Madonna of the Apes

by Nicholas Kilmer

“You have the talent,” Fred said. “You want to simplify this and tell me where he is?”

  “I’ll bring him by that place around six,” Suzette said smoothly. “Six-thirty. You’ll be there?” Fred nodded. “If I’m not there by seven, I couldn’t swing it. Or no, well, I’ll be there in any case. I might not find him. Anyway, I can’t make promises for Mitchell.”

  “Good enough,” Fred said.

  “You see me with an old man looks like he’s put together from cigarette butts, that’s Mitchell,” Suzette said.

  Chapter Forty-four

  “Franklin Tilley is not only dead,” Fred remarked, musing as he headed back to Mountjoy Street. “If he’s been identified at all, it’s as a tourist from down South who strayed from the Freedom Trail. The strong arm, Carl, who knows better, tells the world Franklin left town to visit a sick mother. Correction. Suzette told me Carl said that. And here’s surprise backup from Atlanta, the lawyer, Peaslee, who found out that things are in such a mess up north he has to come up himself until whatever. His line is, Franklin’s called away; not the sales rep any more. Nice epitaph.”

  ***

  Clay, hearing Fred enter, came down to meet him in the workroom. He sat on the edge of the worktable. “Have you lunched?”

  Fred told him, “I Italian subbed.”

  “And were you able to get satisfaction from Ms. Shaughnessy?”

  “Suzette Shaughnessy is a bundle of contradictions wrapped up in the enigma variations,” Fred said. “She’s mostly a waste of time. Still, if she can do what she says, she might be useful. Let me think how much she said is worth repeating.”

  Clay twisted his hands together. His fingers had been designed to execute Chopin mazurkas on reluctant keyboards. Elegant strength, they suggested. “Start with this,” he said. “It’s where people betray themselves most quickly. What does she want?”

  Fred said, “She wants the chest you bought. You know that. Says she’s trying to find Franklin Tilley. She stopped to see him this morning, went up, found the bruiser who came in yesterday while I was there. Carl gave her the dog-ate-my-homework story…”

  “Please?” Clay said.

  “Fed her a line. Told her Tilley was called out of town to help a sick mother. So Carl knows he’s dead, and is covering for his absence. Shaughnessy’s not genuinely in the art business…”

  “They never are,” Clay said. “They see places to insert themselves between moving forces.”

  “Exactly. She smelled the situation and, since Franklin was a rube, she weaseled herself into it, expecting to collect a commission down the line, of which for a brief shining moment I was supposed to expect I would collect half,” Fred said.

  “As I see it,” Fred continued, “the forces at issue are the collection, A. The people marketing it, B, who are now visibly represented by Carl. There’s the owner, C, Peter Hartrack, unless Hartrack’s already sold his interest to an unknown letter, call it X. Discount. That didn’t happen. Hartrack’s in Johannesburg, but a moving part in an annual thirty-some billion-dollar industry. And moving into town tomorrow is force D, Agnelli, with international stature and resources larger than the gross national product of Estonia and Latvia put together. Among the forces in play, Agnelli is a large unknown. I may not know the art world or its market, but I do know Agnelli doesn’t drop whatever he’s got to do in Toledo and fly to Boston just because he hears a pretty voice over the phone. You don’t get where he’s got that way. When you’re at the Agnelli level, you expect things to come to you. You’re not that rich without being ruthless, and you can’t be ruthless without…”

  Clayton interrupted, “You’re not accusing Agnelli, are you? Don’t we assume that if there was indeed murder, the murderer, Carl, is quietly sitting ten blocks away?”

  “Not sitting. Lying on the floor when I saw him last,” Fred corrected. “It’s why I may look a little banged up. I was just there again. It’s a long story and you don’t need it, beyond there was an Atlanta lawyer there, Peaslee, who I’d say represents Hartrack, and had gotten wind of the fact that things under Franklin’s administration had gotten out of hand. For our purposes, I don’t care about accuracy: whether the killer is Carl or a friend of Carl’s called in for the job, or Peaslee, it doesn’t matter; or Tilley himself under pressure and not able to face the music. There’s E, the wild card, Suzette Shaughnessy. And Mitchell. Doctor Mitchell, she told me. None of this may be important…”

  “It is important to Mr. Tilley’s mother,” Clay protested. “Mrs. Tilley. If he has one. His friends in Atlanta if he has friends. His lover, grieving, if he has one.”

