Harmony In Flesh and Black (6 page)

Clayton Reed was wearing the red satin bathrobe he called a dressing gown, which signaled that he was in a state of leisure. He wore it on top of, not instead of, his clothes, omitting only the suit jacket. Fred kept a chair empty next to his desk for Clayton's visits, but Clay wouldn't sit this morning. Fred had picked up a large Dunkin' Donuts coffee to keep warm on the hot plate and was having some of it, but he didn't offer Clay any since Clay did not approve of stimulants. It was barely nine o'clock.

Clay tapped his fingers on Fred's desk, waiting for Fred to rise to the challenge in his questions. “Whatever the trouble that man claims, I must have that letter.”

Fred did not normally lie to Clay without good reason. But given that there'd been nothing on the radio concerning Turbridge Street, he couldn't count on Clay to act the part of innocence unless he was kept ignorant.

“Forget that either of us has ever heard of Smykal. It's important, Clay. Smykal did not answer his door,” Fred said. “I sat out front in my car, watching the street for his return. Suspicious activity began around his building, which I thought might generate a crowd and involve me and therefore us and our business. Smykal's dangerous, and you are going to be hurt if we get caught near him. We must keep a low profile. So I left. The main thing is the Heade. Let's not compromise that.”

“Speaking of trouble, I might as well tell you,” Clayton Reed said. “It's all I can concentrate on in any case. We are in trouble. Serious trouble. We are about to lose the main objective. I cannot think about that horrible man, not now. As far as the Heade is concerned, the sharks are gathering.”

Fred took a drink of his coffee and waited. Things were going to keep getting worse now, as he had feared.

“Albert Finn is in town,” Clay said.

“Shit,” Fred said. “Sir Albert.”

Finn's presence so close to their quarry could represent disaster.

“I ran into him at the Ritz bar after you and I talked by telephone,” Clay said. “I called you from the Ritz, if you remember? I was obliged to drink with the man, at his expense. I am certain Finn is onto something. He wouldn't come up just for the affair at the Gardner.”

“Did Finn mention the Heade?” Fred asked.

“Of course he didn't mention the Heade,” Clayton said, exasperated. “Any more than I would signal interest in it myself. Finn says he's here for the Gardner benefit, to help console them for their carelessness in having all those paintings stolen. You know his cheery laugh.”

March 18, 1990, had been a black day in Boston's cultural history, when thieves in uniform, after gaining access to the museum by appealing to the humane sympathies of its guards, had made off with a select group of paintings, including a Manet—the best piece in the collection—two of the three Rembrandts, and Vermeer's
The Concert.
There wasn't a Vermeer left in town now, other than the one Clayton suspected lay waiting for him, asleep in the hay.

“Makes sense that he'd come for the benefit,” Fred said. “He loves an admiring crowd of the unknighted.”

“Then he said that if I was going to the preview at Doolan's this afternoon, he had nothing important to do, and if I wouldn't drive on the wrong side of the road, he'd ride with me and keep me company.”

“Whoops,” said Fred.

“I couldn't say I didn't care what was at Doolan's,” Clay said. “That would tip him off. So I must take him with me and trust he'll get so mired in admirers that I can look surreptitiously at the Heade. I'm not happy about this. I don't know how one of Finn's hangers-on could miss the reference you discovered, Fred, in the archives, which any fool could find—that is, I mean to say, the archives' microfilms exist in duplicate in all the major cities in the country. It's not as if we have exclusive access.

“The man's no scholar. He's a showman,” Clay continued.

Whereas Clayton Reed studiously cultivated the art of the low profile, Sir Albert Finn accomplished his ends through a mastery of self-promotion. Clay twitched and fretted and started the speech he frequently rehearsed in preparation for the day that would never come, when he would be called on to give the keynote address in the roast of Albert Finn, his nemesis.

“His books litter the world's coffee tables. His students and former students fan out across the globe disguised as curators, critics, researchers, and gallery personnel. Major collectors buy nothing without his nod. The sticky strands in the web of favors, alliances, and enmities in the art world, both academic and commercial, invariably lead in his direction. He is the Moriarty of art history.”

