Man With a Squirrel

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “And,” Oona went on, “not only did we speak together of the great Hungarian composers Jenö Hubay and Ferenc Liszt, Bartók, Kodály, and Dohnányi, but the painters Szinyei-Merse and Béla Iványi-Grünwald, and István Czók…”

  “Jesus!” Fred said.

  “Not just Mihály Munkácsy, who everyone knows because he tried to pass for French.” Oona spat into an elephant leg lined with china: an umbrella stand.

  “You took to Clay then, did you?” Fred said. He finished his coffee and, with permission from Oona’s nod, tossed the cup into the same elephant leg.

  “We spoke of Gyula Krúdy, whom Mr. Reed compares favorably to Proust,” Oona said, putting a price on the head of a gaping china sparrow with salt holes in its throat. “We became great friends, although he did not care to leave his name. Fred, I am smitten. Whatever I have is his for the taking, as long as he will pay my price.”

  * * *

  “Gyula Krúdy, huh?” Fred said to Clayton on the house phone. “Plenty of people have compared me favorably to Marcel Proust, but I don’t go on about it.”

  Clayton made a Hungarian sound—word or expletive. “I suppose I must go to Holland.”

  “Oona is smitten,” Fred continued. “But she can control herself. You don’t have to interpose the whole Atlantic between your bodies.”

  A clinking from Clay’s end was his pencil point bouncing on the Wedgwood plate he kept on his upstairs desk for that purpose. “I don’t know what you are going on about, Fred,” Clay said. “I cannot leap the gap between your synapses.”

  “Holland?” Fred prompted.

  “Unless I ask you to go in my place,” Clay said. “But I suppose I should execute this errand myself.”

  Fred groaned. “You’ve thought of something Molly’s mother would call another wild blue herring, haven’t you, Clay?”

  “Again, I am not following the zoological references, Fred.”

  Fred looked across his room at the pinned fragment with the squirrel. Big bright eye on the animal. “You found another excuse to stall on the Vermeer,” Fred said. “When all we need to do is easy as taking it to the dentist for an X ray.”

  “I’ll not have people shooting rays through my painting,” Clay proclaimed. “It alters cells.”

  Fred hung up. Indulging in argument on this subject would lead inevitably to fury. The issue of the Vermeer could come between them, as lasting and contentious as a messy divorce. Some time before, Fred and Clay—their paths of investigation crossing—had purchased at auction a nondescript study of salt-marsh haystacks painted, it was generally agreed, by Martin Johnson Heade. Clay’s research suggested that a nineteenth-century North Shore widow, careless of posterity’s shifting taste, had given Heade a painting by Vermeer, which she disliked, to paint over.

  The hope and expectation was that Fred, acting for Clay, had purchased a painting that, if one cared to think of it in such terms, was worth millions when the Vermeer was laid bare. But once he owned the picture, Clay refused to initiate direct examination of the possibilities. The one thing Clay and Fred agreed on was that both canvas and chassis were too old, and of the wrong origin, to be consistent with Heade. Clay wouldn’t have it tested and he wouldn’t have it looked at. It sat in the racks, uncleaned and unhousled.

  “He’s like someone who’s so excited anticipating the prospect of finding what’s below his or her belt,” Molly said, “that he won’t look to see if he or she is a boy or a girl.” Or, as Clay put it, “I prefer, Fred, to rely, in the fullness of time, upon my own connoisseurship.” Fred was exhausted with the whole business. He sat to look at the day’s mail, saving the auction catalogs for last.

  Clay came spiraling down the circular staircase, cordovan shoes first, followed by lime-green socks, a suit designed to make a virgin dove ashamed, and a silk tie of green to echo, and rebuke, the socks while teasing them with orange spots. “Ah, Fred,” Clay said, as if surprised to see him. “I shall make a pilgrimage to examine the known Vermeers. I wish to become expert upon their supports, so as to make structural comparisons with my own.”

  Fred said, “Interesting sale coming up in Detroit. Three studies by Gérôme.” He held the flyer out for Clay to see the illustrations. “You want me to telephone for the catalog and transparencies?”

  “Gérôme is pornography. Like French chocolates,” Clay decreed.

