A Paradise for Fools

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Zagoriski had reason enough to be killed in a hit and run. Being as drunk as the skunk he was was reason enough.

  But the violent sudden death of Flash—no—that was cause and effect.

  Until he could be proved wrong, and he’d have to put this together for them tomorrow, Kenzo had come down from Nashua because Flash had told him he could lead him to the painting.

  Had Flash traveled to Nashua, during these intervening days? Why not? Finding a way to ingratiate himself with Kenzo again. Take it from there—why not put Flash in that red wig, leaving the Moonglow Lounge in the company of Zagoriski on the night Z met his fate? Flash could wear a red wig as well as anyone else. If E. Howard Hunt had taught us anything, he’d taught us that. “‘A gorgeous redhead,’ the man behind the bar had said—well, there’d been no evidence to date what standard the barman used to measure ‘gorgeous’ against.

  They could even have come down from Nashua in each other’s company, Flash stringing Kenzo along, and Kenzo driving the truck—that must therefore have been seen in the Green Street area.

  But even after all that, if that’s what happened (barring the ridiculous diversion of Flash in the red wig), Kenzo was still among the many who had no clue where the damned painting was. He’d acted too soon.

  Fred entered the house and told Morgan hello.

  “Flash never returned,” Morgan said. He was a big man, square, whose military posture back of the desk had gone to seed somewhat, but was still formidable. He put his comic book aside. “No word, either. But people don’t—our kind of people—what we do is go away. If people wonder what happened, they keep wondering.”

  Fred went on up without getting into it.

  He’d taken for himself the smallest room in the house, one that was in the center of the building and commanded a view of the street. The fan was still blowing through the cracked-open window, making the temperature reasonably uncomfortable but not insufferable. He tossed Flash’s brown corduroy pants to one side. They’d go into the overflow recycle box, for strays who turned up needing pants. Fred would run them through the machine first.

  What had become of that satchel Flash always carried with him—the collection of stuff that gave him, like a wandering tinker, a profession? The way Fred phrased the question to himself assumed the answer. Kenzo had tossed it into a body of water that crossed his route back to Nashua. He’d either taken out anything useful, like a tattoo machine, or, if he was prudent, left it inside the satchel to give it weight.

  No smell of cigar. Fred had half feared there’d be some vestige of the departed guest on the wall: a sample of his flash, or a photo of his work to keep him company. He’d steeled himself to allow for this invasion; but there was nothing. His walls were as bare as he liked them. He allowed not even a calendar or cork board to distract the walls. He took a quick look in the closet for any sign of the visitor and found nothing. Without the telephone calls with Morgan and Zeke, he’d never have known his room had even been used. The testimony of a pair of worn brown corduroy pants—that was Sammy Flash’s sole legacy to the earthly paradise he’d left behind.

  Fred heaved the window the rest of the way open and turned off the fan. He’d listen to the street while he slept. Let the street’s light keep him company and ease him awake when it became daylight. By the end of the day, by the next dark, who knew where he’d be? If the forces of law and order got picky in Cambridge, or in Nashua, for the length of time it had taken Fred to figure things out, put two and two together, link Nashua and Cambridge—well, he’d face it tomorrow. But he’d carry a toothbrush with him. He was beat.

  He turned off the overhead light, stepped out of his loafers and lay on the foam mattress, remembering, “I hope Flash took that bath before he slept here.”

  Hard ridge across his back.

  “Dog my cats.” Fred flipped the mattress over.

  ***

  Green garbage bag not, from the way it appeared, being used for the first time; and in it a hard slab, slightly bowed, that measured “yay by yay” if anything ever did. Fred eased the mouth of the bag open and pulled the panel out, gently, as if it might explode.

  Flash had laid the thing down on its face. That was a good thing, since the panel was warped slightly. Face down, it had acted as a cradle. Face up, and convex, the weight of the sleeping man—whether Flash or, later, Fred—would have split the panel.

