Madonna of the Apes (22 page)

Chapter Fifty-seven

“Salai would have known her,” Fred said.

“Who?”

“Sorry. I was thinking, but not out loud,” Fred said. “It’s all so long ago and out of sight. Yet so real in the presence of this painting. The woman who sat for your
Madonna.
Cecilia Gallerani, if it was she. Salai would have known her. According to you he would have been underfoot, in and out of the studio, grinding colors, stealing fruit, washing the dishes and breaking them, pissing out the windows on passers by. He was ten when he came to live with Leonardo, you said, and that’s about the time, 1490, when Leonardo painted the
Lady with an Ermine.
We agree, don’t we, that that is the portrait your
Madonna
should sit beside?”

“There comes a time when thinking threatens to replace looking,” Clay said. “When that time comes, I stop thinking.”

The observation fell into the room and went nowhere for a minute or two. They sat like men who find themselves, strangers, seated next to each other in a bar, on a day when nothing is happening, not even on TV. Except that here the
Madonna
occupied the room, and filled it with more event than a World Series.

“Sorry to be so slow,” Fred said. “There’s too much going on. You say there’s a nude
Mona Lisa
?”

“Was. Yes, apparently Leonardo also painted her nude, whoever she was, and if she was anybody. The
Mona Lisa
’s much later than the
Madonna,
of course,” Clay said. “Maybe as late as 1503. It’s been turned into such a myth by so many observers that it is as hard to think about that painting, as it is to get near it at the Louvre. The tourists flock around her like apes. Too many people have thought about her, and have then published what they think. She’s practically invisible.

“Leonardo is said to have worked on her for more than four years.”

“If that’s true, most of his time was spent just staring and worrying at her,” Fred said. “There can’t be more than a quarter pound of paint on the whole thing. Hell, not even that.”

“I am diverted from the direction of my musings,” Clayton said.

“Which were?”

“How prone we are to assume that there must be a basis in reality for an image that takes such a hold on us. We crowd to cast a story against the object simply because the object fascinates, and our time must be filled with white noise.”

“Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you,” Fred sang, not well. Nat King Cole’s tune was barely recognizable. Fred’s singing voice went up and down at the right places, but it avoided notes. “And other happy horse shit,” Fred continued, no longer singing.

Clay declaimed, “Like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her, and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary.”

“Jeekers,” Fred said. “Who produced that gloomy wet dream?”

“It’s Walter Pater,
*
but it could have been any one of a hundred other critics in the 1800s. They get so excited trafficking in the strange webs that come out of their own mouths, they can’t see past them.”

“I notice that you have a little Latin,” Clay said.

“And less Greek. What, if anything, do we do with the knowledge that Professor Mitchell is in the mix?”

“I must think about your question,” Clay said. “I am presently inhabited by strong emotion. Because that can sometimes be indistinguishable from instinct, I am capable of making a mistake. What do you think?”

“I think don’t stir the waters. Last I heard, you were claiming the box was a fake.”

“I have been reading in Leonardo’s notebooks,” Clay announced, swerving away from the matter at hand. “
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,
Edward Mac Curdy’s definitive, if outdated, edition.” Clay crossed the room and took a fat, squat book from the table where he kept the telephone, next to the kitchen door. “There were few subjects he did not touch,” Clay said. “Among the subjects he never touched—I don’t know why this occurs to me—is that of Mary Magdalene. Not a mention. Perhaps the pretended Mantegna in Tilley’s collection brought her to mind and I wondered, off-hand, if Leonardo gave her a moment’s thought.

“But my study as you came in concerned what he might have had to say about the ape. Here,” he riffled pages with his long fingers, “on one occasion, he has taken the trouble to dissect the arm of a monkey in order to understand the comparative musculatures of man and monkey. Elsewhere, again by dissection, he seeks to understand the differences between the structures of the foot of man, bear, and monkey. Here again is a drawing of a monkey’s hand, so like our own. And here, finally, he directs himself,
Write of the varieties of the intestines of the human species, apes and such like; then of the differences that are found in the leonine species, then the bovine and lastly in birds; and make this description in the form of a discourse.
”

“Busy man, busy mind, busy pen,” Fred said. “I’ll bet when you asked him a question he’d talk about something else.”

