Corpus Christmas (23 page)

“He bought
two
of ’em, just alike?” asked Peters. “Uh-huh. He got kinda pissed when we didn’t have two different examples from that period.
It was like maybe he was doing his Christmas shopping or something. But then he kinda laughed and said it didn’t matter; that
he’d just hang one of them upside down. Weird, right?”

Her loose shirt fell forward as she bent to return the poster to its proper slot, but Bernie Peters noted with only half his
attention that she wasn’t wearing a bra. The other half recalled the search he’d helped conduct yesterday.

“I think I saw those posters in the Breul House basement,” he told Matt Eberstadt.

Seated across the library table from the two female detectives, Mrs. Beardsley had grown weary of the way one had to say the
same thing three different ways before the police moved on to a different question. Beyond the possibility of a trunk in the
attic, she had no idea where Sophie Breul’s extra glove case had spent the last seventy years, nor what that satin case had
held, and she had told them so. At length.

This was rapidly becoming, she decided, a delicate question of etiquette.

On the one hand, police officers were, by their very calling, of a lower socioeconomic order. One must, of course, treat everyone—even
one’s inferiors—graciously although a certain distance was allowed.

On the other hand, Miss Harald—
Lieutenant
Harald, Mrs. Beardsley reminded herself sharply—had been met on a social level and she was, after all, a personal friend
of the famous Oscar Nauman.

So one could hardly snub her with impunity. Not even when she made gross insinuations.

“Now
really,
Lieutenant Harald!” She stiffened in one of the leather library chairs. I don’t know with whom you’ve been gossiping, nor
do I wish to be told. Under the circumstances, I suppose everyone becomes suspect. Nevertheless, it’s simply ridiculous to
suppose that one—that
I
—would resort to violence.”

“But Dr. Shambley did fill a vacancy on the board of trustees that you had hoped for, didn’t he?” asked the lieutenant.

“I let it be known that my name could be considered,” Mrs. Beardsley admitted. “One is seldom chosen immediately. It is quite
usual to be passed over the first time or two.”

“Will you ask to be considered now that the seat is vacant again?”

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Beardsley firmly. “Why not? Everyone knows my devotion to the Erich Breul House is unchanged.”

“Yes,” agreed the police officer. “We’ve heard that you’re often the first to arrive in the mornings and the last to leave
at night.”

Her tone sounded more conciliatory and Mrs. Beardsley unbent slightly. “One can’t claim too much credit for that when it’s
merely a matter of walking across the square.”

“And you do have a key,” mused Lieutenant Harald.

Mrs. Beardsley looked at her sharply. Such a drab-looking person today in that dark gray suit and no makeup. On Wednesday
night she’d been rather striking in an odd way. Or was that only because one linked her with Oscar Nauman?

“Tell us again, please, what you did after the others left?” she was saying.

Mrs. Beardsley sighed and went through it all again: how all the guests had gone by eight-thirty, how she’d sent Dr. Peake
on his way, how she’d overseen the caterers’ departure. She did not try to describe how she loved being alone in this house,
how she could almost imagine herself a member of the Breul family, or how alive they often seemed to her. Never mind if Pascal
were in the basement or Dr. Shambley in the attic. As long as one didn’t see or hear either man, one’s imagination was free
to see and hear the Breuls.

“No,” she said again. “I didn’t go down to the basement because I thought Pascal was still out; and Dr. Shambley had made
it quite clear more than once that he did not wish to be disturbed when he was working. I ascertained that all the candles
were snuffed, then I unplugged the Christmas tree and went home without seeing either of them.”

Mrs. Beardsley braced herself for more questions on that point. Instead, the Harald woman sat back in her chair with a trousered
knee propped against the edge of the gleaming table top and asked, “Why did Pascal Grant dislike Dr. Shambley? Some of the
other docents have told us that he avoided the man whenever he could.”

“Dr. Shambley made him feel uncomfortable,” she hedged.

“How?”

Protective maternalism surged in Mrs. Beardsley’s breast. “Pascal Grant couldn’t hurt a fly,” she told them. “Surely you see
what a sweet gentle boy he is.”

