Madonna of the Apes (10 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

“The angels, the lilies, the arches, the curlicues,” Clay said, “all of it worries me. It looks convincing for the fifteenth century, though earlier than my Leonardo. You can see that it is almost primitive. Although there is shading in the angels’ draperies, nonetheless they are not presented with any illusion of volume. The arches are not architectural, but formulaic. Listen to me, I speak of it as if it were a painting, rather than a decorated object. I’ve sat on the floor and studied it. Whether as painting or as decorated object, I am troubled, albeit I know nothing about wooden furniture or joinery. It simply doesn’t fit.”

“We already knew the chest and its top didn’t go together,” Fred pointed out. “I look at it here, even without its top. What do I know? For what it is, it looks pretty good to me. Maybe the original top was damaged? Someone did their ironing on it or something.”

“Horrible thought. But less so if the box is a fake,” Clay said. “As I fear. If this is true, how recent a fake concerns me. I do not wish to think about it. But nevertheless, it is here. It is a part of the story, like it or not. If it is late nineteenth century, as I surmise, it raises the specter of a whole school of master forgers who worked out of Siena. They were skillful enough either to hoodwink, or to collaborate with, such expert aesthetes as Berenson. Among them, they filled American collections with frauds.”

“We don’t care about the chest,” Fred said. “Do we? Why should we?”

“When the
Star of India
turns up in a plastic setting,” Clay worried, “something is amiss.”

“We already know something’s wrong. Even if your Leonardo’s a fake, you didn’t pay enough for it.”

Clay said blandly, “My practice is to separate issues of monetary value from aesthetic considerations.”

“When you buy an egg for a penny,” Fred said, “don’t cry when it stinks in the pan.”

“I am not doubting the egg. The painting. It will stand up to any scrutiny, though the only scrutiny it will enjoy is mine. No one…”

“The couple who were leaving when I got here,” Fred interrupted.

“Have been with me for years. They clean. They are honest, reliable, and thorough. They do not notice or, God forbid, dust, the collection.”

“And you won’t have the straps of the hinges removed from the face of the painting?” Fred pressed. “Or when you do, you’ll blindfold the conservator?”

“Since it appears that, contrary to my better judgment, I open my mind to you, here is one cause of my misgiving. You surprise it from me because of the violence of my emotions. Indeed, I can scarcely speak,” Clay said. He paused, allowing room for Fred to cause an interruption that would let him off the hook; but Fred sat quiet.

“The cut edges,” Clay said. “Not only are they the explanation for the fact that the wreath of laurel, on the marbled side, is now off center. More, I perceive through my horror, the cuts are recent. Must be. I can’t believe they are more than twenty years old. When I examined them under a lens…”

“Should we go up and look?” Fred suggested.

“I have made the examination,” Clay said mournfully. “It grieves my heart. The cut edges have been darkened with oiled pigment, so that they match the color of the other, older edges that have not been tampered with. Worse, before that, the villain abraded them, with fine sandpaper or something finer, perhaps an edge of broken glass, until they could pass for being worn enough to match their apparent age.”

“The wood’s not old?” Fred protested.

“Of course it’s old. Five hundred years and then some. Only the wood exposed by the new cuts had never been subject to the deleterious effects of oxygen, and of pollution. Therefore they were not dark. Not aged. Until the forger tainted them.”

“Forger,” Fred said.

“A similar trick is used by many dealers. Suppose they must stretch an old canvas on a new wooden chassis? Often the new wood is stained so that it will not embarrass the painting it carries by its palpable youth. It is unnecessary, of course. Only the impossibly naïve are fooled, unnecessary as that is. Still, it is a kind of forgery. And the honest age of the wood of my Leonardo, on these two violated edges, has been forged to look, to the careless eye, as if the cut is as old as the painting is. If there was ever any doubt that such a work should be in such a place, and in such hands, that doubt has vanished. I have liberated a hostage.”

Clay stood slowly. “Time is passing,” he said. “I have enjoyed our visit. Our
visits
I should say, using the plural form of the noun.”

Fred suggested, “Carry the rest of the chest to the Museum of Fine Arts, if it bothers you. Get someone in Furniture to look at the wood, the paint, the gilding, the joinery, what’s left of the hinges. You kept the pins?”

“And ten minutes later anyone in the world who wants to, knows my business,” Clay said. “They are all in league. No one in any museum is able to keep a secret. Or wishes to. If they are to be interesting to their friends, they must do commerce in other people’s business. They have none of their own.”

