Corpus Christmas

by Margaret Maron

“Well?” Peake asked impatiently.

  Miss Ruffton looked at him coldly. “Perhaps it was only my imagination,” she said and turned away.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “Please go on.”

  But already she had opened the door to the service hall beneath the main stairs, the quickest route to her own desk, and she did not look back.

  “Merde!” Peake muttered beneath his breath and charged back into his office.

  “Listen, Shambley,” he said to the historian’s slender back, “what are you really looking for?”

  “Mi scusi?” Whenever he wished to insult, obfuscate, or stall until he’d chosen his next words, Roger Shambley always affected Italian. He lifted his oversized shaggy head from a low file drawer. “Why should you think I’m looking for something special?”

  “You’ve spent the last few days quartering this house like a bird dog,” said Peake, abruptly realizing that this was true. “All the Breul papers are up in the attic. What do you expect to find in old Kimmelshue’s files?”

  “Merely fulfilling my duties as a trustee,” Shambley said smoothly. “Familiarizing myself with past routine. And present. Which reminds me: Why are there no current inventory sheets? I find nothing later than 1972.”

  “The inventory hasn’t changed enough to justify a new one,” Peake snapped. “All the corrections have been notated on our master copy.”

  He strode over to the file cabinet nearest his desk and extracted the inventory folder. “I can have Miss Ruffton make you a copy, if you wish.”

  “You checked it thoroughly against the contents of the house when you took over?” asked Shambley.

  “Well, no. I saw no need when—”

  Shambley cut him off with a sneer. “You know what’s wrong with you, Peake? You’re lazy. Physically and intellectually. That’s why you fouled up at the Friedinger.” His eyes narrowed speculatively in his ugly face. “Or was it solely that?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Peake, becoming cautious.

  “I think it’s time the board asked for a complete inventory. See if there’s been any ‘unauthorized deaccessioning’ down here.” He closed the file drawers he’d opened earlier and took the inventory folder from Peake’s suddenly nerveless fingers.

  “Listen,” Benjamin Peake blustered, “if anything’s missing, you can’t blame me. Everyone knows Dr. Kimmelshue was senile the last three years before he died. Anything could have happened then.”

  Roger Shambley turned his huge head and haughtily waved Peake aside. “Permésso,” he said languidly and left the office.

  Mrs. Beardsley was becoming heartily sick of Dr. Roger Shambley’s permésso. In a house this size, one would think a body that small could find a clear space in which to pass without shooing people aside as if they were witless flocks of chickens. And she wasn’t taken in by his air of haughty politeness. Mrs. Beardsley knew all there was to know about using manners as a stick to beat those one considered inferior to oneself. Not that she ever did, she told herself.

  Well, not without provocation, she amended.

  She would admit that she was disappointed when Dr. Shambley received the trusteeship she had sought. She might not have his degrees or his growing reputation as an art scholar, but certainly she knew more about the soul of this house itself than any outsider could hope to. And her income was several times his. She’d checked. Considering the Breul House’s financial difficulties, a trustee willing to give generous support should have counted for something, shouldn’t it? Nevertheless, she had swallowed her disappointment and welcomed him as graciously as possible and what did she get for her graciousness?

  Permésso.

  * * *

  Uptown, in the business office of Kohn and Munson Gallery, Hester Kohn listened in growing alarm as Benjamin Peake screamed in her ear about Roger Shambley.

  “For God’s sake, Ben, get hold of yourself,” she interrupted crisply. “Have you taken anything from the house?”

  “Of course, I haven’t!” he howled. “Then you’ve nothing to worry about.” “Yes, I have and you do, too, Hester. You didn’t hear the way he said ‘unauthorized deaccessions.’ That bastard! He picks things out of the air. You know what art historians are like.”

  “Give them a flake of blue plaster and they’ll prove a Giotto fresco once covered the wall,” the woman sighed. She looked up as her secretary entered with a letter that required her signature. “Hold on a minute, Ben,” she said and tucked the phone between her shoulder and ear while she signed, then told the secretary, “I want to see those consignment sheets before you call the shippers, and don’t forget to remind Mr. Munson about tomorrow night.”

  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 shou
lders, 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.