Madonna of the Apes by Nicholas Kilmer Page A

and I don’t dare touch it,” Clayton said. “Even my conservator. A thing like that in the house, it allows me no peace.”
    The chest was still sitting on the floor where Fred had last seen it, its top opened against the worktable.
    The ape still fondled the fig. The Virgin still struggled with her offspring, with a distracted smile that could be seen as showing fey benevolence. The child still reached. His little pecker was in shadow. The painter had fudged the issue of circumcision, like all the other painters of the Renaissance who thus strove to correct, retroactively, the outward and visible sign of the embarrassing fact that the Messiah, their Messiah, everyone’s Messiah after all, was a Jew.
    “What you want to do is get that top off,” Fred concluded. “But at the same time you trust no one to do the work. Because you trust no one to see what you have. So you are at a really sublime disadvantage, like the swimmer with the Olympic gold anchor around his neck.”
    “I am not following,” Clay claimed. Fred was looking at the hardware. The hinges were old and rusty and attached with what appeared to be nails.
    “What you have to do is disregard issues of value and importance,” Fred said.
    “Don’t touch it,” Clay ordered, as Fred lowered the top to look at its other side, where the painter, or
a
painter, or his workshop, had painted the wood, the wreath of laurel resting on a surface that resembled marble. “Serpentine,” Clay observed.
    “Like the back of Leonardo’s
Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci,
” Fred agreed. “Except there it’s porphyry.”
    “How would you know a thing like that?” Clay exclaimed. “Of course you are right. Porphyry with a sprig of juniper, because of her name, juniper,
jinepro,
which is Ginevra. It’s part of what alerted me, at that man’s place, when I saw the
faux marbre;
and that caused me to lift the lid. My heart stopped, I can tell you. I thought for sure I had given the game away. I believe that I knew it for Leonardo’s creation even before I opened the chest. The man, Tilley, watched my every expression. But I raised no suspicion. Never have I dissembled so well. To the subject you raised: the
faux
stone back of the
Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci
is hardly common knowledge.”
    “It’s not a secret either,” Fred said, studying the hardware. “Yes, I was afraid of that. It’s nails. Look how they’ve come through the wood, been bent over and pounded down, and the holes filled with putty and painted in to match. Not a bad job. But it’s going to be a bitch getting the hinges off. Meanwhile, you say you’re paralyzed. So, what you need is a bull in your china shop. Where do you keep your tools?”
    “Tools?” Clay asked vaguely. “You don’t presume we will further violate…Stop! I insist!”
    “Never mind,” Fred said, taking out his penknife. Clay had turned green. “I won’t hurt anything. Just take these pins out. The metal plates stay where they are. I can separate them without touching either the sides or the top. Why get a crick in our necks looking at the damned thing sideways?” He fiddled with the hardware while Clayton fluttered nearby, as nervous as any human mother watching her first child trying to learn to fly.
    Clay said, “Vandals sawed the painting down to fit the chest. You can see on two sides. Criminals. Granted, until not long ago there was no work of art that was not discounted as mere wallpaper, to be trimmed as the occasion warranted. But Leonardo? I’ve been studying the panel. It’s walnut, I believe.”
    “Like the
Ginevra.
”
    “There’s a piece missing from the bottom, do you see? Also from the left side. For God’s sake, now, be careful.” Fred had removed the first pin from the knuckle where it served as pivot. It was a matter of bending the pin, which was shaped like a nail, so that its bent end straightened and it could be slipped free.
    “Hold the panel steady while I work on the other