***
Nothingness has no center, Leonardo had written, and its boundaries are nothingness. The truth of this observation Franklin was now experiencing. But the experience was wasted on him if there was nothing left to experience it with. There might be no ham sandwich waiting for Franklin; but Fred had meatballs with spaghetti still before him.
“An important distinction,” Fred remarked. “Even Leonardo would appreciate the difference between no ham sandwich and a dish of meatballs and spaghetti.”
Chapter Sixty-one
Fred was still reading when Bernie’s doorbell rang.
Mandy’s hair sparkled with rain. She’d been longer than she intended, talking on the phone. “Cold feet,” she explained. “On the part of the bride. She’s out there already, doing the cocktail parties with the friends of Mummy’s, and trying to pacify the priest and all, and she’s about ready to chuck it.”
Fred hung her transparent raincoat in the garage and motioned her upstairs. She was in jeans and a yellow sweatshirt spotted with green paint, oddly festive.
“Where do you live,” she asked.
“Cross between a house in Charlestown and ‘no fixed abode,’ Fred confessed. “Until something makes me settle down.”
She looked doubtfully around Bernie’s space, prowling the walls while Fred dumped their dinner into a saucepan and started it warming.
“Slowly,” she called from the wall where Bernie kept the sound system. “Put the burner on warm or you’ll burn it. Your friend has enough Dvořák to just about sink that subject.”
“You aren’t vegetarian are you?” Fred asked, pouring wine for her.
“It depends what I’m passing up,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. On meatballs I take a pass. More for you.”
Fred raised his glass and let it clink against hers. “You and Leonardo da Vinci,” he said.
“He’s vegetarian?”
“Was,” Fred said. “I’m reading his notebooks almost as we speak. I quote, not accurately. If you are, as you claim, the king of the beasts—[he’s talking to us humans] you are the greatest beast of all of them—why don’t you help them? Then they can give you their young so that you can gratify your palate. For the sake of your palate, after all, you have undertaken to make of yourself a tomb for all of the animals. It makes you think twice about the genus meatball.”
“Filthy day. Filthy night,” Mandy said, gesturing toward the window as they sat to the meal Fred had dumped from the saucepan, sorting all the meatballs onto his plate and giving Mandy the bulk of the pasta.
“After we eat, if you want to, I thought we might make love, as long as it’s raining,” Fred said.
“That’s where he sleeps, your friend?” Mandy asked. “On the couch? Does it pull out?”
“I’ll have to check,” Fred said.
When the time came, it turned out that Bernie’s couch was no more than a couch, though Fred found sheets to arrange on it as best he could.
“Never mind,” Mandy said. “I should go home anyway, after. Seduce me. Undress me. Talk to me of Leonardo.”
Fred put a hand through her hair and embraced her before he started working at her clothes. “Leonardo knew about anticipation also,” he said. “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end, he wrote.” Fred maneuvered the sweatshirt over her head. This exposed the snake tattoo, old friend now, and a necklace she wore, surprise, made of red beads that glowed like glass. She was wearing a sheer garment for which women must have a name. It covered the torso and tucked in at her waist.
“Tell me more,” she invited.
“Bad habit of mine, I know,” Fred said. “I happen to remember things I read.”
The skirt of the sheer garment did the job of a very short skirt below, as appeared when the jeans were lowered. It was as white as it was transparent, showing the narrow pants underneath, and the bra Fred would still have to figure out. With his large hands he stroked Mandy’s body through the garment until he found a way to peel it down and let it fall to her feet. Mandy helped no more than politeness required. “Yes?” she demanded.
Fred studied her naked back next, looking for the secret of the bra’s engineering. Easy for Leonardo! “Here’s one of Leonardo’s maxims,” Fred said, “He’s a genius. Everyone knows it. Do a survey among all people living in the known world, more of them know Leonardo than Julius Caesar. Dust makes damage. How can you argue with that? We should carve it over the post office door.”
