Corpus Christmas

by Margaret Maron

  Her companion was five years older and if one looked closely at his straw-colored hair one could see gray at his temples. He had an outdoorsman’s face, yet it took expensive tailoring to disguise the fact that his muscular body had perhaps spent too much time behind a desk instead of at the helm of his racing yacht.

  Søren Thorvaldsen was a Danish entrepreneur who had parlayed a boyhood romance with the sea into great wealth by refurbishing aging transatlantic liners into luxurious West Indian cruise ships. After years of hard work, he was ready to start playing again and Lady Francesca’s proposal had amused him and appealed to both his financial and aesthetic appetites.

  “Why don’t you explain your idea to Mr. Munson and Miss Kohn?” Peake said smoothly, turning the floor over to Francesca Leeds.

  She smiled. “It’s really very simple. The Erich Breul House has a serious image problem. Is it a historical house or is it an art museum? Some of the pictures in this collection are first-rate. No one questions that. The others—”

  A graceful half-humorous shrug of her shoulder indicated that she did not intend to speak uncharitably about the bulk of the founder’s collection unless pressed.

  “The Breul Collection is highly regarded by scholars world wide,” said Jacob Munson, who chaired the board of trustees. “Even now, Dr. Roger Shambley is writing a new book using examples from the house.”

  “But is it the general public who’ll be reading it?” There was a charming hint of Celtic lilt to the lady’s British accent. Her father supposedly owed his title to one of those tumble-down Irish castles.

  “Jacob, it’s imperative that we find new sources of revenue,” reminded Benjamin Peake.

  “Ja, ja. This is why we have lent you Richard.” He unwrapped another piece of hard candy and popped it into his mouth. The fragrance of peppermint wafted through the office anew.

  “And we appreciate the loan,” said the director, smiling at young Evans, who looked back at him through the camera’s range finder. “But there’s no point in taking photographs for a new brochure or a larger collection of souvenir postcards if no one comes in to buy them.”

  “We think people have forgotten what serendipitous treasures the Breul House owns,” Lady Francesca said coaxingly. “We must remind them—bring back not just the true art lovers but potential donors, too—the people who support what is chic to support.”

  Francesca Leeds described herself as a free-lance publicist but she was actually a matchmaker between money and the arts. She maintained a small one-room office in her suite at the Hotel Maintenon and new business came through personal recommendations of satisfied clients. As one of the four most highly regarded party planners in the city, she had a flair for matching corporate donors with charitable fundraising events.

  An importer of Italian shoes, for example, could be persuaded to help support a fashion show to benefit a convent founded by a Sicilian nun. The importer’s shoes would be featured throughout the show while the Santa Caterina Sisters of Charity would net several thousands to further their good works.

  The parent company of an expensive line of camera equipment might sponsor a movie premiere to help fund further research in retinitis pigmentosa.

  For every worthy cause, Lady Francesca Leeds seemed to find a moneyed patron.

  Her dark red hair glinted like polished mahogany as she tilted her head toward the heretofore silent Dane. “As a ship owner, Mr. Thorvaldsen recognizes a natural affinity for the Erich Breul House.”

  Rich Evans’ camera followed her eyes, then swept the group as Hester Kohn gave a muffled snort.

  Hester was puzzled by her inclusion in this informal planning session. She was not a trustee and she was much less interested in Benjamin Peake’s career than Jacob was.

  She regarded her partner with fond uneasiness. He couldn’t possibly last more than another year or two and then what would happen to the gallery? She had grown up speaking the specialized jargon of the art world and she was quite comfortable managing the gallery’s finances. But Hester Kohn knew her limitations, knew that she was no judge of artistic merit. One could be cynical and say that given the current state of visual arts in this city artistic merit hardly mattered; yet ultimately, she knew, it did matter.

