Man With a Squirrel Read online

  “It’s amazing,” Fred said.

  “I varnished it so you can see the color,” Roberto said. “All that crackle, and the holes—I’ll fill those when we line it, if you want me to line it.”

  “We were right to wait,” Fred said. “Look.” He let Roberto take out the fragment Oona had bequeathed him.

  Roberto held the frame in both hands and carried it to the window, staring at it and making his eyebrows rise, his mustache lower, in a quizzical frown. “Is it extortion they are attempting?” he asked, turning the object over. “Send the ear, then the little finger, then the thumb? You are dealing with kidnappers?” He shook his head. “Who would do this? Were the parcels mailed in Lebanon?”

  Fred said, “I didn’t touch it, wanting you to be the one to take it apart.”

  “Solomon,” Roberto said. “It is as if that woman had not stood in the way of the wisdom of Solomon.” He felt the ballooning of excess canvas gently where it pressed against the cardboard backing, as if the cardboard were charred skin over flesh that might yet be saved. He carried the object to his worktable. “Normally I prefer you not to be here while I work, Fred,” he said. Fred looked out the studio window at the damp sun shining through mist over abandoned mill buildings. “But if you don’t mind standing quietly, and will not expect this to be a precedent, you probably wonder what you have.”

  Fred said, “It crossed my mind.”

  “And you think you should be rewarded for not taking matters into your own hands. Forgive my asking, do you want to keep the frame?”

  “For a souvenir maybe, but it’s nothing I want. As that same woman might have said to Solomon, Don’t save the bathwater if it means letting the baby drown.”

  Roberto laid the fragment on its face, resting it on the gilded cheesery of the frame. Roberto took diagonal pliers and lifted the staples out of the gray sponge of cardboard, one side at a time, pulling the legs up straight without levering his tool against the cardboard. “The way the canvas is folded in,” he said, “we don’t want to crease it worse.”

  When the backing was lifted and set by (Fred saw it had no writing on either side), a nailed jumble was exposed, folds laid and folded over folds.

  “The bastards used common nails,” Roberto said, scandalized. “Look what their heads have done.”

  “It was the same with the other,” Fred said. “It’s someone who knows what he’s doing and doesn’t give a shit.”

  Roberto was concentrating on getting the nails out with the pliers, using the same procedure Fred had on the first fragment, with the same concentration Fred had seen used to disarm explosives.

  “It gives me a shooting pain in my heart,” Roberto said. “I worry for your safety if you do business with a monster such as this.” He tried to lift the square, double-sided canvas package from the frame. It was jammed in too tightly. “I may destroy the frame?” he asked.

  “Be my guest,” Fred reassured him. Roberto carried the thing over to his woodworking tools, in the instrument-making corner of the shop, and started in with a chisel, unjoining one corner until he could bend the frame apart.

  A flight of seagulls crossed the window. Fred looked at the first fragment where it lay. The links of the squirrel’s gold chain were as exactly rendered as he expected, and no link showed fewer than three colors. The patch of sunlight on the floor gave the squirrel a red-gold ground to stand against.

  Roberto brought the canvas back and took his time lifting the staples out of the edges. “Hurry and you have trouble,” he said. “Pour yourself coffee, but stand clear while you drink it.” Fred took the hint. It was like the moment when the nurse, frustrated in many attempts to discover a friend’s vein, suggests you might visit the restroom across the corridor from Intensive Care.

  Fred held his cup and stood looking out the window, listening to Roberto talk to himself softly. “How not to make things worse? … Right through the finger. How could he? … All right, there’s the knees.” It was like listening to a breech birth on the radio. “No, no head.”

  Fred turned and strolled back, leaving his cup on the table next to the hotplate.

  “He’s holding out for the big payment,” Roberto said. He’d laid the fragment out. It was the same width as the first, and about the same height. But the folding and stapling had been more complex and more harmful, because the canvas had been forced onto a smaller stretcher—this one eighteen by twenty inches—so the excess canvas had been bunched before the staples were fired. In this case, because the canvas did not fit the frame easily, the staples had been pounded flat with a hammer, which had caused more damage. Furthermore, the image selected to be displayed for sale to Oona had not allowed use of even that original left tacking edge.

