“Cream or sugar, Mister Fletcher?”
“Just the coffee will be fine.”
“I spent a pleasant half hour reading you this morning—your monograph on Edgar Arthur Tharp, Junior. I should have read it before this, of course, but it was unknown at the Athenaeum until I requested it.”
“You, do your homework.”
“Tell me, was it originally done as a doctoral thesis? It had no university imprimatur on it.”
“I did it originally about that time in life, yes.”
“But you’ve only printed it recently? Of course you’re still not much older than the average graduate student. Or are you one of these people blessed by the eternal appearance of youth, Mister Fletcher?”
Horan was a far more attractive man than Fletch had expected. In his early fifties, he was slim but heavily shouldered. His features were perfectly even. Without wrinkles, his complexion had to have been cosmetically kept. Over his ears, his hair, brushed back, was silver, not gray. Hollywood could have sold tickets to films of him dancing with Audrey Hepburn.
“Of course,” he continued after Fletch’s silence, haven’t yet gotten my enthusiasm up for the bulk of American artists. Cassat, Sargent, all. right, but your Winslow Homers and Remingtons and Tharp all seem indecently robust.“
“Michelangelo and Rubens you would not call robust?”
“The action in the work is what I mean. The action, the moment, in the bulk of American work seems so existential. It is overwhelmed by its own sense of confinement. It does not aspire.” Horan tasted his coffee. “I shall leave my lecturing for my class at Harvard, where I am due at twelve o’clock. About this Picasso?”
Fletch said, “Yes.”
Being offered a seat was one thing; being put in his place another.
“What is there to say about, the work I haven’t already said?” Horan asked the air. “It may not exist. Then again it may. If it exists, where it? And can it be authenticated? Believe it or not, the job of authentication is easier, now that the old boy is dead. He was prone to claims works he liked, whether he did them or not, and to deny works he probably did do, if he didn’t like them. Then, after we find it, there is the question of whether whoever owns the work is willing to sell, and for how much. You may have come a long way for nothing, Mister Fletcher.”
Fletch said nothing.
“Or did you really come to Boston to expand upon your work on Tharp?”
“Actually, I did,” Fetch said. “ I’m thinking of trying his biography.”
Horan’s forehead creased.
“Well,” he, said. “If I can be of any help… Introduction to the Tharp Family Foundation…”
“Thank you.”
“You want the Picasso purely for your private collection?”
“Yes.”
“You represent no one else?”
“No one.”
“There is the question of credit, Mister Fletcher. Most of the people I deal with, I’ve dealt with for years, you understand. Other than your monograph, privately printed….”
“I understand. The Barclough Bank in Nassau will establish whatever credit for me you require.”
“The Bahamas? That might be very useful.”
“It is.”
“Very well, sir. You mentioned you have a photograph of the Picasso?”
Fletch removed the envelope from his inside jacket pocket. He placed the photograph on the table.
“The photograph was made from a slide,” he said.
“As I thought,” Horan said, picking it up. “Cubist. And Braque did not do it.” He tapped the photograph against his thumbnail. “But we don’t know if Picasso did.”
Fletch stood up.
“You’ll make enquiries for me?”
“By all means.”
“How long do you think it will be before you know something?”
Horan was following him.
“I’ll get on the phone this afternoon. It may take twenty minutes, or it may take twenty days.”
On a little table next to the closet door was a copy of the New York Times. Fletch’s notoriety had not penetrated the Horan Gallery. He looked at the front page.
“I never bother with the Boston newspapers,” Horan said.
“Not even the society pages?”
Horan held his coat for him.
“I believe anything of sufficient importance to warrant my attention will appear in the New York Times.”
Horan opened the door. The houseman, still in his apron, waited on the landing to show Fletch out.
Fletch said, “I’m sure you’re right.”
Eight
Apparently doing nothing but consulting his map, Fletch stopped across the street and looked at the Horan building.
On each side of the roof, along the lines where the building joined with roofs of buildings to its left and right, ran a high, spiked iron fence. Its forward ends curved over the edge of the roof, fanning halfway down the fifth story. The windows on the third, fourth, and fifth storeys were barred, too.
Ronald Horan liked his security.
Using his map, Fletch crossed to Boylston Street and walked into Copley Square.
There, at the State Street Bank and Trust Company—after long, albeit courteous, delays, interviews with everyone except the most junior teller, proving his identity over and over again, including showing his passport, listening five times to the apologetic explanation that “all this is for your own protection, sir”—he picked up the twenty-five thousand dollars in cash be had had sent ahead. He took the money in fifty and one hundred dollar denominations.
He observed how much easier it always is to put money into a bank than it is to take it out. Even one’s own money.
“That’s what banks are for, sir.”
“Of course.”
Then he lunched on a tuna fish sandwich and Coke.
He taxied to five used car lots, in Boston, Brookline, Arlington, Somerville, and Cambridge, before he, found precisely the van he wanted. It was last year’s Chevrolet, light blue, with an eight-cylinder engine, standard shift, heating, and air conditioning. He paid cash for it and had the garageman replace all four tires. The garageman also obliged him by providing the legally necessary insurance for the van, through his sister-in-law, who ran an office across the street. The insurance bill was outrageous in relation to the cost of the vehicle.
Comparing the map with the list of garages for rent he had torn from the newspaper while going back to town in the taxi, he told the driver to go to the Boston underground garage. It was not far from his apartment. Once at the garage, he rejected it immediately—there would be no privacy there, typical of most government-run facilities the world round. He wanted Walls.
He walked to a garage advertised on River Street, even closer to his apartment. First he woke up the housekeeper left in charge of the negotiation by its owner. She had to find the key. In broken down, red house shoes, describing her osteitis in jealous detail, she showed him the garage. The monthly rent was exorbitant. But the place had brick walls and a new, thick wooden door. He paid two months’ rent in cash and took the key, as well as a signed receipt (made out to Johann Recklinghausen) shortly after the interminable time it took the woman to find the receipt book.
He advised her to see a doctor.
After standing in line for forty-seven minutes at the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles at 100 Nassau Street before being able to present his driver’s license, purchase agreement marked “Cash—Paid,” and application for insurance, he was given his vehicle registration (for a light blue Chevrolet caravan) and two license plates.
They attached his license plates for him at the used car lot in North Cambridge.