Winner's Loss

by Mel Bradshaw

  “What rotten luck!” Gussie raised her glass. “Rest in Peace, Nora.”

  Oscar looked up. “Did Koch use snow when he was down there, Gussie?”

  “Not that I remember. Why?”

  “Funny,” said Oscar, although there was no mirth in his hazel eyes. “I was at a party once here in Toronto where people were shoving cocaine up their noses, but Herman said no, he never inhaled it for a lark — only when he needed extra pep to finish a painting. That was when he had portrait commissions. Then he got a reputation for insulting his sitters. I’m guessing he no longer has deadlines to meet. I haven’t seen him for years. Wonder if he still snorts.”

  “Would his wife have had the same use for cocaine?” I asked. I wondered if the drug could have affected her balance up there on her scaffold.

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” said Oscar, returning to his drawing.

  “How well did you know her, Oscar?”

  “I didn’t. As Gussie says, she wasn’t really in circulation. No more here than in New York.”

  “Suppose her work was in demand and Koch’s was snubbed,” I persisted. “From what you know of Koch, would he have been jealous?”

  “Sure. He has an exalted opinion of his own art. Justified too. A little antiseptic for my taste — still, top drawer. You can count on genius not to be too kind.”

  The sky showed black outside the classroom’s tall, uncurtained windows and through the skylights overhead. Feeling a chill the Seagram’s didn’t reach, I got up and walked around. I wondered what Oscar’s own work looked like. There were signed watercolours of sand and palm trees pinned to a corkboard, but it was a large canvas on an easel beside the teacher’s desk that drew most of my attention. It was perhaps six feet by four, a sombre oil painting of soldiers in muddy greatcoats standing at attention in what looked like a twilit farmyard in northeastern France.

  “I’m new to the world of art and artists,” I said. “Maybe you two can help me. In your experience is it common for a genius, so-called, to consider himself outside — or above — the law?”

  “Not Herman,” Gussie said, her face softening as some memory of Koch came back to her.

  “No,” said Oscar, “not Herman, but he does have a mean temper — mostly repressed, as the Freudians would say.”

  I asked what that meant.

  “It’s like this, Paul. Good as his art is, those rural landscapes of his, even the stormy ones, are too clean and bloodless. He doesn’t express the dark side of his soul in his painting, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it came out somewhere else.”

  “You don’t seem to have that problem.” I gestured to the picture on the easel. “A firing squad, isn’t it?”

  Oscar gave me a sharp look. “What makes you say that? I just call it Dawn Muster.”

  I shrugged and smiled. “Goes to show — I know nothing about art.”

  Everything in the picture was distorted. Colour had been applied in lurid swirls so that even the roof lines of the farm buildings were curved and out of perspective. The soldiers’ feet were disproportionately large and not in contact with the ground. Nothing looked quite like anything. And yet I could make out an even dozen men with rifles. Although there was no prisoner present, the look on the faces of the soldiers didn’t fit any assignment but an execution. Eleven, their faces greyish green, wore expressions of sickness and disgust rather than the fear felt in anticipation of a trench raid or an assault. The man nearest the viewer, his face red and contorted with anger, appeared to have mastered his revulsion. On his sleeve, he wore the single chevron of a lance corporal. His role would have been to assemble the squad and have them wait for the officer to lead them opposite the post or chair to which the condemned man was bound.

  “That’s what New Yorkers call the Ashcan style, Paul,” Gussie said. “They think art is truer when it’s ugly. It doesn’t have to be a firing squad.”

  “True or not,” said Oscar, “if Herman could paint like that, he wouldn’t have to keep his rage bottled up and festering inside.” He held up his finished sketch for us to admire. “What do you think, Pierrot? Ugly enough for you.”

  Oscar had shaved fifteen years off Gussie’s age — taken her back, I guessed, to the age she’d been when he knew her in Greenwich Village before the war — and dressed her, in place of her feather boa, in a stage costume, a loose white blouse with a frilly collar and large pompoms for buttons. In her pencilled face I read ambition and readiness for life.

