A Paradise for Fools

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “Right,” Fred said. “Sure. I’ll tell her. Happy to. Next time I stop by Cut - Rate - Cuts.”

  Arthur explained, “People get ideas.”

  Fred let a silence develop until the silence seemed inefficient. It wasn’t pregnant, but vacant. Arthur had drifted into deep space. Fred said, “I get the impression you’re in trouble.”

  “I’m not like Kenzo Petersen,” Arthur said—not responding, but coming out of whatever cloud he’d been in. “Kenzo, before he puts the needle in, he likes to put his needle in, the way he says it. That’s not me.”

  “Got it,” Fred said.

  “Man, woman, boy, girl, it doesn’t matter,” Arthur said. “It’s a Zen thing with Kenzo.”

  “Jeekers!” Fred said. “That’s Zen too?”

  “Kenzo’s into Zen in a big way. The rest of it, I don’t want to…”

  “Listen,” Fred said. “On another subject. We’re here, everything’s quiet, what I’m going to do—I give you a pencil and a clean sheet of paper, you sit down at my desk, and draw me that painting. I’ll give you a hundred dollars for it. That fair?”

  “Fuck that. For the painting?”

  “For the picture you’ll draw of the painting.” Fred began clearing space on his desk.

  “I don’t draw with a pencil,” Arthur said.

  “A pen, then,” Fred said.

  “Ball point? I won’t draw with that,” Arthur said. “Ball point. That’s grease.”

  “It’s what I’ve got,” Fred said. Clayton would have a fountain pen—but with him in Lugano or wherever he had been diverted after the wedding.

  “Whatever you want,” Fred said. “You don’t carry your own pen? You insist on a fountain pen, but you don’t carry…”

  “How am I gonna carry a fountain pen?” Arthur demanded, gesturing toward the blank and pocket-less flat chest clad in Fruit-of-the-Loom.

  Fred said, “You’ll be offended if I offer you, say two hundred to draw the thing with a pencil.”

  “I don’t draw with a pencil,” Arthur said. He kept it reasonable, as if he were explaining to a two-year-old that humming birds don’t swim, or breathe fire. “You want to see that painting. That’s all you want. I don’t know where it is. Besides up here.” He tapped his head hard enough to shake out a thin scattering of dust or dandruff.

  “Listen,” Fred began.

  “I don’t have it,” Arthur said. “People were…and I couldn’t think…and I have it anyway, up here, is all I need, and Kim. The goal is Kim. Finishing Kim. You are going to settle Kim down for me, yes? It’s what I live for. I’m not finished. That was a promise?”

  “I’ll talk to Kim,” Fred promised. Talking with Arthur was like climbing up and down three toothless ladders all at the same time, none of which might lead anywhere. “Listen,” Fred said.

  “Kim’s pissed. Wants to sell that painting, but I don’t know where it is. She thinks I’m lying. Trying to figure out where I hid it.”

  “Listen…” Fred said.

  “And don’t offer me money. What everyone doesn’t understand,” Arthur said, “is I don’t want money. I don’t want money. I don’t want it.” He shuddered and pressed his hands against his ears.

  Fred said, “I’m the same way. Maybe not as much, but I do understand. I take it back about the hundred dollars, unless you can use it.”

  “It’s confusing,” Arthur said. “Money. It’s like a foreign language you don’t want to know. That everything they say in it you don’t want to hear. Like knock-knock jokes.

  “Flash told him where I was,” Arthur said. “Has to be. The old guy I was letting work outside my place. That’s all I can figure. Kenzo calls me, so he has my number, obviously, so therefore Flash gave him my number. Anyway, who else would? Says, How’s tricks? Like everything’s suddenly fine, he’s not gonna beat my head in like he said. Instead, he’s got money for me. For this fucking painting, he says, that nobody ever cared squat about.”

  “Kenzo,” Fred said.

  “That night. Then you called. Money,” Arthur said. “The only thing makes most people ever stop thinking about money is sex, and most of the time even then they’re thinking, what they’re thinking, is, sex, sure; but how much can I get for it? Or how much can I get it for?” He noticed his coffee and took a big drink from it. It settled him into a tremor that was comforting in that its cause was physical, and not spiritual.

