Chapter Sixty-four
Fred woke, bathed in a sudden sweat, at the sound of Clayton’s foot on the spiral staircase. “It’s noon,” Clayton was saying. Six A.M. by Fred’s watch. He’d gotten onto his feet before Clay reached the room. “London time,” Clay explained. “Being a light sleeper, I heard you come in.”
“Carl’s been killed,” Fred said. “I have to move. Don’t know…”
“I telephoned Miss Dibble at two this morning,” Clay went on. “And gave her…Carl?”
“I mentioned Carl to you,” Fred said. “Played the part of a bodyguard or enforcer over on Pekham Street.”
“Of course I remember. I never had the pleasure,” Clay said. “Killed?”
“Hole in the chest. Gunshot. Suzette’s involved, Shaughnessy.”
“The dealer,” Clay dismissed her.
“Yes. Since I don’t understand where we are, I grabbed a couple hours shuteye. Didn’t want to wake you again. Figured it would wait.”
“She promised to fax me the inventory,” Clay said. “While we’re waiting…? I regret I have no coffee, Fred. It is a stimulant. I shall go for the fax. I shall be glad to bring coffee back for you, if I pass a suitable establishment that is open at this time of day.”
“I’ll go,” Fred said. “You start adjusting your mind. I am going to have to do some version of what you call my civic duty before many more hours have passed. Prepare your mind. Before the day’s out, your house could be filled with cops.”
“I have done nothing…” Clay started.
“They’ll be glad to hear it,” Fred promised him. “Do we hide the Madonna or what? If we hide her, it has to be outside the house, and it has to be quick. You be thinking. I’ll go for the fax.”
***
There was no rain. It had so absolutely departed from the dawning sky that there seemed no possible explanation for the wetness of the streets. Fred’s watch read six-fifteen.
Boston is not a large city. Nothing like the City That Never Sleeps—New York. But there are island oases of wakefulness. Fred stopped for coffee at a Dunkin’ Donuts and carried it with him to the Kinko’s on Beacon Hill.
“If I’m going to work with this joker,” he remarked, “he has to learn new tricks. Putting in his own fax machine would be a start.”
“Tell me about it,” the girl back of the counter agreed. She was rummaging under the counter for Fred’s order. “Tell him to put in a copy machine while he’s at it. I’ll go home.”
“Let me ask you this,” Fred started. The girl was sullen, tired, bored, and bedraggled. She could use some cheering up. But nothing occurred to Fred to say that might accomplish that mission.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Just a dumb observation I was going to make,” Fred said. “But it’s too dumb to make. And dumb as it is, I can’t even think of it. Six o’clock in the morning, everything’s pretty dumb.”
“Tell me about it,” she said. “I’ve been on since eleven.”
“I’ll tell him not to buy the machine,” Fred promised. “This way I get out, see people.”
“Tell me about it,” she said. “Also this way I keep my job.”
The city was waking slowly. The air, drowsy with moisture, was clean and fresh and promised all kinds of good things. Lights in the buildings flickered on here and there as early risers found the bathroom switches and reached for the taps. Taxis prowled through the streets, looking for fares on their way to stand in long lines at the airport for early flights.
Fred avoided Pekham Street, but stopped again at the Dunkin’ Donuts to buy breakfast. Coffee and doughnuts. He bought extra doughnuts. Clayton might want an early morning doughnut along with his herbal tea, his Hint o’ Mint or Cinnamon Scam. Possibly nobody had told him that sugar was a stimulant; like anything else that helps you stay alive.
“I am all a-tremble,” Clay said, reaching out for the Kinko’s bag and resisting, with a shuddering smirk of righteousness, the doughnuts’ siren song. “You didn’t look?”
Fred shook his head. “What do we do with the Madonna? Hide her?”
“Put her in the racks with the other paintings,” Clay instructed. “Out of the limelight. Move the love seat back where it was. Let the house not proclaim that anything unusual is resident here. I shall be reading the document.”
Fred climbed to Clay’s parlor, wrapped the Madonna in the Kashmir shawl from the piano’s top, and carried her down the stairs. What did she weigh, ten pounds? In his arms she was ten pounds of coiled lightning.
