A Paradise for Fools Read online

  There had been a willing commercial audience for the fairy pictures. And in the 1800s they even passed as art. A lot of English painters, some Germans also, got into them. Well-trained, highly competent, if deeply silly painters. By the evidence that they continued making it, they managed to sell their work: fairies frisking in moonlight; Oberon, king of the fairies, basking in undergrowth so large as to make the edge of a British dell seem like a jungle imagined by Rousseau; fairies bathing in the presence of large pruriently interested fish. It was all utterly pure and leering and absurdly English.

  What Kim described, and what Fred himself had witnessed during those few seconds of exposure, sounded like Victorian fantasy as interpreted by a preadolescent child. Whatever their origin, those images had come from something. An old dark wooden painting, Kim had said. Clayton was in the market for old dark wooden paintings. On the rare occasion when such old dark wooden paintings were interesting. It was probably nothing.

  Still, why disregard a track that might lead to an interesting picture—a long-lost unimportant work by (drum roll) Richard Dadd, Joseph Noel Paton, John Anster Fitzgerald, Francis Danby, Daniel Maclise or Richard “Dickie” Doyle?

  “I’ll take a look,” Fred said.

  ***

  Central Square had done what it could to rid itself of shade. It made up for that by supplying crowd, heat, exhaust, and noise. Fred emerged from the subway into a ragged, bustling choreography involving people with somewhere to go, who could only get there by navigating through the crowds of stragglers staked out in positions on the sidewalk from which to practice the mild larceny that kept them going.

  Fred found Green Street and walked in the direction indicated by an adept he chose from among the stragglers. They all knew where the G Spot was. And all pointed in the same direction, though in some cases the pointing wobbled. Fred tracked Green Street a couple of blocks past three-deckers, parking lots, and a few commercial establishments such as bakeries and dry cleaners, until he reached the G Spot’s chipped green door, through whose glass panel a large, sullen-looking common room was visible with, at one side, a bar. Next to the outside entrance a separate door must lead to stairs that would arrive at the second and third floor apartments or offices in the three-decker. No posted names to guide visitors or delivery men. The visible mailboxes were busted out anyway. In this part of town, even four blocks from the city’s main police station, you’d do better to use a P. O. box if you actually wanted to receive your mail.

  According to what Kim had said, the tattooist, Arthur, worked on the third floor—top floor, therefore, under the flat roof. Those were his open windows, supposing one apartment on each floor. It must be hot up there.

  The smell in the G Spot was dismay diluted by insouciance and deflated suds. The booths were mostly empty, though about seven people occupied the space, two in uniform, in addition to the thickset man back of the bar whose heavy facial scarring suggested the serious burns a firefighter might have suffered before being thrust into this form of retirement. The sense of the place was definitely “townie.” At one end of the bar sat an old-style cash register. At the other, last week’s hot dogs spun sullenly under a red light in a scuffed and unsanitary looking plastic warmer. A ceiling fan circulated, giving a few flies something to dodge.

  Fred sat on a stool at the bar and told everyone, “Hot day.” The bartender found him and stood opposite, his eyebrows moving upward against the weight of the scar tissue that blighted his forehead. Some mishap had forced a dreadful amount of reconstruction.

  The yellowing sign taped to the mirror back of the bar threatened, LUNCH.

  “Whatever’s cold on tap,” Fred said, and asked for a menu.

  “Hotdog or hamburger,” he was told. “You want, we can do you a cheeseburger.”

  “Hamburger’s fine. With fries.”

  “Chips,” the barman corrected him and called toward a swinging shutter door to his left, “Burger, Maggie.” The sound from behind the doors resembled what happens when a large sleeping animal is startled in the attic. “Be a minute,” the man said, drawing a pint from a lever that claimed “Budweiser.”

  Fred gazed around the room. It had gone silent when he entered, while the occupants sized up the implications of the stranger’s arrival. Now that he’d signaled his bona fides as a customer, their attention could go back to their desultory conversations, and to the silent television that flickered recycled baseball above the bar. The place could serve as the vestibule for Limbo.

