Madonna of the Apes Page 5

  “Good,” Fred said.

  “The other thing,” Lester said, “I am not missing a wheel. Or a two-wheeler or a three-wheeler or four wheels and I am not the fifth wheel nobody knows what it is except it’s a good thing. It helps steer. On a carriage. It’s like a gear. And I’m not three sheets short of a picnic.”

  “You with the IRS?” Fred asked. “You’re working pretty hard.”

  “Peanuts,” Lester said. He turned and walked out into a day that was beginning with rain. The trees outside the house had put on enough leaves to be dripping generously, letting the rain wash itself off onto the sidewalks. Lester was dressed for it, wearing a waterproof jacket from whose pocket he pulled a cap as he crossed the porch. If he was playing a part, he wasn’t going to push it far enough to get too uncomfortable.

  They’d had a spy a year ago, and this might be another one. Some government agency or another might have developed an interest in the operation. It wasn’t a good part of town where you really had neighbors. Still, a neighbor might have developed curiosity about a house where single men came and went at all hours, some of whom looked like people you’d rather lived somewhere else.

  Lester was a plant or a spy. Fred would bet money on it. But there was nothing to find. No secrets. Nothing interesting. Nothing to reward curiosity. Nothing to look forward to.

  Nolan, ten minutes late, parked his big frame back of the desk, taking over for the day shift.

  “I may sleep in town the next day or two,” Fred told him.

  Fred’s room was on the second floor, over the front door, a small room called a “borning room” in these parts, large enough for the single mattress and the chair. His clothes he kept in three cardboard boxes, all the same size, so they could be stacked. One held clean clothes, one dirty, and the third clothes that did not qualify for either of those two categories. Hooks on the back of the door did for the parka, the windbreaker, and the blazer that came in handy for visits to the bank concerning mortgage questions. A small steel box downstairs held anything else he cared about keeping.

  Fred showered, considered his mattress, and rejected it. It wasn’t his business; still, his mind wouldn’t rest. “It’s tomorrow Reed said he’d go back,” Fred said. “Three P.M. It was a date but Reed didn’t mean to keep it. Did Tilley?”

  It wasn’t his business.

  He had laundry to do, and he might as well do it. He’d noticed a Laundromat on Charles Street, not far from Bernie’s, in the neighborhood where he’d spent the last couple of days. That would give him something to do, as well as a change of clothes if he decided to stay in the area, keep his eyes open.

  The walk to Charles Street took forty minutes and was a good way to stretch the kinks out of his legs. Eight hours behind the desk was a punishing stretch. There’d been no mail but crap. The phone hadn’t rung. He was ready for something else.

  There was no activity at the place on Pekham Street. Someone had taken his cardboard from the alley. He walked on uphill to the corner of Bolt Street and turned right, covering the four blocks to the garage over which Bernie had established his small but ungainly apartment. The garage was the reason Bernie had chosen the space, a garage being at a premium in this part of town. Bernie’s cars were important to him, and this garage would hold four of them, although only one was here now, and that under tarpaulins. The apartment proper, on the second floor, had to be entered through the garage, via a circular staircase in back, next to the crusty workbench that held tools from another era, designed for purposes that might or might not be related to the carriage trade.

  The living space was the size of the garage below, barely large enough for the ugly couch, the single bed, the table, and a minimal kitchen. The only extravagance Bernie showed on this floor was in the elaborate sound equipment, which was too complex for Fred to worry about using, even if he had a yen to do so. Unless he had hidden them somewhere in the walls or under the floor—and he likely had—there were no signs of Bernie’s occupation. He was an international courier whose interests, Fred believed, were legal, although he did not know what they were.

  Fred dropped his kit and the bag of laundry, then found a place on Charles that would sell him a reasonably straightforward hamburger and fries, and bought an apple next door to eat on his way to Mountjoy. He paused at the doorway next to the antique store’s window. Miranda? Sheila? But there were no names posted next to the bells.