  “Look at the back first,” Fred told himself. He’d watched Clayton, on first examination of a painting of some antiquity, spend so much time studying the back side that he seemed prepared to be completely satisfied with that. The back can tell crucial stories relating to where a piece has been, and what it is—but not for now. Not here. Fred took the panel to where the murky light from the window fell on it. It was the real McCoy.

  The panel’s face was so dark Flash might have been blowing cigar smoke across it for the past five hundred years. Fred lit the lamp he kept on the small table where he sat when he was reading, and tilted it to play on the painted surface. The panel almost burned between his fingers. “I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute,” Fred said.

  Since the floor’s ratty carpet extended under the bed, there’d been no additional abrasion to the painted surface that appeared now that Fred flipped the dark panel over to expose its face. It would take a month to figure it out, if he had a month to do it. Under the protective skin of dirt and varnish—perhaps nothing had touched Hieronymus Bosch’s paint since the artist applied the first coat of varnish—a hundred figures writhed and paraded across a fantastic landscape in which were surprising pockets that looked like every day. On quick appraisal, this must be either an early sketch, or later summing-up, of many of the themes that had been worked out in the huge altar piece that now hung in the Prado Museum: The Garden of Earthly Delights. But the Prado version was in three segments. In this one, everything had been compressed. Those pink and naked figures down left, separated by a robed figure, had to be Adam and Eve addressed by God, in the Garden of Eden.

  Nowhere was there evidence of the comforting barrier the old stories liked to place between Paradise, where our first parents sinned, and the outside world we live in, into which their sin condemned us. No, not at all. Everything was crammed in together: the flowers, birds, fish, demons, fruits, tortures, weapons, burning cities, a woman milking a goat with a lion’s head, the carafe of fornicating beetles, ships sailing backwards on a prairie, a flying bear; that judgment of Paris without Paris that Fred knew already from Kim’s thigh; people everywhere assaulting each other, naked or in fantastic partial costumes; loving each other; selling things to each other—you could spend years making stories to explain what these people were doing.

  And in the midst of it all—though it was placed in the lower right, where it balanced the vignette of Adam and Eve with their creator—Kim’s goblin. That segment alone, two and a half inches on each side if you had cut it from its matrix—was enough to prove the panel’s authorship. An egg with the feet of a chicken and two heads, yes. The egg was hollow, a shell only, raggedly broken so that within its interior could be seen what might be priests and bishops feasting on the intestines of a pig who was alive. The egg’s legs and feet, cruelly clawed, stretched to run in opposing directions, and from the leg bones feathers grew that pierced the egg’s shell. What might be milk, or blood, water or honey, leaked from the shell’s wounds. Even when the painting was clean, it would be hard to know what the painter was thinking.

  The two heads: one was certainly male, its features gaunt and rugged; a man in his prime who may have seen too much. The other, facing upwards as if the two heads belonged to separate bodies that were engaged in intercourse, might be a woman’s or a young man’s. A woman’s probably. A woman in her prime, and also one who had seen too much. But was still game. The whole painting celebrated tension, balance, despair poised against hope, all these forces wrenching against ea
ch other, keeping the fabric of the complex world in tension.

  “It was painted in daylight and for daylight,” Fred said. “We’ll look at it in daylight.”

  He slipped the panel back into its plastic sleeve, and slept.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  The original plan for the start of the day no longer applied. The painting was accounted for. Where Eva was didn’t matter.

  Fred rose, looked at the panel. Washed, looked at the panel. Made a mug of instant coffee downstairs and carried it to his room to drink while he looked at the panel. With reluctance he turned it around and made, for the second time, a cursory examination of the back, the wood so darkened with age as to be almost black. There were partial paper labels, vestiges of notations in ink, applied with fountain pen in a language that might be Polish. Chalk marks and annotations in red crayon. Enough fragments of information just on the back to keep a graduate student busy long enough to stretch the work into a thesis matching the thesis the interpretation of the front would inspire. It would be interesting to see what Clayton Reed made of it when he returned.

