Circles of Confusion (8 page)

"The battle of Arnhem. With toy soldiers and little silk parachutes and plasticine mountains and some miniature trees from a train set. It's all done to a one to one hundred scale. Sometimes I spend all weekend in the basement working on it."

No wonder Frank was so pale. "If someone who lived in Germany during the summer of 1945 used the term 'DP,' what would they mean?"

"A displaced person—a refugee. Europe was crawling with them after the war." Frank, never a curious sort, didn't inquire why she had asked. Instead he folded down a corner of his paperback to mark his place and stood up from the table.

Claire looked up at the wall and saw that it was already 10:15. Reading more of Aunt Cady's diary would have to wait.

Claire felt sneaky, devious—and damp, since she was coatless on a rainy day. Her lunch hour was nearly half gone, and all she had done was drive to Multnomah Village and find a place to park. She was hoping that her co-workers wouldn't notice her absence. If anyone did come looking for her, the coat she had left behind should serve as a decoy. With luck, they would just think she was in the bathroom.

A bell jingled above her head when Claire pushed open the door to Eclectica. The shop lived up to its name, selling everything from novelty salt and pepper shakers to Native American rugs to Depression glass. For a time an elaborate rattan elephant saddle had filled the front window. And once or twice Claire had seen a painting for sale.

A fiftyish-looking man looked up from behind the glass counter that doubled as a display case for old jewelry. The store was otherwise empty. "May I help you?"

"I'm not sure. I recently inherited a small painting. I guess it's an oil, but I don't know much more about it than that." Her words seemed inadequate, somehow disloyal to the woman in the painting.

"I'll have a look at it if you want. If you want it appraised, I'm not your man, but I've been kicking around this business a long time. I might be able to tell you something."

Claire had cushioned the painting with bubble wrap. Now. she freed it and laid it on the counter.

The man sucked in his breath. He slipped on a pair of half-glasses that hung from a silver chain around his neck.

"You're a beauty, aren't you, dear?" he murmured, addressing the woman in the painting. "But what are you? Not English, no, definitely not that. Possibly French?" He paused. "That doesn't seem right, either."

With his fingertips he picked up the painting and walked from behind the counter toward the window. His eyes never left the face of the young woman in the painting. Claire was struck by the contrast between the real man and the painted woman—his middle- aged body in Dockers, with a tan polo shirt pulled snug over his potbelly, and she serene in the soft folds of her lemon yellow jacket. He tilted the painting to the window and stretched out his finger. "See the tiny cracks in the paint? Those are called craquelure. Oil paint takes as long as a century to dry, so this lady of yours is at least as old as that. Judging by her dress, and if you assume she was painted wearing clothes of the period, I would say much older. And painted by someone who knew what he was doing." He turned his face to Claire, his tired eyes filled with longing and something like awe. "My God, where did you get this?"

"I found it in my great-aunt's mobile home underneath the bed. I think she'd been there a long time. My aunt was stationed in Germany after the war ended."

The shop owner looked upward, speculating. "It could be that this little jewel went missing during the war. A lot of things lost their way during that time." He handed the painting back to her reverently, reluctantly. "I can't really tell you anything. She's Flemish, perhaps, or Dutch. And I would guess several hundred years old— painted somewhere maybe in the 1600s. I know enough to know when I'm out of my depth. And if you want my opinion, anyone in this town would be out of their depth with that. She needs to be appraised by a professional, someone who knows the period intimately. Someone who can be shown something and immediately tell you who this lady was, as well as everything from the name of the artist to what he had for breakfast the day he finished the painting—and then trace the provenance forward three hundred years."

"The provenance?"

"The history of who owned the painting, how it came to change hands." He smiled apologetically. "Nothing against people who live in trailer parks, but I would expect past owners to have been duchesses or earls. The type of people who live in castles." He paused, then chose his words carefully. "There's a time-honored tradition of spoils of war. And sometimes there's a fine line between that and looting."

