Madonna of the Apes

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “What do you want, then?”

  “Another question. Does it mean, How can I help you?” Fred said. “I don’t think so. Suzette drew a mistaken conclusion. I didn’t come to sell back the chest. I want its provenance, that’s all.”

  “My business is confidential. My clients demand that. My clients on both sides of each transaction.”

  Fred said, “Clients like Mitchell and the lovely Suzette Shaughnessy. And Carl, of course. Carl is a client?”

  “The eye’s closing up,” Franklin said.

  “The name Franklin Tilley may already be associated with some funny business,” Fred said. “People who don’t know your face might recognize the name and shy away from the person it goes with. I would. Or the terms of your probation don’t allow you to leave the state of Georgia. Or you are hiding out from Mitchell, and/or from Carl and whoever Carl represents, and now Carl, since he had this much trouble finding you—how did he find you is another of the questions I am not asking—and Carl is pissed off, and…just some random speculations. I don’t care about all that, understand? The money Carl took with him? I don’t care. I just want the object’s provenance.”

  “Listen,” Franklin said. The interruption stopped Fred’s flow of thought. He waited while Franklin Tilley wrestled with what he wanted to say. “Listen,” he decided. “Frankly, I’m in a jam.”

  Fred asked, “Have you noticed that whenever a politician, for example, uses the word ‘frankly,’ the next thing out of his mouth is always a lie?”

  “You can help me,” Franklin said. He shifted the cold pack on his face and groaned. “I said I’ll pay ten grand in cash, but listen, between us, the chest is worth more. Could be.”

  “I ask myself, How come it’s worth so much money?” Fred said. “You I don’t ask.” He let the observation rest.

  “Shit,” Franklin said, disgustedly. “It’s not even worth what Gingrich paid. It’s just, this other guy wants it.”

  “And my mission?”

  “Convince Gingrich to sell. For whatever. There’s ten thousand in it for you. The profit you make off Gingrich, that’s up to you.”

  “I’m bad with numbers. Didn’t Suzette Shaughnessy say twenty?”

  “Twenty then,” Franklin said.

  “I mean that she’d pay twenty for it. Commission. On top of the ten.”

  “I’m confused,” Franklin said.

  “You are,” Fred agreed. He studied the situation a moment before he continued, “The problem with your plan, or a problem, as a plan, is, if Gingrich still has the chest, which he denies, if a person like me goes to him with an offer like that—twenty thousand, fifty thousand, whatever—it makes him think it’s worth five times as much, whereas we know it’s not worth what he paid for it. If he has it. He says he doesn’t.”

  “We’ll find out. Suzette Shaughnessy’s tracking him down.”

  “What if the chest is already mine?” Fred asked.

  “Shit!” Franklin said.

  “And what if you have accidentally informed me that it is worth a good deal more than thirty thousand dollars? Serious money. Another question I don’t ask.”

  “Shit!” Franklin said. “Listen, we can work this together, can’t we?”

  “Here’s one we can both answer,” Fred said. “Is that the doorbell?”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The bell rang again. Franklin rose to his feet and crossed to the intercom next to the front door, held the receiver to his ear, and told it, “Yes?” He listened and added, “I’ll buzz you in.” The questions in his visible eye as he looked over at Fred remained unspoken.

  Fred shifted on his seat, but it did not make him more comfortable.

  Franklin opened the door to Clayton Reed’s elegant self.

  “Mr. Gingrich,” Fred exclaimed.

  “Your conservator—if that’s what you call him—is already here,” Franklin guessed aloud. Clay’s face, as he took in Fred’s presence, revealed nothing. He inclined his head slightly and, unbidden, knelt to unlace his shoes. The gray suit he was wearing fell into perfect line as he stood again. He walked to the center of the room and looked slowly around at the four walls. He sniffed the air in disapproval. The tension stretched as it does in a poker game the moment before someone loses a great deal of money that he may not have.

  “Cigarette smoke,” Clayton complained.

  “I control what I can,” Tilley said. “What I can’t, I don’t. Some people are incorrigible.”

