Madonna of the Apes (3 page)

Chapter Five

“Are you out of your flaming mind?” Fred demanded. “After the way the guy set you up, you leave him with a wad of cash? Even if you find a taxi at one-thirty in the morning, this damned toy chest won’t fit, unless you find a wagon. What’s the plan?” He broke off. Reed was trembling like a leaf in a high wind.

“I live on Mountjoy,” Reed said.

“That’s not far. You can walk it. No, obviously you can’t.
We’ll
walk it over,” Fred said. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

The older man had stood undecided, watching as Fred hoisted the box onto his shoulder. It was a heavy, substantial object. “Be careful, for God’s sake,” Reed protested. He stood trembling under the streetlight. The color had left his face, but for the red welt on his cheek. “I’m faint,” he said. “I’m going to faint.” He sat suddenly on the bottom step of the brownstone they had just come from, breathing hard, and put his head with its mad tousle of white hair between his knees. Fred balanced the box.

“There was nothing wrong with the brandy. Anyway, you didn’t drink it,” Fred said. “What’s wrong? Regrets? A fool and his money? I could, but I’m not going back for your money. You knew better. Hell, at your age you should know it’s not safe to go cruising bars for young men. ”

The older man shook his head and looked up vaguely, as if Fred were speaking from deep underground, and in Swahili. “The desecration! I sat on it! Sat on it! You saw me. As if I were at Brooks Brothers selecting shoes! Forgive me, I am moved.” His voice was tremulous with shock and chagrin. But it was strong. He didn’t require medical attention.

“Let’s hump this thing to Mountjoy,” Fred said. Reed, sitting up straight again, breathed a deep lungful from the cool dark air of springtime. “It is like sitting on the Ark of the Covenant. I shall never be forgiven. Lightning should strike. God help me, there was no other way.”

“Let’s move out, Reed,” Fred said. “Your Ark of the Covenant weighs a fair piece.”

Reed said, standing slowly, “You spotted that man’s game. You saved my life.”

“Maybe,” Fred said. “I doubt it. The gun was next to the bed. Some people do that. Let him spend the rest of the night cleaning and drying it out.”

“It’s fortunate for me, your appearing when you did. I’m grateful to you, Sir. Fred. Clayton is fine, or Clay. My first name. We have become familiar, although we do not know each other. Thank you. I would appreciate your extending your courtesy as far as my home on Mountjoy Street. Truly, I am overcome. My heart is racing.”

“Not my business. There may be a lesson here,” Fred said.

Clayton smoothed the drape of his suit and the two men descended the hill and turned onto Charles Street again, heading left, in the direction of the Boston Garden. The night mist had grown heavier, but it was still warm for May, and the air was filled with the promise of spring blooming. They had the street to themselves.

Clay muttered, “He struck me! Then he has the gall to invite himself into my home? Mantegna indeed! What did he take me for? Magdalene was never a Mantegna subject. Show me a
Magdalene
by Mantegna. I defy you!”

Fred said, “Where did he pick you up?”

“I met him tonight at the M.F.A,” Clay said. “Not ‘cruising’ in a bar. Perhaps you meant no insult. Still, one might take exception to your implication. The M.F.A. is Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. They were having a do ostensibly to show appreciation to their donors. Mr. Tilley was at my table. It was a dinner following which, as I should have expected, we were rewarded with instructions concerning methods we may use in order to entail our assets to the museum during our lifetimes, preempting later testamentary decisions.”

“No need to wait till you are dead,” Fred said.

“They were politely obvious about the whole thing. Next block we turn left. This is exceedingly generous of you. Uphill, I fear. I am an innocent. The sexual motive, if it was proffered at all by Tilley, I missed entirely. I should have seen it. We tend to see no more than what we are prepared for. From our conversation, I gathered only that Tilley owned paintings, and I am interested in paintings. Though there was no suggestion that I would see his collection. No suggestion! Why would I? I do not know the man.

“I lost track of him during the social mix-up after the program. Then, when everyone was preparing to leave, in the vicinity of the coat room, he materialized at my elbow. He had been friendly over dinner, and—I cannot understand that room or what was in it. He could only be so ignorant if he had inherited everything. Nowhere to sit? The Kashan rug would cost seventy thousand dollars in a shop if you could find it, and if you could bargain it down. At auction fifty thousand. I assure you, he didn’t appear to be drinking or I would never have gotten into a taxi with the man. There was never any idea that I would go into his abode. The drink, fraudulent as it was, did not seem to come over him until after he’d given the driver his address.”

Fred said, “He was playing the wounded bird until he could get you into his trap.”

“Could he think I would do anything so dishonorable as to engage in a serious financial transaction with a man who is incapacitated?”

They’d passed the shop over which she was sleeping. What was her name? Patsy? Had she spread the sheet drowsily across herself? Caroline? They turned onto Mountjoy now. It was steep going.

“Maybe he only wanted to knock you on the head and feed you cooking brandy,” Fred suggested, “then snatch your money belt.”

