by Irwin Shaw
The old lady opened a heavy oak door and we went into a dining room lit by a heavy crystal chandelier over the table. A huge bald man with a heavy paunch and a beard like a New Bedford whaling captain’s was standing waiting for us, dressed in a creased corduroy suit that included a pair of short knickers, under which the man’s massive calves were brilliant in red wool stockings. Behind him, unframed, lit by the chandelier, hung a dark painting pinned by artist’s tacks to the plain, yellowish wall. The painting was of a madonna and child, perhaps thirty inches wide and a yard long.
The man greeted us in German, with a little bow, as the old lady went out, closing the door behind her.
“Unfortunately, Herr Steubel,” Fabian said, “Professor Grimes does not understand German.”
“In that case, we will speak English, of course,” Herr Steubel said. He spoke with an accent, but it was not heavy. “I am happy you could come. Could I offer you gentlemen some refreshment?”
“It’s good of you, Herr Steubel,” Fabian said, “but I’m afraid we haven’t the time. Professor Grimes has a call to make at seven o’clock to Italy. And after that to America.”
Herr Steubel blinked and rubbed the palms of his hands together, as though they were sweating. “I trust the professor can get through to Italy promptly,” he said. “The telephone system in that misguided country …” He didn’t finish his sentence. I had the distinct impression that he didn’t want anybody to call anywhere.
“If I may,” I said, taking a step toward the painting on the wall.
“Please.” Herr Steubel stepped out of the way.
“You have the documents, of course?” I said.
He rubbed his hands together again, only harder this time. “Of course. But not with me. They are in my … my home in … in Florence.”
“I see,” I said coldly.
“It would be a matter of a few days,” Steubel said. “And I understood from Herr Fabian that there is a time element …”
He turned toward Fabian. “Didn’t you tell me the gentleman in question was scheduled to leave by the end of the week?”
“I may have,” Fabian said. “I honestly don’t remember.”
“In any case,” Herr Steubel said, “here is the painting. I am sure I do not have to tell the professor that it speaks very eloquently for itself.”
I could hear him breathing heavily as I stepped up to the painting and stared at it. If it was Fabian’s plan to make the man nervous, he was succeeding admirably.
After about a minute of silent scrutiny, I shook my head and turned around. “Of course I may be wrong,” I said, “but after the most superficial inspection, I would have to say that it is not a Tintoretto. It may be the school of Tintoretto, but I doubt even that.”
“Professor Grimes!” Fabian said, his voice pained. “Surely you can’t believe—in one minute—in artificial light …”
Herr Steubel’s breath was coming in short, labored gasps and he was leaning against the dining-room table for support.
“Mr. Fabian,” I said crisply, “you brought me along to give my opinion. I’ve given it.”
“But we owe it to Herr Steubel …” Fabian was hunting for words and pulling furiously at his moustache. “Out of common courtesy … I mean … give it a few hours’ thought. Come back tomorrow. In daylight. Why … why … this is frivolous. Frivolous. Herr Steubel says he has documents …”
“Documents,” Herr Steubel moaned. “Berenson himself has attested to this painting. Berenson …” I had no notion who Berenson was, but I took a chance. “Berenson is dead, Herr Steubel,” I said.
“Ven he wass alife,” Herr Steubel said.
The chance had paid off. My credentials as an art expert had been confirmed.
“Of course, you could seek other opinions,” I said, “I could give a list of certain colleagues of mine.”
“I haff no need of any damned colleagues of yours, Professor,” Herr Steubel shouted. His accent had thickened considerably. He loomed over me. For a moment I thought he was going to hit me with one of his huge, clublike hands. “I know what I know. I don’t need any damned small-time, barbaric Americans to tell me about Tintoretto.”
“I’m afraid I must leave now,” I said. “As you remarked, it is difficult to put calls through to Italy and there may be delays. Are you coming with me, Mr. Fabian?”
“Yes, I’m coming with you.” Fabian made it sound like a curse. “I’ll call you later, Herr Steubel. We’ll arrange something for tomorrow, when we can speak more calmly.”