  “A couple of developments,” Fred began.

  “An advisor,” Franklin kept on. “Not someone you want to cross.”

  Clay held up his hand. “The Mantegna,” he said to Tilley.

  Franklin, the improvised ice pack held against his dripping cheek, began to speak but was cut off.

  “Couple of developments,” Fred pushed on.

  “I want that chest back, Mr. Gingrich. I’ll pay good money for it,” Franklin said.

  “The one with the monkeys on it,” Clay said smoothly. “It has been sold.”

  “This man, Fred, says that he bought it.”

  “Indeed.” Clay let his eyebrows rise to a lofty height. He shrugged. “The issue is closed,” Clay said. He was poised in front of the painting of Mary Magdalene now, looking it over with a quizzical eye. “Mr. Tilley has hurt himself,” he observed, in a voice that struggled to suppress its satisfaction.

  “A friend or associate named Carl,” Fred said. “A messenger from an as yet un-named associate. Who is also looking for a mutual friend of theirs named Mitchell.”

  “You know Mitchell?” Franklin blurted. “Where the hell is…”

  Clay shrugged the interruption off as if it were no more than a light breeze ruffling the pile of his white hair. The hair was too white for whatever age Clayton was. Was it real? Did he have it done? On purpose?

  “I want to examine it under a black light,” Clay said. “The Mantegna, as you call it.”

  “Black light?” Franklin asked. “Isn’t that for growing…?”

  “You have none?” Clay scolded.

  “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” Franklin said.

  “He’s confused about many things,” Fred said. “But I have to say you’ve lost me now.”

  “The black light reveals paint that is not original,” Clay explained. “Because newer paint fluoresces differently. Some of the later additions to the Magdalene are clear to the naked eye. Here, for example.” He crossed to stand closer to the painting. Fred got to his feet and joined him, and Franklin moved in closer, tipping his head in order to focus with his good eye. “Under the breast here,” Clay pointed to Magdalene’s left breast, “in the shadow, someone has filled in for lost paint. It was clumsily done. There are areas, too, in the sand, the sky, the skirt. This is all to the naked eye. A painting with this much age has usually been retouched many times. How much of the original paint surface is left…I cannot say. Mr. Tilley, you offer to sell, at a premium, an object not only whose identity you cannot guarantee, but whose condition you do not know?”

  Franklin, without responding, turned and crossed to the hallway leading to the bathroom, disappeared into it, and came back a few moments later without the cold pack. The left eye was swollen shut, and taking on color. “It’s up to the client,” he said. “Decide for yourself. Examine it any way you want.”

  “I shall take it only on approval, subject to further examination,” Clay said. “Naturally I shall give you a receipt.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Franklin exploded, before he remembered himself, and the league in which he was attempting to feel comfortable. “Under some stress,” he fumbled. “Sorry. No can do. The consignor won’t let the object leave the premises until it’s sold.”

  “Also,” Clay said smoothly, “I shall need the work’s history.”

  “I noticed metal folding chairs in the bedroom closet,” Fred interrupted. “If anyone wonders where I am, I’m getting them.” When he brought the two ch
airs back into the room and started to set them up, Clay was saying, “Surely, for an item that purports to have this much importance, you keep a file. Provenance. Exhibition history. That’s what I wish to see. As is common. I shall take it with me to study.” He sat in one of the two chairs Fred had placed on the rug. Fred took the other and both of them faced the Magdalene as if it was a television set.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  “You mentioned a consignor just now,” Fred prompted. “Though you also said you yourself bought the picture. Or inherited it? In any case, the bill of sale…”

  “Exactly,” Clay chimed in. “That will be helpful too. The bill is in the object file.” He sat expectantly. Franklin shifted uneasily from one foot to another.

  “The service I provide is confidential,” he said finally, repeating himself. “I don’t reveal the name of the painting’s present owner any more than, you being the purchaser, I will reveal that fact to the present owner. This confidentiality is a crucial part of the service I provide.”

  “Suzette Shaughnessy,” Fred said. “You seem to share a good deal of information with her.”