“That’s why we don’t understand what he had against Dr. Shambley,” said the younger detective, smiling at her across the table.

Mrs. Beardsley approved of the blonde’s tailored femininity, her coral lipstick and modest eye shadow, her Cuban-heeled boots
and brown tweed jacket worn over beige-and-peach plaid slacks. So much easier to talk to, she decided. And really, weren’t
policewomen rather like nurses? One could discuss anything with nurses.

“It was painful for Pascal to speak of it,” she said, bravely ignoring her own embarrassment, “but it seems there was a man
at the shelter workshop where Pascal trained when he was twelve or thirteen.” Her voice lowered. “A
sexual deviant
, if you please! And he took advantage of his position to force himself on some of the boys.”

“And Shambley—?” asked Detective Albee. “Oh, no!” exclaimed Mrs. Beardsley. “When I realized how uneasy Pascal was, I cross-questioned
him quite thoroughly, for I would have denounced Dr. Shambley had that been the case. No, no, I’m quite certain he did not
approach the boy; but evidently, there was some physical resemblance between Dr. Shambley and the man who had once abused
him. Something about their eyes, I believe. Poor Pascal. His reactions are emotional rather than reasoned. But you must surely
see from this that his instinct is to retreat, not attack. He simply avoided the man whenever he could.”

The other two women were silent for a moment, then, absently tapping her pen against her knee, Lieutenant Harald said, “Getting
back to your own movements, Mrs. Beardsley: you saw no one after the caterers left?”

“Not even,” added the other officer, “Mr. Thorvaldsen when you crossed the square?”

“I’m sorry, Detective Albee, but when it’s that cold, one doesn’t linger outside to pass the time of night with casual pedestrians
whom one may or may not know. I simply didn’t notice.”

“So when you say that you went home shortly after nine and didn’t return,” said Lieutenant Harald, “there’s no one who can
confirm your statement?”

Mrs. Beardsley inclined her head. “No one.”

Once more they asked her about seeing Thorvaldsen leave the house at midnight and then they thanked her for her cooperation.

One with a completely clear conscience did not register relief at having done one’s civic duty, Mrs. Beardsley reminded herself,
and walked with quiet dignity from the library.

Sigrid glanced at Albee. “Well?”

“Oh yes,” said Elaine. “I could see her deciding that he was a bug that needed to be squashed and just doing it. But only
if he was hurting her precious house. And he wasn’t.”

“That we’re aware of,” Sigrid told her. “We still don’t know where he found that glove case or what he took from it.”

“And we may never know,” sighed Jim Lowry, returning from the attic at the end of her comments. “The docents say there’re
more than a dozen trunks and wardrobe boxes full of Mrs. Breul’s stuff up there and the inventory sheets don’t go into much
detail. Just ‘apparel’ or ‘accessories.’ And the case might have held a jeweler’s box, but they don’t think there was anything
valuable still in it because all her good stuff was sold when the house became a museum.”

Out in the long marble hall, there was a sudden babble and chatter of excited female voices and through the open doorway,
they saw a bearded professor with a harried air as he shepherded his charges past the ticket table.

The art students from that Raleigh women’s college, no doubt.

“This might be a good time to break for lunch,” Sigrid said judiciously.

At the gallery off Fifth Avenue, Rick Evans mechanically set another painting on the easel, readjusted the two floodlights
on either side, took a reading with his light meter, then focused his camera and clicked the shutter.

When he first came up from Louisiana in September, it had surprised Rick how strongly the art world depended upon slides.
The first cuts in competitions were made by judges who looked at slides; grants were awarded, exhibitions decided, magazine
articles written—all very often on the basis of photographic slides alone.

His grandfather spoke of this trend with contempt, but Hester Kohn merely shrugged her shoulders and asked Jacob to consider
the cost of shipping fees, not to mention wear and tear on the artwork itself.

Rick set another large oil painting upon the easel. It looked a little topheavy in composition, all those purple slashes at
the top and empty unprimed canvas at the bottom, and he checked the label on the back of the stretcher to make sure it was
right side up. He no longer tried to understand each picture. All he cared about now was making a technically perfect slide.

