17

Sir Albert Finn was in great form, dwarfing the Ritz dining room. Set off by blue velvet and gold, he loomed and floated, both, like a tethered balloon on whose string clung a delighted female child whose perfect natural breasts struggled to ascend to visit the inflatable.

The perfect breasts were Ophelia’s, at the summit of a sheath of pink velvet. Ophelia’s blond hair was coiled in Continental fashion, confused by strands of pearls. Her neck and chest were bare in order to accentuate both pearls and breasts. Attendant pearls and gold fawned on her ears.

Ophelia rose from the table as Fred and Molly came into the dining room, saying, “Oh, Fred, I was so hoping—you remember Fred Taylor, Al?”

The risen Finn in deep blue suit was wearing, in his buttonhole, a carnation filched from the bouquet on the table, to match the color and shape of his face. That was Ophelia’s touch. Finn spread his arms in welcome also. They looked like a pair of extremely successful scarecrows.

Molly had put on the same black dress, with the moonstone necklace Fred had given her on her last birthday. The moonstones, transparent on her skin, complemented her oval face and challenged her green eyes. Her skin was the smooth, light pink you thought could exist only in paintings.

Fred had selected a gray suit with matching pants and matching jacket and no vest: the suit he had. He had let Molly put a bow tie on him, of a color she described as “runcible” or “mufti.”

They’d made a game one Sunday evening of describing the colors in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as newly cleaned by the Japanese, using a selection of descriptive words available in current clothing catalogs: cerise, melon, jungle, surplus, and—Fred’s favorite—outfit (the color God was wearing).

“Of course I know Fred Taylor,” Finn beamed and boomed. “Clayton Reed’s man. And the beautiful Molly Riley, of whom Ophelia speaks with such affection.”

Finn’s kiss made Molly wince, but Finn was used to that, the wince of homage.

Finn and Ophelia were drinking colored liquids from wine-glasses.

“It’s my party,” Ophelia said. “I’ve chosen the menu, and you’ll have to love it.”

The dining room was filled. The evening’s patrons looked like businessmen traveling on expense accounts and pairs of women celebrating birthdays they would rather forget. There were also a couple of those families whose children consent to dress. You wouldn’t catch Sam and Terry letting anyone put leather shoes on their feet, or shirts with Holly Hobbie collars or whatever those were.

“Well,” Molly said to Finn. “And what brings you to these promiscuous parts?”

“Kipling,” said Finn. “Ha, ha.”

“Yes, but what Kipling?” said Molly.

Ophelia stared back and forth as if attending a tennis game.

“I’ll give you a hint. ‘The great gray-green, greasy Limpopo River,’” Molly said.

“Aha,” said Finn, “‘all set about with fever-trees.’ Got it. ‘The Elephant’s Child.’”

This started them (all but Ophelia) in a broadly literary fashion leading to Kipling’s startling and individual graphic style and its relation to the trends in book illustration coming out of the Yellow Book and the decadent nineties, until Molly did a quick turn and added, “I’m so rude, I asked a question and then didn’t allow you to answer. Is it another book you’re researching? Or what does Boston have to hold your attention?”

Ophelia looked deeply smug and changed it to a blush as she noticed Finn’s sidelong glance. “Sir Albert says something’s gone wrong with a project,” Ophelia said. “But I like to think—”

Finn nudged her. “There is a matter I am engaged on, but it is confidential,” he said.

Fred, as deftly as possible, starting from the preponderance of blue velvet in the room, brought the conversation around to the China trade, the Fitz Hugh Lane of Captain Apthorp’s clipper ship the Hester Prynne, and sea slugs.

He watched to see if Finn betrayed familiarity with the Apthorp diaries or alarm that Fred was familiar with them.

“Apthorp,” Finn said, nodding. “The same family as had the Heade, I suppose? I trust the Lane is of superior quality. I don’t mind telling you that I find the Heade, even for an American picture, indifferent at best. I have said as much in certain quarters.”

“Dried sea slugs,” Ophelia said. “Oh, goodness, right after they bring in this lovely pot roast?” She gave Fred a merry moue.

