rest the right ankle on her knee—a stout little man bent forward to allow a cloud of birds and flowers to exit his anus. Next to him a glass jar held enormous beetles copulating while devouring coins.

  “Ruthie used to be my name,” Kim said. “Fred, that was you in the shop two days ago. Claire recognized you. Start there. How come?”

  Fred said, “I don’t believe in coincidences either. Kim, you and I are on the same page there. I also don’t accept destiny as an explanation. So I can’t tell you. I don’t know how come. I needed a haircut is the answer, but given everything afterwards, the answer isn’t good now.”

  Above the right knee a dark, turbulent pond extended around the cylinder of compact muscle. Its banks crawled with lizards. Fish looked out of it. A boy swam upside down, or else was drowning there, his legs poking upwards in a V shape.

  Claire said, “This is going to sound like my mother. Your answer isn’t satisfactory.”

  Fred said, “So we all three agree. I’ll tell my story. It isn’t satisfactory, but it’s where I have to start. Maybe it only seems like a coincidence because of how things went. I noticed it had been too long. So I stopped into Cut - Rate - Cuts.”

  “Shouldn’t let it go more than a month,” Claire scolded.

  “Two days ago,” Fred continued. “Here’s something about me. I love paintings. Whenever there’s a painting to look at, that’s what I’m going to look at. Not the crap in this guy’s house. That’s mechanical decoration that’s more or less an extension of the rugs and window treatments. Claire was working, nobody was in the shop, everything quiet, I had become an ugly part of the furniture. Kim was talking. For me, with the mirror there, and the two of you having your conversation, it was like being at the movies. It must be like that for you, too. You’re what the real thing is, and your conversation goes on all day. These other folks, the clients, me, we come and go like the shadows of clouds on a windy day. Who notices? Who remembers?

  “Kim mentioned she’s working with an artist, and I happened to see—no offense, there it was on the mirror in front of me—some art I liked she was showing you, Claire, that she was wearing. The tattoos. When she said, about the artist, that he’s working from a dirty old wooden painting, and since I like paintings, and I like the way those figures are drawn—I hope this doesn’t feel like an invasion of privacy.”

  “I’m proud of my tats,” Kim said. “They are a big effing investment. Money and time and itching. So all right. So fine. Where does big Tippy Artoonian come into it, and the rest of it?”

  “And he hasn’t said what he wants,” Claire said. “I am listening to hear him say what he wants.”

  “I want to see that dirty old wooden painting,” Fred said.

  “And then what?” Kim said.

  “Spend time looking at it,” Fred said. “If that leads to something else, see where it leads.”

  “Fred likes to see where things lead,” Kim said. “That much I know. He was following things yesterday as far as Nashua. How come? If all you want is to see that picture?”

  “It does seem kind of roundabout,” Fred said. “But that’s not all. You mentioned Arthur.”

  “I talked to Arthur this afternoon,” Kim said. “Him and I are in touch all the time. He knows about Mr. Z. I told him, don’t try and pull the same trick on Arthur, with the newspaper. He already told me about you. How you’d been in and out and in again and everything, and interested, and asking questions, and now Tippy Artoonian. And Arthur told me, we figured it out, that was you, you’d been there, you went to see Arthur after, two days ago, after you were in my shop, and what the verdict is, it’s not your business.”

  “Arthur said he didn’t have the painting,” Fred said.

  “Arthur would know,” Kim said.

  “No. That’s not what Arthur said.” Fred thought back. “He was afraid about something. Something had spooked him before I ever saw him. I mentioned how you had referred to the painting on wood he was working from here with you, and he said, these are Arthur’s words, ‘Doesn’t ring a bell.’

  “When I drove over there that night, he was working. He invited me.”

  “And when he found out you wanted the painting, Arthur threw you out,” Kim said.

  “Who owns the painting?” Fred asked.

  Kim, opening her mouth to answer, Claire put a swift foot in it. “You don’t have to answer, Kim.”

  Kim said, “I was about to say. This dirty old wooden painting you keep talking about, you must have made it up. Arthur never heard of it. I never heard of it.”

  Fred said, “For God’s sake, Kim, it’s all over you!”

  “And more, and, but also,” Kim said, as smoothly as she could say anything, “Anything you heard me say, I didn’t say it. And I have witnesses. That I didn’t. Claire.”

  “Right. This painting that doesn’t exist,” Fred said. “Who owns it?”

  “Sneaky,” Claire said.

  “Try it another way,” Fred said. “Who doesn’t own it?”

  “And another thing,” Kim said. “What were you talking about with Mr. Z? When you saw him before he died. What did he say? Poor Mr. Z?”