This man, Albert Finn, recently knighted in honor of his contribution to the march of British aesthetics, had thrown his lot in with the Americans, accepting control of the Department of Art History at Newark University, minutes from the largest art market in the world. He was presently working with a large government grant, a network of aides, students, and researchers, and a central bank of computers. His stated project, rather open-ended, was to compile the
World Encyclopedia of Western Painting After 1400.
His real goal was to add riches to honor. With Kenneth Clark out of the way, and nestled among the rubes in the New World, he did not anticipate or brook serious opposition.

Any scrap of information about any painting in private hands that showed a corner anywhere in the world eventually got into Finn's computers. Then, in a transaction quick as a frog's breakfast, the painting (if it was the
right
painting) would disappear into another private collection without trace, or into a gallery with great fanfare—all the time gathering money and shaking it off like a dog coming out of a pond.

And Finn would lean back and smile. He was short, rotund, and rubicund, protected by the armor of academic purity that appears to repudiate all interest in cash. He wore shabby suits and shoes that had given up all attempts at reflection many years before. He kept a poor man's wife.

“You know his cheery laugh,” Clayton had said. Indeed Fred did. And he knew how it raised Clayton's back hairs. Clayton, through patient research, had once discovered the estate of an interesting Boston painter, an impressionist who had died in Geneva leaving one child, a daughter, who had married and moved to Antwerp. Clay found her and arranged to visit her.

But Clay made a mistake, unusual for one so naturally secretive that he hardly informed himself what he was eating for breakfast. He brought his quarry up in conversation with a friend of his, the curator of graphic arts at the Boston Public Library. He mentioned only the painter's name. The next day—no more than twenty-four hours later—Clayton received a call from Alexander Newboldt in London, one of the big dealers and a friend of his.

“As a matter of professional courtesy,” Newboldt said, “I want to let you know that I have an agent in Antwerp who is on the point of making a telephone call for me to the daughter of an American painter who I understand may be of interest to you. It is an estate I wish to buy.”

They went back and forth. How did Newboldt know of Clayton's interest? Through “a scholar” who occasionally gave him advice.

Clayton learned later, too late, that his librarian friend was a former student of Finn's at Cambridge.

Clay had never challenged Finn concerning his role in the hijack. There was no point in it. Their relations remained cordial, infrequent, and careful.

The affair at the Gardner, scheduled for this evening, was a benefit cocktail party entitled “In the Pre-Raphaelite Mode,” to which Boston's Best had been invited to come wearing formal dress or appropriate costume, dropping three hundred bucks a head for the privilege. Clayton wouldn't miss it. He worked that kind of thing well, even enjoyed it. Fred had let his own invitation lapse.

Clayton and Fred worked together but were like occupants of a rain forest who traveled in different layers. Clay kept to the canopy, while Fred did his best work closer to the ground. And Clay knew his leafy canopy. He was smart and had money. If outrageous, opinionated, and exasperating, he was hardly original or unique in those departments. Fred, for his part, understood the rustlings in the underbrush and brought size and physical skill to the operation, and a direct style that sometimes made people flinch. And he knew something about tactics.

A person with a serious interest in collecting, like Clayton, must, as a practical consideration, keep track of what happens in the social circles where things are owned—which means, in Boston, where they are inherited. Clay had a natural knack for this activity, as well as having married into the network of Stillton aunts, uncles, and cousins, which resembled the road map of the North Shore in its illogical complexity and gave him access to what was otherwise marked, discreetly, Private Property.

“You'll have to keep your eye on Finn at the Gardner,” Clay said. “He'll be doing his bit to make up for Berenson's absence.”

“I hadn't planned to go tonight,” Fred said.

“It should be a nice party,” Clay said. “And since Finn's in town, it's important to keep alert, see how the game is moving if we can.”

“Not to change the subject to the nude you bought, but why don't you tell me how much the painting cost?” Fred said. “So I can get a feel for what the stakes are.”