  Although Jacob spoke halfheartedly of educating his slow-talking grandson, who had suddenly appeared full-blown from the Louisiana bayous this past September, Hester soon realized that the boy—he was only twenty—was even less intuitive about art than she herself. Her eyes lingered on him thoughtfully. Momentarily unshielded by his camera, he caught her gaze and turned away in self-conscious confusion. A tractable lad and willing enough to follow—she knew that better than anyone else in the room. Yet anything that couldn’t be captured through a camera lens seemed difficult for him to grasp.

  Jacob must see this, she thought, but would the ties of blood outweigh his devotion to Kohn and Munson’s impeccable reputation? Or would he leave his share of the gallery to one of his protégés, someone like Benjamin Peake for instance?

  She could keep Peake in line if she had to, she knew, shrewdly measuring his familiar, well-proportioned body with her hazel eyes. Despite his Ph.D. in modern art, she doubted that he was as sharp as Jacob wanted to believe, but allowances were made because Peake had been a close friend of Jacob’s son. They had met as fellow students at one of Meyer Schapiro’s seminars on modern art at Columbia, and after Paul Munson’s plane crashed, Jacob bad transferred his paternal interest to Peake’s career. Indeed, Ben Peake owed his present position here at the Breul House to Jacob, who had persuaded the other trustees to hire him after that fiasco up at the Friedinger left him out on his ear. Jacob would not stand idly by and watch this place go down while under Ben Peake’s direction if there was something he could do to help.

  But what?

  In accent-free English, Søren Thorvaldsen leaned forward to explain the similarities between his acquisition of a fleet of cruise ships and the first Breul’s fleet of canal barges. They were kindred spirits, it would seem, and like called to like even after a century and a half.

  “As I understand it, your endowment has been much eroded by inflation and maintenance,” said Thorvaldsen, his keen eyes flicking from Benjamin Peake to Jacob Munson.

  “Und?” asked the older man. “Und I would like to help. If Dr. Peake and your board agree, I could underwrite the expense of mounting a major retrospective of an important artist.”

  “The Breul House doesn’t do that sort of thing,” Jacob Munson snapped, yet curiosity piqued him. “Who?”

  “Oscar Nauman.”

  The old man smoothed his thin gray beard and shook his head. “He will not do it.”

  “He might if you asked him,” said Lady Francesca.

  “My dear lady, I haf asked him. Many times.”

  “Miss Kohn?”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Hester Kohn. “I’d love to mount a comprehensive retrospective of Nauman’s work, but Jacob’s right. He won’t even discuss it seriously.”

  “But why?” asked Thorvaldsen.

  Munson gave a palms-out gesture. “I think he’s superstitious,” said Hester Kohn. “Some artists are. They think a retrospective’s the kiss of death, the beginning of the end, an official assumption that they have nothing more to say.”

  “Nothing more to say?” exclaimed Thorvaldsen. “But this is a man who has found a dozen new voices in his lifetime.”

  Hester Kohn uncrossed her trousered legs and sat more erectly in her chair. “Are you by any chance represented by Dansksambler in Copenhagen?”

  Thorvaldsen hesitated, then nodded.

  “‘Autumnal’ and ‘Topaz Two,’” she told her elderly partner.

  “So, Mr. Thorvaldsen, you own two pictures by Nauman?” asked Jacob Munson.

  “Actually, I own eleven of his works and I’m told there are things in his studio that have never been exhibited.” It was not quite a question and there was a touch of wistfulness in the big Dane’s voice.
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  “What do you think, Jacob?” asked Benjamin Peake and he, too, sounded wistful.

  “Hester is right,” Munson told them with Teutonic finality. “Oscar will not agree to this.”

  Lady Francesca stretched an appealing hand toward him and her soft brown eyes melted into his. “Dear Mr. Munson! Have you not been Oscar Nauman’s dealer for over thirty years? And if you were to explain to him the situation here at the Breul House and entreat him for old time’s sake—?”

  Munson considered and Peake rushed into the lull. “If you approached him, too, Lady Francesca,” he said gallantly. “I’m sure you could make him agree. I’ve always heard that Oscar Nauman responds to beautiful women, right, Jacob?”