  It looked as if Clayton Reed must occupy his entire building. When you stood on the sidewalk the walkway, between pads of ivy, gave you a choice between mounting stairs to ring the bell at a formidable black front door that also offered a knocker, or to follow the path by which they’d carried the chest to the downstairs office space. “Tradesman’s entrance,” said Fred. He climbed the stairs to the entrance designed for the Prince of Wales, and rang.

  A mockingbird sang somewhere, probably in the magnolias across the street. A shadow flickered back of the peephole set under the knocker. Fred rang again and the shadow remained, watchful. “Let’s not play games,” Fred said. Then, louder, “Clayton, it’s Fred.” He used the knocker. The door opened on a chain, allowing a view of Clay’s wild tangle of white hair, and a face pinched with alarm.

  “You could be anyone.”

  “That’s debatable. But it is an interesting concept.”

  “Are you alone?” Clayton’s voice was tight with pressure.

  “Rhetorical question,” Fred said. “You see I’m alone. I prefer a question that actually wants information. You don’t have to open the door. Then again, here I am.”

  The man was struggling. His breeding wouldn’t let him ask baldly, What do you want?

  “The answer to your unspoken question is, That chest I have forgotten is bothering me. I’ve been thinking about it. I’d like to see it again.”

  Clay closed the door far enough to let him take it off the chain and get it open.

  “I’m paralyzed,” he said. “I have to trust someone.”

  “I don’t,” Fred said, strolling in. “But I won’t argue with you.”

  “The chest is where we left it. I can’t move it,” Clay said. He walked down a hallway whose floor was softened with prayer rugs. Its walls were hung with Japanese paintings on unfurled scrolls: here an iris by moonlight; next to that an armored warrior unsheathing his saber; next to that a bold and extraordinarily graceful exercise in calligraphy alone. The place seemed neither a museum nor a home, and you wouldn’t call it a temple either. Open doorways led into what seemed a library on one side, and on the other a living room—what would he call it, a parlor?—dominated by a huge Hopper painting of roofs and balconies and an ominous summer sky.

  Clay led the way down the spiral staircase Fred had seen before, from the other end.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I can’t have anyone in, and I don’t dare touch it,” Clayton said. “Even my conservator. A thing like that in the house, it allows me no peace.”

  The chest was still sitting on the floor where Fred had last seen it, its top opened against the worktable.

  The ape still fondled the fig. The Virgin still struggled with her offspring, with a distracted smile that could be seen as showing fey benevolence. The child still reached. His little pecker was in shadow. The painter had fudged the issue of circumcision, like all the other painters of the Renaissance who thus strove to correct, retroactively, the outward and visible sign of the embarrassing fact that the Messiah, their Messiah, everyone’s Messiah after all, was a Jew.

  “What you want to do is get that top off,” Fred concluded. “But at the same time you trust no one to do the work. Because you trust no one to see what you have. So you are at a really sublime disadvantage, like the swimmer with the Olympic gold anchor around his neck.”

  “I am not following,” Clay claimed. Fred was looking at the hardware. The hinges were old and rusty and attached with what appeared to be nails.

  “What you have to do is disregard issues of value and importanc
e,” Fred said.

  “Don’t touch it,” Clay ordered, as Fred lowered the top to look at its other side, where the painter, or a painter, or his workshop, had painted the wood, the wreath of laurel resting on a surface that resembled marble. “Serpentine,” Clay observed.

  “Like the back of Leonardo’s Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci,” Fred agreed. “Except there it’s porphyry.”

  “How would you know a thing like that?” Clay exclaimed. “Of course you are right. Porphyry with a sprig of juniper, because of her name, juniper, jinepro, which is Ginevra. It’s part of what alerted me, at that man’s place, when I saw the faux marbre; and that caused me to lift the lid. My heart stopped, I can tell you. I thought for sure I had given the game away. I believe that I knew it for Leonardo’s creation even before I opened the chest. The man, Tilley, watched my every expression. But I raised no suspicion. Never have I dissembled so well. To the subject you raised: the faux stone back of the Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci is hardly common knowledge.”