“Unwrap it,” Clay instructed, looking up, “so it looks like the others. Be careful, sliding it in. Don’t scratch it. And don’t allow those hinges to scratch anything else.”
“Right,” Fred said. He’d been in and out for three days and, despite Clayton’s invitation, had not had time to survey, much less study, the paintings Clay kept in the racks; not even what must be elsewhere in the house, on the second and third floors. If he stuck around, there’d be a lot to see. He took her shawl off and slid the Madonna into a space next to a painting on wood of similar size, a man in evening dress, 1930s, signed Beckman. He put cardboard between them. “Don’t want those two getting up to mischief,” he said.
“Interesting,” Clay was saying to himself at the desk, studying the inventory. “It’s dry as it should be. Facts only. No enthusiasms. Yes, here’s the Bronzino I mentioned, the Sebastian Transfixed that sold last year in London, to Agnelli. With a suitable low appraisal. The appraisal for an estate is always low. And here is the Mantegna, so-called. Hah! Item: A Penitent Magdalene, it reads, with the measurements. Italian School, fifteenth century, wood, dirty, is how it is described. No mention of Mantegna at all. No attribution. Not even a suggestion. That attribution was foisted onto the painting after this appraisal, some time during the last seventy years. We see now what we are dealing with. Yes, here also is the Titian.” He did not look up, continuing his eye and finger’s track down the list Miss Dibble had sent him. “Its condition is noted: poor. Thank you, yes, Fred, if you would, put the shawl back as it was. My wife’s photograph on it. And the love seat where it was.
“If we do have the visitors you threaten, let them see no more than what they already expect to see: a quiet home in which are concerned and upright citizens. That is what will be seen unless something is out of place.”
Upstairs in the parlor again Fred replaced the shawl, and the photograph; moved the love seat and the chairs from which he and Clayton had surveyed the Madonna; and finally smoothed out the indentation on the love seat’s seat’s pink plush, where the Madonna had rested, eliminating all trace of her from the parlor. Then, acting on an impulse he did not know had been growing since the night before, he commandeered the telephone and made it divulge the number for that library in Cambridge in whose outlying park he had been known to camp in the days before the Charlestown place.
“Let me have reference,” he demanded.
“Reference,” a female voice told him, after a wait. “Ms. Riley.”
“Just a minute. No,” the voice said, “for that I’d look in one of those small French literary periodicals from the 1920’s. Try Le Navire d’Argent, something like that. That’s where Joyce published the opening of Finnegans Wake. We wouldn’t have it here. Try down the road, at Widener. Or the BPL. Sorry, yes?”
“My question,” Fred said, “I want to know, how much was a scudo worth, in Milan, in 1525?”
“Milan, 1525?” Ms. Riley said.
“Yes. Part of the larger question, was twenty scudi, in 1525, worth more or less than the gross national product of Paraguay? No, that’s more than I want to know. Just—how much was a scudo worth, in today’s money, in 1525 in Milan. Okay? I’ll take it from there. Can you do that, Ms. Riley?”
“I don’t know the answer, but I can find out,” Ms. Riley said. “Can you call back?”
“I’ll probably stop over,” Fred said.
“If it takes more than an hour, we have to charge you,” Ms. R
iley said.
“That’s Okay.”
“But it won’t take an hour,” she said. “I’m on until five. After that, I’ll leave the information, and the bill if there is one but there won’t be. Your name?”
Clay’s exclamation, below, sounded almost like mortal agony.
“Fred,” Fred said. “I’ll come by this afternoon, maybe tomorrow.”
When Fred reached Clay he was on his feet, aghast, his mouth hanging open, the sheaf of Kinko’s fax paper rustling in his grip.
“Listen to this,” he said, when he could make his mouth work.
“You have my attention. You sounded like the aunt in the third act finding the corpse in the window seat.”
“Listen,” Clay said. He raised the papers and read in a trembling voice, “Item: One ornamental wooden coffer, The Annunciation, School of Leonardo…”
“Holy mackerel!” Fred said. “There’s two?”
“Da Vinci,” Clayton finished. He let the papers drop to his side and stared. “Fifty thousand pounds, in the appraisal. More than the value they gave the Bronzino, I might add,” he said lamely.
“Cripes,” Fred said. “Brierstone had another Leonardo?”
