Madonna of the Apes

by Nicholas Kilmer

  What had awakened him had been a general, if palpable, misgiving, as if he’d been trapped again. Any building could do it. Anyone’s house. Anyone’s bed. But that wasn’t it. It hadn’t been this pleasant interlude in an attractive woman’s house. No, he’d wakened with the realization that he’d been blindsided by Clayton Reed.

  The older man, odd as he was, apparently cowed by his ingrown mannerisms into a parody of incompetence, had already proved himself more than Fred’s equal twice. No, three times. He’d acted with speed, courage, and finesse, and walked out of Franklin Tilley’s trap, carrying a treasure that might be worth millions, if anybody cared. He’d proved himself almost as impervious as Fred was to the painting’s possible value. His statement that it was worth more than the gross national product of Latvia had been made for dramatic effect, not because he imagined cashing it in. And, finally, he’d bettered Fred because he’d sucker-punched him. Clay had known what Fred wanted better than Fred himself did, and therefore he’d landed Fred.

  Fred, barely aware that he wanted anything at all, had swallowed the hook along with the bait. Because he wanted to see, and get his hands on, Clay’s collection, without confronting the issues of ownership that allowed him no peace. And now Fred had fallen into a game in which only Clay’s presence allowed him the rationale to participate actively. He’d thrust himself forward and Clayton Reed, with stealth and dexterity, had not only sized him up but reeled him in.

  A dog’s whining brought Fred out of his reverie. Without thinking about it, he’d reached the river, walking the wet grass of the Boston side, away from the city’s center, and toward Alston, Brookline, and points west. A piebald dog without collar and tags—a loner, like himself—was fretting over a bloody suit that once had held a man. What was left of the man was still in it, though the head was gravely wrong. Fred squatted to look closer. Lights from infrequent passing cars, not far off on the parkway, flickered across the bloody face, black eye and all, of Franklin Tilley. A bullet fired up through the roof of his mouth had taken off the back of his skull. It had happened here, and not that long ago. The body was warmer than the night, though its feet lay in the river. The bridge they were under dripped on both of them, the dead man and the body.

  “They’ll look for the gun in the river,” Fred mused. “That’s the plan. And if they don’t find it, they can blame the river. That’s the plan.”

  Franklin Tilley had been returned to his lowest common denominators. “Your curiosity wants to know what it’s like after you die,” Franklin had said, continuing, “There’s no ham sandwich waiting. You turn off.” If there was in fact a ham sandwich waiting, Franklin Tilley knew now whether it included mustard.

  The dog whined again, asking permission to lap at the blood and brains that lay around the dead man’s head.

  “Go ahead, friend,” Fred told her. “You need it more than he does now.”

  Twelve minutes later Fred, in a public phone booth on Charles Street, at the circle under the MTA station, doing his best to control his rapid breathing (he’d been running) was reporting, “…under the overpass. Looks like suicide.”

  Eight minutes later Fred, wearing the yellow terry-cloth robe, was sitting in the closest thing Mandy had to a comfortable chair, letting the street’s lights fall where they wished, into the room, and onto the crags of his face. There was nothing to read in here, and if there was, there was no reason to read it. Nothing to read but the message he’d written Mandy, and that was already torn into many pieces and flushed away. He’d be here when Mandy wakened, and in that way he would have been here all night. “Jeekers,” he whispered. “Clay Reed’s prints are all over the man’s place. So are mine.”

  Once he’d warmed up he went into the john again, checked that his clothes were hanging as they had been when he first took them off hours ago, gave a final rub to his head with a towel and flushed the toilet again. Then he climbed into Mandy’s bed. She nuzzled his neck in sleep and wrapped him with an arm and a warm leg. “Mmph,” she said.

  Fred stared at the ceiling, then at the window and the walls. He learned everything on the walls: the mirror, the calendar, the photo of Mandy with an older man, in a frame. That could be her dad. The colored picture of cherubs lying on their stomachs, their chins propped in their hands, saying to one another mischievously, “I’ll show you yours if you’ll show me mine.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Mandy’s poached eggs were not bad. It was distracting, in a pleasant way, that she cooked wearing nothing but an apron, and that the apron said Be Cool on it. Fred had again been assigned the yellow robe, and that would allow his clothes more time to get closer to dry.