“Then it’s a problem,” Fred said. “Thanks for the coffee.” He stood, grabbed his windbreaker and made for the door. On his way out of the room he hesitated, turned, and asked, “May I use the phone? Local call.”

Clay, taken aback, gestured toward the telephone on his desk. Fred pushed three numbers and asked the noise on the other end, “Atlanta, Georgia. Franklin Tilley.” He waited, listened, and affirmed, “Yes, Pearl Street,” and jotted the number down. He looked a further question at Clay, who nodded and answered, “Why not?”

Fred punched the number and waited until it had rung long enough without a response. “No useful answer,” he told Clay. “And no answering machine.”

“That is to be applauded,” Clay said. “When you have such a device, they are able to spy on you.”

Fred tried the number again. After a dozen rings a male voice answered, “Yes?”

“Franklin Tilley?” Fred asked, and the phone went dead.

“I’ve pushed myself into your business, and I won’t waste your time apologizing,” Fred said. “I don’t explain because, well, I can’t, beyond I helped you get into something that feels wrong, and that might turn dangerous. I feel some responsibility. Also, I’m interested, and it’s been a while…” He let that thought lapse.

“I
am
somewhat concerned about the meeting with Mr. Tilley this afternoon,” Clay said. “I must know the Leonardo’s provenance. As you pointed out so brutally, and as my own better angels advise me in tranquility, if the painting was not Tilley’s to sell, it cannot be properly mine.”

“My thought was, I’ll go,” Fred said. “If the conversation leads in that direction, I’ll let him believe the chest now belongs to me. He’ll figure that, knowing he was interested, I took advantage of you. In order to cheat you, I bought the chest off you for less than the ten thousand he offers. Why not? So I’ll be the owner now. If you continue as the owner of record, you are a sitting duck. Let’s shift the field away from you. It gives me more freedom to work.”

“To work,” Clayton echoed.

“So I shift their attention to me, find out what I can, and then disappear. I can do that, you can’t. You’re better off. The love nest, so called, is a temporary setup. Whatever their business is, these people will do it and go. They’ve got to. The Commonwealth’s revenue officers won’t take forever. Franklin Tilley, and somebody else he mentioned, named Mitchell. Does that name ring a bell?

“I don’t ask your permission, because I don’t ask permission. But I am going to do what I can to find out what’s going on. While I’m at it, why shouldn’t I watch your back?”

“Do what you wish,” Clay said. “As long as I am insulated from further contact with this matter. Much as I hate the fact, I see that circumstance has placed me in your hands. I cannot keep you from going back. I shall be occupied. I must understand my painting. I shall undertake to establish its provenance otherwise, working beneath the surface, starting when it was made. In any case, I won’t keep the appointment. The man is insufferable. Take care. Since I do not expect to see you again, if you don’t mind—on your way out—I’d like to thank you again, and shake your hand.”

Fred took the offered hand and slipped out the basement door into a brilliant May morning, fragrant with the caresses of the spring breezes.

Chapter Twenty-five

Suzette, in her room, answered the house phone at whose other end, in the Ritz lobby, Fred was standing. “Fred?” The brilliant smile lit up the phone line and made it tingle. Ten minutes later she joined him in the lobby, wearing a beige suit, and balancing a handbag taken from the back cover of
Vogue.
“You found it,” she said. The tone of her exclamation was impossible to read. It lay somewhere between “You good boy,” and “Die, alien!”

“Let’s go somewhere and talk,” Fred suggested.

“You’ve seen it, at least?” Suzette demanded. “Come up to my room.”

“There’s a place on Newbury Street,” Fred said. “I was just headed there for an early lunch, late breakfast. Join me? It’s a nice morning. Flowers, wind; and the rain is over and gone.”

The cloth of her tailored skirt was of a light enough material that the sun, shining through it, after traversing the plate glass of the lobby’s street-side wall, made the morning even nicer.

“I’ll take that lunch,” she decided.

“I know a place,” Fred had implied; but he didn’t really know Newbury Street that well. He walked her along the sidewalk, therefore, until a likely looking window offered
GRAND OPENING! Sylvia’s Kitchen,
promising “Meals like Grandma used to make.” The concept was staggeringly out of place for Newbury Street’s pretensions.