  Gussie gasped. “Huh! For an Ashcan man, you’re full of surprises. It’s sweet.”

  “Ah, I think I’ll throw it out.”

  Gussie leapt at him. After a pretend wrestling match, Oscar let her take the paper from him. By now all three of us were laughing.

  “Say, Paul, you going to watch Bruno Ferrari box at the Coliseum next Thursday? That boy’s an artist in his own way, in the application of pain.”

  I told Oscar I wasn’t planning that far ahead. By Thursday, I might be at a gallery.

  Chapter 6

  Saturday morning, I had a large choice of seats on the streetcar in from my Queen Street West apartment to City Hall. The conductor rubbed sleep out of his eyes and yawned before taking my fare. When I greeted him by name, he asked if I were another soul damned to weekend duty. No, I said, just looking for an address.

  Before I could get started on that task, I found a phone message waiting on my desk. At eight fifteen Friday evening, the note said, Eric Hutchinson had called to tell me Herman Koch was asking for the painting supplies Nora Britton had left at Christ Church Grange Park. Hutchinson wanted to know whether Koch should be allowed to take them.

  I’d forgotten about the items I’d left on the scaffold in the church, but I remained suspicious of Koch and decided to err on the side of caution. I told the rector I’d send a constable to take possession of these supplies on behalf of the police and that Koch could be told they would be released to him in due course if they weren’t needed as evidence.

  The address I wanted was that of Nora Britton’s studio on Elizabeth Street. The City Directory told me she shared a building with an antiquarian by the name of C. Moretti. I looked for inspiration at the ceiling of the detective room. I wondered idly if its original colour had been obscured by decades of tobacco smoke or whether it had been painted that colour to begin with. Moretti? Not a typical Church of England name, and yet I had a sneaking idea it appeared somewhere in my record of Friday morning’s conversation with Eric Hutchinson. I flipped through my notebook. Sure enough, the parishioner that had threatened to spit on Koch’s mural. The rector had given me the address of his residence, not his place of business. Elizabeth Street was only a block west from City Hall. How many C. Morettis could there be in the neighbourhood? I thought I’d walk over and have a word with the antique dealer. I would have bid farewell to the two detective sergeants officially on duty, but Howarth and Parsons both appeared to have stepped out for a moment, and the full force of my cordiality had to be spent on a startled secretary. It was cool enough in the shade that I’d worn a trench coat, but the strengthening sun made it almost superfluous. I carried it over my arm.

  Limiting my cheerfulness somewhat was the problem of getting into Nora’s studio. I couldn’t get a search warrant because I didn’t know what I was looking for or how it might relate to a crime. I’d just have to trust to my powers of improvisation.

  Few of the structures on Nora’s street posted street numbers, but by knocking on a door too far north and counting backwards I found the address. The two-storey plank building had a conventional shop front on the ground floor and a loft above with double doors opening onto the street. Inside these doors I assumed there would at one time have been a hoist for loading merchandise. The roof sloped down from right to left, so that the north side wall of the building was at least three feet higher than the south.

  The shop window, mostly empty, displayed in one corner a jumble of tools, toys, appliances, dishes, cutlery, and other household item
s. A broken window in the shop door had been boarded over with unfinished plywood. The shop door was locked; it was opened in response to my knock by a man with one leg and ginger hair. Carl Moretti wore the trousers of a dark green suit, thick suspenders, no jacket, a dun-coloured shirt, and an expression on his clean-shaven face between anger and panic. He was upset and needed to talk.

  He said his premises had been broken into the night before. He didn’t think any of his wares had been taken, but Miss Britton’s studio upstairs had been vandalized. I identified myself as a detective and asked him to show me.

  I saw in the break-in both good luck and bad: my problem of access was solved, but evidence relevant to Nora Britton’s death could have been destroyed or removed.

  The staircase lay behind a second door, the Yale lock of which had been jimmied off. Leading me through, Moretti said the sight of that damage had prompted him to look upstairs this morning as soon as he’d arrived, between eight and ten past.

