Man With a Squirrel (19 page)

“I was in the neighborhood,” Fred said.

“I see you,” Manny said. He glared. The muscles in arms and neck and jaw bulged and frisked around the smiling Mickey on the pink T-shirt.

“Ten grand worth of Mexican food is a big pile,” Fred reminded him.

Manny crossed his arms, saying, “You want to tell me why she's worth that kind of money to you? You want to tell me who's willing to pay that kind of money to find her? You think I'm dumb enough to listen to this shit about a painting? You think I'm pissing crazy?” Manny bounced on the balls of his feet like someone who has seen and believed many films about martial arts. “I'm warning you. Leave her alone.”

“Leave who alone? I want the rest of a picture I bought. I'm not looking for anybody. Good luck to you if you find her.”

Manny started bulling toward Fred, using his overinflated chest as a battering ram. The man displayed the kind of bulk that is grown to match the fantasies of solitude. It was comicbook stuff.

“I'll stop back some time when you're not busy,” Fred promised. “The offer of ten thousand is good, but it is not for a person. Your clients are your business. The offer is for a painting.”

“This painting means fuck-all to me,” Manny said. “I don't know squat about it. Don't come back. I'm warning you.”

22

Fred met Molly as she was coming out of the library at five o'clock. “I have my car, Fred,” she said. “Or did you want a ride?”

“I have wheels. Just wanted to say hello.”

“Hello, then.” Molly wore Sam's red coat with the hood down, so the cold drizzle beaded in her dark curls. Fred looked for the green of her eyes to reflect in the drops of water falling between himself and Molly.

“I have to meet with Clayton,” Fred said. “I don't know when I'll get back.”

“You can sleep in Charlestown,” Molly said. Fred walked beside her to the parking lot next to the library, where their cars were parked across from each other. “If you're embarrassed or hurt sleeping downstairs.” She opened her car door, which she would never lock, and got in.

“Why don't I sit with you a minute and visit?” Fred suggested.

“A minute. The kids expect me.”

Fred folded his body into the front seat next to her. “If we're having a fight I wish you'd clue me in. I don't know where to start. I can sleep on your couch, or the couch in my office, or uproot whoever is squatting in my room in Charlestown, or under a bridge as far as that goes. I'd rather be in your bed.”

Molly stared out the windshield at the traffic on Broadway, and at people maneuvering in and out of the grocery store on the opposite side of the street. “I'm willing to fight if you tell me what we're fighting about,” Fred went on.

“There's no fight, Fred. You're posturing and I am being irrational. Put that aside a minute. Do you know Cover-Hoover's operation has been accepted by the attorney general of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a nonprofit foundation? Not only tax exempt, but capable of receiving charitable donations?”

“It figures,” Fred said. “So they have a board and the rest of it? You've been looking into the corporation?”

“Cover-Hoover's the executive director, as well as president of the board. She draws a salary. That's in addition to whatever Holmes College pays. And the income from her books.”

“Ah,” Fred said. “Thus she affords her disinterested generosity toward her clients, who also provide her with salable stories?”

“The stated purpose of the foundation,” Molly went on, “is to sponsor a halfway house for abused children who have become adults. It is called Adult-Rescue, Inc. She goes in for hyphens. There is no mention of devils or devil worship in the charter—which would have made it harder to get past the lawyers and IRS types, I don't care how snowed they might be by the trappings of good works. The charter sounds like clean, misguided social work.”

A couple of elderly women in scarves and raincoats came out of the library into the parking lot, looked for a car, laughed at the mistake they were making in trying the wrong one, and finally selected one they could get into.

