Madonna of the Apes Read online

  “We agree he’s a bad host,” Fred agreed.

  Clay said, “May we go faster? I worry about moisture on the paint surface. We’re almost there. I can’t tell you how obliged I am to you, Fred. Never mind the man. We will put him out of our minds. Upsetting as the incident has been, it has been providential. Two blocks more. Let’s see now, upstairs or down?” he asked himself, fumbling with his keys. “Downstairs is better, safer.”

  “I’m interested, especially since you left so much money in his hands, did you trust any of what was there?” Fred asked. “The Cézanne?”

  “A ludicrous fake,” Clay said. “Granted Cézanne drew badly, he didn’t draw badly in that way. The imposture couldn’t stand up to five minutes’ conversation, not even with that ignorant youngster. The mixture of objects, events, and persons was outlandish, outrageous, and leaves me deeply, deeply uneasy. We are well out of it. ”

  They’d reached a handsome row of brick townhouses the first of which, on the corner, was set back by its own parking space, a rarity on Beacon Hill—large enough for two cars, although it was inhabited only by one. The chink of Clay’s keys, and the readiness of one of them in his hand, proved they had reached their destination. Clay opened a low iron gate and led them through a brief plantation of dark ivy.

  “One plays the hand as it is dealt. I had to pretend an interest in something,” Clayton went on. “Therefore I chose the Magdalene. The supposed Mantegna. Here, down these steps. My study is on the ground floor. Let me go ahead of you. Never mind the sides, coming in. But treat the top as if it were the queen of Egypt.”

  “The fake marble,” Fred said. “Right.”

  “I had to give him hope I’d come back,” Clayton explained, fumbling with the door. “Let the villain believe I was toying with his bait. Meanwhile…” He’d gotten the door open and, turning on lights, led Fred and his burden into a wide hallway lined with filled bookshelves.

  “Where to?” Fred asked.

  “Give me an end. Let’s get it into the study,” Clay said. “Goodness, I’m all in a tremble and sweat.”

  Fred lowered the chest and allowed Clayton, taking one handle, to precede him down the hall and into a study the width of the building into which they had come. The room was both spacious and cluttered. A large worktable was heaped with books, papers, and magazines. The walls were lined with bookshelves, against which a few paintings rested, on the floor, their backs turned outward. One wall was taken up by the kind of old brown leather couch that no one can ever throw away.

  Clay chortled, “So the villain, flailing at will-o’-the-wisps, reaches for three million? Let us now put him out of our minds forever. Meanwhile I slip out of his trap carrying with me a prize worth more than the gross domestic product of Bulgaria!”

  They put the box down on a green throw rug, next to the worktable.

  “Painted on the inside, you said?” Fred flipped open the chest’s heavy lid.

  “Jeekers,” Fred said. “That’s Leonardo!”

  Chapter Six

  Startled as he was, he’d let the top lie gently back to where it was supported by the legs of the worktable in the center of the room. The painting on the inside—that’s all you could call it—had to be looked at sideways, since its foot was at the left side of the chest. Fred shivered. It was like looking at a ticking bomb. It was spectacular, an amazing thing. The room went still and Clayton Reed disappeared in favor of the work, the subject almost grotesque, the finish exquisite in its precision.

  On the left a woman in blue—the Virgin, clearly, although she bore no halo—sat in a rocky landscape struggling to contain the exuberance of a naked boy child—Jesus, but again lacking a halo—who was twisting away in order to reach for a fruit, a fig, that a crouching ape on the right was offering. The ape was hairy and so lifelike as to appear not even malevolent, but, rather, its natural amoral self. It was an ape, no more, a creature native to this wilderness.