  “I’ll tell you the truth, Arthur,” Fred said. “You and I are brothers at least this far. I hate it when art and money get confused. It happens all the time. Most people can’t even see the art. The money’s in the way.”

  “Like drugs,” Arthur said. “Which I can’t do because I disappear, but other people…you see, the TV in the G Spot, or Kim has one—I don’t want one; TV is on, I disappear—there’s a drug bust, all they’ll say, the cops, the reporters, ‘And in the trunk of the Buick le Sabre was a stash of heroin with a street value of three hundred thousand dollars.’ Not how many people could get high on that for how long, maybe the entire city of Providence, Rhode Island, for a year. Or, I don’t care. What color was it? The le Sabre. What else was in the trunk?”

  “How much did Kenzo offer for the painting?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember. Too much. He said so much money, if I didn’t already know he was lying when he called me, said everything’s great, how are you? I knew it was a lie when he said what he’d pay me for the painting. But he’s a liar anyway. It’s a Zen thing. Once you’re that into Zen, everything is true.

  “What I know is, he found me, and what he said he wanted to do to me, that’s what he still wants to do. I’d be crazy, I didn’t believe that. That’s what Kenzo wants. Same as he wanted before.”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Arthur said, “Then, when I got around to looking for it, it wasn’t there.”

  “After I was at your place,” Fred said. “The painting, yes? The other night? You were working?”

  “Right. And you, I was already upset, Kenzo calling, then here you are, a stranger, suddenly you’re after the same thing, I thought you wanted ink? Your note. You said you loved the Piero. Then you’re here, suddenly you want the painting too, like Kenzo said he wanted and I didn’t believe him? Big as you are? Wouldn’t you be scared? So I threw you out, and then I went out later, get some air, I get, when I’m working…and then I got back, Beth and Eva had gone. I was longer than I maybe thought. I looked under the bed, thinking what Kenzo said, and you being there, it wasn’t there. So they maybe have it. Took it. Eva and Beth. I’m rid of it anyway. It’s not my problem. It’s not like it was mine. Or, I don’t know, they could give it to Kim except she’s mad at Eva for the reason I told you, which is not a reason.”

  “And you’re afraid of Kenzo Petersen,” Fred prompted.

  “Bastard said he was going to send someone,” Arthur said. “You ever see the people he has coming by? That he could send? You bet your ass I’m afraid.”

  “Would Kenzo do that to Mr. Z?”

  Arthur said, “It was an accident.”

  “Somebody went over him three times,” Fred said. “Not a Zen thing, not even by Kenzo’s definition. You know the guy. Kenzo. What do you think?”

  “Coffee. I haven’t eaten. I’ve got the shakes.” Arthur took another trembling drink.

  “Let’s go out. Maybe find a fountain pen.”

  ***

  They mixed with the late breakfast crowd at Rudolph’s diner on Charles Street. It was an easy walk, and Fred was not inclined to take Arthur upstairs and cook him eggs in Clayton’s kitchen, letting him look around. Arthur was too loose a cannon. A couple of inquiries, as they passed likely spots, convinced them that there’d be no fountain pen available unless they happened on a stationery store. Too specialized a requirement. That brainstorm would ha
ve to wait before it could be realized.

  They sat at the counter. Fred watched Arthur tuck away a more than hearty ration of sausage, eggs, and pancakes with butter and syrup. “We’ll talk about something else until we come out,” Fred had said before they went in. “Not Kenzo and Mr. Z, OK? With people around? Or the other things we’ve been talking about.”

  “OK by me,” Arthur had said.

  They ate in silence, therefore, aside from occasional conversation between Fred and Rudolph, who was busy at the grill. “More scrapple?” Rudolph offered at one point, and Fred obliged. But Arthur had no conversation. Not sports. Not motorcycles. Women. Wildlife. Movies. Nothing. Arthur ate.

  Stepping out again onto the sidewalk, heading back to Mountjoy—Arthur had put himself into Fred’s hands—Fred picked up where he had left off, more or less, at least from the point of view of where he hoped he was going. “Kenzo got the idea, talking to you, that you might hand the painting over to him. Is that right?”

  “A tough guy who gets his way,” Arthur said, “he’s gonna hear what he expects to hear, most of the time.”

