Madonna of the Apes

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Fred said, slowly and hoarsely, “You mentioned last night that we don’t see paintings the same way. If you mean this as a test, it’s a waste of your time and mine. The Constable on the left is made of righteous anger. The one on the right, of puzzled self-satisfaction. Between them, they do a whipsaw. The Corot—for the life of me I can’t understand how a man who could see such logic onto the land, wasted his late years in that exorbitant fluff of chocolate box designs. True, a lot of those fuzzy, vapid landscapes are fakes. But a lot of those fakes Corot made himself.

  “We don’t have time for this. Listen, I don’t know the values of paintings. There’s a man dead, which I do understand. Since you and I are involved, and we still need information so the painting you bought doesn’t implode, I have to go out asking questions. I need to understand the environment. I’m as dumb about the art market as you are about the price of sidewinders. The collection we both saw at Franklin Tilley’s. In broad terms, what’s it worth?”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  “I’ve been puzzling over that,” Clay said. “In the first place, there’s more to say about the value of money in a transaction that is not reported. You say his fifty thousand cash is worth a hundred, and that’s true. But. Everyone knows it. Therefore when the man says he wants—take the William Anderson, for example…”

  “William Anderson?”

  “A watercolor. British painter. Dutch harbor scene. Near the…”

  “I saw it. Shipping, Dordrecht.”

  “My point is,” Clay went on, “if he asks for five thousand and I offer him two and a half in cash, he and I both know he’s got his price. Therefore, because everybody expects to bargain, if I offer cash, I might start at one and, depending on how much I want the picture, and how much he wants the money, we tug back and forth until we have a price.

  “I should not have given him five thousand dollars for the Leonardo. It made him suspicious. No, if I had played my hand correctly, I should have had it for three.”

  “I wouldn’t complain,” Fred said.

  “It is the principle of the thing.” Clay had been pacing all this while. Now he took up his perch again on the edge of the desk. “To return to your sensible question. There are too many imponderables to hazard a guess at the black market value of the collection. If you were to purchase them at a gallery, the premium would be overblown because it must necessarily include the gallery’s costs in rent and personnel, in the form of commissions.

  “I mentioned the William Anderson. If it were an identifiable American port, and especially if we saw a Stars and Stripes on one of the ships, it might bring five thousand at auction. That’s what American collectors want, and that’s who has money. If it were purchased by a gallery for stock, the asking price might be twelve thousand, leaving the gallery ample room to bargain. But it is not an American subject, and it is not at auction. Its condition is good, as far as I could see. If I wanted the painting I would offer two thousand dollars and be willing to pay three.

  “For a sidewinder missile I could give you a pretty firm price,” Fred said.

  “But, like lettuces and cans of tuna fish, within each brand name, the missiles are identical,” Clay said. “Are they not? If they work. Of all the other paintings by William Anderson, each is unique.”

  “Try it this way,” Fred said. “Say the guy dies. The government knows about the collection and wants its death duties. Somebody puts a value on the collection. An appraiser. Where the appraiser’s values come from I don’t know, but…”

  “They take the auction record into account. Those are published. The prices realized by all the creditable auction houses. You can look up William Anderson and see what his view of Dordrecht should bring, more or less, barring unforeseen events. But by tradition an estate appraisal’s a good deal lower than, for example, an insurance appraisal or an appraisal made for the purpose of a gift to a charitable institution. There’s room…”

  “Give me a guess,” Fred said. “How much does Hartrack want for the whole shebang?”

  “If he knows it included a Leonardo?”

  “We assume he doesn’t know. Give me a ballpark.”

  “Too many imponderables,” Clay complained. “I don’t know what half the pictures are. And I don’t know what they think the pictures are. Some look like tourist frauds from two centuries ago. Some, like the Dierck Bouts, appear to be honest and excellent pictures. For the Bouts, if I had three hundred thousand dollars to spend, I would spend it.”

  “Which was that?” Fred asked.