  “Spoken like a civilian,” Fred said. “What I’m here for is to tell you that to us, for the moment, it doesn’t matter. In terms of your objective. Of course the story itself progresses, as a story, in many ways, in many places. Every one of these apes has a mother, a father, a place to go next, a favorite nut, a wish to get laid. What we want is what we want. That’s my job. I’m trying to keep it simple.”

  “We have what we want,” Clay said, gesturing toward the stairs that led to his Madonna.

  “Not unless we can both understand and protect her. My next point,” Fred said, “and I don’t remember where I am in the alphabet…”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Chapter Forty-five

  “Your next point,” Clay prompted.

  “My next point is what I went out for. I may be close to a meeting with one of the other wild cards in this mix. The man Mitchell. Dr. Mitchell. Suzette Shaughnessy might be able to produce him. Dr. Mitchell is the inside expert they called in to tell them what the collection was, and appraise it.”

  “Some expert,” Clay snorted.

  “Here’s one place we differ, you and I,” Fred said. “I assume everyone is smarter, or stronger, or at least more unpredictable, than me. I assume everybody wants something I can’t see and probably never heard of. The reason I’m still alive…”

  Clay cocked his head.

  “Don’t underestimate your opponent.”

  “Very well. Dr. Mitchell,” Clay said, speculatively, “is presumably someone with credentials. Doctor as in Ph.D. What else do you know about him?”

  “Likely on the faculty of a college or university in Savannah. Looks like he’s put together from old cigarette butts, according to my informant. I gather he has some age.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out. Excuse me,” Clay said. “We’ll go upstairs.”

  He led the way up the spiral staircase and into his parlor, motioning Fred to sit while he used the telephone at the small table next to the kitchen.

  “I’m doing what I can,” Fred said, in the direction of the painting.

  The Madonna gazed with an absent, indulgent, quizzical expression, at a point somewhere between the viewer and her unruly child, whose squirming insistence was distracting her from some meditation such as, for instance, the question, “What if I’d said, ‘We’ll see’ when the angel asked me?”

  It was impossible to look at her without wondering about her author, Leonardo, the man himself having receded so far into the past, but leaving so vivid a proof that he had lived.

  It was a brown river before her, of uncertain depth. You can reflect an entire mountain in an inch of water. The aridity of the landscape she sat in was so extreme that it was impossible to imagine where the fig might have come from. The heraldic plants, sparse as they were, made their unlikely livings out of not much soil, even though the wilderness supported a good quantity of apes, and they seemed robust.

  But the matters under discussion in the painting did not involve natural history, any more than Leonardo was really interested in natural history. His studies, his drawings, his speculations, all revealed his passion to impose onto the world the order, and the logic, he demanded of it. He refused to admit to chaos, or—chaos is a logical extension based on despair—he refused to admit to the possibility of a power that has no shape. It would be for him like imagining a God without a fa
ce.

  In his drawings of torrents and deluges, for example, which Fred had paused over in the library recently while he struggled to become less pig ignorant about this painter, Leonardo insisted on presenting the forces of rushing water in intricate organizations of parallel lines, as if water, animate and vertebrate, could move of its own volition. Whereas in reality water falls because A, it’s heavy, and, B, the bottom’s been pulled out.

  No, it was Leonardo’s mind that was orderly, even in the machines he invented, which would not work at least until the advent of steam on a larger scale than the system he imagined for turning a spit.

  “My ignorance is almost absolute,” Fred murmured. A man’s life was embedded in the painting, as well as the world that life had been a part of. All of it vanished, but for this shocking remnant, and some thirty others. It was as if a man and his mortal wound had disappeared, leaving only the scar. Fred went across to study the edges Clay had described earlier, the ones that had been aged artificially. He could not see the artifice.