  Having cooked, and before they sat at her table with instant coffee, toast, and her poached eggs, she’d removed the apron and put on a blue robe that was either silk or nylon. They chatted over breakfast, a comfortable pair of strangers, until Mandy remembered, “I have to be in front of a mess of over-aged teenagers at ten. Business Math, they call it. It’s how to do your taxes. In hopes they ever earn enough. So I’m back Sunday night,” she added, around an impending forkful of egg and toast.

  Fred remembered, “The wedding. Cleveland. The dress with long sleeves. May I see it?”

  “Not unless you come to Cleveland. I’m not taking my run today. Unless you want to.”

  “Not today,” Fred said. If he started running he might not stop. “Sirens last night,” he added.

  “Most nights,” she said. “If I’m awake I hear them, but when I hear them I don’t notice them.”

  “Around five. This morning, really,” Fred corrected himself. “Unless you object, I’ll wash the dishes.”

  She mopped up a spill of egg with the last of her toast and handed him her plate, telling him, “You wash the dishes and I’ll wash me.”

  “What time Sunday night?”

  “Nineish, I guess,” Mandy said. “Move your clothes. More like ten-thirty.”

  ***

  Fred walked to the drugstore on the circle and bought a better cup of coffee. He stood in the area where people did that, next to the newspapers, to drink it, keeping his ears open. If there was any place where local news developments might be mentioned, this was it. But nobody brought up a local sudden death, and Fred wasn’t about to accentuate his profile by bringing the subject up himself with what couldn’t help but be a memorable question. “Anyone found dead in the neighborhood last night?” would raise eyebrows.

  Sudden death in a big city is not that big a deal. Not news. He strolled back to the corner of Pekham Street and, seeing no commotion in the vicinity of Franklin Tilley’s last stand, he walked uphill to the mouth of the alley. Did anything connect Franklin Tilley’s body to this place? If so, there should be activity in Franklin’s building. Aside from a mournful visitor entering the dental surgeon’s office for his nine-thirty appointment, there was no sign of life. No sign of bustling institutional interest or concern. Had Franklin’s body carried his ID? If so, the inquiries would be directed to Atlanta.

  A man’s shape passed back of the curtain in the front window of Franklin’s apartment. A heavy, sturdy shape.

  Fred took himself to Mountjoy and rang Clayton Reed’s downstairs bell. In two minutes Clay appeared above him on the front stoop. He was at leisure in the blue robe, and was holding a teacup in a distracted hand. “Bright and early. We’ll get started. Apologies,” he said. “I recalled last night, coming home, that I had neglected to give you keys. There will now be three sets: mine, yours, and those of the couple who clean. The big one is downstairs, the two smaller ones up. You won’t need those.” He tossed a set of keys in Fred’s direction. “I’ll join you shortly.”

  When Clay came down the spiral stairs into Fred’s office, Fred was on the couch, checking the notes he’d made the previous evening on the index cards he’d found stacked on his work table. Clay sat on the edge of the table and waited. His feet rested next to the side of the chest, sitting vacantly on the floor there, its angels a
nd flowers in their puzzling, stilted choreography.

  “Some calls I couldn’t make last night,” Fred started, “on account of the time difference. I got enough info for the big picture. Peter Hartrack. But first—don’t go back to Pekham Street. Tilley’s dead. It’ll be on the radio by now, and the TV news if you have one.”

  Clay shook his head. “Great heavens!”

  “In the papers tomorrow, I guess,” Fred went on. “If it seems interesting.”

  “What happened?” Clay’s pale face had gone paler.

  “Looks like suicide. I emphasize, looks like. I was sleeping nearby,” Fred said. “A friend. In the early morning, restless, I took a stroll, and the stroll took me along the river. Four-thirty. Tilley’s body was on the grass, fully clothed, his feet in the water almost as if he’d been standing in the river when the bullet went through his skull. Shot through the roof of the mouth, which looks like suicide. Though a friend can threaten you, shove a gun in your mouth to make you obedient, and then, once the trusting soul believes the gunman has been appeased by all this obedience, pop! The world turns off. The discharge from a .38 wants a lot of skull.”

