Painted Ladies

36

A woman came into Trachtman’s office with some coffee and cookies on a small tray.

Trachtman introduced her.

“My assistant, Ibby Moser,” he said. “Say hello to Mr. Spenser, Ibby.”

She said hello and put the tray down.

“Ibby’s cookies are amazing,” Trachtman said. “Try one.” I took one and ate half of it. It was peanut butter.

“Amazing,” I said.

We all smiled, and Ibby left.

“A mid-afternoon ritual,” Trachtman said. “Every day. I never know what kind of cookies it will be.”

“Nice ritual,” I said. “Ashton Prince?”

“Ashton is odd,” Trachtman said. “On the one hand, he is a first-rate scholar of low-country realism. An expert.”

“As expert as you?” I said.

“His expertise may not be as broad,” Trachtman said. “I am a bit of a generalist. But in his areas of specialization, it is deeper. He is . . . or was, I suppose I should say . . . the greatest authority I know of, far greater than I, on Franz Hermenszoon.”

“Doesn’t matter what tense you use,” I said. “We both know he’s dead.”

Trachtman smiled.

“I like to be precise,” he said. “There was also an odd sort of collateral specialty. . . . He was unsurpassed in the identification of forgeries in the art of the period.”

“Which is to say Dutch art in the time of Rembrandt,” I said.

“More or less,” Trachtman said.

“You said that on the one hand he was what you’ve just described,” I said. “How about the other hand?”

Trachtman smiled and shook his head.

“This will be, I suppose, a bit subjective,” he said.

“Many things are,” I said.

He nodded.

“There was something deeply fraudulent about Ashton,” he said. “I didn’t know him well, but we had met at conferences and such, and I knew his work. But there was something . . . artificial about him. As if he were, oh, I don’t know, performing. Like someone in a drama whose acting shows through.”

“I think actors call that ‘indicating.’”

“Really,” Trachtman said. “Are you a theater buff?”

“No, but I have a friend who is a performer.”

“You appear to be one on whom nothing is lost,” Trachtman said.

“Though often wasted,” I said. “Do you know anything about his personal life?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing. That’s part of it. Look at you. I’ve never met you before. We’ve talked for perhaps half an hour. And I know that you are unmarried and live alone, but you are in a committed relationship with a woman of whom you are quite fond, and you have a dog.”

“We share a dog,” I said.

“I knew nothing of Ashton,” Trachtman said. “He dressed like some sort of caricature of an art professor. He had a fluty accent, as if he had gone to an upper-class English boarding school.”

“I know,” I said. “I spent time with him. Do you know if Ashton Prince is his real name?”

“As far as I know,” Trachtman said. “But if it weren’t, I wouldn’t be startled. He seems just like the kind of man that would change his name . . . and Ashton Prince is the kind of name he’d change it to.”

“Anything else about him bothers you?” I said.

“Walford,” Trachtman said. “He stayed, for God’s sake, at Walford.”

“Not a good thing?” I said.

“Walford is all right,” he said. “But it is not a first-rate art department, neither in composition nor history. It does not value artistic scholarship in the way that, say, Yale would. Or Brown. Prince was not as free as he might have been someplace else to do scholarship. He had no research support. He always had classes to teach.”

“Salary?” I said.

“He would have been paid more had he taught at a major university.”

“And he was good enough to upgrade?” I said.

“Absolutely,” Trachtman said.

“Any idea why he stayed?”

“In many people I would speculate inertia,” Trachtman said. “But Ashton Prince was one of the great forensic art scholars in the world in his period. People who achieve that kind of expertise are rarely inert.”

“Hard to generalize,” I said.

“Yes.”

“But he had the credentials to work at better schools for more money and fewer teaching hours and more research support.”

“He did indeed.”

“And he apparently chose not to,” I said.

“Yes,” Trachtman said. “That is a puzzle.”

“Maybe he liked teaching,” I said. “Maybe he wanted to be in the classroom.”

“I am, myself,” Trachtman said, “a reformed academic. In my years at the trade I never met anyone who didn’t want his or her teaching load to be smaller.”

“So they can do more research?” I said.

“No,” Trachtman said. “Because they don’t like to teach. It’s hard work if you really do it.”

“Most things are,” I said. “What would they prefer to do?”

“Sit about in the faculty lounge, drinking bad coffee and discussing intensely matters of great import with which they have no active engagement.”

“Frees their mind,” I said, “to romp with the mind of God.”

“Who said that?” Trachtman said.

“Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby,” I said. “Did Prince seem like that to you?”

“No,” Trachtman said. “He seemed a man who might actually want to be engaged.”

“Be my guess, too,” I said.

We spent the rest of the afternoon at it, but nothing much else surfaced. So I went back to the Carlyle, which was always one of my New York indulgences, along with the Four Seasons restaurant and the Bronx Zoo. I had a couple of drinks from the minibar, ordered room service, called Susan, and had a pretty good time.

In the morning I had breakfast in the dining room and got my car from the garage and drove home straight to Susan’s house. Where I spent the night.