5

To Molly’s question, mumbled sleepily as she made a place for him in the bed, Fred answered only, “No, I didn’t get it.” He had showered and slipped in beside her, not wanting to alarm her. He did not want to lay his worry on her unless events made it unavoidable, mostly because he was reluctant to bring an ugly murder to her bed. He’d seen worse things than Smykal, living or dead. Having done what he could, he put it away until he had to take it on again.

Clayton he’d called right away, from a pay phone after he left Smykal’s, waking him up to tell him, Do not mention Smykal to anyone, for any reason, until we talk. Don’t telephone his number. We’ve got trouble. He had not decided how much he could say to Clayton, but he was determined to get the painting out of Molly’s house this morning. That would mean driving into town.

So Fred was drinking coffee in Molly’s kitchen when she came in, and looking at the painting Clay had got them into, which was propped against the oven.

“Sorry,” Fred said. “My Saturday is screwed. I’ve got to spend time with that little lady.”

“It’s hard to imagine what that poor girl will find to do in Clayton’s house, hanging around in her birthday suit,” Molly said.

This was not really fair. Clay had been a widower since long before Fred first met him and they started working together; and he remained a devoted husband to his wife’s memory. She, a Stillton, from one of the Boston families whose names and wealth are coextensive with the towns on the North Shore, still gazed in moist rapture from a silver frame in Clayton’s study. But nothing in Clayton’s manner, nor his social interests, now distinguished him as one for whom an intimate relationship with another human, female or male, was possible. That was a closed chapter for him, something he had done and finished with.

On the rare occasions when he made a reference to his past history—speaking with Fred perhaps on a late evening when both were tired from some project—Clay would suggest the vestiges of a truly bewildered confusion, as if, in marriage, he had awakened in bed one morning surrounded by large, damp clockwork.

But when Clayton ran his hands with tenderness along the contour of a frame or laughed over the juxtapositions of forms and colors in a painted image, Fred thought he saw the man who had had the capacity to court, and marry, and stand by a young wife while the cruel surprise of a wasting illness carried her off.

You had to work at it to see it now, though, and you couldn’t always summon the patience. Molly, perhaps on Fred’s behalf, had far less patience with Clay’s foibles and mannerisms. But Fred suspected that Molly, being a direct sort, was imagining herself in the position of this naked, unnamed model, hanging around in Clayton’s house while he failed to remember that manners are a flimsy substitute for conversation and the rough give-and-take of affection.

Fred had been staring at Clay’s new picture for a half hour. Looking at it now, he figured there might be fifteen Americans who could have painted in that manner, at that time, that well. The drawing was well schooled. There was no fudging at joints or appendages. The paint was handled with confidence but without that bravura or show-offishness that could be so tiresome in work from the period. The painter had considered, and rejected, the daubery of the impressionists, but you could see that he was familiar with them because of the way color found its own shapes in the reflected image in the mirror. The painter could be direct and subtle, too, both in the same picture.

Because he had made what could be a big mistake, Clay was going to be reticent about the unsigned painting in order to save face and seem somewhat intelligent. He’d keep his knowledge to himself. Clay’s task would be proving what he knew, making it stick. The missing letter had to do with this aspect of the matter. The letter must provide the equivalent of a clear title.

An unsigned painting of whatever quality is trouble. If you don’t know who did it, you have to start by figuring out the author. Even once you yourself are satisfied that you know what the painting is and who it is by, you still have to demonstrate those things in a way that will satisfy the scholar who knows that painter best.

When you go to “the guy” (also called the expert) who is the authority on a particular painter, it helps if you can give the history of the picture, where it’s been, who owned it before, where it was exhibited, how it got from there to here. It’s like a title search. If the object is of special purported value, and there’s a big hole in the record, it can be as much of a problem for a picture as it is for a house. And a picture is harder to follow into the past than a house, being more portable.

Fred left Molly’s at about eight, with the painting in a green garbage bag to protect it from the cold drizzle that had elected to fall on Arlington. He tuned the radio to programs divulging local news, but there was no report about the body ticking on Turbridge Street, preparing to make a most unseemly noise. Fred listened for it but kept it otherwise out of his thoughts. He’d done what he could.

The road was wet and empty, the trees dripping with rain and pink and white blossoms. What he regretted most was Sam. He’d had to tell the boy last night, before he left for Cambridge, that he likely couldn’t come to his game this morning. Sam had stared at him, disappointed and suspicious, not mollified when Fred told him that Clayton Reed had messed up something that he now had to go out and try to fix. Sam had said only, “Would you turn off the light, Fred, so I can sleep?” Fred had suspected that under the covers Sam was wearing all his clothes.

His route took him past the damp lawns of Arlington, obediently edged with daffodils and tulips, then down Fresh Pond Parkway and along and across the Charles. Beacon Hill was almost deserted this early on a Saturday morning. It looked like what it wished to be, a piece of London, but steeper.

Fred parked in the spot Clayton owned beside the row of houses and let himself in. Clay heard him arrive and came spiraling down into the office. Fred was taking the picture out of the green bag. Clay looked at it, gloating. It burned into the room and made Clay smaller.

“She’s not a bad little painting, is she?” Clayton said. “But what did you mean this morning on the phone? What did Smykal say? What’s happening? What do you mean, there’s trouble?”

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.