“The story I give her, if the story is good, pirates, parrots, this dive in Central Square, the G Spot, she’ll let me bring her to meet Arthur and once Arthur sees her, skin like she’s got, Arthur goes ape and sells her on a big picture maybe, he’s got a client, she’s got something gorgeous, and also the benefit, she gets her freedom.
“Also, and Arthur lets me have a finder’s fee, depending, how much of a commitment Claire makes, I get so many more hours of his time. It’s a win-win-win for everybody.
“Arthur has big ideas. And it all comes from Mr. Z. He roams around the world, Arthur does. Mr. Z, his roaming days are done. You think, looking at him, at Arthur out there, he’s looking for real estate? He’s one of those developers? No. With Arthur, what he’s looking for is skin. He’s a…what do they call it? Enfant perdu? That sounds French but it doesn’t mean anything. No. He’s walking around, what’s in his head is the picture he wants to put on the right person. It’s like he’s, when he talks about it and his eyes glaze over, maybe we’re in bed, I’m trying to get his attention…a projector shooting a picture out, that wants to land on the right person’s body, and stay there.
“Another one he describes—he says we saw it in Mr. Z’s class but who was paying attention except Arthur?—it sounds perfect for Claire if the bee on her butt can be covered or fit in, because Arthur hates competition—is knights on horseback. The horses rearing, on a pink field with roses blooming behind them in a hedge, a dead guy, spears going in all directions…”
“Paolo Ucello,” Fred said. “The Battle of San Romano.”
“What?
“I’m betting that’s the picture, The Battle of San Romano.”
“Shit, I wouldn’t know,” Kim said. “Arthur describes pictures he sees in his head, you think you’re looking at them on the person.”
“The painting was in your car when you and Arthur drove down from Nashua,” Fred said.
“All the knights and horses?”
“The one with the gremlin, the birds and fish and naked people, and the burning city,” Fred said, “that’s all over you now.”
“What if it was?” Kim said. “I have to get some sleep. Not with you here.”
“I wouldn’t mind taking a look around before I go,” Fred said.
“I looked everywhere,” Kim said. “Go ahead, if you’ll leave after, so I can sleep. Arthur’s, wherever he is, not coming back. Not tonight. Girl probably, a new back that while he’s doing it with her, all he’s thinking about is doing it to her, this other idea he has, a unicorn with hunters all around, spears, in a mess of roses…fuck him. He’s not done with me.”
Kim stayed close while Fred went through the apartment, limiting his search to any place that would accommodate a painting of the size Kim had described: the bedroom closet, back of the bureau, under the bed (Kim’s clothes on the floor next to the bed); between the funky mattress and the equally funky box springs; in the tiny rancid hall off the kitchen that led to the cluttered back stairs. If the painting was two by three feet it would fit under the couch where clients lay down for certain work, but not in a drawer, or…in short, there were not many likely places for the painting here, and Fred came up empty.
“I told you,” Kim said.
“I’ll be off,” Fred said. “He has my number—but in case Arthur wants to give me a call…” He wrote his name and number again on the note from Lexington Orono, with the message, Call me.
“Also,” Kim said, “Arthur being such a baby…” She’d walked him to the apartment door and was talking him out. “One time…So I made up my mind. This guy Lexington. If there’s money like he says. See, money is not what Arthur is into. Being a genius, and that French disease he has, the songe impure like they sing in that song of the Revolution, Arthur does not give a shit about money. Everyone else in the world could push him around if he lets them, and he will. Because all he cares about. This vision. There’s tons of money in Arthur, I know it, if he gets played right. I mean, if he plays it right, which he’ll never do on his own.
“He can’t go up to a stranger in the street and say, ‘Here’s what you need on your back: a scene of hunting, dogs, and porcupines and one guy with a stick, a girl with a net,” because the stranger will run or will deck him and run, or just deck him. Arthur needs me. And I brought him people already.