  “I’m as out of my depth as Clay would be, trying to buy those missiles I teased him about.”

  Clay put the telephone’s receiver down with a crack and crossed from the post where he’d been conversing in low tones, pausing, and jotting notes on the small index cards he kept in a top drawer of the table.

  “The news is not good,” Fred guessed, seeing that fact in his demeanor.

  “Two possibilities,” Clay said. “Based on a quick search at the reference desk in the library of the Museum of Fine Arts. One, John Malcolm Mitchell, if he is living still, would be emeritus. We don’t know what his present affiliation is. He is the author of numerous learned articles and catalogues, and of several books including the frequently reprinted Italian Masterpieces of the Seventeenth Century. That’s fine. No more than one academic in twenty thousand can handle an appraisal, though many claim the ability. Those who live in ivory do not recognize that ivory is a commodity like any other. We can hope that it is he. But I fear not. He would be eighty-nine, if he still lives.

  “It is the other, Fiorello Mitchell, who fills me with disquiet.

  “First let me tell you something. This will amuse you. I learn from my own research into Leonardo’s oeuvre that there is another instance where a genuine Leonardo was brutally cut from its matrix and used as the top of a wooden box.”

  “You don’t say,” Fred said. “Among the few Leonardos known, that happened twice?”

  “A portion of the Saint Jerome in the Wilderness,” Clay went on. “At one time the head of the saint was cut away and used as the top of a coffer. By great good fortune it was discovered in a Paris antiquary’s, and ultimately joined again to the panel it had come from. The result is in the Vatican collection.”

  Chapter Forty-six

  “So there is ample precedent,” Clay concluded.

  “There was a time when the wood was worth more than the painting,” Fred said, “is your point. If the vandalism occurred a while ago. Whereas, with your painting…”

  “More recent, yes. And I cannot be simply relieved at finding the precedent, since anyone else in the world who looks could discover it also. You are about to point out that the vandalism against my painting was carried out recently, at a time when the painting should have been regarded as of more value than the wood.”

  “Which means no more than—” Fred began.

  “We note the fact, and do not pervert our minds against the fact by drawing premature conclusions,” Clay said. “Otherwise we see only what we expect to see.” He’d come to stand near the painting and was gazing at it as he spoke.

  “Okay. Now that you’ve had a chance to get your breath back. Who’s the other possible? The other Mitchell. Fiorello.”

  “It is both wonderful and alarming how quickly one can get such information,” Clay said. He sounded like someone who has very recently encountered a tidal wave.

  “Spit it out. Let’s not pervert our minds against facts by drawing premature conclusions,” Fred quoted.

  “Very wise. Thank you, Fred. Your point is well taken. Fiorello Mitchell would be in his mid-sixties, of retirement age. We were not able to find him on any present faculty. He is the author of numerous articles such as the following, published in a learned journal ten years ago. Its ungainly title: Masterpiece and Forgery: Can Art or Science Detect the Difference?”

  “Oops,” Fred said. “A buck says that’s our boy.”

  They both stared down into the gaping hole that yawned so suddenly between them and the Leonardo. Only a tidal wave might fill it.

  Fred said, “Let’s change the subject while we get our bearings. I’ve seen no sign or evidence, so I assume it is cutting edge. Tell me about the security system that protects your building.”

  “There is none,” Clay said. “It alerts them.” He sat in the chair he had placed three days ago, from which he could survey his Madonna.

  “If we continue working together,” Fred said, “we visit this subject again.”

  “If you wish. You, like me, are capable of suspicion. Good. I must go out. I wish to consult the record of Professor Fiorello Mitchell’s publications. If you are to meet him, it might be useful for me to have done that beforehand. During these unsettled times, would it inconvenience you to remain here in my absence? What time did you say?”

  “Six o’clock.”

  “Ample time. I shall return by five-thirty.”

