Harmony In Flesh and Black

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “He does stick out, doesn’t he?” Fred said. “Like a sore thumb, as we say in America.”

  “Like a sore, a ham … a hem … what is it you Americans have that sticks out and gets sore?” Oona asked. “That’s what he sticks out like. He should be ashamed. I am going all the way up to the third floor now to look at that old woman’s snuffboxes again.”

  Fred wandered, greeted friends, tried some of the minute things to eat, had a glass of wine, and enjoyed the music. The waitpeople did a good job of circulating. It was a pleasure watching the maidens in their diaphanous garments and their Pre-Raphaelite lack of underpinnings. Some pictures in the museum he liked seeing again, though on the whole he would have advised Isabella differently, starting by suggesting that she ditch Berenson and steer clear of the more flagrant fakes. But you had to forgive the near misses given the one remaining Rembrandt; the ghost of Vermeer’s Concert; the Titian; the Velázquez Philip IV.

  Fred passed Mangan near the drinks table. Mangan was telling a joke, evidently, surrounded by an attentive coterie of South Shore dealers. Mangan’s own spread, down near Cohasset, was reputed to have pastures, docks, swans, and outbuildings—a Mount Vernon of its kind, Fred had heard said. Mangan, like any large predator, gathered around him lesser dealers who watched for bloody crumbs too small for him to snap after a second time. He never joined their pools at auctions, preferring to sneer with pleasure when it became known that he wanted something and the bidding faltered in dismay.

  Mangan, being a bully, would be a bigger problem for Clay than Finn if he set his sights on the Heade. If he was going to be witnessed losing a picture at auction, he’d make the price rise to where it punished the opposition. He played the under-bidder’s role as smartly as he did that of the “successful” competitor, even finding ways to slide right under a rival’s top left bid. The thing was, though, behind the loud vulgarity of his presence, Mangan concealed a good eye, and Fred believed the Heade was simply not a good enough picture for him.

  His joke finished, Mangan erupted with a paean of gurgling laughter that caused a ripple effect. He raised his bottle. “Here’s to crime. Keep the stuff circulating,” he roared. The crowd cringed outward from him in rings, like punch into which a noisome object had been dropped. The old Bostonians moved austerely, their money so ancient it wouldn’t crackle. The gentlemen floated, frozen as if caught forever by Ignatz Gaugengigl. The ladies swished away like Sargents, even the ones wearing the silliest dresses.

  The trick with Mangan and his action, and what made him most bitterly resented as a wild card, was that the cash he spent was based on a different value system from the currency anyone else could bring to bear. (No one doubted that it was money Mangan might have trouble accounting for; people muttered about his large spread’s access to the waters of the bay.) Nobody could compete on a level field since Mangan’s dollar was worth five times anyone else’s.

  Fred went up to find Albert Finn. As if Mangan’s laugh were causing an echo, Fred heard Finn’s booming chuckle before he saw the man. Finn was still holding forth on the balcony, looking down onto the crowd in the courtyard. He was a blimp of benevolence. He blossomed in used black tie, sporting but one decoration, a modest Legion of Honor citation in his lapel. Finn was engaged in impressing a small group of the particularly elect. One of them, a bald man shiny with rings and watches and wearing a plaid cummerbund and a pink jacket that might pass in Dallas, was gaping in delight at his place next to the great man’s side. He was probably a new collector on Finn’s string.

  A blond youth attended them, offering a tray filled with glasses. Finn whispered a special blessing in the waiter’s ear. The youth, in lilac tights and lime doublet, looked nervous and broke away, but not before Fred relieved him of part of his burden: one glass for himself and one for Molly, if he found her in time.

  Finn knew Fred, even in the wreath, but did not choose to recognize him to speak to. Fred had hoped he might overhear him talking with Higginson, but Higginson was not in Finn’s group. Fred stood on the balcony looking down and spotted Higginson hobnobbing in the courtyard. Descending the staircase again, he passed Molly, still on Clay’s arm, on her way up. “I don’t expect miracles,” Clay was saying to her. “But anything you find out, I’d love to hear. Some flavor.”

  Fred gave Molly her wine and kept going.

