Madonna of the Apes Read online

  “What comes next is nothing,” Tilley said. “The fact you are curious doesn’t mean there’s anything to be curious about. A person’s hungry, the hunger has an object, like a ham sandwich, that will answer it. But hunger doesn’t make the ham sandwich happen. It’s a lucky accident. Your curiosity wants to know what it’s like after you die? Sorry, there’s no ham sandwich waiting. What happens, you turn off.”

  “Another thing I’ve noticed,” Fred said. “When you ask a person a question, you put yourself in his power. You ask, ‘Did you go home with him and let him suck you off?’ you reveal interests of your own. If I ask you, for example, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ I express vulnerability. Now we both know I’ve gotta go. And I have given you the power to mislead me. You point to the left and I stumble into the bedroom. No ham sandwich, do you see? My curiosity is disappointed.”

  “Your curiosity let you down,” Franklin said. He swirled the contents of his snifter, took a drink, and eyed the bar.

  “No,” Fred said, “it wasn’t my curiosity that let me down. The mistake was to express that curiosity in the form of a question. The question signals I’m interested, and especially when you are talking to an adversary, it’s stupid to give away your interest. You notice I don’t ask you ‘Who’s Mitchell?’ even though I know you are expecting something; and now I also know you are also expecting someone. Mitchell might therefore be carrying what you are expecting.

  “About you, I know you want the chest back. So you feel you made a mistake. I don’t ask you why. Because then I put the ball in your court, do you see? When I babble philosophy with you, and raise the hypothetical question, Where’s the bathroom? your face changes.”

  Franklin Tilley stroked his fish and, absently, began to twist them.

  Chapter Twenty

  “I understand the change,” Fred said, “because I noticed a good deal of cash mixed in with your dirty shorts and socks, in that wicker hamper, last Sunday night.” He finished his drink, stood, and crossed the room to place his snifter next to the bottles. “If I wanted to waste time asking questions, you can imagine what they might be. But a reason I don’t ask the obvious questions is I don’t care what the answers are. Other less obvious questions, I’d get lies too. It takes too long to figure out what the lies mean.”

  Franklin had risen when Fred did, his face pale. “You didn’t touch the money. Bastard. I looked after you left. Crazy I didn’t look before. I was upset. What you did with my gun. Threatening. Bastard. Who are you? What do you want? What do you want with me? You want to play games? I’ve got to have it back. Listen, it isn’t my money,” he said.

  “That’s an answer to one of the questions I don’t ask, that fits into the category of I don’t care what the answer is,” Fred said. “So. Three tomorrow. If he comes. Incidentally, speaking as one human to another, you might want to think about whatever it is you’re doing. There’s a lot of fear in this room, and I didn’t bring it with me.”

  He left Franklin standing in the doorway, in his socks.

  ***

  Boston’s Ritz Hotel had for generations striven to serve as a living answer to the question, How old and rich can you be and still not take a bath? But some months ago it had begun a general facelift, and that had involved extensive cleaning, inside and out. Scandalous vandalism, some protested. It was like scraping the patina off the Parthenon. The outside of the hotel bristled with scaffolding. Inside was a chaos of work in progress even though, this close to midnight, no work was actually being done.

  Fred took the stairs to the fifth floor and knocked at the door to 503. The smile of Suzette Shaughnessy lit the corridor when she opened the door far enough on its chain to see that Fred stood outside. “You didn’t call,” she said, taking the chain off and letting him in.

  “Any friend of Franklin’s,” Fred said. The room was decorated as Laura Ashley’s mother would have done it, in a manner that explained, almost condoned, the excesses of the Laura Ashley rebellion. Stodgy didn’t begin to cover it. Suzette, on the other hand, was decorated in a way neither Laura Ashley nor her mother could have imagined. She’d de-accessioned the basic black dress, and the net stockings, and the matching underwear (how could it not match?) and was now draped in a transparent fiction made of smoke and sequins. A cigarette burned in an ashtray next to the chair where she’d been sitting watching something in black and white on the TV. Something with Cary Grant.

