Madonna of the Apes Page 19

  “Einstein played the fiddle,” Fred recalled. “And he invented relativity though he couldn’t do a goddamned thing with it once he had it except pull out his fiddle and play it lullabies. So it figures Leonardo played the lute.”

  Two thirds of the people living in the world would recognize Leonardo’s name, and tell you who he was. Two thirds of those (the others being snobs) would welcome the chance to have their photos taken standing in front of the world’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa. And maybe twelve hundred people in the world (of whom Fred was not one) knew enough really about the man to give you more than a paragraph about him.

  It was amusing to chase Clay’s notes and observations, and to speculate over where his interests had been directed. Was he trying to demonstrate to himself why his painting, against all likelihood, must be the genuine article, an autograph painting by Leonardo da Vinci, unknown all these years, and not even the subject of speculation? Was he trying to assign to it the likeliest putative date of composition? Difficult for a painter whose finish could require not just months, but years, to achieve. Leonardo, it appeared, hopped from one horse to another at mid-stream or anywhere else. He had completed almost nothing. Given the pile of promises he brought with him in his otherwise empty poke (well, empty except for a silver lute in the shape of a horse’s head), why did Duke Ludovico keep him around? Why not drop the fellow head first into one of the mangonels he promised, and see how far he’d fly over the battlements?

  The big bronze “horse” was never finished. Other commissions petered out. That huge Last Supper started flaking away even before it was finished, because the arrogant bastard—and he was a bastard—was using his biggest commission ever to experiment with a new medium he was inventing that, like so much of what he invented, just didn’t work.

  Whatever else he was good at, he had the gift of gab, like the tailors who sold the credulous emperor that new suit, but twenty times over. Look, he’d say (this was all in his notebooks), here’s a good idea for a tank, except it’s powered by the men running along inside it, and after the first one trips on a rock, or log, or severed head, the rest of them topple over him.

  There are people like this: people who sell you hope, who start things nobody else can finish. People in government love them.

  Imagine this scene. The tailors, getting wind of trouble, tell the emperor they have to go elsewhere for a week to get fresh supplies only they can find for the magic garment. The week stretches out to a month, then six. The emperor’s nervous since he’s already invested in the new suit, and the occasion is coming when he wants to wear it for the first time. He’s angry, he’s concerned at the size of the investment he’s already made, he’s full of delight at how wonderful he’s going to look when the suit is finished, if it is, which he starts to doubt. How do the tailors phrase it when they come riding back? “Forget the suit, your excellency. We have a better plan. Would you like to fly? All we need (except how could Leonardo know it?) is for somebody else to invent the internal combustion engine.”

  *For this and associated material, see Serge Bramley, Leonardo, the Artist and the Man, tr. Sian Reynolds, Penguin Books, New York and London, 1994, pp. 174 and following.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Well and good. But Leonardo was no fraud. An optimist, maybe. If he promised something, it was at least within the scope of everyone’s imagination. Who hasn’t imagined flying? Who could not envision, happily, the sight of flaming rockets falling like rain into the enemy city and setting fire to the enemy women and children in their thatched houses? Who could not imagine a colossal horse made of bronze?

  The man was a think-tank. He was, whatever else he might be, and however useful, at least a worthy decoration for an ambitious court. He was Ludovico’s own private Institute for Advanced Studies. Like Einstein, once he was enshrined, he was never obliged to produce. To anyone asking, “What the hell are you doing all day?” he could show his notebooks. And indeed all day and every day he was thinking, drawing, speculating. Why did God put shells made of stones on the tops of mountains? What are the qualities of certain animals that allow us to perceive them in symbolic ways? How does a horse move? Look how, when I place certain aspects of fish, lion, ape and bird together, I get a griffon or a dragon. And look, when I take my knife to the willing corpse—at least it makes no objection—see the articulation of the bones, the placement of the blood vessels, the interaction of the organs in the ventral cavity.

  However, his observations were distracted by preconceptions. “How on earth did he justify from experience, what he drew, a direct line of communication, in the form of tube-like vessels, between a woman’s breasts and her uterus?” Mandy asked. Fred hadn’t realized her phantom was still with him.

