House of Secrets - v4 (17 page)

R
obert Smallwood emerged from underground at Seventy-seventh Street and headed west toward Fifth Avenue. The day was uncommonly warm, and as Smallwood walked he felt his usual perspiration points activating, almost like timed explosions.

At the corner of Seventy-ninth and Fifth, Smallwood approached the iron-barred glass doors of the Cultural Services building of the French embassy and peered through the glass. In the middle of the circular lobby stood a modest-sized marble sculpture that had only several years back been authenticated as an early work of Michelangelo. All the years it had stood there, the sculpture had remained unidentified. An art professor from New York University had spied it one evening while attending a function at the consulate and, noting certain features of the sculpture, had shared his suspicions with his colleagues in the art world. After it was determined that the Marble Boy, as the work had unoriginally been dubbed, was indeed a work of the teenage Michelangelo, a skirmish had kicked up between the consulate and its nearby neighbor, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There being — amazingly enough — no known Michelangelos in any museum in the United States, the Met had declared “the appropriateness” of trundling the sculpture up the street for enshrinement in the Great Treasure House. Of course, the French government rejected the argument as a preposterous and blatant attempt at cultural imperialism, and in the end the Marble Boy remained with the French.

S
mallwood spent a minute gazing through the doors at the fragile figure, then crossed the street over to the museum. He picked up a pair of day badges from the membership desk, showing his employee ID to get them free of charge, then he parked himself next to the entrance to the gift shop to wait.

And wait.

Marion Mann was late. They had agreed to meet at eleven o’clock, and by eleven thirty she still had not shown. The large man’s perspiration had long since had its way with him. Smallwood would have taken off the sports coat he had chosen, but this would have nullified the desired effect. Among the various lies that he had fed like chocolates to the gullible woman when they’d met at the bar the other day was the tall tale of his own employment. He’d told Marion that he held a position as a professor of art history at Columbia University, polishing the lie with the story of the discovery of the early Michelangelo at the French Cultural Services building, and further buffing up his own credentials by presenting himself as one of the experts who had been brought in to verify the Marble Boy’s parentage. Marion had been duly impressed, exactly as Smallwood had intended her to be.

At 11:40, Smallwood began contending with the very real possibility that Marion Mann was not going to show. The notion depressed him nearly as much as it also pricked his anger. He’d been enormously solicitous to the woman, feeding her merlots and feigning interest in her thoroughly tedious-sounding life. Naturally, he had steered the conversation as often as possible onto the topic of his cousin, dipping his hook into the waters of Marion’s knowledge of her late boss’s activities in hopes of snaring the information that he was craving. He was dying to determine if the man who had approached Marion Mann at Cousin Joy’s funeral and so clearly disturbed her was the same man whom Smallwood had dispatched with the iron pipe out at the house. Smallwood had gently broached the subject several times over their merlots, but each time Marion had evaded his questions. The evening had ended with no revelations as to the man’s identity, and so Smallwood had proposed a rendezvous at the museum for Sunday morning, hoping he could devise the means by which to convince Marion Mann to open up. By that point in the evening, Smallwood had already endured the woman’s wine-driven descent into clumsy flirtatiousness. He’d maintained his composure. Even when she pressed her taut body against his as they parted, Smallwood had gamely accepted the maneuver as his price to pay for pursuing his goals. When she had followed the clench by looking up at him in search of a good-night kiss, it had been all Smallwood could do to resist pressing his thumbs into the lenses of her screwball eyeglasses.

At 11:47, Marion Mann came hurrying through the museum entrance. She came into the vast museum lobby and stopped just shy of the information desk, swiveling her head left and right, putting her exotic eyewear to work. Smallwood spotted her before she spotted him. In his mind’s eye, he etched a quick frame around her and hung her up on a wall.
Marion at the Museum
. She was wearing white Capri pants that were practically painted on, an equally tight-fitting flowery top — cut low — and a floppy straw hat ringed with a wide yellow ribbon. Fashion disaster. Smallwood decided that nobody threw together such an ensemble casually. This was something she had actually
aimed
for.

Making a show of unbuttoning his coat, Smallwood came forward. A smile leaped to Marion’s anxious face.

“Oh. Hi! God, I’m so sorry I’m late.”

There had to be touching. Smallwood grabbed hold of Marion’s hands, the easier to sidestep the hug. Marion’s beaming face tilted upward expectantly and Smallwood put a light kiss on its cheek, his eyes darting toward the information desk to see if there was anybody on duty who might recognize him. Marion’s small hands squeezed his fingers tightly, then delayed in their release. Smallwood’s unavoidable glimpse down the petite woman’s low-cut collar disgusted him.

Marion wanted to see the van Eycks. Smallwood’s eyes glazed over. He was so sick of the fucking van Eycks.

“Perfect,” he said, showing his small teeth in a smile.

M
arion stood in front of the Arnolfini Portrait as Smallwood rattled off factoids about the Flemish school in general and about Jan van Eyck in particular. He gave her the whole la la la about the painter’s use of light and the painstaking re-creations of elaborate materials and fabrics. It was impossible to spend day after day in the galleries as Smallwood did and not pick up tidbits from the different docent talks. Smallwood had forgotten who the pregnant-looking woman in the painting was supposed to be in real life, so he just told Marion that it was van Eyck’s younger sister. He indicated the figure’s seemingly swollen belly.

“Local cleric. Huge scandal.” Complete lie.

Marion was fascinated. He knew she would be. She was pathetic.

