Free Man With a Squirrel by Nicholas Kilmer Page A

seemed tall, almost as tall as her attendant; and the grim, no-nonsense appearance of her cheekbones and jawline belied the lush bulge at her chest.
    â€œShe looks like Anjelica Huston trying to pass for Tonya Harding,” Fred told Molly on the phone.
    â€œOr like a Puritan Mae West,” Molly said. “Listen, Fred, do you know an artist named Pix?”
    â€œPicks? Sounds Dutch. C-k-s? ”
    â€œX,” Molly said.
    â€œOne x or two?” Fred asked. “Sunny-side up or over easy?
    â€œOne x. Doesn’t ring a bell. Lemme look. Here’s Théodor Pixis, born Kaiserslautern, July 1, 1831—genre painter, history subjects—painter of such forgotten gems as Thwarted Departure and Doubtful Arrival; and Moltke in the Black Forest. What do you think? Sound right?”
    â€œIt’s supposed to be just Pix.”
    â€œOr a French sidewalk painter from Montmartre?” Fred offered. “They make all their signatures out of diagonal strokes that look like x ’s. Why?”
    â€œA patron was asking,” Molly said. “It’s not my project, it’s Billy’s, but he mentioned it and I thought I’d ask you. According to Dee, the man’s neck was broken.”
    Dee was a friend who worked for the Cambridge Police Department’s department of traffic and parking. She kept her ears open in the canteen and gossiped regularly with Molly. Walter, her husband, was head of Molly’s library.
    â€œThis artist?”
    â€œI’m changing the subject, Fred. The derelict in the river—his neck was broken.”
    â€œYou’d think so, with cinder blocks around it.”
    â€œNo,” Molly said. “Before he went in. He didn’t drown.”
    â€œSo it’s an unsolved murder,” Fred said. “Boston’s or Cambridge’s?”
    â€œWe own it, Dee claims. We being Cambridge. That’s where he touched ground. I’ll tell Billy to tell his client to check the spelling and try again. I can’t talk now, Fred. Got a line of people waiting for help.”
    Fred had a quick look at the coverage of Cover-Hoover. The reporter, with uncritical straight face, announced the Cover-Hoover view that organized cults sacrificing victims to the powers of darkness were as common as they were widespread. The literature, and the growing treasury of narrative evidence, allowed no doubt. Her work in deprogramming those whose previously repressed memories revealed them to be former victims was similar to replacing a learned but unsuitable dead tongue (such as Phoenician, language of Baal) with a language of light, hope, and loving-caring. Loving and caring were hyphenated, like Cover and Hoover. She was quoted as saying, “It comes down to the question, Shall we be ruled by love or force? The culture of abuse, the power of darkness: all this is force. Light is synonymous with love, which we associate with the nurturing female power.”
    â€œRight,” Fred said. In his experience the boundary in any human person between what passes for sanity and being completely off the deep end was easily breached, razor thin, and transparent.
    Cover-Hoover, according to the article, sponsored a group of “patient-colleagues,” victims in the recovering-healing process, who lived in an undisclosed location—they had reason to fear reprisals—where the work of loving-caring progressed under her supervision.
    â€œRight,” Fred said again. He looked at the legs and feet in the roughly edited painting he had bought. The squirrel was so well painted, and so satisfying an emblem, his inclination had first been to assume it was the star—that the rest of the picture was cut away because it was damaged, or judged by its owner to be indifferent; if a Copley, maybe one of those in which the head of the subject is twice the size it ought to be.
    Fred said to the feet, “People reckon that as soon as it is shared by many,