Chapter Fifty-eight

“No, what interests me,” Clay said, “now that I own a spectacular example of his finished work, is the quality of the man’s mind. All genius is flawed. But listen.”

He opened the book to the place marked by his finger. “From the
Quaderni d’Anatomia,
now in the Royal Library, Windsor—illustrated as appropriate—
If you cut an onion down the center you will be able to see and count all the coatings or rinds which form concentric circles round the center of this onion.

“
Similarly if you cut a man’s head down the center you will cut through the hair first, then the skin and muscular flesh and the pericranium, then the cranium and within the dura mater and the pia mater and the brain, then the pia and dura mater again and the rete mirabili and the bone which is the foundation of these.
Do you see?” He put the book down again, his finger removed now so that he could clasp his hands. “Do you see?” he repeated.

“Frankly, no,” Fred said.

“Simply deliver to the man an onion, a human head, a knife,” Clay said, “and he will do the rest. His mind works by comparison, not even by metaphor. Metaphor is the morass into which Walter Pater would lead us. The Romantic’s sublime avoidance of all issues. The
Mona Lisa
a vampire, indeed! Did the man have no respect at all for his mother?

“The apes in my painting are being compared to humans. Leonardo is painting apes because he has studied them. He knows them inside and out. He paints humans because he has also studied them. Again, he knows them both inside and out. He boasted that he had opened upward of thirty human bodies. He knows
Mona Lisa
’s head because he knows what’s inside it. Not the ideas. Who cares what she’s thinking? She wants eggs for her lunch? Who cares? Leonardo knows that smiling head is put together in a way even an onion would understand.”

Clay’s excitement was such that he trembled, as he might have were he the crowning defense witness in a case that was going his way. “God, Leonardo did not paint, because he had not managed to dissect divinity,” Clay went on. “He writes—I will not recall his words correctly—
Will you seek to comprehend the mind of God, which embraces the whole universe, weighing and dissecting it as though you were making an anatomical study? Oh human stupidity. You spend your whole life with yourself and even then you don’t see the most obvious thing: that you’re a fool.
”

“I’m thinking I should get back to where I’m staying,” Fred said. “We don’t know what some of these wild cards are up to. I did wonder, about the chest…”

“I shall have to come to a decision,” Clay said. “The excesses of the nineteenth century, among which I include both Walter Pater and Bernard Berenson, the critic, art dealer and charlatan, have so clouded the issues of the Italian Renaissance, even in my mind, that even when placing my own hands on the true skin of a real painting, executed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1490, in Milan, I feel I can hardly see it. I am swept away by emotion.

“Fred, Leonardo is correct. We see the world, even this work, through the glazes of our own inadequacies, not to mention the stupidities that are thrust upon us by seduction, fear, or loathing, or the stupidities of our fellows.”

This was all very fine and humble, but it smacked of self-congratulation: the echo of Marie Antoinette’s innocent question, when she learned that the poor were out of bread, “Can’t they eat cake?”

Fred interrupted. “Yeah, well and good,” he said. “You knew that was Leonardo as fast and as clearly as if you looked up the hill at a wall of falling mud and said, ‘It’s a mud slide.’ If you want to sit in the mud afterward and play with it—I won’t say play with yourself. We aren’t on those terms—I can’t stop you.”

Clayton blushed red. “The man of action pretends impatience with the intellectual processes that inspire action. But the issue is one of speed, and not of capability.”

“We’re losing track of something,” Fred said. “According to Mitchell, he recognized immediately the nature of the wedding chest.”

“For me, the important revelation of the day is your welcome testimony, from the Atlanta lawyer, that Mr. Tilley, may he rest in peace, was a
bona fide
‘sales representative,’ as he put it. In that case the sale was as legitimate as it was providential.”

“Tilley could have gotten the chop because he should not have made the sale,” Fred pointed out. “I had assumed that it was because he was skimming money, or cooking the books.”

“We need not dwell on the unfortunate Tilley’s death, except to take note that the man’s demise eliminates a link in the chain that connects me to the former owner of the painting. A fool might think that the elimination of this link releases the chain’s connection. But each of us, in his own way—you are impatient with mine—perceives that the missing link makes the chain just that much shorter. It brings us closer to each other. The present and the former owner.”

