Jonathan was in a detention home at the time, paying for attempting to decrease the surplus population of North Pearl Street by two bantering Irish boys who had assumed that, because Jonathan astounded the teachers of P.S. 5 with his knowledge and celerity of mind, he must be a queer. Jonathan was the smaller boy, but he struck while the others were still saying "Oh, yeah?" and he had not overlooked the ballistic advantage of an eighteen-inch lead pipe he had spied lying in the alley. Bystanders had intervened and saved the Irish boys to banter again, but they would never be handsome men.
When Miss Ophel visited Jonathan she found him to be mild and polite, well informed, and oddly attractive with his gentle eyes and delicate face, and definitely worthy. And when she discovered that he was as homeless as her puppies and birds, the thing was settled. Just after his fourteenth birthday, Jonathan took up residence in the Ophel home and, after a series of intelligence and aptitude tests, he faced a parade of tutors who groomed him for university.
Each summer, to broaden his education, she took him to Europe where he discovered a natural aptitude for languages and, most importantly to him, a love for the Alps and for climbing. On the evening of his sixteenth birthday there was a little party, just the two of them and champagne and petits fours. Miss Ophel got a little tipsy, and a little tearful over her empty life, and very affectionate toward Jonathan. She hugged him and kissed him with her dusty lips. Then she hugged him tighter.
By the next morning, she had made up a cute little nickname for it, and almost every evening thereafter she would coyly ask him to do it to her.
The next year, after a battery of tests, Jonathan entered Harvard at the age of seventeen. Shortly before his graduation at nineteen, Miss Ophel died peacefully in her sleep. On the surprisingly small residue of her estate, Jonathan continued his education and took occasional summer trips to Switzerland, where he began to establish his reputation as a climber.
He had taken his undergraduate degree in comparative linguistics cashing in on his logical bent and native gift for language. He might have gone on in that field, but for one of those coincidences that form our lives in spite of our plans.
As a caprice, he took a summer job assisting a professor of Art in the cataloging of artistic orts left over from the confiscation of Nazi troves after the war. The gratin of these re-thefts had gone to an American newspaper baron, and the leavings had been given to the university as a sop to the national conscience—a healthy organ that had recently rebounded from the rape of Hiroshima with no apparent damage.
In the course of the cataloging, Jonathan listed one small oil as "unknown," although the packing slip had assigned it to a minor Italian Renaissance painter. The professor had chided him for the mistake, but Jonathan said it was no error.
"How can you be so sure?" the professor asked, amused.
Jonathan was surprised at the question. He was young and still assumed that teachers knew their fields. "Well, it's obvious. We saw a painting by the same man last week. And this was not painted by the same hand. Just look at it."
The professor was uncomfortable. "How do you know that?"
"Just look at it! Of course, it's possible that the other one was mislabeled. I have no way to know."
An investigation was undertaken, and it developed that Jonathan was correct. One of the paintings had been done by a student of the minor master. The fact had been recorded and had been general knowledge for three hundred years, but it had slipped through the sieve of Art History's memory.
The authorship of a relatively unimportant painting was of less interest to the professor than Jonathan's uncanny ability to detect it. Not even Jonathan could explain the process by which, once he had studied the work of a man, he could recognize any other painting by the same hand. The steps were instant and instinctive, but absolutely sure. He always had trouble with Rubens and his painting factory, and he had to treat Van Gogh as two separate personalities—one before the breakdown and stay at St. Remy, one after—but in the main his judgments were irrefutable, and before long he became indispensable to major museums and serious collectors.
After schooling, he took a post teaching in New York, and he began publishing. The articles rolled off, and the women rolled through his Twelfth Street apartment, and the months rolled by in a pleasant and pointless existence. Then, one week after his first book came off the press, his friends and fellow citizens decided he was particularly well suited to blocking bullets in Korea.
As it turned out, he was not often called upon to block bullets, and the few that came his way were dispatched by fellow Americans. Because he was intelligent, he was put into Army Intelligence: Sphinx Division. For four wasted years, he defended his nation from the aggressions of the leftist imperialism by uncovering attempts of enterprising American soldiers to flesh out their incomes by sharing Army wealth with the black markets of Japan and Germany. His work required that he travel, and he managed to squander a laudable amount of government time and money on climbing mountains and on collecting data to keep his academic reputation shiny with articles.
After the nation had handily taught the North Koreans their lesson, Jonathan was released to civilian activities, and he took up more or less where he had left off. His life was pleasant and directionless. Teaching was easy and automatic; articles seldom needed and never received the benefit of a second draft; and his social life consisted of lazing about his apartment and making the women he happened to meet, if the seduction could be accomplished with limited effort, as usually it could. But this good life was slowly undermined by the growth of his passion for collecting paintings. His Sphinx work in Europe had brought into his hands a half dozen stolen Impressionists. These first acquisitions kindled in him the unquenchable fire of the collector. Viewing and appreciating were not enough—he had to possess. Channels to underground and black market paintings were open to him through Sphinx contacts, and his unequaled eye prevented him from being cheated. But his income was insufficient to his needs.
For the first time in his life, money became important to him. And at that very juncture, another major need for money appeared. He discovered a magnificent abandoned church on Long Island that he instantly recognized as the ideal home for himself and his paintings.
His pressing need for money, his Sphinx training, and his peculiar psychological makeup, devoid of any sense of guilt—these things combined to make him ripe for Mr. Dragon.
Jonathan sat for a while, deciding where he would hang his Pissarro when he purchased it from the pay for the Montreal sanction. Then he rose lazily, cleaned and put away the hookah, sat at his pianoforte and played a little Handel, then he went to bed.
MONTREAL: June 5