A Paradise for Fools Read online

  The egg, though. It was the egg Fred wanted to follow. Here were a number of Bosch’s drawings from Oxford’s Ashmolean, representing monsters made up of oversized human heads with feathers and the legs of chickens. Here, in the painting Concert in an Egg, the painting itself lost but two fair copies extant, a surface four feet square is filled by the empty shell of a gigantic egg in which fools, both clergy and laity, join their inane caterwauling to the music of an ass and a monkey while a chorus of birds looks on silently. And here again, and maybe finally—exhibit A, was a grimly lovely drawing of that same “Tree Man” in the collection of the Albertina, Vienna. “Vienna Austria, Arthur, you jerk,” Fred muttered. “You can’t get there from Boston on a bus.”

  In this drawing the legs’ thorns were comparatively reassuring and innocuous-seeming branches, although they still pierced the empty shell that, in this version, was more allied to the kind of tree hollow in which one of Bosch’s signature owls might raise a brood. Indeed, an owl perched on one of the branches. The man’s huge head continued to stare fixedly at you.

  Behind this apparition stretched a placid, even charming vista of harbor, villages, steeples and an uneventful cloudy sky. In the foreground a deer you’d want to pet; a placid heron balanced on one leg watching for fish to appear in the broad river in which the monstrous tree man contraption floated in its two rickety rowboats. Anyone could see it as a gremlin.

  Someone at some time—the drawing, like the painting, had been around five hundred years—trying to be helpful—had written in the lower left corner, “Breughel.” But the drawing was by Bosch.

  Most of what Bosch ever made was lost. Given the general run of what he’d imagined, an egg with two heads and the legs of a chicken would be perfectly in keeping and character. Not that there weren’t other painters in his vicinity, followers perhaps, who might run to the same imagery. That northern European version of fable-like surrealism was broadly based and popular. The painting Kim had hinted at, if Fred’s guess as to its age and origin were anywhere near the mark, still might be by any one of a couple dozen worthy painters.

  “But I haven’t seen the damned thing,” Fred said.

  Fred’s quick search through the auction catalogues turned up a recent Sotheby’s London sale of Old Master Paintings that offered a “Workshop of Hieronymus Bosch” painting, oil on wood, not large, in poor condition—a so-called Paradise of Fools—that bore some resemblance to the Louvre’s Ship of Fools, and was estimated at $150,000 to $200,000. Clayton, musing through the catalog’s pages, had marked it with a star, adding, in his insufferably neat hand, which resembled Greek letters more than it did English, “Lacking in the fantastic. Condition a problem.”

  But he’d considered it despite the fact that, reading between the lines—and everybody knew this—Sotheby’s disingenuous “Workshop” attribution meant they couldn’t guarantee or even ascribe the painting’s authorship to anybody. Despite that, in addition to the dicey condition of the picture, the estimate was still good money. Part of the reason for that was the remote critical association that could be drawn to an important painter, Bosch, whose authentic work was now, essentially, never available for purchase.

  “Find the painting,” Fred said. He’d let his coffee get so cold he went upstairs to Clayton’s kitchen to add ice.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Dynamite is an effective way to bring fish to the surface, but if you are after a particular fish, it is very likely to appear in fragments. Fred could get the same effect by marching a second time into Arthur’s apartment, now that the existence of the painting had been denied, and suggesting that it was worth money. Arthur was already hopelessly out of his depth. Genius though he might be, he was uncontaminated by education or broad experience. The austerity of his life, and the illegality of the means by which he made his living, made it impossible to guess how he would react to such a stimulus. Other than the myth of money, Fred had no purchase or fulcrum.

  If the painting was in the apartment it was not displayed—that much Fred knew. Potential hiding places were few. It was possible for Fred to bide his time and enter surreptitiously when Arthur was out, but there was no satisfactory rationale for breaking in. Curiosity alone wasn’t enough. But the curiosity itched. Also Arthur was afraid. That fact might have nothing to do with his denial, but it was curious also. And it added to the itch.