  “It’s not a secret either,” Fred said, studying the hardware. “Yes, I was afraid of that. It’s nails. Look how they’ve come through the wood, been bent over and pounded down, and the holes filled with putty and painted in to match. Not a bad job. But it’s going to be a bitch getting the hinges off. Meanwhile, you say you’re paralyzed. So, what you need is a bull in your china shop. Where do you keep your tools?”

  “Tools?” Clay asked vaguely. “You don’t presume we will further violate…Stop! I insist!”

  “Never mind,” Fred said, taking out his penknife. Clay had turned green. “I won’t hurt anything. Just take these pins out. The metal plates stay where they are. I can separate them without touching either the sides or the top. Why get a crick in our necks looking at the damned thing sideways?” He fiddled with the hardware while Clayton fluttered nearby, as nervous as any human mother watching her first child trying to learn to fly.

  Clay said, “Vandals sawed the painting down to fit the chest. You can see on two sides. Criminals. Granted, until not long ago there was no work of art that was not discounted as mere wallpaper, to be trimmed as the occasion warranted. But Leonardo? I’ve been studying the panel. It’s walnut, I believe.”

  “Like the Ginevra.”

  “There’s a piece missing from the bottom, do you see? Also from the left side. For God’s sake, now, be careful.” Fred had removed the first pin from the knuckle where it served as pivot. It was a matter of bending the pin, which was shaped like a nail, so that its bent end straightened and it could be slipped free.

  “Hold the panel steady while I work on the other hinge,” Fred ordered.

  “I continue to stand by my original identification of this work as being from Leonardo’s hand. You’ll accuse me of presumption,” Clay fretted. He struggled to keep the panel in place. Nature, it seemed, had intended him to arrive in this world already clothed in the blue suit he was wearing. Neither it nor he had expected him to be called on to perform physical labor. “Considering that the Ginevra, now accepted by all scholars as an autograph work by da Vinci, was earlier dismissed as the work of Ghirlandaio, or Lorenzo di Credi, or Verrocchio, or even—and here words fail me—of Lucas Cranach! Leonardo had been Verrocchio’s pupil, granted, in Florence, before he was indicted. And his earliest works are primitive, as they should be coming under Verrocchio’s guidance. But the Ginevra is a mature work, nothing like…”

  “Got it,” Fred said. He let the freed pin fall to the floor and, taking the full weight of the panel from Clayton, gently gave it the forty-five degree turn it needed.

  “We should be wearing gloves,” Clay pleaded. “Both sides are precious now, remember. Be careful. Both sides are precious.”

  Fred stood, holding the panel, freed now, by its edges. “Where do you want it, Mac?”

  “You are going too fast,” Clay said. “From the outset. I am not accustomed to such haste. I…”

  “You like anticipation,” Fred interrupted. “Rather than get it done. You like anticipation. Therefore you prolong it.”

  “Perhaps. Without anticipation life is flat, pedestrian and sad. Language itself, if lacking the spice offered by anticipation, is monotone. Anticipation is a quality of hope, without which…”

  “Let’s get it done. Upstairs or down?”

  “It’s not my habit to bring a work into my living quarters until it has been cleaned and framed, “ Clay said. “But in this case…”

  “Upstairs, then,” Fred concluded. “Let’s get it where we can look at it.” He led the way to the staircase they’d come down, the panel almost warm between his hands.

  “Be careful. Be careful on the stairs. We’ll wrap it first.”

  Clay disappeared upstairs and came back carrying a Kashmir shawl, which the two men wrapped around the panel before Fred carried it up the spiral staircase and into Clayton’s parlor. The room was a maze of comfort and beauty and almost immediately as they entered it Clayton Reed made sense. It was a mixture of Oriental, Victorian, antique European, and solid American objects and influences. “Put it on the love seat,” Clay said, leading Fred to a rosewood frame covered in pink plush. “It will be safe here. I’ll take the shawl.”