  Roberto slid the new fragment to lie above the first. This one would not lie flat because of the places where its folds had been hit by the framer’s hammer. The tabletop, meeting the left edge of the canvas, hovered above a man’s knees in gray britches. The subject was seated, one hand (his right) resting on the tabletop in shadow and reflected dimly into the wood’s finish. The other hand, holding the end of the squirrel’s chain, rested on the figure’s thighs in the shadow beneath the table.

  “Those hands are Copley’s,” Roberto said. “I won’t swear to it, not if this is a legal matter; but it’s what they are.” Beside the table the man’s plain waistcoat, and the gray jacket of his suit, rose to his shoulders where again the knife or razor blade had done its work. “Who hates Mr. Reed enough to torture him this way?” Roberto asked, awed.

  Fred said, “It’s worse. It’s ignorance.”

  “I’ll put heat on it,” Roberto said. “But I can’t make it go flat without lining it.”

  The edges of the canvas matched exactly. The feet and calves had knees and thighs and trunk now; the squirrel had most of a captor. Fred had two-thirds of a painting.

  “People like that—” Roberto started. “Although I do not believe in capital punishment because I do not myself care to be a murderer, nor do I wish to be a citizen of a country in which human life is so officially despised by law; still, in a situation such as this…”

  “I have to see a man about a bridge,” Fred said. “Roberto, do what you can to protect this piece and start reversing the folds.”

  “On my hot table I can line them both, putting them together so successfully you will not see the join unless you look for it,” Roberto said.

  “I’m going after the head,” Fred told him. “Thanks for letting me come at such short notice.”

  “As long as there’s no rush, you are always welcome,” Roberto said.

  * * *

  Fred left his car next to Clayton’s in Clay’s space off Mountjoy Street, rather than prospect for an opening on Charles. Driving past Oona’s he had seen the hand-lettered sign in the door, “Closed due to death of Oona.” He should let Marek know he’d created what some might take for a joke in poor taste.

  He’d called Molly from New Bedford in the morning to touch base and warn her things were moving, that he might not get to Arlington for a day or two. There’d been nothing in today’s paper about Oona’s death, but it was too soon, and perhaps the death was not interesting enough. But Fred asked Molly to see what she could pick up from Dee.

  “Poor woman,” Molly said.

  Fred would not call the Carlyle to clue Clayton in that they were closer to what looked like a Copley, since the possession of two-thirds was more infuriatingly unsatisfactory than having the first section alone. It seemed deliberate, malicious, and inexorable. Also, Oona was dead, of inexplicable violence, and Fred would just as soon not go into that with Clayton on the phone.

  “I am filled with grief and worry,” Marek mourned when Fred got through to him on the telephone. “I shall have her body burned, and cast her ashes on the Christian Science monument in that cemetery in Cambridge. It is a pretty place she loved. What do you think?”

  “Let’s look at where she had the accident,” Fred said. “If you
are free? I’ll take my car.”

  “I shall practice until two,” Marek said. “Oona would wish it. Her spirit tells me I must work. We will go at two.”

  * * *

  Fred picked him up at Oona’s shop door. Marek was dressed in blue jeans, white turtleneck sweater, brown leather jacket, and black leather gloves so thin that Fred thought, That’s kid. The jeans were slim and accentuated a well-sculpted matinee-belt bulge. Marek was strikingly beautiful. He looked like a man who must continually fend off passionate advances. He certainly dressed for it. Marek sat in Fred’s car, glanced around the inside, and sniffed.

  “I am mastering the second movement of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit,” he said. “It is too good for the criminal who has destroyed my mother’s sister and my patron.”

  Fred said, “I don’t know it.”

  “Le Gibet,” Marek said. “From which you would gladly hang such a person, who violates a lady’s precious honor.”

