“The son isn’t here,” Nim said uneasily.
“Where was it Brogan said yesterday that he’d gone? Drummond Island? You did go to the police this morning, didn’t you?”
“Yes. It was mostly about him they questioned me. I think they’ve made some connection between him and Stu. It could be Drummond Island.”
A servant collected the glasses.
Wallenstein raised his hand for attention again. “You will indulge me in a few moments of personal reminiscence. Then we shall look at some more pictures. My son and I have many years of alienation between us, and I am as aware as he is of the feelings of this distinguished group toward his…public image. For much of his apparent superficiality, shall I call it, I am to be blamed. Today I atone. I should have liked myself to be a painter, and from the time Everett was a child I wanted it for him. I surrounded him with the best my fortune could buy—not the worst of the famous but, as you will have observed, the best of the lesser famous as well, most of whom have proven my taste to be as excellent as their own.
“It occurred to me one day when Everett had become adamant about showing me anything he’d done, that I might have crippled him with such perfectionism. I am rewarded in a way I am not sure I deserved. We were not friends for a long time even though he took his place in the firm. And when he came into his inheritance from his mother, he bought his own house and lived separately—very separately. I was not invited, ever. But one day I invited myself. So much is prologue. Please come with me.”
“My God, my God,” McMahon said. Nim’s fingers were digging into his arm.
They followed the others who followed Wallenstein up the wide hall staircase, the latter among them exchanging whispers of disbelief. They would not easily discard their image of young Wallenstein, the dilettante.
The elder Wallenstein opened the door to a sitting room and threw on the lights. There were perhaps twenty paintings hung in the room. At a glance McMahon would have said they were the work of several artists, the difference in styles, colors and textures, the range from objects to abstraction: but this he and Nim already knew to be likely of the work of Muller-Chase.
“Please, one by one,” Wallenstein said, “but this one first.”
They gathered round him beneath a nude, the back of a black woman bowed so that her head showed only where the hair tumbled down over her arm, the forlorn shape of an abandoned woman. “This,” the old man said, “is what I saw first that day when I presumed to invade his studio.”
Nim cleared her throat and pulled McMahon down to where she could whisper to him: “E for ego, self…remember?”
Wallenstein then said almost the same thing: “It may seem academic, gentlemen, but Everett insists that E does not stand for his name but for Ego. Perhaps the self which I tried to deny him?”
They went from one group of paintings to another, only three or four in each group. McMahon could not really say whether he liked the nonobjective work or not. The experts were noncommittal, silent.
“He has destroyed hundreds of canvases, preserving only those which tell the truth. His philosophy of art is interesting: he believes an artist is only himself for a little while in any environment. Then he becomes corroded—with praise or blame, with fashion, with what is expected of him by, forgive me, you gentlemen. An artist should preserve only what he achieved at the moment of greatest self-demand, self-recognition. The rest turns him into a barnacle. But perhaps you will listen to him differently from now on, eh, gentlemen?”
Something terrible came into those mild gray eyes again when he said that: greed? arrogance? Power. Maybe that was it, McMahon thought. They were moved along to a painting that McMahon and Nim both recognized. She squeezed his arm. The sketch Broglio had given her would have been the forerunner to this work: the lines of the grocer’s back as he stood at the scale were even more poignant in the painting. Wallenstein said of it: “How many generations of heritage went into that, would you say? In Germany a hundred and fifty years ago, my great-grandfather sold coffee by the measure.”
“What does it mean?” Nim whispered again. “What does it mean?”
They had come almost full circle of the room to where a silken drapery hung over another frame.
“Everett hung this collection himself in the last week,” Wallenstein said. “And yesterday, before he left for Europe, he brought this latest canvas. I have obliged his request that even I not see it until today.” He reached up and with the plump, well-manicured hand, drew away the drapery. An envelope was in the corner of the frame, but McMahon saw it only peripherally as the old man took it in his hand. It was the picture that shook both him and Nim so that it seemed like one shudder running through both of them. He put his arm around her and held on tightly.
Realism superimposed on impressionism: the background tone was the smoky amber of the Orthodox church with the suggestion of the brown beams arching, and the pendulous chains shone through the muskiness, the paint seeming not yet dry, but instead of the glass-bowled candles that hung in the church, in the painting hung the severed heads of men. Nim hid her face against McMahon’s arm.
He kept staring at the painting, wanting to keep his own balance. The chains seemed to sway a little as though the heads were restless still. The others of the group were reacting now, a murmurous consternation, but the attention shifted to Wallenstein himself. When McMahon looked at him he saw that the cherubic pink of his face had turned to parchment pallor, the hand in which he held the note trembled more and more violently.
A man stepped forward to help him. Wallenstein crumpled the paper and thrust it into the man’s hand, and with the same motion pushed the man out of his way, and then the others, his arm stiff before him, and walked from the room with the autonomic step of one who has measured the distance to his collapse.
The man into whose hands he had given the paper un-crumpled it and read what was written, passing it on then to his colleagues. Finally it came to McMahon and Nim.
