Man With a Squirrel Read online

  “I leave it in your good hands,” Fred said.

  Roberto would not test it while he watched. His solvents, like his methods, were his secrets.

  * * *

  As long as he was in the Old Country, Fred picked up fresh bread and mackerel for Molly and the kids from the shops downstairs from Roberto’s. New Bedford’s North End was populated by groups who clung to their recent European identities, many of them Portuguese. The cosmopolitan working class, like the city’s old character as a fishing center and the low real-estate prices caused by decades of neglect, was among the attractions that had beckoned Roberto here from the Midwest.

  Roberto’s own Old World orientation did not come naturally to him. It was generally agreed by those who knew him that the final vowel on his first name had been added at whatever point in his life Robert Smith decided to make it impossible for anyone to think of addressing him as Bob, Bobby, Rob, or Bert. He had acquired a retroactive Italian identity at the same time, which complemented his dual careers of conservation and instrument building.

  “What I’d love to do or make or imagine,” Fred said, standing on the sidewalk with his groceries, next to his car, “is the rest of the damned picture—even if I’m never going to see it.”

  Shoppers and strollers pushed by him. A café and bar across the street suggested itself as a place to think, but it was after four and if the mackerel were to compete successfully with whatever Molly had in mind for dinner, he’d better get their bodies back to Arlington.

  Fred drove up 140, watching the road as best he could while at the same time visualizing, without arriving at a concrete image, a Copley painting that was made up of combined elements of Copleys he could think of (a standard way for the forger to work—a pastiche made by copying fragments of known pictures by the forger’s victim-model).

  The squirrel and chain he had; and the feet placed in such a way as to indicate a posture like John Irving Junior’s (but facing the opposite direction). The head, body, and arms could come from John Hancock (reversed); and the table could be borrowed from Mrs. Ezekiel Goldthwaite, complete with—why not—the plate of stuffed fruit. The painting Fred envisioned, using this method, could not help being two-thirds forgery. He could not see a hint of the truth established by the bit of the room’s interior, the floor, on which the shaft of light defied the forger’s servile invention.

  “Clay’s going to have a fit,” Fred said, avoiding Taunton by leaving 140 and taking 24 north. “My surrendering the fragment to Roberto without negotiating about it with Clayton for two weeks beforehand. But he’s not going to use his delaying tactics on this one. This is my baby.”

  * * *

  Terry and Sam, when Fred got back to Arlington, were playing catch in the street in front of Molly’s house. Fred eased his car around them and put it in the driveway, leaving room for Molly to get into the garage. Arlington’s laws forbade anyone to park all night in the street.

  It was six o’clock and still light. Molly was not home. Fred climbed out of his car and watched the children. Sam threw the ball hard, to make it sting his sister through the glove. Terry threw high to make Sam jump and barely miss.

  “How about three-corner catch,” Fred said, “until your ma gets back. Where is she, shopping?”

  “For Froot Loops if she knows what’s good for her,” Terry said.

  The kids were dressed alike by accident, in jeans and red sweatshirts and sneakers. The coincidence had produced a fight at breakfast, but neither wanted to be the one to back down and change.

  Fred put the fish in the fridge, the bread on the kitchen table, and came out again, telling Sam, “Throw to me and I’ll throw to Terry. But Sam, ease up some since I don’t have a glove, and Terry, see if you can get the ball down. It’s showing a tendency to ride high.”

  “How come you don’t have a glove, Fred?” Terry asked.

  “Too much to keep track of,” Fred said.

  “Fred travels light,” Sam said, “according to Mom.”

  Fred tossed the ball to Terry. That was a bitter edge in Sam’s voice. Was it an off note in Molly’s voice Sam had picked up? Terry threw the ball at the center of Sam’s chest, forcing him to dodge in order to catch it without being hit. Sam burned one at Fred.

  “It’s like you don’t live here,” Terry said. “You really live some other place where you keep your piano and your pet fish and everything, and here it’s a hotel where we live.”