  Fred timed his arrival at the library for nine o’clock. There were other libraries, but only the Broadway branch of the Cambridge Public Library had a reference librarian who intrigued him. Today’s mission was not going to look like much after his last one.

  Molly looked up and smiled. She was occupied with a boy who wanted information about giant squid. Eleven or ten years old, he was almost trembling with fear and hope. “But they’re true,” he was insisting. “Aren’t they? They can be true and still people are writing lies about them. Like Atlantis.”

  “I’ll show you books where you can start,” Molly said. “Those books will tell you about other books, and you go on to other books from there. If we don’t have something here, we’ll order it from another library. Be with you in a minute,” she told Fred, smiling again. She led the boy into another part of the library.

  This early in the day the library hadn’t warmed up. A few older clients sat at the long tables, reading newspapers. The library’s own staff was getting started, moving things around, stacking books, sorting periodicals, tidying in a variety of displacement activities. Molly reappeared. “The day is coming,” she said, “and soon, when I can send that kid to a computer in the corner and tell him, ‘Go fetch.’ Heck, the day’s likely coming soon enough when the military-industrial complex sees to it that the kid has a computer of his own. Never has to step out of his bedroom. Has nobody to steer him around among the information, helping him distinguish between the sheep and the goats. I didn’t have time to look at your question again.”

  She was wearing green again today: a summer shift, almost shapeless, over a long sleeved white blouse. Her own shape underneath was…

  Fred said, “I’m driving to Nashua, New Hampshire, and I don’t know a thing about the place.”

  “Guide book? Tour book? Camping?”

  Fred said, “Figure me for a blank slate. I want to pass for not a complete hopeless stranger, without spending hours boning up.”

  “Be right back. Don’t follow me. It slows me down.”

  Her own shape underneath was—graceful, wholesome, un-emphatic, businesslike, symmetrical, brisk, and decidedly, frankly, female. There. He’d figured that out. And no, no wedding ring.

  Molly reappeared with a couple of slim camping and hiking guides and a rueful expression. “Nashua, New Hampshire, is a well kept secret. Looks like the secret, though, is as exciting as my breakfast. Only interesting as long as it’s a secret.”

  “The romance of secret pleasures,” Fred said.

  “Exactly. Until the secret pleasures turn out to be Cheerios with Nu-Form milk.”

  “My secret was coffee,” Fred said.

  “I know.” Molly paused, possibly debating whether to color, or to smile, at this intimacy. She did neither. “You want business-type info, like real estate, crime, statistics. I pulled this off the Internet. Population close on sixteen thousand, average house value a hundred thousand, population black two hundred, Hispanic five hundred, Asian seven hundred, five Hawai’ians; average income per household fifty thousand, average household 2.36. I haven’t had mine yet. I am dying for a cup of coffee.”

  Fred said, “My theory is, there’s plenty of protein in coffee, so long as you drink enough of it. I’d offer to bring you some, but they’d probably…”

  “Not probably. They’d certainly,” Molly said. “We have a fat book, I can see it, New Hampshire, An Explorer’s Guide, but someone’s filched it or taken it out or shelved it wrong. Given a book’s an object, it can wander
anywhere.”

  “You have a newspaper from Nashua?” Fred asked.

  “Nashua Telegraph. No,” Molly said. “Union Leader’s not based there. We used to subscribe, but these days…”

  “Or a map of downtown,” Fred said. “What time do you take your break? I saw there’s a Starbucks…”

  Molly shook her head. “Gilly called in sick so there’s only one person doing reference today. If I can find five minutes, I don’t know when it will be. Town of sixteen thousand, you are not going to need a map to find downtown.”

  “I know it,” Fred said.

  Molly had printed a page with the statistics she had quoted, apparently from memory. She held it out. “If it’s any use to you.”

