Harmony In Flesh and Black

by Nicholas Kilmer

  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.”

  4

  Fred parked on Turbridge Street and gritted his teeth against the coming stench, preparing to beard Smykal in his den. In the darkness after midnight, the prospect was not pleasant. But this should not take long. Fred was in no mood to be gentle with him.

  Fred rang the outside buzzer and was clicked in without ceremony. So Smykal was home now.

&n
bsp; His door opened a crack to Fred’s knock. The scent, exacerbated by bright, hot light, rushed out from behind Smykal’s surprised face. Fred heard his telephone ringing.

  “You’re not him,” Smykal said, trying to force the door closed.

  Fred told him, “I’m him enough for me. I want that letter.”

  “I’m filming,” Smykal said. His telephone continued ringing. “What letter?” Smykal looked down at Fred’s foot in the opening of the door. The telephone rang again and stopped.

  “The letter Arthurian bought.”

  The door was on a chain. Smykal kept pushing it against Fred’s foot.

  “You can’t come in,” he said. “It’s art film. I guarantee privacy.” Smykal sniffed, the unconscious, habitual sniff of the user.

  Fred heard a muted voice in the background. He saw the bright vertical segment of Smykal’s chamber of art, flooded with stinking light that shone through the studio door, which was ajar.

  “You can’t come in, not now,” Smykal repeated.

  “I’m happy not to,” Fred said. “Pass me the letter, and I’ll be on my way.”

  “I gave it to him.”

  “Empty,” Fred said. “As you know.”

  The phone began ringing again.

  “Just get out,” Smykal snarled.

  “With the letter,” Fred said.

  The telephone stopped. A female voice whined.

  “It’s not here,” Smykal whispered. He sniffed. Blotches of red were developing in his gray face. His concave beard bristled with exertion.

  “Look, to tell you the truth,” he went on, “I decided that for my own protection I wanted a copy. Why should I trust anyone? I’m having my own copy made. At Kinko’s.” Smykal looked at his watch. “I pay my models by the hour. I’m expecting—”

  “I’ll wait,” Fred said. He pushed against the door. Smykal tottered. They could both feel how fragile the door’s chain was, each knowing Fred could splinter his way in.

  “Smykal,” Fred said, “don’t screw around.”

  “Sorry about the mix-up. I’ll call him and explain.”

  The man was as devious and hopeful and stupid as he was pathetic. Hard man to discourage. He was holding out in order to force Arthurian to receive, once more, his slimy invitation to make photos of normally secret flesh in utter privacy.

  “I’ll call this minute,” Smykal said. “Give me the number.”

  “Arthurian is not listed,” Fred said.

  He turned and left, clothed, descending the staircase.

  * * *

  Fred left his car where it was. The night was clear and cold, and the town quieted down in these streets off Harvard Square. Before he forced the issue by breaking in, he had decided while palavering with Smykal on his landing that he might as well check out the old boy’s story.

  Kinko’s was an all-night copy place on the other side of Harvard Square. Fred was there in about fifteen minutes. The man behind the counter, as young and plump as he was harassed, talked on the phone with, apparently, an irate Iranian couple who were in the process of organizing their divorce while they gave him directions. The machines thumped and banged and bent paper behind him, and he turned to respond to alarm signals. Now and again he yelled into the back room, “Billy! We got people here lined up.”

  He turned toward the counter and his waiting customers, shrugging, spreading out his hands to indicate, What can I do? My partner’s back there with the trots.

  Two seedy academics of the male persuasion, burning their own midnight oil, were already waiting, and Fred was behind them. Each was burdened with extraordinary complexity in his approach to the copying experience.

  “Lost his slip,” Fred said, presenting himself with a sheepish grin when his turn finally came. “I’m supposed to pick an order up for first name Henry. Henry Smykal.”

  The plump boy rubbed his hand through his short black hair, picking up glints of light from the street on his earring. He yawned.

  “How big an order?” he asked. He turned and yelled toward the back, “Billy! A lot of people don’t get paid by the hour to do what you’re doing in there.”

  “It sounds like the order’s pretty small,” Fred said. “Tell you the truth, I forgot to ask Henry. I can tell you what Smykal looks like, if that helps.” He described Smykal, using the clenching in his gut to guide him as to the accuracy of his report. The boy shook his head.

  “He’s not familiar to me,” the boy said. “But I try not to look at the customers. Anyway, I just came on an hour ago. I’ll look. What was that name again?”

  Fred watched the boy turn to the shelves of work completed and waiting projects, reading the names on the order forms.

  “You spell that S-M-Y-X-A-L?” he asked, picking a package up.

  “You got it.”

  “Three fifty,” the boy said, taking Fred’s money and giving him change. “We’re not supposed to do this,” he confided, handing over the package, a bag about a half-inch thick showing pink, “if you don’t have your claim thing, you know?”