  Fred tossed the ball high, to be fielded as a pop-up. He rubbed his stinging left hand. “Ease up, Sam,” he said.

  Terry tossed the ball to Sam’s left, making him reach and stumble. “Bring your glove,” Sam said. He burned one at Fred as Molly pulled her Colt into the driveway. Sam marched into the house while Fred and Terry unloaded groceries. Molly, in Sam’s red jacket, took one load in and disappeared upstairs to change into jeans and a red sweatshirt, it turned out.

  “The Riley uniform of the day,” Fred said, when Molly came in to start supervising the putting away.

  “What?” Molly said. She hadn’t noticed.

  Fred took off his coat and tie to take upstairs later, and set about preparing the fish. “We will have mackerel à la Fred,” Fred said.

  “What’s à la Fred?” Molly asked. “Fried or broiled?”

  “The latter,” Fred said. “But with the added secret ingredients of salt and pepper.”

  “And lemon, I hope.”

  “Each customer will be permitted to apply his own,” Fred said. “Ad libitum, ad labias, or al dente. A la table.”

  Molly said, “Must I change into something more chic?”

  Terry escaped to the living room with the Froot Loops.

  “Sam’s pissed at me,” Fred said. “Or else you are and Sam’s smarter than I am at seeing it.”

  Molly started cutting cabbage for slaw. Fred had potatoes boiling already, and the broiler heating. Something about Molly’s activity brought Louis XVI to mind. “What did Sam say?” Molly asked.

  “Blamed if I understand it. He told me to get a glove,” Fred said.

  “A glove?”

  “Baseball glove.”

  “Ah,” said Molly.

  11

  From the feel and the heft of it, the wood from which the offending frame had been constructed was a cross between Styrofoam and pine.

  The back of it bore a purple stamp, HECHO EN MEXICO / 20 × 20. Fred looked at it in hatred, assigning it primary blame for the violation performed on the painting. He was sitting with it in the subway, riding outbound from Charles Street station after an uneventful Monday. He’d put the puzzle out of his mind during the weekend. On the way in this morning he had confirmed what the Yellow Pages told him, that there was no place in Harvard Square to get a frame for anything other than a poster or photograph. Molly said he’d have better luck at Porter.

  So now, with the Procrustean object in his lap, he bounced noisily through Harvard station, swayed, and indulged the moaning complaints of the line of cars. The frame was joined in Mexico and shipped north, with a cavalier stick-something-in-this approach. And if it doesn’t fit, cut off a piece that will.

  The frame’s face was harder than plastic, and more gold and swirly than the most opulent music box ever imagined. It made Fred recall the ovoid chapel at Versailles—hadn’t Molly been talking of Versailles the other day?—which Fred always referred to in his mind as the Eye of the Needle.

  Porter gave you a choice between cardiovascular stimulation and one of the lengthier escalator rides on the East Coast. Fred chose the latter and arrived at street level to find bald, cold sunlight glaring midafternoon onto the semimall and complex intersection, presided over by Susomu Shingu’s stubbornly stable red mobile, threatening the citizens of Cambridge with politically correct public art as determined by committee.

  Fred slid the frame into the shopping bag he’d been carrying it in. Molly was right. Ahead of him was a line of shops—Allrite Liquors, Phast Photo, E-Z Tanning Salon—nestled along
a parking lot. Across the street, next to an Indian restaurant, was Kwik-Frame. Fred crossed both parking lot and street and had a look. Walking past bins of backed posters in acetate and shelves of precut kits, he headed for the remainders, against the right wall, in front of the desk separating the showroom area from the broad tables in the workspace.

  Kwik-Frame was having a sale to rid itself of its line of Mexican frames. The brothers and sisters of the one in Fred’s bag, identical in finish, in various dimensions, were specially priced (on red tags pasted across their former wishful thinking) from $6.95 up to $15.00 for the largest, sofa-sized model.