  “Yes. She is working with me. Partners. In a single restricted project. You know the project, Mr. Gingrich, though you claim the issue is closed. She called on you?”

  Clay said, “Unfortunately, I have not had the pleasure.”

  “Never mind all this,” Franklin insisted. “And I’m talking to both of you, or either one of you. What will you take for that chest?” His urgent tone, along with the damaged eye, made the plea almost pitiful.

  “We have no further business,” Clay announced, standing and crossing to his shoes. He knelt to put them on, adding, “I want nothing further to do with you, Mr. Tilley.”

  “I’m about done here too,” Fred said.

  “Think it over, Mr. Gingrich. I’ll call you,” Franklin pleaded.

  “Regrettably, my number is not listed,” Clayton said. Fred followed him out. Once on the stairs Clay said, his tone tinged with regret. “You did not do that to Mr. Tilley?”

  “Carl is visiting muscle from Atlanta, representing the power behind the operation. He walked out with a satchel of cash, I assume. I saw the satchel, not the cash.”

  “My name has become Gingrich?” Clay said. “I can’t say that I like the name Gingrich.”

  “They were bound to look for you, given how much they want the painting back. So I gave them a name,” Fred said. “Which we can bet Suzette Shaughnessy at this moment is hunting for.”

  The afternoon had turned chilly and damp. They both turned down the hill, walking side by side as if they had the same destination. Charles Street, when they reached it, was bristling with foot traffic and choked with cars whose drivers cruised with an eye for nonexistent parking places that might open up in time to be nabbed just before the meters stopped functioning, in which case they’d be set until morning. Clay finally broke the silence. “You were in the neighborhood,” he said.

  Fred said, “Let’s hang back and make sure Tilley doesn’t try to follow you. He’s dumb, but he’s desperate, and he may be sly. I might as well let you know, I dropped the hint to Suzette Shaughnessy—we lunched—that the chest went from you to the Agnelli Collection. She’s not working for him at all, to judge from her response. Hoping to sell to him, she pretended to be with him. You and Agnelli cut her out of the loop, is her conclusion. If she believes that. She can go to Agnelli and ask him but he’ll deny it, and she won’t believe him, is my guess. And if she asks him, she loses a lot of face, and maybe the customer. Then I dropped the hint, both to her and to Tilley, that in fact I own the thing. When Suzette and Tilley compare notes, there’s going to be confusion. That can’t hurt.”

  Clayton waved his hand for silence. “The reason I kept the appointment.”

  “Yes? I wondered since you said you wouldn’t.”

  “Very well. No matter. At least six of the paintings in that room come from the Brierstone collection. Shall we go now? I take it you are going in my direction?” Clay sounded resigned.

  They walked in silence for ten minutes, as far as the antique store above which the woman with the snake tattoo lived. His woman. Fred’s woman. Her name tugged at a vanished cord in a dark part of his brain. “Brierstone,” Fred said. “That so-called hypothetical yarn you were spinning about the Diana de Milo the other day. You were fishing. Testing. Looking for what I knew.”

  Clay said, “It would have been instructive to see your face indicate an awareness of the Brierstone name. I could not rule out the possibility that you and Tilley were acting in collusion. It would have been a clever ruse: you, the worse villain, snatching me from the jaws of the first villain, and using the occasion to gain entrance to my home.” Clay took hold of Fred’s arm with his long fingers and stared into his face as if he were considering it as a possible addition to his collection. “I was confident that I recognized the Magdalene and one other,” he said. “The Bacchus by Titian. Not in good shape. It’s why I came back this afternoon. To check. To be certain. If it was a risk it was worthwhile, because now I am almost certain that I will confirm the Leonardo’s provenance.

  “I am a suspicious man by nature. I suspect the veracity of almost everything except my instincts. Although I may on occasion have misread my instincts—a reading may be diverted by folly—my instincts themselves are never wrong.”

  “I am happy for you,” Fred said, “even though you change the subject.”

  Clay started walking again, his hand, at Fred’s elbow, propelling him forward in company.