“Come alone,” was all that Herr Steubel said as we opened the dining-room door and went out into the dark hall. The little old lady in the lace cap was standing just a few feet away, as though she had been trying to listen to what had been said in the dining room. She let us out of the house without a word. Even if she couldn’t have understood what had been spoken in the dining room, the tones she had overheard and the brevity of the conference must have made an impression on her.
Fabian slammed the car door behind him when he got behind the wheel of the Jaguar. I closed my door gently as I slid into my seat. Fabian didn’t say anything as he started the engine and revved it savagely. He had to back into a driveway to make the turn to go down the hill toward the lake. I heard the tinkling of glass as he slammed the rear light into a low stone fence. I said nothing. He didn’t say a word either until we reached the lake. Then he parked the car and turned the motor off. “Now,” he said, keeping his voice even with an obvious effort, “what was all that about?”
“What was what about?” I asked innocently.
“How the hell do you know whether a Tintoretto is a fake or not?”
“I don’t,” I said. “But I was getting bad vibes from that fat Herr Steubel.”
“Vibes! We risk losing twenty-five thousand dollars and you talk about vibes!” Fabian snorted.
“He’s a crook, Herr Steubel.”
“What’re you and I? Trappist monks?”
“If we’ve turned out to be crooks, it’s by accident,” I said, not completely honestly. “Herr Steubel’s a crook by birth, by inclination, and by training.”
“You say that.” Fabian was on the defensive now. “You see a man for three minutes and you invent a whole history for him. I’ve done business with him before and he’s always fulfilled his obligations. If we’d gone through with the deal, I guarantee you he would have come across with our money.”
“Probably,” I admitted. “We might also have wound up in jail.”
“For what? Transporting a Tintoretto, even a fake one, across Switzerland, isn’t a criminal offense. One thing I can’t stand in a man, Douglas, and I must tell you to your face, is timidity. And if you want to know, I happen to believe the man’s telling the truth. It is a Tintoretto, Professor Grimes of the University of Missouri.”
“You through, Miles?” I asked.
“For the moment. I’m not guaranteeing the future.”
“Transporting a Tintoretto, even a fake one, isn’t, as you say, a criminal offense,” I said. “But arranging for the sale of a stolen Tintoretto is. And I’m not having any of it.”
“How do you know it’s stolen?” Fabian was sullen now.
“In my bones. You do, too.”
“I don’t know anything,” Fabian said defensively.
“Did you ask?”
“Of course not. That doesn’t concern me. And it shouldn’t concern you. What we don’t know can’t hurt us. If you’ve decided to back out, back out now. I’m going into the hotel and I’m calling Herr Steubel and I’m telling him I’ll be there tomorrow morning to pick up the painting.”
“You do that,” I said levelly, “and I’ll have the police waiting for you and that old art lover, Herr Steubel, at his ancestral mansion when you arrive.”
“You’re kidding, Douglas,” Fabian said incredulously.
“Try me and see. Look—everything I’ve done since I left the Hotel St. Augustine has been legal, or approximately leg
al. Including everything I’ve done with you. If I’m a criminal, I’m a onetime criminal. If they ever can pin anything on me, it will only be evasion of income tax and nobody takes that seriously. I’m not going to jail for anybody or anything. Get that absolutely straight.”
“If I can prove to you that the picture is legitimate and that it isn’t stolen …”
“You can’t and you know you can’t.”
Fabian sighed, started the motor. “I’m calling Steubel and I’m telling him I’ll be at his house at ten A.M.”
“The police will be there,” I said.
“I don’t believe you,” Fabian said, staring ahead at the road.
“Believe me, Miles,” I said. “Believe me.”
