Man With a Squirrel (11 page)

“Marek—what happened?”

“She is crushed by a train,” Marek said. He shuddered and shook. “At ten-seventeen. The police know the time exactly. I was at that very moment playing Chopin's Scherzo number Two in b-flat minor, opus thirty-one, for my second encore. Jesus, Jesus. Suddenly all I can hear is a great roar. I think it is more applause, too soon. Or a stroke making the blood rush in my ears and I must die. But it was the train I heard, crushing her gallant spirit from her body with tons of iron.”

Fred said, “I'll drive you to Cambridge.”

“I have been to Cambridge already. I identified her poor body,” Marek said, “by recognizing the earrings she was wearing. She is disgraced. Her head, her poor head…” Marek shook his head and moaned. “Now all my future is a black chasm filled with thunder.”

“How can I help?” Fred asked.

Marek stared. “Her message says telephone you. That is her last wish.”

“What did the police tell you?”

“They think she is drunk. They will cut her apart to prove it. They say she leaped or fell in order to be destroyed by the train rushing toward Concord.”

“Where did this happen?”

“Oh, the disgrace! The idea of Oona drunk! What was she doing in Cambridge? Slivovitz in her coffee, yes, I admit, always.”

“Where in Cambridge?” Fred asked.

“There is a Kentucky's Chicken,” Marek said. “The road is named after one of your writers. A bridge.”

Fred said, “Yes?”

“They take me past the place. I see her car. Oh, Jesus, her poor car. She cannot leave it there.” Marek trembled and wept into his white linen. “What will become of her car?” Marek spread his arms and stared hopelessly around Oona's back room. “I cannot be responsible. Was that not the meaning of her note? Fred Taylor? That you will be responsible?”

“It is a terrible thing,” Fred said.

“She believed in me,” Marek said, tucking the handkerchief back into his sleeve. “She pays for me to come to your country. She bought my instrument. She supported my lessons. She is to pay for my debut.” Marek shook his head, rose from the table, and stood near the door, tearing his hair with supple fingers strong as vines. “She cannot destroy herself,” Marek said. “She had everything to live for.”

Fred said, “Sleep. I'll talk to you tomorrow if you want.”

Marek said, “I shall go upstairs but I shall not sleep again. Never.”

Fred put a hand on Marek's shoulder.

“Never,” Marek said. He opened the backroom door and let Fred into the dusky shop. Crystal shivered on its shelves. “Take this with you,” Marek said.

He handed Fred a large shopping bag with hard internal corners, and with one of Oona's squares of paper stapled to the top. “Hold for Fred Taylor.” The irony that is the sole spiritual essence owning certain immortality, chuckled.

“What is this?” Fred asked. His flesh crawled.

“There will be lawyers and police and the tax bandits and I do not know who else comes in your country after the person dies in such disgrace,” Marek said. “This has your name on it, so take it. It is between you and Oona. Settle it with her, Fred Taylor, if you are her friend.”

Fred said, “Marek…”

“Find who killed her,” Marek demanded. “She is no strip-teasing acrobat to leap from bridges or balance along railroad tracks at night in—Oh, the shame of it—in her underwear!”

“In her underwear?” Fred exclaimed.

“You see exactly why I shall believe nothing they say,” Marek announced. “Oona was never in her underwear!”

“Walden Street,” Fred guessed, as Marek opened the street door to the tolling of the bell announcing movement of the customer.

“Yes, yes,” Marek said. “A bridge over the tracks. Walden. Henry Walden, your most famous author. I knew I would remember his name.”

“Lock the door and sleep,” Fred said. “I'll talk to you later, Marek. Later today. I am sorry about Oona.”

“Sorry, yes,” Marek said. “You may be sorry. I, I am destroyed.”

13

Before he looked into the bag, Fred locked the door between his office and waking Mountjoy Street. The triumph of expectation warred against the sinking knowledge, It's too small.

“Like Clayton on a monument,” Fred complained against himself, “smiling at Greeks bearing gifts, as Molly's mother would say.”