  “The little Crucifixion next to the fraudulent Cézanne that has since disappeared. For that, incidentally, if it were not a fraud, the retail price to be expected would be in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand. But for other pieces on the wall the values would be some in the thousands, some in the low ten thousands. On the other hand, what I took to be a late Titian, the Head of Bacchus—You spotted it?”

  “Maybe not,” Fred said.

  “If I am right, though damaged, probably three million. Overall…” Clay squeezed his eyes shut and calculated, using his fingers. “Let’s level the field and hypothesize that these works, with a published provenance, were legally offered at public auction. The estimated hammer price might fall—don’t hold me to it—between fifteen and eighteen million. That’s counting the Titian as a Titian, extracting the false Cézanne, and leaving the Leonardo out of the equation.”

  “Not much in the arms market,” Fred said. “Therefore they want the Mantegna to be a Mantegna, and they sure as hell want that Madonna back. What’s it worth? Don’t give me the gross annual product shtick.”

  “The Leonardo alone, properly vetted and published, should realize between a hundred and a hundred fifty million. Easily. There has been nothing like it on the market. What would the Mona Lisa bring? More or less than the Taj Mahal, do you think? On that score things have changed, I have to say, drastically, and recently. Just twenty years ago or so, in the late ’60’s, the Metropolitan Museum in New York passed up a chance to contend for the Ginevra de’ Benci we’ve talked about already between us. Too expensive, they thought, when the National Gallery scooped it in for six million. If it came on the market today, you wouldn’t get near it for eight times that figure.”

  “At those kinds of numbers, you just stop thinking about money, don’t you?” Fred said.

  Clayton looked demure. He twitched. “If I valued my collection for its monetary equivalents,” he said, “I should be a bundle of nerves. I do not.”

  “It would be like valuing Bulgaria for its monetary equivalents,” Fred helped.

  “Meanwhile, there is our duty as citizens,” Clay pressed on.

  “Duty as citizens,” Fred repeated.

  “Regarding the death of a fellow citizen. Regardless of the fact he was a villain,” Clay said, “the authorities must be informed.”

  “I did that right away, but quietly,” Fred said. “I don’t like the anonymous telephone call, but our prints are all over that man’s apartment. We could help them with what we know, but our civic duty to a dead fool won’t make him less dead or less of a fool.”

  “Our civic duty is to the living,” Clay scolded. “We don’t want them here, as they would be, were we to interfere. You made a wise decision. Prudent. Meanwhile, your research last evening. The next step may be to make direct inquiries at the source. Did you find an address, perhaps a telephone number, for Peter Hartrack?”

  “Jumping Jiminy,” Fred exclaimed. “Think!” His exclamation had brought him to his feet, within inches of Clayton’s perch. Clay winced but held his ground. Fred turned, took a few steps, and sat again.

  “Not a good idea, you think?”

  “The man’s a major force, involved in a shady transaction in which he wants his involvement to be secret. The reason for the transaction is shady, and secret. He’s a merchant of death already. And five hours ago, here’s a violent end to one of his team. Now you want to telephone Hartrack and ask him to expla
in his part in these events?”

  Clay clasped his hands and studied the proposition. “He is free to deny his connection.”

  “That advances our cause not one inch, and puts a collector who lives on Boston’s Mountjoy Street square in his sights. Take my advice. It’s what I’m here for. Say nothing to anyone. Do what you’re good at. Work from Leonardo’s end. It’s where your talents lie. See what you can learn about this painting’s past, if you can do it without being seen to be looking. Let me work among the living,” Fred said. “And, if need be, the very recently dead.”

  Clayton was adjusting to this demand while Fred put on his windbreaker and headed for the door, adding, “We have no choice. Things are moving. We have to know what they are. I’ll go and talk to Suzette Shaughnessy. No. Better. I’ll make her come and talk to me. But I need bait. With your permission, since it belongs to you.”