Claire's head was spinning. Could this painting rightfully belong to someone else? She remembered her great-aunt's diary, with its mention of an inlaid bracelet—probably the same bracelet she had found in the suitcase. "What would you do if you were me?"

Without hesitation, he said, "Go to New York. Don't go to a dealer or an art gallery. Take her to Sotheby's or Christie's or Avery's. Have someone tell you who she is, where she comes from, and what she's worth."

"Don't they charge money for that?"

"The big houses don't. Of course, they take a percentage if they sell it. In this case, my hunch is that would amount to a tidy little sum."

MYTB$$

Claire arrived back at the office just in time for her monthly "Hold the Gains" meeting with Roland. She knocked on his office door and then pushed it open. Hundreds of staring eyes greeted her.. Like Aunt Cady, Roland also had a collection of animals, although in his case it was elephants. The collection dated back to his childhood and had followed him from his parents' home to college to this job, his first. Each Christmas or birthday, someone in the department drew the short straw and was forced to take on the task of finding the group gift—a new elephant unlike the others he already owned. Now they peered at her from bookshelves and the tops of filing cabinets, dozens of elephants in all shapes, sizes and materials. Although Roland boasted that the elephant thing had begun because of his excellent memory, Claire sometimes thought that given his big ears and lumpy body, he felt more at ease surrounded by animal versions of himself.

The elephants weren't the only ones appraising her. Claire repressed a shudder as Roland's eyes slowly traveled from her head to her feet. "Is that a new outfit?" he asked.

She tried to keep things from veering off course by not answering his question. "How did my charts for last month look?"

"That's what I like about you, Claire. Always so business-minded." He pulled a sheaf of paper from a file. "And last month you did your usual excellent job." Roland handed her the charts, created in Excel on his IBM but hand-colored by him with rainbow pens.

Although there were more than a dozen charts, each one actually showed the same piece of information—the number of applications the department had processed, broken down by employee. Roland was enamored of the fact that with just a few clicks of the mouse, the computer could present the same data in many different ways. Each month he printed out pie charts, bar graphs, holograms, scatter diagrams, crisscrossing lines and bell curves. He experimented with 3-D, legends, labels, dual axes and drop shadows. It was Roland's dream to get a color printer so that he wouldn't have to spend hours in his office coloring. At the beginning of each fiscal year, he routinely requested a color printer, claiming he would "utilize it to facilitate improved work process flow." Just as routinely, Ed had denied the request. Now, if Frank's rumor were true, Roland might be able to fulfill his dream.

No matter what chart type Roland used, Claire's bar or pie slice was always slightly larger than her co-workers. Over the years, she had developed the ability to steadily review applications while daydreaming. And with the exception of today, she had never taken extra time for lunch or over coffee. She had even accumulated 689 hours in her vacation time bank, just under the state-mandated limit of 700 hours.

Claire never knew what she was supposed to say when confronted by Roland's endless sheaf of paper. She flipped through the pages, and after what seemed a long enough silence, she pushed the papers back to him and mumbled, "Thank you."

"You're always pushing the envelope," Roland said. "Do you know how much I appreciate that, Claire? I can always count on you. I wish I could get the others to model your paradigm." Roland spoke incomprehensibly in a vain effort to make other people think he was smart. He invariably had the latest management tome prominently displayed on his desk, and tried out as many of the concepts as Ed permitted. So far, the department had suffered through self-directed work flow, quality circles, self-esteem banks, team-building retreats and re-engineering.

The business end of their meeting presumably at an end, Roland leaned back in his chair, relaxed and expansive. "Did you have a good weekend?" He took one of his collection of elephants—a plastic one about seven inches tall—and began to walk it up and down his desk.

In her mind, Claire saw the woman's painted gaze, felt the ridged brushstrokes under her fingertips. She kept her answer short, hoping that Roland would let her go. "Uh-huh."