  8

  A direct assault on Higginson made the most sense. Fred encountered him as if by accident, but they fell to talking together naturally.

  Fred had to be careful. William Wadsworth Higginson represented the biggest potential obstacle to their success. As a matter of protocol, in the absence of the expert, Higginson would have been asked by Doolan’s to look the Heade over. He had access to all the space-age equipment at the Museum of Fine Arts; if it had been a dull day he might, for the hell of it, run the picture under their X-ray machine, and spot anything funny, like a Vermeer, under it.

  If the Vermeer was there.

  The expert’s own research on Heade could already have brought the Apthorp story to his attention. It was not exactly hidden—no more than a piece of hay is hidden in a haystack. It was there for the finding, but looked like the other hay. Their best hope was that only Clay had taken note of the reference to the Mechanics Hall exhibition, and that he alone had correlated it with the Apthorp possibility.

  Higginson liked a fruity academic joke, and they made conversation concerning the themes of lilies and haystacks in late-nineteenth-century painting, Fred keeping things more or less focused on Heade, hoping to catch vibrations or see if Higginson tried to steer attention away from the Apthorp picture. Fred gathered that Higginson accepted the Heade as genuine but dismissed it as not of museum quality.

  “I really don’t think they care,” Fred said later, brushing into Clayton near a tub of flowers behind which one of the flautists was sneaking a smoke.

  “Something’s gotten to Finn,” Clay said. “He’s not himself. If anything, he’s worse.”

  “You left Molly with him?”

  “Yes. And her sister,” Clayton said, shuddering. Clay would not forget his and Ophelia’s meeting and might never forgive Molly for having engineered it.

  “Ophelia can make anyone nervous,” Fred reminded Clay.

  Fred hadn’t known that Ophelia was coming. She had not mentioned it last night, and she didn’t usually fool with the art crowd. Normally Fred’s and Ophelia’s professional paths did not cross. But Ophelia was an eager beaver, and everything, as Molly’s mother put it, could become grist to her mule.

  “Why don’t you stop by Turbridge Street on your way home?” Clay asked Fred, whispering. “It’s on the way.”

  “We’ll leave it till Monday,” Fred said. “I’m serious. Forget it. I promise you, Clay, that’s the best plan.”

  Clayton circulated. Fred went looking for Molly.

  The crowd was starting to thin out. Late dinners were planned in Boston and the suburbs to capitalize on and prolong the festivities. In growing numbers people moved into the rainy darkness. That made it easier to see long distances inside.

  Fred spotted Ophelia, dressed in leopard skin, her long blond hair loose around her shoulders. She was hanging on to the arm of Albert Finn, looking up at him as they descended the stairs to the great hall. As Fred approached them, he heard her say, “I love your books. They’re marvelous. So, like yourself, approachable. You keep the common touch.” She blushed. Molly had told Fred that as a child, Ophelia could also fart on purpose.

  “Ah, well,” said Finn. His hearty laugh made Titians shake. “You know what they say about King Kong.”

  Finn pronounced his English in the manner of one constantly tormented by peanut butter on the palate. Fred knew Ophelia would give Finn what he wanted. She paused, a master of timing.

  “No,” said Ophelia. “What do they say about King Kong?”

  “The bigger you are, the nicer you are.” Finn’s chuckle of delight occupied them both while Fred edged past. Ophelia,
noticing Fred, said, “We’re going to dinner at the governor’s. Will I see you there? I need a date, and Sir Albert has obliged.”

  “Please, call me Al,” Finn said to Ophelia.

  “I promised Molly something else,” Fred told her.

  Finn was edging closer to the exit, but Ophelia held back, her eyes sparkling, to ask Fred, “What is it you’re supposed to be?”

  “I am glad you asked,” Fred said. “The antique Greeks had a practice of placing, at crossroads, where travelers could rub them for luck, tremendous stone monuments representing the male generative organ in full display. They were called herms—after Hermes, the god whose organ was being celebrated. Such a monument presented a special problem in artistic license for the Pre-Raphaelite painter. John Reinhard Weguelin, in his picture Adoring the Herm, as Al Finn knows, did nothing to dismay the sensibilities of the time. He represented a marble bust of a bearded male, wearing drapery, on a pedestal, and simply called it a herm. Except for the beard, I am his vision of the herm.”

