The Resurrection Man (3 page)

“The leg’s doing fine, Bill. I suppose you know Lydia Ouspenska’s not at the Fenway Studios any longer. I met her on the way over here just a little while ago, looking like a million bucks’ worth of two-dollar bills. Have you seen her lately?”

“No-o-o. She just—” Bill waved his old lady friend off and shrugged her into oblivion. “I thought she must have—” either died or gone off with some man. That Lydia might have gone with a woman wasn’t even worth fluttering about, it could never have happened. “What’s she—”

“She claims she’s working for the Resurrection Man. Know him?”

Bill pantomimed a corpse laid out for burial. Max shook his head. “Not that kind. This guy has a business restoring antiques and paintings. His name’s Bartolo Arbalest and Brooks says he used to work in New York.”

Bill raised his eyebrows. “Are they—?”

“Oh sure, Lydia’s living with him, though only in the Plutonic sense, as far as I know. Arbalest prefers to have his helpers staying in the house so he can get them to the studio on time in the mornings.”

Bill smiled a wee smile. “Lydia does that? He must be some operator. Where’s his—?”

“Good question,” said Max. “We hope to have an answer in a while.”

“Didn’t Lydia—?”

“Her lips are sealed. She claims Arbalest has made all his elves take a vow of silence, for reasons of security.”

“Hey-y-y.”

Bill drew some rather alarming pictures. Brooks, who’d been quietly enjoying the pantomime, nodded.

“We’ve been wondering that ourselves, Bill. Not that it’s any of our business what Arbalest is really securing himself against,” Brooks added, for the code of the Kellings was a stern one, in spots. “Though I don’t suppose that need stop us from trying to find out,” he appended further after a moment’s thought. The code of the Kellings had certainly never stopped his Cousin Mabel. “Lydia claims the idea is to keep thieves from knowing where the clients’ priceless art treasures are being taken, so that Barto, as I gather she calls him, won’t have to carry heavy insurance. She could be telling the truth, I suppose.”

He, Max, and Bill shrugged in unison and enjoyed a merry chuckle together at this amusing fantasy. Then Bill started waving his hands again.

“So how does he—?”

“Make connections? House calls, according to Lydia. When I knew Bartolo in New York some years ago, he had a shop. People just strolled in with their Duccios under their arms and he touched up the bald spots. Now, it appears, he takes referrals by appointment from the more respected galleries and auction houses. It could be an upgrading of his image in the interest of higher fees, I suppose. Lydia didn’t happen to mention. Max, whether Bartolo drives up to the client’s door in a coffin brake?”

“Hell, I forgot to ask. It hardly seems likely he’d want to call attention to his comings and goings, if he’s that secretive about where he lives. I’m surprised he’s letting Lydia run around loose.”

“He probably isn’t,” Brooks demurred, “except for occasional errands. The truffles may have counted as a desperate emergency, Max, you know what amateur chefs are like. You’ve been out of circulation, of course, but I’m back and forth pretty much every day, as are Theonia and Charles. If she were really on the loose, it does seem one of us would have run across her somewhere along the line.”

“Unless the studio’s out in the suburbs somewhere.”

It wouldn’t be. Max’s guess was a re-gentrified former rooming house in the Back Bay. Lydia hadn’t specified how many people were actually living in the house, but surely they’d each want a bedroom. Unless Arbalest carried his medieval-guild concept to its limit and made his artisans sleep rolled up in sheepskins under the workbenches. Lydia probably wouldn’t mind, she’d slept in ruder places.

“As it is,” Brooks went on, “I haven’t heard so much as a whisper of her since Ernie Haire left Boston, much less of Bartolo Arbalest’s having arrived. Bartolo never struck me as the sort to hide his light under a bushel. All this secrecy suggests to me, as I’m sure it does to you, that he’s got himself into rather a bad fix in New York and is lying low till the dust settles. I just wish we knew what it’s all about, one can’t help worrying a bit on general principles. Lydia has about as much sense as a common coot.”

“I’ve never found anything common about Lydia,” Max objected. Except her love for the common man, he didn’t have to mention that. “Well, let’s not start tearing our hair till we see what the undercover agents have to report. What else is new, Bill?”

