Harmony In Flesh and Black (11 page)

“How did you find the man?” Fred asked. “What's the connection? How did you locate the painting of Conchita Hill there? From the mark on the wall, he'd had it a long time. It's dangerous to keep secrets now, Clay. Can someone follow this project back to us?”

“There is a remote chance.”

Molly's hiss of indrawn breath was clear as a kettle reaching the boil.

“I think not. I think it is remote enough,” Clayton said. He didn't want Fred to learn his methods.

“Clay, there are times to play games, and games to be played, and games I don't need and won't play. I'm in this, too. Come off it.”

“Sarah Chatterjee at the Genealogical Society. She did the research under my guidance,” Clay said, smirking until he recalled the corpse. “Conchita Hill married Simon Goodson. In Baltimore. They had a daughter, Sarah, who married Franklin Arbuthnot. In Cleveland. Their daughter Annie married Henry Smykal. Senior. Of Somerville, Mass.,” Clayton recited from memory. He would have it all down on file cards as well, translated from Miss Chatterjee's report. She'd have told him where everyone had gone to school, the names and numbers of offspring, and the rest.

At least Clay hadn't discovered it himself, Fred thought.

“And Miss Chatterjee is…?” Molly asked.

“In Bengal for six months, visiting her mother,” Clay said. “That is our good fortune, I imagine.”

“Therefore the woman in the painting,” Molly said, counting on her fingers, “was Smykal's great-grandma. In that nasty place.”

“I should probably tell you,” Fred said, “that I found Smykal's body and concealed the fact.”

Clay looked at Fred, thinking. He stroked the Unitarian stripes on his necktie, settling them down. “I'm glad to hear that, Fred,” he said. “Therefore you had a chance to search for the letter.”

His look turned expectant.

Fred saw Molly start and open her mouth to say something, and then close it again, tight, saying it to herself through clenched teeth instead.

“It wasn't to be found,” Fred said. “Not in the time I had.”

“A shame,” Clay said, still solicitous of number one. “I want that letter. It has to be somewhere. Between the time I saw it in his hand and when I brought the money to him, on Friday, he had three hours. Where did he put it? You don't suppose you could go back now…” His voice trailed off in response to Fred's snort of incredulity. “No, I suppose they have the apartment sealed or whatever it is they do.”

“If you gentlemen will excuse me,” Molly said, “I'll get dressed.”

She slammed into the house.

*   *   *

Clayton was badly spooked. Fred had been right to tell him nothing. A murder happening near enough to the both of them for them to feel the wind of it—that was alarming. “A rude reminder of mortality,” Clay called it. They were sitting in the aluminum chairs, which Clay also found, it seemed, a rude reminder of mortality, to judge from the way he crossed his grasshopper legs and fidgeted.

They looked the situation over. In the course of twenty-four hours, it appeared, they might well have lost, simultaneously on two separate fronts, their advantage on the Heade and the hope of completing the provenance on the recumbent Conchita Hill.

As far as Smykal's murder was concerned, what was their exposure? If either Clayton or Fred had been seen at Smykal's apartment, it was by someone who did not know them.

“But can we keep out of it? Our fingerprints will be there,” Clay said. “I imagine there's something in that business of fingerprints?”

“They have to compare them to something,” Fred said. “Fingerprints without reference mean nothing, like the exhibition history of a picture you can't find. But we could volunteer, tell them we were in the apartment. If we don't, we set a record that looks like guilty knowledge. If they're going to find out anyway, it's better we tell them now than they find out later.”

“How would that help me get that letter?” Clay asked. “I keep recalling the way he strove to rub my face in his photographs! Can I want my associates and friends to think of me in such a place? Still … how do we get the letter, with who knows what storms washing around the place? You have many skills, Fred. I am sure you can manage something. It's too bad about Smykal—a tragedy from his point of view. But for us, as you keep pointing out, Fred, the important thing's the Heade. He's clever, and he has great power,” Clay said, standing and walking toward Molly's back fence.