“I made up my mind, I had time, we’re talking. Arthur may not give a shit about money, but I do, and I’m Arthur’s friend. I do not say girlfriend because, fuck him, where is he? What I’m gonna do…
“Another thing, by now he owes me, big time…what I did for him. Big time. Forget Kenzo. I’m gonna go see Lexminster Oreo myself. Find out about the money. I want to get to Phoenix. Phoenix sounds like me. And Arthur, Arthur can do well in Phoenix is my bet. So I help Arthur do whatever he has to do, and get my cut. Does that make sense?”
Fred spread his hands. At the moment not a great deal made sense. He started down the stairs.
“And another thing…”
Fred turned back.
“This thing. Because you don’t look like it. You being. The painting. Could that mean money? For Arthur? I mean to say, money from you? Are you in the bidding?”
Fred said, “I wouldn’t say no.”
“Because it looks like now, the son of a bitch has stashed that painting somewhere. And me getting a cut, right? How much?”
“I’d have to see it,” Fred said. “I wouldn’t mind being the first one to see it. Before anyone talks with Oreo would be good.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
The voice was Arthur’s, again finding Fred asleep on the leather couch in his office space at Clayton’s. “Where can we meet?”
“Arthur,” Fred said into the phone. The silence confirmed it.
“Depends where you are,” Fred said. “And when.” He sat up. Seven thirty. He’d managed two hours.
“I’ve been walking. Called my place. Kim, you know Kim?”
“Right,” Fred said. “You want to meet there?
“Kim gave me your number again. I’m not going to my place right now. She’s…There’s too much…There’s too many…I’m not…”
Silence stretched out on his end.
“Wherever you want,” Fred said. “I hope not back in Nashua, but I can get there.”
“I walked across the river,” Arthur said. “Then along. There was enough light. The roads along the bank. I was walking. Trying to think, but I can’t. I’m at, right now, there’s a big drug store, Charles Circle, near the bridge where the Red Line crosses into Boston?”
“I know it,” Fred said. “In fact, I’m not all that far away. Get us a couple coffees, I’ll stop by.”
“I don’t have much money,” Arthur said.
“Give me ten minutes.” Fred described his car.
***
Fred handed a five through the window, told Arthur, “Large, black, for me,” and waited until Arthur came out again, balancing two containers. “We’ll go where I’m crashing,” Fred said.
Outside the basement door he went through the motions of tapping code into a box concealed in the ivy. Arthur Pendragon, né Schrecking, was 97 percent an unknown quantity. There was no point letting him know of Clayton’s hardheaded refusal to indulge in a security system.
The door opened directly into Fred’s office. There hadn’t been time to straighten things out of the way. The desk was heaped with books and catalogues, as was the floor at either end of the couch where Fred’s navy blanket was thrown back.
“It’s cool down here,” Arthur said, gazing around. The books he disregarded as if he were a shark and they a particularly unappetizing breed of starfish. But he took note of two paintings leaning against the bookshelf, their faces inward.
Fred said, “I told you. I like paintings.” He turned the two pictures
around, propping them side by side on the floor. For something to do, he’d been trying to make sense of them a few days ago. He’d pulled them out of the racks in the storage area that adjoined his office. Having access to the racks was one of the pleasures that accompanied working with the insufferable Clayton. Arthur squatted down to look. The smaller of the two pictures Fred wasn’t happy about. Maybe six inches by ten, it represented a still life—peaches, probably, on a plate, surrounded by background so murky it wasn’t possible to guess what, if anything, it represented. The paint had been applied to canvas, and the canvas later laid down—glued, in fact—to another canvas, the second a superior linen. It was easy—uncomfortably easy—to read the signature in the upper right corner, Renoir. But the picture was bad.
Arthur picked it up. There was no doubt about the signature—that is, about the fact that it had been put on with a stamp. The estate had applied the facsimile of the artist’s signature after his death, to pretty much anything they could find blowing around his studio, including sketches he wouldn’t have used to wrap his dog’s lunch. Things he would have destroyed, because their existence contaminated the integrity of the record. So there were known and established works with the Renoir signature that were, within the embrace of this caveat, legit. But because so many of these works were truly inferior, it left room for easy fraud by unskilled forgers.
