“You have this on good authority?” Clay demanded.
“The best.”
“Unfortunate,” Clay said. “Still…” He rang off.
Mitchell said eagerly, “I will publish the work. Just by itself it is worthy of a book. At least of a learned article. I am grateful to you. The top will be reunited to the chest. Hinges will be a problem,” he noticed, thinking ahead. “Half the hinges are gone. We’ll make more. I know how to rust them appropriately. There’s a man…”
“You’re going to be busy,” Fred said.
“Yes. With my book. The Annunciation Wedding Chest will be first published as a Joni, by its discoverer. Not as Tilley wanted.”
“I was wondering when we’d get to Franklin Tilley.”
“I regret to say, a dishonest man,” Mitchell announced. “May I sit on a chair?”
Suzette pulled a pack of cigarettes from a raincoat pocket, tapped it against the arm of the couch, and lit one. She blew a deliberative plume of smoke. “We’re wasting time with this fool,” she announced. “Wanting to find a masterpiece by this forger he’s in love with, of course he pretends to find one.”
“At first I misjudged him,” Mitchell said. Fred was hoisting him off the floor, getting his buttocks onto one of the straight chairs. “I believed the respect was mutual. When I finally understood that, despite my protests, he was determined to sell the work as from the hand of Leonardo…”
“He shot him,” Suzette helped.
“On that subject I rest mute,” Mitchell said.
Chapter Sixty-nine
“He was adamant. The work must be sold as a Leonardo. He was prepared, on behalf of my client, and with his commissions in mind, to perpetrate fraud. The Magdalene must be offered as a Mantegna. Well and good. I held no brief for the Magdalene. Caveat emptor. It was his crime, not mine. But at the misrepresentation of the Icilio Joni I would not connive. I was the Joni expert. If I represented myself as having been hoodwinked by my subject, I could never hold up my head again.”
“Here’s what the jury will think,” Suzette said, blowing smoke. “The old man shot his lover. Then shot Carl. Lover’s quarrel. Because Carl…Franklin was cheating on him with Carl.”
Mitchell shook his head mournfully. “It made no difference to Franklin Tilley that, as a Joni, the work has true value, both financial and historic,” he announced. “Were it offered as Leonardo, and the seller were then exposed as a fraud—notice I say the seller, not the work—the value of the work would become anomalous.
“It is a mark of the market’s perversity,” Mitchell said. “A little Madonna and Child in tempera and gold on wood, that might have entered the market in 1920 attributed to, for example, Duccio di Buoninsegna, of modest value in 1920 even as Duccio, but later unmasked as one of Joni’s masterly imitations, might command a truly serious price on today’s market, once proved to be a genuine work from Joni’s hand. Incidentally, since it is I who am the expert, I alone can present an opinion that qualifies the work as being from Joni’s hand.
“There are collectors—I know them, I told Franklin—who, once we put it together again…so intent was he on selling the Annunciation as a Leonardo that he burned his bridges. Because I had already told him that the body of the chest was of recent origin, he disposed of it. Couldn’t have it around, he said, to cast doubt on the Annunciation. He told me first that he had burned it. He would not listen when I explained that once we put the chest together again, it would have a value of as much as a hundred fifty thousand dollars,” Marshall said. “On the open market. Perhaps more.”
He paused and looked at Fred with a vacant speculation that seemed to demand response.
“You didn’t want the chest,” Fred told Suzette. “Neither of you. Not you. Not Franklin. You knew it would never pass.”
“Mitchell wanted it,” Suzette said. Her eyes flickered toward the gun, which Fred might do well now to put out of harm’s way. It was clear now; at least the probability made sense. She’d wanted to get next to the chest again, destroy it if she could; and anyone associated with it, if need be. Fred next, then Mitchell? Having used herself to smuggle Mitchell in here, with the gun. What ruse had tempted Carl into the alley, in the rain, without his shoes? Whose hand had held the gun? By what means had Suzette, or Mitchell, or both of them together, led Franklin Tilley out to the river’s edge? She’d been part of this trail of death. Good luck to the jury who tried to figure it out.
Suzette lit the room with a dazzling smile. Fred kicked the gun, sheets and all, under the couch.
“If there’s a reward,” Suzette said, “we split fifty-fifty. I brought Mitchell here after all. Shit,” she added. “What’s the odds? It’s up to you, Fred, I guess, if this old man gets to tell his story. Maybe it doesn’t matter. We can still sell the Annunciation. Cripes, you tell me. Who cares what Mitchell says? Who’s going to believe a murderer?”
Chapter Seventy
It was a good three hours before Fred was able to close the door on his guests, with their armed and uniformed escort, Suzette expressing brilliant surprise at the suggestion that she might be anything more than a hapless victim in this tragedy. Fred had had to accept the obligation to keep himself available here, at Bernie’s, where there was still nothing to read but Leonardo’s Notebooks. Then it took twenty minutes to try to explain the situation to Clayton on the telephone, honoring his paranoid version of secure communication by speaking as far as possible without using nouns.
“What chance is there that the villain saved the edges he sawed off? What chance that we can get them?”
“None,” Fred said. “What’s more, we can’t show any interest in doing it. We just breathe easy that nobody seems to miss the thing. It was a fair purchase. Don’t monkey with it.”
“What of the owner? The man—I mention no names, not on the telephone—from whose collection the item in question originates?”
“Before I telephoned you I made another call. On Bernie’s bill, if he tries the number, it will answer as not in service. The owner made a mistake risking a trip to Pekham Street. As soon as he arrives, he’ll be picked up. Among other things, people will wonder what he wants to buy, and where, for so much money. If he ever leaves this country at all, after our people are happy with his answers, he’s due for about twenty years of true discomfort in England.”
“And you. You are comfortable where you are?”
Fred looked around. Maybe he’d figure out how to make Bernie’s system play music. Maybe he’d clean up some, see if Mandy, when she came back Sunday night…no. That was done.
“I reckon,” he said. “If I get restless, I might make a library run. Got a piece of research pending.”
“I still can’t believe it,” Clay said cautiously. “Nobody, not even the professor, the expert, who should know his field, could see the Madonna for what it was, without the big frame, the dim lights, the trumpet music and the fawning tourists. Not even the expert. As we look further into its history, we will undoubtedly find that he is not the first man who read it wrong.
“What we ultimately do with the object you have in keeping there, I don’t know,” Clay continued, after he appeared to understand enough to keep him where he was. “You believe the man, I take it? I must resign myself to my loss?”
He was talking about the Annunciation: a passing figment.
“That’s my conclusion. It has to be a fraud. According to Dr. Mitchell. Of course, everyone in the art business lies. But in my opinion, Mitchell is the genuine exception.”
More from this Author
For other books, upcoming author events, or more information please go to:
www.poisonedpenpress.com/nicholas-kilmer
Contact Us
To receive a free catalog of Poisoned Pen Press titles, please contact us in one of the following ways:
Phone: 1-800-421-3976
Facsimile: 1-480-949-1707
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.poisonedp
enpress.com
Poisoned Pen Press
6962 E. First Ave. Ste. 103
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
Madonna of the Apes Page 25