The Golden Calves Read online

  A ghost of a smile indicated that Farr recognized the joke. “I suppose a forger’s trouble would be in simulating reverence. He’s apt to show too much or too little.”

  “And which does this?”

  “That’s what I can’t make out.”

  “Why should it show any?” Carol demanded.

  “Well, isn’t Mayan art largely of a religious nature? Those anthropomorphs and zoomorphs are all gods and goddesses or at least creatures of the spirit world. The man who made them must have worked for priests.”

  “Does that have to mean that he believed all the crap he heard from the priests?”

  Farr formed his lips into a circle of faint surprise. “One doesn’t tend to think of doubt among the Mayas. Like other early civilizations, theirs seems to have been marked by extreme conformity.”

  “Seems? To whom? And even if it was, that doesn’t mean the artists conformed. In their minds, I mean. Great artists never believe in anything but art.”

  “Really? Would you say that of the Middle Ages? Would you say it, for example, of the man who carved the figures on the north transept of Chartres?”

  Carol, exasperated, jumped up. “Well, of course there are always going to be exceptions. I’ll concede that a few stonecutters and glassmakers in the hysteria of the twelfth century may have believed that Jesus was born of a virgin and could walk on water. But the greatest artists, never! Do you think for a minute that Michelangelo and Leonardo weren’t laughing up their sleeves at their silly popes and bishops? That’s exactly what sets them apart from ordinary mortals. While the idiots of the human species were feeding each other to lions or flames, or cutting off their own balls for the gratification of sadistic deities, it was the artist who stood aside, knowing it was all grist for his own glorious mill! And that is why, too, now that the churches have fallen into disuse, or given place to nutsy California evangelists, the museums have become the true temples. The new godless are beginning to glimpse the terrible and wonderful truth that there is nothing on earth to worship but art!”

  “It’s an interesting thesis. Perhaps you should write a book on it.”

  “Oh, go soak your head.”

  “Yes, sir.” But Farr turned back in the doorway. “Actually, I think I’m going to agree with you about the snake.”

  “Of course you are.”

  Carol returned to his silent study of the coiled asp. Staring into the center of its rings, he tried mentally to drape them around his torso and then to tighten their grasp, to be crushed by a beast converted into a giant anaconda, which indeed perhaps it was, so that in becoming it, he would be it, and being it, be its creator, for the artist and his product had become indistinguishable. That sculptor had lived under a cloudless sky amid broad flat plains; he had climbed to the top of the pyramid temple to survey the green and yellow vegetation for miles and miles, and he would have come down to his atelier to put the heart of the country and his own heart into this curled-up apod. And he would have been happy, happy as a mortal could be!

  Damn the telephone.

  “Mr. Sweeters? The director would like to see you.”

  “Tell his high mightiness, good Miss Swayne, that I will come to him by and by.”

  He swore under his breath. Addams, like the beak-nosed warrior with the eagle headdress in the tablet leaning against the wall, could go slit his penis. What else was he good for? There may have been some sense, after all, in the bloodletting customs of the Mayas. Most administrators of any period were good for nothing but to shed their own blood, and if the populace chose to believe that this propitiated the gods, it may have been the best thing they could do. If they weren’t shedding their own blood, they’d sure as hell be shedding someone else’s.

  Double-damn the telephone.

  “Carol? It’s Anita. Can you still talk to me? Or am I such anathema up there it’ll cost you your job?”

  “If our little Napoleon has tapped this wire, I hope he’s listening in right now. Do you hear me, Addams? You’re ‘nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.’ ”

  “Heavens. You don’t suppose he’s really listening?”

  “If he is, you can tell him it’s from Lear. Kent to Oswald. For I doubt he got beyond Twelfth Night in high school.”

  “Oh, Carol, it’s good to hear that old tone again. I’ve missed you.”

  “If that is so, the ghost of a starved feline in the streets of Newport must be haunting you.”

  He heard the sharp intake of her breath.