Clayton would normally tell you nothing you didn't have to know, especially when the subject concerned his money. If Fred was going to an auction to bid on a painting for him, Clay even hesitated to reveal how high he wanted him to go. Fred told Molly it was like having a partner at bridge who was so pleased with his cards that he wanted to keep even his partner in the dark and wouldn't bid his best suit.

“Art is a function of the spirit,” Clay said in his most infuriating manner.

Fred looked at the painting. Its cheerful subject looked back from the far side of her langorous naked hip, an innocent mocking the horrors in the house she'd left barely in time.

“All right,” Fred said, “if you want to keep me guessing. I'll do what I can for the young lady. We'd best not show her, Clayton. Not even to Roberto. In fact, let's hide the picture. If Albert Finn should drop in, or some such—not that it's likely—I'd as soon not have to defend the young lady's honor, even if she's La Belle Conchita.”

Out of the blue, without premeditation, blurting it out without thinking, Fred had hit the nail on the head. Clay jumped as if he'd been goosed—an infrequent occurrence in his social circle. Fred had guessed the model's identity without intending to. He gave a big and lazy smile.

“Naturally,” Clay said, miffed but pretending Fred's accidental brilliance was the obvious. “Who else could she be? I discovered La Belle Conchita, and I have set her free.” He went all formal, his disappointment plain at losing, this fast, half of his secret.

“Spare me the details. I shall rely on you, Fred, to do what you can to get that letter when you think it prudent, and to let me know when you succeed. By all means put her in the racks. I can't enjoy the painting now. I am too tense. God help me, I must spend the afternoon with that ass Finn.”

He went corkscrewing up the stairs to his quarters, leaving the painting of La Belle Conchita, as nature had intended her, for Fred to put away. She wouldn't be allowed upstairs until she had been cleaned and a new frame chosen for her.

6

Fred hit the road. He turned the radio on and listened for news amid the chatter. Nothing. Smykal's body, armed and triggered, lay as unremarked behind his locked apartment door on Turbridge Street as a Vermeer might, lurking beneath a Martin Johnson Heade.

Traffic in Cambridge was picking up as it got closer to noon, and rain fell into the world in a hesitant way, slowing pedestrians. Fred drove slowly along Mass. Avenue and looked up Turbridge Street for the activity that would give away the presence of concerned authority. Nothing stirred. It looked as if a person could go up to Smykal's door, ring, be admitted, and find the leering fellow hale and vertical. The past twenty-four hours had not happened.

Fred parked several blocks away and sat in the car thinking, looking into the spring air at a Saturday he was not spending with Molly's kids.

He did not want this to be his business. Was it conceivable that someone had come back with a barrel and cleared the thing away, carpet and all?

Since he could think of nothing to defuse the problem or even signal how large a problem it might be, Fred put it out of his mind. That left the Heade, and Albert Finn.

Finn's presence on the scene was a hazard about which, at the moment, nothing could be done. Fred put that out of his mind, therefore, as well, and enjoyed feeling smug about his lucky guess concerning the identity of the subject of Clayton's painting—La Belle Conchita.

An intelligent subconscious had accomplished its mission. Let Clay think Fred had done it through good fieldwork.

Aside from lucky guesses, there are two ways to find things out. One is through research; the other is by standing people in a corner and asking them questions. The fact that Fred had in the past shown talent for the latter method did not negate his capacity and preference for the former, and indeed he was as good working from the printed page as Clayton was; it was just that he had the ability, also, to do research under fire, while he was losing blood and friends of his were screaming not far off.

It wasn't anything he talked about with Clay, except once, tangentially, when he had first explained to him how Clay needed help he could provide. That was three years ago now? Four?

Clay had needed a bodyguard, and that was how they had met. Fred had not mentioned at the time—because what Fred craved wasn't what Clay cared about—that he also needed something: to touch things that were beautiful and not designed or intended to harm people. The paintings he handled for Clayton were objects in which Fred found a passion of intelligence, even where that passion (as he felt it to be in many paintings) was shaped by creative energy beginning in the artist's hatred, frustration, or despair.