Harmony In Flesh and Black (14 page)

“Brute force we can deal with,” Clay said. “What worries me is Finn's finesse—and the fact that we can't guess what that devious man might know. It was the lady Molly who reminded me. On the phone, when I called her, at around noon. Assume the worst. I must think about how Finn works and who his informant is.”

Fred began shredding a roll for something to do.

Clay went on, “Suppose the informant is a past or present student, a scholar with time for research, endless and grueling. ‘Why don't you look at the graduate students?' Molly asked. ‘Find out who in the neighborhood is working with Heade, or with Vermeer. Start from the bottom and work up.'”

The way Clay said it, as he began to separate the leaved flesh of his fish, made Fred recall those nature films where the lioness runs the warthog down, getting her first good hold under the tail.

“For the moment, let us keep what advantage we can in the game,” Clay said. “Let us be elastic, versatile. We can change plans where indicated. Let the police do what they do about the Cambridge misadventure. We will respond as needed, doing what we do, if need be.”

“Right.” Fred rose from the table. As far as the Cambridge “misadventure” was concerned, he would do what he thought was best and safest for all concerned, regardless of Clay's directions.

“Give me a call tomorrow,” Clay said. “I'll ask around, too. I'll call a friend at BU who knows who's doing what. Why don't you check Harvard? Go on to Brown if you like. Talk to the guy. Who is it? That book on Mondrian? It can't hurt, as long as we are absurdly careful and—”

“Other than that…,” Fred said, standing and watching the servitors become edgy about the large man standing, looking like a potential threat. “Other than that, Clay, you'd best be thinking about what our position is going to be, financially speaking, especially if Buddy Mangan's got his eye on it. As a Heade, the estimate is eighty to a hundred K, already too much for that picture. I'll need to know how far to go on the thing, what the cushion of risk is between what the Heade is worth to you as such and what it might be worth if it's what you hope.”

“Not here,” Clay whispered. “Don't talk amounts.” He looked down, blushing, as if discovering himself unexpectedly, and publicly, naked.

There was plenty of room between tables for private conversation.

“You'll need to think about it,” Fred said.

He walked out past the bowing help. He tipped the startled harpist, who was taking a breather at the bar. Her long black strapless gown packaged a cleavage that would easily accommodate five bucks.

15

Molly was awake, reading in her living room. The kids were in bed. School tomorrow. Molly had something she wanted to talk about.

“It meant a lot to Sam, your taking time to be with him yesterday,” Molly said. “I can tell him forever how handsome and smart and responsible he is, and how he has to take a shower, but he needs a man to take him seriously enough to play with him.”

It pleased Fred, hearing Molly tell him this.

“You're not a man who sets out to hurt people, Fred. But you do approach life like an act of God. You've got Clayton's work to worry about, and the other matter. That's your business, Fred. But you're not good at thinking about more than one thing at a time.

“Both the kids have been hurt before, by their father. I'm not telling you because I'm afraid it's going to happen, but you should know. If it develops that you hurt me, that's okay. It's a risk I'll run, and I won't mind retaliating. But I won't see either of the children hurt again, and the more vulnerable at the moment is Sam.

“Terry thinks the world of you. Your sex is an advantage. If you're going to make a commitment to Sam, don't forget it's important.”

They'd come into the kitchen, where Fred was warming a can of beans and making toast for toast and baked beans as an antidote to Clayton's dinner.

“You want bacon with it?” Molly suggested.

Good idea.

“Did I hurt Sam?” Fred asked, defensive. For God's sake, he'd spent yesterday afternoon with the kid.

“On the contrary. You gave him reason to try some trust and affection on you.”

“Well, that's good.”

Fred got out a beer to go with his late supper, offering one to Molly, who refused it.

“It's good unless it's betrayed. If that happens again, I won't forgive you. Not even if it's not your fault.”