“A friend of mine, a good friend, whom I hadn't talked to in a couple of years, called me recently and told me he lost two kids in a scam like this one, out in San Francisco,” Molly said. “Similar story but without the devils—the same theme, one generation turned against another, in a mess where you can't tell which is which between delusion and evidence and precious
feelings
that are symptoms offered in proof of forgotten crimes. We are all prone to gravity, Fred.” She was not answering him, but enunciating a tangent that might apply if Fred was patient. “Aside from gravity the biggest threat to a human person is self-delusion. I don't care if she's paid for it or not, what that woman is doing is perverse, because it pretends to be conversation. But the proper function of conversation is, or should be, that each side of it continually makes a balance or correction for the native self-delusion existing in each of its participants. It's our job as humans. It's the contract we must assume between each other. If I feel something imaginary crawling up my cheek and you point to it and scream, ‘Look out, a bug!' I'm going to believe it. I'm going to jump and smack my face.”

“So what did I say?” Fred protested.

“Don't be such an asshole, Fred,” Molly said. “I'm not talking about you. Listen a minute. I'm ashamed of myself. I've got this creepy undermining going on that started with Doctor Loving-Caring and Ophelia and found a willing playmate in my native scheme of self-delusion. I can't help it's there. I can't shake it.

“I'm preoccupied with the ridiculous notion that my poor old dad, after a night hauling and lifting crates and barrels in the warehouse in Watertown, used to come flying home and drag his daughter out to fuck with goats and kill babies at crossroads and the rest of it, all the seventeenth-century junk Cover-Hoover has been withdrawing from her clients' revived memories. I can't stop shuddering with fear and loathing at the idea.”

The bare trees scratched against the wet darkness, on the far side of the library's lawn in front of the stores on Broadway. Molly said, “I can't stop asking myself, ‘What does Ophelia know I don't?' Even if it's all made up?'

“I'm going to stop that woman. She was so convincing when she touched my stupid scar and jerked her finger back, saying ‘It's hot.' I feel it myself now, two and three times a day. It's hot.”

Fred said, “I will sleep on your couch until you feel like having a visitor in your bed again.”

“The children are talking,” Molly said.

“That's OK.”

“They think one of us is a heel and they can't decide which.”

“That's fair.”

“They think you're going to leave, Fred.”

“Not until we have a fight and one of us loses.”

*   *   *

Clay invited Fred up to his living quarters. “The occasion of your discovery calls for strong drink,” he said on the house phone. He'd been listening for Fred to come in. It was almost seven. Fred had not been upstairs for several months. He was basically aware of which paintings came down from Clayton's walls, and which were selected to replace them. The circulating exhibition in Clay's rooms was handled, under Clay's supervision, by the husband-and-wife team that came in twice a week to polish Clay's spotless quarters.

Clay met him at the top of the spiral staircase. He had removed his suit jacket and replaced it with the scarlet dressing gown that proclaimed him to be in an advanced state of leisure. “Congratulations, Fred,” he said. “Have a glass of crème de menthe.”

“Let me join you in spirit and accept a beer if you have one,” Fred said. “Or ginger ale or soda water. Anything wet.”

Clay disappeared into his kitchen. Fred looked around the living room. He'd never heard Clay's grand piano played. The portrait of Clay's wife, born Prudence Stillton, who had died so quickly and so tragically after their marriage, gazed out of her silver frame, which stood on the Kashmir shawl that draped the piano. The room was done in reserved Boston Antique: a style that falls between French and English, and between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. From Fred's brief glimpse of the furniture and china vases and ormolu clocks beneath Sandy Blake's underwear, she could have provided things to complement or match Clay's.

What stood out, and the only part of the setup Fred was kin to, were the paintings hanging on the stolid green walls of the large room. The current program included an early female human nude by Chase, looking like the young painter's homage to Velázquez's
Rokeby Venus;
a Géricault sketch of a madwoman; a huge late-seventeenth-century Dutch flower piece Fred and Clay had despaired of identifying further.

Clay's sideboard between the gold-draped floor-to-ceiling bow windows overlooking Mountjoy Street carried a silver tray with the cut-glass decanter of green liqueur and two snifters to rub it in. Clay had been waiting for Fred before himself indulging.

“It is Amstel,” Clay said, entering with a filled glass mug in one hand and a silver bowl of crackers in the other. He poured a glass of sweet green and lifted it in a toast, then sat in an armchair near the window while pointing another chair out for Fred.

“Now,” Clay said. “Tell me everything.”

