“Yes, I’ll remember.”
“And some day—” But it was clear that neither of them had any faith in that day. They seemed to know that this was good-bye for good.
The plane, while old and shabby, was comfortable enough for the short run to Lima, the more so with half its seats unoccupied. The stewardess aboard was the same toothily smiling girl as on the incoming flight, but, Ben saw, her manner toward him was markedly unsmiling now. Her manner toward Nora and Klebenau as well. The professionally cheerful air was reserved for the other passengers; in dealing with this hapless trio of norteamericanos she was as discretely mournful as an attendant at an expensive mortuary.
A few minutes after they were airborne they were over the sea, and not long after that, Klebenau, who was seated beside Nora across the aisle, stood up and said to her, “Smith and I are going to the lounge for a cigar. I want you to get some sleep now,” and like an obedient child she rested her head against the back of the seat, eyes closed.
Klebenau gestured to Ben and led the way to the lounge using his umbrella as a cane. Ben observed that after he had closed the door behind him and had stretched out in a chair, umbrella braced between his plump thighs, hands clasped on top of it, he made no move to light a cigar. It was the first time they had been alone together since they had parted at the hotel the night before, and Klebenau as yet had not reported on his mission to the Bambas-Quincys.
When Ben asked about it, he said, “What did you expect? They displayed all the appropriate emotions—incredulity, outrage, and finally anguish—and Bambas-Quincy, at least, displayed acute symptoms of shame. He and his mother were the ones I spoke to. What a woman she is. I swear to you, Smith, once she knew her scheme had been thwarted, she was sitting there already plotting a new one. I could see it in her eye.”
“Did they have anything to say about Elissa?”
“Her father did. There’s no question that he’s deeply devoted to her. Spent a fortune importing psychiatrists she’d have nothing to do with, offered her anything to travel for several years with her mother, upholds her virtue at every turn. He also makes the common error of assuming that virginity in itself is a pearl of great price, something which redeems almost any other fault. He’s as obsessed with that notion as Juana, although honest enough to admit that a man might expect certain other attributes in the woman he chooses to marry. Which, I explained in my most diplomatic manner, was the substance of your case and the reason for your departure. And now that you are departing, Smith, may I ask what lies ahead for you?”
“It’s hard to say. One thing is sure. I’m done with my job whether it’s waiting for me or not. I don’t want any more of what I’ve had so far.”
“What do you expect to replace it with?”
“That’s what I don’t know. I feel terribly restless. Unsettled. I’d like to do something big and exciting, but what? I’ve been thinking about it, Klebenau, and I know I can come up with an answer if I have enough time, but I’m in your spot now. I need money to buy time, and I’m almost flat broke.”
“How sad,” said Klebenau. He laid the umbrella across his lap with great care and gently ran his fingers over it. “On the other hand, let’s consider that you own ten percent of this unsightly object. Homely, useless—it won’t even keep the rain off your back because its ribs have been removed—yet it is surely the most valuable umbrella anywhere in the world. I’d say that your small share in it alone is worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars. Do I have to tell you why?”
He didn’t. His face was now wreathed in a smile so effulgent that it shone like the rising sun. “You’ve got the picture,” Ben said. “The Gauguin. But where? How?”
“First lock the door.”
“This isn’t a private compartment.”
“We’ll make it private for a few minutes.”
Ben locked the door and confronted Klebenau accusingly. “Has that thing been in your possession all along? Have you been feeding me a cock-and-bull story about searching for it?”
“No. It was placed in my hands at five o’clock this morning. Given to me as a gift by its owner. Does that tell you anything?”
“At five this morning? Then it must have been Bambas-Quincy. He was the owner.”
“Guess again, Smith. Think hard and see if the whole enlightenment does not come to you as splendidly as it did to me.”
When the enlightenment came, it dropped Ben heavily into his seat. “The patróna. The old lady. Very old. My God, Klebenau, she wasn’t the model, was she?”