  “I had them bring up champagne, just in case,” Suzette said, suppressing the TV with the remote while, with the other hand, putting the cigarette to her lips for a fleshy drag. “My only vice,” she apologized, and put it out, smiling through smoke. “I was going to give up at midnight and drink it myself or, I don’t know, just leave it in the bucket. Will you open?”

  “Being the MAN,” she did not say.

  Fred obliged. The business let him look around the room. Her clothes were out of sight, as were her suitcases. So she was neat or she had really expected him. Or someone. If she was reading anything, a book or magazine, it was hidden, maybe under a pillow. The bed was slightly disarranged. Fred poured into the two glasses and offered her one. She crossed a leg and wriggled the toes of the raised bare foot in pleased anticipation. She lifted her glass, higher than her foot.

  “Appropriate sentiments,” Fred offered in toast, raising his glass to touch hers.

  “Appropriate sentiments,” she echoed, and drank, her breasts moving under the transparent garment, and eying Fred as if they were her mildly interested pets.

  “So he’ll be here Friday,” Fred started.

  Suzette nodded and held her glass to a level that let her test the fizzle of the bubbles with her nose. “He won’t want anything there. He’s looking for names.”

  “Mantegna’s a name.”

  She shrugged. “Two million? Even if it is a Mantegna, which it isn’t. It’s one of the also-ran Italians nobody knows and nobody cares. De Predis? Who cares? He won’t.”

  “Two million,” Fred said. “Franklin offered it to me for three, but I wouldn’t take off my shoes. So you get a discount. Five hundred thousand per shoe. But you have nice feet.”

  “There was one thing I wanted,” she said. “After courting Franklin for two weeks. And it’s gone.”

  “Gone,” Fred repeated.

  “So, Fred, tell me about yourself,” she said. She settled into a more alluring slouch.

  “No hidden depths,” Fred said. “What you see is pretty much what you get.”

  “You’re in the business?”

  “I do this and that,” Fred said. “These days more this than that.” He took a drink and considered. “Though, to be honest, I still do enough of that to keep my hand in. I try to.” She’d emptied her glass and held it up. A summons. “You’ve done well,” Fred told her, and rose to fill it again.

  “When you walked into Tilley’s place, I wondered, Did he sell it to you?”

  “What?”

  She studied him over the fizzle before she decided to proceed. “He had a painted box. It had angels and flowers on it.”

  Fred shook his head.

  “Franklin Tilley won’t tell me anything,” she complained. “Par for the course in the art world. Everyone lies. If they tell you anything, which mostly they don’t, that’s when you know it’s a lie. If you’re in the art world, Fred, which to me seems like a safe guess, even though you look like you drive a truck, you may take that as a personal insult.” Again, her brilliant smile added new sparkle to the bubbles in her glass.

  Fred said, “That’s what your guy collects? Painted boxes? You said he wants names. Now I’m confused.”

  Suzette studied the conflicting themes and found no way to resolve them. Instead she stood and allowed the light from the hotel’s table lamp to make a mockery of her covering. She stretched and yawned. “Champagne does something to me,” she confessed. She crossed to stand next to Fred and put a hand on the hair he cropped short so he wouldn’t have to think about it. “My principal
,” she said, “the man I work for, will pay good money for that chest. I know his taste.”

  “I guess I could look around.”

  She stroked the side of his face, bristling now at the day’s end.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  She was more naked in this packaging than if one or the other of them peeled her out of it. Not that the garment presented any obstacle.

  “You must know the locals,” Suzette said. “Who’s a likely candidate.”

  “Problem is, in the art world, everybody lies,” Fred said. He put an arm around her hips. The hips were there, the arm was there. The hips swayed briefly toward him. He let them go again. “There’s more bubbly.” He reached for the bottle, which sat patiently in its bucket of ice; poured some into his glass. “Will you have some?” She shook her head. “Even when they’re lying with each other, they’re likely to lie,” he said.

  She laughed and went back to her chair.