Clay shook his head, stunned. “It all comes clear,” he said. “I see now. The angels, the gilding. Of course. The top of the box was—is—has to be a da Vinci Annunciation. An early painting it must be, as we know from the manner of the painting on the corpus of the chest. An early work, done in Florence, before Leonardo departed for Milan in 1489, while he was still apprenticed to Verrocchio’s shop.
“Fred, I’ve been blind. Seeing only what I expected to see, I dismissed what I saw, because the body of the chest did not fit with my Madonna. But that is only because my Madonna was done a decade later.
“I am in a fever. There is another Leonardo in this city. There are two, and I am in a position to own them both.”
Chapter Sixty-five
“No wonder the opposition is in such a commotion,” Fred said. “Running around seducing people. Lying out of every orifice. Killing people. They want the rest of the package. They took it apart to ship it; made a mongrel out of the chest so nobody would care about it in the container. With the plan, when they got here…but hold on. That’s not much, that appraisal, fifty thousand pounds. For Leonardo?”
“At the time the world was very different,” Clay said. “These things were not regarded as they are today. A lot has happened since thieves walked off with the Louvre’s Mona Lisa in 1911. Which they could do because nobody valued her enough at the time even to keep an eye on her.”
“A Leonardo Annunciation. So that’s the big thing Franklin was waiting for,” Fred said. “Waiting for, possibly dying for.”
Clay said, “Listen to me. I know it’s in my notes. On your desk. Blinded, I paid no attention to anything prior to 1490. I’ll find it again. Among the paintings from Leonardo’s hand, lost paintings, known but unaccounted for, but in the record: there were several Madonnas he had completed before he left Florence.
“An Annunciation! Because of the angels on the chest, I see it now. You know the one in the Uffizi. The angel on the left. An early work attributed to Ghirlandaio until the late 1800s. Nobody knew. Nothing was ever signed. In that painting, Leonardo included a background of the Florence landscape. In this one, there may be no more than a hint of architecture, since the function of the image is different. From the remainder of the chest’s decoration I can see it. Angels and lilies, the symbol the Virgin holds when the angel speaks to her. Gabriel. Or does the angel hold it? I am in such a tizzy. ‘Hail, full of grace.’ The angel kneels. Yes. There are two arches, in gold. In one, the left side, the angel bearing the lily. The virgin is in the other. Where is it? It’s the top of my chest. Has to be.”
“School of Leonardo it says, remember? On the appraisal,” Fred pointed out.
“Of course that’s what the appraisal says. An estate appraisal gives every advantage it can to the estate. I was blind. I must study the chest again,” Clay demanded. “I will not rest until I do. Find the Annunciation. I repeat, where is it?”
“We should probably ask Mitchell,” Fred said. “But given that nothing is what meets the eye, take it slow. I admit you’ve got me curious. Even if we can find it, and get past the intervening complications that multiply by the day, how many millions do they want for it? You ready to bid against Agnelli? Take it easy, stay out of sight. I’ll take another look at the chest.”
He left Clay scrambling like a terrier through the notes on his desk.
***
While Fred tapped Bernie’s secret code onto the buttons of his alarm pad, Suzette Shaughnessy stepped out of the shadows of a neighboring doorway. It had started to rain again. Dr. Mitchell, slightly behind her, held a blue umbrella over the pair of them. The umbrella Mitchell held in his left hand. It was with his right that he pressed the gun’s muzzle against the small of Suzette Shaughnessy’s back. He was still dressed as he had been on their first meeting, in the tired blue suit, the vintage fedora, the trench coat from a movie nobody had seen, not even on late night television, for thirty years.
Suzette, bareheaded, pouted apologies. Mitchell, nudging her from behind, told Fred, “We’re coming in.”
“Good,” Fred said. “I didn’t know where to find you.” He opened the entrance next to the big overhead door, then stepped back and let the two shove in, Suzette stumbling, Mitchell propelling her in front of him. Mitchell dropped the umbrella to the garage floor, keeping a wary eye on Fred until Fred closed them in.
“Sorry,” Suzette said. “He just suddenly got like this.”
“Upstairs,” Mitchell ordered.
