One Coffee With (12 page)

“Mike has a hot temper,” Nauman objected. “Poisoning would be too deliberate for him.”

Sigrid reserved judgment and asked, “If Janos Karoly was an important artist, why is his nephew working as a janitor?”

“Important artists come from all classes of society Lieutenant, and they seldom make much money till after they’re dead,” Nauman said bitterly. “Then it’s the entrepreneurs and promoters like Riley who cash in on their works. Do you know Karoly’s paintings?”

Sigrid shook her head. “No. I think I’ve heard the name but you were right when you guessed that twentieth-century art doesn’t much interest me.”

Perversely he was pleased that she didn’t apologize or make a pretense of
excepting
his work. He had always preferred indifference over the empty flattery of someone who hadn’t the least understanding of what he was striving for. Open hostility would be even better because anger implied that the viewer took the work seriously enough to feel challenged by Nauman’s assumptions.

Their waiter returned to clear the table, and by this time Sigrid was so used to the tavern’s scruffy ambience that it didn’t outrage her to see him use one corner of his dirty apron to wipe it dry before setting down the tray of coffee utensils.

Nauman stirred sugar into his cup, drew on his pipe and leaned back in the heavy oak chair. He hoped he wasn’t getting pedantic. That was the danger when one was so innately a teacher; it was so hard not to lecture. Especially when one’s audience was as receptive as this policewoman seemed to be.

“Janos Karoly,” he said slowly, “was probably Riley Quinn’s one foray into altruism. It turned out so profitably that it’s always puzzled me that he never tried it again.
Unless Mike Szabo s right, and it wasn’t honest altruism.

“It all started after the war.” He paused and looked at Sigrid’s face. Only around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth were there faint beginnings of age lines. “The Second World War,” he clarified carefully. “There had been a few abstract exhibitions before the war, but abstract expressionism didn’t arrive until ’46 and ’47. Paris was still the international art center of the world, and everyone went there.
The great, the near great and the merely hopeful—Soulages, Hartung, Poliakoff, Appel—and not just artists but critics and historians.
Riley, too, clutching his discharge papers from the Stars and Stripes and looking for firsthand data for his postgraduate studies.”

“Stars and Stripes
was
a military newspaper, wasn’t it?”

“Right.
He’d been one of the feature writers on the staff. That was before I met him, but we were all the same—lusty young cockerels playing King of the Mountain on the art heaps of Paris. Janos Karoly was there, and one of the more established artists.
A fairly respected practitioner of tachism, though not really in the master ranks.”

“What’s tachism?” she asked.

“Literally it means spot painting. Refers to the way an artist puts paint on a canvas. Someone more calligraphic might brush on wide slashes and bands of color. A tachist adds spot to spot or wedge to wedge and—”

“I thought that was called impressionism,” Sigrid objected. “Like what’s his name? Seurat?”

“Seurat used very small pellets of color, and his pictures were all quite representational. Something like newspaper pictures built up of black dots. The tachists were abstract, and in the purest examples their pictures became loosely structured clusters and patches of color. They downplayed line to concentrate on color and texture.

“That’s the way Karoly was painting when Riley first met him. It was all very competent, but nothing to set your blood on fire. Still he was almost sixty then, and he’d knocked around Europe long enough to have known everyone—Braque, Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, all the Bauhaus people—and Riley was impressed. What Karoly thought of Riley . . . well, he had an acid tongue, but Riley’s French was
limited,
and his Hungarian nonexistent, so Karoly’s choicest remarks went over his head. Things were never as bad in Paris as they were in other European capitals, but there were still shortages and rationing, and the black market was expensive. With his American dollars and his American military connections Riley could wangle extra amenities. Karoly allowed him to bring food and wine and coal and sit in his studio and listen to him reminisce about art and artists. I suppose it was mutually beneficial.

