Read Online Man With a Squirrel by Nicholas Kilmer - Free Book Online Page B

looking at one of the labels for a set of lurid post-Impressionist tortoises.
    Oona winked. “If you price them what they are worth, people think they are junk,” she said. “This reassures them they are not making a mistake. They can trust their eye, which tells them to like this. What can I do?”
    Fred had a drink of his coffee. Oona was taking her time.
    â€œAnd,” Oona went on, “not only did we speak together of the great Hungarian composers Jenö Hubay and Ferenc Liszt, Bartók, Kodály, and Dohnányi, but the painters Szinyei-Merse and Béla Iványi-Grünwald, and István Czók…”
    â€œJesus!” Fred said.
    â€œNot just Mihály Munkácsy, who everyone knows because he tried to pass for French.” Oona spat into an elephant leg lined with china: an umbrella stand.
    â€œYou took to Clay then, did you?” Fred said. He finished his coffee and, with permission from Oona’s nod, tossed the cup into the same elephant leg.
    â€œWe spoke of Gyula Krúdy, whom Mr. Reed compares favorably to Proust,” Oona said, putting a price on the head of a gaping china sparrow with salt holes in its throat. “We became great friends, although he did not care to leave his name. Fred, I am smitten. Whatever I have is his for the taking, as long as he will pay my price.”
    *   *   *
    â€œGyula Krúdy, huh?” Fred said to Clayton on the house phone. “Plenty of people have compared me favorably to Marcel Proust, but I don’t go on about it.”
    Clayton made a Hungarian sound—word or expletive. “I suppose I must go to Holland.”
    â€œOona is smitten,” Fred continued. “But she can control herself. You don’t have to interpose the whole Atlantic between your bodies.”
    A clinking from Clay’s end was his pencil point bouncing on the Wedgwood plate he kept on his upstairs desk for that purpose. “I don’t know what you are going on about, Fred,” Clay said. “I cannot leap the gap between your synapses.”
    â€œHolland?” Fred prompted.
    â€œUnless I ask you to go in my place,” Clay said. “But I suppose I should execute this errand myself.”
    Fred groaned. “You’ve thought of something Molly’s mother would call another wild blue herring, haven’t you, Clay?”
    â€œAgain, I am not following the zoological references, Fred.”
    Fred looked across his room at the pinned fragment with the squirrel. Big bright eye on the animal. “You found another excuse to stall on the Vermeer,” Fred said. “When all we need to do is easy as taking it to the dentist for an X ray.”
    â€œI’ll not have people shooting rays through my painting,” Clay proclaimed. “It alters cells.”
    Fred hung up. Indulging in argument on this subject would lead inevitably to fury. The issue of the Vermeer could come between them, as lasting and contentious as a messy divorce. Some time before, Fred and Clay—their paths of investigation crossing—had purchased at auction a nondescript study of salt-marsh haystacks painted, it was generally agreed, by Martin Johnson Heade. Clay’s research suggested that a nineteenth-century North Shore widow, careless of posterity’s shifting taste, had given Heade a painting by Vermeer, which she disliked, to paint over.
    The hope and expectation was that Fred, acting for Clay, had purchased a painting that, if one cared to think of it in such terms, was worth millions when the Vermeer was laid bare. But once he owned the picture, Clay refused to initiate direct examination of the possibilities. The one thing Clay and Fred agreed on was that both canvas and chassis were too old, and of the wrong origin, to be consistent with Heade. Clay wouldn’t have it tested and he wouldn’t have it looked at. It sat in the racks, uncleaned and unhousled.
    â€œHe’s like