Klebenau leaned forward excitedly. “But I suspected it. I had good reason to suspect it long ago. How could I fail to, faced with that man-hating image. And talk about the rise of Catherine the Great! It was nothing compared to what this woman did. From a dirty little whore in the stews of Colón to the patróna in her castle on the Victorica. And a most moral patróna. Oh, the very essence of bloodcurdling morality. Think of it. Not only to cut off the past, but to bury it so deep that nobody in the world knew about it yesterday, not even her family. Today, you and I and Nora know, but it’s our secret alone. It’s never to be revealed. I made that pledge in good faith, and it must be kept. Remember that, Smith.”
“Yes, but how did you find her out? How did you get her to admit it? Klebenau, in some ways you’re as fantastic as she is.”
“I am. But after all, I’ve spend much of my life searching out hidden treasure and negotiating for it. And I’ve often been lucky, although never as lucky as this. Still, there’s a curious logic to luck itself. If this woman hadn’t been driven by ambition to rise to the heights, she would have been lost forever, and the picture with her. What I was really tracing from Colón to Buenos Aires was that ambition of hers. Each step of the way the trail became more clearly defined, more glittering with success. Whore, courtesan, owner of her own establishment, owner of a whole chain of such establishments. In Buenos Aires right now, her name is part of bordello legend. Her true name, that is. The name in the Laval letter, which was the one I knew her by.
“Then suddenly that name disappeared from all records, the woman herself disappeared from sight. The one fact known was that around the turn of the century she had sold out her immensely valuable properties and left the city forever. The one persistent rumor I had to go by was that she had contracted a fatal illness and had gone off to die in peace, possibly on the desolate island of Santo Stefano.
“That was what led me here. Of course, I never dreamed the woman was alive, but I knew that if there was any truth to the rumor, there was a chance of tracing her heirs. An enormously wealthy woman like that just couldn’t vanish forever from the face of the earth. However, I will admit that she seemed to have done it, until I heard my first stories about la reina, the uncrowned queen of the island. Almost immediately, I had the idea that she herself might be the very one I’d been following, and the more I heard about her, the more I became obsessed with that idea. Yet, I couldn’t move without being sure, or else the whole deal would blow up. If she were the wrong woman, she wouldn’t have the picture to give me, and, worse than that, everyone would then know my business here. The true owner of the picture would be awakened to its real value, and I could never pay the price that would be asked. In the end, it was Juana who provided me with the assurance I needed to go ahead.”
“How?”
“Poor Juana. Her function in life seems to be helping people attain good ends for bad reasons. As soon as she told me the story of the old lady’s plot against you, my search was ended. Why should that surprise you? Use your head, Smith. Don’t you see that what the patróna planned for her granddaughter was exactly what she had achieved for herself! A woman with a bad reputation has no problem if she’s rich enough. She buys a respectable husband, goes to some far place with him, and establishes a new identity shining with morality. Can’t you imagine the old lady’s line of thought? If it worked for me, she said to herself, it will work for this troublesome granddaughter of mine. So be it. And she may yet make it work. She h
as the spirit to.”
“You almost sound as if you admire her.”
“Well, my feelings are ambivalent. After all, Smith, she was the model for that picture. Do you see what that means? She knew Gauguin. She spent hours with him, talked to him, slept with him. He was flesh and blood to her, that sublime man. Thank God, memory works the way it does. When you’re as old as she is, yesterday may not be too distinct, but youthful days are remarkably fresh in mind. Yes, she remembered him and told me what she could remember. I sat alone with her in her room at dawn and heard about Paul Gauguin from someone who had held him in her arms. Machote, she said. Virile. All man. And cruel sometimes, the way a man was. He would torment her, tell her how ugly she was, how he would try to make her more beautiful in the picture so that people wouldn’t laugh at it. The picture itself is magnificent. It needs cleaning, but even under the grime you can see that it’s a great and significant work. Naturally, it wasn’t framed and on display. She kept it rolled up in a locked trunk in her room, and it was the only thing out of the past, she said, that could tie her to it. She had thought sometimes of destroying it but could never bring herself to. For that alone she may end up in heaven.
