A Paradise for Fools

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Molly swallowed. “Hard boiled egg. Dee, this is Fred.”

  A flash of veiled recognition crossed Dee’s eyes.

  Fred said, “Because of persons like you, I left my car under the Charles Hotel. You hear that sound? It’s money falling out of my pocket. Those folks charge. But I can’t always run back to feed a meter or find another one.”

  “I can’t get you under the Charles Hotel,” Dee said. She was stout, dark-haired and of an olive complexion that suggested something Mediterranean. “Too bad. It’s a town and gown thing. The Charles Hotel might as well be Harvard, MIT. You could do better, Fred, leave it in the street and let us ticket you. Cheaper for you. Also it helps the schools. When I get to know you better, you give me your plate number, I’ll get the word around. As long as you’re…Molly, I’m out of here. I’m late. Fred, it’s been real.”

  Dee deposited her trash and headed for the road.

  “I didn’t happen to be passing by,” Fred said.

  Beside her on the bench, on the right side, Molly had balanced the cardboard cup from Starbucks, and plastic containers with her lunch. In her right hand was a white plastic fork. Her left hand, the one with the napkin in it, gestured toward the bench beside her.

  Molly said, “I didn’t happen to be sitting where I could see the road.” Fred sat. “Hungry? There’s another egg.”

  Fred said, “The breakfast scrapple is a vivid memory that will last till supper time. If you can spare a carrot stick, I’ll keep you company.”

  Molly held the container toward him. “Dee and I went to school together. From fourth grade on, right through high school. She did Junior College, wanting to get out of the house, work, and get married. Walter, her husband, is my boss.”

  “Right,” Fred said. “That could drop an interesting curve ball into an old friendship.”

  “It could,” Molly said. She picked up the hardboiled egg she’d offered earlier, dipped its white flesh into the scattering of salt and pepper that lay in the corner of the plastic container, and took a bite. She chewed and swallowed before she took a drink of coffee. “But it doesn’t,” she added. “Walter is such a gentleman, you don’t believe it until you’ve known him for several years. Half the words Dee uses in conversation—Dee has got a mouth on her—you think, but Walter doesn’t know that word. He’s courtly. That’s what Walter is.”

  “Whereas the man I work for,” Fred said. “The collector. Clayton Reed. Did I tell you? You’d say is a snob, except the man is such an innocent, and it comes so naturally to him, I don’t know what to call it. Is he a nabob? What’s a nabob?”

  Molly said, “Indian word, from the Hindi, but with a B now in the middle where there used to be a W. People think it means ‘snob,’ but a nawob is a rich man or, more accurately, the way it was used a couple hundred years back, an Englishman who came back from India with a fortune.”

  “That’s Clayton Reed,” Fred said. “Except he managed to avoid India. But he sure came back from somewhere.”

  Chapter Forty-five

  Molly said, “The Nashua business. I felt bad, stumbling over bad news and handing it to you, blind. That man, Zagorski?”

  “Zagoriski,” Fred said. “Starts as a hit and run, but then looks more malicious once you get into it. It’s nothing I’m part of. Then again, since I was talking to the guy a few hours before…”

  “I don’t mean to pry,” Molly said.

  “Slight change of subject,” Fred suggested. “Here we are, it’s lunchtime, a pretty day, well, hot. The one thing I can tell you so far for certain about Zagoriski is that he was not a pretty man. Complex, but not pretty. Fade to black. Cut to the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve wandering. This is before the serpent puts ideas into their heads. They look up into the tree full of apples, what is one apple worth?”

  “You mean in money?” Molly asked. She ate celery. “You have a thing with money, Fred.”

  “I have a thing against money. I have a thing with not understanding money,” Fred said. “It’s a dumb question, granted. The two of them look into the branches, one says to the other—I don’t care which one says it—‘That one on the end of the branch, the red apple with the yellow marking, has got to be worth…’ fill in the blank. OK. Hold that thought. Next question. God says, ‘Don’t eat that’ for the reasons specified. Does the value of the apple change? Next the serpent whispers, ‘That apple is going to make you’—whatever the serpent promised. Now is the apple worth more or less than it was before?”