  “It’s not harems,” Fred pointed out. “These are still-life studies of what the decorators call accessories.”

  “Nonetheless,” Clay said, glancing briefly at the photograph of Gérôme’s rendition of a large clay pot, “you know what the man is thinking.” Clayton tapped his right foot. “What will be their response at the Gardner if I ask to see their file on The Concert?”

  “Bells and sirens. And a lot of attention you don’t want, for a long time,” Fred said. “You will wish you were in Holland.”

  Boston’s only known Vermeer had been among the cream of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s collection—a choice, Clay loved to point out, not of Berenson but of the painter and socialite Ralph Wormeley Curtis. However that might be, it was among the paintings stolen some years ago, along with Rembrandts, pastels by Degas, and a wonderful Manet. The stolen pictures had not been traced or recovered or heard of again.

  “My painting is exactly the same dimensions as the Gardner’s,” Clay observed.

  Fred said, “We’ve been over that. And fractions of an inch away from Beit’s Lady Writing a Letter in Blessington, Ireland; and easy spitting distance from London’s Lady and Gentleman at the Virginals. So what? There may be reasons to go to Dresden and the Hague, Clay, but you are playing games.”

  “It would be so much easier if I could go straight to Director Hawley,” Clay said.

  “And put all your cards on the table,” Fred reminded him, “as you are wont to do.”

  “If only I could conceal my identity,” Clay mused.

  “Clay, everyone always knows you,” Fred said. “With the exception of one airplane stewardess who mistook you for George Plimpton. You don’t disguise well.”

  Clay smirked and tutted. “My position would be improved if they had not mislaid the keystone of their collection. As you say, Fred, we want no one to suspect what we might have here. It puts us in a painfully anomalous position. I shall go to Holland. What do they call it now?” Clay went upstairs.

  Fred opened his paper. There was trouble in South Africa. Trouble in what had once been known as Yugoslavia. His eye fell on a lavish article, with action photo, in the Metro section, concerning Molly’s sphere of activity the previous night.

  “Hope for the Devil’s Children” was the headline, under the picture of Dr. Eunice Cover-Hoover striding through a crowd that did not show Molly, unless she was behind a hefty young man who was following or flanking the doctor. Cover-Hoover was gorgeous in a Vogue way and looked as if she were a black-and-white photograph made dangerous flesh. She seemed tall, almost as tall as her attendant; and the grim, no-nonsense appearance of her cheekbones and jawline belied the lush bulge at her chest.

  “She looks like Anjelica Huston trying to pass for Tonya Harding,” Fred told Molly on the phone.

  “Or like a Puritan Mae West,” Molly said. “Listen, Fred, do you know an artist named Pix?”

  “Picks? Sounds Dutch. C-k-s?”

  “X,” Molly said.

  “One x or two?” Fred asked. “Sunny-side up or over easy?

  “One x. Doesn’t ring a bell. Lemme look. Here’s Théodor Pixis, born Kaiserslautern, July 1, 1831—genre painter, history subjects—painter of such forgotten gems as Thwarted Departure and Doubtful Arrival; and Moltke in the Black Forest. What do you think? Sound right?”

  “It’s supposed to be just Pix.”

  “Or a French sidewalk painter from Montmartre?” Fred offered. “They make all their signatures out of diagonal strokes that look like x’s. Why?”

  “A patron was asking,” Molly said. “It’s not my project, it’s Billy’s, but he
mentioned it and I thought I’d ask you. According to Dee, the man’s neck was broken.”

  Dee was a friend who worked for the Cambridge Police Department’s department of traffic and parking. She kept her ears open in the canteen and gossiped regularly with Molly. Walter, her husband, was head of Molly’s library.

  “This artist?”

  “I’m changing the subject, Fred. The derelict in the river—his neck was broken.”

  “You’d think so, with cinder blocks around it.”

  “No,” Molly said. “Before he went in. He didn’t drown.”

  “So it’s an unsolved murder,” Fred said. “Boston’s or Cambridge’s?”

  “We own it, Dee claims. We being Cambridge. That’s where he touched ground. I’ll tell Billy to tell his client to check the spelling and try again. I can’t talk now, Fred. Got a line of people waiting for help.”