  “Of course I’ve thought about that. I wouldn’t be I, would I, if I hadn’t? But do you know, Carol, I’ve wondered if I didn’t come down on you too hard about that incident. When I last saw my mother, she asked about you, and somehow she got it out of me about that cat. She told me I was a perfect idiot, that cats really could live off the streets in a city, that millions did—”

  “Ah, but did I know that? Did I care? No, I think you’re going to have to see me as the devil I am. I didn’t think twice about what was going to happen to that cat.”

  “But if I’d told you it was going to starve, Carol, and you’d believed me, you wouldn’t have shut it out, would you?”

  Well, how far did he really want to push it? “Perhaps not.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t have. But to get to the point of my call. I really need to discuss with you what’s going on with Miss Speddon’s things. You couldn’t possibly stop here after work, could you? I’m still in her house till it’s sold. There’s only the caretaker and me, but I could give you a drink.”

  “I’d love to see that house,” he exclaimed, with genuine enthusiasm. “And have a look at her treasures.”

  “You mean what’s left of them. I’m afraid you’ll be sadly disillusioned. About six, then?”

  When she rang off, he resumed his contemplation of the snake, half-ashamed at his own satisfaction at being exonerated for the fate of the cat. But there was no denying that she had hurt him badly in that matter—and why? Because he blamed himself for what he had done? Of course not. He wouldn’t have given a damn if that cat had starved. The world was full of cats. And yet he had hated appearing a brute to this girl. Why? Because he respected her judgment of men? Hardly. Had she not once admired Addams? Might she not still? Because he had fallen in love with her? That was hardly his style. Or was it simply that he was afraid, if he started caring about the things she cared about, that he would turn into the kind of nut that refused to swat a mosquito?

  But he wasn’t concentrating on the snake. The man who had made it could have been forgiven the massacre of a thousand cats for his carving of one. Had not even the priests felt that? Surely the artisan had been exempted from the bloodletting and human sacrifice of the time. Would Leo X have burned Raphael for even the most egregious heresy, or Henry VIII put his bloody paws on Holbein?

  “Well, if the curator won’t come to the director, I guess the director must come to the curator.”

  And there was Addams grinning in the doorway. Oh, for the crimson altar, the obsidian knife!

  “I see you have put away all traces of your uncrating,” Mark continued.

  “Oh, I am always very neat, very tidy,” Carol retorted blandly. “What can I do for you, Herr Direktor?”

  “You can talk to me about that serpent. You needn’t tell me how you got it. I already know.”

  Mark seated himself now in the chair opposite Carol and placed on his desk, so that it faced the curator, a typed sheet under the engraved letterhead of the Mexican Consulate.

  Carol disdained to more than glance at the document. “I bought it in Zürich. You can rest assured that the museum got unimpeachable title.”

  “But it was illegally exported.”

  “So? Do they claim it was stolen?”

  “Not in so many words. They claim it was smuggled out of the country.”

  “The purchaser in good faith of a smuggled item has good title. The offende
d nation is left with its remedy at law against the smuggler.”

  Mark’s look was quizzical. “And that doesn’t give you any trouble? Buying hot stuff?”

  “It depends on what you call hot. A great many artifacts turn up on the auction block that have been taken out of Turkey or China or Mexico, or where have you, without due observance of all border formalities. Many come through because custom officers—or perhaps even higher authorities—have been bribed. Is it our duty to maintain clean government in the Third World? That’s quite a job you have given yourself, Mr. Director.”

  “But don’t you see, Carol, you’re encouraging the illegal traffic in works of art?”

  “How could works of art be better cared for than in the great museums? Didn’t Lord Elgin see the Turkish militia taking pot shots at the friezes in the Parthenon?”

  “What about the dealers who dynamite archeological sites as the quickest way to unearth stuff they can sell?”

  Carol glared at that hated boyish face. He always found the dynamiting argument distressing. “What do you propose to do with my snake?”

  “Send it back to Mexico.”

