3

After dinner Ophelia drove off toward her home in Lincoln in her Mercedes of subdued maroon. Molly and Fred washed up together in the kitchen while Sam and Terry, enjoying freedom from homework at the kitchen table since it was Friday, rode their bikes outside in the dusk with friends from down the street.

They played Hearts together after that, before Molly sent the kids up to pretend to sleep, as they were permitted to do on Friday and Saturday nights—they could read or do whatever they wanted that sounded like sleeping.

In the evenings the phone at Molly’s house rang frequently and was for Molly or Sam or Terry. Fred was surprised when Sam called down at around 10:45.

“It’s for you, Fred. It’s Clayton. Mr. Reed.”

Fred picked up the kitchen extension.

“That creature cheated me,” Clay said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You have my painting?” Clay asked.

“I guess so,” Fred told him. “I haven’t had a chance to look at it. He wrapped it. Smykal did.”

He had clean forgotten the painting. That was one of the problems with Clay’s having kept him out of the foreplay. It hadn’t been Fred’s business, and he’d not had the scent of the quarry in his nostrils. But he recalled the stink of Smykal’s place now and regretted it.

Clay said, “Unwrap it. I’ll call back.”

Fred said, “What do you mean, he cheated you?”

“Hurry, Fred, would you?” Clay urged. “Open the package, look at the painting, see if a letter’s in with it, and call me back? I’m at the Ritz bar.”

“What’s that about?” Molly asked, drying her hands after washing the coffee cups she and Fred had been using.

“What that’s about,” Fred told her, “is what made me late getting back: a picture I picked up for Clayton that sounds like a problem. A virgin, Clay said. Let’s take a look. Rare bird where it came from, if true.”

They went through the kitchen into the garage, turning lights on. Fred got the package out of the car, and they worked on Smykal’s string and tape together, using scissors, going carefully.

“It stinks,” Molly said, her nose wrinkling at the greasy package.

“Clay sounds like he’s been conned,” Fred said. “Which is what happens to your average paranoid. He digs his own trap, playing games, then tiptoes in.”

“If that’s a virgin,” Molly said, standing back and looking at the picture with her hands on her hips, “if that’s a virgin, no wonder it’s an endangered breed.”

Fred was behind the unwrapped picture, looking without success for anything resembling a letter, perhaps taped to the back of the frame, or caught in the wrapping. But Molly’s tone brought him around front.

“Don’t she make the Rokeby Venus look like a sick pig?” Molly went on. Molly was a direct, no-nonsense critic.

It was a nude of shocking elegance: a female figure reclining, her back toward you, her rotundities fully realized. The figure made a startling white diagonal of flesh against black draperies with red and gold accents in luscious, loaded slabs of paint: a fan, the carved gilt edge of the couch she lay on. A mirror in front of the figure, reflecting head and breasts, held painted gestures that suggested the striding legs—in black trousers—of a man entering the room in back of the viewer. The subject looked at you out of the mirror, surprised but pleased that you had found her. It did a strange thing with space, even in Molly’s garage, because the viewer was eliminated. Molly and Fred couldn’t exist if the reflected entrant was as present as they felt him to be. The garage, the bicycles, the lawnmower, Fred’s car couldn’t exist since they didn’t reflect.

It was a painting of alarming intimacy.

“You’re right,” Fred said. “The Velázquez is an image that stays with you. Whoever did this young lady spent an awed afternoon beforehand standing with his mouth open at Rokeby Hall—unless Agnew’s had it already, off H. E. Morritt. The National Gallery in London didn’t get it until after nineteen hundred, and this painting’s earlier.”

It shook Fred to think of the pathetic vulgarity of the den from which he’d brought so arrogant a testament of beauty.

“Who’s the lucky painter?” Molly asked.

Fred looked. It was usually the first thing he would do, but the command of the painting had distracted him. They both looked. They shone a flashlight at likely spots for a signature, examined the back for clues, and tried spitting on a thumb and rubbing to remove the layer of surface dust to expose—no signature.

Fred could guess a lot from a quick look at the painting’s style and at its architecture front and back. He told Molly what he was thinking while he looked.

“It’s by an American, done in the eighteen eighties. He’s done the Grand Tour. Given the modeling and the celebration of grays, the painter was trained in Munich and then finished in Paris, where the painting was made, since you see here, on the back of the canvas, the inked stamp of Durand’s shop on the Avenue des Ternes. The artist was a craftsman who knew his business, someone of Sargent’s polish.”

“That’s no Sargent,” Molly said. “Sargent was too mean with the female nude, never wanted to get any on him. He couldn’t show affection or appreciation for the subject. No, Sargent was a drapery man, in my opinion.” Molly stood back, studying the image of the naked woman, pinching her face between the fingers of her right hand.

“Jeezus Heezus,” Sam said from the doorway to the kitchen, still in his jeans and the green Champion sweatshirt Fred had given him. “Is this what you two do after you think we’re in bed?”

Fred turned.

“It’s Mr. Reed again. Didn’t you hear it ring?”

Fred went back to the kitchen for the phone. Sam stayed with his mother, looking at Clayton’s picture.