  “Only Mona Lisa knows,” Fred said. “And she ain’t telling.”

  Or was Clay’s special interest the question whether the model for his painting might indeed be Cecilia Gallerani? He’d tried, and hadn’t gotten very far with this line of inquiry, to see what had become of Cecilia’s son, who was also the bastard son of Duke Ludovico, legitimized by the man she’d married. To chase that down you’d have to go to Milan and hire a wizened gentleman covered with scraps of Latin and cobwebs.

  But there’d been a more fruitful line of inquiry.

  By the time Leonardo had been adopted by Francis I, the king of France, until he died at sixty-seven, he had become little more than a think-tank, partly paralyzed, although he could still draw. Clay’s notes hinted at the merest outline of what could be years of study. Leonardo had never married. Acknowledging the inevitability of his impending death, he had disposed of his worldly goods, including the few paintings that remained of the few he had ever made.

  Testament, Clay had noted on another card. Half of a vineyard to Salai, as well as the house Leonardo built him. The house had paintings in it? The rest of the property, clothes, books, writings, and “all the instruments and portraits concerning his art and trade as a painter” were left to his executor, Messire Francesco Melzi. Clayton had underlined the word portraits.

  A separate card headed Melzi set out to track the fate of the collection of Leonardo material that had gone from Melzi, who died in 1570, to his son Orazio. The dispersal of manuscripts to Lelio Gamardi (if Fred was reading Clay’s hand correctly), the family tutor; a monk named Mazenta; a sculptor named Pompeo Leoni employed by the king of Sardinia; Cardinal Borromeo; a painter; Charles-Emmanuel of Savoy.

  “So this is what Clayton Reed is up to while I chase around in the rain,” Fred said. “Leading what we may call the active life, collecting bruises in my solar plexus.”

  These were the starting points of the tracks that led, after impossibly convoluted and infuriating twists and turns, into the history of the possessors of the various notebook manuscripts alone. Enough to entrance. Enough to drive anyone crazy. Except that, if you owned a work thought to be by Leonardo, you’d want to be able to say, if you could, where it had been since the old man died. Not so old as that, Fred reminded himself, at sixty-seven.

  What of Salai? Clay had written at the top of one of his cards.

  Who the devil was Salai? Everywhere Fred looked in the real world, and every bush and outcropping Clayton peered behind back in the record, there was another monkey.

  Envy rose in Fred’s gorge. Clay Reed was free to roam among his paintings and his books, while Fred must push into the rain again, to see what new surprises Suzette might have in store.

  It was twenty after five. Fred scrawled a note including the telephone number at Bernie’s, and cast around for a place where Clayton, in his large establishment, was bound to see it. He could prop it against the Madonna and earn Clay’s horrified contempt into the indefinite future. There would be many little things to work out for this uncertain future, including what was Clayton’s telephone number? Not only was he unlisted, the number wasn’t recorded on the telephone itself.

  He roamed again through Clayton’s first floor, checked the kitchen
to make sure nothing was on, made sure the front door was secure, and went down again to the office floor, where he looked once again at the chest. “The marks of the saw,” he said. “We can have those analyzed, learn what kind of saw, hand or mechanical, and when the work was done.” Then he stepped into the rain, grabbing an umbrella as he went.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  The rain was now of the kind that doesn’t seem to fall, so much as to hover in the air. It was not so much a visitation as a presence. It managed to find the undersides of leaves. It insisted on fecundity, seeming to be an undeserved blessing distributed by the vegetable gods. Fred opened the umbrella above him, though that made little difference since the rain was suspended in the air he walked through.

  The people on the late afternoon sidewalk seemed not so much oblivious to the rain as enlivened by it in a way they were not aware of. Everyone carried more light, or speed, or grace. Fred walked uphill, beginning the meandering ascent that would take him finally to Bolt Street. He’d avoid Charles Street this time, and the corner at Pekham where he could not prevent himself from looking upward at the building out of which Clay’s painting had come, so surprisingly and so recently. Four days it had been.