  “This isn’t how you earn your living, is it?”

  “Before you start heading for the exits, if you’ve got a moment. The narrative I’ve stumbled into in a way is like that question, but maybe after the apple, with a couple bites out of it, is thrown over the fence of the Garden of Eden, into the wilderness outside. There wasn’t money in Paradise. At least it isn’t mentioned. Though if Adam and Eve were human beings there was trading for something going on. But out in the wilderness—here’s a question for you. What is the first time money is mentioned in the Bible? Money, as in a worthless object to which symbolic value has been agreed sufficient to let it seem the equivalent of something to eat.”

  “I’d have to look it up,” Molly said.

  “Once Adam and Eve, then the kids, were out in the wilderness anyway,” Fred said, “you can bet there was money or whatever. But here’s the thing. The way I make my living at the moment means I have to deal with works of art. That means scrambling in the wilderness in a lot of ways I’m only starting to learn. Sorry to get all abstract on you. I‘m trying to dodge telling you what…”

  “It’s OK,” Molly said.

  “But I can tell you whatever I want,” Fred said. “It’s not as if it isn’t my own story. Secrecy is a bad habit, is all. It might be relevant, my metaphor of the apple. The story so far in a nutshell, I’m trying to get a look at a painting. It sounds like a honey. Can’t tell. Could be a tempest in a teapot. Since I haven’t seen it and the only descriptions I have so far come from people who don’t know what they are talking about, heck, it might not even be a painting at all. It could be a reproduction, or a copy, or a poster that someone faked to make it look old and original. Not only can I not figure out what it might be or where it is, I don’t know who it belongs to.

  “Where my lunchtime fable comes in, at one time the painting, let’s say it’s a good one, had no value. Like the apple on the tree before God pointed in its direction and the serpent began whispering. The thing got passed from one person to another and nobody worried about it because it was regarded as worthless and therefore it was worthless.”

  “Right,” Molly said. “Then the whispering of the serpent, and God’s pointing finger too, let’s be fair—those things started assigning value, but nobody knows what that value might be because in the art business, until the check is actually written, and I mean the last check in the sequence, how does anyone know?”

  “The devil of it is,” Fred said, “if I do find it, and if I can figure it out, and work my way through the rat’s nest of who might be the owner of record, a life or two could be destroyed by the sudden appearance of money in significant quantities. Like the lottery.”

  “Not to mention what happened to Zagoriski,” Molly pointed out. “If that’s part of it, which you worry about.”

  “Well, of course,” Fred said. “If some miserable jerk got the idea that Zagoriski’s life was a fair trade against the painting. There’s a whole story of Zagoriski owing money he couldn’t pay, and another story about a pending divorce, and of Zagoriski’s habit of mentoring his female high-school students more closely than you might want for Terry when the time comes.”

  “Oh, God help us,” Molly said. She stood, gathering her containers into her black cloth bag.

  Fred, standing with her, said, “If I were one of those girls’ mothers I might drive a truck over the
guy myself. But Zagoriski’s death doesn’t have to fit into any of my stories. Why should it? It could be an accident.” Molly had started walking in a direction away from the library where she worked. Fred fell in next to her, pursuing his train of thought. “Hit and run. The random perpetrator could be so upset by hitting the pedestrian, he backs up to see what happened, can he help? Maybe the driver’s drunk—we know Zagoriski was.”

  “Horrible,” Molly murmured.

  “Of course. We are,” Fred agreed. “So now he’s run over the victim again, he panics, starts thinking what the consequences could be for his own life—his record, his license, maybe he’s not insured, maybe he’s an alien in the country without papers—he decides he’d be a fool to leave his victim alive to testify against him and runs over him once more on the way to the car wash, to be sure. Or in panic, more innocently, keeps going in the direction he was going before that particular bump in the road. It isn’t exactly murder. More like prudence.”

  “I like to walk a few blocks before I go back to the desk,” Molly said. “Even hot as it is. So I forget that I spend the whole day inside.”