  Chapter Forty

  Fred waited on Bolt Street, outside Bernie’s place. There was no way anyone not prepared for it would believe this was a living space, and not some tiny version of the Old Abandoned Warehouse so beloved of movies that have nowhere else to go.

  The bones of the building were brick, and a dingy side door next to the two rolling overhead garage doors might have been stolen from the seediest of grocery stores in a bad part of town. Though there was a button to push that seemed to lead to a bell, nobody would believe the bell was in working order. “Join me for lunch at my place,” Fred had told her and, such as it was, he had it with him, in a paper bag.

  Suzette Shaughnessy was dressed in a blue summery outfit that was premature, and that had required her to throw on a sweater as well. Her golden hair sparkled with damp. She carried a large black bag and a dazzling smile that was, this late morning, a bit off center. She’d come on foot.

  “What do you, live here?” she demanded, disgust and dismay struggling to break through the ambient jocularity of the question.

  Fred said, “I’m watching the joint.”

  He led her in through the garage and watched her dismay darken and waver as, turning, she saw evidence of the security systems Bernie had installed to protect his cars. The one hooded vehicle, under its tarp, brooded as they went past.

  “Upstairs,” Fred directed her.

  He drew back to let her precede him up the staircase and they jostled on the landing as he pulled out the key to Bernie’s living space. Once in, she threw her bag on the floor by the couch and begin to deliberate whether to take off the sweater. It was a thick knit, of dull rust color. It was chilly up here and she concluded that she needed it. When she sat on the couch and crossed her legs, most of the dress disappeared under the sweater, and most of her legs emerged, clothed in sheer white.

  “Shall we talk first or eat?” Fred asked. “There’s subs. Your choice. Tuna or Italian. I can make tea, I think.”

  “Business first. It’s good you called,” she said, patting the couch next to her. Fred pulled a chair from Bernie’s small all-purpose dining and worktable and sat where he could see her. “You’re probably the only one who can help me,” she said. “I have a thing about people and I know when I can trust them.” She crossed her legs the other way. “Where is Franklin Tilley?”

  Fred’s silence, accompanied by slightly lifted eyebrows, invited elaboration.

  “I stopped by,” Suzette continued. “To pick him up. On the way here. I knew you wouldn’t mind, since naturally Franklin is interested too, and you’re working with Franklin, and…but…and so am I, naturally, now…anyway, Franklin wasn’t home. Another man answered the door. Carl. Told me Franklin had been called away suddenly. His mother is critical. Carl doesn’t know where. Not only not what hospital, not even what city or state. ‘It was real sudden,’ is all he would say. So Franklin’s got cold feet, and he’s hiding out, maybe. Unless the mother story’s true. Carl wouldn’t let me in. He made me real nervous, I have to say. He was nice enough, but he made me afraid.”

  “Did he have his shoes on?”

  Suzette’s outpouring came to a sudden halt.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Fred said. “Go on. That no shoes business gets to me. Did you happen to notice, Carl, did you say his name is? Is it a rule of the house? Or just Franklin’s rule. Was Carl wearing shoes?”

  “Scaggy white socks,” she said, and tittered. She smiled, almost like her old self.

  “And the shorts with the bags on the sides, and a T-shirt. He looked, I took him for the janitor or the cleaner. No, he said, he’s a friend of Franklin’s, watching out for the stuff until Franklin gets back. Him and those paintings…” She paused.

  “Yes?”

  “They don’t go together at all,” she said. She crossed her legs the other way. The dress couldn’t ride any higher. It was gone. She kicked off a shoe and wriggled the toes. “You, since you’re working with Franklin, know how to reach him,” she said.

  Fred scratched his face.

  “Or if you don’t, you can find out from Carl. Carl might respond to size. Ask him. We can ask him together. Later. First things first. You have a line on that chest,” Suzette said. “According to what you said on the phone. Yes?”

  “‘Let’s talk about it over lunch’ were my exact words,” Fred corrected her.

