Corpus Christmas (8 page)

She waited until the secretary had closed the door behind her, then spoke into the receiver. “There’s no way Roger Shambley
will start speculating about what really happened unless you give him that first flake of plaster.”

But for several long minutes after she’d hung up, her hazel eyes were lost in thought as she wondered if she’d made a mistake
in encouraging Jacob to sponsor Shambley on the Breul House’s board of trustees. She’d considered it a minor quid pro quo
when Shambley approached her about the vacancy in October. She didn’t know how Shambley had heard about her tutorial sessions
with young Rick Evans or how he knew she’d prefer Jacob not to learn of them, but smoothing his way onto the board seemed
a small price to pay for his silence.

Not that he’d been crass enough to threaten her. Open confrontation was not Shambley’s way. The man was oblique indirection:
a lifted eyebrow, a knowing twitch of his lips, a murmured phrase of ironic Italian. His victim’s guilty conscience would
do the rest.

Only… had she drastically mistaken which situation Shambley meant her to feel guilty about?

In the office across the hall, Jacob Munson unwrapped a peppermint drop from the bowl on his desk. He had not intended to
eavesdrop on the conversation between Benjamin and Hester and had almost announced his presence on their line when something
in Benjamin’s voice kept him silent. A lover’s quarrel, he’d thought at first.

When he’d realized last year that Hester and Benjamin were occasional lovers, he’d hoped that it might lead to marriage. Thirty-four,
Hester was, and time was running out if she wanted children.

That would have made an appropriate solution to the gallery’s uncertain future—Horace’s daughter and the best friend of Jacob’s
only son. To his disappointment though, their relationship had never gotten out of bed. When dressed, they didn’t even seem
to like each other most of the time. So what was all this about plaster flakes?

He sighed and absently tucked the cellophane candy wrapper into his pocket. Maybe it was a sign. Maybe blood was best after
all. Surely it was not too late to train young Richard to carry on the Munson heritage at Kohn and Munson?

* * *

By closing time, Rick Evans had shot the last roll of film that he’d brought with him to the Breul House. He climbed down
from Pascal’s tall aluminum stepladder and unplugged the floodlights he’d used to light the plaster moldings on the ceiling
of the third floor hallway.

“I guess we’ll call it a day,” he told Pascal Grant, and began packing up his cases.

Pascal bent to help, his smooth face so near Rick could have touched it with his own. His beautiful eyes met Rick’s trustingly.
“Will you need my ladder anymore, Rick?”

“Not for now.”

They collapsed the light stands and carried everything through the frosted glass doors, down to the end of the hall and the
mannequin maid, where they loaded it all on the dumbwaiter—easier than carting everything up and down by hand. Together they
carried the ladder down the back service steps and unloaded the dumbwaiter down in the basement next to Pascal’s room.

“Want to go get a pizza?” Pascal asked hopefully when they had stowed Rick’s equipment in an empty cabinet. “We can eat it
in my room and listen to some more jazz.”

Rick hesitated; then, with a fatalistic
que sera sera
shrug of his shoulders, he nodded.

“Dr. Shambley?”

The patrician voice floated through the marble hall, startling him as he descended the main staircase, now dimly lit. For
a moment, he almost thought he’d been addressed by the elegant female mannequin on the landing. Then he realized it was that
Beardsley woman speaking to him from the doorway of the darkened gallery beyond the massive fireplace.

“
Cretina!
” Roger Shambley mumbled under his breath. He thought everyone had left for the day and that he was alone except for the simple-minded
janitor somewhere in the bowels of the house.

Mrs. Beardsley turned off the lights in the cloakroom, leaving only the security lights in the hall, then buttoned her red
wool coat and pulled on her gloves. “You won’t forget to let Pascal know when you’re leaving tonight, will you, Dr. Shambley?
The burglar alarm wasn’t switched on till almost midnight last night because he thought you were still here.”

“I’ll remember,” he said brusquely. “
Buona notte
.” Dismissing her, he crossed the hall and entered the library, pettishly turning on the lights she had extinguished only
moments before.

A slam of the front door restored the earlier silence. Already, the automatic thermostat had begun to lower the temperature
here. For a moment, he contemplated finding the master control and turning it up again, then decided it was pointless.

