Man With a Squirrel (16 page)

“Not really.”

“You want to come in and talk?” Bookrajian asked.

Fred told him, “My dance card's pretty full today, unless it's urgent.”

“We're gonna nail the little fuck,” Bookrajian said. “And you can tell him I said so.”

“To be frank, I was surprised you were happy with the accident theory,” Fred said.

“Are you kidding?” Bookrajian said again. “That turkey won't even tell us where he was that night between eight and midnight—which is when we finally got through to him on the old lady's phone. If you're a friend of his, tell him how that looks to some of the dumb, crass, plain old born-American assholes working my department,” Bookrajian said.

“I'll let him know.”

“Anything else I can help you with, sport?”

“That'll do it. Thanks,” Fred said.

“No problem.”

*   *   *

When Fred called the Carlyle Clay was out, leaving no message. If Clay were willing to enter the twentieth century, Fred would have had a machine on his desk to take messages. But Clay was convinced such a convenience would “let them know what we are doing.” Fred drove into Cambridge shortly after noon and was just in time to spot Manny leaving Kwik-Frame, and to follow him down Massachusetts Avenue toward Harvard Square. Manny crossed Linnaean Street and took himself into a Mexican restaurant, where he ordered at the counter and then sat at a tippy Mexican revival table to wait for his refried or otherwise reconstituted lunch. Fred ordered iced tea, carried it to Manny's table, and sat across from him.

Manny looked up. He'd been studying the inlaid chips of colored ceramic making a semi-Olmec style design on the tabletop.

“Do you mind?” Manny said belligerently.

“Business,” Fred said. The man behind the counter called out, “Twenty-three.”

“Table's taken,” Manny announced, getting up. He strode the seven strides to the counter and returned with a loaded tray from which fat steam rose, wafting an afterthought of bean. Manny stood, holding his tray, staring belligerence. He himself smelled strongly of something intended to keep a person from smelling like sweat when aroused.

Fred said, “I noticed you work at Kwik-Frame and I want to ask about a picture you framed.”

“I'm on my lunch break.” Manny tucked into his tortillas, fajitas, burritos, enchiladas, or whatever they were, with meat.

“Please go ahead,” Fred said.

Manny stared at him, his eyes gobbling.

“A painting of a squirrel,” Fred continued. “The person said you did the framing. Of the squirrel.”

Manny swallowed. He took a drink of orange soda, using a straw. He sucked a long time, watching Fred. He picked up something brown, took a bite from it, and chewed. “The person? What person?” Manny asked.

“Person I got it from,” Fred said. “You recall doing the squirrel? Old picture on canvas. A lot of extra canvas bent around back.”

Manny swallowed. He took a bite of something else that started brown but oozed green in protest when he put pressure on it. “We do a lot of squirrels,” he said. “Cats. Other animals. Mostly cats. The people go for cats.”

The storefront was loud with customers giving their orders, the cooks slamming dishes, and people making conversation over hasty lunch. Fred drank from his tea.

“Why do you care?” Manny asked.

“It could be worth money to the person who helps me find the owner of that picture.”

“You say you are the owner?”

“The one you framed it for,” Fred said. “Maybe they have the other part. The picture of the squirrel was cut from something bigger.”

Manny said, “I can't help you. But if I could, how would I find you?”

“I come by all the time.”

“You have an idea what the information is worth?” Manny asked. “Or what you're looking for if the other part of this canvas should come in, or if I hear about it?” Manny ate a piece of lemon. He was dressed for cold weather, wearing a deep-blue down jacket, open, over the yellow Mickey Mouse T-shirt he was working in today. “I don't like you following me here,” he said.

“Ten thousand dollars,” Fred offered. “If it's in reasonable condition. My guess is a guy at a table, dressed like George Washington, you know? He could even be wearing a wig.”

“I'll ask the other person in the store,” Manny said, through a large amount of something that had become tan. “You stop in sometime when I'm working, maybe I'll know something. Unless you want to give me a number, or like that.”

“I move around so much,” Fred said. “Out of state half the time. You'd go crazy trying to reach me. I'll stop over when I'm in the area.”