“And do you know something? I think she made a great impression on Gauguin. In Brittany, a year after he left Panama, he painted that picture of Jacob wrestling the angel—are you familiar with it?”
Ben shook his head. “Only from reproductions. That’s the one showing the women standing around in Breton costumes watching the struggle, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and I’ll swear the patróna is in it. He must have visualized her with great clarity, because there she is in the lower left-hand corner, actually the most conspicuous figure in the whole painting. You can’t mistake her, even though she’s shown in profile, while the portrait is full face. There she is, that plump, full-lipped, rapacious little animal among all those big, rawboned Breton females like something escaped from a jungle rite to witness a Puritan ceremonial. Her whole character is written in that designing face. How old was she when Gauguin met her? Sixteen? Seventeen? But even then she knew what she wanted from life and how to get it. In a past century she might have been the power behind a great throne. You can’t blame me for thinking of her with mixed feelings.”
“No,” said Ben, “not as long as you don’t expect me to share the more favorable ones. How did you get the picture away from her?”
“By polite extortion. I had with me the complete dossier on her professional career from Colón to Buenos Aires. In return for destroying the dossier and erasing its contents from my mind I was given the painting. And what a wily old hypocrite she is. Despite her shock at my revelation she managed to point out quite coolly that publicizing her secret might well pull down the government of her country and place its bleeding remains in the hands of the maniacal Left. It’s a familiar argument nowadays, but I doubt if it’s ever been used under these exact circumstances. Of course, I gladly agreed to her terms. I am not a man intended to pull down governments, and when I think what may happen to that statue of Ajaxa should the iconoclasts take power, I am not happy.”
“Rest easy,” Ben said. “Ajaxa will survive. Look at what your Gauguin survived.”
“Our Gauguin. Don’t forget you’re a partner in it. And, you must admit, so far it’s been a highly successful partnership. I’m led to wonder, Smith, if you’d be interested in continuing it.”
“How?”
“I’m going to reopen my gallery in Manhattan, and also establish an office in some part of the world where they take a civilized attitude toward taxes. Zurich, possibly, or Geneva. All this needs time, of course, and meanwhile I could be teaching you the rudiments of the business. Then, when we’re ready to start operations, you and Nora can handle the New York end while I’m abroad. We can’t miss. At the opening of the gallery we’ll simply display the Gauguin for the first time and get front-page publicity around the world. Can you imagine the furor? Wait until you’re caught up in the middle of it, Smith, and see it at first hand. You’ll find it far more rewarding than doing statistics on the sale of frozen fish. Believe me, there’s nothing frozen about a work of art.”
“But I’m a rank amateur in art. I know hardly anything about it.”
“That admission alone makes you unique. The two best qualifications for entering this business are a refreshing ignorance and the candor to admit it. Then you are ready to learn, and I am ready to instruct. There’s time for the process, too. David’s death is the event to get our first consideration. Much as I revere Gauguin, I will not have him stealing David’s thunder. Aside from this, the one question concerning you is how you’re to manage financially for the next few months. After I announce the discovery of the Gauguin, money will be no problem, but until then it’s going to be in short measure.”
“I can get by if I have to,” said Ben. “But working with you in a gallery isn’t what I had in mind for myself.”
“It won’t only be me. Nora will be one of us, too. A wonderful girl, Smith. The more you know her—”
Despite himself, Ben had to laugh. “Klebenau, are you matchmaking? But use some sense, will you? Chapin hasn’t been dead a week. This is no time to be offering me his widow.”
“Don’t be so drearily conventional, Smith. You and Nora will make a splendid match, and I’m using good sense when I say that such an arrangement must not be left to chance. It’s to her advantage as well as yours. Life with a stormy spirit like David was an exhausting process, and she needs a change now. A settled home—children—she’s always yearned for children but never had them because she felt David needed all her attention. She deserves all this now. It doesn’t make you any the less machote for being the kind of man who can provide it.”