  He’d checked a few times out of the windows, during the afternoon, to see if there were overt signs of anyone taking an interest in Clay’s house. But you couldn’t tell that from inside. That was the trouble with being inside. A house is a trap, and the only way to watch it is from the outside. There was no reason to expect a watcher, any more than there had been reason to expect Franklin Tilley’s body beside the river early this morning, adding its quiet stinks to the morning air.

  From all appearances Clay, his person, home, and possessions, were secure. There was no sign, as Fred walked uphill, of any interest. No standing vehicle whose driver showed a sudden unnecessary concentration on yesterday’s newspaper. Nobody searching with tedious methodical slowness for a lost cat or earring. Nobody leaning frankly against a telephone pole and whistling into space. And there were no shops in which a watcher might sit. The alleys were empty. It didn’t hurt to be prudent.

  ***

  Bernie was not a reader; nor did he keep canned food in his pantry. He’d stripped the place down past its skivvies before heading off to Mumbai and points north. More for something to do than out of hunger, Fred devoured the half sandwich Suzette had left on the table at lunchtime: tuna fish with pickles. Then he paced the length of the room’s wall where Bernie kept both the indecipherable sound system and his massive collection of records and tapes. He studied the jackets and labels without taking anything completely out of its place on the shelf. Everything was in Bernie’s idea of meticulous order, and Bernie’s idea of meticulous order could not be understood by anyone else. Bernie was his own uncrackable code.

  At a little after six-thirty the telephone rang and gave him Clay. “Give me your number there,” Fred suggested. “Then tell me about Salai. No, that can wait. Give me your number. Then fill me in on Mitchell.”

  After postponing Clayton’s apologies, he wrote the number on a scrap of paper he tucked in his pocket.

  “If Fiorello Mitchell is our man, he knows a good deal in a highly restricted field,” Clay started. “Never published a book. Small potatoes in the academic world. Apparently he spent his career shuttling between short-term positions in various American academic institutions, and taking grants to work or teach or study overseas, usually in Italy. Fiorello Mitchell, as his name implies, is the result of the union between an American serviceman and an Italian woman, who met during the First World War, married, and produced this child some time later. His field…”

  “In case we’re interrupted,” Fred said, “streamline this.”

  “His field of expertise is a group of Sienese master charlatans who produced works in the manner of the Italian fifteenth century, between the late eighteen hundreds and the early. I believe I mentioned, in passing…”

  “That’s the door,” Fred said. “If I don’t get down there, I’ll lose him. Stick around.”

  Chapter Fifty-four

  A male contraption constructed of cigarette butts and wire stood at the door, next to Suzette, under that umbrella. Suzette had put on her black raincoat again, down which the rain was chortling in brisk rivulets. Fiorello Mitchell, slightly behind her, was halfway between five and six feet, wearing a trench coat and a hat from a bad 1930s movie about spies. His brushy mustache was of the kind that sticks straight forward, seeking to snatch out of the air more than its weight in crumbs.

  “Fred, Dr. Mitchell,” Suzette said. “Let’s for God’s sake get out of the rain. Mitchell, Fred Taylor.”

  Mitchell, looking around him furtively, gazed with misgiving into Bernie’s garage before he screwed up his courage and followed Suzette inside. “Where is it?” he asked.

  “Leave your things down here,” Fred suggested. “There’s no room upstairs.” He helped them hang their wet coats on nails poking out of the exposed studs of the garage walls. Mitchell handed over his hat reluctantly, as if it gave him more valuable access to the world even than a library card. He smelled strongly of the cigarette butts he was made of. Under his coat, the suit, which had once been blue, had worn itself down to a color that almost matched, but not quite, his shirt. There was a necktie, and it had been red. Fred followed them up the stairs.