  He managed his crutch nimbly on the stairs and we soon reached the loft, which was lit at the far end by large windows overlooking a back lane and by a couple of smaller ones let into the higher north wall. I thought it possible the latter had been added when the room was converted from a storage area to an artist’s studio. A wood-burning stove in the centre of the loft might also have been a late addition. Still, I couldn’t see that it would have added much to the comfort of the studio in winter, as any cold wind would blow through the cracks in the plank walls where daylight now showed. The furnishings were modest — a flimsy wardrobe, a chest of drawers, two bookcases, a kitchen table, a dry sink, three ladder-back chairs, one Windsor chair, and one wicker rocker. All unremarkable, except that all had been knocked over. The standard-width bed remained on all four feet, but the pillows and covers appeared to have been stabbed and torn with a knife. Books, dishes, and food staples littered one area of the plank floor. The rest was covered with paintings on canvas as well as sketches and watercolours on paper. Some of the papers were torn in half or into smaller bits. A few of the canvases had been stabbed. When I looked more closely, I saw that the cuts had excised or at least shredded the faces of certain persons represented in the pictures.

  All this disorder spoke of the hostility that Nora Britton had aroused in certain quarters. The idea that she had enemies wasn’t new. So should I have been as surprised as I was standing in her studio with the October sun pouring in on this scene of devastation? What had me catching my breath, I guess, was the passion expressed in this attack. Such fury was so at variance with the calm calculation that would have been required to kill Nora inside the locked sanctuary of the church. So I had to keep in mind that evidence of hostility was not necessarily evidence of murder.

  Carl Moretti was starting to right the furniture and pick up the papers. I had to ask him to leave everything as it was.

  “Have you already told the police about this break-in?” I asked.

  “How the heck would you expect me to do that? I can’t afford a phone, even though I did work for the company for five years.” The man seemed less scared with a policeman present, but remained irritable. “I’ve been watching the street all morning for a constable to come by, but you people don’t bother patrolling the poorer neighbourhoods.”

  “It looks as if Miss Britton’s only access to her studio was through your shop. You must have seen a good deal of her.”

  “Not so much. I don’t live here, you know, so how she spent her evenings I couldn’t say. She had her own key to the shop.”

  “Was she friendly?”

  “Friendly?” snapped Moretti, as if this were a quality he had no use for. “Friendly enough — but she knew I liked to be left alone, so she didn’t try to make talk every time she came in or went out. I’m sorry she’s dead. If the landlord can’t find someone else to pay as good a rent for this space, he’ll sell, and where will that leave me?”

  “What did you think of her art?”

  “It’s all right. She gave me a picture of some soccer players. You can see it downstairs if you think you might buy it.”

  “Did you object to her being commissioned to paint a mural in your church?”

  “What do you know about my church?” Moretti snapped.

  “Christ Church Grange Park, Mr. Moretti. The rector spoke to me about you.”

  “The rector’s a fool where this mural is concerned. It was no job for a woman. Have you seen how big that wall is? And then she got some Chinaman to build a scaffold for her. More foolishness. Something was bound to go wrong.”

  “Did it matter to you that she was married to Herman Koch, the winner of the first design competition?”

  “I didn’t give a darn about that.”

  “You threatened to spit on a mural painted by Koch. Would you have done that to one painted by his wife?”

  “She wasn’t German — and besides, she and Koch were separated. I never saw him here. Or in church.”

  I wondered what else I could ask Moretti. “Did you ever give Miss Britton anything to eat?”

  “What? Does this look to you like a restaurant?”

  “Did you at any time give or sell her food?”

  “Definitely not. I don’t keep food in the shop. It would attract rats.”

  “Did you ever give or sell her anything to drink?”

  “Are you calling me a bootlegger? I don’t drink alcohol; I don’t sell it; and, if I had any, I certainly couldn’t afford to give it away.”

  I explained to Mr. Moretti that I didn’t just mean alcoholic drink. He assured me, in a self-congratulatory tone, that he had never offered Nora Britton so much as a sip of water. The man was making me thirsty. I told him he could go back to his shop. I wanted to take a closer look at the art.