“You are commendably alert. The brandy the man offered was, indeed, undrinkable. Following which he had the insufferable gall to regale himself, in front of me, with an old Napoleon. I could smell it. Exquisite. Which he downed as if it were drugstore coffee. He understands his liquor as well as he does the rest of his collection. He drank it because of its cost, and not its nose. In every way, a despicable fellow.”

“We agree he’s a bad host,” Fred agreed.

Clay said, “May we go faster? I worry about moisture on the paint surface. We’re almost there. I can’t tell you how obliged I am to you, Fred. Never mind the man. We will put him out of our minds. Upsetting as the incident has been, it has been providential. Two blocks more. Let’s see now, upstairs or down?” he asked himself, fumbling with his keys. “Downstairs is better, safer.”

“I’m interested, especially since you left so much money in his hands, did you trust any of what was there?” Fred asked. “The Cézanne?”

“A ludicrous fake,” Clay said. “Granted Cézanne drew badly, he didn’t draw badly in that way. The imposture couldn’t stand up to five minutes’ conversation, not even with that ignorant youngster. The mixture of objects, events, and persons was outlandish, outrageous, and leaves me deeply, deeply uneasy. We are well out of it. ”

They’d reached a handsome row of brick townhouses the first of which, on the corner, was set back by its own parking space, a rarity on Beacon Hill—large enough for two cars, although it was inhabited only by one. The chink of Clay’s keys, and the readiness of one of them in his hand, proved they had reached their destination. Clay opened a low iron gate and led them through a brief plantation of dark ivy.

“One plays the hand as it is dealt. I had to pretend an interest in something,” Clayton went on. “Therefore I chose the
Magdalene.
The supposed Mantegna. Here, down these steps. My study is on the ground floor. Let me go ahead of you. Never mind the sides, coming in. But treat the top as if it were the queen of Egypt.”

“The fake marble,” Fred said. “Right.”

“I had to give him hope I’d come back,” Clayton explained, fumbling with the door. “Let the villain believe I was toying with his bait. Meanwhile…” He’d gotten the door open and, turning on lights, led Fred and his burden into a wide hallway lined with filled bookshelves.

“Where to?” Fred asked.

“Give me an end. Let’s get it into the study,” Clay said. “Goodness, I’m all in a tremble and sweat.”

Fred lowered the chest and allowed Clayton, taking one handle, to precede him down the hall and into a study the width of the building into which they had come. The room was both spacious and cluttered. A large worktable was heaped with books, papers, and magazines. The walls were lined with bookshelves, against which a few paintings rested, on the floor, their backs turned outward. One wall was taken up by the kind of old brown leather couch that no one can ever throw away.

Clay chortled, “So the villain, flailing at will-o’-the-wisps, reaches for three million? Let us now put him out of our minds forever. Meanwhile I slip out of his trap carrying with me a prize worth more than the gross domestic product of Bulgaria!”

They put the box down on a green throw rug, next to the worktable.

“Painted on the inside, you said?” Fred flipped open the chest’s heavy lid.

“Jeekers,” Fred said. “That’s Leonardo!”

Chapter Six

Startled as he was, he’d let the top lie gently back to where it was supported by the legs of the worktable in the center of the room. The painting on the inside—that’s all you could call it—had to be looked at sideways, since its foot was at the left side of the chest. Fred shivered. It was like looking at a ticking bomb. It was spectacular, an amazing thing. The room went still and Clayton Reed disappeared in favor of the work, the subject almost grotesque, the finish exquisite in its precision.

On the left a woman in blue—the Virgin, clearly, although she bore no halo—sat in a rocky landscape struggling to contain the exuberance of a naked boy child—Jesus, but again lacking a halo—who was twisting away in order to reach for a fruit, a fig, that a crouching ape on the right was offering. The ape was hairy and so lifelike as to appear not even malevolent, but, rather, its natural amoral self. It was an ape, no more, a creature native to this wilderness.

Aside from some sparse, meticulously rendered, heraldic vegetation, the landscape was barren, stretching toward ominous overhanging rocks. Beyond the rocks, and visible between them, were glimpses of sky and choppy water. Within that dangerous wilderness a half-dozen more apes were foraging or scratching for fleas or, even, grooming each other. The paint surface was smooth, vivid with cleanly modulated color, the browns and gold of the landscape set off by the rich blue of the Virgin’s garment, the blue-green of the distant water, the ape’s russet coat with meticulous gold highlights, and the chubby ochre pinkness of the child, whose skin reflected tints from the red cushion on which the Virgin was either sitting or kneeling. The woman’s face was seductive in a way that offered not much hope. She was taken. Strap hinges, rusty with age, had been attached to the panel where, at the top, part of a toppling outcrop was obscured and, at the bottom, the spill of the Virgin’s drapery, as well as an ornamental clump of grass, were partly covered. It was, on the whole, a piece of incredible workmanship and, given the circumstances, in astonishingly good condition.