He’d begun to despair of finding the letters he knew Erich Jr. must have written during his brief months in France. He had
already leafed through all the personal papers still stored in Erich Breul’s library. Except for that one tantalizing letter
misfiled in the attic, there was nothing later than the spring of 1911 when young Breul wrote to say how pleased he was that
both parents were coming to Harvard, that he’d reserved rooms for them at Cambridge’s best hotel for graduation weekend, and
that “although you will find her much altered since her father’s death, Miss Norton trusts that her health will enable her
to receive you at Shady-hill.”

Charles Eliot Norton! Shambley had marveled when he read that. One of the patron saints of fine arts—an intimate of Ruskin,
Carlyle, Lowell, and Longfellow—and the Breuls,
padre e figlio
, had been guests in his home!

Disconsolate, Shambley twirled Erich Breul’s large globe in its teak stand. Those letters might as well be in Timbuktu for
all the chance he had of finding them at this point.

Sophie Breul had saved her son’s toys, his schoolwork, his best clothes. Surely she would have saved his letters as well.
Yet he’d exhausted all the logical places and no more of Erich Jr.’s last letters were to be found.

He gave the globe a final twirl, switched off the lights, and crossed the hall to the cloakroom for his overcoat, the hollow
sound of his footsteps on the marble floor echoing eerily from the walls all around him.

He started to leave, remembered Mrs. Beardsley’s injunction, and descended the stairs to the basement, muttering to himself.
As if he had nothing better to do than remind another cretin of his duties!

At the bottom of the steps, Roger Shambley paused, uncertain exactly where the janitor’s room was. Lights were on along the
passageway beyond the main kitchen and he followed them, noting the storerooms on either side. Late last week he had checked
through the racks of pictures that Kimmelshue had consigned to the basement on the off chance that the old fart really had
been as senile as Peake claimed. A waste of time. No silk purses hiding among those sows’ ears.

No pictures stacked behind that pile of cast-off furniture, trunks, and rolled carpets, or—

He stopped, thunderstruck.

Trunks?

Slowly, almost holding his breath, he found the light switch, pulled a large brown steamer trunk into an open space, and opened
it.

Inside were books, men’s clothing, turn-of-the-century toilet articles, and a handful of—
Dio mio
, yes! Programs from Parisian theaters, a menu from a Montparnasse café, and catalogs from various art exhibits.

Excitedly, he pawed to the bottom. A few innocuous souvenirs, more clothing, nothing else. Erich Breul Jr.’s last effects
didn’t even fill one trunk.

Well, what did you really expect?
he jeered at himself. Retaining the catalogs, he shoved the large trunk back in place and lifted the lid of the smaller one
to see yellowed feminine apparel, an autograph album from Sophie Breul’s childhood, and what looked like an embroidered glove
case. He almost pushed it aside without opening it, but scholarly habit was too strong and as soon as he looked, be knew he’d
found treasure: fourteen fat envelopes, thick with European postage stamps. The top one was postmarked August 1911 and had
been mailed from Southampton, England; the last from Lyons in
Octobre
1912. And
si! si! SI!
—near the bottom was an envelope postmarked
XXXI Août 1912.

His hand was shaking so that he could hardly read the faded city.

Lyons?

If he remembered rightly from his one course in Post-Impressionism, Sorgues lay south from Lyons in the Rhône River valley.

In 1912, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the co-founders of cubism, had spent the summer in Sorgues, where, in a burst of
creativity, the two friends had invented the first collages.

For a moment, as he experienced a pure rush of excitement, Shambley’s ugly face was almost attractive. Here was every scholar’s
dream: the discovery of primary documents, a chance to become a permanent footnote in history. He wanted to sit down and read
them immediately; but innate, self-serving caution made him put the letters back in the glove case and slide it and the catalogs
into his briefcase until he could be certain of no interruptions.

Leaving the storage room as he’d found it, he switched off the light and retraced his steps. Beyond the stairs, he noticed
a door that was slightly ajar, and when he pushed it open, he realized he’d found the janitor’s bedroom. No janitor, though.