It took Fred a minute to understand. He realized that the Vermeer had filled Clayton's horizon again; he was talking about Albert Finn.

“We know Finn's in the game since he's staying in town.” Clay looked at his watch. “I have a wedding in Manchester I must get to, Fred. I conclude we should be guided by your judgment, which you have described so vividly using the metaphor of lying in ambush in a swamp. We must lie low and still, saying nothing while we watch carefully ourselves. Let us not allow them to see the water shake.”

Fred agreed that they might as well keep silent at least until the auction was played out, acknowledging to himself what Clay did not seem to recognize, that any risk being undertaken according to this plan was primarily Fred's.

In the meantime, Clay suggested that “since we are citizens, and if you can do so without risking the possibility of my painting's being confiscated from me as evidence in a crime,” Fred might as well use his many skills to pluck the letter safe and well from this flaming disaster, without letting himself be noticed.

“And if I'm caught, say I don't know you?” Fred shot at Clayton as he turned to go.

Clay pretended not to hear. Ever the gentleman, he said, walking out the side gate to the front of the house, “Please thank the lady Molly for her hospitality, and apologize for me again for my breaking into the tranquillity of your Sunday morning.

“I'll understand if you don't come in tomorrow,” he added. “Call. I may have an idea. You may also have something to tell me. I agree with your sage advice, though. Don't lose track of our primary objective: the Heade. Whatever you do, don't ruffle the surface.”

Clayton paused in thought, the idea struggling for completion. “What's ruffled will not reflect,” he told Fred.

11

There was discussion before it was decided what Fred would do. Molly had changed clothes, the yellow robe supplanted now by pink shorts and one of Fred's white shirts, and they sat at the table in her kitchen.

“It's not the desert. Someone must have seen you come out of the building with that painting,” Molly said.

“It was wrapped. It was the day before Smykal was found,” Fred said.

“You're damn right. Which you know because you were there just before he got killed, and then right after. Jesus, Fred, you were practically living at that place.”

“Smykal was expecting someone,” Fred said. “He buzzed the door lock open without using the intercom. He said, when he saw me, ‘You're not him.'”

“Who was ‘him'?” Molly asked.

“I may have to find out,” Fred said.

If they had been married, Molly would have something to say about the situation he was in. And Fred would have to say something like, “Trust me.” This present arrangement was more awkward since it didn't provide Molly any legal right to worry.

“Just don't be an asshole,” Molly said, taking his arm and giving it a rough shake.

Fred didn't say, “Trust me.”

“And don't pretend you don't know what I mean,” Molly said. “Someone's been killed. So you're going to poke a stick into a dark place where you can disturb somebody who will kill. You, for example.”

They both knew that Molly was thinking about Fred's scars, which looked too amateur to be from surgery: the slash marks on his chest and upper arm and the one along his jawbone on the right side; the puckered, light circle on the inside front of his left shoulder, matched by the larger one from the exit wound on the back.

Fred wouldn't talk about them. When she'd asked him, early on, what they were from, he would only say, “I was acquiring life skills.” Then he would talk about artists, people like Caravaggio, who had died violently.

Now he said, “Art itself is violent, like hanging steel girders three hundred feet up, or making anything, really; like breaking eggs. Art requires philosophical defiance as well as the contest with material. The artist's eye is grasping, transforming, destroying. Clay finds art peaceful and can't feel the painter's hot breath as he gets down to the short strokes. There is nothing peaceful in a work of art, any more than the force of peace prevents the moon from crashing into the earth.”

Fred talked about this with Molly. He would talk pictures, she would recall his scars, and they mixed in her mind, the pictures and the scars.

Fred added, “Besides, I'm interested.”

He began prowling the backyard. He realized that the yard wouldn't long survive that, so he put on shorts and a T-shirt and went for a run by the pond to clear his mind or give it distraction. It was midmorning, already getting warm. Dogs were out, and birds. The sky was blue and clear.

Fred hadn't known that Molly was running, too. They bumped into each other three blocks from the house, both of them sweating, coming from their opposite directions.

