Shorter silence.
“Delegate, delegate. Yes, I know. Unfamiliar turf. I was the delegate. The whole delegation.” To whatever this Franklin chap says next, she laughs. “Of all the places we went together, we never once went to Arizona. He never toured there. I’m positive. I barely stopped to think about why. He did have invitations….Why couldn’t he just create a new book prize or endow a children’s library?”
Nick looks at the framed pictures and documents on the wall, though none of them really holds his interest. (Awards, proclamations, group portraits…) He walks over to the locked case containing the Greek vase, an earthen orange painted with black silhouettes of male figures, some interlocked, at first glance wrestlers. Well, wrestlers of a rather particular kind. Talk of cavorting!
Tommy hangs up the phone. She watches the actor for a moment. He’s examining the vase. Another task she hasn’t tackled: appraisal of this ostensibly priceless object. She almost hopes it’s a fake. Because even if it’s not, what if it’s stolen, if the certificate of provenance is forged? Either way, what if it has to be “repatriated” to some temple in Macedonia? Yet another inconceivable task.
“Are you getting what you need?” she asks.
He turns, looking cheerfully startled. “I’m rather in shock. There’s so much to absorb. But I would still—later, if you don’t mind—like to ask you some things. I don’t want to intrude on your work, I want to be respectful….” How can he be respectful and tell her what he knows? Why does he feel he must?
“Later is fine. I don’t know if you want to have dinner again. We could go into the village.”
“Yes to dinner.” He pauses. “But no to the village. If you don’t mind.”
“Oh, of course. You’re…well.”
“It’s awful, embarrassing really, that I’d vainly assume anybody would recognize me—or care about it. I’m just not up for that today. The autographs and photos. Because I always want to oblige. And then I have to become…my outer self.” Which, he sometimes thinks, threatens to become his dominant self.
“I’ll make us something easy.”
“You won’t lift a bloody digit. And now I’ll leave you in peace. I probably ought to make some calls of my own.” At the door, he turns to say, “Someday, you know, my encroaching like this on your privacy might make a good story.”
“Mr. Greene,” she says, “I don’t have much privacy these days.”
“Nick,” he says. “Please, please, call me Nick.”
“Nick,” she says, feeling absurdly special.
Inside the house, he goes to the den to face his phone. Nothing. Nothing! Miracle of blissful miracles.
He opens Lear’s laptop, which he smuggled down from the upstairs bedroom—afraid that if he left it behind, it might vanish, along with the proof that, no, he wasn’t imagining the famous man’s midnight confessions.
But this time he ignores that correspondence and returns to the Leonard file. He opens the first of the folders, a letter dated October 10, 1999. The year, he recalls, that Soren died. Is that relevant somehow?
Dear Reginald,
I do remember you and that we played together a few times. I have to say, I’m surprised that your father made the connection. I lived there a very long time ago and then, of course, my mother changed our name when we left. I’m sorry for you and your sister that your father’s death has left you with such a difficult situation. A parent’s foolish choices should not burden his children beyond the grave.
I imagine those drawings he kept all these years, though I do not know why, are indeed mine. I did sign my art when I was small. I was pretentious that way. They also sound like images I would have drawn. I often drew the plants and animals I saw in the garden at Eagle Rest.
Are they of value? I suspect the answer to that question is a qualified yes. It might depend on the condition they’re in. You need not bother to send me photos. From your descriptions, they sound like mine.
How would you sell them? That is trickier. I am sure there is an auction house in Phoenix or even Tucson that will sell them for you. But I think it would be easier if I were to buy them directly from you.
You say you have thirty-two. I am willing to pay you a thousand for each. I assume that is acceptable. Let me know if it is not.
Yours sincerely,
Mort Lear
The next piece of correspondence in the file is a short note, pure business, to a bank agent, requesting a transfer of thirty-two thousand dollars to Reginald’s checking account. This is for a purchase of art, the note explains.
There are only two more documents in the folder, both letters written by Lear, both dated over a year later, in December 2000.
Reginald:
It’s not a good idea to threaten blackmail in print. I have your recent letters in my files. I have a smart, expensive lawyer. (The expensive ones win.) I am sorry for your troubles, but I believe I was generous with you. I do not ever go to Arizona, so there would be no occasion for our meeting, even if we had a remotely cordial relationship. I have no idea what “stuff” you remember or what kind of photographs your father took. I do not wish to know. If you write me again, you will hear back, but not from me.
Dear Bruce,
I hope Penny and the brood are thriving. Did I promise B.J. an autographed copy of the latest Insep? Either way, I’ll have Tommy send one to the house pronto. And please tell Penny her birthday gift of the purple clematis is still blooming up a Shakespearean tempest.
Your time is precious (and don’t I ever k$ow it!), so I’ll cut to the car chase. I think I’m possibly about to be blackmailed, though I promise you I have committed no crime. Scout’s honor. Before you call out the dogs (meanwhile, I can only hope, resisting the urge to alert Page Six), it’s something small and sordid, out of my neolithic past. But maybe we could have an actual in-person convo. I estimate fifteen billable minutes max!
Hey, I could kill two birds with one slingshot: I’ll bring B.J.’s book along. How’s next Wednesday or Thursday? If you’re not too busy trimming a tree or throwing the office shindig.
Also make note, for the record, that I have taken a safe-deposit box at the local moneylender, just for the cold storage of an odd batch of papers. I’m not big on these boxes, but it’s an “out of sight out of mind” situation. I’m putting the key in my sock drawer. Nothing precious to anyone, really.
In gratitude and haste (I hear the meter ticking!),
Mort
Nick scrutinizes this final item, as if it will solve his moral dilemma. Actually, it’s not a dilemma. If he had a principled bone in his body, he would, jolly well now, put the key back into the box from which he withdrew it, the one containing a tangle of old-fashioned baubles, costume jewelry from decades long gone, shoved to the back of that sock drawer. But instead, he fiddles with it inside his left-front pocket, twisting it this way and that, like a fetish. He thinks, oddly, of Andrew’s earring.