Madonna of the Apes (9 page)

Chapter Twenty-one

She was more naked in this packaging than if one or the other of them peeled her out of it. Not that the garment presented any obstacle.

“You must know the locals,” Suzette said. “Who’s a likely candidate.”

“Problem is, in the art world, everybody lies,” Fred said. He put an arm around her hips. The hips were there, the arm was there. The hips swayed briefly toward him. He let them go again. “There’s more bubbly.” He reached for the bottle, which sat patiently in its bucket of ice; poured some into his glass. “Will you have some?” She shook her head. “Even when they’re lying with each other, they’re likely to lie,” he said.

She laughed and went back to her chair.

“Not for publication,” Fred said, “who’s your principal, and how much money are we talking? In case I get lucky.”

“I assumed Franklin Tilley told you. I’m curator, personal assistant, whatever you want to call it, for the Agnelli Collection. No relation to the car people. We’re in Toledo. I’m the one you go through. Tony Agnelli.” She held out her glass again. Fred poured.

“Yes?” he prompted. “On the ‘How much?’ issue.”

“I have to see it again,” she hedged, “and show it to a couple of people. But I’d say, if you can find it for me, you can ask pretty much what you want.”

The poise of her body was as suggestive as her words.

“Some box,” Fred said. “Describe it.”

Suzette gave an accurate description of the outside of the chest, so brilliantly pedestrian that it would have earned her an A in any graduate program worth its salt. “Then you open it,” she finished, “and on the inside is a weird holy picture, the Virgin and Child and some monkeys. The box looks Italian. My principal, Tony Agnelli, is Italian. Duh. Italian-American. You probably guessed that. The collection needs objects, not just pictures, I told him.”

“You’ll be here,” Fred said. “In case I have information for you.”

She nodded. “Tony makes all the money decisions. I can make promises but not commitments. That sounds wrong. You know what I’m saying. How do I reach you?”

“I move around a lot,” Fred said. “You won’t want me unless I have something for you, and in that case I’ll get word to you here. Or should I leave a message with Franklin Tilley?”

She said, “Let’s not get Franklin Tilley mixed up about who’s working with whom. And by the way, Fred. Don’t get ideas. Agnelli doesn’t buy anything except through me. That’s what he pays me for. Go after him yourself, either you spook him, or his people send him to me.”

Fred said, “If I have anything to sell, I go through you.”

Suzette shook her head. “About some people you have an instinct.” She flicked from her breasts imaginary crumbs, or bees, or the pollen from imaginary exotic flowers. She looked across at Fred in a direct and unmistakable manner. “Next question. Unless you’re one of them, but my instinct tells me I’m warm here, when do we move this expedition to the next plateau?”

“It would be a pleasure and an honor,” Fred said. “But also not prudent, at least for me. I get confused when I can’t make out the line between business and pleasure. Let’s wait till we see where this is heading. Otherwise we both lose sight of the main objective.”

***

“Hell, with her it’s all business,” he muttered five minutes later on the stairs, after he and Suzette had made their wary farewells. “The packaging, the time spent in the gym, the big grin. She’s the personal assistant and curator for big money from Toledo named Agnelli, who puts her up at the Ritz, and I’m invited to dip my wick? Thank you. Weird holy picture, she says. She’s spotted our Leonardo.

“Correction, Clay’s Leonardo.”

Though the rain was long over the night was damp. Fred took a taxi to Charlestown and slept in his solitary bed.

***

Wednesday morning he was on Mountjoy Street at around ten, carrying two cardboard cups of coffee in a paper sack, along with containers of cream and packets of sugar. A couple was just leaving the basement entrance, a man and a woman, in their late fifties. Clay, in the doorway, splendid in a blue satin robe, was telling them, “Next week, then,” when he saw Fred on the sidewalk. Fred stood aside to let the couple pass, then held up his sack and called, “I brought coffee. I was in the neighborhood.”

Clay said, suspiciously, but hesitantly making room in the doorway, “An unexpected pleasure.”

“Franklin Tilley. I ran into him on the street and—well—the upshot of the matter is, he wants to buy it back. The chest. His offer is ten thousand.”

“Inside,” Clay ordered.

Fred carried his sack to the worktable in the office and began taking out its contents. “Actually,” he said, “and it’s not my business: there are other things you should know.”