  Because there was no wind the sun made the car warm. Fred drove along the river. Marek sat speechless beside him, now and again letting his gloved fingers burst into frenzied sequences as if he were rehearsing in his mind a passage of music he needed tactile reinforcement to recall.

  Fred said, “It’s the railroad bridge on Walden, near Mass. Avenue.”

  Marek nodded. “Yes, it shall all be mine. God help me, I don’t want it. What shall I do with an antique store in Boston when my life must be travel?”

  Fred repeated his question.

  Marek said, “I am capsized. I was thinking of something else. Miles away. What was I saying?”

  “It’s all right,” Fred told him.

  14

  “That’s Oona’s car,” Marek observed, pointing out a green Volvo wagon parked on Walden Street, not far from the bridge, on their left side as they came from Mass. Ave., and on the far side of the bridge. Several tickets fluttered under the windshield wipers.

  “She shall not pay,” Marek proclaimed.

  Fred was confirming what had first impressed him when Marek told him of Oona’s death early this morning. The Walden Street railroad bridge was eight blocks at most from the Kwik-Frame at Porter Square. Fred parked in back of Oona’s car, near a small variety store, on the corner of Richdale Avenue.

  “You’ll want to drive it back to Charles Street,” Fred suggested.

  “I have no keys. Also, I do not drive.”

  Several children, released from school and carrying sodas and snacks from the variety store, stood on the bridge and reached up to toss their wrappers over the solid iron barrier, painted a turquoise green—almost the only green in sight. The afternoon was dark and cold. No, there was also green in the plastic awnings, green-and-white striped, over the windows of a house for sale diagonally across the street and bridge. Fred and Marek walked up the hump of the bridge and looked down onto the tracks, fifteen feet below—almost twenty if you measured from the top of the barrier.

  “They want to believe Oona, my mother’s sister, who was broad as she was high, and advanced in years, forgot herself so far as to strip her clothing and climb high as her head in order to do herself this thing?” Marek exclaimed.

  The neighborhood was generally built-up but not prosperous, and thoroughly mixed-use, and lacking self-definition: a part of Cambridge in which people could still afford to have children. It was possible to look a long way down the tracks in either direction and imagine oneself almost anywhere in the country on a gray day between seasons.

  Fred asked, “Did they say where she was hit?”

  “Swept like a bird in wind,” Marek said. He pointed north and west along the tracks, which ran in a broad gully between wooded banks. An office-furniture salesroom and warehouse backed onto one side, and houses with yards fenced in high anchor chain ran along the other.

  A good distance along the tracks on the Mass. Ave. side, next to the northbound track, was the circle of yellow plastic police ribbon protecting a dark patch of crushed weeds. Marek’s gesture pointed there.

  “I saw that,” Fred said. “I wondered where she was hit.”

  “The train’s driver said impact was at the bridge,” Marek said. “‘Impact’ is his word. He says she came from nowhere. It is a lie.” Marek led Fred across the bridge to the side where the cars were parked, including Oona’s wagon. “She comes from Hungary,” Marek said.

  * * *

  “I say her enemy threw her across this what you call a barrier,” Marek said.

  Given Oona’s size and her potential for fury, what Marek thought of as a one-man job would require at least two enemies. For that matter, it was not easy to imagine a single enemy getting Oona out of her clothes against her will.

  On this side of the bridge he saw a gap in the anchor fencing that generally protected the tracks from idle visits. Fred strolled down the bank next to 56 Walden, a three-decker. Marek, keeping his black loafers inviolate, stayed on the sidewalk.

  “Anyone could reach the tracks this way,” Fred called up. At night the weeds and undergrowth would give reasonable cover. The person seeking a rendezvous with death at this particular barricade would have to drop down a five-foot cinder-block wall to reach the ground, then get across fifteen feet of open flat to the tracks. It seemed too far for an unwilling subject to be pushed, even if she were small and fat.

  “It is muddy?” Marek asked from the sidewalk.

  “Yes,” Fred told him.

