Socolow turned back to Charlie Riggs. “Doc?”
“Who knows? Maybe it was the weather. It’s well known that violent crime goes up seven to ten percent during a heat wave.”
“C’mon, Doc. You can do better than that.”
“Sapiens nihil affirmat quod non prohat.”
Socolow squeezed his eyes shut. He looked like he had a migraine.
“A wise man states as true nothing he cannot prove,” Charlie translated.
“Good advice for opening statement,” Socolow agreed, “but I’m looking for some leads here.”
Charlie shrugged and Socolow turned away to speak to one of the cops. Before opening his mouth, Socolow swung back to Charlie Riggs. “Where?”
“Where what?” Charlie asked.
“The potato silencer. Where was it used before?”
“Why, Russia, of course,” the bearded wizard said.
12
harlie Riggs shoved an oversized book in front of me, tapped the cover with a pudgy forefinger, and leaned back in his chair, chewing a cold pipe.
“Not another one, Charlie. My eyes are bleary, and I need a beer.”
“Perhaps if you’d had a well-rounded education, this wouldn’t be necessary.”
“Hey, I studied every linebacker’s assignment in the split six and knew every cheerleader by the shape of her thighs, so give me a break.”
Charlie tsk-tsked his chagrin at the decline of the liberal arts. We were on the second floor of the downtown library, huddled into a corner with every book Charlie could find on Russian art museums. After five hours, everything looked alike. Still, I worked, looking at pictures and turning pages like a robbery victim scanning mug shots.
I had told Charlie that Soto’s painting looked “sorta, I dunno, modern.” Charlie regarded me skeptically, then gave me a crash course on Russian art at the turn of the century-Korovin, Vrubel, Konchalovsky, Mashkov, and a bunch of other names that were meaningless to me-but that was only the beginning. The Russians were great collectors. Prior to the Revolution, Charlie told me, the nobility had gathered the finest artwork from throughout Europe. So here I was, leafing through books I had successfully managed to avoid in pursuit of more or less higher education. We had finished the Italians, Dutch, Germans, English, and Spanish, and were halfway through the French. I had overdosed on winged horses, Madonnas, and naked women who obviously never took high-impact aerobics.
“If you were able to describe the painting with any degree of particularity, I could identify it, and I do not pretend to be an expert. Even a basic class in art history-”
“Friday afternoons from three to six,” I said.
“What?”
“Art History 101. Fall semester, every Friday from three to six P.M. Conflicted with road trips and Happy Hour chugging contests. Also kept out the guys who just wanted to meet coeds, which was the primary purpose in the days when we figured a woman’s chastity could be determined by her major.”
“No?”
“Sure. Art majors did and business majors didn’t. Petroleum engineering, no way. Elementary education, maybe, but you had to talk marriage first. The gals in creative writing would, especially during their Anais Ni’n phase.”
Charlie slipped his pipe into a buttoned pocket of his blue chambray shirt, harrumphed, and removed his crooked eyeglasses. He fiddled with the fishhook that held them together, breathed on the lenses, wiped them off on his shirt, and slid them absentmindedly on top of his bushy head. His eyes were weathered, the crinkled face a tanned hide, and he was starting to show his age.
“You miss your nap today, Charlie?”
“I can still outfish and outwork you, and don’t forget it.”
Outthink me, too, he could have said.
Charlie Riggs was as close as I had ever come to having a father, and my look must have betrayed some of the feelings I usually tucked deep inside, because he turned away and slid the glasses back down. Charlie limited his emotions to a healthy academic inquiry, and it wouldn’t do to give him a hug and get misty-eyed over personal feelings. But the truth for me was simple. I loved my Granny who raised me after my father was killed and my mom took off, and I loved Charlie who taught me just about everything worth knowing.
Clearing his throat, Charlie adjusted the reading lamp, tilting the shade so that the light shined directly on a slightly musty copy of the book, French Paintings from the Hermitage. If I didn’t get anything else from the book, I could bench press it a few times and have a healthy workout.
“Don’t you have the Cliffs Notes version?” I pleaded.
“Read,” the doctor ordered.
I groaned, stood up, did a few spinal twists and some deep knee-bends, then dropped to the floor, and just to get the blood flowing, powered through twenty-five one-armed push-ups with each arm. Except for my breathing, I didn’t make any noise, so the librarian didn’t say boo.
Then I sat down, groaned again, and opened the book. I’d already pored through directories of the Pushkin Museum, the State Picture Gallery, the Museum of Modern Western Art, the Gorky Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, and the Petrodvorets Palace. I had seen gloomy paintings of ships on a stormy sea by a Dutch artist, some dead birds entitled Trophies of the Hunt by an artist from Flanders, which must be a place I missed in geography, more virgins with child than I could count, and some fine Italian noble ladies with graceful necks and melancholy pusses.
I studied portraits of generals from the War of 1812, handsome bemedaled chaps with generous mustaches and muttonchops. I looked at Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, but couldn’t remember it fifteen minutes later. I saw The Madonna and Child by da Vinci and listened to a fine lecture by Charlie Riggs on the High Renaissance style.
“Doesn’t the Madonna’s tender gaze reflect the humanist dreams of the ideal man and a harmonious life?” he queried.
“Took the words out of my mouth,” I agreed.
Now I was looking at a bunch of stuff by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec, but I still didn’t find the painting I was looking for.
“What style was it?” Charlie asked for the umpteenth time. “Try to describe it more completely.”
“Green.”
“Green?”
“Like a lawn. And two figures, a man with large hands about to grab a nude woman. That’s all I remember. The faces were not well defined, sort of crude. Like I told you, Soto was going to say more about it, the name of the painter maybe, but Lourdes stopped him.”
I was leafing through some haystacks by Monet, some ripe women by Degas, some still lifes by Cezanne, and a bunch of Tahitians by Gauguin. Still, no husky guy about to pounce.
I stretched my arms over my head, intertwined the fingers of each hand, and cracked my knuckles with the clatter of a cue ball on a break. “Damn, I’m tired,” I announced, a tad too loud, and a young woman in a ponytail working at a nearby carrel gave me a grad student’s indignant glare.
Charlie didn’t notice. He was gazing into the stacks, his eyes unfocused. “The ugliness of murder and the beauty of art.” He sighed.
“What?”
“The irony, Jake, that the clue to man’s brutality may be buried in such works of beauty.” He pointed his empty pipe at the pile of books. “When I see all this, my first thought is how far we’ve come. Five million years ago, our ancestors were tree-dwelling apes in tropical rain forests. The strongest males ruled by either killing or banishing their rivals. When the climate cooled, the apes came out of the trees, stood erect, and foraged for food, mostly seeds. Still, the largest and fiercest controlled the others by force. Another two million years or so later, the climate cooled again, and the australopithecines developed. They were meat eaters, and despite their evolution and loose society, they were still violent toward one another.”