  Carol jumped up in dismay. “But we own it, Addams!”

  “Then we’ll own it in Mexico.”

  “You can’t do that! It belongs to the museum. Who do you think you are, anyway, that you can dispose of the collection?”

  “Ill submit it to the board, of course.”

  “We’ll see what Claverack will say to that.”

  “We’ll also see what Peter Hewlett will say. He has promised me his backing in all such questions of restitution.”

  Carol went to the window and stared out despairingly at the park. Of course Addams was right about the chairman. Claverack would never oppose Hewlett over a jade snake. Oh, yes, he might take up the cudgels if it were a question of giving up some modern canvas of a naked old man with his balls for a head and a head for his balls, but confronted with something beautiful, something perfect … what did any of them care?

  “Well, I hope you’ll be satisfied when my vision serpent turns up at the Met or the Natural History. They won’t be so fussy.”

  “I think you’ll find they will be. There’s a new spirit abroad, Carol.”

  “And I despise it! Why worry about the degenerate heirs of great civilizations? What do they know or care about their glorious predecessors? And what do you, Mark Addams? What are you but a cheap huckster who ripped off the misguided old virgin who put her faith in you? You talk to me of ethics? You?”

  Mark had turned very red; his fists were clenched. “I’d better get out of here before I smack your yellow face.”

  “Yeah. You’d better.”

  “And get that snake ready for shipment. Today! And I’ll be making a study of every damn thing you’ve bought since you’ve been with the museum.”

  “Do that. Clear the galleries for the pink garbage cans and plastic urinals of Claverack’s Modern America wing. That’s what he made you director for, isn’t it?”

  Still trembling with indignation, minutes after Mark had stamped from the room, Carol was nonetheless able to reflect, with a hard dry little chuckle, that Addams would never dare to fire him now. The director was too “virtuous” to wish to be tainted with a motive of personal resentment.

  Seated with Anita in the long living room at 36th Street before a tray with half a bottle of whiskey and two tumblers—no hors d’oeuvres, he noted regretfully—he contemplated the bare spaces left by the removed portraits on the peeling walls.

  “You’d think your great patroness had been dead a hundred years.”

  “Well, isn’t that always the way with houses? They manage to put up a brave front, to stick it out so long as their owner is living, and then they suddenly go to pieces.”

  “And have the pictures all been sold?”

  “Well, not, happily, the ones that were in this room. Even Claverack wanted to keep the Copleys. When they’ve been cleaned they’ll be hung in the front hall of the museum.”

  “That’s a relief. I thought we were going to get Boy Masturbating in Swimming Tank by his newest protégé.”

  “No, that will be the showpiece of the Modern America gallery. To be built with Speddon money, of course. But with nothing of hers in it but her portrait by Larry Rivers. The one that shows her as a kind of cipher in a gallery of empty frames.”

  “Hardly very kind.”

  “It’s a work of art, anyway. Which is more than one will be able to say about its companions. Miss Speddon was always amused by it. But, then, she could take a joke about herself.”

  “What about the Speddon period rooms?”

  “Some will be kept, but completely redecorated. The three main ones will be replaced by post World War Two confections.”

  “And their contents?”

  She shrugged. “Deaccessioned, I presume.”

  “What about the other things in this house? And the warehouse?”

  “Well, the dolls, as you know, are already gone. And more than half the primitives. He did, I admit, keep some of the best of these, but that was thanks to Mrs. Pinchet.”

  “Who is?”

  “The niece. Who has something of an eye. The nephew, Tom, is a complete philistine. More than half the silver and porcelain has been sold.”

  “But how can Claverack do that? Does he have the legal right?”

  “It’s not deaccessioning, you see. He claims he’s acting under his broad powers as executor. The museum was left the artifacts, but the will gives him the power to define them.”

  “But isn’t the nephew an executor, too?”