  Aside from some sparse, meticulously rendered, heraldic vegetation, the landscape was barren, stretching toward ominous overhanging rocks. Beyond the rocks, and visible between them, were glimpses of sky and choppy water. Within that dangerous wilderness a half-dozen more apes were foraging or scratching for fleas or, even, grooming each other. The paint surface was smooth, vivid with cleanly modulated color, the browns and gold of the landscape set off by the rich blue of the Virgin’s garment, the blue-green of the distant water, the ape’s russet coat with meticulous gold highlights, and the chubby ochre pinkness of the child, whose skin reflected tints from the red cushion on which the Virgin was either sitting or kneeling. The woman’s face was seductive in a way that offered not much hope. She was taken. Strap hinges, rusty with age, had been attached to the panel where, at the top, part of a toppling outcrop was obscured and, at the bottom, the spill of the Virgin’s drapery, as well as an ornamental clump of grass, were partly covered. It was, on the whole, a piece of incredible workmanship and, given the circumstances, in astonishingly good condition.

  Apparently Clayton Reed was speaking, and had been for some time. “…don’t mean to impugn, I mean to say. And with you, Fred, I will not dissemble. Cannot dissemble, after the service you have performed, which is deeply appreciated. You may have saved my life. He struck me! He was armed. What further depredation did that man not intend? In my experience a man who is prepared to sell is equally ready to steal. Meanwhile—I don’t know your last name.”

  “Taylor.”

  “It does, as you say, look like a Leonardo. That fact must never leave this room. Meanwhile I don’t know you from Adam and, out of six billion people living on this sphere, the stranger who providentially appears to assist me in my hour of need, in the first second leaps to the same conclusion I did in that man’s apartment. Can it be true that Tilley could live with such a thing and understand not even that it is a painting? Simply because it is at one and the same time pressed into service as the top of a wooden chest?”

  Fred shrugged.

  “The world is out of joint. Except through the malevolent interference of Providence, such things should not occur. I am an innocent. Why should you not deviously be in league with him?” Clay pressed on. “It is my nature to ask. And yet, how can I be such a churl as to doubt your bona fides? Why do you say Leonardo? Help set my mind to rest.”

  Clay had pulled out the chair that stood at the other side of the desk. He now sat there, twitching with impotent suspicion. “I’ll be off,” Fred said. “On a hunch, yours is a mind that can’t be put to rest. For an innocent, I’d say it was pretty slick the way you maneuvered this thing out of there. If you skunked the man, the man deserved it. For what it’s worth, though it’s much smaller, to me your box top has the look of da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks. The one in the Louvre, obviously. The one in London is a copy, done much later, most of it, by a kindergarten class.”

  “I see,” Clayton said, concentrating on the painting before them. “It’s water in the foreground, all the way across, where the monkey is reflected. Also the thing he is holding in his, or is it her, paw? Hand?”

  “The ape is male,” Fred said. “He’s discreet about it, but there’s the edge of his testicles, there, under the tail. A male ape in this position almost conveys menace, but I don’t see threat in the painting, do you? Seems pregnant with symbolism, doesn’t it? Which people are always going to read wrong. How can anyone look at this and not remember Adam and Eve? Even though the fruit’s a fig. See how it’s split? And not an apple.”

  “It’s what I was born for,” Clay said, running a spotless handkerchief across his forehead. “To have such a thing in my possession. No one must know I have it. No one must know it’s here. I’d never sleep again.”

  “So I’ll forget it. But I can’t make any promises for the other guy. Can Tilley find you again?” Fred asked.

  “I don’t want people knowing my business. With you, who may have saved my life, I am obliged to take a leap of faith. It is why I did not even consider writ
ing him a check,” Clay said. “I could have, and gladly, for the eight thousand dollars he asked, though to have given him what he wanted would have raised his suspicions. No, that would not have done. Had I been willing, he would have refused. In any case, even moved as I was, I knew more than to deliver my address to the man. Innocent I may be, but I am not hopelessly wet behind the ears. That man has no clue what he sold me. Because, palpably, he doesn’t know what it is. To your question: I am not listed. My number, or address. Furthermore he believes, as did you, that Reed is my first name.”

  Fred yawned and turned for the door. “It was a treat to see it. Now I’ll forget I did, and you can sleep in peace.”