When we got to the hotel, we didn’t say a word to each other. Fabian went off to the telephone and I went to the bar. I knew he would finally have to join me. I was on my second whiskey when he came into the bar. He looked more sober than I had ever seen him. He sat down on a stool next to mine at the bar. “A bottle of Moët and Chandon,” he said to the barman. “And two glasses.” He still didn’t say anything to me. When the barman poured the champagne for us, he turned to me, lifting his glass. “To us,” he said. He was smiling broadly. “I didn’t talk to Herr Steubel,” he said.
“That’s good,” I said. “I haven’t called the police yet.”
“I spoke to the old lady in Italian,” he said. “She was crying. Ten minutes after we left, the police came and arrested her boss. They took the painting. It was a Tintoretto, all right. It was stolen sixteen months ago from a private collection outside Winterthur.” He laughed wildly. “I knew there had to be some reason I took you with me to Lugano, Professor Grimes.”
We clinked glasses and again Fabian’s maniacal laughter rang out, making everyone in the bar stare at him curiously.
16
OUR BUSINESS DONE IN LUGANO, we set out the next morning in the new dark blue Jaguar for Gstaad. I drove this time and enjoyed the sweet performance of the purring machine as we made our way back over the mountains and then sped through winter sunshine through the gentle rolling hills between Zurich and Bern. Fabian sat beside me, contentedly humming a theme that I recognized from the Brahms concerto we had heard a few nights before. From time to time he chuckled. I imagine he was thinking of Herr Steubel in the Lugano jail.
The towns we passed through were clean and orderly, the fields geometrically precise, the buildings, with their great barns and sweeping, slanted eaves, witnesses to a solid, substantial, peaceful life, firmly rooted in a prosperous past. It was a landscape for peace and continuity, and you could not imagine armies charging over it, fugitives fleeing through it, creditors or sheriffs scouring it. I firmly shut out the thought that, if the policemen we occasionally passed and who politely waved us through the immaculate streets knew the truth of the history of the two gentlemen in the gleaming automobile, they would arrest us on sight and escort us immediately to the nearest border.
Since there was no possible way Fabian could risk any more of our money while we were on the road, I was freed, at least for the day, from the erratic nervousness, that fluctuation between trembling hope and taut anxiety that came over me whenever I knew that Fabian was near a telephone or a bank. I hadn’t had to take an Alka-Seltzer that morning and knew that I was going to be pleasantly hungry at lunchtime. As usual, Fabian knew of a beautiful restaurant in Bern and promised me a memorable meal.
The gliding, steady motion of the car, as it so often does, set up agreeable sexual currents in my groin, and as I drove I rehearsed in my mind the gentler moments of my night in Florence with Lily and remembered with pleasure the soft voice of Eunice awaiting me at the end of the day’s journey, the childish freckles across her tilted British nose, her slender throat and nineteenth-century bosom. If she had been at my side at the moment, instead of Fabian, I was sure I would not have hesitated to drive into the courtyard of one of the charming timbered inns that we kept passing, with names like Gasthaus Lowen and Hirschen and Hotel Drei Koenig, and take a room for the afternoon. Well, I comforted myself, pleasure delayed is pleasure increased, and stepped a little harder on the accelerator.
As I glimpsed snow on fields high up from the road, I realized that I was even looking forward to skiing again. The days in the heavy atmosphere of Zurich and the dealings with lawyers and bankers had made me long for clear mountain air and violent exercise.
“Have you ever skied in Gstaad?” Fabian asked me. The sight of the snow must have set his thoughts going along the same track as mine.
“No,” I said. “Only Vermont and St. Moritz. But I’ve heard it’s rather easy skiing.”
“You can get killed there,” he said. “Just like anyplace.”
“How do the girls ski?”
“Like English,” he said. “Once more into the breach, dear friends …” He chuckled. “They’ll keep you moving. They’re not like Mrs. Sloane.”
“Don’t remind me of her.”
“Didn’t quite work out, did it?”
“That would be one way of putting it.”
“I wondered what you bothered with her for. I must say, even before I knew you at all, I didn’t think she was your type.”
“She isn’t. Actually,” I said, “it was your fault.”
Fabian looked surprised. “How was that?”