  Fred stood back in the hall and let Clayton open and close the door for himself. He had, he realized with a rush, the place to himself. Not for the first time, no—but when Clayton had left him here to work, a few nights back, he’d stuck to the downstairs office.

  He came back into Clay’s parlor, alone now in this room, as he had not been before. He was alone with these large beasts, with no bars to separate him from them.

  “Is it money?” he asked himself. “Because I don’t want it? The mask of money, that gets between us?”

  But he didn’t know where the question led, or where it came from.

  It was high time he got to know the man into whose game he’d thrown his hand.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  “I don’t think it’s the money,” Fred said, crossing the room. “Although I hate it as much as I hate purposeful cruelty.”

  Fred went first to the Hopper, and the Hopper sucked him in. He’d marked it from his first moment in this room but had never been closer to it than twenty feet. The Leonardo had gotten in the way, as well as the natural diffidence that came with being an intruder on another man’s turf.

  The Hopper hung over a mantelpiece setting off a fireplace that clearly was never used. The subject was roofs and chimneys silhouetted before a sky that had so much impending weather in it you could not guess what it portended. Normally when a form is seen against the light, the insistence of the luminous background forces the form into the illusion of two-dimensionality. Since the painting is already two-dimensional, this makes for a disorienting sense of double illusion, the viewer being forced to perceive an illusory two-dimensionality in an illusion of three dimensions that has been built on the two-dimensional plane. Though the paint was not really flat. Never flat. It was as rough as a city.

  Here, though, the roofs and chimneys were so insistent with presence that they seemed almost pregnant. They blocked the light, defied it, and in their threatened substance claimed, to the advancing sky, “You think you’ve got something up your sleeve.” Fred stood in front of the painting, reaching his right hand out to within an inch of the surface as you might with a banked fire, to test its heat.

  To anyone with an interest in such things the room’s rugs, curtains, furniture and so forth might be worth noticing. Overall, the room—double parlors opening into what must be a small kitchen—felt and almost smelled of Old Boston. Though nothing was shabby exactly, none of it had been polished up for sale within the last hundred years, and nothing had been new for longer than that.

  The walls were green.
The heavy curtains hanging at the windows were a deeper green that, if it wasn’t brocade, was something worse. They were tied back with gold loops that sported tassels. The view of the outside world of Beacon Hill was masked by a scrim of white net, so that nowhere did direct daylight strike into the space. The light in the room seemed to come from the paintings, which in turn were illuminated by spots set into the high ceiling.

  “What else do we have?” Fred said, although he had already done a hasty inventory the moment he first walked in, in an involuntary gesture he feared resembled the appraisal performed by what women knew as “elevator eyes.”

  “The Canaletto was my wife’s,” Clay had told him in passing, when they entered with the Madonna that first day. Clay’s tone of voice he had not been able to read; and in any case he was not really listening. Was it dismissal or affection or, perhaps, a mingling of the two, with a tinge of regret added? The Canaletto looked as if it must have come with the house, and had been hanging between two tall windows overlooking Mountjoy Street since it had first arrived in Boston. It was a horizontal view of a Venetian scene, a gondola builder’s yard, maybe two-and-a-half feet wide by a foot high. A person who knew Venice, or who had known Venice in 1740, would have been able to tell you at which juncture of which canals the painter had been standing when he made the preliminary drawings; the name of the church whose spire was seen over a peculiar rectangular building with Moorish trim; would have been able to tell you what that peculiar building was used for. The boats and the business and the scurrying people were presumably made up, or were a composite of activities the painter had jotted down in a notebook. If you were little, and sick, and stuck in bed with the thing on an opposite wall, it might amuse you to speculate over the lives and projects of the men; to count them; to note the variety of their clothing, and to ask why so many men appeared, and so few women.

  Though what intrigued the painter was none of that. He loved the stage set, the gliding grace of the square-rigged buildings made almost to float on glass. The cruelty of the Venetian civilization was beautifully masked by the elegance of its commerce, and by the fact that, like the cruelty of all civilized constructions, it protected many decent humble people too busy, most of the time, to indulge in the small cruelties their natures invited them to try.