Evil Breeding

head of Remington Arms and some other companies. The grandfather was Marcellus Hartley. His daughter Emma married a man named Norman White Dodge, and for a wedding present her father gave them a house right next to his. He lived on Madison Avenue. Anyway, Emma died in childbirth, and the grandfather raised the baby, his only grandson. And then when Marcellus Hartley Dodge was a junior in college, at Columbia, when he was only twenty, his grandfather suddenly died, and he inherited everything. He became the head of the family and the head of the companies and everything.”
    “Did he know about her when he married her?” Steve asked, meaning, of course, Geraldine R.
    “I’ve wondered,” I said. “Even then, she must have been a little, uh, eccentric. She was always crazy about animals. But she had other interests. She was a very important art collector. It’s a miracle, when you think about it, that her paintings and things weren’t chewed up by all those dogs, but lots of them were shepherds, and she was very fussy about temperament and training, so maybe they weren’t destructive. And, of course, it wasn’t as if her husband had had to pay for her, uh, extravagances. She had essentially unlimited funds. And they stayed married until he died.”
    Steve smiled. “She got another dog, and he died of apoplexy?”
    “Actually, I don’t know what he died of. I guess it could’ve been apoplexy.” I paused to eat some salad. “What is apoplexy, anyway?”
    “A stroke.”
    “Well, I can’t imagine that another dog would’ve bothered him. He must’ve been used to it by then. Besides, they lived in separate houses. As far as I know, they were both perfectly happy with the arrangement. I mean, I do sort of assume that he was driven out by her dogs, but after that, I think maybe they had quite a happy marriage. I’ve wondered whether the death of their son might not have brought them together. He was their only child. It must have been a terrible loss for both of them. They donated lots of things in his memory. He went to Princeton. There’s a gateway in his memory there, a great big monumental arch, and I think they both gave that. And the Madison, New Jersey, town hall. The entire building.”
    “What did she look like?”
    “The Times called her ‘outdoorsy.’ Or something like that. Big. Heavy by today’s standards. When I first saw her pictures, I thought she was homely, but the more I know about her, the more I see her as imposing. She looked powerful. And gracious.”
    To hear each other over the din of the crowded café, Steve and I had been leaning over our plates. Since we hadn’t been discussing anything private, at least for a while, we hadn’t been paying attention to whether we were overheard. Consequently, when I finished my lunch and casually looked around, I was surprised to find the art student at the next table regarding me with a piercing look I couldn’t read. Anger? Suspicion? Something unpleasant. I couldn’t imagine what I’d done to arouse his attention.
    After we left the café, we went to the museum shop. There Steve bought me a beautiful guide to the treasures of Fenway Court. The covert message was, I guess, that I should read about museums instead of dragging him to them, but I was still grateful. I insisted that before we left, we had to go up to the third floor to see the museum’s most famous painting, Titian’s Europa. For some mysterious reason, the robbers had left it. Maybe it was too big for them. The canvas alone must be at least five feet by six feet. Or maybe no one had ordered it: One of the many hypotheses about the heist was that the robbers had arrived with a shopping list dictated by a nefarious mastermind who arranged to have particular works stolen on commission for wealthy collectors.
    “If so,” I said to Steve as we stood before the grand canvas, “you’d think that this would’ve topped the list.”
    What it shows is a plump nude woman riding a bull through the sea. The full title is The Rape of Europa. As my brand-new book informed me, Zeus, the father of the gods, stumbled across the beautiful Europa while she was strolling by the sea. To seduce her, he transformed himself into a gorgeous, tame white bull, and in that guise, lured her onto his back and then took off with her to Crete. Archaic date rape. As I recalled, Zeus was always running around with young women. You could hardly blame him, really. His wife, Hera, was a shrew,