Madonna of the Apes (26 page)

Chapter Sixty-seven

“You were together all night,” Fred said to Suzette, behind her on the stairs. “You and Mitchell.”

“Scared to death,” Suzette explained. “After what happened to Carl? I called you, but you didn’t come in time, so I called Mitchell.”

“Ah,” Fred said.

He pulled the tarp back from Bernie’s Lagonda and exposed the chest where he had stashed it, still in its green plastic trash bags, its bottom resting on newspapers to protect it from the possibility of oil.

“He’s got it,” Suzette called up the stairs. “It’s here, Mitchell.” She dropped her voice. “No offense. We couldn’t figure out how to get past the alarm. It’s all we were going to do, wait for you inside, Fred. Out of the rain. You didn’t damage it, did you? Getting that crazy top off. Fred, I don’t understand you. You don’t care that you own a chest painted by Leonardo?”

“Doesn’t balance favorably against a couple of dead men,” Fred said. “Neither one of them worth much. Let’s get it upstairs. Take the front.”

“For God’s sake don’t harm it,” Mitchell called.

Suzette whispered, stooping to grab one handle, “I spent the night with him. Had to, since we’re working together. He’s holed up in a stinking rat’s nest belongs to a friend of his, near the museum, with the paintings. I’ll level with you now. It is an
Annunciation
by da Vinci. Gorgeous. Pristine. Never been seen. Perfect. Like I say, Mitchell has it, but it’s not his. He got in a snit with Franklin and ran off with it. Lover’s quarrel.

“What we do, we leave Mitchell where he is, pick up the painting, carry it back to Pekham Street, deliver it to the owner—I have the guy’s name now, finally, from Carl—and promise to come back tonight with Agnelli. And with the chest. Or we carry it with us.”

“Upstairs,” Fred directed. The phone was ringing.

Mitchell’s eyes bugged when the chest was placed on the rug beside him. “I thought I would never see it again,” he said.

Fred picked up the phone.

“Say nothing more than you must on the telephone.” Clay’s voice. “Pitchers have ears.”

“Visitors?” Fred asked.

“I have heard nothing. I should have come to look at it with you. What do you…?”

“Not a good time,” Fred said. “He’s out of the country, as a matter of fact. I’m keeping an eye on the place.”

“Ah,” Clay understood. “Visitors. Understood. Excellent. Excellent, Fred. I shall await…I leave it in your good hands,” Clay said. He hung up, saying, probably to himself, “My instincts are never wrong.”

Mitchell had managed to sit up and he was doing what he could to examine the topless chest’s surfaces, inside and out. “It’s no worse than it was,” he announced, his eyes following the scrolling designs, doing an inventory of the angels’ wing feathers.

“Fifty-fifty,” Suzette whispered.

“It’s intact,” Mitchell said. “God have mercy.”

Fred said, “Maybe you have the patience to wait.”

Rain stroked the windows of Bernie’s living space.

Mitchell said, “I don’t care what happens to me.”

“That’s wise,” Fred counseled. “Except for the top, it’s as you first saw it. In England. In the Brierstone…”

“It was sitting there in the hall,” Mitchell snarled. “English people! Aristocrats! They kept boots in it. A wedding chest. Perfect subject for the occasion. The
Annunciation
on it that you’d think would break their backs with its beauty. English gentry. They lived with it all this time and couldn’t see it under their noses, because they knew it only for how they used it, a box for their boots. It was a masterpiece. I knew it immediately. Leonardo’s
Annunciation
that hangs in the Uffizi, in Florence. You know the painting. Everyone knows it. It is on a thousand Christmas cards.

“My heart stopped and stood still, and then flooded with suspicion and delight. Then with alarm.”

“Go easy, Mitchell,” Suzette cautioned.

“My client required the shipment to move without attracting attention. The customs officers on both sides of the Atlantic would recognize the superb quality of the chest, I told myself, even though the Brierstone family clearly did not. Suppose one of them said to another, ‘Don’t I know this painting?’ Suspicions would be aroused. Was the chest stolen? The whole shipment would be subject to scrutiny, despite the reputation of the diplomat in question, into whose container the shipment was to be placed.

“It had to be hidden somehow, and as you know, the chest was of considerable size.”

Mitchell paused and attempted to make himself comfortable. It was difficult, delivering a lecture in art history with his hands tied behind him. “Now, at this stage in my presentation, I beg for your understanding. I must confess an indiscretion, though I am an honest man. We won’t argue about what might be due to customs officers. Some things take precedence.

“I confess it. I did both imagine and execute a ruse.”

“Okay,” Suzette said. She’d been perched nervously on the edge of the couch, listening to Mitchell’s account.

“Fortunately, my researches have included more than a little practical experience in the methods used by the craftsmen I have studied, that group of Sienese masters of whom I told you, it seems now, so long ago. I removed the top from the chest, the
Annunciation.
Without it the chest might attract no notice, I thought. The top I determined to carry myself, with my luggage. How I disguised it I will not tell you. It was a risk. I took it. If it was questioned I would respond as I was guided. It was not questioned. I am as poor as I look.