There was no more inclination in Ben to laugh. “Thanks for the compliment. And the offer. But I’m not taking it.”
“Not taking it? You can’t mean that. Art is big business today. There’s a fortune to be made from it. And it’s a soul-satisfying business, too, not like what you’ve been working at.”
“No,” said Ben, “I’ll settle for what you owe me and that’s all.”
“I thought there was more than a debt tying us together, Smith. Something closer to friendship, perhaps.”
“Did you? But what friendship could we have, Klebenau? I’m not David Chapin. According to you, I’m a flower of dull, suburbanite manhood. An unimaginative time-server. An amiable partner to Nora in the placid aftermath of her hitherto exciting life.”
“So that’s it! But you’re misinterpreting me, Smith. You’re putting words into my mouth.”
“No, I’m only describing your view of me. The worst of it is you may be right. But maybe you’re not. Maybe there’s something deep inside me waiting to be released and now is the time to discover it and release it. Why haven’t I the right to go off to the South Seas and try my hand at painting, like Gauguin? Or fight alongside Tito Aguilar in a guerilla war? What makes me so different from them?”
“One thing,” said Klebenau. “If you heard yourself speaking just now, you’d know that. There was no conviction in what you said, no fury, no real passion. It was only anger at the injustice of life for not providing you with the gifts they were born with. And it’s a proper anger, too, a commendable one, because it shows an envy of the one truly enviable thing in life.
“I know that feeling, Smith. I still suffer it at times, although not as often as I did during my youth. In your case right now, you’re suffering it as a form of island fever. I learned long ago that even a few weeks on a small island—especially on a tropical island—works like a cathartic on the emotional system. It’s like being locked in a small room with a crowd of strangers. There is no escape from them or yourself. You rub against each other, building up a potent charge of electricity. Your view of the world around you changes from the soothing impressionistic to the lacerating expressionistic. Your moods become exaggerated. Even the thick-skinned tourist may undergo this. For someo
ne like you who is not thick-skinned and who has lived at an intense rate these past weeks, I suppose it was inevitable.
“But island fever doesn’t last very long, Smith, so don’t make decisions under its influence. The mainland works its own magic very quickly. The electricity ebbs, perspective returns, the moods become temperate again. You’ll find that out in short order. Let’s wait until then before settling our affairs. Right now we are, figuratively and literally, too much up in the air. Once we’ve got our feet firmly on the ground, we’ll be able to discuss prospects more sensibly.”
“I thought I was discussing them sensibly now,” Ben said. “My problem isn’t island fever, Klebenau. It’s trying to cut through that layer of condescension around you.”
“Yes,” said Klebenau amiably, “I can appreciate your feelings. However, whatever your future decision, you’ll have to extend the partnership at least another week. I’m not taking the plane through from Lima to New York. Since the Gauguin must be provided with a provenance, I’m going directly to Colón to arrange that. I know a couple of cheap curio shops there that sell worthless paintings, and I must buy one—a portrait of a young girl, if I can find it—for the sake of the sales receipt.”
“I see,” said Ben. “Then you destroy the worthless painting and say that it was the Gauguin you bought in Colón. Very neat, if the shopkeeper doesn’t commit suicide when he finds out he apparently sold a Gauguin for ten dollars.”
“Five dollars,” said Klebenau. “And the shopkeeper will be small loss to the world. Meanwhile, you and Nora will return to the States with the Gauguin and care for it until I arrive. Of course, word of it must not get out. There’s going to be some newspaper excitement when you land—the papers have undoubtedly learned of David’s death by now—and you’ll have to be careful not to let mention of the Gauguin slip out during interviews.”
“Interviews?”
“It’s all right. Nora’s been briefed on what to say at them. She’ll explain it to you before you reach New York.” Klebenau handed over the umbrella. “Now guard this with your life. Don’t relax your hold on it for a second. But not like that, for God’s sake. By the handle.”
The Panama Portrait Page 26