  While Fred propped the painting against the love seat’s upholstered back, Clay crossed to a baby grand piano and smoothed the shawl over it before he took from its bench a photograph framed in silver, and placed it on the shawl. It showed a young woman, tender and beautiful, standing in an evening gown before a hazy background.

  “My wife,” Clay said. “Prudence Stillton. She was called Lucy. This was her family’s house.” He paused and stroked the shawl. “She died of an awful illness. Very suddenly. And very young. We’d been married…” He did not finish.

  The Hopper over the mantelpiece, with its roofs and impending storm, might once have dominated this room, but it was challenged now.

  “I have made a decision,” Clay announced. “The new painting shall be entitled Madonna of the Apes.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Fred found a chair whose solid design seemed likely to accommodate his bulk, and moved it to where he could sit in front of the Madonna. “She’s better right side up,” he said. He stared at the painting for five minutes while Clayton hovered in silence. “It’s a grand painting,” Fred said at last. “I don’t care who it’s by.”

  Clayton said, “There’ll be books written about it. Academic conferences. Ph.D. theses. Letters back and forth in academic journals. All that palaver. But not in my lifetime.” He smiled with a seraphic smugness and clasped his hands at his waist. “Because I shall show it to no one.”

  Fred said, “You might have found the one person in the world who truly doesn’t care. But what you say is true, I’m sure. There will be future debate. People like to take sides to prove their friends are dolts. Rembrandt has a committee, I’ve heard, to decide that everyone’s Rembrandt is a dud. Does Leonardo have a committee?”

  “I don’t know. Some scholars’ opinions are presently in vogue. I haven’t looked into it, and I won’t look into it, because it is of indifference to me what such a committee, if any, might say.” One side of the room was lined with the little gilt chairs they used to bring out during dances to hold the wallflowers in Louisa May Alcott’s day. Clay brought one over and set it next to Fred’s chair. “Today’s moral equivalent to Berenson,” he sneered. “I don’t care who they are because they will not see this painting.”

  “Given the way da Vinci worked,” Fred said, “if the work is his you might find his fingerprints in the paint. Or not. He used his fingers sometimes to maneuver his paint.”

  “Indeed,” Clay said. “How do you know so much about it?” he did not say—but it was in the suspicion in his voice.

  The Madonna looked imperturbably at a point that lay between the two men. The child looked at the ape, and struggled to reach it. The ape looked—it was hard to decide. At the fig, at the child; perhaps the ape even had a weather eye cocked toward th
e mother who was after all, by comparison, a mammal of considerable size and potential ferocity.

  “Let them make, or break, or lose their reputations on someone else’s picture,” Clayton continued. “They are not getting near mine. May I offer you refreshment?”

  Fred shook his head. “I have to go. Being in the neighborhood, I thought I’d take another look.”

  “Talking of fingerprints,” Clay continued, “how do you know about Leonardo’s fingerprints? You’re right, but how do you know? But in any case, that will never be an issue, not while I live. No, to register prints, one would be obliged to subject the object to the X-ray procedure, which I will not do. It alters cells.”

  “Thanks for letting me visit the lady. I’m glad to see her the right way around.” Fred stood and started for the door. “You have a program in mind for tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?” Clayton asked blankly.

  “Yes. It’s not my business, but I am worried about tomorrow. The fact you are scheduled to call on Tilley again. Three o’clock, you said. According to him, he might have something really good to offer tomorrow.”

  “The man is as ignorant as he may be dangerous. Naturally I won’t see him tomorrow,” Clay said.

  “Suit yourself. It’s not my business. Maybe you really don’t care. But the question is—you have possession all right. Not to impugn your motives—you asked for a price, the guy gave you a price, you tussled, you agreed on a price, you paid him. So far so good. But was the thing his to sell? We now see the painting could have phenomenal importance. If it is ever going to take its place in the big parade, even if that’s only after your death, somebody has to explain where it came from, and how it got to you. Also where it was for the last five hundred years, if they can. Isn’t that how it works?”

  “I know what provenance is,” Clayton spluttered.

  “Of course you do. And if this honey of a painting is worth the gross domestic product of Rumania, as you say…”