“Even without its top, the chest was handsome. I worried that being incomplete, it would stand out. In the garret where much of the collection was stored, I had noticed a wooden panel large enough to be substituted for the top I had removed. It was almost old enough to pass muster to a dull eye—early sixteenth century. Painted on it was a scene so blasphemous I could hardly bring myself to handle it. The mother of God and her child, in converse with an obscenity of monkeys. It was grotesque and embarrassing. Perfect. Only because the cause was good, I steeled myself, cut it to fit, and attached it to the chest, using the methods suitable to its age.

“And now I did the only thing I am ashamed of.” Mitchell stopped, trembled, and blushed like a fat boy of fourteen.

The phone rang.

“
Item.
” Clay’s voice.

“No,” Fred said. “This is Fred. Bernie’s traveling. Is there a message?”

Clay paused for effect. “I should not say this on the telephone. Amongst the inventory, listed with the candlesticks, glass and silver, number 437,
item: a mother and child with monkeys. Continental school. Wood. Dirty. £2.
”

“I can leave a note for him,” Fred said. “
Continental,
eh? Don’t know when he’ll be back. On the other matter, don’t hold your breath.”

Clay was almost chortling with pleasure. “The provenance is confirmed. Alas, it was slightly larger.”

“I’ll leave him a note,” Fred promised.

“Now,” Mitchell repeated, taking up his story again, “I did the only thing I am ashamed of.”

Fred held his peace. Mitchell, blinded by its apparent blasphemy, hadn’t seen the
Madonna
at all! He couldn’t see the Leonardo for the apes!

“What I did next, I admit, was fraud,” Mitchell stammered on. “However harmless. The intent was to mislead. I was carried away, swept up in the stream of events. Examining my conscience now, I must confess to arrogance. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it.

“Because the cuts I had made exposed new wood that had not darkened as the other edges had, I was obliged to act dishonestly. Not only did I sand down and smooth and give a fraudulent patina to those edges: I darkened them!”

“So what?” Suzette demanded.

“That makes me a forger. I will regret it until my dying day.”

Chapter Sixty-eight

“So,” Suzette said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

The phone rang.

“Just—Fred? Before I head for the airport.” Mandy’s voice.

“Hey,” Fred said. “Can I call you back?”

“No. Let me talk. I’ll be fast. I woke up, I was dreaming of a new course called
Parliamentary Math,
” she said. “My dreams are useless. You dream?”

“I’ll call back,” Fred said.

“No, wait.” Were those tears? “The thing is, Fred, I should tell you, when this semester’s over, I’m going to Portland. That’s two weeks.”

“Maine? That’s not so…”

“Oregon. My big break. I’m going to teach math in a community college there, and while I get settled I have a job doing summer school classes for kids who flunked high school courses.”

“Oregon,” Fred said.

“I like the West Coast. I like the way people think.”

Fred couldn’t compete with the way people thought on the West Coast. He looked across the room at Suzette. At Mitchell, who stared at the chest. At the gun in its nest of used bed sheets.

“Come on, Fred. We had such a nice time,” Mandy said.

“I guess…I don’t much care where I live,” Fred began.

“No. For me it has to be a fresh start all the way. I wanted to tell you last night, Fred, but I couldn’t. And now there’s this wedding…Fred?”

“What do you look forward to in Oregon?” Fred asked, making his voice as friendly as he could.

Mandy had a paragraph of things she looked forward to but before she was well into it Fred had to tell her, “Good luck with the new job and the new place.”

“So,” Suzette said. “How do we play this? Here’s what I suggest. Mitchell we keep out of sight. We go pick up the
Annunciation,
get the package together again. We can convince the owner to do it since you have the chest here, and he’ll be so happy to have his Leonardo again.”

“Not Leonardo,” Mitchell said.

Suzette lunged toward the gun. Fred scooped her out of the air and dropped her onto the couch again. “Let the man talk,” he demanded.

“Don’t listen to him,” Suzette said. “He’s crazy.”

Mitchell droned on, as if there had been no interruption, “I had in my care, I was convinced, not a Leonardo at all, but what must be the greatest work ever created by that master, the subject of my long study, Icilio Federico Joni. It is a spectacular Joni,” Mitchell announced. “The best, perhaps, that has appeared. Of museum quality. That he is the painter I now have no doubt. I have had ample time, here in Boston, to study the top. I know Joni’s hand. Even concealed in the best of his imitations, I know it. The chest…”

“Bastard,” Suzette shrieked.

“The chest, aside from the painting, which is Joni’s, I suspect to be the work of a collaborator, most likely Igino Gottardi. He was not careful with his glue, which tests modern. The wood is old, from furniture of the period. No question. But the joints? No, they will not pass muster, as I told my client. Of course my conclusion will require corroboration from a colleague in Milan.”

“So it’s a fake,” Fred said, moving toward the phone. “The whole thing. The top. The
Annunciation.
”

“Not fake. You lie! An imitation. An
hommage.
An
original
Joni,” Mitchell shrieked, then whispered his conclusion, “made, I would say, between 1900 and 1910, at the high point of his career.”