“At last, though, Riley came back to finish his dissertation, and Karoly decided he was an old man who should die in his native land, although I believe Hungary was the one European country he’d assiduously avoided for the previous forty-five years. Nobody heard from him after that. If they thought of him at all, it was probably to assume that he was dead. Then
came
the Hungarian Revolution. How Janos Karoly got mixed up in the political mess, no one could ever understand. He didn’t even know himself—maybe they thought his paintings were too decadent, who can say? His name wound up on a proscribed list, but somehow he got out of the country and into Italy, and the first person he ran into was Riley Quinn, who was in Rome appraising some things for the Klaustadt Gallery when Karoly wandered in with a roll of canvases under his arm. Riley took one look and immediately talked him into applying for an American visa. He arranged the flight and found him a studio.”

“He could still paint? He must have been nearly seventy by then,” said Sigrid, who’d been keeping track of the dates.

Nauman nodded. “I remember how he seemed older than God when I saw him then.” There was wry self-mockery in his smile. “Somehow seventy doesn’t sound as old as it used to.”

A burst of heavy male laughter arose from a far table. The bar at the front of the deep room was well lined now with serious drinkers—longshoremen, mechanics and three crewmen from a German liner that had docked that morning. The tavern had grown warm enough to make Sigrid take off her shapeless gray jacket. Underneath was a chastely tailored white silk shirt. Man-styled with buttons down the front, pointed collar tips and close-fitting cuffs at the thin wrists, it had survived a day of city grime and polluted air to remain pristinely white. As she leaned forward to pull the jacket sleeves free, the white material stretched tautly over small, high breasts, briefly outlining the lace tracery of her bra beneath.

And wasn’t that interesting, thought Nauman fleetingly. All tailored and buttoned up on the outside, lace lingerie beneath. It was enough to make him revive his theory of repressed romanticism.

“If Karoly’s work was only conventionally good, why would Professor Quinn go to so much trouble?” Sigrid asked. “He must have met lots of well-known artists by that time.”

“You’re catching on to Riley’s character,” Nauman approved. “You’re right; he’d learned a lot since postwar Paris, and he no longer sat at any artist’s feet. But Karoly was exceptional. Everyone thought he’d done all he was capable of. Very few artists go on breaking new ground in their old age, but Karoly was a maverick. When he got back to Hungary, he was very isolated from the artistic community, and somehow in his solitude he discovered a whole new wellspring of creativity within himself and completely transcended tachism. Oh, he still used the basic techniques, but he’d tightened his structure. The subjects were mostly still lifes—fruits and flowers and luminous bowls and vases.
Incredible handling of color and shape.
The National Gallery has six of those paintings, and they almost justify a trip to Washington. Riley did his damnedest to discourage him, but Karoly insisted on giving them to the government in gratitude for his sanctuary.
Also by way of thumbing his nose at the Communist regime in Hungary.”
There was jaundiced cynicism in Nauman’s tone.

“So far as I know—and I only saw him once or twice that last year—he never questioned why Riley would go to so much trouble and expense for him. He didn’t read English, so he had no idea how strong a reputation Riley was building as an astute critic and authority. Karoly was just as arrogant and scornful as he’d been in Paris. Thought Riley was a toad but a useful toad; that he was still a star-struck admirer whose only function was to furnish food, shelter and painting materials so the master could get on with his work. It was the old biter-bit thing, but justified somehow because he was still discovering new frontiers when he died. If the Whitney weren’t closed, I’d haul you over right now to see the painting that was on his easel when he died—New World Nexus, where unexpected representational elements begin to show up.”

Nauman’s coffee had grown cold, but he drank it anyhow, lost in a memory Sigrid didn’t disturb. At last he sighed and picked up the thread again.

“Karoly had been here about four years when he suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack, and Riley produced a holographic will.
In French of course but properly notarized and witnessed.
Reduced to its simplest elements, it said he was leaving everything to Riley Quinn to do with as Quinn saw fit. There was one curious phrase: he wrote that he knew Quinn would do all that was
‘juste et humain’
with his paintings. There were no relatives here to contest the will, so it was probated without a hitch.

