Black Elvis Read Free Page B

of a project—otherwise his head was going to blow up. The town was full of art history graduate students giving private tours.
    "Performance art!" Julia cried delightedly when he ran the idea by her. "I can help you find customers. I meet people all the time. I'll look for the dumbest faces and the nicest shoes. People with money always have good shoes."
    "Let's not call it art," he said. "Let's call it theft."
    He doubted he'd be able to pull off the deception for long, if at all. Perhaps it would lead to a fistfight. Secretly, though, he hoped he might meet a girl, someone to take his mind off his broken heart.
    To his surprise, he turned out to be a reasonably good guide. No one seemed to know that "Massachusetts State" was not a real school (he had in fact gone to Hopkins, studied English, and played bass, badly, in a retro-punk band, The Meretricious Popes). Even for the clients willing to pay for tours—he charged a hundred euros for five hours—visiting the museums and churches was still mostly a duty to be fulfilled, a required purgatory to pass through on the way to afternoon gelato. They were not suspicious. There was a Japanese family of four who nodded a great deal and had him take their photo in front of Pizza Ponte Vecchio, then took his; there were Carol and Cliff from Ohio who were mostly interested in counting angels ("Look, Cliff, look how many there are in that one!").
    He told the Japanese family that the pictures underneath various altarpieces at the Accademia were called the pudenda , and even got them to repeat it. He explained to a woman from Van Nuys that the Medicis had been crypto-Jews. He told Carol and Cliff that since Saint Peter was always depicted holding a key, he was the patron saint of locksmiths (Cliff was a locksmith). Some of the information he gave out was accurate—he'd eavesdropped on a few real guides, studied a guide to Florence he picked up at a tabacchi , and had done his best to remember information from the Survey of Western Art class he'd taken sophomore year—but he also made a point of saying things that were simply outrageous (though the locksmith comment, to his surprise, had turned out to be true). He told the Frankenthaler family from Bayonne that Michelangelo had done a series of pornographic woodcuts at the request of the Pope, and that these were kept in a special vault at the Vatican, too valuable to be destroyed, too embarrassing to be acknowledged. Before 1500, he explained, all depictions of Jesus showed the holy genitalia—loincloths were painted over later, mostly by Titian.
    They met in front of the information office at the train station, as arranged. Bob Seitz was gray haired, in his midfifties, of average height, with overly tanned skin and a nose that appeared to have been broken at some point—it took a distinct turn to the left. He wore the kind of "travel" clothes you find in SkyMall catalogs—khaki cargo pants, a white, short-sleeved shirt, and a vest with an absurd number of pockets in it. He was allergic to something, and behind his round glasses both his eyes were rimmed red.
    It was a particularly hot Tuesday morning in July, and Larry's hangover was bad. He'd stayed out late drinking Scotch and listening to an Italian band called Hard Again do covers of Muddy Waters songs. Bob Seitz shook Larry's hand enthusiastically, his grip powerful, the backs of his hands, Larry noticed, practically cobwebbed with hair. "Pleased to meet you," he said, and he really did seem it. "I'm looking forward to this."
    They walked together to Santa Maria Novella. "Masaccio basically scared the hell out of everyone with this painting," Larry said, when they were in front of the Trinity . "They thought it might be black magic. Look how the figure of Jesus comes out at you."
    "Who are those people praying?"
    "Rich people who paid for the painting. If you paid for a painting, you got to be in it. Even a crucifixion. Noblemen and clergy show