  “The gun we saw there?” Clay hazarded.

  Fred nodded. “That would do it. My guess is it’s murder. I don’t see Franklin Tilley doing that job on his nice haircut. No, a friend got him.”

  “Friend,” Clay repeated. “You are thinking of—what did you say his name was? Carl?—who was there yesterday in that man’s apartment, and took money by force.”

  “Yes. Carl, but acting for someone else, following orders. For Hartrack we assume, given what we’ve now learned, who has to keep himself on the far side of the Atlantic.”

  “These are dangerous times,” Clay said.

  “Dangerous people,” Fred corrected him. “Dangerous people, if Franklin was playing them for suckers, as I think he was.

  “We can get back to it, but this kind of trumps the rest of what I gathered for you. Last night, on the phone. On the other end of the story, and assuming you are correct that the chest comes from the same collection, the reason Peter Hartrack does not appear in England is that if he does, he’ll be arrested. And he can’t come here to the States, either. Yes, he’s the heir to the Brierstone fortune. The problem is anything out of that fortune that gets sold in England, like the Bronzino you mentioned that was sold at Christie’s, London: the crown wants all or most of it. Tax problems, the rest of it. And the only reason the government of South Africa does not let Britain extradite him is that he’s tied to the right people in the right places, in South Africa; which he knows can change any day since governments change. So he’s cornered. Stuck in South Africa. And unsure that South Africa will work for him indefinitely.”

  “Why would he be arrested? What’s his game?”

  “Arms,” Fred said. “Above the table and below the table. He’s an international arms trader and there’s no such thing as an international arms trader who is not also an international arms smuggler. There’s no such thing as an international arms smuggler who does not, at the same time, interest himself in one side or another, or both, of any revolution that’s building.

  “It’s up to someone to supply machetes to the Tutsis and the Hutu, and shoulder-fired missiles to the rebels in Kashmir and Kandahar. In addition to all the sales to be made in the open market, to the governments of Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Pakistan, Indonesia, Syria, and other pleasure spots around the world.”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  “I don’t know anything about the international trade in arms,” Clay said, “beyond that it’s one of the ways the richer nations have to strip from the poorer countries what little wealth they have. As for Hartrack, you conclude…”

  “He’s trying to raise a lot of clandestine money, in cash, in this country, so as to make a purchase. That’s what I hear. The people I talked to had a pretty good line on this monkey. He can’t sell what he inherited in the UK, and we have to assume he hid as much as he could from the authorities there. Reading between the lines, unless he sold it there to someone who’s fool enough to pay for it first and try to smuggle it out later, he’s found an agent to spirit what’s left of his family’s collection out of England. Tilley is, or was, part of the selling end. Working under cover this way, illegally, and being ignorant anyway, they can’t help being stupid. Hartrack can’t do the sale in person because we normally suck up to Britain and if we found him here we’d send him back to the UK to face the music.

  “So he’s got to work with scoundrels. And, not knowing how to latch on to scoundrels who know the ropes and can be trusted, he latches on to scoundrels who don’t know what they’re doing. Which he figures may be all right, since every dollar he makes is tax free, and worth double. Being scoundrels, of course they don’t tell each other what they’re up to. Everyone has a dodge. Tilley made a mistake. What that mistake is, or what they think it is, I don’t know. Maybe he kept money he shouldn’t have. All that cash blowing around? What was that about? Maybe he spent Hartrack’s money stupidly, like for the fake Cézanne. Got the bit between his teeth, thinking he’d turn a profit for himself before he got found out. He wouldn’t be the first idiot in the history of the world to go down that hole. Maybe he sold something he shouldn’t have sold, for not enough money. For example, to you.”

  “Right,” Clay said, with surprising equanimity. “And you assume these people, Tilley’s friends as you call them, would kill for such a mistake?”