This took the conversation to dehydrated foods in general and how to cook them; they followed that track until Fred went too far, bringing up a favorite recipe of his that he suggested accounted for the ill humor of the Mongol warrior in the time of Ghenghis Khan: “It’s simple. A slab of dried horseflesh is placed under the saddle at first light. The warrior spends his day riding, raping, and pillaging, never dismounting; in the evening he pulls out the slab, which has by this time softened and absorbed sufficient moisture as to be palatable.”

*   *   *

Finn was too old a hand at this game to let anything slip in conversation. Fred had caught Clay in his room, by phone, beforehand, and told him that he might have another line to follow toward the letter Chase had written. He’d listened with great pleasure to Clayton’s dismayed pause at having the remainder of his secret laid bare, then continued, “I decided, since I was in the stacks anyway, that I’d try to nail down the date when Chase painted La Belle Conchita. What’s your thought, Clay? Eighteen eighty-five or so?”

“Ah,” Clay said. He’d had time to recover his telephone aplomb. “You do not disappoint me, Fred. You recognized Chase’s hand once you were free to concentrate.”

Fred told him about the young man, Russell Ennery.

“You think he has the letter?” Clay asked, excited.

“I only conclude that he has knowledge of the painting,” Fred said.

“If that youngster has my letter, I’ll buy it from him,” Clay went on. “Tell him—I don’t know, whatever will impress him. A hundred dollars? Perhaps I will telephone him.”

“I’ll follow this up,” Fred said. “Leave it to me, Clay. Don’t mess with it. It’s complex, don’t forget.”

Clayton was not thinking about the broader implications. He was forgetting that they were monkeying around the edges of a murder and that they wanted themselves isolated from it.

Ophelia’s dinner sparkled on, a triumph of Yankee international cuisine served by omniscient waiters of an Italianette persuasion, whose dexterity with the pepper grinder—lobed and long as Fred’s forearm—was applauded under the table by Molly, kicking Fred’s ankle.

The telephone waiter appeared at the same time as the dessert, asking for Finn, who listened to the receiver, grunted, “Not now,” listened some more, said, “Not here,” listened some more, said, “No,” and then, “I’m working on it,” and hung up.

“Excuse me. Confidential,” Finn assured the table. He was as impenetrable as the German chocolate cake they were presented.

They got through the meal. Fred had to accept coffee but refused brandy. Ophelia was grateful. She turned down Fred’s offer of a ride, simpered, and hung on to Finn’s arm. Finn was attended by tuxedoed waiters as if he were the Second Coming. A couple of them, big ones, even seemed to follow him.

“You don’t think that ridiculous man is traveling with bodyguards?” Molly said after they had left their hostess and her companion at the Ritz door and were walking down Newbury Street toward where Fred had parked his car.

Fred shrugged.

He enjoyed Newbury Street after the galleries closed. You could look in the windows. Paintings are bought and sold like stamps, or stocks, or sofas. Of a sofa, people need to know, is the color right, and will it fill the available space? Of a stamp, is it genuine? what number of this issue were circulated? what’s its condition? Of a stock, is it going up or going down? But paintings that you look at on the street, you have to see with a different eye than you cast on those in institutional captivity. On the street they are a complex, floating form of currency. This is true not only of pictures by dead people (now limited in number by the truncation of production); some living painters can be marketed in the same way. Their dealers make the artists exotic, limiting production, keeping it even and predictable, like the issuing of stamps, once the painter hits on a formula people will buy.

They took their time getting back to the car.

It was cold. The temperature was more fitting for late April. Molly shivered. Fred put his arm around her shoulders, and they walked that way.

“Let’s look at the place in Central Square,” Molly said. “You can show me what you did all day.”

They parked in front of the building on Pearl Street. It was a scruffy, seedy neighborhood, partly defined by drugs and crime and children up late and, now and then, blood on the sidewalk. The children were visible even now, but the blood, drugs, and crime were occult.

It was a part of Cambridge where rent should be more supportable than in safer surroundings, perfect for the poor but honest student.

“That’s where our Russell lives,” Fred said, pointing across the street with his chin. “Tomorrow I’ll find out what he’s up to.”