*   *   *

After fifteen minutes there was no further discussion as to their first priority. They must get hold of the missing fragment. “It is a shame you could not overpower her,” Clay said. “A shame, I mean to imply, about the ethical imperative. It is eight o'clock. We'll go now. At least I can offer a new face, and a different approach.”

Clay went upstairs and came down again, having changed back to his suit jacket, and carrying both a checkbook and six thousand dollars in cash. “It is all I have on hand,” Clay said, putting on his coat. “I agree with you, Fred, the thing to do is to acquire the fragment now and make adjustments later as needed. We don't want to take unfair advantage, not indefinitely. Not if there is an alternative that's practicable.”

Each drove his own car, Clay following Fred in his golden Lexus. They parked and conferred at the corner of Hay and Mount Auburn, and Fred pointed out the building where, if Fortune blinked, Sandy Blake was, unbeknownst to herself, preparing to sell Clayton the final installment on the Copley.

Clay said, hesitating before he advanced to the fray, “Will that young woman expect me to rape her also?”

“On that you're on your own.”

“A person who can do such shocking violence to a painting,” Clay said, holding back, “it gives one pause. However, as you say, the cause is just. My approach shall be straightforward.” He patted the inside pocket of his jacket, where the cash rested.

Standing on the sidewalk they must have looked like anarchists discussing the final details in a plot to bomb or purchase or otherwise dispose of St. Paul's Church, which rose nearby in its brick Italian-Colonial way.

“If Miss Blake is not at home,” Clay said, “I am thinking ahead, Fred. In that case would it be wisest for you simply to break in and—no, I suppose not.”

The ethical imperative again.

Fred sat in his car and watched Clay approaching the stairs to the building's entrance. He looked elegant and out of place. Fred rolled down the front windows and drove down the block, keeping behind Clay. If Clayton was admitted, Fred wanted to hear when Sandy started screaming so he could pop in and give Clay the benefit of a corroborating witness. Clay climbed the stairs and pushed the buzzer, standing on the porch in his black cloth coat. The wind blew his wad of white hair around. If Sandy was expecting a visit from the Evil One, she might not be surprised to find Clayton Reed on the stoop.

The door opened. Clay talked to the opening. Fred saw him nod, then shake his head slightly. Clay raised his right hand behind him in the gesture he and Fred had agreed on, which acknowledged that it was Sandy Blake, and by herself, answering the door.

Clay went inside. Fred double-parked in front of the building. Sandy Blake's third-floor windows were lit, and the blinds drawn.

Fred recalled Molly's rueful observation in the car, earlier that evening, that sanity and culture are the continuing result of human disagreement expressed in conversation.

Cover-Hoover seduced her patients, if Molly was right, by guiding them in the direction they were already tilting, while at the same time propping them up, and so becoming a structural necessity. Fred had not realized how deeply Molly had been disturbed by her two hours with Eunice Cover-Hoover. Molly was normally a balanced, sane, and cynical observer; but she had predispositions of her own. Whatever old strands of grief, fear, love, hate, shame, anger, affection, jealousy, chagrin, pleasure, or longing existed in the elements of Molly's being that reflected her relation with her father—those had been tweaked and strummed. Ophelia was a fool to hand such an effective opening to Cover-Hoover. And Cover-Hoover was cruel, and maybe something still more common, to use it: carelessly stupid and self-important, as abetted by avarice.

Part of the setup of this caregiving was that it forced or tricked the patient into a child's posture of submission. Sandy Blake had been made not just submissive, but aggressively impotent. It is not invariably the organism's most practical defense to faint when threatened.

Clay had been inside about ten minutes. Fred could see clear down to the river. The body of water itself was dark, and reflected lights moving on the far side, from traffic between the water and Harvard Business School. The length of Clay's absence began to make him uneasy. Clay was in his own fashion a genius at negotiation. He came on as such a nitwit that a person's instinct was frequently to help him, or to take advantage. Whichever approach Clay's targets selected, often enough they found they'd assisted him in buying something they had not meant to sell—and for less than they wanted.