  “Afterwards, after I’d been there, after Eva and Beth took off while you were gone, when you came back, you found out the painting wasn’t there,” Fred said. “When had you last seen it?”

  “I figured, I’m free. Then next thing, I started thinking,” Arthur said. The higher end shops were starting to open their doors—places whose customers can afford to sleep late. Arthur gave them not a glance, even the shops with works of art in their windows.

  “Whoever Kenzo sent would find you didn’t have it after all,” Fred said. “And be, let’s say, disappointed. Or figure you had it but you changed your mind. Maybe wanted a better deal.”

  In fact the someone Kenzo had sent was Stephanie. She had brought with her a different kind of backup persuasion—not violence, unless you counted sex as violence. She’d said nothing about money—not even when she was under the misapprehension that in Fred, she had found a larger-than-life-sized Arthur, well worth persuading from her point of view.

  “I told him I didn’t want any fucking money,” Arthur said. “Then I hadda, it wasn’t mine, exactly, and Tippy and I aren’t, if I call her…that would mean Mr. Z again, because that’s where she was. Maybe he would say the painting was still his? Like Kim said he could say. Her opinion. So we hadda…I don’t know.”

  They turned up Beacon Hill on Mountjoy and Boston immediately became quieter, shadier, greener, less diverse. More brick, more history, more ivy. Fred said, “Mrs. Z. When she took off…”

  “Yeah,” Arthur said. “If Eva took it out of my place, why wouldn’t she give it to Kenzo? Then I’m home free.” He stopped on the sidewalk facing uphill, disregarding gravity and studying the question. “But how would Eva know Kenzo wants it? I get confused. Or no, knowing Beth like I do, what Eva would do, Beth would sell it to Kenzo. They were there when Kenzo called me, yes? Or was that before? They saw how upset I was. I can’t remember.”

  Arthur started walking again, Fred at his elbow. He stopped abruptly. “I talk while I work,” he said. “But I don’t listen. You came to my place. You asked about the painting. I threw you out. Did—see what I thought, why I was upset, when you mentioned Piero, I thought Piero was the one Kenzo was sending. Or you were Piero. Is that what I thought? I’m confused.”

  Arthur started walking again, in a daze. Fred steered him left at the walkway to Clayton’s building, and down the stairs to the basement entrance; went through the charade again of punching the security code into the ivy. Arthur, thinking, paid no heed. Inside again, and seated on the couch, he asked himself aloud, “Did I mention how Kenzo offered money for that picture? Did I remember how much? Talking to Beth and Eva? While I was working? To keep them quiet? I might do that.”

  The effort required to keep thinking in a straight line exhausted him. Fred prompted, “Eva, being from Nashua, part of your crowd in the old days. She’d know Kenzo.”

  Arthur turned, stretched out on the couch, said, “Do you mind?” and slept so instantaneously it seemed he had been shot, except that he continued to breathe, deeply and regularly.

  It was Flash who had told Kenzo how to find Arthur. Even though both Arthur and Flash had reason to keep out of Kenzo’s sight.

  Sitting at his desk across from the sleeping Arthur, Fred called the house in Charlestown.

  Morgan again on that end, answering as he did with the single word, “Morgan.”

  “Fred,” Fred said. “Checking in.”

  “Right,” Morgan said. “Nothing going on. Beyond it’s getting hot.”

  Fred said, “I can’t talk now. That guy upstairs?”

  “No problems.”

  “Can you expand on that?”

  “Haven’t heard anything,” Morgan said. “Haven’t smelled smoke. Or we’d throw him out.”

  “He’s there? Put him on, would you? ”

  “I’ll check,” Morgan said. “Can’t say I’ve seen him. Flash, right?”

  “Right,” Fred said. Arthur slept on. He had two amazing talents. He had such total recall of a picture that he could draw it accurately from memory with a fountain pen. And he could sleep on a dime. The books on the desk that exposed his own interest in Hieronymus Bosch, Fred moved downwards in the piles while he waited. No point dropping that name into the mix. As far as Fred knew, Arthur had never encountered the name Hieronymus Bosch. But he happened to be the world’s sole living expert on one of his missing paintings.

  “Not here,” Morgan said.