“No letter,” Fred told Clayton. “Nothing.”

“The painting’s all right? A female nude, late nineteenth century…?”

“The painting’s a stunner,” Fred said. “Whose is it?”

“Mine,” Clayton said briefly, gloating. He knew Fred meant, who painted it? “So there’s a limit to Smykal’s perfidy. I can scarcely bring myself to speak his name. You’re certain there’s no letter? Wrapped with the painting?”

“Molly and I both looked,” Fred said.

“The villain’s playing games,” Clay said. “He gave me an envelope that he said contained the letter—which I saw myself, I’m no fool, Fred—and switched it. It’s a blank paper. He’s holding out. What does that creature want?”

Fred answered, “He mentioned your appreciation for his photographs, which he calls art. You show promise, he told me. He is eager to receive you into his bosom as an apprentice.”

“I improvised and gave the man the impression that I abetted his perversions,” Clayton said. “The situation was complex. I would like this never to be mentioned between us again, Fred. I still reek of it.”

Clay, trying to be cute, had been screwed. It was going to cost Fred time and Clayton money.

“Let me think,” Clay said.

Fred could hear fragments of refined hilarity from the Ritz bar.

“I should have checked the letter before I left the man’s apartment, Fred. Go back and get it,” Clay said.

“It’s late, Mr. Arthurian,” Fred said.

Fred did not say—since there was no point, it was indeed late, and he had designs on Molly—The mistake was yours, Clay, keeping me in the dark, putting down money, and walking away without what you paid for.

“Stop the check,” he suggested, knowing there had been no check. “I’ll go first thing in the morning.”

“He’s got his money in a form I can’t retract,” Clay said. “Being so shaken by the circumstances, I made an error. I should have thought of this possibility and told you to take precautions. There’s no alternative. I regret that you must go back, Fred.”

“Call him.”

“He does not answer the phone,” Clay said. “I have tried every half hour since I opened the envelope and saw how I was taken in.”

Sam went through the kitchen, heading upstairs, calling back to his mother, “I’ll take a shower tomorrow, promise. It’s only been a week.”

“Who’s the painter?” Fred asked again.

“Without that letter, no one,” Clay said. He was upset with himself, so he would take it out on Fred by stretching out the coy. But Fred was not about to play that game with him, not over the phone at close to midnight, for all that the painting proposed an interesting puzzle.

“We’ll talk in the morning,” Fred said. “I agree with you, by the way.”

“You do?”

“You made an error,” Fred said. “Meantime, I’ll go lean on the guy. What am I looking for?”

“You’ll understand it,” Clay said. “The letter is an essential part of the transaction. It is an autograph, from the painter to the original owner, who happens also to be the subject of the painting. The whole thing will come clear to you, Fred. You know paintings.”

“You won’t say who wrote the letter?”

“No need. You’ll know it when you see it.”

Fred knew Clay well enough to feel him twisting on the point of what he might be losing—whose full extent he did not want Fred to understand unless Fred saved him from the loss.

“What does the letter look like?”

“White stationery, no heading, folded, about four by five inches. The paper is foxed. Six lines of writing. It includes a drawing you will recognize. It is signed,” Clayton said. “Nickname only, but it will make immediate sense.”

“Nickname, eh?” Fred said. “Some of these fellows had distinctive nicknames. Like Twatty.”

“Twachtman, I suppose,” Clay said. “No, Fred. It isn’t Twachtman. I don’t know what put that into your head.”

Fred hung up, furious. Clay’s penchant for unresolved romance had made trouble, and Fred hated the idea that he’d have to see Smykal, or Smykal’s place, ever again. Between the pornographer and Clay, at that moment, it was hard to decide who he would rather hang up by the ears.

Fred went back into the garage, where Molly was still looking at the painting.

“I know a Duveneck of similar quality in a collection in Chicago,” Fred said. “Same slather, all black and rich and opulent in this fin-de-siècle way. But the Duveneck’s too hard for close comparison: it’s beautifully, even tenderly painted, but the tenderness is all for the paint, not for the model.”

And you could feel a glowing warmth of sentiment in the picture Molly now carried into the kitchen, saying, “She can’t spend the night in the garage. She doesn’t look as if she’s used to it. Does Clay say what she’s worth?”

“Clayton won’t tell me anything. You know Clay.”

“You know where she comes from, at least,” Molly said.

“You don’t want to know. You don’t have the stomach for it,” Fred said. “I certainly don’t, knowing I’m going back. I can tell you it’s a scumbag. And that’s just an unconsidered off-the-top-of-my-head hint of Henry Smykal’s lovely home on Turbridge Street,” he added. “I’ll give you the whole miserable picture later if you want. I have to go, since the guy’s playing games with Clay.”

Molly objected strenuously when she understood that Fred was going out again, but there was no help for it, and they both knew it.

“I’d like to horsewhip that Clayton Reed,” Molly said. “If I had a horse.”

They put the painting in Molly’s bedroom closet.

“Poor kid,” Molly said, patting the model’s rump gently before they closed her in. “Whoever you are, you’re in for a lonesome stretch, honey.”