They got back to the house and sat on the front steps, cooling off.

“It's true,” Molly said. “We are interested.”

Fred stretched and turned to go into the house. He showered in the creaky little bathroom all of them shared on the second floor. He dressed for a warm day, putting on a blue polo shirt without the alligator, khakis, and once-white sneakers.

Sam's door was closed. Terry was waking as he passed her open door. He stepped in for a visit. She kept her room in a sweet rumpus. She collected rocks, which tended to get mixed in with homework she forgot to deliver; she slept only in the upper third of her bed so there would be room for the rocks at the foot.

“Sit down,” she said, offering him the rock pile.

“Thank you.” Fred sat. “Your bed reminds me of the Yukon.”

“Thank you,” Terry said. “Fred, can you teach me to throw a curveball?”

“I'll show you how it's done,” Fred said, “but your coach may want you to wait till your hand is bigger.”

Terry followed him downstairs, still in her ragged blue pajamas, and made a lunge for the most disposable parts of the paper in time to provoke a confrontation with Sam, who came in right behind them, still dressed in yesterday's T-shirt and jeans.

Fred did what he could to postpone bloodshed, found Molly still sitting on the front step, gave her a squeeze, told her, “Don't worry, I won't be recognized. Yesterday I was wearing a coat and tie,” and took the car into Cambridge to poke around.

*   *   *

Cambridge on a late Sunday morning in spring, warm, not raining, around Harvard Square, was filled with people who were somewhere else. Many were in Paris. They sat at tables next to the traffic and consumed coffee and croissants served to them by kids required by the management to wear berets. But the kids smiled at you, so you didn't get that Paris feeling.

Some people were in New York. In jogging outfits, jangling with jewelry, accompanied by designer dogs, they ran or biked or roller-skated through the streets and on the sidewalks.

Some folks were attending church in Armenia. Some were at a Baptist wedding in Atlanta.

Some were in Southeast Asia still. Even home, they hadn't been able to get home. They lived on vents by the river and panhandled, trying to score the comparative sanity of being drunk to take the place of the demon-haunted nightmares they otherwise frequented.

The parks were full of people. The bookstores, at least half of them, were open, but the places to buy earrings were still closed.

Harvard's buildings loomed, dorms and offices strangling the village that had been here once, where cows had walked down to drink out of the river. Long afterwards, in the same village—now a city—a generation of young people had heard the martyred ghost of JFK urging them to ask what they could do for their country, and some, like Fred, had tossed everything and talked to the smiling suits and opted for a life of patriotic travel and intrigue.

Fred parked near Turbridge Street. The sun was bright enough for him to keep his sunglasses on. Half the people were wearing shades anyway. When he was here before he'd been wearing his working clothes: the white shirt, jacket, and tie. He could sit at a table on the sidewalk on Mass. Avenue, drink coffee, and stare up Turbridge Street, seeing what was going on and expecting not to be recognized. A cop car idled across the street from the café. The cops were drinking coffee, not going anywhere, now and then glancing up Turbridge Street.

Fred bought a Sunday paper and watched. A man he knew only as Teddy, a damaged veteran now living in the Charlestown house, sidled by and looked a question at Fred, asking, Can I know you? Can you know me? He was six-two, rail-thin, and dressed in odd scraps of uniform and mismatched sneakers, his lean face twisted and grizzled with a week's beard.

“Sit down,” Fred said, and he went inside and bought Teddy a cup of coffee.

Teddy had come to the place in Charlestown after Fred left it. Teddy was the only name he would give. He sometimes was absent for long periods. He'd got the address from some buddies—nobody knew who—and he wouldn't talk, except about baseball.

Fred believed that Teddy was from Atlanta, though his skin was so black you would have thought him straight Senegalese or Nigerian.

“How you doin'?” Teddy said. “We don't see you.”

“Well, no,” Fred said. “How you been?”

Teddy closed his mouth tight and shook his head. He was not saying. He looked carefully at the surface of his coffee and left it on the table, untasted.