Harmony In Flesh and Black (29 page)

Fred grinned at Ophelia. He stood and gave Finn the heartiest of good-morning waves.

Ophelia looked helplessly around the room.

“Over here,” Fred shouted.

“He doesn't want you,” Ophelia whispered urgently. “You'll ruin everything. He's supposed to meet the recluse, Arthur Arthurian. He didn't tell me Mr. Arthurian was staying at the Charles. He's supposed to be at the Ritz.”

Fred moved away from the table, went toward the waiter, tipped him a buck—which he was too surprised not to accept—and took Finn by the shoulder. Finn was disgruntled and bemused.

“You have a letter for me,” Fred said. “William Merritt Chase to Conchita Hill.”

Finn stared. “You?” he puffed.

Ophelia, rising now, took Finn by the arm. “Sit down, darling,” she pleaded. “Don't let's make a scene.”

Finn noticed her at last and shook her hand off his arm in its brown cloth. “You,” he snorted, turning purpler.

“The letter,” Fred said.

“Sit down, baby,” Ophelia said.

Finn glanced around. He saw that he was becoming the star of a scene that he'd rather not play so publicly. He allowed Ophelia to lead him to the table, where he sat on the edge of a chair. A waiter bowed over him and asked, “Coffee?”

“Not coffee. Not anything,” Finn said.

“I don't understand,” Ophelia said, looking from one man to the other.

“Snake,” Finn hissed at her. “You're in this, too.”

Finn stared at Fred.

Fred's coffee was cold, but he took a sip anyway, savoring it.

“You're not Arthur Arthurian,” Finn said finally, slowly.

“A nom de guerre,” Fred said. Ophelia stared in incomprehension.

“It doesn't make sense,” Finn said. “I have to make a telephone call.” He made to get up again, but Fred put a big hand on his shoulder and let the fingers grasp it, denting the brown cloth, dragging the weight of his arm downward.

“We can ask to have a telephone brought to the table, Finn, but you're not leaving until I have that letter.”

Finn sat.

“What about Mr. Arthurian?” Ophelia asked.

“Don't pretend,” Finn said. “You and your pal here! Ha! You played me for a sucker, the two of you.”

“The two of us?” Ophelia protested. “What, Fred and me?”

“I know Taylor is your relation,” Finn said. “I thought you could rise above that.”

Mud is thicker than water, as Molly's mother would say.

Ophelia, stunned, opened her handbag and began some displacement activity in there.

“Shall I call for a telephone?” Fred asked. “You may want to think about it first. Mangan's Providence connection sounded as if he was getting impatient with the whole thing.”

Finn looked at Fred. He started to sag. Fred took his hand off the brown coat.

Ophelia, finding a tissue, looked as if her next move might be tears.

“Hold it, Ophelia,” Fred said.

The waiter bowed over them all again.

“Nobody here wants anything,” Fred told him. “Here's what I think,” he said, turning to Finn. “Stop me anytime. A graduate student from the fine-arts department at Harvard—let's call him Russell Ennery—got in touch with you and told you about a painting he had found. Unsigned, but accompanied by a letter that gave it all the authority it needed. You got in touch with Mangan to engineer a quick cash sale, and then you arranged, through Ennery, for the purchase.”

“Correction,” Finn objected, defending his professional skill. “Of course I examined the painting myself. Friday afternoon. In situ. Before I recommended purchase.”

“Correction noted,” said Fred. “What else did you examine there?”

Finn lost a good deal of color.

The waiter bowed over all of them once more. “The check, sir?”

“I'll take it,” Fred offered. He continued, “Friday afternoon, unknown to you, there had already been a higher bidder. But you took the letter with you to examine while Smykal waited to see if the higher bid—ours—would materialize. Later that evening, Russ told you you'd been scooped. Meanwhile, Mangan was becoming impatient with your delay—”

“A delay,” Finn exploded, “that's lasted a week now. I am supposed to be in Paris. I am
needed
there.”

“You told Mangan, and Mangan said, ‘I'll go back and take care of it,'” Fred said. “And in the meantime it seems to have become very complex. A small murder intervened.”