“You’re stirring things up,” Clayton said. He stood indecisively next to the desk that was being commandeered by this large visitor. The blue satin robe had been put on over gray suit pants, a white shirt and tie. The man’s hair was in the same wild tousle of white strands. If this was his idea of dishabille, it was as conscious as Suzette’s had been, in her appearance at the Ritz. The painted chest, stripped of its top, still sat there on the floor. Its top had taken so much of his attention up to now, Fred hadn’t really looked at the rest of the object. The interior was dark wood, unpainted, pocked with worm holes. It gave off a musky smell, as if someone had been keeping his grandmother in there, clean, but dead. Outside, the decoration, carved, gilded, and painted, was not easy to place, mostly because Fred had never bothered to spend time looking at such things. If it was evidence of anything, he was too ignorant to read it. The angels were nicely painted, with large, flat, delicate wings. The angels reminded him of something. Maybe Fra Angelico? Except it was furniture.

“Stirring things up,” Clay repeated.

“Maybe. But things were already stirred up. Heavy objects. We want to keep track of them if we can.”

Clay hesitated a long minute before he sighed and shifted course. “My one desire is to be left alone, to study and to think about what I have purchased. Would that the present might be simple, so that I could indulge the complexities of the past. Yet the present is not simple. Here you are again. It is difficult to welcome you, since you bring bad news. Still, most kind.” He sighed again. “The coffee. I regret—it is my single eccentricity—that I eschew stimulants. Forgive me. I appreciate the gesture.” He sat in the chair at the worktable and motioned Fred to the couch. Fred, taking his coffee black, left the litter of condiments on the table next to the extra coffee, the sack, and a pile of books on whose covers and spines the word
Leonardo
seemed to predominate.

Fred began, “I’m told that in the art world people either say nothing about their business, or lie.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Fred looked across at Clay and waited. The older man pursed his lips. “About me you are correct this far. I cannot bear for anyone to know my business. It is an instinct. Almost an obsession. And yet, apparently, perhaps heeding a deeper instinct, I take you into my confidence. At a time and in a circumstance when a great issue is at risk. With a prize such as my Leonardo at stake, why would I not lie, or stand mute, to protect it? If you infer, or aver, that I am in the art world, I will not argue, although I don’t think of myself as belonging to any world at all. If I accept your premise, and wish to confirm it, my next move is either to lie, or to say nothing. We reach an impasse.”

“In
my
world, on the other hand,” Fred said.

“What
is
your world?” Clay interrupted.

“In my world, I hate to waste time.”

“You keep coming back,” Clay said. “Why?”

“There are things about the neighborhood,” Fred said. “Moving on…”

“You told me you want nothing,” Clayton reminded him. “I hold a vulnerable treasure, which indeed you helped me to procure. Unavoidably, through happenstance, your business and mine coincided, briefly, while you saved my life. I acknowledge it. I have thanked you. Forgive me if my instincts were at fault, but you seem a man of considerable pride, and I believed that to have offered anything in the nature of a financial reward—yes, I see that I was right. You say that you want nothing. I must respect that statement. Yet you keep coming back.”

“Moving on,” Fred said. “There are things you don’t understand. That makes me nervous. There’s too much wrong. For one thing, Tilley keeps a large amount of cash in the house.”

“As you know I had on me, on Sunday night, a notable amount of cash. It comes in handy sometimes, as the event developed. It would not surprise you to learn that I had more cash in the house.”

“Not in the bathroom hamper with the dirty socks and skivvies,” Fred said.

Clayton Reed blushed. “You were thorough,” he said. “Still, people are free to do what they wish. I prefer a safe. Many persons prefer to effect their transactions in the form of cash. If their reasons are dishonorable, their dishonor is their business.”

“Upward of fifty thousand cash,” Fred pressed on. “That’s a guess. That kind of cash in that kind of place means trouble. Normally it indicates traffic in contraband. When I called Franklin on it, he turned green.”

Clay started, “I didn’t hear…”

“Last night,” Fred explained. “I was in the neighborhood. He had a woman there, representing the Agnelli Collection, she told me later. She also wants your chest. She didn’t mention a figure.”

Clay jumped to his feet, almost chattering in alarm. “This is an unforgivable intrusion.”

“Without which,” Fred said evenly, “you would be ignorant of the forces that are moving. Without my interference you wouldn’t know that Franklin Tilley regrets making the sale. You wouldn’t know he keeps a gun. You wouldn’t know about this new player, Suzette Shaughnessy, or her principal…”

“You didn’t…” Clayton started.

“I told her nothing.”

