Harmony In Flesh and Black Read Online Free Page B

endangered breed.”
    Fred was behind the unwrapped picture, looking without success for anything resembling a letter, perhaps taped to the back of the frame, or caught in the wrapping. But Molly’s tone brought him around front.
    â€œDon’t she make the Rokeby Venus look like a sick pig?” Molly went on. Molly was a direct, no-nonsense critic.
    It was a nude of shocking elegance: a female figure reclining, her back toward you, her rotundities fully realized. The figure made a startling white diagonal of flesh against black draperies with red and gold accents in luscious, loaded slabs of paint: a fan, the carved gilt edge of the couch she lay on. A mirror in front of the figure, reflecting head and breasts, held painted gestures that suggested the striding legs—in black trousers—of a man entering the room in back of the viewer. The subject looked at you out of the mirror, surprised but pleased that you had found her. It did a strange thing with space, even in Molly’s garage, because the viewer was eliminated. Molly and Fred couldn’t exist if the reflected entrant was as present as they felt him to be. The garage, the bicycles, the lawnmower, Fred’s car couldn’t exist since they didn’t reflect.
    It was a painting of alarming intimacy.
    â€œYou’re right,” Fred said. “The Velázquez is an image that stays with you. Whoever did this young lady spent an awed afternoon beforehand standing with his mouth open at Rokeby Hall—unless Agnew’s had it already, off H. E. Morritt. The National Gallery in London didn’t get it until after nineteen hundred, and this painting’s earlier.”
    It shook Fred to think of the pathetic vulgarity of the den from which he’d brought so arrogant a testament of beauty.
    â€œWho’s the lucky painter?” Molly asked.
    Fred looked. It was usually the first thing he would do, but the command of the painting had distracted him. They both looked. They shone a flashlight at likely spots for a signature, examined the back for clues, and tried spitting on a thumb and rubbing to remove the layer of surface dust to expose—no signature.
    Fred could guess a lot from a quick look at the painting’s style and at its architecture front and back. He told Molly what he was thinking while he looked.
    â€œIt’s by an American, done in the eighteen eighties. He’s done the Grand Tour. Given the modeling and the celebration of grays, the painter was trained in Munich and then finished in Paris, where the painting was made, since you see here, on the back of the canvas, the inked stamp of Durand’s shop on the Avenue des Ternes. The artist was a craftsman who knew his business, someone of Sargent’s polish.”
    â€œThat’s no Sargent,” Molly said. “Sargent was too mean with the female nude, never wanted to get any on him. He couldn’t show affection or appreciation for the subject. No, Sargent was a drapery man, in my opinion.” Molly stood back, studying the image of the naked woman, pinching her face between the fingers of her right hand.
    â€œJeezus Heezus,” Sam said from the doorway to the kitchen, still in his jeans and the green Champion sweatshirt Fred had given him. “Is this what you two do after you think we’re in bed?”
    Fred turned.
    â€œIt’s Mr. Reed again. Didn’t you hear it ring?”
    Fred went back to the kitchen for the phone. Sam stayed with his mother, looking at Clayton’s picture.
    â€œNo letter,” Fred told Clayton. “Nothing.”
    â€œThe painting’s all right? A female nude, late nineteenth century…?”
    â€œThe painting’s a stunner,” Fred said. “Whose is it?”
    â€œMine,” Clayton said briefly, gloating. He knew Fred meant, who painted it? “So there’s a limit to Smykal’s perfidy. I can scarcely bring myself to speak his name. You’re