Mandy chuckled absently. The movement of her rib cage helped Fred find and unhitch the mechanism that held the bra’s ends together in back, and he relieved her of the garment, dropping it on the table behind her, but at a distance from their plates. The breasts were firm and round and soft, their nipples pinker than they might be because the red glass of the beads around her neck was near them.
“The necklace?” Fred asked.
Mandy shook her head and leaned into him. “It’s not in the way.”
Fred slid his hands down her smooth back again, under the pants, and snaked them downward. “Movement tends toward the center of gravity,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll lift you out of the rest of this.”
“I don’t mind if you’ll stop quoting Leonardo,” she said. “Three’s a crowd.” She’d gone quite serious. Fred lifted her out of the puddle of clothing and held her while she pried her shoes off, one foot at a time. He held her as if he were rescuing her from the burning building.
She whispered, “Isn’t it nice that it takes a long time? Put me down now. Take your things off. No, I will.”
Fred had laid her elegant body down on the couch and, his hands free for the first time, had begun with his shirt buttons. Blue Oxford cloth. Get it done. Mandy swung around, sat up, and her hands went straight to his belt.
“What was that line about the center of gravity?” she asked, finding his.
“You told me to stop quoting.”
“Just the one line again. I liked it.”
“Movement tends toward the center of gravity,” Fred repeated.
“It’s true,” Mandy said. “Take your own shirt off. I’m busy.”
Fred let the shirt fall behind him and stepped out of his shoes.
Chapter Sixty-two
“Some of Leonardo’s maxims,” Fred said, after several minutes had elapsed, “if I may?”
“There’s no turning back now,” Mandy said. “Not for me. It’s nice what you’re doing. If you want to talk, talk. Just keep…good.”
“Some of his maxims are easy enough to follow,” Fred said. “Even self-serving. Such as this one: I never weary of being useful.”
“No fear,” Mandy encouraged him. “You’re being useful.”
“So I didn’t give it much thought,” Fred continued. “Other sayings he seemed not to finish, like most of the rest of what he started. Until now I thought they didn’t pertain to anything.”
“Example?”
“Not to leave the furrow,” Fred quoted.
Her laughter was eclipsed by a gasp.
“More?” Fred asked.
“The fucking couch is too small,” she said. “There’s a crick—yikes!—We’ve gotta try something else or I’ll break a hip.”
“Every obstacle yields to effort,” Fred said, rising from her.
Mandy stood, her hands on her hips. “There’s the table or the floor,” she said. “I vote for the floor.”
The telephone rang.
Fred stripped the bedclothes from the couch and picked up its three generous pillows. “Compromise,” he offered.
“Who cares about sheets?” Mandy demanded.
Laid on the floor, the pillows gave generous room for Fred to lie beside her.
The telephone stopped ringing. “You don’t have to get that?” she asked.
“They’ll call back if it’s important.”
Fred stroked her torso as she snuggled against him, one arm under her head and neck, the two of them getting past the interruption.
The earrings she wore matched, with their beads, the red necklace. Her dark hair streamed across the sheets. She was alive in Fred’s hands and arms until she cried out, and cried out again, and began crying with surprisingly hot and copious tears. “I’m so sorry.”
***
“Do I dare use your friend’s bathroom?” Mandy asked after a while, tracing an idle finger above Fred’s breastbone and letting it wander toward his groin. Her fingernails were pink, not with paint, but on their own, but less pink than her nipples. “It’s great not to answer the phone,” Mandy said. “I love sometimes on a Sunday morning to just lie in bed and not answer the phone.”
“It’s a luxury,” Fred said. “Maybe a bit anti-social. My guy, who I’m working for now, doesn’t have an answering machine. Why did you say ‘I’m sorry’? What’s the trouble? You have nothing to be—what you’re doing right now could get us in trouble again. To quote—may I quote?”
“Good God. Do you remember everything you read?”
