Thorn

by Fred Saberhagen

  I naturally looked with interest, but only one sketch showed the model’s face at all clearly, and it had distorted her features into such an artificial expression of heaven-sent rapture that I thought it would be useless for identification. I made no comment.

  Verrocchio talked on, nervously. He had had vague plans of posing the girl himself—yes, there was something truly lovely about her, signori— but the next thing he knew, she was gone, no one knew where.

  I asked: “Which apprentice was it who brought her round? That stubbly fellow out there?”

  “Yes. Would you gentlemen like to talk to him?”

  We went out into the large room again, where Lorenzo with his usual good humor approached the dark-cheeked youth. Would he settle a small bet? That young woman who was here until a few days ago, what language did she really speak, besides her bad Italian?

  The pseudo-prophet with the rheumy eyes got a chance to rest from posing. The apprentice put down his tools. He dropped things and was upset at being questioned. He stuttered that he really didn’t know, he didn’t think that he could tell us much.

  I demonstrated what Hungarian sounded like. Yes, said the nervous youth, that might have been it. But he wasn’t really sure. He had never talked to the girl much and didn’t know her name. True, he had picked her up in a tavern, and brought her here for some modeling, but you gentlemen know how that goes—excuse me, perhaps you don’t —but a man doesn’t always learn their names. No, he didn’t know where she was now. She had seemed unhappy—she had gone off—

  It seemed to me that there was more to be learned from this man, but he was not mine to question as I willed. He was probably a valuable worker here. Perhaps later, I thought.

  “Let us talk to the servants, then,” said Lorenzo, still effortlessly maintaining the pose of a small bet to be settled. “And to the other apprentices.”

  The few servants were soon casually processed. I allowed them to get away with knowing nothing whatsoever, at least for the time being. As for apprentices, Verrocchio informed us that he presently had only three. The second, a somewhat younger and handsomer lad than the one we had already spoken to, was called in from the yard where he had been mixing pigments. This one, acting not too bright, only giggled slightly and glanced nervously at his master when I asked him how well he had known the woman; he did confirm, though, that my Hungarian sounded like the language the young woman had muttered to herself in when she was upset.

  “What was she upset about?”

  The youth made an eloquent gesture with both arms, that seemed to take in all of life.

  “I have only one more apprentice, gentlemen. He lives at home, but is due to arrive here at any time now. Will you honor me by waiting?”

  “It is we who are honored by your company, maestro,” said Lorenzo, and sat down again for some more leisured conversation about Art. The staff went back to work. Presently the lad we were waiting for appeared. He looked to me no more than about twelve years of age, though quite tall and strong for his years. He was better dressed than either of his older colleagues.

  Lorenzo, beginning to put a question to him, paused in mid-sentence. “Stay, I think I know you. Your father is Ser Piero the notary, is he not? Yes, of course, and how is he?”

  “Father is well, signore.” Again we went through our list of questions. This time Lorenzo, as an acquaintance, did most of the talking.

  “The girl perhaps talked to you about herself? Your good master here says that you spent more time drawing and painting her than any of the others did.”

  “Yes, she modeled for me many days. But we did not talk very much.”

  “Perhaps,” I put in, “you have a drawing, at least a sketch, some good likeness of her that you can show me?” I realized that our fiction about the bet was by now too tattered to be of any other further use. “Since you say you put in so many hours at it. Can you draw well?”

  The boy looked at me. There was something intrinsically cold, withdrawn, about him. “I can draw. I threw some of my sketches away, but I think there is something. I will see what I can find.” He turned away.

  “Stay,” commanded Lorenzo. “The important thing is, do you know where she is now?”

  “Yes, signore, I think I may know.” We all stared at him. “In the palazzo Boccalini.”

  This obviously meant something to Lorenzo and Verrocchio, who exchanged looks. Then the master of the studio demanded of his young apprentice: “How do you know this?”

  “I saw her on the street, two days ago, arguing with two young men of that family. They were starting to pull on her arms, and laughing. She was not laughing. And she has not been back here since.”

  Verrocchio looked all about him, as if calling on witnesses to this strange behavior. “Yet you said nothing to anyone here about this? Why?”

  “No one asked me about it, until now.”

  Verrocchio glanced at us, then waved the youth away. When he was gone, Lorenzo said to me: “The Boccalini are no friends of my family. And what the boy said may be true, for they have a bad reputation of taking advantage of undefended young women. If she went with them, it may well have been unwillingly. I believe the older men of their family are still at their summer villa, leaving the young gallants unsupervised in town. We will do what we can to find out for certain whether she is there.”

  Verrocchio, chewing on his lip, had moved a pace or two away; he was not anxious to take part in these intrigues. At this point the young boy came back, lugging a fairly large wooden panel. “The little sketches are all gone,” he said laconically.

  His master took the painting from him and held it upright on a table, in good light. A twelve-year-old has done that? was my own first reaction, even untutored as I was in the difficulties of the art. For once, I think, Lorenzo’s judgment was the same as mine; he scowled intensely and murmured something. Verrocchio, who must have seen the panel before, still sighed faintly with what sounded very much like envy. He snatched up a small brush from the table, and hastily flicked in his signature across a lower corner where part of the background had been finished.