Chapter Fifty-nine

Clay continued, “Even as we speak, the Brierstone collection and its present owner are drawing ever closer to one another.” He was arranging his lengthy limbs with the intention of standing. “My researcher in London, a woman of tenacity and skill, has unearthed an inventory of the furniture and other articles of value left in the estate of Hartrack’s grandfather, the last Lord Brierstone. What became of the title is another story. Never mind.”

He stood, marking his place in the book with a long finger. “There is an invention called a facsimile machine,” he announced. “Or fax.”

“Right,” Fred told him.

Clayton said, “I do not have a fax machine. It enables them to know what one is doing. However, my researcher, Margaret Dibble, offers to send to me, by fax, a copy of the inventory. What it contains I do not know. I did not wish to reveal to her what I am looking for. Not on the telephone.”

“That’s in character,” Fred interjected.

“If I can give her the telephone number of a local fax machine, she will transmit the information. I thought to ask my attorney if I might impose, but I do not like to do that without offering to pay his hourly rate, and I do not like his hourly rate.”

“Simplify this,” Fred said. “Use the nearest Kinko’s.” Clay found the directory in the telephone table and Fred pointed out the number. “Six hours difference,” he reminded Clay. “Phone her the number when she wakes up, give me a heads up. I’ll collect it.”

“The number you gave me, that’s where you’ll be?”

“If I’m not going to be there, I’ll let you know. I’m thinking—what put this into my head I don’t know. It’s convenient: the one person who saw you, and who can associate you with the Leonardo, is dead.”

“That occurred to me,” Clayton said dryly. “If this is an accusation…”

“Oh, come off it. I mean it’s easier to insulate you, as long as I keep our connection, yours with me, invisible. At some point, maybe our civic duty makes me tell the cops that Carl is holed up in the dead man’s joint, since Carl likely blew the back of Tilley’s head off and, dumb as he is, he’s probably still got the gun. Then there’s the Atlanta lawyer Peaslee, and the new sales rep who’s supposed to be turning up tomorrow. Does your instinct tell you how to play this part of it?”

Clay looked wise and twisted his fingers together. “The judges have a phrase they like that means ‘Let’s put this case on the back burner, and turn the burner off.’ We’ll take it under advisement.”

“Lend me those
Notebooks,
will you?” Fred asked. “Bernie’s got nothing to read.”

***

On the way to Bernie’s Fred detoured to Pekham Street and spent a quarter hour standing back in the alley, his eye on the building where the man they had known as Franklin Tilley had set up his trap, or shop. It would not have been easy, just physically, to get that many paintings, intact, out of the U-Haul, carry them upstairs, get them hung, and tidy the wrappings away. That would have been a couple of days’ work. Had Mitchell joined the effort? Or, perish the thought of his handling paintings, Carl? If they noticed, what did the neighbors think of the activity? If it were his responsibility to account for Franklin’s abrupt departure from this world, Fred would have questions, and a program to follow that, in due course, might put Carl away. What further danger did he represent?

The front windows in Franklin Tilley’s apartment were lighted, but there was no sign of movement there. “Another corpse,” Fred said. “What’s left in Franklin Tilley’s apartment might as well be the contents of the estate of a man named Salai, whose ashes turned long since into the ashes of the ashes of whatever they became when Salai was through with them. Salai, his paintings, his jewels, his sisters.”

If he started talking to neighbors, landlords, to Carl again, or to the lawyer Peaslee, he might have a better understanding of the moments that preceded the wrecking of Franklin’s head. A dismal time, in darkness, on a wet grassy riverbank. In a way he wanted to understand it, since he had known Tilley, though briefly. In a way, it was his responsibility, some would say, to bring whoever was responsible for Tillley’s death, even if Tilley himself, to justice.

But there was no justice. People who used the term meant only retribution.

Besides, Fred had taken on another responsibility, which might be antithetical to any obligation that might have been suggested under the term Clay used, his “civic duty.” He had undertaken to protect Clayton Reed, and what Clayton had purchased. For the time being, if Carl was sleeping in there, let him sleep. Carl and whoever signed his pay check. There’d be time.

If he was already on the bus back to Atlanta—Atlanta wasn’t very far away.