  Fred accepted it. “Average household 2.36. I’ll remember that. I’ll just drive north until I see five Hawai’ians. Then I know I’ve reached my destination. That’s two Hawai’ian households and some change.”

  “The point twenty-eight remainder is their Hawai’ian dog,” Molly said. “Do the Hawaiians eat their dogs? That would wreck the statistic. Have a good trip, Fred. I’ll go help that kid with his squids.”

  ***

  Nashua turned out to be another disappointed New England mill town: its river no longer harnessed to power idle and vanished looms; grand industrial architecture gone to rack and ruin; seedy if hopeful attempts to make something of the wreck that might attract tourists until such time as a building and design renaissance transformed the little city into a worthy echo of its former modesty. The god of naming streets had thrown the same names onto the land here as in every other town in New England including Grover’s Corners: Maple, Main, School, Elm. But the ghost of Thornton Wilder shuddered at what had happened afterwards. An hour north of Boston, Fred had arrived in, if not the third, at least the second world. Once you got through the strip malls Nashua was not a dead end, but not much better than a crossroads.

  Fred found a place near City Hall whose honest hamburger was not contaminated by a wine list and frills. Conversation at the counter and in the booths behind him was vacant and unfocussed. His fellow diners were familiar to each other but not friends. Nashua was too big to be a small town, too small for camaraderie between strangers. You couldn’t help but feel, with any teenager worthy of that designation, “Help! Get me out of here!” The phone book had given an address for Kenzo’s in one of the malls outside the city’s swinging center, stuck between a pizza parlor and a gift store specializing in fake rusticity. The cardboard sign in the door had said Come Back at One P. M., maybe 2.

  That left time to dawdle over lunch.

  The waitress was the right age. Fred took a lucky stab, “Nashua Central?”

  She blushed. “People remember,” she said. “Me with the pompons, right?”

  “How could anyone forget?” Fred dropped a few names across the counter as the woman worked the service up and down, while dickering with the pass-through into the kitchen.

  ***

  Kenzo’s, in fact, opened at 1:27, when an aging young woman, whose tank top allowed a generous display of several people’s work, turned up with keys. The lower body was concealed in jeans. Fred watched the place from his car while the shades went up, lights went on, the hanging cardboard sign was reversed to read yes, we are. Fred gave it a few more minutes. When he walked in the woman, a telephone pressed to one side of a pile of hair bleached to a uniform blond, held up a hand in either welcome or dismissal. She continued talking while he took one of the waiting area’s unmatched chairs, purchased from the going-out-of-business sales of foreclosed motels, and looked around.

  “West Palm,” she was saying. “Skinny Louie’s. Before that Tampa, first Carlotta’s Steam Mirage, then Road Runners, but Tampa was too…West Palm’s livelier and I was with someone there turned out…So then, but now I’m here.”

  Pause.

  The storefront, maybe ten years old, was broken in the middle by the reception desk where the woman sat surrounded by brochures and magazines and ring binders of samples—whatever it might be. Windows overlooked the parking lot, but Fred faced inward. Make a few quick shifts of decor, the place would function as well for dog grooming, bakery outlet, real estate office. A license to practice prominently posted on the wall displayed the power of the Licensing and Regulative Services of New Hampshire’s Department of Health and Human Services, next to poster-sized photos of things people had paid to have done to themselves.

  “If you want barbecue,” the woman told the phone.

  Pause.

  There were enough chairs for five clients to wait in, and a table with more of the kind of materials Sammy Flash piled in his waiting area. The place could also be a dating service or no-nonsense dental office, with the name No Holds Barred. The visible clues spoke of the low-grade persistent viability of a whole industry. At the desk the woman held up her hand in a gesture that meant “You didn’t make an appointment,” or “What can I do? She’s my mother.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “No. Yes. No,” the woman said.

  Pause.