  He sighed again. “Yes, this is she, Signore Ladislao, an excellent likeness. From this you may know her. If she is where the boy says she is, I pray Jesus and San Lorenzo that you may bring her safely out. If that is what Your Honor really wants to do.”

  Lorenzo was still marveling at the painting in silence. Then he asked: “The boy really did this?”

  The master nodded. “Indeed he did, Signore Lorenzo. I watched with my own eyes.”

  What impressed me most, at my then primitive level of artistic judgment, was of course the marvelously lifelike character of the face, which like most of the figure was completely finished; parts of the background, as I think I have mentioned, were still not done. With this face before me, I felt I must know the model at once if ever I saw her in the flesh. And this suggested to me another point: such a perfect, breathing likeness, if allowed to remain here, might someday serve as evidence in the hands of King Matthias’s enemies, proof that his sister had indeed once been here and posing.

  “I would like to take this painting with me,” I said, reaching for my purse once more. “What is its price?”

  But this time the master of the shop would have none of my gold. “Please, signore, you will honor me by accepting this trifle as a gift.” Verrocchio made the offer quickly and easily; I am sure he calculated that in the long run he would not lose by such a gesture, which ought to bind him closer to the Medici in friendship; and, anyway, the gift was not all that expensive. Not in 1464, though within only a few decades the value of ready-made art from Florentine studios would increase tremendously.

  “It is only the work of a novice, signore, though he is gifted beyond—” Verrocchio broke off, catching sight of the boy still standing nearby, silently attentive. “Back to your work now, Leonardo.”

  Chapter Seven

  So.

  It may be that some of my readers, equipped with
good memories or else forearmed by a fortuitously recent reading of some art history, anticipated the little revelation at the previous chapter’s end. But before these readers congratulate themselves too heartily, let them consider why none of those supposedly expert folk involved in the art auction uttered that most potent name. Why, barring one hint by Ellison Seabright, there has not been even the most tentative suggestion along that line. Two points awarded for the correct answer, and more on the subject later. For the moment let it suffice that the reader has now caught up with Mr. Thorn in this much at least: that Magdalen was definitely not a Verrocchio, worth perhaps the quarter of a million dollars or so that Ellison Seabright paid for it; it was instead a genuine Leonardo da Vinci, heretofore unknown to the experts as such, but if its origin could be verified worth easily twenty times that much.

  The announcement of the missing aircraft caused Mr. Thorn to cut short his visit to the Seabright mansion as soon as he politely could—which, under the circumstances of confusion prevailing there, was not long. He took his leave without offering his host any further revelations of his own about the painting. He had not been about to provide that gross, half-clever criminal with any very truthful revelations anyway. The two of them vaguely agreed that they would talk to each other again sometime and with that matters between them were left hanging.

  Driving his rented Blazer back into the more plebian regions of the city, Mr. Thorn felt unhappy for several reasons. First, the painting was once more out of his reach, gone again, somewhere, where he could not even look at it. Second—or perhaps really first—it is always a painful experience, that dawning realization that one has underestimated an opponent. That first moment when the placidly grazing prey turns suddenly, baring its own fangs, unsheathing its own sharp claws … and, perhaps thirdly, perhaps worst of all, is the suspicion that one has finally grown old, become ineffectual through overconfidence.

  Mr. Thorn, still determined of course to have his painting, but denied it, and realizing now that he did not even know who his true adversary was, would have liked to go back in time two days, and start over again in the auction room. That being impossible even for him, he decided to do the next best thing, which was to come as close to starting over as he could.

  Sighting a public phone booth, he stopped and made a call. Twenty minutes later he was ringing the front doorbell of a modest house on an anonymously modest Phoenix side street.

  Robinson Miller, eyes full of subtle suspicions, appeared inside and let Thorn in. At Miller’s feet a small dog, on getting his first whiff of the visitor, yapped once in extreme surprise, and then was still. Behind Miller in the living room was the sofa that Mary once had mentioned, looking indeed as if it might have spent part of a long and adventurous career inside a Salvation Army store. Mary herself was just rising from its sagging cushions. Tonight her jeans had been replaced by shorts, revealing legs quite as attractive as Thorn had expected them to be. She wore a blue vinyl vest, doubtless because there was no bra beneath her blue T-shirt. With her usual eagerness for any new development, she greeted the visitor more freely than Miller had. “This is a surprise, Mr. Thorn. Glad to see you. Something’s happened, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Though I am not sure exactly what.” Thorn took the offered armchair, a place of honor that got the main benefit of the laboring window air conditioner. He declined well-intentioned offers of coffee and beer, and looked calmingly at the small dog who was edging close to offer worship. To the humans he related the essentials of his visit to the Seabright house.

  Mary was quite as upset as Thorn had been to hear about the missing plane, though her disquiet had a nobler basis. “Then the plane is really down? That’s bad. How many people were on it?”

  “Oh, I am sure that by this time it is down, somewhere. I gather that it carried only the pilot, a man named Gliddon. A search is to be started in the morning.”

