A Victim Must Be Found (25 page)

TWENTY-ONE

The sign attached to the Contemporary Gallery’s front door said “CLOSED.” Further inspection informed me that a
vernissage
was scheduled for Thursday night. That was only a few hours away. I didn’t know what a
vernissage
was, so I decided to ask. I probably would have tried the door anyway. I was glad to find the door unlocked.

The door opened into a hallway with walls painted a flat white and linoleum flooring and stairs leading in two stages to a second floor. A rectangular window over the door washed the steps with outside light. I followed the steps to the top and found myself outside a second closed door. But this one had light shining through the crack at the bottom. I knocked and waited, wondering how prepared I was for previewing a
vernissage
, still having no idea whether it was a French orgy or a routine stocktaking. I couldn’t guess which. My ignorance in this area was unfathomed.

Paddy Miles opened the door and, after a moment of trying to place the face, invited me inside. “Mr. Cooperman, as I live and breathe! Welcome aboard!” He retreated into the large room and I advanced. On the white walls I could see about sixty pictures, most of them simply framed, and all belonging to the period I’d been seeing a lot of these last few days. At a glance I saw more Lambs and Milnes than I’d ever seen in one place before. One wall was still empty and a pile of canvases was leaning against it. Martin Lyster was standing on a ladder with a hammer in one hand and a mouth full of nails. Paddy and Martin both looked surprised to see me.

“I know you’re closed, but I wanted to see how things were going,” I said lamely.

“You mean you have some questions for me, Mr. Cooperman. We’re both on the same side, remember.”

“That’s right, I forgot.” The gallery was badly provided with places to sit down. There was a grey pouffe thing in the middle of the room; fine for admiring the collection from, but far away from the two other people in the gallery.

“May I get you a drink?” Paddy Miles asked and then, as an afterthought, introduced me to Martin Lyster. Lyster smiled at me, enjoying the redundancy. I was busy declining the offer of a drink. “I only have some plonk that I bought for tonight. I hope you’re planning to come?”

“That depends on what it is,” I admitted, flatfooted.

“Why, it’s an opening. ‘Another opening, another show.’ What did you think it was?”

“That word on the door …”

“Oh,
vernissage
!” he laughed, and Martin joined in. “It’s very pretentious of me to keep on using Arthur’s pet words, but there it is. It’s French for a varnishing. The painter’s friends used to get a special preview of a show while the artist varnished his canvases. That was in the old days, of course. Now it just means ‘opening’ or perhaps ‘sneak preview.’ Arthur loved all that French cant that litters the trade. I suppose it’s too late to change now. Arthur is still very much with us, isn’t he, Martin?”

Martin, who was about to swat a nail from a distance that was too far away to be rewarding, gave up the attempt in order to answer. “The place is spooked, and that’s the truth. Only I don’t think Paddy’d want the news to leak out. It wouldn’t be good for business.”

“You’ll be blackmailing me next, Martin.” Martin went back to hanging pictures. Paddy turned to me. “How is the investigation going on?”

“It’s always slow at the beginning,” I said, letting him think that I’d investigated so many cases of art-related crimes that I had seen patterns and had developed graphs and statistics. “I scared Peter MacCulloch into discovering that he has a cache of your paintings at home and at the university.”

“Good! I’m glad you’re getting results. Any others?”

“Not so far, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear from some people before long.”

“Well, here I was about to make a speech about how unlikely it was that you’d be able to uncover anything, and here you are, reeking with results. That’s excellent work!”

“I’m pretty sure that Alex Favell has a change of heart coming. Mary MacCulloch has been doing some picturedealing on her own hook through Hump Slaughter.”

“Mary? I can hardly credit that! Can you, Martin? I am prepared to believe anything about Slaughter. I don’t think he has a straight bone in his body. He might take advantage of Mary.”

“Is this all right?” called Martin. He was holding a landscape with a lot of purple sky up on the wall. Paddy cocked his head and nodded.

“Martin’s my half-brother. Did you know that? Same mother, different fathers.” I indicated that this was news to me, but as information, I didn’t know what to do with it. Was it good or bad for my current problems? I suppose it accounted for the long, lean look of both the gallery manager and the book-finder. I thought that I’d collect my information and then get on my way. I tried a round of questions and collected a blast from Paddy Miles for my trouble.