“Since then Janos Karoly’s reputation has got bigger every year. Riley had a genius for fanning the flames just enough. He donated three paintings to the Museum of Modern Art on condition that at least one
be
displayed at all times, or the gift would be revoked. That was to keep them in the public eye. Then he’d lend three or four to an exhibition here or see that they were mentioned in an important article there. He was chary about selling them, but whenever he let one go, it always brought the full asking price.

“The one thing he didn’t do was let anyone touch Karoly’s notebooks. Shortly after Karoly’s death he’d started translating them for publication—he read French very fluently—but he complained to me once that every time Karoly seemed to be getting to the heart of a problem, he’d switch to Hungarian. Naturally I suggested getting someone to translate those passages, but he mumbled some excuse, and that was the last time he ever mentioned the notebooks willingly. He’d always change the subject if they came up.”

“Where does Mike Szabo come in?” Sigrid asked as he paused to refill his coffee cup and hers from the thick earthenware pot on their table.

“That started about a year and a half ago. The Klaustadt Gallery owned a couple of Karoly’s paintings, which they d bought from Riley, and they wanted to do a retrospective. Riley made the mistake of agreeing. The show was stunning. No other word for it. It was the first time that many of Karoly’s later paintings had been seen together, and they captivated the public’s fancy. Inevitable, I suppose. The colors were so entrancing, and they were representational enough to be understood by most people, including the sector that usually professes itself indifferent to art.”

Sigrid ignored the barb.

“The exhibition attracted wide coverage—from all the art journals and even from newsmagazines and television. Somebody started calling Karoly the ‘Hungarian Picasso,’ which showed an abysmal ignorance of both artists; but it stuck. About a week after that, Mike Szabo turned up at the Klaustadt and demanded to know who had stolen his uncle’s paintings.
Created quite a scene.”
Nauman grinned, recalling accounts of that laborer’s eruption into Klaustadt’s elegant premises, how in three or four broken languages he had called them all thieves and swindlers loudly, indignantly and at great length.

“They bundled him into a back room and sent for Riley in a hurry. Riley accused him of being an impostor at first, but he had papers and letters that proved he was definitely the only son of Janos Karoly’s only sister. She’d been much younger than Karoly, and they hadn’t seen each other in years; but when he fled Hungary, he’d smuggled a letter back to her, which promised that he wouldn’t forget her or her son. Szabo found it among her
papers after her death in ’67 and immediately scurried off to Italy, but he couldn’t find anyone who’d ever heard of Janos Karoly. I gather he wasn’t particularly disappointed. Art in the abstract doesn’t seem to appeal to him too much. He’d drifted around Europe for awhile and finally wound up in Pittsburgh in the early seventies, living on the fringes of the Hungarian community there, working odd jobs and making just enough to get by. Nobody in that crowd gave a damn about art, either; but once the news media started giving so much space to their ‘Hungarian Picasso,’ someone mentioned it in Szabo’s presence, and it sank in.

“Legally he didn’t have a leg to stand on, but Quinn tried to stop it quickly and gave him five thousand dollars outright.”

“Plus a one-way ticket back to Pittsburgh?” Sigrid asked dryly.

Nauman shook his head. “Riley was more thorough than that. The ticket was for Budapest with the promise of another five thousand when he arrived.”

“I’m surprised Szabo didn’t take it. Ten thousand must have seemed like a lot of money to an oddjobber.”

“Oh, he was tempted,” Nauman conceded, “but Piers Leyden deflected him and helped him resist. Leyden was at the Klaustadt the next day, heard the whole story and saw an irresistible chance to tweak Riley’s nose. He told Szabo that Riley wouldn’t have given him a dime if he didn’t have a guilty conscience, and that ten thousand was a pittance compared to the true worth of his uncle’s paintings. Szabo was only too willing to believe it; but what could he do?”