A good thing about Molly was that she would give clear expression to so unreasonable an emotional proposition. A bad thing about her was that she'd do it while you were trying to have supper and unwind after an uneasy day. Even if Fred took time in advance to think about it, he couldn't predict what the proposition was going to be, so he couldn't have an answer ready.

Molly's opening gambit could lead to one of two ultimate resolutions: either Fred's sleeping on the couch, where the kids could find him in disgrace in the morning, or a more satisfactorily intimate exchange, to be achieved only by fancy footwork on the part of them both.

Fred could not, himself, opt successfully for either resolution. The conversation would go where it had to, and then he would go where he had to.

Fortune smiled on him this time, and he found himself in Molly's bed after all, with Molly crying and taking comfort, and then one thing leading to another in the happy, random plunge of the juggernaut of unlogic.

In the morning the kids kvetched and noodled in anticipation of school, and Molly whirled around preparing to go to work at the library, where she could be found behind the reference desk.

Important issues arose concerning the Red Sox game of the previous evening, in the form of a shouting match between Terry and Sam. Sam had the paper and Terry the urgent opinion that contradicted the paper, and Fred was called on to arbitrate. Terry was dressed for school, holding tight to the homework that she was not forgetting this morning and eating Froot Loops out of the box—“for the vitamins, Fred.”

“Roger Clemens has milk with his,” Fred said, pouring her a glass.

“If I put down my homework, I'll forget it,” Terry protested. Fred had to pour the milk into her, Sam watching with envious disdain. To keep a balance, Fred sided with the
Globe
and Sam, and Terry stamped off to the bus mad but still clutching her homework. Sam went upstairs to dress. He would ride his bike today; he liked to skid into the school yard as the bell rang.

Molly was wearing a bright red dress this morning, feeling good. Fred was not fully dressed yet since he'd be the last one out of the house and had to straighten things up before leaving.

“Watch your back, honey,” said Molly—her exit line as she headed for the garage and the Honda and the day at work. Sam went out with her, the two of them a couple.

“Won't be long before you're driving your old lady to work,” Fred called. Sam didn't look back. He had another fish to fry: his mom.

*   *   *

Start anywhere in the maze and you finish either at the start, or at the heart, or in one of the blind alleys. The best place to be, with regard to a maze, is directly above it, but that was a luxury far from Fred's present circumstances. Despite the threat of attachment to Smykal's ugly body in its bath of violence, he nonetheless determined to keep his attention on Clay's main objective—at least this morning.

He had to find a way through the local crop of professors, scholars, and graduate students in art history and figure out if someone existed who might have put the Heade and the Vermeer together and taken the package to Finn. If this person turned out to be at Harvard, whether grad student or professor, he, she, or it was probably holding a clutch of books concerning Heade, or Vermeer, or—preferably—both.

Academics are trained to despise commerce. The idea of being a merchant is the antithesis of aesthetic intellectual idealism. Take money for things? Horrors! No, no, take money for words, ideas: mouth-temperature air. Live, travel, hump, and defecate in warm tranquillity, supported by money laundered by the sanction of the institution.

Let pirates give their money to Harvard, and Harvard pass it along to scholarship. That way all can console themselves that the ivory tower has nothing to do with dead elephants.

So far were they from recognizing art's proximity to commerce that not many graduate students in the area even knew Doolan's existed. It was outside of town. Students might be aware of what was happening at the museums, if it was in their own particular field, but they spent more time with words than with things, were more familiar with prints of photographs of objects than with the objects themselves. Conversely, brilliance in commercial instinct would not drag a youngster to the drudgery of the graduate student's life and the prospect of an ill-paid career spent counting objects bought by someone else's manipulation of the world.

It was what made Finn so brilliant an anomaly. He continued with one hand to grasp academia by the short hairs while keeping the fingers of his other hand tightly curled around the testicles of commerce.

If a mature Finn existed, Fred reasoned, why not a larval form as well, slowly devouring the bland pap of the academy and looking even now for a safe corner in which to secrete the chrysalis where he or she could blossom into something rich and wonderful?