Fred looked into Finn's eyes for a long time. At last he said, “About the phone call—how much do you want the Albert Finn saga to be publicly intertwined with Smykal's? Are you sure you want to make that call?”

Ophelia, licking her lips, looked across at Finn.

Finn took an envelope from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. It was a new white envelope, with an older one inside it. He put it on the table and made to stand.

“I'll just look it over first,” Fred said.

He opened the outer envelope. The one inside was directed to Conchita Hill. It bore no address. Fred slid the letter out and read,

7 rue Saint-Georges

Conchita. Dearest. I leave you with this token. In tribute to the master who first brought us together, I shall think of this painting always under the title
Harmony in Flesh Color and Black.

Will

Below that was a small pen sketch of the painting.

Russ, starting with nothing but the nickname Will, could have worked hard for six months before narrowing the possibilities down to Chase.

Fred nodded, dismissing Finn. Other parts of the story would be interesting to know, but they were not important now. He had the letter.

Finn rose. The breakfasters looked around in expectation. Maybe there would be a fistfight after all. Ophelia started rising as well, to follow her man.

“I'll come with you, Al?”

He looked down at her amazed, his face rich with disgust. “I shall be on the next shuttle to New York,” he said. “An afternoon of work at the office. Sadly neglected. Then an evening flight to Paris. I have wasted a whole week.”

Finn turned but held back, needing another exit line. “My commission on that transaction was to be fifteen thousand dollars. In my opinion, the commission is still owed. By Clayton Reed.”

Ophelia was starting to cry now. Finn's crack about a week wasted had been pretty mean, considering.

“Why don't you send us a bill, Sir Albert?” Fred suggested.

Finn stormed out.

Fred accepted the check from the waiter.

Ophelia blew her nose into some very common Kleenex. “Al was so hopeful about the Arthurian connection,” she said, “and you just made him up!”

“You sure you don't want something else to eat?” Fred offered. “You can't get far on half a grapefruit.”

She shook her head. “He was just another opportunist after all.”

She held her hand out, keeping Fred at the table. She needed someone there while she put her face back together, which she now started to do, replacing the divots uprooted by her tears.

“He didn't look that good in the brown suit,” Fred confided.

“He looked like a fool,” Ophelia agreed. “You know, Fred, the reason he turned on me? All men are like that when they're disappointed. I heard him on the phone yesterday, really pulling strings and arguing to get this meeting, insisting on it.

“I told him what you'd said about Arthurian—confidentially, of course. But just to make sure I had his interest, I made up a lot of extra shit and threw that in too.”

She started laughing.

Fred got up and took her arm.

“There's someone at the desk who wants to meet you,” he said. “Fran, who says you changed her life.”

35

Fred was at his desk at Clayton's by eleven. He couldn't stay long; he wanted to look at the Heade himself before the auction started, so he'd have to be at Doolan's by one o'clock. He wouldn't mind having the pressure lift after that, much as he enjoyed the feel of the sharp edges he'd been skating along and the skill of his own skating.

He pulled Conchita out again and gave her a long look. She was cool and smooth and filled with mischief: the artist out of uniform. He wondered, had the weight of the world she found afterward been such as to let her live the mischief into her painting? Her own paintings had still not been discovered, but maybe they would surface someday—unless she, like many another, had been distracted into the whirl of living like an artist, or a parent, and had lost her art.

So Whistler, according to the letter that Fred now placed on his desk, had introduced Conchita to Will Chase. Then what?

Fred couldn't wait to see the painting cleaned.

He glanced at the mail and called Clayton.

“How's Proust?”

“Proust led a life any man might envy,” said Clayton, probably the first person in the history of the world to think so.

“I have the letter,” Fred said.

“Good.” No questions.

“And Albert Finn is on his way to Paris via New York.”

There was a pause while Clayton took that in.

“Finn had the letter,” Fred told him.

“Oh.”

Another pause. A long one.

“Ah,” Clay said. “You'll explain later, I imagine.”