“I thought Sloane was you,” I said.
“What?”
“I thought he’d taken my bag.” I explained about the brown shoes and the red wool tie in the train from Chur.
“Oh, you poor man,” Fabian said. “A week out of your life with Mrs. Sloane. I do feel guilty now. Did she stick her tongue in your ear?”
“More or less.”
“I had three nights of that, too. Last year. How did you find out it wasn’t Sloane?”
“I’d rather not say.” As far as I was concerned the story of Sloane’s discovering me, with a cast on my perfectly sound leg, trying to put my foot into his size-eight shoe and throwing my shoe and Mrs. Sloane’s watch out into the Alpine night was going to die with me.
“You’d rather not say.” Fabian sounded pettish. “We’re partners, remember?”
“I remember. Some other time,” I said. “Perhaps. When we both need a good laugh.”
“I imagine that time will come,” he said softly.
He was silent for a while. We sped along through admirably preserved Swiss pine forests.
“Let me ask you a question, Douglas,” he said finally. “Have you any ties in America?”
I didn’t answer immediately. I thought of Pat Minot, of Evelyn Coates, my brother Hank, of Lake Champlain, the hills of Vermont, room 602. As an afterthought, of Jeremy Hale and Miss Schwartz. “Not really,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“Frankly,” he said, “because of Eunice.”
“What about her? Has she said anything?”
“No. But you must admit—to say the least—you’ve been most reticent.”
“Has she complained?”
“Not to me anyway,” he said. “But Lily has hinted that she’s puzzled. After all, she flew all the way from England …” He shrugged. “You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.” I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.
“You do like girls, Douglas?”
“Oh, come on, now.” I thought of my brother in San Diego and took a turn in the road more sharply than necessary.
“Just asking. These days one never knows. She is an attractive girl, don’t you think?”
“I think. Listen, Miles,” I said, more hotly than I would have wished, “as far as I understand, our partnership doesn’t include my hiring out to stand at stud.”
“That’s a crude way of putting it.” Surprisingly, he chuckled. “Although, I must confess, in my own case, from time to time I haven’t been averse to the practice myself.”
“Christ, Miles,” I said, “I’ve only known the girl a few days.” Even as I said it I mourned for the h
ypocrisy into which he was forcing me. I had only known Lily four hours before I had gone to her room in Florence. As for Evelyn Coates … “If you must know,” I said, “I don’t like the role of public fucker.” Finally, I was approaching the truth. “I guess I was brought up differently from you.”
“Come now,” he said. “Lowell, Massachusetts, isn’t all that different from Scranton.”
“Who’re you kidding, Miles?” I snorted. “They wouldn’t find a trace of Lowell in you if they went in with drills.”
“You’d be surprised,” he said softly. “You really would be surprised. Douglas,” he asked, “do you believe me when I tell you that I’ve grown fond of you, that I have your best interests at heart?”
“Partially,” I said.
“To put it more cynically,” he said, “especially when they coincide with my best interests?”
“I’ll go along with that,” I said. “Part of the way. What are you driving at now?”
“I think we ought to put you in the marriage market.” His tone was flat, as though it was a decision that he had worked over and had come to after hard thought.
“You’re missing a lot of beautiful scenery,” I said.
“I’m serious. Listen to me carefully. You’re thirty-three, am I right?”
“Right.”
“One way or another in the next year or two you’re bound to get married.”
“Why?”
“Because people do. Because you’re fairly good-looking. Because you’re going to seem like a rich young man. Because some girl will want you as her husband and will pick the right moment to make her move. Because as you’ve told me, you’ve had enough of being lonely. Because you’ll finally want children. Does all that sound reasonable?”
I remembered, painfully, the sense of deprivation, jealousy, loss that I had felt when I had called Jeremy Hale’s home and his daughter had answered the phone and the pure young voice had called, “Daddy, it’s for you.”
“Reasonable enough,” I admitted.
“All I’m suggesting is that you shouldn’t leave it to blind chance, as most idiots do. Control it.”