My dear father: The work you have shown is that of Thomas Stuart Chase, whom I killed with a knife when he agreed that I should perpetrate this hoax. E is for Ego, but Chase’s, not mine. Mine I now propose to find in the way he found his. E.
They walked until they found a coffee shop on Madison Avenue, a quiet place, it being well before the dinner hour. They sat opposite each other, not looking directly at one another; or, when their eyes met, it was not in concern or involvement with one another. McMahon leaned an elbow on the table and shaded his eyes with his hand, seeing still in his mind’s eye, that last picture, then finally the others. When he looked up Nim was crying.
“What I’m doing, Nim—I’m thinking of the paintings themselves. They’re safe. That’s the important thing. I almost think it would be the important thing even if the fraud had been successful. I’m wondering if that isn’t how Muller himself felt at the end. He could have told me…”
She was only half-listening to him, trying to keep from sobbing.
“Why are you crying?”
“Because for the first time in my life I know what it is I’m hating and it feels good.”
“To hate—or to cry?”
“Both.”
“What are you hating, Nim?”
“That man—from the first minute I saw him. The arrogance—no, the voraciousness—that’s it. It’s what I ran away from, Joe, that soft, mine-all-mine possessiveness. The smugness, smothering…God, how I hate it, him.”
“I see. You’ve got a lot of things mixed up, Nim.”
“Maybe I do. He’s like my mother, and in a crazy way, his son is like my father—you know—Wall Street—a physicist making Dow chemicals to please her. You’re right. I am mixed up.”
“Why can’t you just think about the paintings?”
“Because they’re there! In his house.”
“You’d think it was he who killed your friend, and it wasn’t.”
“But it was. He’d kill all of us. He’s Hitler, Joe, the way Stu told i
t to Mr. Rosenberg. And if Stu could see his pictures hanging there, he’d go in and destroy them.”
“But he’d be wrong, Nim. And I don’t think he would. Or the paintings wouldn’t be there now. The devil has many disguises, but the Christ in us knows them every one. It’s an old saw, but the devil quotes scripture. Hitler might have liked Mozart. But Mozart was still Mozart. All I’m saying, Nim—love the pictures. Love what you can love, even if you can’t love what you want to love. That’s where the mix-up is, I think.”
Nim leaned her head back in the booth while the waitress served their coffee. When the girl had gone, she said: “I’m beginning to get things sorted out. I’m trying to protect something. What?”
“A couple of things,” McMahon hedged.
“Me. I’m protecting me. I wanted him—I wanted his child—you—the pictures—I wanted to protect them. But as you say, they are protected. It’s all right now, Joe. As long as I know what’s going on in me. It’s when I don’t know. That’s when I’m in trouble.” She blew her nose. “Will you go to the police?”
“Someone there will.” He realized and said: “I have the note in my pocket. I didn’t know what to do with it. I want to think some things out first. I don’t like to think about young Wallenstein either, but I’m going to. I don’t like what I remember of him, the way he looked at you that first time in his house. He wanted everything too.”
“Not me,” Nim said. “He didn’t want me. What he wanted was to see if I had anything of Stu’s.”
“When I think of the coldness,” McMahon went on, following his own train of thought, “with which he looked at the face of the man in the morgue and then came out and talked to me about you—that dinner he gave us—the tears in your house: what did they mean, Nim?”
“He said it: they were for himself. Like mine just now. Not remorse, not grief, not even anger. He’d have seen Stu in that painting of mine and he’d have known of himself that he wasn’t even as good as me. Remember? At the door he asked how my father felt about my painting now.”
McMahon thought about it. “I wonder if that was the moment when he decided on this note that’s in my pocket. Vengeance over all.”
“Uber alles,” Nim said. “He would have loved Stu once I think, wherever they met, however often. But it would have been a kind of hell for him to keep those paintings when he couldn’t make his own. And that father to run away from.”
“Maybe that’s it and now he thinks he’s free. Sometimes I’ve thought that Muller didn’t live to finish what he was trying to say at the end, I took the knife away from him. Maybe if he’d finished it, he’d have said: and given him a brush.”
“Maybe, maybe, maybe. It’s all over as far as I’m concerned. I’ll be able to think of the paintings now. Stu is dead, and here I am with you, ready for another kind of dying.”
“I’m going away for a few days,” McMahon said. “Some place cheap by the sea where there aren’t any people this time of year.” He looked up at her suddenly. He had not meant to, but he did.
Her eyes were waiting for his, expecting them, the question in them. She shook her head.
20
WHEN HE GOT BACK to the rectory there was a message for him: Phelan had been picked up again by the police. He went at once to the station house.
Priscilla Phelan was pleading with the officer at the charge desk to be allowed to see her husband. She was on the raw edge of profanity. McMahon knew too well her mercurial temper. He called out her name. She ran to meet him.
“He’ll be all right,” McMahon said. “Tell me what happened.”
“He went for a walk and that bastard in the backroom followed him.”
“Where?”
“To the building where Muller was killed.”