  “It stays light late in summer,” Fred said. “It must seem that I’m wrestling with a lot of imponderables and intangibles. I guess I am. Part of it is, most of these clowns I mentioned—they’re young, they’re barely getting started, they don’t know where they’re going, this world is stacked against them, and I like them. They’re full of goony energy. They’re doing what they can even if they’ve knowingly cut themselves off from the support of the straight world.

  “But if the best the straight world has to offer them is the compulsory mentoring of Zoltan Zagoriski, backed up by the institutional threat he wields of flunking them, maybe they didn’t have much choice to start with.”

  Molly’s walk had led down Broadway in the direction of Central Square. This part of town wasn’t old in terms of its houses and apartment buildings, but its trees were old enough to provide shade.

  “Hell, everyone’s ignorant,” Fred said.

  Molly kept walking.

  “I don’t want them hurt,” Fred said.

  Molly kept walking. They’d reached a large brick school building across from which were shops. Molly turned to double back.

  “Tricky,” Fred said, turning with her. “Because I also want something from them.”

  “That painting,” Molly said.

  “I want to see it. I don’t want to have it. I don’t want to have anything, which I’ve confessed to you already is a flaw I bring to the table. Depending on what it is, it could be something the man I work for wants, if he can afford it, and if we can figure out who owns it, and if the owner wants to sell it. And if I can keep these folks safe.”

  “You make it sound wonderfully easy,” Molly said.

  “What time do you get off work?”

  Molly stopped short and looked Fred over for a full twenty seconds. “Eight o’clock,” she said. “We’re open late tonight. Gilly’s got kids, and since mine are…I said…”

  Fred said, “I’ll…no, I forgot. I have to meet with a couple of the clowns.”

  Molly started walking again. “I almost forgot also. Business. I’m getting yearbooks from the Nashua public library. They’re sending them down. Maybe tomorrow. They can’t circulate. You have to…”

  “I’ll stop in when I can,” Fred said.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Both Kim and Arthur, having eliminated each other, assumed that Eva and Beth, sensing an opportunity, had walked the painting out of Arthur’s place three nights ago while Arthur, worried first by Kenzo’s call, then by Fred’s visit, was mooning around in the streets to clear his head. Both Kim and Arthur had dropped the hint, or the presumption, that Eva might take the thing to Kenzo in Nashua, whatever Kenzo might think he wanted with it. That Kenzo wanted it was plain enough from the fact that he had telephoned Arthur looking for it and then sent Stephanie. And he’d had dealings with Orono.

  Fred recognized, turning away from seeing Molly back to her building, that he had reached the conclusion, under the white noise of his philosophizing about biblical values, that he had nothing to lose in going direct to Kenzo again and taking another look.

  “All us blind people are after the same elephant,” Fred said, the welcome wind blowing the scent of dog around the inside of his car as he headed north again. “The ones who have seen it don’t know what it is: Kenzo, Eva, Beth, Tippy, Arthur, Kim, Zoltan Zagoriski. The ones who haven’t seen it think they know: Lexington Orono and Fred Taylor. With that many people on the scent, who else is gathering? Unless Orono was lying, there’s still a photograph somewhere. And if there’s one photograph, assume multiples. Has nobody, getting the whiff of money, not wandered into Christie’s and said enough to a pretty girl behind the reception desk to get her seasoned uglier older sister or brother out from the private office upstairs on the run?

  “The art business is dog eat dog. Everything looks friendly, like that Maypole dance, the dogs and bitches circling in a ring, each nosing the next one’s anus and genitals, until the lights go out and they to gnaw, eating each other out, starting from the most vulnerable purchase. An image worthy of Hieronymus Bosch himself, almost. The dogs don’t stop to snarl. Why would they? Their best cover is silence. Beware of the enemy who makes no threats.”

  Where had he heard that line before?

  He’d said it himself. Tina. At the Moonglow Lounge. Z had owed Tina an unspecified large sum of money. Was Tina among the blind who knew about the elephant? Oh, yes, and there was Stephanie. She had come down from Nashua by bus to trick Arthur into confirming the painting’s presence at his apartment yesterday afternoon.

