Read Madonna of the Apes Online
Authors: Nicholas Kilmer
Tags: #FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Historical
Madonna of the Apes (27 page)
It was a good three hours before Fred was able to close the door on his guests, with their armed and uniformed escort, Suzette expressing brilliant surprise at the suggestion that she might be anything more than a hapless victim in this tragedy. Fred had had to accept the obligation to keep himself available here, at Bernie’s, where there was still nothing to read but Leonardo’s
Notebooks.
Then it took twenty minutes to try to explain the situation to Clayton on the telephone, honoring his paranoid version of secure communication by speaking as far as possible without using nouns.
“What chance is there that the villain saved the edges he sawed off? What chance that we can get them?”
“None,” Fred said. “What’s more, we can’t show any interest in doing it. We just breathe easy that nobody seems to miss the thing. It was a fair purchase. Don’t monkey with it.”
“What of the owner? The man—I mention no names, not on the telephone—from whose collection the item in question originates?”
“Before I telephoned you I made another call. On Bernie’s bill, if he tries the number, it will answer as
not in service.
The owner made a mistake risking a trip to Pekham Street. As soon as he arrives, he’ll be picked up. Among other things, people will wonder what he wants to buy, and where, for so much money. If he ever leaves this country at all, after our people are happy with his answers, he’s due for about twenty years of true discomfort in England.”
“And you. You are comfortable where you are?”
Fred looked around. Maybe he’d figure out how to make Bernie’s system play music. Maybe he’d clean up some, see if Mandy, when she came back Sunday night…no. That was done.
“I reckon,” he said. “If I get restless, I might make a library run. Got a piece of research pending.”
“I still can’t believe it,” Clay said cautiously. “Nobody, not even the professor, the expert, who should know his field, could see the
Madonna
for what it was, without the big frame, the dim lights, the trumpet music and the fawning tourists. Not even the expert. As we look further into its history, we will undoubtedly find that he is not the first man who read it wrong.
“What we ultimately do with the object you have in keeping there, I don’t know,” Clay continued, after he appeared to understand enough to keep him where he was. “You believe the man, I take it? I must resign myself to my loss?”
He was talking about the
Annunciation:
a passing figment.
“That’s my conclusion. It has to be a fraud. According to Dr. Mitchell. Of course, everyone in the art business lies. But in my opinion, Mitchell is the genuine exception.”
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