There was quite a lot, Bill told it graphically. More graphically than verbally, anyway. Brooks made careful notes in his own secret code, nodding from time to time as some piece of information fitted snugly into one of the various webs he and Max were weaving. They had all but wrapped up two of the cases on their docket, and were interestedly dissecting a rumor that had filtered through to Bill by way of Montenegro and Lima when a stage-caricature anarchist of the old Bolshevik school breezed in.

“Hi, Dmitri,” said Max. “Sit down and park your bomb.”

“Oh, fudge, you rumbled me.”

Charles C. Charles, for this could be none other, removed half a pound or so of bushy black-crepe hair from pate and chin, detached the matching eyebrows, and revealed himself in his Lord Peter Wimsey guise, except for the monocle he’d been too pressed for time to remember.

Charles, a professional actor, had done a magnificent Mr. Hudson for Sarah during her boardinghouse days, but had been forced to depend for spending money on a job in a plastics factory. Since Max’s accident, he’d been doing much of the legwork for the agency and was proving himself a man of more parts than he’d ever got to perform on Boston theater stages. Even as he picked spirit gum off his chin, he was turning into Sergeant Charles C. Charles, CID. First, however, he did a brief aside.

“Mariposa went back to the house, she thought moddom might be needing her in the kitchen. And now, sirs, to report. Pursuant to orders received and understood, M and I liaised with Mrs. B and son at the corner of Charles and Beacon. Finding her already in conversation with Countess O, we lurked until the latter party had kissed both Mrs. B and son D several times and prepared to cross on the walk light to the Public Gardens.”

“You mean the PG?” Max asked.

“Yes, sir, if you prefer, sir. Countess O was carrying a little weeny brown grocery bag, indicating to M and me that the truffle-procurement operation had been successfully carried out. That the bag was so small suggested to us that the countess hadn’t had money enough left to buy anything else. Otherwise she no doubt would have, she being the way she is. Neither the size of her handbag nor the cut of her costume was conducive to successful shoplifting and O has never been much good at it anyway. She might conceivably have snuck something into her parasol, but they were most likely keeping an eye on her in the store, knowing Countess O as they do.”

“So, in short, you trailed her.” Unless firmly taken in hand, Charles did tend to pad his roles. Max was eager to get at the nub.

“Yes, sir, we did, sir, my partner and I. M, I mean. We trailed Countess O to an address on—is it okay to say Marlborough Street? I’ve already used up the M.”

“It’s perfectly okay,” Max reassured him. “Between Arlington and Berkeley?”

“No, Berkeley and Clarendon, on the Beacon side. It’s the house with the fancy iron grilles on all the windows, both downstairs and up. New ones. Newish, anyway. The door’s painted a sickly olive green and has a brass knocker with a face on it.”

“Anybody’s we know?”

“I hope not. It’s more of a symbolic face, like a satyr or a dryad or maybe a gargoyle. I’m not too swift on dryads. Not shiny brass, the other kind.”

“Is the knocker strictly germane to the report?” asked Brooks, trying not to sound waspish.

“Oh yes, sir, strictly germane, because Countess O used it to knock with. On the door,” Charles added in the interests of perfect accuracy. “M and I walked on a short way, then paused for M to remove a hyperbolical pebble from her shoe while I employed my trusty see-back-o-scope in the hope of spotting the person who let her in. Unfortunately, the door was opened just far enough for Countess O to squeeze through. All I got to see was a hand with paint stains on it, and a little bit of a green velvet sleeve about the same shade as the door.”

“Excellent, Charles, that’s exactly what we wanted to know. You did get the house number, of course?”

“No, Mr. Brooks, because there wasn’t one. Of course it was easy to deduce what the number ought to be by reading those on the adjoining houses, but the actual metal numbers, as I suppose they must have been, were gone. Being a trifle farsighted, I could even see the little nail holes where they’d been taken off.”

“Well, that’s interesting. Don’t you think so, Max?”

“Could be. Jolly good show, Charlie. There’s no other house like it on the block?”

“No, it’s the only one with grilles all the way up and that olive-colored door and the face on the knocker. It’s between the red door with the federal-style knocker and the purple one with the old-fashioned wind-up doorbell in the middle. You couldn’t miss it. We walked down to Clarendon, then M split and I doubled back up through the alley with my Red Sox cap on to disguise me from above if anybody happened to look out. I wanted to see if there were grilles on all the back windows too, and there are. Every single one.”