"I went to that Rod Stewart concert I told you about. Should have gone with me! You really missed a great show." Roland had offered her a ticket weeks ago under the guise of altruism—he had an extra ticket, it was a sold-out show, perhaps she would like to go.

He had seemed almost angry when she declined. "That guy knows how to rock." For emphasis, he tipped the elephant on its hind legs and made it dance while humming the first few lines of "If You Want My Body." Claire repressed a shudder at the thought of sitting by Roland's side, watching the bobbing bleached crest of the skinny, aging singer as he pelvic-thrust his way through twenty-year-old hits.

She began to push back her chair. Roland had danced the elephant halfway down the desk, until it was now directly behind another elephant—a squat unpainted wood carving. The positioning brought the two elephants' hindquarters into a suggestive proximity. Roland offered her a sideways leer.

"What does this make you think of?"

"It makes me think I'm not going to stay in this meeting," Claire said, surprising both of them. She stood up and reached for the door.

"Wait! Wait! I'm sorry." The dancing elephant dropped onto the desk with a thud.

Claire felt like a teakettle about to boil. "For the last two years I have overlooked your behavior toward me, but that is beyond the limit! Do you realize that what you just did qualifies as sexual harassment? I hear the state has a new head of HR who made her reputation by exposing stuff like that."

"Shh! Shh! Quiet down! You don't know what you're saying! Heck, I didn't know what I was saying!" He was flushed to the tips of his big ears, and Claire guessed he was seeing his promotion slipping away. The sight of him cowering instead of leering sent a thrill of power through her.

"You knew exactly what you were saying."

Roland made a soothing motion with open hands, as if Claire were a dangerous dog. "There's no need to go running off to HR about this. In fact, I was already planning on talking to HR about you in regard to a completely unrelated matter. There's a good possibility of a promotion in this department, and my input on it is pretty important." He gave her a strained, fearful smile. "How would you like to be sitting in this office someday?"

"I don't want to be you, Roland." Claire didn't even want to be herself, but that was too hard to explain to him. "You want me to forget about what you just did? Then give me some time off. I want a week. Starting tomorrow."

"But this is the busy season!" There was no busy season. They both knew Roland was clutching at straws.

"I guess I'll be telling HR about your mating elephants, then."

"All right, all right. You can have a week off."

"Good."

When Claire closed the door, Roland was slumped dejectedly at his desk, his palm resting protectively on the sharp curves of the wooden elephant's butt. CUNQRT

Claire ran down the back of one of 35th Avenue's undulating hills, fast enough that she could ignore the autumnal chill still lingering from the night before. Her speed was fueled partly by exhilaration and partly by fear. Only an hour ago, she had booked a flight to New York for the next day, Wednesday. She had half hoped that she might even be able to avoid spending the night, just stay long enough to take a bus from the airport to an auction house, and then bus right back to a waiting plane. That alone had seemed terrifying but possibly manageable. But the airline clerk on the other end had patiently explained that the new low fares required a Saturday night stay. And she had found herself saying yes.

So now Claire was going to New York, a place she knew only from movies and books. It wasn't just the run that was making her heart pound and her palms sweat.

When Claire had proposed the idea last night, Charlie had encouraged her, digging out guidebooks and making lists of things to pack, visit and bring home. But she had not done the one thing that Claire had secretly hoped for—offered to come with her. Charlie loved New York and visited there every few years. But she had just won a part in a Mittleman Jewish Community Center musical, and she could not miss nearly a week's worth of rehearsals.

After she had made her plane reservation, Claire had been excited, thinking that in only a matter of hours she would be doing those things she had read about—studying the exhibits of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, walking through the holding rooms at Ellis Island, applauding a Broadway musical. But now she was frightened by her own daring. She had never been farther east than the Idaho border. By tomorrow night she would be in a city of seven million people, many of them, according to the TV shows she liked, intent on either conning or killing her.