“And now you want…”

“You thought you were home free. Now we know about two parties who are looking for what you bought.”

“What do you want from me?” Clay demanded, smoothing his lapels with trembling hands.

“I can make allowances. You are worried. But understand this,” Fred said, slowly, and with measured force. “You don’t know me, but you’ve had a chance to take my measure. Do you really want to suggest that I will either betray or blackmail you, just because I could do both, so easily?”

He let the question hang. Clayton sat again, poised behind his desk, his eyes wary. The words from the large man in his office, with the square farmer’s hands, and the face as craggy and alarming as the deliberation that had given force to the spoken words, had offered no threat. But threat hung in the air.

“Living in Boston so long,” Clay said, “perhaps I forget my manners. I do apologize. I am overwrought. Give me a moment to collect myself.” He began to pace nervously in a small area between his worktable and a bookcase against which three paintings leaned, unframed, their faces turned away. “In fairness, and in fellowship, I must accept your word,” he said finally. “However, you say you want nothing, and that is impossible. Therefore I am confused. And with me, confusion and suspicion are indistinguishable.”

“Moving on,” Fred said. “Help me understand this new player, Suzette Shaughnessy. Let me ask you, do you know Tony—Anthony, I guess—Agnelli? Is he a known quantity? The Agnelli Collection.”

“You mention heavy objects,” Clayton said. “Agnelli is, to adopt your term of art, a truly heavy object. Agnelli is the only man living who can, and will, successfully challenge the Getty Museum.” Clay perched nervously on the edge of the table and settled the satin robe over his knees. “The Agnelli money’s plumbing. Three generations of plumbing that, under Anthony Agnelli’s guidance, went from drains and faucets to encompass an empire of everything hydraulic. Hydroelectric dams throughout the world; the digging of new canals; the plans underway to restore the Saharan aquifer, and to save Venice both from the sea and from its own pollution. He’s a major force in the world, a Bechtel or Halliburton in his own right, since he won’t go public.

“Ten years or so ago he began to buy art. He buys only the work of Italians, or works done in Italy. He owns six of Corot’s Italian landscapes. When he started buying, a person like myself might compete for a lesser name—a Baldovenetti, a Cosimo Rosselli—among the Florentine painters of the Renaissance, for example—the Renaissance is where he started. But because of his competition nothing slips by. As for the big names—I happen to know that he bought the Brierstone Bronzino at Christie’s London sale last October. He arranged to bid not only against the Getty, but also, in order to ensure that the price might rise to a level the National Gallery of London could not match, by public subscription, to keep the work in England as a National Treasure—he arranged for a shill to bid against him.”

“Bid against himself,” Fred said.

“And brought the Brierstone Bronzino, the
Sebastian Transfixed,
back to Toledo. There was nothing for the United Kingdom to do but watch and wring its hands.” Clay looked up sharply at Fred and paused, waiting.

“You’ve lost me,” Fred said.

“The subject is life-sized. The martyr Sebastian pierced by arrows. Lord Brierstone had brought the painting to England, probably in 1730, following a tour of the continent. Then, four generations later, when the family and its fortune were both falling into disrepute…”

“No, the other thing,” Fred interrupted. “The bidding and so on.” He took the other coffee from the desk and began on it while Clay changed horses.

“The United Kingdom, England, like many countries in the Old World, has passed laws designed to keep within her borders all works of art that a committee of interested parties determines to be National Treasures.”

“Go on.”

Chapter Twenty-three

“The British spirit of fair play does not allow its citizens to lose their financial interests in their properties. Suppose the work is placed at auction. Let us extend the hypothesis to suggest that Lord Brierstone’s descendants owned the
Venus de Milo
’s more presentable younger sister, Diana, who also has her arms. The smooth and pomaded elderly gentlemen from Christie’s, accompanied by the ravishing titled young woman whom misfortune has forced into trade, also from Christie’s, persuade the family to place the piece at a suitable London sale, and they so notify the world. The competition is strong and relatively unimpaired by collusion, and we’ll assume that the Getty places the highest bid. Since you are indulging my hypothesis, let us say that the Getty’s successful bid is for two hundred fifty million pounds, hammer price, which means that in addition they must pay a commission at whatever rate they have previously and privately negotiated with the auction house. At those figures nobody pays the published rates.