“What do you think?” Fred asked, taking note of Arthur’s preoccupation.
“Working on skin, what you don’t get,” Arthur said, running his palm across the rough surface of the painting, “is the 3-D effect. Like here, where there’s like a crust.” He feinted toward a highlight with a fingernail. Fred held the hand back quickly.
“Guy I work for’s kind of picky,” Fred explained.
“Whatever,” Arthur said. “You look at the pictures like what Mr. Z had, printed, it’s all smooth. You don’t get confused. If you want—and it would be a stupid tattoo, I would never do it—but say you want to do these fruits, I guess they are, rotten, places where the paint crusted before it dried, like a scab? The only way I can think to do it is raising scars on the person, which takes forever and then you can’t get color onto the scar, it’s dead. It’s what you do? Work with these? It’s here, your work? What’s the work?”
“For one thing, is the painting you’re holding a fake?” Fred said.
“It’s ugly. Who cares if it’s a fake?” Arthur’s reasonable point was much to Fred’s way of thinking. But the fact that the picture was ugly wouldn’t kill it in the marketplace if it could be demonstrated as legitimately by Renoir. In the right sale or circumstance it would command as much as a hundred grand from the buyer who wanted that brand name to display. Clay could sell it and use the proceeds to buy five other pieces. Arthur put the picture back on the floor, its face hidden again. “That’s better.” If the signature, Renoir, meant anything to Arthur, the fact didn’t register.
The second painting, also French, was rock solid. On canvas, roughly a foot square, it had been waiting in the racks while Clayton took his agonizing time to decide how to frame it. It was a dark and crusty Daumier Harlequin reading his newspaper in the wings, tilting the pages so as to catch the glow from the footlights. It was not in the Daumier literature, and wouldn’t be any time soon. The signature in red paint was fine. Clayton had landed it in a private sale. He would not say even what country he had bought it in.
Arthur folded his arms and studied the picture before he shook his head and said, standing, “Doesn’t do it for me. The guy, you can see he means well. Artist who painted it. But there’s no detail. When you get right down to it, it’s out of focus. Well, you can read the name of the paper, I’ll give him that. But with a paintbrush, what can he do? He’s screwed. That’s why I like a needle.”
Fred pulled his chair away from the desk and sat, leaving the couch for Arthur, who figured that out and sat. Fred pried his coffee open and watched Arthur doctoring his. He waited. Let Arthur figure a way into the next scene. Whatever he adopted as his opening gambit, Arthur would be bound to reveal something. As far as Fred’s position was concerned, everyone knew what that was, at least to start with—he wanted a look at that painting.
Fred took a drink, rehearsing what he had so far, and how it would look as an appendix in the revised updated Hieronymus Bosch catalogue. A Paradise for Fools [the name Fred had assigned the painting he was chasing]. Date: unknown [possibly 1500]. Support: oil on wood [perhaps poplar?], yay by yay inches [ca. 24 x 36]. Location: unknown. Provenance: unknown, thence to Zoltan Zagoriski, recently deceased, and/or Mary Zagoriski, married, of Nashua, NH, [Mary having removed to New York?], thence to Tippy Artoonian, also of Nashua, NH, thence [the issues of actual or legal ownership or title being unresolved] to Arthur Schrecking [aka Arthur Pendragon] of Cambridge, MA, with, as an interesting side issue, the interference of Ruthie Hardin of Nashua, NH [aka Kim Weatherall of Cambridge, MA]. Subject: A scene reminiscent of aspects of the Prado’s triptych known as The Garden of Earthly Delights, including a version of the central iconic image from the right-hand, or “Hell,” panel: a hollow eggshell with two heads and the feet of a chicken. For further details readers are referred to the collection in progress on the skin of Ruthie Hardin, aka Kim Weatherall.
Arthur said, “I can’t keep it straight in my head.”
“We’ve got time,” Fred said. “At least I do. I don’t know your schedule.”