He tore the bag open at the staples. He'd already felt the profile of the familiar Mexican frame, and knew what he would see in that respect; and he was not disappointed. The canvas, backed by gray shirt cardboard, showed a tabletop in shadow—wooden top, round table—the canvas buckled and bent around the stretcher, and bunched under the cardboard. On the table's surface was a calm still life: what Fred would say was a silver inkwell; several papers on which the inverted writing could not be deciphered; a quill pen; and a china cup. Behind this was darkness. The visible fragment was smaller than the first, but Fred had no doubt it belonged with the squirrel. Again, more painting existed here than showed in the frame. The way the cardboard had been stapled into the back covered the nails holding the mounted canvas in. It bulged. There was too much bulk folded in there.

*   *   *

Fred had breakfast at a New Bedford diner—linguica and eggs and blueberry muffins laid open and fried on the same grill. He'd driven straight down, not touching the new fragment, not even to take the cardboard off the back, or remove the canvas from the mocking frame. Roberto Smith's habit was to start working early, but Roberto wouldn't want to see anyone unexpectedly. Fred drank coffee and looked at the paper until eight-thirty, when he called Roberto.

“I will put coffee on,” Roberto said. “This is a nice surprise.”

Roberto's studio smelled strongly of coffee and solvents. “I cleaned the squirrel yesterday,” Roberto said. “That is your reward for not being in a rush.” He lifted a cardboard sandwich from a table near the hanging instruments and, keeping it horizontal, brought it to the big worktable in the window, lifting the upper cardboard to show Fred the surface he had worked on. There was color now: not observed color (that wouldn't come for another hundred years), but carefully modulated and justified heraldic color, emphasized by the turnings of the forms as realized in a language growing out of the vocabulary of the engraver—black and white.

“Some yellow in the highlights on the squirrel's fur,” Roberto said with pride. “A lot of people would clean that off, because it's a glaze. Stripping the varnish from a painting where the artist suspended a series of pigments in varnish glazes—that's when your heart is in your mouth, Fred.”

“It's amazing,” Fred said.

“I varnished it so you can see the color,” Roberto said. “All that crackle, and the holes—I'll fill those when we line it, if you want me to line it.”

“We were right to wait,” Fred said. “Look.” He let Roberto take out the fragment Oona had bequeathed him.

Roberto held the frame in both hands and carried it to the window, staring at it and making his eyebrows rise, his mustache lower, in a quizzical frown. “Is it extortion they are attempting?” he asked, turning the object over. “Send the ear, then the little finger, then the thumb? You are dealing with kidnappers?” He shook his head. “Who would do this? Were the parcels mailed in Lebanon?”

Fred said, “I didn't touch it, wanting you to be the one to take it apart.”

“Solomon,” Roberto said. “It is as if that woman had not stood in the way of the wisdom of Solomon.” He felt the ballooning of excess canvas gently where it pressed against the cardboard backing, as if the cardboard were charred skin over flesh that might yet be saved. He carried the object to his worktable. “Normally I prefer you not to be here while I work, Fred,” he said. Fred looked out the studio window at the damp sun shining through mist over abandoned mill buildings. “But if you don't mind standing quietly, and will not expect this to be a precedent, you probably wonder what you have.”

Fred said, “It crossed my mind.”

“And you think you should be rewarded for not taking matters into your own hands. Forgive my asking, do you want to keep the frame?”

“For a souvenir maybe, but it's nothing I want. As that same woman might have said to Solomon, Don't save the bathwater if it means letting the baby drown.”

Roberto laid the fragment on its face, resting it on the gilded cheesery of the frame. Roberto took diagonal pliers and lifted the staples out of the gray sponge of cardboard, one side at a time, pulling the legs up straight without levering his tool against the cardboard. “The way the canvas is folded in,” he said, “we don't want to crease it worse.”

When the backing was lifted and set by (Fred saw it had no writing on either side), a nailed jumble was exposed, folds laid and folded over folds.

“The bastards used common nails,” Roberto said, scandalized. “Look what their heads have done.”

“It was the same with the other,” Fred said. “It's someone who knows what he's doing and doesn't give a shit.”