  Suzette sat on the couch, homing to the indentation she had left that morning. Mitchell gazed slowly around the room, fondling his moustache, bristling it clear of crumbs. He said, “I was designed, by the good lord, to be a wealthy man.” He smiled sadly, waiting for the applause of sympathy he knew from long experience would never come, and went directly to the wall where Bernie kept his music. There was nothing else on the walls to look at, not even a calendar.

  “And is the good lord disappointed?” Fred asked. Mitchell might be sixty-five but he could pass for ten years older.

  “The lord has considerable patience, evidently. Billions of years of it.” Marshall’s observation, funny in itself—at least self-deprecating or wry—was not accompanied by any change in expression. Both statements had been made with the simple flat tones that might accompany the statement, “There are six eggs in this bowl.”

  “You are an expert in forgery,” Fred said.

  “Start somewhere else,” Suzette interrupted. “Maybe more neutral.”

  “It looks like rain,” Fred said.

  “A forger is a lazy man,” Mitchell said. He looked at the couch, thought better of it, pulled a chair out from the table, sat on it, and rested his head on his arms before he lifted it again. “A lazy man, and a fool. I’ve had enough of fools. Still I’m no expert.” He put his head down again and kept it there.

  “He’s been staying in a hotel,” Suzette said. “Where he says he can’t sleep.”

  “The pigeons,” Mitchell said, raising his head. “They disturb me. They interrupt my prayers.”

  Was this a joke? It was impossible to tell either from Mitchell’s or from Suzette’s expression. “And yet they are God’s creatures,” Fred hazarded. “Pigeons, I mean. Like the rest of us.”

  “Mitchell did the expertise, I told you,” Suzette said. “The appraisals, all that.”

  Mitchell raised his head. Were those tears? “This man challenges my good faith,” he announced. “I am finished.” He made no move to leave; simply sat, looking hopelessly offended.

  “I better warn you,” Suzette interrupted. “Which it took me a long time to figure out, because I’ve never run into it in this business, before or since. Dr. Mitchell tells the truth. What he says, it’s always what he believes or what he knows. It’s disorienting, like he’s hiding in plain sight. Like he’s an honest man disguised as an honest man.”

  “And yet he’s in the art business,” Fred said. “Mitchell, I meant no offense.”

  “None taken,” Mitchell said: a man insulted so often that he took no offense from insults?

  “My special interest,” Mitchel
l said, “my avocation, concerns a small group of artist craftsmen who went to great pains to learn, and to use, the materials and methods of their ancestors. I am weary.”

  “Tell me about it,” Fred invited.

  “Mr. Taylor, are you are willing to be educated?”

  “Fred,” Fred said.

  “Fred, then. A forger is a lazy man who finds, for example, a brown Dutch painting of a miserable old man, signs it Rembrandt, or R van Rijn, and rushes it to market. There is a difference between that charlatan and the true craftsmen who are the object of my study. These men are imitators, but not forgers. Are, I say, but I should say were. Though their work lives, the great ones are dead. Are you listening?

  “In the late nineteenth century a school of master craftsmen developed in Siena whose journeyman members, following the old traditions, were skilled in many things. Italy had recently awakened to the value of its previously despised artistic heritage; the thousands of works of art and decoration that had been produced, many of them in the fifteenth century, for churches and other wealthy patrons. Book covers, frames, portraits. These things had been moldering and falling apart, neglected, for years. In the churches the frescoes sifted into ruin. The great gilded tabernacles and altarpieces, the carved and molded fretwork decorating walls and ceilings…”

  “Fred gets the picture,” Suzette said.

  “Almost within living memory,” Mitchell persisted, “in certain towns and villages, fires were sometimes built in the public square, in which old paintings, furniture, were burned so that artisans could retrieve their gold. But in the late eighteen hundreds this was changing. Churches, towns, noble families, began suddenly to appreciate what they had disregarded. They came into vogue. Craftsmen were needed to repair them. These craftsmen were obliged to discover, to imitate, or to duplicate in some way, the methods of the ancients. Suppose the gilded frame around an altarpiece had been carelessly charred over the years, by candles? Now the cathedral suddenly saw a purpose to repairing it. The restorer must fill and match the portion that had been harmed.