“At this juncture a great noise and commotion is heard in the land. The committee, egged on by the press, declares the
Diana
to be a National Treasure, meaning that the United Kingdom would suffer a severe loss if the
Diana
left its borders. That’s all very well, but now Christie’s, and the Getty, and the under bidders, have all demonstrated that the Diana is worth two hundred fifty million to its owners. The crown may not simply confiscate the property. They’re going to get their share anyway, when the taxes are collected. The Brierstone family, as long as they get their money (two hundred fifty million less taxes and the commission they have previously negotiated with Christie’s, which will be less than what you read on the printed page), agree to allow the
Diana
to be set up in a public place, such as the National Gallery, and the crown begins to organize a subscription to collect a fund to match the Getty’s bid. School children are invited to contribute their lunch money. Lord this and Lady that, the fellow who owns Harrods (who’s hoping one day to be knighted), and the rest of them, are importuned to make their tax-deductible contributions. And if the Getty’s price is matched within a specified time—I forget what that time is, it doesn’t matter—if, as I say, the bid is matched, the Brierstones get their money from the fund, the government takes back its share in taxes as expected (unless the government forgoes its taxes? After all, it is getting the work in question), Christie’s, I presume, collects its commission as expected, the
Diana
remains in the National Gallery, and the Getty’s people slink back to California emptyhanded.”

“Ah,” Fred said. He toyed with his cup. “The Brierstone heirs would be unusual, especially if their fortunes have fallen into disrepute, if they welcomed this worldwide attention to the sale of a family jewel.”

“Indeed,” Clayton said.

“Not to mention, the loving attention of the crown would ensure that they lose between a third and half her value in taxes, yes?”

“Indeed,” Clay repeated. “Roughly speaking. Forty percent, I believe. On a sale of two hundred fifty million, the government would pocket a hundred million.”

“Then what I’d suggest,” Fred started.

“If you were unscrupulous,” Clay said. “If I see where this is going…”

“Yes. Is put this
Diana de Milo
in a cast, let’s say a fiberglass cast, make her look like a sculpture by Niki de Saint Phalle, one of those bulbous she-women painted up like a circus tent, then sell her. She’s too big to be smuggled out in a suitcase. Sell her as a modern work that is imitating Saint Phalle, for whatever it costs—fifteen hundred pounds?—to a confederate, pay the tax on the fifteen hundred pounds, the confederate ships the thing to the U. S., for example, and then strips off the fiberglass cast, and sells the
Diana
quietly.”

“Right,” Clay agreed. “It’s done all the time with paintings and antiquities. Since Egypt, a bit late in the game, has decided it doesn’t want its ancient papyri to leave the country, the smugglers face them with modern tourist copies and they travel disguised as souvenir junk. Once arrived at their point of destination, the false front is removed and the originals are quietly placed on the clandestine market.”

“Another thing you could do,” Fred said. “Say, as a hypothetical, you had an important painting that happened to be on a wood panel. Why not arrange to have that painting seen not as a painting at all, but, for example, as the top of a kid’s toy chest?”

“Indeed,” Clay said. His response registered no surprise.

“Next question,” Fred pushed on. “Were we smart, or were we lucky?”

“We?” Clay asked. The single syllable stretched languorously over a considerable space of time, and Clay twined his long fingers, unraveled them, and wove them together during the course of the question.

“This may not be news to you,” Fred said. “This brilliant original idea of mine.”

“Such a procedure demands trust between the confederates,” Clay said. “The trust that is elsewhere called Honor among thieves.”

“In the case of the Brierstone
Diana,
” Fred continued, “if the heir wants more than the sixty percent he’d get on the open market, it would pay both him and the buyer to arrange a quiet sale, say for two hundred million. The buyer saves fifty million. The seller gives a commission of maybe ten million (let’s be generous. It’s only money) to the confederate brokers, the heir takes in a hundred ninety instead of one fifty. There’s a profit of forty million for the heir. Everyone’s happy.”

“With the exception of the government,” Clay pointed out. “Which had also expected to pocket its fifteen percent VAT, or sales tax. Unless the buyer can claim an exemption.”

“And within all this,” Fred said, “The
Diana
has become just another commodity, like a crate of bananas.”

Clay nodded.

The remainder of the chest, from which they had removed the top, was still sitting on the floor in front of Clayton Reed’s worktable where Fred had left it, a body without a head. The interior dark with age, its painted sides were luxurious with pink and grass green angels, accentuated by vivid swirls of gold and ultramarine. The sides were as nicked and scratched as any such object might be if it had been used for many years.

“What do you make of the box?” Fred asked.

“It worries me.”