  “Another art dealer,” Kenzo had said, when trying to figure Fred out. Fred had assumed that meant Orono was asking questions. But who else? Why only one? Why not one of the smiling principals from Ader Tajan in Paris?

  “While we apply our driving time to idle speculation,” Fred said, as the deep green countryside swished by, “the business Orono kept bragging he was missing in Paris—couldn’t that have been with the auction house Ader Tajan? Isn’t that where you’d go if you wanted a cutout between yourself and a fabulous old master painting for which you needed a fictitious recent European provenance? Throw a little smoke?”

  Kim had told Claire at Cut - Rate - Cuts; Claire and whomever Kim had paraded herself in front of had seen multiple images from the painting. Tippy—dancing at the Moonglow—must have inspired questions from clients about the source of the interesting image on her buttock: those copulating beetles eating money.

  Fred swung into the Nashua mall area and found a spot to park far enough from Kenzo’s that his car could seem to have an interest in baked goods. There was no shade. He locked the car leaving the windows open half an inch. “The great advantage in having nothing,” Fred said to himself, walking toward Kenzo’s, “is you have nothing to lose.”

  As he drove past the shop he’d taken note of the fact that the cardboard sign in the door faced outward with the message yes we are. Stephanie, looking more like herself than she had in the red wig yesterday, at Arthur’s. The bleached hair was her own. She sat back of her reception desk exposing the many samples on arms and upper chest. Pink tank top. She chewed gum into the phone’s receiver. She stared in Fred’s direction with such vacant nonrecognition you could sell that look for five hundred dollars to the CIA, to teach their agents. She held up a hand to stop him in case Fred had something to say, and gestured him to sit. She listened. Fred took a chair and picked up one of the magazines, riffling through it for a title such as But Isn’t It All Junk?

  “No,” Stephanie said into the receiver, and continued chewing. The air conditioner groaned. “It’s like before they even let you on the bus, you have to prove to them you’re Chinese,” Stephanie said past her gum. “I never saw so many. They can’t all live
here, can they? Isn’t there a law?” She chewed.

  Fred got up to walk past her, “Men’s room,” he said. She held up her hand in a gesture he disregarded. “I’ll handle Kenzo,” he assured her. He pointed at his crotch to prove his innocent intent.

  The work area was vacant. Lights off; black padded recliner empty; rolling stools stationary, against the table well covered with tools in reasonably sanitary array. No Kenzo. No client. No painting. No place to stash a painting.

  “Wait a minute,” Stephanie was saying into the phone. Fred pulled the heavy curtain at the back of the work room and peered through.

  That had to be the “room back of the back room” Arthur had talked of. The air conditioner’s groaning was louder in Kenzo’s Zen temple. The area was dark, a hallway, leading to what had to be a back door exit and another little door that must lead into the washroom that building codes, and the State of New Hampshire’s Licensing Authority, must require. The chrome objects next to the generous couch—call it Kenzo’s Altar of Zen—must be the sterilizing equipment: autoclave, whatever; and sterile storage. The object on the couch was a sleeping woman.

  There was room under the couch for a painting whose dimensions matched Kim’s estimated “yay by yay,” but Fred could see only bare green linoleum under there, and a small leopard-skin patterned overnight case, next to a pair of tan leather sandals. Stephanie, in little yellow shorts, her midriff bare, still chewing, stood between the curtains whispering angrily, “Hey, mister.”

  Fred turned and whispered back, “It’s OK.” The sleeping woman, on her front, and mostly covered with a white sheet—it was hot in here, despite the big box air conditioner that was set into the wall over the exit door—had her face turned toward the wall. Dark as it was in here, Fred could see a good deal of black hair, curly; a medium-sized displacement of female body under the sheet. He opened the bathroom door and slipped inside. Toilet and sink, clean, in good order. No painting. No room for the painting either. If the Board of Whatever cared, the room was sanitary, and Fred left it that way, tiptoeing past the sleeping woman again and meeting Stephanie in the passageway.