  Nothing remotely resembling a woman was visible, other than what was represented on the calendar photo for PRECISION PISTONS. The invisible Maggie was presumably human and female.

  Next to the calendar, in the space leading to the swinging shutter door back of which Fred’s lunch was beginning to spit on a grill, hung an assortment of home-made neighborhood notes with fringes of tear-off tabs. They were illegible from where Fred sat. He’d have to get back there to look closer.

  “Men’s room?” Fred asked.

  The genial host jerked his head toward the swinging shutter. “Through the kitchen.” Fred took a swig from his mug and headed through. The kitchen was a narrow passageway, made narrower by Maggie. Her large blue-and-white-checkered form tended the objects sizzling on the frying pan she balanced on the hot plate that sat on a mini fridge, next to a slate sink that had been bright and new in 1937. The place was well protected from the Board of Health. One of the advantages to having city cops among the regulars.

  “On through,” Maggie growled without looking up from the fork she was poking unhappily at his lunch: a violently thawing burger and two separated halves of a bun. The passage doubled, or tripled, as a store-room for glasses, paper goods, bottles, cases, and the odd chair. Fred found the door—WC—the little room equally available to either sex—and followed his star inside.

  The G Spot was indeed well protected from the Board of Health.

  The only available sink was in the kitchen passage. In Maggie’s absence, Fred made use of it as he passed through. He hesitated before the selection of notices and posters next to the calendar on his way back to the bar. Baby sitters, a dog walker, someone selling bookcases, two competing readers of Tarot cards, someone who would shovel your walk or driveway—there, that had to be it. A Fine Line was illustrated with the famous portrait of Che Guevara, all in black, with a black rose on one side and, on the other, a cross around which a serpent coiled. No service was offered. The tear-off stubs at the bottom had the name, Arthur, with a phone number.

  Fred took one and slid it into the breast pocket of his polo shirt. He’d masked his interest with his body, though he might not have completely hidden the action from the bartender, nor from Maggie, who had crossed the room in order to get one little plastic squeeze packet each of yellow mustard and ketchup to slap on the bar next to the plate bearing his hamburger.

  “Shit. Forgot his chips.” She muscled past him, sighing, toward her kitchen.

  Fred sat down to his meal. “The people posting are regulars?”

  The bartender shrugged. “I don’t pay much attention.”

  “Guy shoveling snow,” Fred said. “Given the kind of day we’re having, that sign’s premature.”

  The bartender shrugged. Fred drank beer, pried his bun open and squirted the contents of the two plastic envelopes onto the rigid huddle of fried meat. Maggie reappeared with a package of chips. The bartender washed glasses. One of the men in a booth behind Fred called out, “Two more, Leo?”

  “Things get crowded, I pull stuff down,” the bartender elucidated. “Otherwise, free country, I don’t care. Unless it’s a hooker. Health food nut, Young Republican, something like that. Off color. Give the place a bad name. What do you want to post? Music concert, animal rights, paint my house, yoga lessons, you’re probly wasting your time.”

  “I’m making conversation,” Fred said. He got
around his lunch while Leo took care of his customers.

  Maggie emerged from the kitchen and stood back of the bar. Leo went to sit at one of the tables with a drinker resplendent in a blue uniform with all the trimmings. City of Cambridge cop. Their murmur of talk was so crammed with statistics that it must concern either life insurance or baseball. Fred took a final bite and told Maggie, “Feels like home.”

  Her look, not amazed, not alarmed, was mostly not friendly. Fred had spoken and bar ethics demanded a reply. “You’re not from here.”

  Fred lifted his shoulders in agreement. “Boston, at the moment. I’ve been overseas.”

  “There’s a lot of that.” Maggie shook her head. “Not on a cruise, to look at you.”

  Fred’s silence affirmed her guess.

  Maggie said, “These students.”

  She let that hang. Fred left it hanging as well until he shook his head and agreed, “You got that right.”

  “Twenty-eight and six,” someone said in a loud, disbelieving voice across the room. The exclamation was followed by a complex murmur of mixed male voices.