  Claire said, “I have to get home. My kid brother. They want to go out, I have to be there. My bus. I have fifteen minutes.”

  “Can I get you a Coke?” Kim offered. Claire shook her head. “Beer?” The head continued shaking.

  “Zagoriski wanted to know where Ruthie Hardin was,” Fred said. “And where Arthur was.
How interested he was, I couldn’t say. We’re not going to find out now.”

  “Him being dead,” Kim said impatiently. “That terrible accident. No, I mean about the painting.”

  “That doesn’t exist,” Claire said.

  ”What did he say?” Kim demanded.

  “I asked him about the dirty old wooden painting you talked about, the one that has what you call a gremlin in it, an egg with two heads and the legs of a chicken, like the one you have on your back under that halter top. He said, the first thing he said, pretty much like you, is that the painting doesn’t exist.”

  “Which is suddenly worth money,” Kim said, smirking. “Even when it doesn’t exist. And strangers like you are interested. Go on.”

  “Then the next thing out of his mouth, Mr. Z wanted to know where you live. You and Arthur. I’m like you, Ruthie. Or Kim. Coincidences don’t do it for me.”

  “So, Fred, we’re out of here,” Claire said, standing. “I am not leaving you with Kim, alone. I promised.”

  Kim sat, staring, seeming to be speculating, caressing the group of figures on her left thigh. “Unless you promise we’ll only talk about something else,” she said. “Like money, maybe.”

  “Fred’s coming with me,” Claire insisted. “Don’t be an asshole, Kim. He’s not staying.”

  Fred shrugged and stood. “I’m easy,” he said. “I’m interested, but I’m not about to start pushing people around or waving money.”

  “How much?” Kim said.

  “I can’t stay,” Claire insisted.

  “Here’s my phone number,” Fred said, “in case you think of something. What I speculate, suppose you conclude that there’s no reason to—no, I’ll say it this way. If you think of a way for me to see the painting, if you remember that painting, and maybe where it is, or anything that might help me—give me a call.”

  He turned over an envelope from the absent mogul’s telephone company and wrote in large print his name, Fred, and the phone number at Clayton’s. “That’s where I’m staying,” he said. “Or I’ll stop by the shop when I happen to be passing by.”

  He left the envelope on a glass coffee table where Kim’s absentee landlord must rest his feet while he watched TV whenever he didn’t happen to be either in Hong Kong or at the office. God knows he wouldn’t waste time looking at the art on his walls. It was worse than anything that might appear on the TV.

  Claire led Fred down the stairs. She did not speak.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Fred followed Mount Auburn back to Harvard Square. Hopeful young people, sensing the onset of evening and the possibility of street theater, were beginning to gather in a desultory way. He found a pay phone and raised Zeke’s dangerous-sounding growl at the desk in the entrance to the Charlestown place.

  “Fred,” Fred said. “Checking the home front. How are things?”

  “Hot.”

  “Here too. I’m on the street. That character I sent. Sammy Flash. He’s working out all right?”

  “Haven’t seen much of him,” Zeke said. “His hours, whatever they are, and mine…”

  “No trouble?”

  “Nothing noted.”

  “If he’s in, put him on.”

  “I’ll check your room,” Zeke said.

  The phone clacked onto the desk. Fred listened to Zeke’s heavy tread moving across the small vestibule—barely big enough for the desk—and up the stairs. Fred occupied the small room over the stairs on the second floor in the front of the building, that some called, in these New England houses, the “borning room,” since it was ideal for the new baby. Fred needed room for nothing more than the foam mattress on the floor, a chair, and a table with a lamp in case he was wakeful and felt like reading.

  The pay phone he’d located was in front of a flower shop that had put its hardier offerings outside on the sidewalk. Bees had found them. Their presence added conviction to the display. Fred watched the passers by, pedestrians and a few on bicycles. A pleasant aimlessness seemed to motivate his fellow humans, relaxed by the beginning relaxation of the day’s worst heat. Many carried ice cream.

  That regular thump in his ear was Zeke descending the staircase.

  “Not in,” Zeke said.

  “Any sign of when he’ll be back?”

  “No sign of him at all,” Zeke said. “Room’s empty. I’m wrong. Pair of pants. Brown corduroy. Those yours?”

  “No,” Fred said.

  “Thought not. They’re damp. Hung over the radiator. He’ll be back. Otherwise nothing.”

  “He carries a shoulder bag,” Fred said. “Leather. Beat up.”

  “Not in the room. It wouldn’t be, if he carries it.”