  “Gliddon,” said Mary, and made a face. “I didn’t like him.” Still her dislike hardly seemed to make any difference in her concern over the pilot’s fate. “When I lived at the house he was always in and out, though I never knew what he did. It must have been some kind of work for Ellison.”

  Robinson Miller said to Thorn: “Do I understand you to mean that you think the plane didn’t really crash?”

  “Correct me if I am wrong,” said Thorn, “but I believe that the land between here and Santa Fe is somewhat sparsely populated?”

  Miller nodded. “Five hundred miles of nothing.”

  “Mountains, deserts, some forests,” Mary amended. “Late last spring two Air Force planes from the missile range at Alamogordo were lost. They crashed right out in the open and in spite of a big search it was months before the wreckage was found. At least it’s not winter now. I suppose if Gliddon survived a crash in the mountains he’s got a chance.”

  “Somehow,” said Thorn, “I have little doubt that he survived.”

  Mary looked puzzled; she didn’t get it yet. Miller said: “I suppose Seabright was having a fit. Though not over the missing man, of course.”

  Thorn nodded. “He was going through the motions of one who is, as you say, having a fit over some lost property. Barking orders, phoning hither and yon, demanding explanations, demanding action. But I … have had some opportunity of observing humanity under various kinds of stress. And I am sometimes able to see through efforts at deception. And—this is why I have come to talk to you tonight—I think Mr. Seabright was not truly surprised by the news that his masterpiece and his aircraft and its pilot were missing. Indeed, I suspect that one reason I was invited to his house tonight was to provide him with a neutral witness, able to testify to his surprise and his dismay.”

  Some of Mary’s old fierce delight quickly returned. She thumped the arm of the battered sofa. “I believe you!” she cried. “He’s pulled another trick! He’s getting away with it again!”

  But Miller was frowning, shaking his head. “The suggestion being, I suppose, that Seabright is somehow spiriting the painting away into hiding by faking a plane crash. But he’s just bought it and paid for it. Why the hell should he steal it from himself?”

  Thorn had his ideas on that subject. But he said nothing for the moment.

  “Insurance money!” Mary pounced.

  Her lawyer was still shaking his head. “No, I don’t think so. That kind of thing isn’t easy to get away with—”

  “Neither is murder, but he got away with killing Helen and Del.”

  “—and anyway, since the painting was being carried on his private aircraft I doubt that any insurance coverage on it would be in force.” Miller’s gaze focused suddenly on Thorn. “You’re not from some insurance company, are you?”

  “No,” Thorn said patiently. “I am a collector, as is Seabright.” A few feet away, in the kitchen, the telephone began to ring. Miller got up to answer it.

  “Mary.” Thorn looked at her intently. “Why did Delaunay give you that painting?”

  His gaze did not bother her. “Why? I told you. Out of gratitude, for my helping Helen. He was that kind of a guy, I guess. He knew I’d sell the painting, I’m sure. He just wanted me to have some money to use, helping other kids.”

  “You say you think Ellison knew about this gift? How can you be sure?”

  But Mary was looking toward the kitchen doorway. Miller was standing there, rather like some interviewer with a microphone, holding out toward Mary the yellow telephone receiver on its helixed cord. But the look on his face was that of a man in shock; and Thorn got to his feet.

  “Who? What?” asked Mary vaguely, standing also.

  Miller licked his bearded lips. “She says … she’s Helen.”

  There was a pause in which no one did anything. Then Mary sprang forward. In a moment she was holding the phone pressed against her disheveled hair. “Who is this? If this is supposed to be some kind of a joke, it isn’t…”

  A feminine voice at the other end of the connection had begun to answer. It was a quiet voice
, and its tones were mottled and distorted by an imperfect connection somewhere, and at first Mr. Thorn could not make out the words. But Mary could, and they had an immediate effect. Her face lost color, and her hand holding the receiver slumped a little. “What?” she asked weakly.

  The voice at the other end made itself louder. Now both men standing by in the kitchen could hear it well enough to distinguish words. “Mary, this isn’t any joke. It’s me. I can’t come back now, it’s too dangerous. Anyway, I don’t really want to. Everything’s fine for me the way things are. But I wanted to talk to you. You’re my best friend, Mary.” Mr. Thorn, listening hard, thought there was a certain dazed quality in the voice; a disconnection from present reality, as if it might be reciting lines learned for a play.

  “Helen? What do you mean, dangerous?” Mary’s own voice now sounded no less dazed. “Why? Where are you?”

  “You know why, Mary, if I come back he’s going to try to kill me again. Look, I wanted to tell you, Mary, I’m sorry about running away again, after all your work with me and all. But there was nothing else for me to do. Please don’t try to look for me again, this time I’m gone for good.”

  “Baby, if this is really you … you tell me not to look for you? How can you call me up like this and say a thing like that?”

  “You always said you wanted me to have a happy life someday. So now I’m going to be able to have a happy life. So let me alone.”

  Miller stood beside Mary where she sat in a kitchen chair. He was slowly bending over her, getting his ear closer and closer to the phone in her hand; and meanwhile his eyes squinted, as if he strained to see something in the far distance. Thorn waited motionless in the kitchen doorway, and he also was listening very carefully.