“Now look, Mr. Cooperman. What I said at Alex Favell’s office still holds.” As he spoke, he was checking through a list of pictures still unhung, with more attention to detail than the job warranted. “Find the list that Kiriakis told you about and if it’s genuine I’ll genuflect in any direction you prescribe. I’ll dance in the streets, I’ll shout from the housetops, I’ll wash and iron your shirts, if you want. But the damned thing has to be genuine. When Kiriakis said he had it, I thought it was too good to be true. And it still is.” He moved away from a Group of Seven painting of a pine tree
in extremis
and began cracking his knuckles one by one, with the precision of long habit. I watched, hypnotized. “Oh, you didn’t know Arthur, Mr. Cooperman. He was a genius, wasn’t he Martin?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “He was clever like a genius and maddening like a genius. In the ten years I worked for him, he left me two written communications.
Two
. That’s all. And now this list! You see what I mean?”

“I’ve been hearing all over town he was crazy in his way,” I said. “There are people, Mr. Miles, who might take advantage of a character like that.”

“‘Might,’
you say? It happened all the time. He’d pay Wally Lamb two or three times for the same canvas that came from a prepaid commissioned lot in the first place. He nearly drove everybody crazy. Like the times he’d take off and leave town without a word. He could be gone for weeks. Oh, if I was not preparing for this opening tonight, I could give you chapter and verse about his ‘lovable’ eccentricities.” Paddy moved to the pouffe end of the gallery, waving his wineglass grandly. I followed, surveying the pictures.

“Lucky he had you around to look after things when he went through the keyhole.”

“He’d sometimes invite a hundred people up here without telling Paddy,” Martin added from his perch on the ladder.

Miles made a mime gesture to indicate that the point had been made, and I nodded agreement.

“I’d have been carted away to the booby-bin if Martin hadn’t shown up.”

I was about to return towards the door, when another thought hit me. “Mr. Miles, how exactly did Mr. Tallon die?” The question hit Paddy Miles with an irrelevant clunk. He shrugged. I sat down on the pouffe.

“That was at least quick,” he said. “Heart.”

“I heard he was in the General.”

“He was sitting where you are, finishing up a plate of spaghetti. It was his second helping. Suddenly, he had one of his heart attacks. He had angina, you know. Very bad. He went pale, had a hard time breathing, said he had a shooting pain in his arm. I used to be a medical student. Dropped out to sculpt in my fourth year. So, I knew I had to get him to the hospital at once.” Paddy Miles entered into the spirit of his tale; I felt quite caught up in it. “But,” he said, letting his hands fall helplessly to his sides, “he was DOA.”

“Just one of those things,” I said.

“He was a wonderful human being,” Miles said, then gestured towards a blown-up photograph near the door to the private or office part of the gallery. “That’s him. It’s an enlargement of a snap from canoe trip. That was five or six years ago.”

I looked. He looked healthy enough in the picture. There were lines on his face, but his body was lean and fit. His arms were sinewy and strong. “He doesn’t appear to be about to blow away.”

“He knew the north,” Paddy Miles said. “Loved it up there. Even went sketching in the Barren Lands.”

“That bracelet he’s wearing doesn’t quite go with the paddle and knapsack.” Martin laughed from his wall. Miles gave him a stern glance.

“There wasn’t anything effeminate about Arthur, Mr. Cooperman. You’re reading a lot into a bracelet.”

“At this stage, Mr. Miles, I’m not reading at all—just sounding out my words.” Miles appeared to be trying to read something written on the wall behind me for a few seconds and then he smiled. At the same moment, or nearly, Martin began driving another nail into the wall. The conversation was over. After a few years in this business you get to recognize punctuation like that.

I walked along Church Street and cut across Market Square to King, where a small coffee shop much frequented by the legal profession runs an emergency teaand-bun service for refugees from the County Court House. I ordered a cup of tea and vaguely looked around to see who was there. I’d often been able to get free legal advice both at the counter and at the chipped vinyl tables. But today the profession must have been off burying a QC or chasing ambulances. The place was deserted. It was too early for the high-school kids too. That meant the telephone was free and the noise level was such that I would be able to hear both sides of the conversation I was planning to have.