In the beginning, his grandfather had brought a chair into the workroom and sat beside him during these photography sessions
and talked to him of each work’s artistic strengths and weaknesses. “See how the dynamic forces play against the static, Richard,”
he would say, his words lightly accented with German and the smell of peppermint. Or, “Why do you think the artist placed
the yellow so low? Why to buoy up the work and to relieve the dark weights above. Contraction and relaxation,
ja?
”

And if the picture touched a chord, he would go off and rummage through books in his office and come back with illustrations
that showed how Vermeer, though a Dutch realist of the seventeenth century, used the same approach; or how Picasso or Matisse
had dealt with the same matter differently.

“Do you see?” he would ask. “Do you see?”

“Yes, sir,” Rick would reply, wanting to please. And he
did
see when his grandfather pointed it out, but when asked to critique a fresh picture, he always muddled it.

“
Mein Gott!
” Jacob had exploded one day. “The simplest thing in art and you do not see it!”

That day, he had grabbed Rick by the shoulders and fiercely swung him around to glare into his face. As their eyes locked,
the anger had drained from the old man’s face.

“Paul’s eyes you have,” he’d said sadly, “and in you they are blind.”

After that, his grandfather continued to sit in on some of the sessions and to instruct as before, but the intensity had gone
out of his lectures and he had stopped asking Rick to describe what he saw.

He could stand that, Rick thought, as he snapped the last exposure on the roll of film. What he couldn’t stand was the look
that had appeared on his grandfather’s face when he and Hester had returned from the police station yesterday.

“You were there last night?” Grandfather had asked in a dreadful voice. “In that
Schwachsinnigen’s
bedroom?”

“In his
room,
” Rick had said, reddening under the scornful implication. “And he’s not an idiot, Grandfather, just a little slow. We’re
friends.”

“
Ja,
sure,” his grandfather muttered wearily, and suddenly he looked his full eighty-two years, old and frail and utterly defeated
by what fate had given him. He had touched the picture of his dead son, then sighed and laid it face down among the papers
on his desk, swivelled in his chair, and turned his back on Rick. “Tell Hester to come in,” he’d said stonily.

He would stay until after Christmas, Rick thought, sliding a fresh roll of film into his camera. After that, he would go home
and let his mother pull strings for a job with one of the state bureaus in Baton Rouge. He would walk back-country lanes again
and take pictures of pelicans and swamps for wildlife calendars or tourist brochures.

And he would stop trying to deny to himself that he was what he was.

Next to a rent-controlled apartment, Zeki’s, just west of Third Avenue, was that most precious urban find: an as-yet-undiscovered,
good, midtown restaurant. Even Gael Greene was unaware of its existence. Although celebrities often lunched there, knowing
they would not be bothered by gawkers, New Yorkers came for the Turco-Croatian cuisine of delicately spiced lamb and indescribable
breads, not to see and be seen.

It was nearly two and the outer room was still crowded as Oscar Nauman passed through. He spoke to a couple of friends, nodded
when the barman said, “The usual?” and found Jacob Munson at his corner table in the back.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, sliding into the chair opposite his dealer. “The garage down the block was full. You order yet?”

“
Nein.
”

Oscar looked across the snowy white tablecloth and frowned. “You feeling all right, Jacob?”

The old man shrugged. He looked shrunken today. His face was nearly as gray as his thin beard and his brown eyes had lost
their elfin luster.

“Not coming down with something, are you?”

“It’s nothing. A little cough. What are you? Nurse Nightingale?” Jacob asked irritably.

“That’s better,” Oscar grinned.

But as his glass of ale arrived accompanied by a martini, the grin faded; and when the waiter had taken their orders, he said,
“What’s with the drink? I thought your doctors said—”

“They did. Lean closer, my friend, and I’ll tell you a secret: Jacob Munson is not going to live forever. Tomorrow he could
drop dead; so why not a martini today?”

He lifted the glass and sipped long. “Then who’ll take care of my show?” Oscar asked lightly, determined to shake Jacob out
of this puzzling mood.

“Elliott Buntrock will.” He caught the waiter’s eye across the room and signaled for another martini. “There’s a Buntrock
under every rock,” he said bitterly.

“Jacob?”