It was almost noon but, aside from a meager staff, they had the place to themselves. The hostess, struggling to use Suzette as bait, tried to make them sit in the window, but Suzette insisted on a table. “Out of the light. My eyes,” she explained.

Grandma had specialized in macaroni and cheese, liver and onions, tuna casserole, and meatloaf with all the fixin’s. “Grandma was from Toledo, I guess,” Suzette said. “Yes, look, for dessert you can get Jell-O or apple pie or chocolate cake. No junket, but that may be too 1940s, even for Grandma.”

“You’re not from Toledo,” Fred said.

The waitress hovered. Fred ordered a draught beer and she shook her head. “No license,” she said. “They’ve applied.” At this rate Grandma might last a week before she had to close out of sheer loneliness.

Suzette told the waitress, “I’ll bet you could make me a salad? I don’t see one on the menu, but there must be a salad that comes with some of these orders. That’s what I’d like. With a diet Coke.”

“Diet Pepsi,” the waitress corrected her. They’d forced her to wear a dress of vertical pink and white stripes, along with an apron arrangement that Grandma’s Grandma would have called a pinafore. “I’ll ask them about the salad. You, sir?”

“Meatloaf,” Fred decided. “And iced tea.”

“Excellent choice,” she approved. “I’ll ask if we have iced tea.”

“If the chef has ice, he’ll figure it out,” Fred reassured her.

“All right. Let’s talk,” Suzette said briskly, as the waitress disappeared into the kitchen. “You’ve found it. You’ve seen it. You’ve made a deal on your own. With Reed. Typical. Cutting me out.”

The waitress reappeared. She’d put on a nametag that gave her name as Carol. “We
can
do iced tea,” she crowed. “It’ll just be a minute. About the salad. What we do is coleslaw. A side of coleslaw. Would that be all right?”

“Sure thing,” Suzette told her.

“Excellent choice! I’ll get your drinks.”

Fred said, once the coast was clear, “You have Reed Gingrich’s name from somewhere.”

“The man’s a fool,” she remarked. Her eyes neither blinked not widened as she registered and salted away the prize she’d surprised out of him: Reed’s last name, Gingrich.

“I won’t argue,” Fred said. “My hasty impression of Reed…”

“Not Reed. I don’t know Gingrich. Franklin Tilley.”

“I get the impression he’s out of his depth,” Fred agreed.

“Whatever you paid, we’ll raise,” she said. She paused, fooled with her fork, and added, “Then add a commission for you.”

“We?” Fred asked. He could not make the syllable last as long as he wanted, but he did what he could.

“This morning we had a frank exchange, Franklin and I, and decided that we had a common interest,” Suzette said. “We are working together, just on this one project.”

“Common cause,” Fred said, then looked up and left off as the waitress leaned toward them with beverages. Suzette’s soda clinked with ice. Fred’s tea, in its glass, was pale and thin, and warm, and carried a fingernail of ice in the thin film of scum on its surface.

“There was ice at first,” Carol apologized. “It probably melted.”

“Grandma’s not from Toledo,” Suzette remarked behind Carol’s retreating back. “Toledo may not be Savannah, but in Toledo we do know how to make iced tea.”

“Relax,” Fred said. “You’re not from Toledo yourself. Not anywhere near.”

“Where you from, big boy?” she asked. She sipped from her drink, dark with its diet caramel coloring. “What is this, a truck stop?”

“So, you and Franklin Tilley and the Agnelli Collection all have the same interest? I can negotiate with any one of…”

“You talk to me,” she said briskly. “Franklin’s a fool. Tony’s not here, and in any case I represent Tony’s interests. Where appropriate.”

Carol came back. She carried two shallow dishes of coleslaw and a plastic basket of rolls that Grandma would have recognized from the cover of a 1950’s
Family Circle
magazine as able to emerge from a tube in order to imitate something served at the Parker House. The rolls she put in the center of the table. She put one dish of coleslaw in front of Fred, and the other in front of Suzette. She studied the arrangement, pouted, and shook her head.

“When you get a chance, would you bring me a glass with ice in it?” Fred asked.

Carol adjusted the dish of coleslaw in front of Suzette, putting it off to the side. “That way you have something to eat while the gentleman has his entrée,” she explained.

“Something to look forward to,” Fred said.

“Excellent choice,” Suzette said. “Fred, are you with me?”

“With you and Franklin Tilley and the Agnelli Collection? I don’t know. That’s some party.”