Arthur scratched at his thick mop of red hair and the action brought to his notice the glasses he seemed surprised to find on his face. He took them off and cleaned them on the lower end of his regulation white T-shirt, then put them on again, wincing as if they hurt his face.
Among the questions Fred was not asking: Did Tippy call you? (But he wouldn’t have been home, would he?) Have you talked with the dealer Lexington Orono? Did he offer a deal? Did you sell him the painting? How come did Sammy Flash move out? Is it relevant? When you first telephoned, two days back, you were alarmed about something and you thought I might be part of it. What spooked you? Kenzo, wasn’t it? How much control does Kim have over you, and why? Oh, and also, where is the painting?
Chapter Thirty-eight
Arthur said, “Everything should be simple and easy.”
Fred had no argument to offer.
“Instead…” Arthur said. He let the idea dwindle away to nothing. Come to that, it was a pretty much nothing idea at its point of origin. He tried again, “Once you’ve said one thing, and then something else, and then I don’t know, and there’s loyalty, and none of my business, and I don’t care anyway, and sometimes it’s all too much. Something else happens. And now Mr. Z is dead.”
“He gave you your start,” Fred tried.
That was a mistake. Arthur glowered. “Him? All those beautiful things? What he does, he holds them hostage. Mr. Z does not give a rat’s ass for anything except cornering a girl and making her life better for her until he can get close enough she’s bumping up against him. She’s a hostage too, until then she gets an A.
“Me, he flunked. Gave me my start? They made me take business math in the summer, make up the credits. Slimy son of a bitch. He brings in these beautiful things, lets them loose in the room, like they have wings, these pictures, like beautiful birds. People waiting for lunch, they don’t, he doesn’t give a shit either. What he’s doing, we’re waiting for lunch, detention if you fuck up. Him, he’s waiting for his paycheck. Smoking in the hall. Because he’s too good for us. And he passes around these beautiful things he has, that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about, and, the end of the period, he collects them and what we were supposed to write which he does not have to read. Kids write anything. He uses it for attendance.
“It’s art, he says. Be creative. Meaning who gives a rat’s ass?
“She almost wouldn’t talk to me. I figured out, well, because that’s what she said, what Kim thinks, I’m with another girl.
Kim’s jealous and she’s mad and she has my keys and I’m not even finished, my big project, I want as much as she does, it’s like, why I’m alive. I figured, she’s not in the place she’s staying, maybe she was with me. In my place. And I don’t…I can’t…they…Shit, most of the time I didn’t even go.
“She almost wouldn’t tell me—see I didn’t bring your number with me—you can tell her, you remember, I remember that night you came by. Two girls. I was working—maybe you don’t remember?”
“I recollect the scene,” Fred said.
“The two girls. Beth is one,” Arthur plowed on, “that I had started with, the two guys blowing flowers while they fly…”
“Got it. From the left side of the Botticelli Venus. The winds.”
“If you say so. Yes, that’s what you said. It doesn’t matter. Listen, that girl Beth. Beth is with Eva. Eva was the other one? That was getting ink when you came? You remember?”
“I do,” Fred assured him.
“Because if it was me sometimes I get so blown away by the picture, I forget who it’s on, or what, or whatever. Anyhow, Eva was at school. Central. With…you remember, all that red hair she has, really red, not like mine?”
“I promise you, I remember Eva,” Fred said.
“It’s true we had a thing in high school,” Arthur said. “Eva and I did. So what? Everyone had a thing with someone, and mostly it didn’t mean squat. Anyhow, Eva’s with Beth. You saw that. She’s crazy and an asshole and I told her but what she decided, Kim, if I’m not home, I must be sleeping with Eva. I can tell you the only way I’d get through to Eva now is first I’d have to get past Beth and, besides, that’s all over, years ago.
“So. Can you tell her?”
“What? Tell who what?”
“Tell Kim that Beth was there that night when I was doing Eva’s ink, the whole time, and you could see, and anyone can see, Eva and Beth are the thing. Not me. That’s all I can think of. Or I’ll never finish it,” Arthur said. “With Kim.”
A Paradise for Fools Page 18