Smallwood guided his date through various other galleries, reciting snippets from the hundreds of talks he had heard over the years. He explained how Sargent had caused such a scandal with his original
Madame X
, placing the gilded shoulder strap of the haughty beauty’s gown on her upper arm instead of up on her shoulder, and how he had been forced by Paris patronage society to rework the painting and put the strap aright or else face complete censure. Marion drank it up. This whole professor of art history thing — it was a snap.

The two had a light lunch in the trustees’ dining room. Smallwood had lifted a pair of passes from the membership desk before leaving work the day before. Personally, he thought the trustees’ dining room was a dreary dump. The public cafeteria was far and away the preferable place to go. But the venue allowed Smallwood to introduce a bottle of merlot onto the scene, and as he had witnessed during their previous meeting, Marion Mann was unabashed in her enjoyment of the medium-bodied grape. Over dry salmon and a limp salad, Smallwood forced himself yet again to feign interest in the minutiae of Marion’s life and in her views on topics that were of zero interest to him. For the most part, he was able to convert her words to mere noise by the time they reached his brain. A nod here, the visual pretense of interest there; it took quite little on his part to appear engaged.

Thank God for small favors.

As the wine and Smallwood’s parody of paying attention unloosed Marion’s tongue, her chatter confirmed for Smallwood what he had previously concluded about the woman: Her life was completely void of meaning. She knew nothing about everything and everything about nothing; she was a space filler and very little else. The funny glasses, the sharp black bangs and the overly made-up lips, the drooping cut of her flouncy blouse — if he tried hard, Smallwood supposed he could find her amusing. As it was, the longer she prattled on in her nervous, inane way about nothing, what he really wanted to do was reach across the table and close his hands around her pale little birdlike neck. But he didn’t. He allowed the woman her jabbering. He even allowed her to toy with his pinky, which by the time Smallwood ordered the second bottle of merlot the queer woman was doing obsessively. She might have been measuring the digit for a suit.

“
S
hall we go?”

Smallwood’s apple tart sat partially eviscerated in front of him, bleeding vanilla ice cream onto the plate. The second bottle of wine had leveled off just beneath the label. Marion’s eyes were brilliantly lit behind her lenses.

“Go?”

“Shall we go?” Smallwood said again, doing his best to bite back the note of sarcasm. He was only partly successful. “Leave? Vacate the premises?”

“Well. Okay. If you want.”

Marion fetched her straw hat from the empty chair and placed it on her head. Her hand remained a moment on top of the hat, as if it were glued there. Her crooked arm looked to Smallwood like the handle of a teacup.

She asked, “Where should we go?”

Smallwood felt his furious heart slamming to free itself of its ribbed cage. He forced himself to remain calm. If he had to shake the damn woman like a rag doll until the information he wanted finally fell out, then that’s the way it would have to go. His patience was about to expire.

“I was thinking about your place,” Smallwood said.

C
hristine and Andy’s driver coming in from La Guardia wanted to talk about the current political situation with his passengers, but Andy stopped him.

“My wife and I prefer silence,” he snapped, one shade below testy. “If you don’t mind.”

The driver shut up. Andy and Christine gazed out separate windows the entire way into the city. Something unyielding had descended between them over the course of the weekend. Both were keenly aware of it; neither wished to discuss it.

They arrived at the apartment, and after dropping off their bags in the bedroom, Christine got on the phone with Michelle up in Greenwich. Andy went into his office and closed the door. Forty minutes later, Christine poked her head in. Andy was seated at his desk, a scotch and soda in his hand, gazing up toward the ceiling.

Christine waded in. “Andy. Is everything all right with us?”

With seeming reluctance, Andy came partway down out of the clouds. “We’re fine,” he said. “I’ve just got a ton on my mind right now.”

Christine tried again. “Care to share any of it?”

Andy looked across the room at her. For a moment he looked as if he thought the idea might just have some merit. His eyes took in his wife for several long seconds.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. No. I don’t think so.”

M
arion came in from the kitchen pouting and dropped the white envelope on the coffee table. Smallwood was standing at a chrome and glass shelf unit, looking, uninterested, at Marion’s collection of framed photographs.

“Are these your boyfriends?” he asked mockingly. His tone went undisguised. Ever since getting into the taxi at the museum, Smallwood’s courtly facade had fallen away.

Marion was unhappy. Could things have really gone sour so soon?

“Those are my brothers.”

“Stout lads,” Smallwood said. He turned away from the photographs and settled into Marion’s round swiveling red chair. Her prize possession. Marion sat down on the couch. She aimed a wounded look across the room.

“I shouldn’t tell you anything.”

All this man wanted to talk about was Joy. He was obsessed. The entire way downtown in the taxi he had pumped her for information about his deceased cousin. It was depressing.

Smallwood pivoted smartly in the chair. It looked like a giant cherry with a giant’s bite taken out of it.

“You’re wrong,” he said snippily. “I think you should tell me everything. She was my cousin, after all. Family has a right to know everything.”

Marion glanced down anxiously at the envelope on the table.

“I don’t like being bullied.”

Smallwood knew he was going to win. That much was obvious. How could a man with his brain not best a hurt little pup? Smallwood felt as if Marion Mann’s brain was made of clear crystal and that the machinery was exposed for all to see. He could see the gears working. She was pouting, and she wanted his pity. This could be her only form of victory, the simple eliciting of Smallwood’s sympathy. A pathetic victory. But okay, if you can’t lead with your strength, lead with your weakness.

Smallwood locked his oversize eyes on the woman. “Who was my cousin screwing?”

Marion appeared ready to cry. “Why are you being so mean all of a sudden?”

“I’m not being mean at all,” Smallwood said. “You’re being coy.”