“It was not far,” McMahon said, as though that were the important thing. He asked the desk officer to phone and see if he might go up to the interrogation room. Permission was granted. “I’ll come back as soon as I can,” he told Mrs. Phelan. “Just sit down quietly and don’t make any trouble.”
“Stay with him, Father. Don’t leave him alone with them.”
The point on which they were interrogating Phelan when McMahon entered the room was where he had met Everett Wallenstein. Phelan, slumped in the straight chair, circled in light, denied having ever met the man at all. While Brogan questioned, Traynor strolled over to meet the priest. “Counselor,” he said.
McMahon said, “You know that Wallenstein left a confession to the murder?”
Traynor nodded.
Brogan, aware then of the priest, said, “Just tell us what you were doing in that building today, Dan.”
“I wanted to see something upstairs. That’s all.”
“The poor devil could hardly climb the stairs,” Brogan said to McMahon, “but he still won’t tell us what he was looking for. His fingerprints were all over that goddamned cot we found up there.”
McMahon said, “The painting, Dan? Is that it? The severed heads?”
Phelan looked in his direction, trying to see through the wall of light.
“Let’s sit and talk without all that light. Let’s try it that way, lieutenant.”
So, with the priest’s help, Phelan told of how he had first followed Muller, and then discovered the painting he was working on at the top of the abandoned building. “I’d go there sometimes when I knew he wasn’t there and just sit on the cot, just to be there.”
“Sexual fantasies, Dan?”
Phelan nodded. “But religious too, Father. I got them all mixed up.”
McMahon said to the detectives, “This is Dr. Connelly’s work, not ours.” Then to Phelan: “Dan, were you in the building when he was killed?”
“I’d been there most of the night. That’s where I went when I left Priscilla. It’s where I was before too. But when I heard the voices in the basement, you could hear them up the stairwell, I got out as fast as I could. I didn’t want him to find me. I swear to God I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know. And later when I found out what happened, I just kept away.”
“But why the hell didn’t you go home?” Brogan said.
“Because that’s where my wife was,” Phelan shouted hoarsely.
“Okay,” Traynor said. “He’s in no shape to do any more talking now. You can take him home, Father.” He got up from the table around which the four of them had been sitting.
Brogan said, “To think you brought Wallenstein in to us, Father, and I let him go. Drummond Island—and all the time he was skipping the country.”
“Where’s Drummond Island?”
“It’s away out off the coast of Maine. His old man owns it.”
McMahon gave Traynor the crumpled note.
When the police were gone he sat down again with Phelan.
“I’d like to go to confession, Father.” He looked around the small, bare room with its smoke-grayed walls. “I don’t think I can make it to the church.”
“It’s a long ways in your condition,” McMahon said.
Phelan closed his eyes for a moment. “It’s funny, you saying that, Father. I was thinking this morning of my own father, a tough brute of an Irishman. He was always trying to squeeze a dollar out of my mother, and she’d say, ‘It’s a long ways to payday, lover.’ Always lover. And he’d say, ‘It’ll be a longer one, Tess, if you don’t give me the dollar now.’ Why do the Irish drink so much, Father?”
“I’m not sure they all do,” McMahon said, “but I drink too much myself.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long ways to payday.”
Phelan managed a crack of a smile. “I can’t get over that family in the hospital with me. Love, it’s the only word for it.”
“They’re real,” McMahon said.
“Oh, yes. They know what it’s about. No dark corners. You know, they’d kill for one another, Father. They wouldn’t say it was right. But they’d say it was love.”
McMahon drew a long breath. “Dan, I want to tel
l you something that’s on my conscience: I was with Detective Brogan in the bar on Eighth Street when they picked you up. I’d gone out for a few drinks with him. I didn’t know why we’d wound up in that particular spot until I saw you. You were informed on by a priest, Dan.”
“I wasn’t running away. Just staying away—in a place I felt comfortable.”
“I know.”
After a minute Phelan said: “It’s all so rotten, so crooked, getting sex out of pictures.”
“Dan, it’s a very common thing. Dr. Connelly will tell you that. That’s why I want you to keep seeing him.”
“He can’t change me.”
“He can help you live with yourself—whether it’s with Priscilla or not.”
“Does it come with a guarantee?”
“No. Only confession comes with a guarantee. And even that is on your own bond.”
“‘Nothing is given to man’: I like that song.”
“He’s given some choices if he’s got the guts to make them.”
Phelan put his hand to his breast, to where the knife wound was scarcely healed. “I chose—and I couldn’t even do that right.”
“I’ve written a draft letter that might be some help to you. I’d suggest you write the Franciscan Brothers if it turns out that’s still what you want when you get things straightened out.”
Phelan gave a dry little laugh. “It was a dream—lying in the nice white sheets of the hospital. I should’ve done it long ago if I was going to. I’m not going to give the Lord back this rotten lump of clay.”
“He made it, Dan, and he’d have known what was going to happen to it—even as you and I don’t know now. Do you remember the story of St. Ignatius? A soldier, a dissolute man in the days when even the pope was corrupt.”
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