In his state of excitement, the room’s ornate sensuousness neither surprised nor interested him. All he cared about was scribbling
the dummy a note—assuming the dummy could read—that he’d left the house for the evening.

He propped the note on the mantelpiece and, from force of habit, read the signature of the saccharine oil painting there.
Idly, his eyes drifted over the posters with which the janitor had lined his walls and at the doorway, he paused, amused by
the coincidence of seeing a reproduction of an early Braque collage when his head was so full of the possibility that Erich
Breul had actually met Braque.

He hesitated, eyes on the poster. Braque or Picasso?

In later years even Picasso had trouble identifying which works were his and which were Braque’s, so why should he be any
more knowledgeable? The wood-grained paper overlapping a sketchy violin said Braque, but something about the lines of the
head—a monkey’s head?—said Picasso.

Curious, Shambley leaned closer, searching for a signature. There was none. Suddenly, a frisson of absolute incredulity shot
through his very soul. This wasn’t some poster issued by the Museum of Modern Art. That scrap of yellowed newsprint at the
edge of the picture was real! He ran his hand ever so lightly across the surface of the picture and felt the irregularities
where one piece of paper had been layered over another.

Very gently, he removed the bottom two thumbtacks by which the paper was held to the wall and lifted it up. With a minimum
of contortion, he could read the words scrawled in charcoal on the back by two clearly different hands: “
A notre petit singe américain—Picasso et G. Braque.
”

Hardly daring to breathe, he carefully replaced the thumbtacks precisely as before and moved to the two pictures nearby. Even
in this soft light, he could now see that they, too, were no mere reproductions but oil paintings unmistakably by Fernand
Léger, another master of cubism. Indeed, the canvases still held faint crease marks from where they had been rolled and squashed.

The trunk, Shambley thought. The collage was small enough to lie flat on the bottom, but the pictures must have crossed the
Atlantic rolled up in that trunk and there they’d stayed for the next seventy-five years because Kimmelshue had his ass stuck
firmly in the nineteenth century and Peake was too damn lazy to get off his. A goddamned fortune thumbtacked to a janitor’s
bedroom wall.

“And little ol’
píccolo mio
’s the only one who knows,” he gloated, wanting to kick up his heels and gambol around the room.

The distant sound of a closing door and young male voices raised in laughter alerted him. He quickly snatched up his note
and stepped outside, pulling the door shut just as Rick Evans and Pascal Grant walked into the main kitchen carrying pizza
and a bottle of Chianti.

Shambley was startled. Young Evans he’d met and had treated with courtesy because of his relationship to Jacob Munson, but
he had never really looked at the janitor. The guy usually had his head down or his back turned when Shambley was around and
he always wore rough green coveralls and mumbled when he spoke.

Tonight, Grant was dressed in tight Levi’s and a beige suede jacket, his blond curls had been tossed by the icy December wind,
his fair skin was flushed with cold, and his face, his beautiful face, was so animated with laughter that it was impossible
to believe that he was the same slow-witted Quasimodo who had ducked in and out of his presence these last two weeks.

The two youths halted at the sight of him. Pascal Grant’s laughter died and he lowered his head fearfully as they waited for
the trustee to speak.

“A party?” Shambley asked. He’d meant to sound friendly, but it came out a sneer and for some reason, Munson’s grandson flushed.

Instantly, Shambley knew why and was swept with a jealousy that he could hardly conceal. Deliberately, he walked over to Grant,
put out his small hand, and lifted that soft round chin, but the handyman trembled and wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Take your nasty hand off him!” Rick Evans snarled, stepping toward him.

“Or you’ll what?” asked Shambley. “Give me a proper thrashing?”

Without waiting for an answer, he released Grant and waved them both aside. “I’ll let myself out this way.
Buona sera.
Enjoy your”—he let his voice turn lewd—“pizza. Or whatever.”

As he passed through the shadowed passage to the front door, he almost forgot his first discoveries in the contemplation of
this last: old Jacob Munson’s grandson a
femminella.
Well, well, well.

Back in the warm security of his nest-like room, Pascal Grant rubbed his chin where Roger Shambley had touched him. “I don’t
like him, Rick.”