Roberto was concentrating on getting the nails out with the pliers, using the same procedure Fred had on the first fragment, with the same concentration Fred had seen used to disarm explosives.

“It gives me a shooting pain in my heart,” Roberto said. “I worry for your safety if you do business with a monster such as this.” He tried to lift the square, double-sided canvas package from the frame. It was jammed in too tightly. “I may destroy the frame?” he asked.

“Be my guest,” Fred reassured him. Roberto carried the thing over to his woodworking tools, in the instrument-making corner of the shop, and started in with a chisel, unjoining one corner until he could bend the frame apart.

A flight of seagulls crossed the window. Fred looked at the first fragment where it lay. The links of the squirrel's gold chain were as exactly rendered as he expected, and no link showed fewer than three colors. The patch of sunlight on the floor gave the squirrel a red-gold ground to stand against.

Roberto brought the canvas back and took his time lifting the staples out of the edges. “Hurry and you have trouble,” he said. “Pour yourself coffee, but stand clear while you drink it.” Fred took the hint. It was like the moment when the nurse, frustrated in many attempts to discover a friend's vein, suggests you might visit the restroom across the corridor from Intensive Care.

Fred held his cup and stood looking out the window, listening to Roberto talk to himself softly. “How not to make things worse? … Right through the finger. How could he? … All right, there's the knees.” It was like listening to a breech birth on the radio. “No, no head.”

Fred turned and strolled back, leaving his cup on the table next to the hotplate.

“He's holding out for the big payment,” Roberto said. He'd laid the fragment out. It was the same width as the first, and about the same height. But the folding and stapling had been more complex and more harmful, because the canvas had been forced onto a smaller stretcher—this one eighteen by twenty inches—so the excess canvas had been bunched before the staples were fired. In this case, because the canvas did not fit the frame easily, the staples had been pounded flat with a hammer, which had caused more damage. Furthermore, the image selected to be displayed for sale to Oona had not allowed use of even that original left tacking edge.

Roberto slid the new fragment to lie above the first. This one would not lie flat because of the places where its folds had been hit by the framer's hammer. The tabletop, meeting the left edge of the canvas, hovered above a man's knees in gray britches. The subject was seated, one hand (his right) resting on the tabletop in shadow and reflected dimly into the wood's finish. The other hand, holding the end of the squirrel's chain, rested on the figure's thighs in the shadow beneath the table.

“Those hands are Copley's,” Roberto said. “I won't swear to it, not if this is a legal matter; but it's what they are.” Beside the table the man's plain waistcoat, and the gray jacket of his suit, rose to his shoulders where again the knife or razor blade had done its work. “Who hates Mr. Reed enough to torture him this way?” Roberto asked, awed.

Fred said, “It's worse. It's ignorance.”

“I'll put heat on it,” Roberto said. “But I can't make it go flat without lining it.”

The edges of the canvas matched exactly. The feet and calves had knees and thighs and trunk now; the squirrel had most of a captor. Fred had two-thirds of a painting.

“People like that—” Roberto started. “Although I do not believe in capital punishment because I do not myself care to be a murderer, nor do I wish to be a citizen of a country in which human life is so officially despised by law; still, in a situation such as this…”

“I have to see a man about a bridge,” Fred said. “Roberto, do what you can to protect this piece and start reversing the folds.”

“On my hot table I can line them both, putting them together so successfully you will not see the join unless you look for it,” Roberto said.

“I'm going after the head,” Fred told him. “Thanks for letting me come at such short notice.”

“As long as there's no rush, you are always welcome,” Roberto said.

*   *   *

Fred left his car next to Clayton's in Clay's space off Mountjoy Street, rather than prospect for an opening on Charles. Driving past Oona's he had seen the hand-lettered sign in the door, “Closed due to death of Oona.” He should let Marek know he'd created what some might take for a joke in poor taste.

He'd called Molly from New Bedford in the morning to touch base and warn her things were moving, that he might not get to Arlington for a day or two. There'd been nothing in today's paper about Oona's death, but it was too soon, and perhaps the death was not interesting enough. But Fred asked Molly to see what she could pick up from Dee.