  “Ha, ha,” Finn said.

  “Art is a favorite of mine,” Ophelia said, turning to join Finn’s hasty trundle toward the door.

  Fred watched the pair of them waft away. Sheep that pass in the night, as Molly’s mother would say. He found Molly, and they collected raincoats and made themselves scarce.

  “I couldn’t learn much,” Molly said in the car as they maneuvered through the evening traffic toward Arlington. “Except for this: Albert Finn was upset, said he’s expected in Paris Monday but something has come up that forces him to stay in Boston. For the moment his travel plans are on hold, he says.”

  “That’s ominous. How did you get the great man to tell you?”

  “I was saying how boring it is to be emotionally involved with a man in the art business—that’s you, Fred—who’s always running around the world without notice. Finn had to top it. You learn things when you get a man to complain, which he can’t do without bragging.”

  “He took off with Ophelia,” Fred said.

  “So he did,” Molly said, and she commenced singing, under her breath, “Herm, herm on the range.”

  * * *

  Molly wanted to find a hamburger in Cambridge and follow it with coffee in Harvard Square. Fred let his route take them along Massachusetts Avenue so he could get a sense of whether Henry Smykal had continued to maintain a low profile.

  Turbridge Street, when they passed it, was choked with police cars, fire engines, and ambulances. Policemen forced people back behind yellow plastic tape and sawhorses, and the traffic was so slowed by the festivities that Fred was able to stare up the street toward the focus of activity, Smykal’s building. The cat was out of its bag.

  “Something’s going on there,” Molly said.

  Fred nodded, feeling a traitor on account of the silence he was maintaining. But if there was anything he wanted to provide for Molly, it was what former employers of his had called deniability. He’d wait, like other civilians, to let information reach her through normal channels.

  * * *

  They stopped at a Cambridge restaurant they liked. Fred left his wreath in the car. They sat over supper for a long time, then went for coffee at Pamplona, no more than seven blocks from where the functionaries of law and death were dealing with Smykal’s body.

  “I enjoyed Clayton Reed’s asking me to help him maneuver,” Molly said, stirring sugar into an iced cappuccino. “And his taking me into his confidence. He hasn’t done that before, which shows how much respect he has for you, Fred. I understand it’s a crucial and exciting moment in the game.”

  “Molly,” Fred said. “I guess I talk about it like a game, and it plays like a game. If we win, we’ll feel like the smartest kids on the block. In town.

  “There may be forty Vermeer paintings known to exist in the world. Five are among the most wonderful paintings ever made. If a Vermeer were offered for sale anywhere in the world now, there is no way I could have it in my hands. No way Clay could get near it. Clayton can spend at most one or two hundred thousand at a time; a Vermeer could bring fifty million.

  “So this is the only way Clayton can get a Vermeer. And I’ll tell you something true about that fellow. He wouldn’t care if it was worth eighty million. He’d keep it. It would never turn into money. He’d laugh with joy because he’d got a Vermeer, and under hundreds of very intelligent noses.”

  “A Vermeer that he hasn’t seen,” said Molly. “Don’t forget.”

  “But if it’s there, we know what it looks like,” Fred said. “It’s of two lovers standing by a table that’s covered in carpet. He’s in uniform, a cavalier. She, on the left of the painting, is in a window—you know the window Vermeer does, moves back in a diagonal, lets in a shaft of silvery golden light. The couple is looking toward a velvet cushion with a pearl necklace on it. She’s in a long dress, her hair bound up, looking down, in profile, her neck bare, accepting the gift.”

  Fred put his hand on the back of Molly’s neck, stroked it. “The part of a woman the Japanese say is the sexiest part to expose, the base of the neck at the back.…”

  “Never mind,” Molly said. “I follow you perfectly.”

  Fred had no trouble seeing the colors of the painting, though he could be wrong. All he and Clayton had to work from was the drawing made at the Massachusetts Mechanics Hall over a hundred years before. In the painting as Fred envisioned it, the woman wore dusky yellow. The cavalier was in blue with a red sash. The Turkish rug was so dark you would have to study it to find the pattern. The wall was cream plaster, with that map pinned on it. There would have to be green somewhere—a subtle green, probably, in the meanderings on the map, and the velvet cushion maybe a deep green to show off the pearls and to prove that the color of the meanderings was green as well.