“We’re working together,” Suzette protested, more or less to the space around them, as Fred, following Mitchell’s gestures, led the way upstairs into Bernie’s living space.
Suzette followed, Mitchell behind her, keeping the gun’s muzzle firmly in the small of Suzette’s back. She shivered in the black raincoat. Her face wavered with banners of pink and white, the fear taking her that way.
“What is it with you people?” Fred asked, letting his eyes flick back and forth from Mitchell to Suzette.
“On the couch,” Mitchell demanded. “Not you, Suzette. Him. Fred. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
“She’ll faint if she doesn’t sit down.” Fred advised. “She’ll flop down like a turd.”
Mitchell’s eyes darted around the room. “You,” he told Fred again. “On the couch.”
“We assume I care if the lady lives or dies,” Fred said, standing his ground.
“The chest,” Mitchell said.
“Downstairs.”
“I knew it,” Suzette said.
“She’ll faint,” Fred repeated.
Suzette winked, moaned, and dropped like a turd. Fred, lurching sideways to avoid getting tangled in her limbs, twisted and managed a decisive swipe at the side of Mitchell’s head. The gun’s report was almost absorbed by the room’s rugs, drapes, and Bernie’s couch and sound system.
“I’m all right,” Suzette called. Fred, standing over the twisting professor, kicked the gun out of his hand and then kicked him again, with precision, back of the ear, on the other side of the head.
“He won’t be out long,” Fred warned. “Find something to tie him with.” He flipped Mitchell onto his back while Suzette went prospecting in Bernie’s kitchen cupboards. “Quick,” Fred urged. Suzette came back with twine and a pair of kitchen scissors. “Get his shoes off,” he ordered. While Suzette worked at the black wingtips, he tied Mitchell’s thumbs together, and then his wrists, behind his back. “Socks too,” he said. The professor’s naked feet were nothing you’d want to find under your Christmas tree. Fred took more twine and tied the big toes together, then the ankles. Suzette had watched the procedure carefully, absorbing information in case she could use it later in her new life as an art dealer. She stood up then, twisting herself out of her wet coat and throwing it on the linoleum floo
r of Bernie’s kitchen area. She was wearing a blue dress under the coat. Blue linen, cotton, something like that. It didn’t look warm enough. Locating a mirror, she checked herself in that.
“It hit the couch,” Fred said. The bullet had disappeared into the Hurculon upholstery of the couch’s plaid back.
“What do you, sleep on the floor?” Suzette demanded. The sheets were still spread out there, as he and Mandy had left them.
“Don’t touch the gun,” Fred cautioned. Suzette was starting to wander. “Mitchell’s prints are on it. Leave it where it is.” Mitchell’s gun, formerly Franklin Tilley’s, was lying on the sheets where he’d kicked it.
Suzette said, “Downstairs. You had it the whole time. I knew it, Mitchell,” she said. “I told you…” She swerved away abruptly from the direction in which her words were heading, and gave Fred a tentative smile that, in a moment, lit the room before it was replaced by a look of dawning alarm. “It’s like I’m on fire,” she said. “God, Fred. That was close. Thanks for the graphic image. Me doing my famous impersonation of a flopping turd.”
Mitchell stirred.
Suzette stroked the bodice of the summery blue dress and straightened its sides. “I thought I was going to have to buy another dress,” she said. “That’s all I thought. Can you imagine?” She took a hesitant step in Fred’s direction.
Chapter Sixty-six
“The neighbors don’t care when someone fires a gun?” Suzette asked.
Fred shrugged. “It’s Beacon Hill. It wasn’t loud. If the neighbors hear it, and if they know what it is, they don’t want to make waves.”
“Maybe life sucks,” she said, taking another hesitant step in Fred’s direction. “But it’s better than the alternative. I’m going to sit down before I really do fall.” She sank into the couch.
“Now we talk,” Fred said.
“He would have killed me,” Suzette said. The observation sounded like an explanation more than an apology.
“Yes, but he didn’t,” Fred countered. “The way I took him, you were never in danger. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Gets lucky sometimes, but he’s an amateur. Meanwhile, your delayed reaction is only fear. Leftover fear. Don’t worry about it. Fear’s a good thing. Fear is the prolongation of life. Also, as the man said, Fear springs to life more quickly than anything else.”
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