  “You’re not going to see a deal like that every day,” the woman in back of the counter said. She wore a striped apron of ticking, carried a head of short red curls, and looked at Fred belligerently from a gray face dismayed by most of her forty-some years of living in the world.

  “True,” Fred said.

  No doubt the frame he carried was from here; the stretcher was from the Bob Slate down the road a block, on the other side of the street. Having come this far, it was not clear what his next move should be. He wanted something this place might lead him to, but if he advertised his interest to the potential seller things might get complicated. The key to successful buying is to be visibly not in the market, just as the key to successful selling is to be owner of something that is not for sale. It is why the successful dealer, striving to represent both sides honorably, is properly regarded as a lying snake.

  “Can I help you?” the woman asked, tormenting a paper clip that had betrayed her in the past.

  Fred said, “A lot of framers carry these Mexican prefabs?”

  “We’re dropping the line,” the woman said. “NAFTA. It’s not worth it.”

  “I wondered, are they widespread and common?” Fred said.

  “The frames? Kwik-Frame has three hundred franchise outlets nationwide,” she said. The phone rang on her desk. She picked it up. It was pink. She said into it, “I know.” She repeated the phrase six times, with pauses in between. Then she called into the workspace behind her, “Manny!” A young man put down the glass he was cutting and picked up the shop extension.

  “People think we’re making donuts,” she told Fred. “They don’t understand the art business.”

  Fred said, “If I brought in a loose canvas, you people could frame it for me?”

  “You mean like a piece of fabric? Sure,” the woman said. “Bring it.”

  Fred was watching the young man in back talking into the phone, saying, “I know.” Something about the man was off, wrong, or familiar. He was beefy and quick, dressed in a white T-shirt with a Mickey Mouse head grinning on the front and much-worn blue chinos. Something walked along Fred’s spine. He’d seen Manny somewhere.

  “Thanks,” Fred said. He turned for the door. The colors visiting the inside of his skull were those of an unspecific danger.

  We’re only talking about a picture that’s been violated, Fred told himself in the street. Not danger.

  He started walking along Mass. Ave. toward Harvard Square, looking to bypass it and get to Molly’s library. He’d catch a ride to Arlington with her and leave his car at Alewife until tomorrow.

  No, he thought, he’d better keep access to his independent wheels. He took the stairs down into the bowels of the Porter station and rode through Somerville to Alewife and his car.

  He had a location to work out from—Porter Square—and could fairly assume, as a starting point, that the person who owned, or found, or stole, or bought, and massacred the painting whose bottom portion was laid out under Roberto’s eye had a routine that took him or her through Porter.

  Why not ask the discouraged lady in the striped apron, Did you people recently put a frame on a squirrel? Because once he asked he was committed to that approach. He could always ask later, but he couldn’t withdraw the question. His vague recollection of the young man in the Disney T-shirt raised a warning he couldn’t read but wanted to respect.

  From Alewife station he called Molly and asked her to meet him at Porter after work.

  * * *

  “Walk in the place, buy a frame for one of Terry or Sam’s school portraits, and look at the guy in the back,” Fred said. Molly had found an open meter in front of Bob Slate and crossed the street to meet him. “He wears a Mickey Mouse T-shirt.”

  Molly was in black pants and Sam’s red jacket this cold day. The scarf around her head boasted Eiffel Towers: a present from Ophelia, which one of her admirers had given her.

  Fred looked over the menu in the Indian restaurant while Molly did his business.

  She came out.

  “I know I’ve seen him,” Fred said.

  “Is it urgent?” Molly asked. “Can it wait till we get home and I confirm it?”

  “I’m behind you,” Fred said.

  * * *

  “Were at the park til super,” read Terry’s note, obviously written under duress applied by Sam. The note was stuck to the fridge with a magnetic ladybug.

  “They must be freezing,” Molly said. “You want to find something for super while I poke through the recycling?”

  “How about Spaghetti al Fred?”

  “If that means fried or broiled, maybe not.”

  “The package suggests placing it in hot water.”