  “Ah, you’ll never catch whoever made this mess.”

  I listened till the alternating thumps of his boot and crutch on the steps died away. My pocket flask had been refilled before breakfast from the bottle of Seagrams I kept in my kitchen. I took a belt while starting to look around. Beside a knocked over easel, I found an oil on canvas painting about three feet tall by two wide. The coloured area was rounded at the top. Within the semi-circle, the sky was a shade of green I recognized from the church. This painting I thought might be Nora’s mural design.

  I spent several minutes looking at it. In the church, apart from the patch of green sky, no colour had as yet been applied to the wall. I remembered seeing some charcoal marks; indeed, Nora might have sketched in all the main elements, but to anyone standing far enough back to take in the whole these lines would have been too faint to make out, as well as being largely obscured by the scaffolding.

  In the centre of the painting I held in my hands stood a slender wooden cross, dividing the composition into two halves. The background of each half was a city. On the right, buildings shaped like ones I’d seen in Belgium were on fire. In the distance, people with small packages of belongings could be seen fleeing the flames. On the left, a streetscape characteristic of Toronto’s Ward neighbourhood was discernible. Elizabeth Street itself was recognizable with its plank sheds and houses sheathed in crumbling roughcast. Here the background figures were rag and bone collectors and children playing in a mud puddle.

  Before each cityscape stood a pair of large figures, an armed serviceman shielding a woman in each case.

  On the left, in front of the Toronto slum, I believed the artist had painted herself — although I’d only seen a photo of Nora Britton in profile and this woman was depicted face on. The eyes of the woman in the picture were apprehensive, her cheeks sunken. And yet her mouth was the same shape as Nora’s; her straight, dark hair was pulled back flat from a centre part in the same way. Despite her poverty and sense of danger, the woman embodied a proud beauty. The artist had given her likeness a long, plain, mud-coloured dress that nevertheless allowed to be seen an erect and well-proportioned figure beneath. Her protector wore a khaki battle tunic and a kilt in the tartan of my own regiment, the 4
8th Highlanders of Canada. His left arm was stretched in front of the woman, as if to keep her from falling out of the picture. His rifle was in the order arms position, with the butt resting on the ground near his right foot and his right hand around the barrel. I noted that this was no generic weapon. The artist had taken the trouble to portray exactly the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield Mk. III — standard issue to Canadian troops in 1916 after the failure of the Ross Rifle. This meticulous attention to detail I saw was characteristic of her style throughout the painting and a clear contrast to Herman Koch’s approach. The Koch landscape on his easel in the chapel made you believe in detail that wasn’t there. Nora Britton made you believe she was showing you a photograph, except that no photograph was this sharply focused, this pure in its colours, this well-lit. Both husband and wife were illusionists of the first order.

  On the right side of the cross, Koch himself figured in Nora’s painting. The pacifist’s face had been given to a sturdy sergeant with the insignia of the Canadian Machine Gun Corps embroidered above the chevrons on his sleeve. Across his body he held in both hands a Lewis gun, easily recognizable for its distinctive circular pan magazine and its large-diameter aluminum pipe around the barrel, a device meant to assist with the air cooling. Sheltering in the lee of this warrior stood a woman in folk costume with a high lacey headdress. The face of this representative of Belgian womanhood had been cut away by the intruder as had that of the infantryman on the left side — the Toronto side — of the cross. Beneath the scenes depicted, a panel inside a decorative border of laurel leaves and poppy blossoms had been left blank, presumably for the inscription of names of the parishioners killed in the war.

  I admired the painting as a whole. I didn’t know whether it was good art, but the clean style was refreshing, and the content gave me lots to think about. At the same time, it didn’t strike me as a war memorial. The painted soldiers, despite their accurately portrayed uniforms and weaponry, failed to evoke my own war dead, the fellow officers and men that our battalion had lost between 1914 and 1918. There was something of the recruiting poster about it, a celebration of heroism from a naive civvy point of view. I thought I’d like to sit Nora down and talk to her about all that. That’s when, standing in her violated nest, I felt a pang of loss.