Fred finished his tea and stood. Manny had a long way to go to clear his tray. The only way to maintain show-muscle like that was by wasting enormous amounts of energy.

Manny looked up and swallowed painfully. “That's a lot of money,” he said.

Fred shrugged. “Maybe in your business,” he said. “Not in mine.”

*   *   *

Fred drove into town along Charles Street, past Oona's closed shop, and parked next to Clay's car off Mountjoy.

When Clay telephoned at three, Fred was taking counsel with himself over the question of how, and how soon, to stop by Kwik-Frame again. The prospect of ten thousand unexpected dollars had settled firmly into Manny's head by now, and he'd be worrying how to maneuver his knowledge of Fred's quest into the best possible position for himself. When Fred assured Clayton that it was indeed himself at this end of the line, Clay said, “Concerning the research you are engaged in—your project, I fully acknowledge—but as long as I had the opportunity, I have been looking into the matter of the Copley fragment…”

Fred interrupted, “That's fragments now. Plural.”

A stunned pause on Clay's end. “Excellent, Fred. You made that woman sell us the rest of it? What does it look like?”

“It's not that simple,” Fred confessed. “Unfortunately. This will take some time. First you should know that Oona Imry is dead.”

It required twenty minutes to fill Clay in. Clay understood immediately that what he owned now was a grotesque. His passionate responsibility to the pure cause of art would prevent him from keeping the fragments separate and enjoying the expurgated details. He would, in due course, be obliged to have the two parts joined, and should they be unable to find the last part, no one would hang and enjoy the headless man with a squirrel. Its missing element would intrude too much. It could be seen only as an illustration.

“At any rate, Fred,” Clay continued, “as a matter of interest you might want to take these down as being of possible relevance—American portraits we know Copley executed but which are lost or thought to have been destroyed.”

Fred jotted down the information as Clayton reeled it off.

“There's Thomas Ainslie—too early to be ours, painted in 1757, but I might as well mention it. Then Benjamin Andrews of 1773. The wife was done in a companion piece, also unlocated. We know of them from Andrews's own letter to Henry Pelham, who was supposed to paint alterations in some of the landscape detail.”

“Pelham the half-brother and apprentice,” Fred said. “Maybe Pelham hocked them and … never mind.”

“The three-quarter-length portrait of Governor Francis Bernard which du Simetière saw hanging in Harvard Hall in 1767—that is missing. Wilkes Barber, of 1770, is not located. But that was a boy of four. A Mr. Barron was painted in New York in 1771, but I doubt ours is a New York portrait because there is no reason for it to have migrated north. But the thing to note in this case is that we know the size, fifty by forty inches, a standard size for Copley. Those must be the dimensions my painting had prior to the assault.

“But here, Fred, you might want to think about these three paintings said to have been destroyed in the Boston fire of 1872, by which time they belonged to a Peter Wainwright: Dr. John Clarke seated at a table and wearing a white wig; his wife, née Elizabeth Breame; and their son William.”

“Clarke,” Fred said. “That's the family Copley married into, isn't it? Wasn't his wife Susanna Clarke?”

“Same name but different family,” Clay said.

19

Clay careened down his list. Fred noted only the known portraits, acknowledged to be unlocated, that had any likelihood of corresponding to what they had: adult, male, originally fifty by forty inches, and painted in the Boston area reasonably close in time to the paintings containing the squirrel motif Copley was using in the Pelham and Atkinson portraits of 1765.

Captain Tristram Dalton of Marblehead, painted in 1767, was gone, missing (along with Mrs. D). Fred liked Dalton, and starred him. James Flucker he dismissed as too small, too late. Maybe Peter Oliver. He noted a missing John Hancock whose size and date were not recorded; a Benjamin Greene (no date) also destroyed in the 1872 fire.

“Never mind John Lane,” Clay said. “The evidence is conclusive that the Brooklyn Museum Copley called
Gentleman with a Cane
is in fact John Lane; hence Lane is not unaccounted for. Like many others who seem to have fallen from the face of the earth, he simply went to Brooklyn.”