  “Just like that?” Clay Reed said, rising to his feet and standing in almost pitiable indecision. “Overcome by events, I neglect my obligations as a host. At least the other villain offered cooking brandy. What will you take?”

  “There’s nothing I want,” Fred said. “I barely want to be alive.”

  The silence around them echoed the truth and the surprise of the ungainly statement. It sat in the room as wild and mocking, as seductive and as demanding, as the ape who held the broken fig.

  “Don’t know where that came from,” Fred said. “It’s late. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  But the apology could not withdraw the statement. There it sat, like a turd on the carpet. You couldn’t just walk around it. It had to be dealt with, especially if it was yours. Clayton was staring at him in alarm.

  Fred said, “Forget I said that. When enough people have wanted you dead enough ways for a long enough time, you start thinking they have a point.”

  Clayton stepped toward him.

  “It was rude. Forget I said it,” Fred said. “Deal? And I’ll forget your Leonardo.”

  Clay gestured toward the couch along the wall, where a few papers and magazines lay on a Kilim rug. “Where did you train?” he asked. The room was warmed by books, some of them on shelves and others piled on the floor. The paintings that leaned against the walls, their backs turned out—those paintings could be almost anything. They might be worth looking at. An open door allowed a glimpse of another room in which were racks holding more paintings, only whose outside edges could be seen. Back of the worktable a spiral metal staircase led upward into the house proper. “Where did you train?” Clay repeated. The suspicion had gone out of his voice, to be replaced by a sympathetic curiosity.

  “Here and there,” Fred told him. He shrugged. “Oh, you mean how do I happen to know a da Vinci when it bites me in the ass?”

  “I’m Princeton,” Clay explained. “Then Yale.”

  “And I pay attention to things I can’t control,” Fred said.

  Chapter Seven

  “A painting like that, you’d be a fool not to pay attention,” Fred said. Clay’s gesture toward the couch, inviting him to stay and reveal himself further, was ignored. “I’ll be off.” He turned, quickly enough that he could seem not to disregard the hand Clayton held out either in appeal, or in an effort to formalize their parting with a handshake.

  Outside, the damp air blew in veils lit by the streetlamps. Fred walked down to the river and stood looking across black water. Cambridge, on the far bank, glittered with lights. The odd car moved on either side. No one was sleeping on the riverbank tonight, though it was warm. Either they’d been moved along, or they’d moved along on their own. It was a lot of real estate to be going so unused.

  The ripples on the river carried light, and the river itself carried the reflections of lights. The river’s darkness was either its own darkness, or the reflected darkness of the sky. The landscape could use an ape or two to jazz it up and make this civilization seem less of a wasteland. Or were the apes intended to represent the spirit of the place? What did they mean to Leonardo? Even though the notions of evolution were far off in the late fourteen hundreds, and you’d be burned at the stake for entertaining such a theory, still, any fool could see the similarity between ape and human. The similarity between ape and God—that would have been a stretch, even for Darwin.

  Fred lay on the grass for a while, but sleep eluded him. His senses had been too enlivened by the pheromones of danger, intrigue, greed, and by the compact web of emotions that clung to and emanated from the painting Clayton Reed had, so improbably, discovered and carried off with his assistance. There would be no sleep now. The situation the painting had come from—Franklin Tilley, the subterfuge, the gun and all that stage set, so elaborately arranged—it was just wrong. It worked at the edge of his brain like a blade that is sharp, but pitted with rust.

  Fred walked back to Pekham Street and looked at the dark building from which the chest had come, and at its dark windows. It would have one apartment on each floor, with the exception that the first floor, with its own separate entrance, seemed to be given over to dental surgery. If it became important, or if it mattered, there would be people to ask about the tenant of the second floor. Or tenants, plural. That was a double bed.

  Pekham Street rose at the same steep incline as did the rest of Beacon Hill. It was a hill too steep for comfortable grazing back in the days when it was farmed. It was also too steep for corn or wheat. But maybe an apple orchard?