  Her smile did not falter, thought Jacob Munson, and the old man gave her full marks for self-control. Nauman tried to keep his personal life private, but the artist was a public figure and rumors did get around. Jacob was under the impression that Oscar’s affair with Lady Francesca Leeds had ended more than a year ago. He seemed to recall that there was a fresh rumor making the rounds now. A lady fireman, was it?

  Or dog catcher?

  Something unusual anyhow. Leave it to Oscar.

  Mr. Breul had arrived in Europe in the summer of 1879, but nearly three years were to elapse before he presented his compliments to the Swiss branch of his grandfather’s family in Zurich, where the Fürsts had been burghers since 1336.

  In later years, Mr. Breul enjoyed to speak of that first encounter with his fair cousin, Sophie. Fresh snow had begun to fall as the young American crossed the park to the Fürst villa on the right bank of the lake. As he approached the gate, a small white dog darted through the railings, heedless of a girlish voice that called in vain. Though hardly dressed for the bitter weather, the impetuous girl had rushed from the house to rescue her wayward pet, undaunted by her thin shoes and indoor dress.

  With the instant acumen that later marked his business dealings, Mr. Breul immediately grasped the situation and hastily captured the little dog by its collar before it could hurl itself beneath an oncoming carriage.

  His quick action secured the young woman’s gratitude, but when he insisted that she take his coat as protection against the falling snow, he won her heart from that moment forward.

  ERICH BREUL—THE MAN AND HIS DREAM,

  PRIVATELY PUBLISHED 1924 BY THE FRIENDS AND

  TRUSTEES OF THE ERICH BREUL HOUSE.

  III

  Sunday, December 13

  EVEN BEFORE SHE WAS FULLY AWAKE, SIGRID sensed a difference in the December morning light. And it wasn’t just the difference between rural Connecticut and urban Manhattan either. She snuggled beneath a down comforter with her eyes half focused on one of Nauman’s early oil paintings and drowsily noted a new clarity in the shifting planes of color, a new vibrancy.

  A part of her brain cataloged the variance. The other part was still too drugged by sleep to care or analyze.

  She yawned, turned over in the king-size bed, and abruptly caught her breath at what lay outside.

  Oscar Nauman’s house sprawled along the edge of a steep, thickly wooded hillside. With no near neighbors on that side, he had replaced his bedroom wall with sheets of clear glass so that nothing blocked her view of a tree-filled ravine that had transformed itself into a Currier and Ives print.

  Yesterday’s heavy gray sky was clear blue now and last night’s thin flakes must have thickened sometime during the early morning hours because snow capped each twig and limb, softened the craggy rocks, and shone with such dazzling purity that sunlight was reflected inside to intensify Nauman’s paintings and light up the room from unfamiliar angles.

  A thoroughly urban creature, Lieutenant Sigrid Harald, NYPD, knew almost nothing about nature in the raw and, on the whole, rather mistrusted unpaved lanes and trackless forests. She cared little for wildflowers or for knowing the identity of birds hopping mindlessly around in treetops. An occasional National Geographic special on Channel 13 was her nearest link to wild animals.

  Moreover, snow was usually an annoyance, dirty slushy stuff that got inside her boots or lay too long in messy heaps and, by alternately melting and refreezing, made city sidewalks treacherous for walking.

  But to gaze out for the first time in years upon a virgin snowfall unsullied by any footsteps filled her with unexpected wonder.

  She pushed herself upright in bed with Nauman’s down comforter wrapped around her bare shoulders and watched a small black-capped bird try to perch on an ice-crusted twig just outside the window. It misjudged the ice’s slickness and seemed startled when its feet slid out from under its first attempt at perching; but it recovered, settled onto the twig, and hunched into its gray feathers much as Sigrid hunched into the bedcovers.

  Her breath puffed in visible little clouds and she felt a momentary twinge of solidarity with the bird. If it was cold in here, what must it be out there? And how did birds keep their unfeathered feet from freezing anyhow?

  On the end wall opposite the bed, the stone hearth was black and lifeless. Nauman liked to sleep in an unheated room and last night’s fire had already burned down to glowing embers before they fell asleep. She shivered and sank a bit deeper into the covers.