“Finn wants a commission.”

“He wants a what?” Clay exclaimed.

“My thought exactly,” Fred said.

“I shall come home, then,” Clay continued, putting it together. “As long as Albert Finn is out of it.”

“I won't be here long,” Fred said. “I have things to do. There's Doolan's, you'll recall. Shall we talk about that?”

Seldom had Clayton left his final instructions until this late in the game. “With Finn gone,” he explained, “we have no competition to be concerned about, unless Mangan drives up the price.”

Fred thought. He waited. He said nothing about Mangan. Better not, on the whole. Not yet.

“I have been thinking,” Clay said, “about testosterone.”

There was nothing like Proust to get a man thinking about gonads.

“Conflict,” Clay announced, “is the enemy of art.”

Fred had a similar theory, which was that art was the fruit of conflict, but he was not inclined to argue, at the moment, against the combined forces of Clayton Reed and Proust.

“Also,” Clay went on, “I believe I permitted the prospect of impending challenge to cloud my judgment. About the Heade.”

Fred waited, looking at Conchita. She looked back at him, a young woman full of energy and skill and hopes and dopey ideas. Like Terry someday. Later a mother, a grandmother, dead, the great-grandmother of a hideous, lost man, and so on.

“I think,” Clay said, “we'll stop bidding at a hundred thirty-five thousand. That gives us a fair margin over the painting's value as a Heade and keeps us from making a naive gesture after fantasy. We have no hard evidence that the Vermeer is there, after all—nothing more than coincidence and hope.”

Fred didn't often argue money with Clayton. That was Clayton's business. It was he who was going to be the owner. Fred didn't want to own anything. But he hated to see this one go without a fight.

“Give me some slack, Clay. Let me go to one seventy-five.”

“No,” Clay said. “I've been thinking it over as we've been talking. I let my animosity toward that man get the better of my judgment. He is no longer a threat. He is so filled with self-importance that he missed the obvious. A hundred thirty-five shall be my limit. That's hammer price.”

“Of course,” Fred said. The gallery would take a ten percent commission on top of the hammer price: $13,500 more for Clay to pay if Fred bid his top limit. “You're coming home, then? Do you want me to call after the Heade sells? Let you know if we got it?”

“If it's not too much trouble,” Clay said. He sounded impatient, trying to get back to his Proust, his finger in the book. “Oh, and Fred?” he said.

“Yes?”

“I appreciate that—listen, Fred, please don't be insulted; I don't talk about such things easily. I want to make a gesture to acknowledge your exceedingly competent work, and even some awkwardness you encountered this past week.”

“Thank you, Clay. I appreciate your saying so.” Fred looked around the office, itching to get out of here. It was a nice day outside, and he had a job to finish.

“You saved me a great deal of money,” Clayton said.

That was true. It was interesting, too. Fred didn't save anything, not for himself. There was no place to put it. But he was happy to save Clay's money.

“I want you to have something,” Clay said.

Conchita looked at Fred still in her knowing way. He'd have to get that girl upstairs. He wasn't exactly listening; he was wishing he could let down, get out of here, drive fast through the cold blossoms.

“Please keep the check I made out to you yesterday as a token of my respectful admiration,” said Clay.

Fred thanked him, too surprised almost to do that much. “I'll call after the sale, then,” he promised.

“If we are successful in our bid,” Clay went on, “find someplace safe to keep the painting, will you, over the weekend? And bring it in Monday when you come.”

*   *   *

Fred locked up, took the car out of its spot on Mountjoy Street, and headed back across the river. It was a bright day, and sailboats skidded on the water. He went west, out Route 2 and so on, dodging Concord. The willows furred the edges of the roads and hills with their defiant color, yellow tempting green. Apple orchards were beginning their bloom. Doolan's was twenty miles out of town, surrounded by orchards and overgrown farms, in an area ripe and yearning for mall culture if only the economy would change.

Fred had a totally unexpected, amazing, unbudgeted check for twenty-five thousand bucks in his pocket. It was like suddenly owning a giraffe. Ridiculous. He wasn't like that.