“An
original
forgery. Who cares?” Fred said, “since it’s a forgery?”

“I will ask you not to use that word again,” Mitchell said. “Not in my hearing. The
work
is not forgery.”

“I’ve gotta call that girl back,” Fred said. “Give me a minute.”

“Yes?” Clay’s voice.

“That thing,” Fred said. “Not what we wanted. Sorry.”

Clay’s silence stretched while Fred noticed the rain trickling down the windows, and Suzette’s eyes fixed on the chest now, with money struggling to surface in them.

“You have this on good authority?” Clay demanded.

“The best.”

“Unfortunate,” Clay said. “Still…” He rang off.

Mitchell said eagerly, “I will publish the work. Just by itself it is worthy of a book. At least of a learned article. I am grateful to you. The top will be reunited to the chest. Hinges will be a problem,” he noticed, thinking ahead. “Half the hinges are gone. We’ll make more. I know how to rust them appropriately. There’s a man…”

“You’re going to be busy,” Fred said.

“Yes. With my book. The
Annunciation Wedding Chest
will be first published as a Joni, by its discoverer. Not as Tilley wanted.”

“I was wondering when we’d get to Franklin Tilley.”

“I regret to say, a dishonest man,” Mitchell announced. “May I sit on a chair?”

Suzette pulled a pack of cigarettes from a raincoat pocket, tapped it against the arm of the couch, and lit one. She blew a deliberative plume of smoke. “We’re wasting time with this fool,” she announced. “Wanting to find a masterpiece by this forger he’s in love with, of course he pretends to find one.”

“At first I misjudged him,” Mitchell said. Fred was hoisting him off the floor, getting his buttocks onto one of the straight chairs. “I believed the respect was mutual. When I finally understood that, despite my protests, he was determined to sell the work as from the hand of Leonardo…”

“He shot him,” Suzette helped.

“On that subject I rest mute,” Mitchell said.

Chapter Sixty-nine

“He was adamant. The work must be sold as a Leonardo. He was prepared, on behalf of my client, and with his commissions in mind, to perpetrate fraud. The
Magdalene
must be offered as a Mantegna. Well and good. I held no brief for the
Magdalene. Caveat emptor.
It was his crime, not mine. But at the misrepresentation of the Icilio Joni I would not connive. I was the Joni expert. If I represented myself as having been hoodwinked by my subject, I could never hold up my head again.”

“Here’s what the jury will think,” Suzette said, blowing smoke. “The old man shot his lover. Then shot Carl. Lover’s quarrel. Because Carl…Franklin was cheating on him with Carl.”

Mitchell shook his head mournfully. “It made no difference to Franklin Tilley that, as a Joni, the work has true value, both financial and historic,” he announced. “Were it offered as Leonardo, and the seller were then exposed as a fraud—notice I say the seller, not the work—the value of the work would become anomalous.

“It is a mark of the market’s perversity,” Mitchell said. “A little Madonna and Child in tempera and gold on wood, that might have entered the market in 1920 attributed to, for example, Duccio di Buoninsegna, of modest value in 1920 even as Duccio, but later unmasked as one of Joni’s masterly imitations, might command a truly serious price on today’s market, once proved to be a genuine work from Joni’s hand. Incidentally, since it is I who am the expert, I alone can present an opinion that qualifies the work as being from Joni’s hand.

“There are collectors—I know them, I told Franklin—who, once we put it together again…so intent was he on selling the
Annunciation
as a Leonardo that he burned his bridges. Because I had already told him that the body of the chest was of recent origin, he disposed of it. Couldn’t have it around, he said, to cast doubt on the
Annunciation.
He told me first that he had burned it. He would not listen when I explained that once we put the chest together again, it would have a value of as much as a hundred fifty thousand dollars,” Marshall said. “On the open market. Perhaps more.”

He paused and looked at Fred with a vacant speculation that seemed to demand response.

“You didn’t want the chest,” Fred told Suzette. “Neither of you. Not you. Not Franklin. You knew it would never pass.”

“Mitchell wanted it,” Suzette said. Her eyes flickered toward the gun, which Fred might do well now to put out of harm’s way. It was clear now; at least the probability made sense. She’d wanted to get next to the chest again, destroy it if she could; and anyone associated with it, if need be. Fred next, then Mitchell? Having used herself to smuggle Mitchell in here, with the gun. What ruse had tempted Carl into the alley, in the rain, without his shoes? Whose hand had held the gun? By what means had Suzette, or Mitchell, or both of them together, led Franklin Tilley out to the river’s edge? She’d been part of this trail of death. Good luck to the jury who tried to figure it out.

Suzette lit the room with a dazzling smile. Fred kicked the gun, sheets and all, under the couch.

“If there’s a reward,” Suzette said, “we split fifty-fifty. I brought Mitchell here after all. Shit,” she added. “What’s the odds? It’s up to you, Fred, I guess, if this old man gets to tell his story. Maybe it doesn’t matter. We can still sell the
Annunciation.
Cripes, you tell me. Who cares what Mitchell says? Who’s going to believe a murderer?”