“For a while. Then it goes away. Otherwise I’d have a head like a junk shop. You’ll hate me, since I forgot your name, and that’s important to me. It’s trivial, this other stuff, what I remember. Leonardo tended to think in fables, but he could also be an acute observer. Yes, I foresee trouble on its way.”
“While we’re waiting for trouble,” Mandy said, beginning to concentrate, “you might as well tell me your fable.”
“More an observation Leonardo made,” Fred said. “About the anatomical specimen currently under observation. Sometimes it confers with the human intelligence but it also sometimes has an intelligence of its own. In spite of what a man wants, it can be obstinate and go its own way. Sometimes it moves by itself, whether the man wants that or not. The man can be asleep, it’s awake, and vice versa. He goes on and concludes that this creature has a life and intelligence of its own, separate from the man. An independent beast.”
“A pet,” Mandy said. “I know, a pet monkey, with fur.”
“Now you mention it,” Fred said. “Then Leonardo goes on that therefore men shouldn’t hide them under their clothes, but instead…”
“Not that easy to hide anyway,” Mandy said. “I can try. Stay where you are. Pay no attention. I’ll…”
Deftly, she straddled him.
Chapter Sixty-three
“I’ll walk you back,” Fred said while Mandy began to get herself together. It was after eleven. He unleashed Bernie’s phone and dialed Clayton’s number.
“Heard the phone ring,” he said. “Couldn’t get to it. You called?”
“I am sleeping,” Clay scolded. “Time enough in the morning.”
“Was it you?”
“I am sleeping,” Clay repeated, and the connection went.
“Give me the number here,” Mandy demanded. “In case I notice I’ve lost an earring.”
She was oddly subdued when Fred left her at her street door, and would not invite him up. “Gotta shift gears,” she said. “Get ready for the next thing.”
“The airplane trip. The wedding. Cleveland,” Fred said. “Sunday night.”
“All the above.”
“Anticipation,” Fred agreed.
The rain had slowed. No one would claim that it had stopped. It was poised, more or less, waiting to increase to a flow you could call rain again.
The telephone was ringing when he let himself into Bernie’s garage. Still ringing when he got upstairs.
“I’m afraid.” Suzette Shaughnessy’s voice, husky, subdued and tense.
Fred said, “Can you talk? Where are you?”
Silence. “He’ll hear me.”
“Who?”
“The man who was there before. Carl. He’s…”
“Where?”
“Same place. I made a mistake, came back.”
“You’re there now? I’ll be…”
“I can’t,” she whispered hoarsely. The connection was gone.
***
Fred eased into the windbreaker again, flexing his arms. He should run, or telephone to get her anonymous help, but all his instincts told him to take it slow. So far, Suzette at her most obvious had invariably been Suzette at her most devious.
What was going on?
Bernie’s number was printed on the face of the phone. She’d picked it off while she was here, while he was talking with Mitchell. Yes. And since he told her it was out of service, she had taken it for granted—being used to the art business—that couldn’t be true.
How long since the first call? Assume it had been Suzette an hour before, after his and Mandy’s late supper, attempting to interrupt the other diversion, and before he walked her home.
He reached the wet sidewalk and started downhill.
That was a long time for one sustained emergency. Or had the first call been to invite him to come with her, hang around, maybe in the background, while she tried her own methods on Carl?
Then failing to raise Fred, she’d set off to try her luck by herself?
If so, by this time she and Carl had undoubtedly concluded that they had a common interest. Just the one project they could work together. She wanted Clayton’s chest. His Leonardo. Which everyone, half-paralyzed with the desire to protect self-interest by prevarication, had agreed, by common consent, simply to call the chest. Fred was all she could work on. Also, Fred had seen to it that she be convinced he owned it now. She wouldn’t say so, but she knew it was worth the gross national product of Slobovia. Otherwise none of this made sense. She’d do what she had to.