  “I have made a decision,” Clay said. “Come to my house. We’ll discuss it. That is, if you are free.”

  “I have nothing pressing,” Fred told him.

  Nothing more was said until after Clay had opened the big front door and led the way into his parlor. The Madonna of the Apes was where Fred had seen it last, propped on the love seat. Fred’s eyes flickered to the other paintings hanging on the walls. The walls had been painted a dull deep green. There was too much, and too much variety, to be taken in quickly, although it was nothing like the almost meaningless clutter of the collection in Franklin’s apartment. What put Fred off balance here was the odd juxtapositions of works. It was as if, in the zoo, the rhinoceros, the sturgeon, and the brown recluse spider were presented in contiguous cages.

  “Sit,” Clay invited. Fred found a chair that would accommodate his size, took off his windbreaker and sat, the jacket across his knees. He’d chosen a place from which he could keep his eyes on the Madonna and on the apes as well. While Fred studied the painting, Clayton sat in a flimsy chair that had been designed for one of Marie Antoinette’s off moments, and studied Fred.

  “Where would he have seen an ape?” Fred asked, after the silence had lasted long enough.

  “In Milan,” Clay said. “Leonardo had come to Milan, after difficulties in Florence. Difficulties, I say. It could have been a mortal difficulty. He was accused, with a young musician, of sodomy, for which in those days burning at the stake was the legal remedy prescribed, although said remedy might have been more honored in the breach than the observance. He must have had friends in Florence, colleagues, who were jealous. I forget the outcome of the accusation but he must have been acquitted because, fortunately for the world, Leonardo was permitted to live. You ask about the apes. Leonardo studied animals. He studied everything. The duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, would have kept a zoo. In the 1480s anyone wishing to maintain any degree of pretension was obliged to keep a coterie of exotic animals. Not to mention musicians, armed guards, and mistresses. You mentioned one of them earlier, downstairs.”

  “I did?”

  “Certainly. Cecilia Gallerani. It was she who modeled for the Krakow painting you spoke of, Lady with an Ermine. By the time she was fourteen years of age, that ambitious young lady was in Ludovico Sforza’s bed.”

  “Nowadays we’d call that statutory rape,” Fred said. “We’d blame the duke.”

  “Indeed.”
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br />   Chapter Thirty-three

  “I spend hours studying my painting,” Clay continued. “Thinking about it. Doing research. Anticipating what will be said and published in the years to come, after I am dead. Even when we make allowances for habits of style and execution, there is a striking resemblance between the head of the Madonna before us, and that of the Lady with an Ermine, and even, when you look, of the head of the angel Uriel, who appears in the Paris Virgin of the Rocks.”

  “What became of her?” Fred asked.

  “The angel?”

  “Cecilia Gallerani. The job of a strongman’s mistress isn’t easy.”

  “By 1493 she had been set aside, along with a son—the duke’s—and a husband the duke chose for her. She had a dowry large enough to allow her to commission her own castle. It amuses me to think that my painting may have stayed with her. That’s one hypothesis. The painting displays more than a hint of wickedness, wickedness suitable to an illicit alliance. But this hypothesis is fueled in part by my own conservatism in such matters. Neither Sforza nor any of the thousands of public figures of his day, including cardinals and popes, saw anything out of the way in keeping a mistress. She was no more than a necessary piece of stage business: an expensive prop.”

  Clay paused, distracted. “How did we get onto Cecilia Gallerani?”

  “You were speaking of the zoo you either know, or think, Ludovico Sforza kept in Milan,” Fred said, “when I mentioned the apes. That’s not why I’m here. What you are actually doing, while we converse, is to mark time while you organize your thoughts, putting off whatever you really want to say.”

  Clay twisted his hands together, thinking. “It does not matter that you see a painting differently from the way I do,” he said finally. There being no useful answer, Fred let the observation go. “I notice that you have the ability to be candid,” Clay continued. “That’s rare.” Fred let that pass unanswered also. “You were there again this afternoon. I should be enraged and suspicious, yet I am neither. Why? You are working with me,” Clay said finally. “I repeat myself, but I can’t think why.”