  “Yes, but he’s putty in Claverack’s hands. He’s a spendthrift who’s gone through most of his own money and thinks he owes it to Claverack that he got a sixth of his aunt’s estate. A notion that his coexecutor does nothing to contradict. What he does owe to Claverack is his executorship and the big commissions he’ll get for doing nothing but keeping his mouth shut. And incidentally there’s a special provision in the will that all the art is commissionable.”

  “How can he do that? Isn’t it a specific legacy?”

  “Not if the testatrix provides otherwise. I suppose he convinced her that sorting out all those artifacts was work for which her executors should receive extra compensation. Which I wouldn’t mind if he was sorting them out for the museum.”

  “And the nephew just nods.”

  “And holds his hand out. The only job he has is purporting to represent his aunt’s point of view if any question is raised by the trustees at the museum. That is why Claverack put him on the board.”

  “Anita, do you realize that you have just described a criminal conspiracy?”

  “And one that seems to be foolproof.”

  “What about the niece? Any hope there?”

  “Not that I can see. She’s very quiet, very staid, very old New York. The kind that leaves everything to ‘the men.’’’

  “And her husband?”

  “Not much better. When they go to Newport in the spring the one not driving holds in his lap the framed Abe Lincoln letter congratulating Arleus Speddon for his work on the Sanitary Commission. It’s the same when they come back in the fall. The holy document is never trusted to a servant or left in an empty house.”

  “I see. It seems we have no remedy at law. At least not one that we’ve found yet. But there’s no telling what you may discover once the mud starts flying.”

  “You don’t expect me to throw mud, do you? What would Miss Speddon say? Would anything be worth that to her?”

  “I’m surprised that after working for three years with a great collector you could ask so naive a question. But relax. I don’t mean mud we’ve made up. I mean real genuine, mucky, oozy, slimy, honest-to-God mud. What you’ve just told me!”

  “How would we use it?”

  “You and I would make a little call on my friend Bill Stebbins, the editor of Art in Town. He always appreciates a story of wicked fiduciaries. This will
not, incidentally, be the first that he will owe me. I think it should make the cover.”

  Anita, who struck him as even paler and thinner than usual, or, as he preferred to put it, more agreeably pre-Raphaelite, turned away, slowly shaking her head. “I wonder if I could really bring myself to do that.”

  “And why not?” Carol was startled to hear the sudden rise in pitch of his own tone. “Is it because you might get Young Lochinvar into trouble? Well, let me say at once that I profoundly hope we may! Do you think for a minute that Addams hasn’t been in this thing from the word go? Is there any toilet he wouldn’t reach his dirty paws into at the behest of his lord and master?”

  “Oh, Carol, please!”

  “Well, is there?”

  “It’s so nice, our being friends again. I can’t bear to have you all angry and cruel the way you used to be.”

  “Cruel? Who is crueler: Lochinvar or me? Did I make googoo eyes at you to worm my way into the confidence of your dear old mistress, who was beginning to dote? Did I?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’ll bet he even made love to you.” As Anita turned back to him with eyes that beseeched him to stop, he suddenly recalled the chilling of relations between her and Addams that had followed Miss Speddon’s death. “I’ll bet he even asked you to marry him!” It all came to him now in a shattering blaze, and he almost shouted, “At least he promised Miss Speddon he’d marry you, didn’t he?”

  “Carol, don’t!”

  “Didn’t he?”

  “Something like that.”

  Getting up, he took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Anita Vogel, it’s your bounden duty, before whatever God may be, to tell the truth, and not to tell it slant, either, as the great Emily wrongfully suggested, but to tell it so that all the world shall know!”

  She broke away from his grasp. “Oh, Carol, must I?”

  “If you don’t, it’s because you love the son of a bitch! You’ll be like one of those brutalized Nazi victims kneeling down to kiss her guard’s toe!”

  She sighed deeply as she had to give in. “All right, Carol. I’ll go with you to your friend.”

  He kept his eye severely on her as he finished his drink in silence. “I’ll set up an appointment with Stebbins and call you tomorrow.”