Corpus Christmas

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 i

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 sensuousnessneither 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’ pìccolo 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 which 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.”

“I don’t either,” Rick Evans said and his soft Louisiana voice was grim.

On any clear winter night, Søren Thorvaldsen could look upriver from his desk and see the distant George Washington Bridge strung across the Hudson like a Victorian dowager’s diamond necklace, but it was not half so beautiful to him as the cruise ship docked almost directly below his office window. The Sea Dancer was lit from stem to stern by her own glittering lights and she would sail on Saturday with eighteen hundred winter-weary customers.

A soft trill drew him from the window back to his desk where a winking button on his telephone console signaled a call on his private line.

“Thorvaldsen here.”

“Velkommen hjem, Thorvaldsen.” A gurgle of Irish laughter warmed her golden voice as Lady Francesca Leeds stumbled over the word for home.

Her attempts at Danish amused him. “I tried to call you from the airport,” he said.

“I know,” she replied. “I’m sorry. I was tied up with a client tonight.”

He looked at his watch. Nearly ten. “Is it too late for a nightcap?”

“I’m afraid so,” she murmured regretfully. “But I have good news for you.”

“Oscar Nauman’s agreed?”

“Not exactly. But he hasn’t said no, either, and this is the closest anyone’s come yet. I’ve arranged a small cocktail party tomorrow evening at the Erich Breul House. Jacob Munson’s going to bring Nauman to look at the space. You’ll come?”

“Helt sikkert!” he assured her happily.

Her voice turned teasingly miffed. “I think you’d rather see Oscar Nauman than me.”

He laughed as she said godnat and hung up, but her teasing held a shadow of truth. Francesca Leeds excited him more than any woman in years. It wasn’t solely because she so outranked him in birth, although bedding a woman out of his class had always been an aphrodisiac. It was her special blend of sophistication and earthiness that was so irresistible to the self-made Dane, who had learned to hold his own in the drawing room without ever quite forgetting what went on out in the kitchen. She was capricious enough to keep him off balance, uncertain of victory.

Yet past successes, spiced with a tinge of cynicism, let him savor the chase. For the first time, he enjoyed prolonging the preliminaries. Inevitably, she must surely come to his bed.