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.”
I wasn’t sure where Charlie was going, but between his discussion of hungry apes and images of Cezanne’s fruit platters, I realized my stomach was growling. “I’m sure there’s a point to this, Charlie.”
“They are the forebears of our genus, Homo. They developed into man.”
Charlie withdrew a packet of cherry-flavored tobacco from a buttoned shirt pocket and tamped a wad into the bowl of his pipe. “We’ve come so far as a species,” he said. “We’ve built bridges and machines that fly out of the solar system. We compress a billion bits of information onto an infinitesimal wafer. We produce ageless works of beauty, such as you see before you, and yet…”
I was starting to catch on. “We still kill each other. That’s what you mean, isn’t it, Charlie?”
My old friend didn’t say a word, so I must have gotten it right. I thought about Vladimir Smorodinsky and Francisco Crespo, two men descended-like all of us-from Charlie’s tree-dwelling apes. I thought of Francisco’s body lying face up, bound and bloodied, on the bed. I was the one to tell his mother, hold her as her knees gave out, sit with her as she cried, and listen all night as she remembered Francisco as a nino in Cuba, when the air was still sweet with future promise.
“Can you find who did this to my son?” she had begged me.
I told her the truth. I didn’t know, but I could try. I showed her the gold rabbit. She had never seen it before.
Now I thought of Smorodinsky, too. Somewhere, did he have a mother crying in the night? Or a brother. What was it Matsuo Yagamata had said? Something about Smorodinsky’s brother being well versed in Russian art. And Severo Soto knew something, too. He told me the two brothers ran Yagamata’s St. Petersburg operation.
Only he had used the old name, Leningrad. An operation that had to do with art. Then Soto proudly showed me a painting his daughter didn’t want to talk about.
Which is why we were in a library looking at pretty pictures.
Because you have to start somewhere.
“Do you think, Charlie, that your line of work has made you cynical?”
“Why? Because I have concluded that evolution of our species stopped somewhere short of true