  The downstairs café was filled with people, and the open door to the street let in cold springtime air. Fred kept his eye open in case he should spot, by some hideous accident, the face of the young man with the bike who had seen him last night, late, entering Smykal’s building.

  Fred said, “There are as many man-hours of labor in a Vermeer as there are in the Brooklyn Bridge. And as much engineering.”

  “If it’s there.”

  “Well, yes. It’s why Clay’s willing to buy the picture like an expensive Heade. At least he’ll have the Heade, then, which he says isn’t that bad, though I don’t agree.”

  “What I really don’t understand is,” Molly said, “suppose he gets the Heade, then what?”

  Fred stretched his legs, his big feet extending toward a neighboring table where three old ladies sat with a single man around a table made for two. A few cars passed outside.

  “Suppose we get the Heade,” Fred said. “I do the bidding, obviously. Clayton doesn’t bid. Clay won’t even go to the auction. I bring it back to your place. We stash it in the bedroom closet.”

  “Jesus! Fifty million?”

  “Just a picture. Then when it’s convenient I drive it to Clayton’s and we look it over together, Clay and I. Clay picks it up, looks at it from every angle, holding it out in front of him and tipping it to get the raking light.

  “You know how aerial photographs taken when the sun is low, in the morning, will show old earthworks in farmland?

  “So we’ll look to see if there’s any sign of the underpainting. But there isn’t. Clay would have seen that this afternoon, when he went to the preview with Albert Finn, and he didn’t mention it. The lack of visible underpainting doesn’t mean anything, though, since Vermeer painted very smooth, and the Heade is done with unusually heavy impasto. Heade would have known that oil paint gets more transparent with time and allows underpainting to show through. He wouldn’t want lines from the Vermeer to bounce out later and spoil his haystacks.”

  “Gotcha,” said Molly, and she started tickling at the ice in the bottom of her glass. “Get to the part I don’t know.”

  “Anyway, then Clayton calls Higginson and says, ‘Guess what, I bough
t the Heade,’ and Higginson says either ‘I’ll tell the boss when he calls; he’s in Japan,’ or ‘Why would you want that?’ The conversation results in Clayton’s being invited over to look at the thing with Higginson under the museum’s machines.”

  “And little Fred comes along,” said Molly. “Because Clayton doesn’t pick things up. Go on.”

  “If there is an older painting under there, you can adjust your levels of penetration to find it. An X ray will pick out the metals in the whites, and that gives you a starting outline of the picture underneath.”

  “So,” said Molly. “Say you don’t draw a blank at that point, and there’s the Vermeer. First Higginson has a fit. Then what?”

  “We take it to Roberto, and Roberto tests a corner. It will be tricky because the Heade is old. Oil paint gets harder over time, and the harder it is, the more resistant it’ll be to solvents. But that makes the Vermeer, in theory, two centuries harder than the Heade. What amazes us both, incidentally, if anyone did examine the painting seriously, is that nobody noticed the age of the canvas. You can see the fabric when you look at the back, and it is entirely different from what Heade should have worked on. One thing Clay said—we had about three minutes to talk behind Isabella’s big arras, the one covered with ducks near the punch—if it isn’t a Vermeer under there, it’s something else. Something old and Flemish. It’s like a Victorian church built on Roman foundations.”

  “So,” Molly said, her green eyes burning. She was excited now because it sounded as if there had to be something there.

  “After that it gets technical, and you’d have to talk to Roberto. But if there’s another painting underneath, Roberto will find it. And let’s hope it wasn’t abused before Heade covered it up. We’ll hope also that a good layer of dirty varnish gave it a cushion to protect it from Heade’s brush. That would make it easier to separate, too. For all I know, Roberto can slip a solvent between layers and float the Heade right off so we’ll have them both. What will dissolve the varnish in its layer might not get through to the paint on either side if there’s enough of a buildup of greasy candle smoke and dirt to insulate it.