  “His bag? No, he’d have that with him. Listen, he left a pair of pants on the radiator, drying. Did you notice…?”

  “Lemme check.”

  Fred pulled out the desk’s top drawers and fumbled through them. Clay worked here sometimes. He favored fountain pens, as Arthur did, though the ones Clay used, like Danae, tended to have been visited by a shower of gold. There might be a spare.

  No luck, but Fred found a deposed queen’s ransom in paper clips, pencil stubs, and rubber bands.

  “All present and correct,” Morgan said into the Charlestown end of the line.

  “The pants are there? Brown corduroy?”

  “Dry as a bone.”

  Chapter Forty

  Sammy Flash had left town.

  “Rassle around,” Fred said. “Would you, Morgan? See if anyone in the place talked with the guy. Is anything missing?”

  “Will do,” Morgan said. “Where can I reach you?”

  “I’m moving,” Fred said. “I’ll call back when I can. If he left a note, you’d see it.”

  “There’s nowhere to hide a note in your room,” Morgan pointed out. “You live up there like a hermit nun.”

  Fred let Arthur sleep for an hour, amusing himself by sketching, in pencil, badly, what he could recall of the isolated images he had seen here and there on Kim’s body. He could not fit them together into anything resembling even the nightmare-like coherence of Hieronymus Bosch at his average best. For Bosch a painting’s surface was like a stage set whose perspective was forced and undependable, racing back to a horizon line that might or might not give way to sky; more accurately, the crowded surface might not be relieved by sky at all. The surface itself, on which humans, demons, animals and apparitions wandered, was treacherously riddled not only by water features: rivers, lakes, and bays—but effectively also by the kinds of trap door that, on a stage, can open to admit a dead man into the action, or gape suddenly to receive a living person into a fiery pit that snaps shut over her. A river transparent enough to fish in suddenly turns to ice, and cracks open on death. A black pool, opaque lens, an ellipse without the power to reflect, gives up creatures who may have crawled all the way from the opposite side of the—what did Bosch think we live on, a disk? a dish? a sphere?

  All Fred could see from his know
n works was that Bosch recognized that the young earth, during its first days of genesis, had a circumference. Because he drew it that way, as if it were either a disk or a ball (either one has a circumference), with its mountains separating reluctantly from its oceans. The volume enclosed by the circumference was not important. More to the point, at least as far as his myth-making symbols were concerned, Bosch saw no clear line of demarcation between his homeland in Flanders and either paradise or hell.

  Flash forward in time and carry with you the mind from which Bosch viewed the world he lived and painted in. Put him in Nashua, New Hampshire. Give him a week to accommodate himself to the passage of five hundred years: the appearance of fire engines, donut shops, super highways, buildings higher than four stories, Western clothing, girls walking around in reasonable comfort in next to nothing, a multiplicity of openly professed religions.

  For Bosch, the entrance to hell could open back of the Luck-Key Car Wash. Adam and Eve, taking an evening stroll through their garden after a light supper of apples, might, in stepping through the garden gate, have found themselves unexpectedly standing in the lobby of Nashua Central High School, their escape blocked by an irate angel with a flaming sword.

  Bosch loved themes of temptation, and it was never clear exactly what relation there might be, in his images, between temptation and outright sin. Nor was it easily divined what moral qualities, if any, Bosch might be assigning to the objects and circumstances that provided temptation. The Bosch Temptation of St. Anthony, for example, now in Lisbon, offered a confusing moral lesson, if it was either moral or a lesson. Yes, at the center of the center panel knelt the hermit, struggling to meditate, and working to keep his spirit focused on eternal things, while all around him teemed, not the things of the world in their obvious daily guise, but a rat in a saddle blanket, and fish, a swan that was also an airship, a flying galleon, that burning city again, a matched pair of humble dogs, a bishop in whose cause you might decline to invest, the crucifixion, a nun masquerading as the devil queen, or vice versa, an outsize persimmon from which emerged a whole Halloween parade, a glimpse of perfect weather and a green hill you’d send the kids to for summer camp. In short, the place in question, where St. Anthony was said to be entertaining these temptations, was not all that far from Nashua, New Hampshire, or Boston, Nairobi, or Tokyo. And nothing about it was convincingly evil.