  “Not for publication,” Fred said, “who’s your principal, and how much money are we talking? In case I get lucky.”

  “I assumed Franklin Tilley told you. I’m curator, personal assistant, whatever you want to call it, for the Agnelli Collection. No relation to the car people. We’re in Toledo. I’m the one you go through. Tony Agnelli.” She held out her glass again. Fred poured.

  “Yes?” he prompted. “On the ‘How much?’ issue.”

  “I have to see it again,” she hedged, “and show it to a couple of people. But I’d say, if you can find it for me, you can ask pretty much what you want.”

  The poise of her body was as suggestive as her words.

  “Some box,” Fred said. “Describe it.”

  Suzette gave an accurate description of the outside of the chest, so brilliantly pedestrian that it would have earned her an A in any graduate program worth its salt. “Then you open it,” she finished, “and on the inside is a weird holy picture, the Virgin and Child and some monkeys. The box looks Italian. My principal, Tony Agnelli, is Italian. Duh. Italian-American. You probably guessed that. The collection needs objects, not just pictures, I told him.”

  “You’ll be here,” Fred said. “In case I have information for you.”

  She nodded. “Tony makes all the money decisions. I can make promises but not commitments. That sounds wrong. You know what I’m saying. How do I reach you?”

  “I move around a lot,” Fred said. “You won’t want me unless I have something for you, and in that case I’ll get word to you here. Or should I leave a message with Franklin Tilley?”

  She said, “Let’s not get Franklin Tilley mixed up about who’s working with whom. And by the way, Fred. Don’t get ideas. Agnelli doesn’t buy anything except through me. That’s what he pays me for. Go after him yourself, either you spook him, or his people send him to me.”

  Fred said, “If I have anything to sell, I go through you.”

  Suzette shook her head. “About some people you have an instinct.” She flicked from her breasts imaginary crumbs, or bees, or the pollen from imaginary exotic flowers. She looked across at Fred in a direct and unmistakable manner. “Next question. Unless you’re one of them, but my instinct tells me I’m warm here, when do we move this expedition to the next plateau?”

  “It would be a pleasure and an honor,” Fred said. “But also not prudent, at least for me. I get confused when I can’t make out the line between business and pleasure. Let’s wait till we see where this is heading. Otherwise we both lose sight of the main objective.”

  ***

  “Hell, with her it’s all business,” he muttered five minutes later on the stairs, after he and Suzette had made their wary farewells. “The packaging, the time spent in the gym, the big grin. She’s the personal assistant and curator for big money from Toledo named Agnelli, who puts her up at the Ritz, and I’m invited to dip my wick? Thank you. Weird holy picture, she says. She’s spotted our Leonardo.

  “Correction, Clay’s Leonardo.”

  Though the rain was long over the night was damp. Fred took a taxi to Charlestown and slept in his solitary bed.

  ***

  Wednesday morning he was on Mountjoy Street at around ten, carrying two cardboard cups of coffee in a paper sack, along with containers of cream and packets of sugar. A couple was just leaving the basement entrance, a man and a woman, in their late fifties. Clay, in the doorway, splendid in a blue satin robe, was telling them, “Next week, then,” when he saw Fred on the sidewalk. Fred stood aside to let the couple pass, then held up his sack and called, “I brought coffee. I was in the neighborhood.”

  Clay said, suspiciously, but hesitantly making room in the doorway, “An unexpected pleasure.”

  “Franklin Tilley. I ran into him on the street and—well—the upshot of the matter is, he wants to buy it back. The chest. His offer is ten thousand.”

  “Inside,” Clay ordered.

  Fred carried his sack to the worktable in the office and began taking out its contents. “Actually,” he said, “and it’s not my business: there are other things you should know.”