  “I started out in the Middle West,” Fred said. This conversation was not going to lead to Arthur any time soon.

  “Somebody has to,” Maggie said. “Besides Indians.”

  “You’re native?” Fred asked.

  “Indian? Hell no, I’m born Cambridge.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Fred said. “Native to Cambridge.”

  “Then fucking say so, will you? Next thing he’ll want to know am I a gypsy.” Maggie, offended, moved to the end of the counter where the cash register waited and demanded, “Something else?”

  “I’ll finish the beer,” Fred said, pulling his wallet out. “As long as you’re at the box, save you the trouble later…”

  Chapter Eight

  Not only were the two mailboxes popped open, next to the street entrance to the second- and third-floor apartments, the door itself was not locked. Recent green paint on both door and jamb covered, but did not obscure, the gouges made by an impatient visitor’s crowbar at some past time. The two ancient ceramic, breast-shaped doorbells with their little nipples—both unmarked anyway—would be as dysfunctional as the mailboxes. Fred stepped into the entranceway.

  That smell of mildew, dust, under-linoleum, defeat, stale beer, and urine—that could be marketed in a spray can, like new-car-smell, to be spritzed into old apartment buildings in order to give the edifices the sense of every possible kind of decay. The smell serves as a boundary marker separating youth from age. For youth, the smell signals horizons opening as supervision is relaxed. For those who have crossed the boundary into age, the smell means, “There’s no way out of here.”

  Fred could see marketing a whole line of such scents, perhaps under the brand name “Rédolescence,” pronounced à la française, as Inspector Clouseau would do it.

  The stair’s flesh-colored linoleum was lifting despite sprung and dangerously flapping aluminum corner strips that had been nailed over the treads’ front edges. The stairwell’s walls had once been as green as the Gobi desert before the ice age had sucked it dry. Fred, climbing, disregarded the despondent notices taped along the walls by landlords, fellow tenants, and fast-food delivery services.

  The door on the second floor landing had also been jimmied in the past. Now it boasted an armored skin of plywood that had been in place long enough to darken with age. Written neatly onto the plywood in black magic marker was the legend, “Hammond. Knock.” Outside the door, on the narrow landing leading to the next flight up, lay phone books still in their plastic, mass-mailing advertisements for everything that exists that’s cheap and colorful, and more ads for food delivery, drug counseling, and marginally literary periodicals.

  A window on the landing allowed a dingy view of Green Street below.

  Fred climbed to the third floor. The smell grew although it seemed, by its nature, the kind of smell that should sink until it found its proper basement home. It was hotter here, under the flat roof.

  Arthur was making good use of his landing. Three dinged metal folding chairs stood against the wall in the passage overlooking the stairwell, where an untrustworthy-looking railing offered a place for the person using a chair to rest his feet. Arthur’s landing also had a window overlooking Green Street. The walls were thickly decorated with pages torn from tattoo magazines; advertisements for concerts; designs, both hand-drawn and Xerox copies, for decorations to be applied with ink under the top layers of the skin. Most were depressingly familiar: the skulls, the knives, the handguns, the busty insouciant women, snakes, raptors, feline beasts of prey, flowers, vines, Popeye and Porky Pig, portraits—was that Doris Day? Why?—crosses, devils, impolite mottos such as bite me in a Gothic script, angels, fairies, feathers, sharks, suns; Mother in a pierced heart. No sign of the goblin Kim had described—no, “gremlin” was her word—nor of anything resembling it. Everything visible was trite enough to make you gag. A fat glass ashtray on the floor next to the chairs, stuffed full, added its own encouragement to the gag reflex.

  Brown panel door. The panels could be easily kicked in, but they hadn’t been. The neatly hand-lettered notice affixed to the door confirmed, A Fine Line. Fred knocked and waited. Nothing. The life style that applied back of this door implied a day that started late. Still, it was after noon. He knocked again. No response.