Apparently Clayton Reed was speaking, and had been for some time. “…don’t mean to impugn, I mean to say. And with you, Fred, I will not dissemble.
Cannot
dissemble, after the service you have performed, which is deeply appreciated. You may have saved my life. He struck me! He was armed. What further depredation did that man not intend? In my experience a man who is prepared to sell is equally ready to steal. Meanwhile—I don’t know your last name.”

“Taylor.”

“It does, as you say, look like a Leonardo. That fact must never leave this room. Meanwhile I don’t know you from Adam and, out of six billion people living on this sphere, the stranger who providentially appears to assist me in my hour of need, in the first second leaps to the same conclusion I did in that man’s apartment. Can it be true that Tilley could live with such a thing and understand not even that it is a painting? Simply because it is at one and the same time pressed into service as the top of a wooden chest?”

Fred shrugged.

“The world is out of joint. Except through the malevolent interference of Providence, such things should not occur. I am an innocent. Why should you not deviously be in league with him?” Clay pressed on. “It is my nature to ask. And yet, how can I be such a churl as to doubt your
bona fides?
Why do you say Leonardo? Help set my mind to rest.”

Clay had pulled out the chair that stood at the other side of the desk. He now sat there, twitching with impotent suspicion. “I’ll be off,” Fred said. “On a hunch, yours is a mind that can’t be put to rest. For an innocent, I’d say it was pretty slick the way you maneuvered this thing out of there. If you skunked the man, the man deserved it. For what it’s worth, though it’s much smaller, to me your box top has the look of da Vinci’s
Madonna of the Rocks.
The one in the Louvre, obviously. The one in London is a copy, done much later, most of it, by a kindergarten class.”

“I see,” Clayton said, concentrating on the painting before them. “It’s water in the foreground, all the way across, where the monkey is reflected. Also the thing he is holding in his, or is it her, paw? Hand?”

“The ape is male,” Fred said. “He’s discreet about it, but there’s the edge of his testicles, there, under the tail. A male ape in this position almost conveys menace, but I don’t see threat in the painting, do you? Seems pregnant with symbolism, doesn’t it? Which people are always going to read wrong. How can anyone look at this and not remember Adam and Eve? Even though the fruit’s a fig. See how it’s split? And not an apple.”

“It’s what I was born for,” Clay said, running a spotless handkerchief across his forehead. “To have such a thing in my possession. No one must know I have it. No one must know it’s here. I’d never sleep again.”

“So I’ll forget it. But I can’t make any promises for the other guy. Can Tilley find you again?” Fred asked.

“I don’t want people knowing my business. With you, who may have saved my life, I am obliged to take a leap of faith. It is why I did not even consider writing him a check,” Clay said. “I could have, and gladly, for the eight thousand dollars he asked, though to have given him what he wanted would have raised his suspicions. No, that would not have done. Had I been willing, he would have refused. In any case, even moved as I was, I knew more than to deliver my address to the man. Innocent I may be, but I am not hopelessly wet behind the ears. That man has no clue what he sold me. Because, palpably, he doesn’t know what it is. To your question: I am not listed. My number, or address. Furthermore he believes, as did you, that Reed is my first name.”

Fred yawned and turned for the door. “It was a treat to see it. Now I’ll forget I did, and you can sleep in peace.”

“Just like that?” Clay Reed said, rising to his feet and standing in almost pitiable indecision. “Overcome by events, I neglect my obligations as a host. At least the other villain offered cooking brandy. What will you take?”

“There’s nothing I want,” Fred said. “I barely want to be alive.”

The silence around them echoed the truth and the surprise of the ungainly statement. It sat in the room as wild and mocking, as seductive and as demanding, as the ape who held the broken fig.

“Don’t know where that came from,” Fred said. “It’s late. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

But the apology could not withdraw the statement. There it sat, like a turd on the carpet. You couldn’t just walk around it. It had to be dealt with, especially if it was yours. Clayton was staring at him in alarm.

Fred said, “Forget I said that. When enough people have wanted you dead enough ways for a long enough time, you start thinking they have a point.”

Clayton stepped toward him.

“It was rude. Forget I said it,” Fred said. “Deal? And I’ll forget your Leonardo.”

Clay gestured toward the couch along the wall, where a few papers and magazines lay on a Kilim rug. “Where did you train?” he asked. The room was warmed by books, some of them on shelves and others piled on the floor. The paintings that leaned against the walls, their backs turned out—those paintings could be almost anything. They might be worth looking at. An open door allowed a glimpse of another room in which were racks holding more paintings, only whose outside edges could be seen. Back of the worktable a spiral metal staircase led upward into the house proper. “Where did you train?” Clay repeated. The suspicion had gone out of his voice, to be replaced by a sympathetic curiosity.

“Here and there,” Fred told him. He shrugged. “Oh, you mean how do I happen to know a da Vinci when it bites me in the ass?”

“I’m Princeton,” Clay explained. “Then Yale.”

“And I pay attention to things I can’t control,” Fred said.