  “You see footprints?”

  “I reckon. It’s the only obvious access to the tracks. Everyone must have passed up and down this way after the engineer called the accident in: police, ambulance medics, all that. Curious persons like us as well.”

  “There’s nobody in that house,” Marek said. “Number Forty-five is for sale.” Fred climbed up the bank and crossed to the house he had already noticed, the small white one with the green-striped awnings. The children, who had been watching the two men, gathered closer to Fred while he looked at number 45. There were six of them, between ten and fourteen. One of the older girls asked, “You looking about the lady she went off the bridge?”

  “Yes.”

  The empty house was small, with a steep backyard ending in tall weeds and volunteer scrub saplings. Its chain-link fence looked whole—enough so the mother wouldn’t have nightmares in the kitchen while the little ones played outside. Growing up in that house you’d hear trains running all the time, filling your head with the romance of possibly being somewhere else.

  The children, or a voice from among them, asked, “Whycome did she do it?”

  Fred said, “What do you people say? You must have thought a lot about how to get somebody in front of a train at the right moment. They try to make it hard for you.”

  Fred gestured toward the barriers and fences.

  Marek went back to sit in Fred’s car. Fred talked with the children, listening to their ideas; listening also for suggestions of what they might have heard.

  “Say you wanna push the guy off the bridge, or if she’s gonna stand on the rail waiting on a train,” a boy said, tossing his Twinkie wrapper over the barrier, which was level with his eyes. “Problem is, there’s people on this bridge all the time, driving or walking, one.”

  “They’d see you,” everyone agreed.

  “Me, I’d wait underneath the bridge,” a girl said. “That’s how I’d do.”

  “My Dad saw the body,” someone said. “Like she was bare naked.”

  “Bare naked like shit. Don’t listen to Denetha,” another voice tossed in.

  “She was too. She was a mess. Blood all around,” Denetha insisted.

  * * *

  Fred joined Marek in the car. “You are a pianist. You were playing a concert last night?”

  Marek nodded.

  “Where?”

  Marek stared out the window at the children, now moving in a ragged pack down Richdale Avenue in the direction of Concord—the direction Oona’s body had been carried. “I prefer not to say.”

 
Fred prodded, “Not a public concert?”

  “Public art is a contradiction,” Marek said, “which you Americans deny.”

  “You mentioned applause. How private was this concert?”

  “I prefer not to say.”

  Traffic, sparse but regular, crossed the bridge in both directions. Marek stared into the lowering afternoon. His gloved hands rested on his knees.

  “You want to tell me what the program was?”

  “Scarlatti, Schumann, Chopin, and Ferenc Liszt,” Marek said.

  “A private concert. Is that not like a secret proclamation?” Fred asked.

  Marek looked out the window and said, “I do not follow you. I must go. All Oona’s friends will demand a service. I must decide about her body, and the rest, and waste time with her lawyer, Mr. Bartholdi, an American.”

  “They are releasing the body so soon?” Fred asked.

  “They find she is full of alcohol,” Marek said bitterly. “Gin, which she never drank. An empty bottle in her car, they said. They have it. They say she is drunk, therefore she is unclothed. They keep her handbag. Police everywhere are the same. Now drive me back into Boston.” Marek leaned back and closed his eyes, his mouth set in a narrow line.

  Fred said, “I have an errand in Porter. The Red Line will run you to Charles. I can’t leave my car on Walden, since I’m a nonresident and they’ll ticket me if they can, but I’ll ride you toward the T until I find a meter.”

  Marek frowned and opened his eyes. Fred had betrayed him. “I do not care for the subway,” he said.

  * * *

  “You will allow the police to cover this over?” Marek asked. “You are the same as them?”

  Fred had parked at a meter from which he could point out the entrance to the T, under public art that, he agreed with Marek in this instance, was more public than it was art. He enjoyed Maggs Harries’s bronze gloves inside, though, cascading down the slope between the up and down escalators, and pooling toward bottom. It was a funny gesture, tender and humane.