  It would be interesting, also, to see Clay jump when he saw the panel’s face.

  Before Fred stopped in at the police headquarters in Cambridge, he put his nose in at the public library’s reference desk. “She’s out today,” Gilly told him.

  “Trouble at home?” Fred asked. It slipped out. It was not his business.

  “Summers our hours get crazy,” Gilly said. “She’ll be in tomorrow.”

  Fred left the note. He hadn’t thought of a way to improve it, beyond adding the phone number at Clayton’s. Then, looking at that, he’d thought it not an improvement. But it was done. Too late. He’d thought that exchanging a few irrelevant words with Molly might help get him the balance he needed to deal with the crowd of themes closing in on him from all around. He was in the middle of this story. He’d followed the possibility of a painting which had led him, like a will-o’-the-wisp, or ignis fatuus, into a swamp where fellow travelers had started drowning. Others might be in danger. And it was his own damned fault. He’d asked for it.

  Meanwhile, he had laid hands on a fabulous painting and, in all the world, he alone knew where it was and what it was.

  Were it to be discovered now, in its present refuge, its pure identity as a living work of art would be lost immediately under a heap of inferences. It would be evidence, not art. It would become a permanent bone of contention. What is it worth? Whose is it? Whose fault is it? Who’s dead on account of it?

  What should Fred do with it?

  At no place in his being could Fred find a desire to keep the painting. He had slept with it. He had held it, studied it. He would like to see it after it was cleaned. His partial reading of events pulled his sympathies here and there. Arthur, in fellowship with the artist, had a collegial claim of ownership, if only on the basis of affection. Tippy Artoonian had reason, if she cared—as she must were she to discover a financial value in the painting—to feel she had a claim. The painting had been given to her, and she had accepted it in good faith, even if Zagoriski had no business passing it along. Tippy in turn had either given or loaned it to Arthur, or let him hold it for her, still in good faith. In fact, as long as there’d been no question of value, good faith had pretty much characterized the various transfers of the property, starting with Zagoriski’s uncle’s wedding gift. Even bums and jerks, as long as they’re not thinking about it, can act in good faith. It was a tangle.

  Everything should be simple, Arthur liked to say.

  The simplest thing was to acknowledge Mary Zagoriski as the painting’s rightful owner.

  But if the painting turned up now in Nashua, in her hands, she would inevitably become a person of interest to those who, putting two and two together, noticed the fatal coincidences that had led to her uncluttered possession of what the media would quickly call, in its tedious shorthand, a “priceless” “masterpiece.”

  Fred didn’t know Molly and he couldn’t reasonably burden her by describing the problems that he faced. But he would have enjoyed looking into her face before he decided what to do. He’d like to measure his decision against that look.

  ***

  The Cambridge detective he was assigned to, a man named Gamble, was as canny, common, knowing, and experienced as a cigar butt. He was silent and dangerous, and Fred wasted no time trying to put anything over on him. He only withheld the discovery he had made last night. As far as the story went, the characters and their interactions, Cambridge and Nashua, the works—even the notion that there might be, floating around somewhere, an old unsigned picture that had once been appraised for forty-five dollars—he let it all hang out. The fact that Sammy Flash had spent a night in Charlestown didn’t come up. The men in the house would never mention it. Sammy Flash wouldn’t. As long as it wasn’t relevant, why should Fred?

  Inevitably, the number of persons in the circle of interest widened, and because every human being is the hub of his own complexities, things got complex. Lexington Orono had grabbed an early morning flight for Paris. He would be interviewed on his return. Gamble had called on Kim at her place of work, and hauled Arthur into the station for a protracted interview. Because Fred started his own interview with his suspicions of Kenzo Petersen, Gamble interrupted their conversation at the outset by putting a call in to Nashua to alert the forces there that something might develop.

  “They want to talk to you,” he said. “Their question is, and my question, do they send a car down? One of those cars with no handles inside the back door.”