“And Lydia had gone straight back after she left Sarah, not making any detour or stopping to talk to anybody?”

“Like a homing pigeon, Mr. Max. That’s not like her. You don’t suppose she’s had a brain operation or something? I had a walk-on once in a play where the mad scientist did a number on the beautiful heroine and she turned into a robot, obeying his every whim without question or hesitation. That was my big line: ‘Great Scott, Chavender! Pauline, that wilful madcap of yesteryear, now obeys that unspeakable cad Dr. Testoob’s every whim without question or hesitation.’ The play didn’t have much of a run.”

“T
OO BAD,” SAID MAX
, “but you can’t hit a home run every time. Did you see anybody else around the house?”

“There were people going by,” Charles replied, “but nobody in particular, if that’s what you mean. Nobody sitting on the steps across the street and watching the place, or anything like that. There was one man in the back alley whom I did wonder about a little. He was out in the alley behind the Arbalest house, doing exercises.”

“What kind of exercises?”

“Jumping up and down, clapping his hands over his head, swinging his legs around, that aerobic stuff, you know. What hit me was that he had on a bright-red jogging suit. Long legs, long sleeves, the whole nine yards. It looked strange on a hot day, you’d have expected him to be wearing shorts and a T-shirt.”

“Maybe he was trying to sweat off some weight,” Brooks suggested.

“Could be, but as far as I could tell with that baggy sweat suit blocking the view, he didn’t have a spare ounce on him. He was about Bill’s size, only darker, and his hair was straighter. He wasn’t black or Hispanic, more—oh, I don’t know. Indian or Malaysian, maybe. I couldn’t get a good look at his face; by the time I got close to him he was bent over double, swinging his head around upside down. I don’t want to make something out of nothing. It could be just that he lives in a small place where there’s no room to work out. Or that his wife collects Chinese porcelain and won’t let him do it in the house for fear he’ll break something.”

“Why wife, and why Chinese?” asked Max.

Charles thought it over. “Wife because he wasn’t a young kid,” he said at last. “His hair was fairly long, when he was flapping his head around I noticed some streaks of gray among the black. Porcelain because—I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that Mrs. Sarah was washing the china out of the cabinet in the dining room this morning and I was lifting down the pieces off the higher shelves for her.”

“Could be. Thanks, Charlie. Well, guys, I don’t see much reason left for us to hang around here.” Max glanced at his wristwatch. “My God, I didn’t realize it was so late. We’d better get back to the house before Sarah sends an ambulance. Why don’t you gallop ahead, Charlie, and tell her we’re on the way? Bill, would you care to come back and eat with us?”

“Thanks, but I’ve—”

Bill’s hands were less expressive this time, perhaps he simply didn’t feel like having dinner at the Kelling house tonight. More likely, he was champing at the bit to get his espionage network perking on the subject of Bartolo Arbalest and his medieval-artisans’ guild. Max could relate to that. If he’d had two sound pins under him he’d be hitting the trail himself. He picked up Great-Uncle Frederick’s cane and pulled himself together for the homeward trek.

The walk back across the Common was uneventful except for the usual requests for largesse from assorted indigents, which neither Max nor Brooks could ever wholly ignore. As they turned into Tulip Street, Max caught Sarah peeking out from behind the library curtains. She was having a hard time trying not to be too protective, poor kid. His accident, which in fact had been no accident at all except for the fact that the persons trying to kill him had fallen short of their ultimate purpose, had taken as big a toll from her as from himself. He’d have to find some way to make it up to her. At the moment, a hug and a fairly resounding kiss were the best he could think of.

“Home is the hunter, home to the hill. So how’s my
Fischele
?”

“Fine. I’m just so glad you were able to—”

Sarah had to break off and sniffle briefly into Max’s shirt front to show how glad she was. Then young Davy rushed out in his pajamas, demanding equal hugs and permission to play horse with the silver-headed cane. Being an amiable child, he settled for the hugs and the promise of a bedtime story after daddy’d had a chance to rest his leg, and rushed off to help Charles put on his butler’s coat and tie.

“Theonia will be down in a minute, she’s changing,” Sarah explained as she led the two men into the library. “Can I pour you some sherry, or would you rather have something else?”

“Sit down, Sarah, I’ll do the drinks.”