  “You’re stirring things up,” Clayton said. He stood indecisively next to the desk that was being commandeered by this large visitor. The blue satin robe had been put on over gray suit pants, a white shirt and tie. The man’s hair was in the same wild tousle of white strands. If this was his idea of dishabille, it was as conscious as Suzette’s had been, in her appearance at the Ritz. The painted chest, stripped of its top, still sat there on the floor. Its top had taken so much of his attention up to now, Fred hadn’t really looked at the rest of the object. The interior was dark wood, unpainted, pocked with worm holes. It gave off a musky smell, as if someone had been keeping his grandmother in there, clean, but dead. Outside, the decoration, carved, gilded, and painted, was not easy to place, mostly because Fred had never bothered to spend time looking at such things. If it was evidence of anything, he was too ignorant to read it. The angels were nicely painted, with large, flat, delicate wings. The angels reminded him of something. Maybe Fra Angelico? Except it was furniture.

  “Stirring things up,” Clay repeated.

  “Maybe. But things were already stirred up. Heavy objects. We want to keep track of them if we can.”

  Clay hesitated a long minute before he sighed and shifted course. “My one desire is to be left alone, to study and to think about what I have purchased. Would that the present might be simple, so that I could indulge the complexities of the past. Yet the present is not simple. Here you are again. It is difficult to welcome you, since you bring bad news. Still, most kind.” He sighed again. “The coffee. I regret—it is my single eccentricity—that I eschew stimulants. Forgive me. I appreciate the gesture.” He sat in the chair at the worktable and motioned Fred to the couch. Fred, taking his coffee black, left the litter of condiments on the table next to the extra coffee, the sack, and a pile of books on whose covers and spines the word Leonardo seemed to predominate.

  Fred began, “I’m told that in the art world people either say nothing about their business, or lie.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Fred looked across at Clay and waited. The older man pursed his lips. “About me you are correct this far. I cannot bear for anyone to know my business. It is an instinct. Almost an obsession. And yet, apparently, perhaps heeding a deeper instinct, I take you into my confidence. At a time and in a circumstance when a great issue is at risk. With a prize such as my Leonardo at stake, why would I not lie, or stand mute, to protect it? If you infer, or aver, that I am in the art world, I will not argue, although I don’t think of myself as belonging to any world at all. If I accept your premise, and wish to confirm it, my next move is either to lie, or to say nothing. We reach an impasse.”

  “In my world, on the other hand,” Fred said.

  “What is your world?” Clay interrupted.

  “In my world, I hate to waste time.”

  “You keep coming back,” Clay said. “Why?”

  “There are things about the ne
ighborhood,” Fred said. “Moving on…”

  “You told me you want nothing,” Clayton reminded him. “I hold a vulnerable treasure, which indeed you helped me to procure. Unavoidably, through happenstance, your business and mine coincided, briefly, while you saved my life. I acknowledge it. I have thanked you. Forgive me if my instincts were at fault, but you seem a man of considerable pride, and I believed that to have offered anything in the nature of a financial reward—yes, I see that I was right. You say that you want nothing. I must respect that statement. Yet you keep coming back.”

  “Moving on,” Fred said. “There are things you don’t understand. That makes me nervous. There’s too much wrong. For one thing, Tilley keeps a large amount of cash in the house.”

  “As you know I had on me, on Sunday night, a notable amount of cash. It comes in handy sometimes, as the event developed. It would not surprise you to learn that I had more cash in the house.”

  “Not in the bathroom hamper with the dirty socks and skivvies,” Fred said.

  Clayton Reed blushed. “You were thorough,” he said. “Still, people are free to do what they wish. I prefer a safe. Many persons prefer to effect their transactions in the form of cash. If their reasons are dishonorable, their dishonor is their business.”

  “Upward of fifty thousand cash,” Fred pressed on. “That’s a guess. That kind of cash in that kind of place means trouble. Normally it indicates traffic in contraband. When I called Franklin on it, he turned green.”

  Clay started, “I didn’t hear…”

  “Last night,” Fred explained. “I was in the neighborhood. He had a woman there, representing the Agnelli Collection, she told me later. She also wants your chest. She didn’t mention a figure.”

  Clay jumped to his feet, almost chattering in alarm. “This is an unforgivable intrusion.”