Eliminating a string of missing New York portraits, Fred made note of Miles Sherbrooke (no date but the right size); G. W. Schilling (right date but the painting was last heard of in Utrecht, in 1769); James Scott (1766); Peter Traille; Joseph Webb; Joshua Wentworth (probably too late, since it first entered the record in 1774).

“I have to tell you,” Clayton concluded, “that of all these the one I favor is Captain Dalton. You will use your own judgment, Fred, but if I were to make a suggestion I would recommend looking for Dalton's trail in Marblehead. Being a captain he would have social standing and may be in the record, with his heirs.”

“I had him starred too,” Fred said. “But being a captain he might also have been British or Tory, and left town.”

“Drat the Revolution,” Clay said. “It is regrettable about that woman. Please, if you can do so without attracting attention to our interest, present flowers in an appropriate manner to her family. She does have family?” Clay had followed some turn of reasoning from the Revolution back to Oona Imry.

“Are you familiar with a young Hungarian pianist named Marek Hricsó?” Fred asked. “He is her nephew.”

“I have heard him play,” Clay said. “The man is a genius with his hands. By all means, give him flowers.”

“An eccentric individual,” Fred said. “Would you agree?”

“The word I prefer is ‘genius,'” Clay said. “It is true he will not play in public.”

“But you have heard him.”

“By invitation. I am not the public.”

*   *   *

When Manny left Kwik-Frame, Fred fell in behind him, wearing the Irish hod-carrier's cap Molly had given him, and, to complete the disguise, his red plaid jacket. The framer had changed to his bodyguard outfit of tweed jacket, white shirt, and tie. Fred was prepared for another dodging sequence on the subway. Manny, however, ignored the entrance to the T at Porter and stayed on the far side of Massachusetts Avenue. Fred followed a generous block behind as the man made his way toward Harvard Square, passing the site of his Mexican lunch without giving it a glance.

It was cold for March, dark for March, and wet for March—in fact, typical March. Traffic was heavy and slow. Manny marched toward the center of Harvard's metastasizing sprawl and hooked right along the edge of the Common (
UNDER THIS TREE GEORGE WASHINGTON
 …), jumped a fence, cut through a soccer game being played by eight-year-old girls, and pushed across Garden Street at Appian Way, skirting Radcliffe admissions buildings and the grad school of education.

“Left on Brattle,” Fred muttered. “And take me to your leader.”

Manny moving through pedestrian traffic made Fred think of a cow grazing—steady and relentless, though a good deal faster. He made his way past the small shops and the office buildings, until he found a doorway next to Nini's Corner and strutted into it. It must be the building Molly had visited yesterday, where Cover-Hoover had her office suite. Fred hung a block back and watched. After ten minutes Manny came out again in the close company of Eunice Cover-Hoover.

The doctor was tall, graceful, and elegant. From the newspaper photograph, and after Molly's description, there was no mistaking her. She wore a long black coat that gave a capelike impression. Anjelica Huston trying to pass for Tonya Harding, Molly had said. Or had Fred said it to Molly? Manny looked up and down the street with exaggerated caution before he gave Cover-Hoover a nod and the two turned left. They did not speak to each other. Cover-Hoover moved along the sidewalk like a lady traveling with a bodyguard from a rental agency which should be preparing to receive a nasty note from the customer. Manny fawned like a beaten dog who smells bacon on his master's hands.

Fred stayed behind them. He had hoped Manny would lead him to the remaining portion of the Copley, but this detour would also have some value, giving him something to contribute to Molly's research. They took the first cab in rank in front of the Harvard Coop, across from Harvard Yard.

“I'm interested where that pair is going,” Fred told his driver. “If you don't mind keeping a couple cars behind them.”

The driver nodded an angular gray face leading up to yellow hair in a single braid she had looped over her right shoulder. She was in her middle thirties and drove like a stock-car racer in traffic. She did not take her eyes off the road ahead, or off the cab Fred wanted followed, as they moved into the stream and went with it around the elbow at whose crook sat the Charles Hotel; then down to Memorial Drive and left at the river. Without looking back the driver said, “You got any idea where they are going, in case we lose them at a light?”