  “Try that way,” Molly said, “but first remove it from the box.” She went out to the garage, calling back over her shoulder, “Give me a yell when you are about ten minutes from the moment of truth and I’ll go get the kids.”

  Fred heard Molly’s exclamation of triumph while he was opening the jar of generic red sauce. “Got it,” she called. She came in with a section of newspaper and showed him the photograph he had been looking at a couple of days earlier: Cover-Hoover surrounded by a small crowd of people, from whom she seemed somewhat distanced by a husky male.

  “He’s the one on the right.”

  Wearing a white shirt, necktie, and sport jacket instead of Mickey, the man looked different. He sported a crop of light curls—too short for an opponent from the avenging powers of darkness to get a grip on. “He’s moonlighting as Cover-Hoover’s bodyguard?” Fred asked.

  “That’s what it looked like. In her talk she claimed death threats are widespread and common against a person doing her kind of rehabilitation and to her present, former, and future clients.”

  Molly went for the children. Fred watched the red sauce throb in a saucepan. He put plates on the table, stirred the spaghetti in its boiling water, and brought out the remainder of Molly’s coleslaw from the previous evening along with the cheese that Molly and the kids called “Protestant.” “Small world,” Fred muttered. He had a man to think about, or ask about now, in connection to the crime of altering an old canvas. He had a man to ask, Who did you stretch and frame that fragment of a painting for? Where’s the rest of it?

  It was not amusing that the same road led to Cover-Hoover’s operation. That was a can of ugly worms, which he would as soon not think about.

  Molly and the children came in, the kids throwing wet sneakers and baseball gloves into the corner near the dryer.

  * * *

  “How come you’re following that guy?” Molly asked, after they had eaten.

  “It isn’t that. I’m looking for the rest of the picture.”

  “That leads to Cover-Hoover?”

  “To Kwik-Frame,” Fred said. “Where by coincidence Manny works, at a task for which he is physically overqualified. That’s where my piece was framed, I’m certain.”

  “What are you looking for, Fred?” Terry asked.

  “A man with a squirrel.”

  The kids put their dishes next to the sink and went upstairs to start appearing to do their homework. Molly would make them work at the kitchen table when she and Fred were finished.

  Molly said, “So you go and ask Manny where your squirrel comes from?”

  “I can, but the pheromones tell me, Think a minute.”

  “I don’t
like those people,” Molly said.

  “I know it.”

  Molly went to the sink and ate the remainder of Terry’s spaghetti.

  Fred hadn’t seen Clay all day, or heard from him. His only sign of life had been the index card laid square in the clear space Fred kept on his desk, saying, in Clay’s neat Linear C handprinting, “You have the Copley?”

  Around noon Fred had telephoned and talked to Roberto, who told him, “I tested it, Fred, after you left. It won’t be a problem. No shellac. That’s what I always fear.”

  “So it’ll clean all right.”

  “When I can get to it,” Roberto said. “You didn’t say there is a rush.”

  “No rush,” Fred said.

  “I have people pushing me to finish their things,” Roberto said. “They can be very pushy, people like that.”

  “I know it,” Fred said. “And half the time they don’t really need it.”

  “They think you are trying to cheat them, by taking time to do good work.”

  “I know,” Fred said.

  “It’s why I don’t like to work for dealers,” Roberto said.

  “I can understand that,” Fred said. Dangerous ground was entered whenever Roberto introduced the subject of dealers. Dealers needing to recoup their investments, the lifeblood of his trade, always pressed for speed and would sometimes suggest that conservation errors committed on the side of pretty and salable might not be taken amiss.

  “They bring you a Corot and want you to goose it brighter,” Roberto would say, “until everything is tourist colors. Easter eggs. Miami Beach. Monet in Venice. Not everybody paints that way, using those colors. I tell people this is between me and the picture. I am going to find what the artist painted. If that’s not what you want, go somewhere else.”

  Fred told him, “I thought I’d see how it tested. You let me know when you’ve had a chance to work on it. I am relieved there’s no shellac. No rush, Roberto.”