  The groaning sound was an air conditioner in back, struggling to catch up to radiant heat the parking lot had leached into the unventilated space during the night. The place was designed to be intolerable without air conditioning. The woman’s arms and shoulders, her chest above the halter top, and her stomach and back below, were fully decorated with competing arabesques of color that opened here and there like mandorlas—those haloes that appear in paintings of medieval sky, like white holes, to reveal significant symbols. The woman’s symbols were precisely executed but tended toward the trite: the skull, the heart, a lion’s head, guitar in flames, chrysanthemum, a shark, snake, puppy, the Eiffel tower—that was surprising—spiders, and words Fred didn’t read.

  “He’ll show up. Not until I have my license. Why I want the hundred fifty…That’s what I told you. That’s what I said. The risk, it’s not fucking worth it, they’re getting…and besides…”

  Pause.

  Fred said, from his chair, “You expect Kenzo?”

  The gesture of her hand meant, “Who knows?” or else, “Kenzo owes me seven dollars.” But it was accompanied by a nod.

  “They catch you without a license, you know what they can fine you? Do to you? And in case something goes wrong?…That’s what I said. But, like I said, if you want barbecue, forget the east coast.”

  Pause.

  “Maybe South Carolina. Near the coast. Small places. Not the chains.”

  Fred’s doze was interrupted by the closing slap of the door. That coincided with the clank of the phone hastily coming to rest. The man entering had to be Kenzo: burly, late middle-aged, in white muscle shirt and ripped jeans, broad arms swarming with color, a pony tail reaching down the center of his back, the top of his head balding. Heavy scarred black boots.

  “Stephanie,” he growled, looking toward Fred.

  Stephanie’s hand gestures, which the new entrant disregarded, meant “Please don’t fire me,” or “These people—where do they all come from?”

  “C’mon in back,” Kenzo said. “Stephanie, the phone’s been tied up forty minutes.”

  “Get call-waiting,” Stephanie said. The relationship must be complex enough so firing was not an option. Having both hands free, she started putting the surface of her desk in order. Kenzo led Fred behind the partition separating his work area from the front of the store.

  “Fellow your age, if you want ink, you already have it,” Kenzo said. “So, next question…”

  “I came up from Massachusetts.”

  “Right.”

  The work area had in it a padded recliner with a black surface of fake plastic leather—that would be cleanable between clients—as well as a couple of rolling stools, on one of which Kenzo sat, next to the table that contained supplies. What was visible on his arm
s and neck, and in the scoop above his shirt, was Japanese in flavor. There was more to the building but it was closed off by heavy double curtains that had to mask a passageway leading to storage and rest room areas, maybe a kitchen.

  “You have ID?” Kenzo challenged.

  “The ID I have won’t prove the negative. Meaning, I may look like law. But I’m not law.”

  “Which you can’t prove,” Kenzo said. “What we’ll do, for the sake of argument, I happen to be free, my two o’clock’s not here, say what you came to say and I’ll consider it as if you’re law. Meaning I’ll listen.”

  “Young guy named Arthur,” Fred said. “Talented guy…”

  He paused. There was no visible response. “Draws like an angel,” Fred added.

  Kenzo broke the silence. “Prosecutors like that trick. In court. You get the choice, jail or answer the question. Like they’re pitching, they set up their rhythm, first easy questions, yes or no, simple. Then they start making statements, the poor goof keeps on answering. ‘I take it you own a watch.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I take it you own a pair of shoes.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I take it you were running out of the bank carrying a sack of money.’ That’s not a question, it’s a statement. How does the goof know if the prosecutor takes that or not? He can’t answer. But the judge goes along with the prosecutor, pretends it’s a question. If the goof says ‘Yes, you take it,’ it sounds like ‘Yes he did it.’ So, to answer the question you didn’t ask, ‘Yes, he does.’ If it’s the Arthur used to hang around the shop here. Arthur draws like a fucking angel.

  “I take it you have an interest in Arthur,” Kenzo added, after a pause. “Unless your interest is in fucking angels.”

  “Arthur’s tangential,” Fred said. “My interest is paintings.”