  “Right. You didn’t—not to be paranoid about it. Flash drinks. I don’t want the place burned to the ground. You didn’t, in the room, smell cigar smoke or see butts or ashes?”

  “Guy leaves the room funky,” Zeke said. “Why I took a moment getting back to you. I opened the window more, turned on that fan to blow out, ventilate some. I’ll go up in an hour or so. I don’t think he smokes in there. You know how it is, general funk.”

  “Thanks,” Fred said.

  “I don’t want to forget and leave your window open forever, in case it rains. No sign when the guy is coming back and the next man on the desk—well, the window’s my responsibility. I’ll take care of it.”

  ***

  Rather than commit to the subway, wasting the start of a pleasant evening underground, Fred stretched his legs, walking the long mile and then some to Central Square. He’d left his car in Clay Reed’s parking space. No use fighting for unpredictable and temporary meters as long as his local business focused on areas easily reached from stops along the Red Line.

  Central was more crowded than Harvard Square, hotter, its evening more advanced. Lighted windows promised seedier fun or cheaper shopping. Fred glanced into the G Spot. It was doing a brisk after-work business, even to the point that a double line of customers stood drinking at the bar. The men’s look was lumberjack out of uniform. The women dressed as groupies who would be attracted to such bait.

  Fred pushed through the street door leading to the apartments and started climbing. Already, six stairs up, the place felt wrong. By the time he reached the third floor landing, the feeling was confirmed. The three metal folding chairs were still in place, but everything else was gone: the scruffy piles of magazines, the pinned displays of flash and photographs along the wall opposite the railing above the stair well. Only the window showed no change. It was still painted shut.

  “Our friend Flash has decamped,” Fred said. Wasn’t that the word Molly had used earlier today? He’d mentioned her children’s father in an interrogatory fashion and met her single word response. Decamped. It was an efficient word. And final. Sad. Much left unsaid.

  Fred knocked at Arthur’s door. No answer. He waited, knocked again.

  There was a choice. Should he follow the trail back to Charlestown and wait for Flash to reclaim his drying trousers? Why? Because his sudden absence made Flash interesting. Flash was a familiar here. What had he seen? What had he overheard? Did he know the painting?

  Or should Fred keep to the plan and wait to enjoy a second interview with Arthur?

  Or seek a middle ground, given that he was hungry?

  He went prospecting until he found a Middle Eastern place that would fill a collapsible metal tray with an assortment of edible materials to keep him busy while he waited. He’d take the opportunity as well to leaf through Molly’s introduction to the garden city of Nashua, New Hampshire, under the unwitting front-page keynote patronage of the late Zoltan Zagoriski, R. I. P.

  Fred was spread out on the floor of the landing, eating and scanning the paper, when footsteps mounted the stairs and kept coming past the second floor landing. Male feet. H
e made no move to shift position. Let him appear to be settled down comfortably for the duration.

  The head first—a young man’s, wavy hair, blond, recently cut. No. Styled. It had cost him seventy-five bucks to do that to his head of hair; then dark suit jacket, summer weight, across narrow shoulders; white shirt; necktie in blue silk with white stripes bending dexter. The rest of the suit. Fred gazed at him until even the black Oxfords reached the chipped brown-painted floorboards of the landing.

  “Take a chair,” Fred said.

  The young man, ignoring Fred’s invitation, knocked on the door. He put the attaché case he was carrying next to his feet and knocked again. Fred ate an olive. The collection of edible materials included hummus. He dipped a triangle of flatbread into that and ate it. Then a fat slice of red onion. Another olive. The new client, waiting, had New York written all over him. If the hair had been a little shorter, he had New York Lawyer written all over him; but a fellow this young, still gunning for partner, wouldn’t want to stand out within the firm as someone having time and energy to waste growing hair. That would brand him as expendable, in terms of the big picture.

  Fred said, “If you’re looking for Porky Pig…”

  The man knocked again without acknowledging the intrusion.

  “Or the Cat in the Hat,” Fred said. There was lamb in the mix, sliced and warm. He had some. He’d picked up a bottle of Rolling Rock. He wouldn’t lift that unless he needed the emphasis. With the food, the beer, and the newspaper spread out, it must look as if Fred planned to sleep here too, when he got around to it. It was a possibility. The G Spot next door would provide for his other modest comforts.

  “Don’t like to eat in front of a hungry man,” Fred said, offering the tray. The newcomer in the suit looked over, making no further move to acknowledge the gesture. Fred continued, “Take a folding chair. That puts you closer to the door than I am, but don’t forget. I’m first in line.”