Half his instincts, stirred by the agonized worry in her voice, told him to run. It was what she wanted him to do. If it was also what she needed him to do, too bad. The winning half of his instincts, almost smugly, counseled a brisk and watchful midnight stroll instead: citizen responding to the Surgeon General’s advice to walk off unnecessary flab after dessert rather than climb into that extra beer. Fred wasn’t far from Pekham Street. He’d get there.
Suppose that by now Suzette and Carl had formed an alliance. Or Suzette and Peaslee, if he was still around. In that case, since she was convinced Fred had the Leonardo, Carl should be waiting in the alley with some persuasion. It must be another honey trap. It was how the opposition thought. The only difference was that, since they’d already tried Fred once, and failed, with sex, this time the trap was baited with the pheromones not of sex, but fear. The damsel in distress. “Which boils down to sex anyway,” Fred grumbled. “She’s not an old man.”
The streets were not without occasional traffic, even of the odd pedestrian dodging rain that had begun to blow in sheets, shaking the dark new leaves on the bristling trees of Beacon Hill and denting new blossoms that seemed to clang with it until Fred shook his head and put the noise where it belonged, into the charged gutters and on the metal tops of trash containers waiting in the side yards.
When he turned onto Pekham Street, maintaining his quick saunter, it was clear that whatever the trap might be, it was already sprung. Five blocks away, downhill, a knot of activity churned there, almost facing Franklin Tilley’s building: the swirling blue lights, the sirens, the officious uniforms in orange slickers, the excess of municipal squad cars, fire trucks, ambulances.
Fred let his pace pick up, as anyone’s would. Suzette’s blonde hair rose in a cloud before him, matted with blood and brains, the back of her skull blown off. Rain pounded onto the black raincoat, bunched under her…no. Carl had been waiting in the alley all right, but in a horizontal posture. That was Carl. Under the streetlights the large hole in his T-shirt leaked diluted blood into the tilted puddles of Pekham Street.
No, that was still wrong. Fred kept walking. Pekham Street was tilted. Puddles don’t tilt. Trick of the eye, that was. Carl, on the folding stretcher, the baggy shorts wet with rain, and without the Nikes, was being loaded into a gaping vehicle. Fred kept walking. No worried Suzette huddled in the shadows, or stood hobnobbing with emergency personnel.
The windows of Franklin Tilley’s apartment were dark. In the
other windows of the building, and of the surrounding buildings, dark shapes moved inquisitively in front of dim light. The inhabitants of Beacon Hill would keep their windows modestly lit during what must become an unpleasant tragedy. Nobody who lived in such surroundings would wish to be seen to have a prurient interest.
Fred walked on to Charles Street, swung right toward the subway and was almost there before he remembered, “It won’t be running now. Too late.” He walked on as far as the Ritz, a good half hour, and stood across from it, thinking. Three in the morning. Without causing a commotion from which he and Clayton might never recover, there was no way to learn if Suzette was in her room. The desk wouldn’t ring, they wouldn’t tell him if she was there. Pay that much for a room, they’re not going to let on to a dismal stranger whether you are at home or not. No way was he going to get through the lobby at this time of night, and let himself up to her floor either by elevator or the fire stairs.
She was here; or somewhere else, and healthy, Fred had no doubt. Hell, she could be holed up with Peaslee, in Franklin’s pad.
The very few things Fred knew for certain could be arranged and rearranged a hundred ways.
He started walking again. What stood out was the likelihood that, for whatever reason might be percolating in that elusive brain, Suzette had expected and wanted Fred to find himself involved in the consequences of Carl’s abrupt departure from this vale of tears.
Unless she’d been on the up and up. Even if that was true, Carl was no threat now, was he?
Look Suzette in the eye and ask. That was the only way to learn what lie she’d tell. Find her tomorrow. She wouldn’t go far. She wanted Clay’s Madonna. She’d come looking for him. He could rely on that.
Find her tomorrow. Not tonight.
He’d stay by the Madonna.
Fred let himself quietly into his office on Mountjoy Street, and stretched out on the couch. “They’re getting serious,” he muttered, before he slept.
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