Free Man With a Squirrel by Nicholas Kilmer Page B

whatever it is, a practice must be sane. A single person chanting by itself, for instance in the elevator, and facing the rear, however, is shied away from.”

10
    Fred, cross-eyed with crossed legs, drove to New Bedford. He’d been looking at the eighteenth-century portrait-painters’ manners in rendering feet until he longed for Copley’s John Hancock solution. So he’d called Roberto Smith, in New Bedford’s North End, and asked if he could drive down with something.
    â€œTwo o’clock,” Roberto said.
    That would give the people at Gene’s in Fairhaven time to fry a mess of clams for Fred’s lunch beforehand.
    Roberto’s studio was a large, bright space on the third floor of a modified mill building whose first floor housed a fish store and a large bakery. The second floor hummed and thumped with people manufacturing factory seconds for a nationally famed brand of jeans.
    The drive had been encouraging. Wet fields on either side of the roadway after Fred got past Quincy showed illusory highlights that resembled blossom or leaf. Bare twigs of fruit trees in the scraps of second-growth woods hinted at bloom on account of the tattered remnants of webbing from last year’s tent caterpillars.
    Fred carried the fragment—rolled again, but inside a heavy cardboard tube—through the corridor separating fish store and bakery and up two flights of stairs, to Roberto’s steel-clad door. The stairwell smelled of fish, bread, and cut fabric.
    When Fred knocked, Roberto’s spy hole flickered before the door swung open. Roberto was tall and broad and bald and stooped. He worked in a suit, which he protected with a butcher’s canvas smock—one of a supply he had bought at Building 19. Today’s was blazoned at the heart, in red, with the name “Dick.” Offering Fred a hand to shake, Roberto caused the white Bismarck soup-strainer mustache he favored to twitch in an indication of a smile. The mustache, and his exuberant eyebrows, were the only hair he had left above the neck.
    â€œFred, welcome,” Roberto said, stepping back.
    Roberto’s passion was stringed instruments. Violins, mandolins, theorbos, and psalteries of his making hung on stretched strings along the sides of the studio where the sun from his north window would not reach them. Roberto’s easel in the window, next to the table with his paints and varnishes, was empty. Whatever he might be working on for a client he would have turned to face the wall. Clay loved Roberto not just for the delicacy of his work, but because Roberto was, if anything, more paranoid and secretive even than Clay. For all that, and though he was more than seventy, Roberto moved with muscular agility to his big worktable.
    â€œIt’s a crime, what I’m going to show you,” Fred warned him. He handed his cardboard tube to the old man. From this moment onward only Roberto would be permitted to touch the painting until it was outside his door.
    â€œIt’s been cut down,” Roberto said, shaking his head and brushing a thin finger along the cut edge as he laid the canvas out. He put a circlet with a miner’s lamp and magnifying bar onto his pink head, and studied the cut and its attendant scars and scratches.
    â€œVery recently,” Roberto said. “There’s no dirt in the scratches. What are these holes down the middle from, staples? Yes, it was folded here and here—around a small stretcher, I understand this, but not for long or the paint and priming would be worse cracked, abraded, lost.”
    Roberto shook his head, distressed at the condition of the patient—like the medic presented with the twitching lower half of a person.
    Fred explained the fragment’s condition when he found it.
    Roberto sighed and shook his head. He spread his arms. “What can I do? I want no part of this, this crime.”
    â€œI wanted your opinion first,” Fred said.