  “It’s been a god damned wild goose chase so far,” she said. “And I hope to God—listen, Agnelli’s coming tomorrow. We’re expecting. He’s expecting…”

  “Not the Mantegna,” Fred exclaimed.

  Suzette snorted. It suited her. “You know and I know what Agnelli wants. Why should we play games with each other? We’re on the same side.”

  “We are?”

  “Once the chest got away—and Agnelli swears he doesn’t have it. ‘I’d never do that to you, Sweetie,’ he says. Which is why I come back to you. Because there’s a market for it. There’s only the one other thing over there that Agnelli would care about. A lot of what’s left isn’t even Italian. And I want my commission. There’s enough to go around. Unless—is this collector you’re working, Gingrich, hot for the Titian as well?”

  Fred shook his head slowly. “We don’t like the condition.”

  “Hell, if I could look that good in five hundred years…” She leaned toward him and looked piercingly into his eyes. “I mentioned your name to Agnelli and he said, ‘Who?’ Then I mentioned Mr. Gingrich and he said, ‘Don’t bother me.’

  “Therefore, knowing Reed has an inside track—Franklin told me he had to hold up on selling anything else until I don’t know what—here I am.” She smiled and shimmied out of the sweater, which she laid on the couch next to her. She patted it into place like a large and embarrassingly obedient dog. She noticed where her dress had gotten to and pulled at it, without much result. “Tell me about you and Gingrich.”

  “He and I are not close,” Fred explained. “We happened to have a project that interested us both. Nothing in your league. To save time and money, we decided to work on it together.”

  “Sounds interesting,” she invited.

  “These things never are,” Fred demurred. “They start interesting, everyone’s filled with hope and excitement, and then they peter out. What you thought might happen doesn’t, or what you thought might be something turns out to be something else.”

  “You’re talking about that chest,” she said. “Which you bought together. Or you bought from Gingrich. Franklin told me. So, where is Franklin?”

  Fred offered, “If I hear from him, I’ll call you.”

  “You can do better than that,” she wheedled. “Get Gingrich over here. I want to watch him while he answers the question what he did with that chest.”

  “Let’s lunch,” Fred said. He stood.

  “Franklin. Tilley,” Suzette insisted. “Where is he? Shit, who cares? You want to talk about that chest? Forget about Tilley, then. I’ll handle that end. Maybe it’s simpler. If he’s gone, he’s gone. Sell me the chest.”

  “There are some issues I wonder about. Mitchell. Where is he? And, as long
as we are doing business together, you and I, who are you? I asked for your card before,” Fred said. “You’d forgotten it. Remember? In the other bag? Isn’t this the other bag?”

  Suzette bit her lip and studied the situation for thirty seconds before her face broke into a dazzling smile and she exclaimed, “Of course! I remember now. I thought it was a déja vu. At that horrible restaurant, yes? I’m telling everyone—everyone I hate—to go there. I should have made you meet me there today. It would have served you right. But I wanted to see…” She swept her bag off the floor and pulled a card case out of it, from which she extracted a pasteboard rectangle that she turned over to Fred along with the tail end of the dazzling smile. Fred took the card and sat again to have a look. Suzette Shaughnessy Fine Art it read on the first two lines, in large print, serious, not florid. Then, below, almost as if in parentheses, Consultant, with an address on East 83rd Street in New York, and numbers for telephone and fax.

  Fred tucked the card into his shirt pocket and gave his version of a dazzling smile, stretched out his legs and crossed his feet, ready to listen. Suzette had quailed somewhat before his dazzling smile, which tended to show teeth. “Yes?” he prompted.

  “First, I’ve only told Agnelli about the collection,” she started. “It took me a week to get through the god damned secretaries. There’s six in a line, like the cartoon where the fish are lined up, the little one followed by the bigger one and so on, all with their mouths open, until the biggest one, Agnelli, swimming along, is just smiling and saying to himself, in bubbles, ‘I can wait.’”

  Chapter Forty-one

  “Let’s start with how you learned about Franklin Tilley’s pictures,” Fred said.