  No sign of Nauman, of course. He was an early riser and had probably been up for hours.

  According to the clock on the mantel, it was a quarter past eleven. Were she in her own apartment, Sigrid would have stretched contentedly and gone back to sleep. A weekends’ greatest luxury was her freedom to drift in and out of sleep for several hours and she seldom rose before noon.

  Nauman’s Connecticut retreat offered better incentives to rise; nevertheless it took all the willpower she could muster to leave the warm bed and snatch up jeans and sweater.

  Happily, the man’s Spartan attitude toward cold bedrooms did not extend to his bath. The tiled floor felt pleasantly warm to her bare feet and the hot water was a benediction.

  She showered, toweled the mirror free of fog, then ran a comb through her dark hair and pushed it into shape with her hands. Until October, her hair had been long and she’d worn it pulled straight back and pinned into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Now ragged bangs swept over her strong forehead and the back was clipped short.

  Smoothing moisturizer over her face, she hesitated over the other small bottles and tubes in her toiletry bag. Cosmetics were something else new in her life, and even though she enjoyed the sexual sizzle they sent through her body, she still lacked expertise with the intricacies of technique.

  She would never be very pleased with her reflection—her face was too thin, her cheeks had never dimpled, her mouth was too wide—but she was starting to be satisfied with her eyes and the way her new bangs softened the former austerity. Cutting her hair seemed to have cut away some inhibitions as well, made her less reserved and awkward.

  At least with Nauman.

  Suddenly impatient to find him, she smudged on eye shadow and lip gloss and quickly dressed.

  An aroma of coffee hung in the air and she followed it out to the kitchen, but that utilitarian room was empty save for the tantalizing smell of onions, herbs, and well-browned chicken now rising from the oven. Nauman cooked as instinctively as he painted and had evidently felt creative this morning. Sigrid poured herself a cup of strong dark liquid, pulled the plug on the coffee maker, and backtracked through the house to the end wing formed by the studio and its decks.

  The lyrical intensity of a Martinu symphony was muffled by the double glass doors that led to Nauman’s studio.

  Essentially a huge sun porch, it was lined on both long walls with French windows that led to wide decks on either side. A high ceiling followed the pitch of the roof, accommodating two ten-foot easels; and with the snow outside today, the room was awash in brilliant natural light.

  At the far end of the studio, beyond the thrift-shop of tables and cabinets that held his painting supplies, was a huge stone fireplace flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Oscar Nauman sat in one
of the comfortable chairs pulled up before the blazing log fire and Sigrid paused to watch him relight his pipe.

  He was half a head taller than she and a generation older, with a lean hard body, piercing blue eyes, and thick silver hair that had finished turning white before he was thirty. They had sparred for six months, been lovers for six weeks, yet Sigrid was still unsure of her feelings for him—how much was sexual, how much emotional, and whether the two added up to that irrational state called love.

  By nature and by training she was cool and analytical, but Oscar Nauman was the one element in her life that she consciously refused to analyze. Clearly he was too old, too quixotic, too opinionated, too self-centered. Why was she not heeding the logic of this?

  Then Nauman’s head came up, he smiled in her direction, and Sigrid’s heart turned over. She smiled back and started to open the door before abruptly realizing that he was not alone, that his smile had been for a red-haired woman who now walked into Sigrid’s view holding one of Nauman’s pictures. Specific words were indistinct but her voice held a musical lilt.

  With the snow reflecting so much dazzling sunlight into the studio, Sigrid knew she would not be seen if she retreated back down the shadowed hall and read the morning paper till the woman was gone. Two months ago, she might have done just that. She was still self-conscious with Nauman when around others but she was trying to overcome it. So she told herself that she lingered here only because she was uncertain if the woman had come for business or if her Sunday morning visit were purely social. Perhaps this was something neighbors did in the country?

  There was only one way to find out.

  Steadying the coffee cup in her left hand, she opened one of the glass doors. The others looked up as she entered.