  Fred crossed the street and found a shadowed alley where he could stand looking over the building and consider the neighborhood. From old habit he made note of the vehicles parked in the area, and of their license plates. He made note of the time—3:47—when a light appeared on the second floor, burned for three minutes, and went out again. An answering impulse took him deeper into the alley for a similar amount of time.

  “We apes,” he said, “why wouldn’t it be our instinct to offer the child a piece of fruit?” Or—here was potential fallacy. The action of the painting was frozen in time, and the human interpreter might well mistake in what direction the action had been tending. In so far as the picture had to be about a story, why would the narrative not be equally likely that the child had given his fig to the ape? And with success: the ape had taken the bait. What did the child want in return?

  The painting was about the wilderness of divinity and, in turn, the wilderness of humanity. But what was the suggested narrative? It would fit a moment during the flight into Egypt. An angel having betrayed to Joseph Herod’s plan to massacre all the local boy children in order to exterminate the future Messiah, Joseph and Mary had slipped out of town with their child, leaving the other children to his fate. “Might have been nice to warn the other members of the nursery co-op,” Fred mused.

  So, in the scene Leonardo had chosen to elaborate, Mary was either in an imagined Egypt, or on her way; the Messiah was taking entertainment where he could, and Joseph, off-camera stage left or right, was looking for more figs. The apes were not canonical. How many of them had there been? One either offered or accepted fruit. Two groomed each other. One scratched. Either two or three more climbed the rocks. Therefore five or six apes. The painting was not large enough to support more.

  Suppose, under the Madonna’s robe, on the otherwise virgin arm, a snake tattoo?

  What was that woman’s name? Candy? Angelica? Nobody is named Angelica. Paris? Maris? Ferriss? Nobody is named Ferriss either.

  The Madonna in the painting might be expected to register alarm. But she would understand that the symbolic wilderness all around her conferred symbolic safety also. The child she held, all milky behind the ears, wasn’t going to be killed for another thirty-two years yet, and the apes, with their neatly parallel highlights of golden furry curls, had no interest in pulling her hair, tearing off her clothes, biting her buttocks, or stealing her baby away to raise him up as their Messiah. The painting invited thoughts of blasphemy—almost demanded them. But meanwhile, at the time of its creation, such thoughts were not to be thought. Therefore not to be imagined.

  Still, the painter, by placing these elements together in this context, had allowed such grim imaginings any one of which, if spoken aloud in company, might lead to the stake. The collaboration betw
een this human son of God and the most manlike of the animal kingdom felt perverse—an arrangement so wrong that it might contain even sexual implications.

  The rocks in the background, superimposed upon a blue of Mediterranean tranquility, recalled Capri, that playground of Tiberius, Caligula and their pals. It was even now a watering spot for persons without visible moral ties. Who were the moral equivalents of Tiberius and Caligula in Leonardo’s day? Whoever they were, they certainly existed. They always exist.

  Should he sleep at Bernie’s? It would be soft, and dry, and not that far away.

  No, there was cardboard stacked in the alley, only slightly damp. Fred made a mattress of it and slept. If something moved on Pekham Street, he’d wake and see it.

  Chapter Eight

  Dogs woke him early, an inquisitive pair who sniffed at him half-heartedly until, concluding that he was not dead, they lost interest. It was almost six o’clock. He’d been here longer than he intended. He must have found a place the police were unused to checking for sleeping strangers who did not belong here, and probably nowhere else.

  “Nothing for you today,” Fred told the dogs. Fourteen Pekham, almost opposite his alley, was still. It wasn’t his business. He had no business. No, wrong. Fred had an urgent, almost pleasant desire for coffee.

  The drugstore at the foot of Charles Street let him buy coffee in a paper cup to drink by the river while the advancing daylight slowly replaced sleep. The river in the early morning steamed in a frankly bucolic way. It served as the common reference point for gulls, cormorants, a pair of mallard ducks, and swallows. Nothing commercial had any business on this river. But by seven the first of the institutional sculls, rowed by students, streaked slowly past, followed by the odd kayak.