Fred left his car in the garage under the Charles Hotel. He might be in Cambridge all day, and he didn't want to run back and forth feeding a meter.

At the entrance to the fine-arts library Fred told Joan good morning. She was standing, as usual, behind the desk, looking severe, her rimless glasses glaring, her black ponytail frisking in an independent way, as if it did not know that the rest of the animal was in dead earnest. Joan was as tall as Fred was. Whenever he came in, it seemed she was lying in wait for him.

“Come here, Fred,” she said. “Don't be so fast. I want to tell you a joke about Teddy Kennedy.”

Fred submitted to the joke, an awful one that could survive only in the forgiving groves of academe. He went back past the reference desk to the card catalog.

It was a Tuesday morning. So late in the academic year, the place was almost deserted, as it had been the previous Saturday. Fred looked first, on the computer, for recent theses about Vermeer or Heade, but nothing local was cooking in this regard.

It would be hard to sell the idea of a thesis on either Vermeer or Heade. The subjects were already well covered. Harvard wants you to study odd, neglected corners of art that have long since kissed their ninth lives good-bye, such as the persistence of the Roman funerary-portrait formula into Byzantine decoration, or how Pontormo's figures can be explained by inferring an extra joint in each limb and digit. The idea is to find something that hasn't yet been said about a pot and say it at enough length to call it a thesis.

It was partly on account of this enforced attention to the inane that Fred had lasted less than a single term at Harvard, whose main contribution to his early career had been to make it impossible for him to go back to the Midwest.

The quiet plan, the first plan, was to go downstairs to the stacks, find a gap around either Heade or Vermeer, and then go back up and ask at the desk who'd taken those books out.

He found no such gap or gaps, no hole in Vermeer's section. Higginson's mentor's book on Heade was safe and well on the shelf with the others, not recently checked out, according to the sheet in back.

As long as he was here, Fred looked around. The place was so deserted that he thought he'd check on what the graduate students were actually up to. This meant simply strolling along the carrels, seeing what books they were using, what little clippings and Xeroxes they had taped to their humble work places.

Someone was studying Scythian influences on the working of leather in medieval Poland. Was it not at this desk that Fred had seen the rotund student dozing so profoundly last Saturday? Another student was apparently seeking to establish how many of Venice's different canals could be identified in all the Canalettos, if you discounted the fakes.

Another, harder project on one desk sought to deal frankly with the question of whether or not surrealism could have existed as a school of painting had it not been 85 percent literature and 10 percent illustration.

Someone was evidently doing a comparison between Celtic bronzes and William Merritt Chase. If Harvard's fine-arts department was letting that happen, it had got a sense of humor suddenly.

Maybe the student just liked Chase and was doing the Celtic bronze for real, or vice versa.

Or …

Shit!

Something other than bronze began gleaming in the back of Fred's mind. He sat at the desk and looked at the absent student's collection of books. There were two shelves. On the top was what you'd expect of a normal student's interest: volumes exhausting methods of bronze casting; Roman influences; Celtic influences; trade roots; Iberian history; and Sardinia and Carthage and the Phoenicians.… photocopies of twenty or more bronze and clay horses were taped around the area, annotated, all looking pretty much the same.

Shelf two was all William Merritt Chase. Here was the catalog of the sale of his studio's contents and his personal collection of paintings after he died. There were books done during his lifetime and after; collections of works by his students; semi-definitive works by the Chase guy, who was keeping his options open.

Chase was a serious side issue for this Celtic bronze student.

Fred looked around, the back of his neck prickling. He remembered now, when he was down here on Saturday, prepared for bolts of lightning that would reveal who had painted La Belle Conchita. He'd noticed that, in the stacks, there wasn't much on Chase. This was why.

The place smelled of decayed plaster and incipient mold. He turned on the student's lamp that was clamped to the upper shelf and started leafing through the Chase books. He felt that tingle you feel when, half the time, you're on to something.