  Fred had a quick look at the coverage of Cover-Hoover. The reporter, with uncritical straight face, announced the Cover-Hoover view that organized cults sacrificing victims to the powers of darkness were as common as they were widespread. The literature, and the growing treasury of narrative evidence, allowed no doubt. Her work in deprogramming those whose previously repressed memories revealed them to be former victims was similar to replacing a learned but unsuitable dead tongue (such as Phoenician, language of Baal) with a language of light, hope, and loving-caring. Loving and caring were hyphenated, like Cover and Hoover. She was quoted as saying, “It comes down to the question, Shall we be ruled by love or force? The culture of abuse, the power of darkness: all this is force. Light is synonymous with love, which we associate with the nurturing female power.”

  “Right,” Fred said. In his experience the boundary in any human person between what passes for sanity and being completely off the deep end was easily breached, razor thin, and transparent.

  Cover-Hoover, according to the article, sponsored a group of “patient-colleagues,” victims in the recovering-healing process, who lived in an undisclosed location—they had reason to fear reprisals—where the work of loving-caring progressed under her supervision.

  “Right,” Fred said again. He looked at the legs and feet in the roughly edited painting he had bought. The squirrel was so well painted, and so satisfying an emblem, his inclination had first been to assume it was the star—that the rest of the picture was cut away because it was damaged, or judged by its owner to be indifferent; if a Copley, maybe one of those in which the head of the subject is twice the size it ought to be.

  Fred said to the feet, “People reckon that as soon as it is shared by many, whatever it is, a practice must be sane. A single person chanting by itself, for instance in the elevator, and facing the rear, however, is shied away from.”

  10

  Fred, cross-eyed with crossed legs, drove to New Bedford. He’d been looking at the eighteenth-century portrait-painters’ manners in rendering feet until he longed for Copley’s John Hancock solution. So he’d called Roberto Smith, in New Bedford’s North End, and asked if he could drive down with something.

  “Two o’clock,” Roberto said.

  That would give the people at Gene’s in Fairhaven time to fry a mess of clams for Fred’s lunch beforehand.

  Roberto’s studio was a large, bright space on the third floor of a modified mill building whose first floor housed a fish store and a large bakery. The second floor hummed and thumped with people manufacturing factory seconds for a nationally famed brand of jeans.

  The drive had been encouraging. Wet fields on either side of the roadway after Fred got past Quincy showed illusory highlights that resembled blossom or leaf. Bare twigs of fruit trees in the scraps of second-growth woods hinted at bloom on account of the tattered remnants of webbing from last year’s tent caterpillars.

  Fred carried the fragment—rolled again, but inside a heavy cardboard tube—through the corridor separating fish store and bakery and up two flights of stairs, to Roberto’s steel-clad door. The stairwell smelled of fish, bread, and cut fabric.

  When Fred knocked, Roberto’s spy hole flickered before the door swung open. Roberto was tall and broad and bald and stooped. He worked in a suit, which he protected with a butcher’s canvas smock—one of a supply he had bought at Building 19. Today’s was blazoned at the heart, in red, with the name “Dick.” Offering Fred a hand to shake, Roberto caused the white Bismarck soup-strainer mustache he favored to twitch in an indication of a smile. The mustache, and his exuberant eyebrows, were the only hair he had left above the neck.

  “Fred, welcome,” Roberto said, stepping back.

  Roberto’s passion was stringed instruments. Violins, mandolins, theorbos, and psalteries of his making hung on stretched strings along the sides of the studio where the sun from his north window would not reach them. Roberto’s easel in the window, next to the table with his paints and varnishes, was empty. Whatever he might be working on for a client he would have turned to face the wall. Clay loved Roberto not just for the delicacy of his work, but because Roberto was, if anything, more paranoid and secretive even than Clay. For all that, and though he was more than seventy, Roberto moved with muscular agility to his big worktable.

  “It’s a crime, what I’m going to show you,” Fred warned him. He handed his cardboard tube to the old man. From this moment onward only Roberto would be permitted to touch the painting until it was outside his door.

  “It’s been cut down,” Roberto said, shaking his head and brushing a thin finger along the cut edge as he laid the canvas out. He put a circlet with a miner’s lamp and magnifying bar onto his pink head, and studied the cut and its attendant scars and scratches.