  Fred turned to go, saying, “I appreciate it.”

  “Hold it,” the boy said.

  Fred turned back.

  The boy stared at him with a lewd gaze, as pink as the paper showing through the bag he’d given Fred. He licked his lips. “You want your original?”

  Fred gave him a big grin and reached out for the sheet: one page, 8½ × 11, suitable for use as a poster on light poles and store windows. He took it into the lighted street and looked at it.

  LIGHTS ** CAMERAS ** ACTION, it said, most visibly, in bold letters. It was an ad for Smykal’s little hobby. The large words, meant to catch the eye, were followed by a short paragraph of almost random junk—small fee; equipment provided; work with ** LIVE ** MODELS ** in perfect privacy; release the hidden talent that resides in you—and a telephone number.

  Smykal was a geek, absurd and absolute, and he’d told Fred the grudging, automatic half-lie that’s always the one most likely to succeed because it carries a fragmentary ring of truth. Smykal did indeed have an order at Kinko’s—but not what he owed Clayton.

  He’d lost a good deal of time waiting for Billy’s peristalsis and the march of democracy at Kinko’s. Good. Smykal should be more responsive if he had to be awakened.

  Fred headed back for Turbridge Street, checking his watch when he reached Smykal’s building. It was 3:35 A.M., with early random tulips in front of the three-decker sucking at the chill damp of the dark. He tossed Smykal’s posters into a rubbish barrel next to the building before he went to the entrance door again.

  * * *

  Fred held the door for a young man dressed in formfitting rubber, coming out into the world alone and wheeling a bicycle. He received his smile of thanks and slipped into the building. The smell in the stairwell eased gratefully into his reluctant nostrils. Immediately his nerves jumped with the wrong current bristling in the air as his feet hit the stairs, moving quickly and as silently as his bulk and the old wood allowed. The air in Smykal’s building had gone wrong.

  Amid the dust and the brown painted plaster walls, nothing was remarkable or changed in the stairway to the third floor (above which would be only the standard flat tar roof), other than the increase of stench that Fred knew was normal to it. But Smykal’s door was ajar and, where earlier hot lights had shone, dim. He stood a few moments listening outside the apartment door, letting his instincts work.

  The stench had turned worse. It was no longer Essence of Jersey City but rather Old Calcutta, with the addition of fresh blood and feces. Old Man Death was in there. Old friend. Fred knew it well.

  “Beautiful,” Fred said, enveloped again in the persuasive reek of mortal danger.

  He listened until the silence was convincing. Nothing lived in there, not even the man’s buzzards.

  Fred edged into the room, using his shoulder to open and then close the door behind him, checking to see that it locked so he could be alone with whatever he was going to find.
The front room was dark and empty except for the clutter he had seen earlier today, even more kicked and broken now. The red toolbox was overturned, the space on the wall still waiting. Fred pushed open the door to the studio that he had earlier declined to visit. Henry Smykal lay on the floor, grinning up at a dim overhead light and staring.

  Smykal’s teeth were stained. The gash in his face where his teeth were, amid the trimmed hair around his mouth, looked like something in one of his art photos. He had bled a good deal from the crushed place on the right side of his head. Fred saw where a hammer had been tossed across the room and now lay against the wall. The simple story winked with eloquence: a man and his hammer. The hammer’s claw had got into the act also; the blow to the skull had been the last in an organized series.

  Smykal’s blue suit stank and shone, so maculate with blood that nobody was going to use it again, not even to burn him in. Aside from the body, the room was surprisingly empty after the hectic, tawdry flea-market-and-whorehouse ambience of the sitting room. Its floor was carpeted in fabric as cheaply fake as it was white: a big remnant spread across the room for Smykal to bleed into. The red stains had gone brown already, in big, deep, caked puddles. It was a great deal of blood, as if he’d danced before he dropped. It spread to splashes and stains on walls and furniture as well.

  The windows were boarded with painted plywood. In addition to the overhead socket, where a dim bulb burned, large photographic lights were placed on stands around the walls. They had been turned off but still cast vestigial warmth to a hand held near them. Along one wall of the room, a shelf held three or four Nikons. We supply the equipment. The furniture consisted of one double-bed mattress covered with once-white sheets and a loveseat in pink plush. One wall sported a large mirror.

  Roses on the dirty wallpaper in the stricken room—the same wallpaper as in the front room—carried the color of Smykal’s blood onto the wall, where their cousins, splotches of actual blood, joined them. Cardboard coffee cups stood or lay on the floor, some used as ashtrays. Pot was among the smells, its rancid reek striving against that of Smykal’s emptied bowels. Although the man had apparently been filming when Fred was here earlier, there was no immediate sign of his work, nor of who had been here with him.