  He waited for Fred’s reply.

  Fred said, “I pretty much know my way. Whatever you folks want, obviously.”

  The issue was left hanging while Gamble wavered back and forth between addressing Fred as a colleague and as an intruder he would as soon lock up.

  “What I don’t like,” Gamble said finally, “and what I don’t understand, and why don’t you help me with this? What are you doing in the middle of all this? That’s what I don’t get.”

  “I’m baffled myself,” Fred told him.

  “I listened to your story, and I don’t believe it,” Gamble said.

  Fred had no useful reply. It was reminiscent of Kenzo Petersen’s complaint of the prosecutor’s recurring gambit, ‘I take it that’ whatever. Impossible to answer.

  “I think what you are is chasing girls,” Gamble concluded finally. “Your story. To hell with it. Chasing girls is the only thing that makes sense. I like facts, but facts are no good without motives. I’ve seen these girls. Kim, the one at the hair place, the one you started with, according to you, following her tattoos, which I have only seen a little bit of, I’m a married man, got enough trouble with that—still, that I can understand. Chasing girls. Running after her. The redhead, Eva? OK, I see that too. There’s one in Nashua dances naked—no, you said two? I see where you’re coming from, Fred, and I see where you’re going. And I am telling you as one who has been there. Don’t.

  “Be where we can find you. I’ll let you drive to Nashua on your own but you are a witness and I want to know when you get there and when you get back. When you get back I want to know where you are. Thanks for your help, and leave the girls alone. Girls are trouble. Especially girls with tattoos. I will certainly see you again.”

  ***

  Nashua was more involved. Kenzo, reacting with fury to the initial questions as to his whereabouts the previous morning, had flown into such a rage that he had given the cops reason to lock him up. The information he had included accidentally in his tirade, together with what Fred had reported from Cambridge, gave them enough to apply for warrants, to impound his truck and motorcycle, and to seal off both the shop and the trailer where Kenzo and Stephanie lived.

  “This much I can tell you,” Fred explained when he sat down with them. “When Arthur left Nashua, whenever that was,
he was scared enough of Kenzo that he changed his name and left no address. Didn’t tell anyone where he was, except Flash. Or Flash found him. I don’t know which.”

  They’d handed him over to a youngster trying to make his way up through the pecking order. “According to you everyone wanted a painting,” the youngster said. In plain clothes—tweed sports jacket in this heat, and open collar—he wore a tag saying Hamada. He might be one of Nashua’s five Hawai’ians.

  “Nobody can put their hands on that painting at the moment,” Fred said. “Mrs. Zagoriski, as she’s probably told you, when she took a photo of it to a gallery in New York, was told if they liked it, they’d give her twenty thousand for it.”

  Hamada drummed on his desk and smirked. “In India, Mexico, the Congo, they kill you for twenty thousand,” he said. “We don’t do that here. Twenty thousand? Hell, these days anyone can go to the bank even without collateral and borrow twenty thousand. Forget the painting. I talked to Gamble on the phone and he’s right. He’s been around. It’s women. There’s women all over this. The Cambridge end, that’s their problem. We’re glad to help, as far as we can. Looks like the murder of Sammy Flash leads back to Kenzo. Why, that’s another story. We’ll go through Kenzo’s place. The trailer, the shop. Look for the keys you said he tossed. Test the motorcycle chain, the back of the truck, the rest of it. The guy was washing the bed of his truck when we picked him up. That blond chick with him—wet Tee shirt, everything.

  “The girl, Stephanie her name is, all I can say so far, maybe she was in the apartment in Cambridge a couple days back, looking for Arthur, like you say, Fred. That’s interesting and we’ll follow up. But nothing happened to Arthur. What might make sense, if you’re right. Flash, the dead guy, had robbed so much stuff from Kenzo Petersen…but this is nothing to do with you. I’d make you stay in town, but Cambridge wants you. I promised they’d get you back.”