“So the survivors are worth a pile,” said Paddy, who understood supply and demand as well as the next man. “What’s the problem?”
Beaumont was lighting himself a cigarette. I wondered if the timing of that was a coincidence or if, after so many years spent acting in melodramas, he automatically inserted the pregnant pause.
“The problem is, Racine didn’t always sign her work. Especially her early work. The experts say this is a Racine, and that would be enough if she were dead. But she’s alive and rich and crotchety. She saw a photo of this painting in the catalogue of the dealer who sold it to me. Ever since then, she’s been telling all her artist cronies that it’s a fake, the hack work of an art student she’d had underfoot back then, a Mabel Tuohy. According to the aforementioned dealer, the painting did come from this Tuohy’s estate.”
“So you want us to talk with the art dealer regarding a refund?” Paddy asked, seizing what he took to be a handle on the situation.
Beaumont showed his teeth in his trademark grin as he shook his head. “No. I don’t want you to bump off Miss Racine, either. After a lot of haggling, she’s agreed to look at the actual painting. I want young Mr. Elliott here to take it to her. In Agujero, New Mexico.”
“Me?” I was roused now but good. “Why don’t you go yourself?”
“ ’Cause I’m off to Africa in the morning. Four weeks of bugs and bad food just to get a little footage we would have shot in a couple of afternoons on the back lot at Warners in the good old days.
“Besides, I’m counting on the Elliott charm to soften the old girl up.”
“Why would she need softening?” I asked. “Either she painted the damn thing or she didn’t.”
“Nothing’s that simple. Not in the art world. There’s always been this rumor floating around about Racine’s real reason for leaving New York. Seems she might have found her poet lover in bed with another woman. Mabel Tuohy, to be precise.”
2
Late the next afternoon, I kissed Ella, my very pregnant wife, goodbye and caught a Santa Fe Railroad sleeper out of Union Station. I switched to a local in Albuquerque for the short hop north to the railroad’s namesake city, which, ironically, was no longer on the main line.
Santa Fe was a sleepy town and squat, the buildings no taller than the trees and everything dwarfed by the surrounding mountains. I didn’t waste much time rubbernecking. I’d gotten my fill of scenery as I’d breakfasted on the Super Chief. Most of the passing territory had been brown and barren, the month being February. A very dry February, according to the character in the Gene Autry shirt who rented me an old Ford coupe with canvas bags of emergency radiator water slung across its hood.
Gene gave me directions to Agujero, telling me to drive north to Española, make a left, and keep going until I came to a town.
“Suppose I don’t come to a town?” I asked.
“Then drive till you see an ocean. You’ll be back in California. Sell the car and wire me the money.”
New Mexico through the Ford’s windshield was an improvement over what I’d seen through a train window. A few miles north of Santa Fe, the mountains came close enough for me to spot the snow in their shaded folds. There were dark blue mesas and towering pink buttes that would have set John Ford’s heart atwitter. The foreground was still dry sage and drier grass, but there were pine trees for variety, hundreds of fat ones, widely spaced and the height of a man on horseback.
Great country for an ambush, I thought, and the feeling stayed with me.
Agujero’s suburbs was a stand of cottonwood trees along a stony riverbed. The downtown consisted of a collection of adobe buildings around an adobe church. Exactly two human beings were in sight, men in straw hats who were drinking beer from cans in the middle of the main drag. I thought of asking them for one, but settled for directions to Gladys Glenn Racine’s house.
What I found just north of town was more a compound than a house. The buildings were one story and adobe, the main ones surrounded by a low mud wall that was itself surrounded by the best stand of trees I’d seen since leaving Santa Fe’s plaza: oaks and spruce and a giant mulberry.
I parked outside the waist-high outer wall and walked to an inner one, a wall of the house itself. It was holding up an old wooden gate right out of a Zorro movie. The Fairbanks silent version, not the Tyrone Power talkie. There was a man-size door set in the gate. I knocked on it, though I’d already seen some movement through gaps between the weathered boards.
Sure enough, the door was opened right away by a young man who made me think the gateway might be a shortcut back to Hollywood. He was handsome in the way old Hollywood had defined the term for the world, his features small and fine, his hair and brows black, his eyes not much lighter. His smile, on the other hand, was a pre-nicotine white, set off by a complexion that was a shade my side of Cesar Romero.
Tastes in leading men had changed since the war, as I knew from bitter experience. Pretty boys like Jose — as he introduced himself — could be found in every menial job around movieland. Jose had found his in Agujero. He was Gladys Glenn Racine’s assistant. And student, he added bashfully. I couldn’t help thinking of the late Mabel Tuohy.
“Torrance Beaumont wired us you were coming,” Jose said, mouthing the actor’s name reverently. He led me across an inner courtyard and through the room on its far side, the living room, Jose called it, though the only furnishings were adobe benches that flowed out of the whitewashed walls. When artificial light was needed, it was provided by a naked bulb that hung by its cord from the ceiling.
We exited through the back of the house and followed a pebbled walk to a smaller, lower outbuilding. “Gladys’s studio,” Jose said.
Also her bedroom. Off the entryway that Jose ushered me through, I caught a glimpse of a cot. The monk’s cell that held it was the size of the sleeping compartment the Santa Fe Railroad had rented me the previous evening.
Then I was in the equally barren studio, in the presence of the great woman herself. Gladys Glenn Racine was sixty-something and looked every day of it. Her straight gray hair was pulled back from a face that was all sharp edges and severe angles. Her skin was as sun-damaged as any I’d seen, and I lived in a town that worshipped the sun like nobody since the Aztecs.
Racine was seated on a stool before an easel, wearing an untucked and faded blue shirt and dungarees that looked brand new. She was facing the easel’s canvas, giving me the benefit of her hawk’s-bill profile. The artist acknowledged Jose’s presence first, flashing him a smile that took ten years off her. Twenty maybe. I received a damped-down version and a question.
“What do you think of my home, Mr. Elliott?”
“It’s a touch underfurnished,” I said. Never too early to get off on the wrong foot.
Racine’s voice was high and flat, and so was her laugh. Even so, it got Jose smiling. “Exactly as I like things,” she said. “Underfurnished. The more empty space you have, the more beauty can sneak in.”
She glanced toward the window behind her, and I realized that the subject had switched from her house to her adopted land. There was certainly a lot of empty space in sight, most of it deep blue sky. The lower half of the view consisted of chalky cliffs, which were represented on Racine’s canvas by wavy white lines.
“I’ll be in shortly, Jose,” she said.
He bowed and left us, taking the artist’s warmth with him.
“Is that the painting?” she asked, pointing to the flat case Beaumont had provided, the one that had made me feel like a traveling checkerboard salesman. “Leave it, please.”