“Hello?”

“Ella, it’s me.” There was a pause at the other end of the line. I could feel my self-image deflating like a discarded birthday balloon. “Benny Cooperman,” I added.

“Oh, that ‘me.’ What can I do for you?”

“How would I look up information about a British Army officer?”

“What century?”

“The present. He was active around 1955–60.”

“Living or dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” Ella seemed to add about three additional “ls” as she drew out the word to give her a moment to think. “Well, in the last act of
The Importance of Being Earnest
, Jack Worthing consults something called the
Army Lists
to discover his father’s name.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” I should never quarrel with other people’s thought processes. Knowing how peculiar my own are, I should allow free rein to the ways and means Ella Beames has of placing misplaced information. “I mean, Ella, are the
Army Lists
still published?”

“I’ll have to check and I’ll call you back. Who is it you’re interested in?”

“He was a major in Cyprus during the troubles there. His name is, or was, Timothy Bell. That’s all I know about him except that he served in Palestine before going off on half-pay. He went active again in the fifties to do his bit in Cyprus.”

“I’ve got that down. I’ll call you. Are you at your office?”

“No, Ella, but I will be in an hour’s time.”

“I’ll try you there. Anything else?”

“That’s it and thanks.” She hung up and I went back to my tea. There was little heat in the metal pot, and I spilled most of the remaining tea into the saucer and onto the table. This pot, like all commercial teapots I’ve encountered, dripped everywhere. Where was the inventor of the dripless metal teapot? I pondered this while sipping the tepid stuff. As I paid up and left, a bunch of teenagers with designer hair came in in a clump and took possession of half of the tables. Generally I’m not in a hurry to greet middle age, but I was happy, just then, to be out of my early years. I might be sorry later, but I didn’t think I could wrestle with the rigid rules of being uniformly unconventional.

An hour later, good as my word, I was sitting in my place of business. Some ideas had started percolating in my head and I made a couple of calls to find things out. One of these was to Bill Palmer at the
Beacon.

“Palmer here.” He had a tone in his voice that told me that he had a pencil poised above a pad of paper. But that’s the romantic in me. Such props are probably outlawed in a modern newspaper office.

“Bill, it’s Benny Cooperman.”

“Oh, hi, Benny. What’s up?”

“Bill, I’m just playing a hunch and it may not lead anywhere, but it would help for me to know as much as I can find out about Major Tim Bell of the British Security Police in Cyprus.”

“Tim Bell! The Ghost of Christmas Past? He’s been dead for—let me see, nearly three years. It was in the London
Times.”

“I want to know whatever you know about him.”

“Can I call you back or meet over a drink?”

“Sure, what about at the Harding House in, say, half an hour?”

“Hey, you must want this pretty bad. I’ll try to get away from here for a few minutes. See you then.”

I still wasn’t sure what kind of bee it was that was buzzing around inside my hat, and I didn’t know what it had to do with what happened to Pambos last Tuesday night. All I knew was that I had an itch at the back of my knees and that it seemed to ease off when I began thinking in this direction. It was now an hour and a quarter since I’d talked to Ella at the library. She was late. I began to imagine her research interrupted by a couple of hoods in black balaclavas. Ella put up quite a struggle, but in the end they stuffed her still-fighting frame into an unmarked VW van and headed off out of town. I was trying to think what to do to get her out of their clutches, when the phone rang. It was Ella. I didn’t ask her how she’d escaped from the sinister van heading for the international border, not because I’d escaped from my own daydream, but because Anna Abraham was suddenly back in my office.

“Hello,” I said to Ella, while smiling at Anna. “I’m glad to hear from you so soon.” With my hand over the phone I told Anna that this was important and to sit down. But she didn’t. She began pacing my office and examining everything in sight, including the bald mannequins.

“Benny,” Ella said, “the library’s no good on a thing like this. I had to go to my personal network of experts.”

“Like who?”

“Never mind. Suffice it to say that he’s a retired military man living a few miles out of town.”