  “A mistake the size of the gross annual product of Bolivia? Are you kidding? Yes, we operate on the most prudent assumption: these people kill for the right mistake, but not until they have decided what to do next,” Fred said. “We know they want the Leonardo back. At least Tilley did, calling it a chest. Nobody admits what it is. So Tilley was being pushed. Do they know they lost a treasure worth the gross national product of Serbia? That was last seen disappearing down Charles Street on my shoulder?”

  “Still, murder is a dramatic response to what may have been no more than an honest mistake,” Clay observed. “Though Tilley was a violent man. He struck me. Why would his colleagues be any better?” He folded his long hands and tipped his head to one side, speculating.

  “Interruption,” Fred said. “For what it’s worth. Who’s Mitchell? What was Tilley waiting for? The big deal painting he tried to promise you. What is it? Where is it? End of interruption.”

  “We don’t need to know that,” Clay said. “Much better ask ourselves, what do we want? That has not changed, despite the distractions. I still need provenance. With Tilley’s sudden unfortunate exit from the story, that becomes more difficult.”

  “Also, and more important, dangerous,” Fred said. “First, we want to stay in front of their speculations. On Sunday night we discovered, almost by accident, a clandestine fortune, illegally in this country, and destined to serve as barter in a large purchase, by a ruthless man. We ran off with the best part of that fortune. The amount of money I saw in Tilley’s place, upward of fifty thousand dollars, is peanuts in the arms trade. Peanuts to a Peter Hartrack, even though when it’s cash, and nobody knows about it, it’s worth twice that. But it sets the stage. That and the art. Which I’ll get to. Sure, Tilley was a fool. Still, he found you. Who else did he find? He reached Agnelli, if we can believe anything that comes out of Suzette Shaughnessy’s mouth, by way of Suzette Shaughnessy.

  “Keep it simple. Hartrack needs a lot of money. It was up to Tilley to get the money by selling paintings. Tilley didn’t have to know all that much. As long as he got the total, maybe it didn’t matter what individual pieces brought. He tried for three million on the supposed Mantegna. He knew something in the group was worth that, is one way of looking at it. He just got the wrong thing. What would you have done if he had demanded three million for the Leonardo?”

  “Ah,” Clay said, “but how could anyone be so ignorant? To confuse a Mantegna—even a false one—with a Leonardo?”

  “Try this hypothetical,” Fred cou
ntered. “We drop you into an arms bazaar on the outskirts of Tripoli with a few million bucks to spend. You want to choose between—let’s make it easy. You’re shopping for missiles. Do you select the American AIM-54A/C Phoenix, the much older Sparrow, or the Sidewinder? Maybe you want the UK’s Skyflash, it’s brand new, but how do you check on the Marconi XJ521 guidance system? When push comes to shove, will it work? Maybe you go with the French R.550 Magic or a Russian Acrid. They’re on offer two for the price of one. Or maybe you want the Aphid, if you can tell the difference between them…”

  “I take your point,” Clay said.

  “And yet you are an intelligent man. Maybe in the top twenty percent.”

  “I have taken your point,” Clay said. He slipped off the edge of the desk and, dodging the chest, began to pace in the area in front of Fred. “You turned the three paintings around,” he said.

  “Something to enjoy while I was on the phone,” Fred said.

  “What do you think?”

  To shift from the morning’s concerns to the three paintings was like stepping from a parched landscape into a cool glade full of rushing water. Fred had turned them around the previous evening, even before he confronted the task he had taken on. Two of them were studies of clouds, each radically different from the other. One was filled with an angry and windy sunset, the other with a gliding pomposity of cumulo-nimbus buoyed up by summer breezes. Neither was signed. Both were extremely dirty. The third painting represented an Italian hill town, probably in Tuscany. It was designed with clean discipline, the architecture of the town as clever, almost as godlike, as the architecture of the hill it stood on and the hills around it. The architecture of the sky and of its clouds spoke the same hand of God, and in the case of all these architectures the god involved was neither Christian, nor classical Greek, but probably an outright atheist. The colors were laid on precisely, as if to give guidance to the designer of the real world. The small C in the lower right-hand corner confirmed the authorship.