  “Very recently,” Roberto said. “There’s no dirt in the scratches. What are these holes down the middle from, staples? Yes, it was folded here and here—around a small stretcher, I understand this, but not for long or the paint and priming would be worse cracked, abraded, lost.”

  Roberto shook his head, distressed at the condition of the patient—like the medic presented with the twitching lower half of a person.

  Fred explained the fragment’s condition when he found it.

  Roberto sighed and shook his head. He spread his arms. “What can I do? I want no part of this, this crime.”

  “I wanted your opinion first,” Fred said. “Not to play games, but knowing you worked on practically everything in Cleveland before you retired to the Wailing City, what does this look like to you?”

  Roberto’s mustache made wings as he pursed his lips. “Do you know?”

  “What I think may be guided by what I want,” Fred said. “What you think would be guided by what you know.”

  “Flattery,” Roberto said. “I like that.” He studied the painting while Fred strolled toward the hanging instruments. As far as he knew, Roberto did not play an instrument.

  “I won’t be asked to testify in court?” Roberto asked suspiciously.

  “In court?”

  “About this crime,” Roberto said, gesturing toward the chained squirrel.

  “No, no,” Fred assured him. “The crime I referred to was an aesthetic one.”

  “Because the monster who did this is without human sense, passion, or reason,” Roberto said. “It is as if he took a meat ax to a dulcimer. I would gladly see him jailed for such a crime but I would not wish, myself, to testify.”

  “I meant, who is the painter?” Fred said.

  “Someone like Copley?” Roberto suggested slowly. “Although finally no painter is like any other. Look at the way he has done each individual highlight on the pelt…” Roberto took out a jeweler’s loupe and lowered his eyebrows and mustache almost to join the animal’s fur.

  “I’d have to clean it,” Roberto said. “And before I clean it I prefer to line and stretch it. There’s no point in asking for the other piece? Do you not want them put together again?”

  “I wish I knew where it was,” Fred said. “Of course I want the rest if I can find it.”

  “To clean
it I’d want to reline it,” Roberto said, looking dubious. Once it was relined they’d be committed to this lopsided fragment, a ludicrous composition. On no account would Clay, or Fred, or Roberto, allow only the part of the fragment representing the squirrel to be lined. They wouldn’t confirm or abet the crime already committed.

  Fred said, “If you can clean it without lining it, I’d as soon we do that, in case I come up with the other part.”

  “I can’t fill the holes,” Roberto said, shaking his head. “Not without lining it. There’d be no point doing the inpainting either. It would all have to be done again.”

  Roberto would normally use a formula based on beeswax to adhere, using a vacuum blanket, a vulnerable old canvas to a new one that would support the old fabric. This procedure was easily reversed with heat, but any filling of cracks and holes, and inpainting to make up for areas of loss, would stand out if and when they should be so fortunate as to discover the missing part and remarry the two fragments.

  “Let’s wait to line it,” Fred said. “If you can stand it, I’d love to see it clean.”

  “That’s going to reveal a lot of crackle,” Roberto said. “Which you don’t notice now on account of the layers of dirt and the discolored varnish. I can’t do the inpainting if it’s not lined. I have explained that, Fred.”

  “What do you think, can we go one step at a time?” Fred said. “As long as that won’t damage what’s here.”

  Roberto turned red and stammered, rising almost to his full height. “If Mr. Reed has qualms or reservations, Fred, about my professional tact…”

  Fred reassured him. “We do not want our eagerness to see the painting clean to induce you to undertake a procedure that is against your better judgment.”

  “It would not,” Roberto said. “And I would not. First do no harm is my motto.” He stood waiting, like an offended secretary of state. A cloud crossing the sun made swooping shadow darken the whole window behind him like a bad memory.

  “Maybe I can clean and varnish it so you can appreciate the real nature of the paint,” Roberto said finally. “So we can see it. No filling and no inpainting. If you want to leave it I will test it and call you. Sometimes a thing like this has been shellacked, not varnished, and then there’s trouble, as you know. I have to use alcohol, which is the mortal enemy of paint, to remove it, and try to remember my prayers while I am doing it.”