  Well, there were chairs, and a few magazines kicked into a corner—tattoo magazines, it turned out—scuffed, dog-eared, and decaying like the rest of the decor. Fred, sitting, flipped and idled through one. The concentration of all this material between covers made it seem a world. This was a culture he hadn’t previously given more than a passing thought—a culture that like all others brought with it many implied appendages: the bikes, the inks, the machines to power the needle’s application, the lingo, the sense of vulnerable and defiant loner camaraderie. The many possible conventions, contests, rivalries and jealousies, knockoffs, and hero worships. The culture seemed, in an odd way, to be empowered by a nostalgia for the 1940s, when a nation at war depended on the antisocial talents of its misfits at the same time as it forced its best and brightest, its most admired, into lives that, in peacetime, must be called hideously unethical.

  “We bear the mark of Cain as a badge of honor,” Fred mused, leafing through a particularly gaudy display in which chains and Harleys squared off against the far more fragile arabesques of color sported by their scantily-clad female riders. His eyes, wandering to the ceiling, took note of the rectangular opening that held the hinged trap that would lower a narrow fold-up staircase with access to the roof. “This kind of weather, that’s where I’d sleep for sure,” Fred mused. The eye bolt that was intended to be pulled, by means of the hooked dowel that must be around somewhere, had been fixed by a flimsy padlock to a ring in the wooden molding that housed the trap. Security. Barely. To discourage, for five minutes, unauthorized entry from a roof that could be jumped to from either of the adjoining buildings. Above the trapdoor there’d be a hatch, hinged, to keep out rain and snow so long as the tenants remembered to keep it closed.

  These people, the ones living within the magazine, had their own conventions; their own class systems, habits and expectations; their own myths and heroes; their own narrow aesthetic codes. You can’t be human without despising something. They had their own languages, both in words and symbols. Here in the affluent and culturally scattered Western world, the ethos of the tattoo had spread far more widely than its roots in the military and in prisons. Its attraction was by no means limited to the rogue male, or to the impertinently young.

  Heavy tread on the stairs. Brisk and uneven. Cigar smoke rising. Black leather cap. Brown leather flight jacket on this steaming day, then the rest of the climbing man, puffing around the wet cigar stump, his red face seamed. “Got held up,” the man said, stretching a square hand out, its fingers stain
ed with tar. Late fifties? The walrus mustache was as stained as the fingers. He hadn’t shaved for a while.

  “Fred,” Fred told him, rising to take the hand.

  “Still Sammy Flash. See anything you like?” the man challenged. “I got held up.” Sammy Flash lowered a bulging leather shoulder bag to the floor in order to manage a ring of keys that was clipped to his belt. “They call me Flash.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Arthur around?” Fred asked.

  Flash selected a key, inserted it in the apartment door, turned it. “Search me. Take a seat.” He pulled a heavy green extension cord out of the shoulder bag and began to uncoil it, pushing the door open far enough to enter. The odor from inside the apartment was different, but no improvement over what had congregated on the landing. It was dark inside. Fred got barely a glimpse of sparse furniture and almost empty walls. The impression was of an ascetic darkness. The Rédolescence spray can could be labeled Unwashed Carthusian.

  “I’ll get set up,” Flash said. “Take me a minute.” The cigar stump being clenched between his teeth, his words were indistinct, but predictable enough to be easily understood. He stepped into the apartment with one end of his cord and emerged again quickly. “Plug out here’s busted,” he explained, closing the apartment door again with difficulty, on account of the cord. Out of the bag he pulled a contraption resembling a corkscrew, nutcracker, and Notary Public seal-stamp combination designed by Hammacher Schlemmer for the executive who has everything. A roll of paper towels followed, as well as a cigar box containing plastic vials of ink.

  “Ink supply’s low,” Flash said. “Depending what we need, I’ll borrow from Arthur.” He took a deep drag from the stump of the cigar before grinding it out in the ash tray. He walked back and forth in front of the wall display. “Till I get my own place or move on. Sit, take the load off. Have something in mind? What do you like? Fred, you said? Didn’t you say ‘Mike’ before?”