Corpus Christmas

More specific, she would not be; so Sigrid turned her gaze back to the man, who had taken Francesca’s glass over to the bar for a refill. “Would you prefer to finish your statement down at headquarters tomorrow, Mr. Thorvaldsen?”

“I thought I had finished already,” he said, pouring Irish whiskey into two glasses.

Sigrid flipped back several pages in her notebook. “You told me you worked until midnight and then went to bed.”

“Ja.”

“Yet we have a witness who saw you at the Breul House at midnight.”

That finally got under the shell of amused condescension which he’d adopted since Francesca’s arrival.

His blue eyes narrowed. “He must be mistaken.”

“No,” she answered flatly.

Francesca looked up at him as he returned with her new drink.

“Søren?”

He ignored her. “And if I say he lies, it is my word against his. Then what happens?”

“Then your people here will be questioned. No matter what you think, if you returned after midnight, someone will have seen you. Lady Francesca’s key to the Breul House will be analyzed. If the lab finds any waxy or soapy residue, that might indicate that it’d been duplicated without her knowledge. We would probably look more closely into your activities, see if Roger Shambley had learned something interesting about you-how you acquired all the pieces in your art collection, for instance. And then-”

“Enough, enough.” He turned to Francesca. “I did not use your key.”

“But you did go back to the Breul House,” Sigrid prodded.

“Ja,” he sighed and walked over to the windows to stare out at the dark river.

Francesca’s eyes met Sigrid’s and both women waited silently.

With his back to them, Thorvaldsen said, “When I returned to my office last night, there was a message on my machine from Dr. Shambley. He apologized for what he’d said about Francesca and Nauman and said he wanted to make it up to me.”

“Is the message still there?” Sigrid asked.

“No, I erased it.” Thorvaldsen sank heavily into the tawny leather chair opposite the low oak-and-glass table, his full glass cradled in those strong hands. The red lump under his eye had begun to turn blue.

“Did he say what he pla

“Not in so many words. Francesca told you before: he could say one thing, but you knew he meant something else.” He looked at his glass, dien set it on the table without drinking.

“This you must understand, frøken Harald-I did not get here by following every rule.”

He made a sweeping gesture of his hands that encompassed their luxurious surroundings here on the high deck of this ship and, by extension, all that it symbolized. “If I’d done that, I’d still be breaking my back under bales of smoked herring on a dock in Ålborg. Back then, ja, maybe I did sail too close to the wind. But that was then and this is now. Now, my money makes more money. All by itself, and all legal. Now, I want things I never dreamed of when I was a kid in Denmark. Now, I have time to learn what these things mean, and money to pay for them.”

He gestured toward the painting across the room. “Twenty-three years ago, I was walking along a street in København and I saw a picture in the window of a gallery. A little thing, so-” He sketched a small rectangle with his hands, approximately twelve by eighteen inches. “-and it stopped me cold. I didn’t know why, I just knew I had to own it. It took me two years to pay for it. My first Nauman picture. Now I own eleven Naumans and they form the heart of my collection. I’ve collected other artists, of course-two Picassos, a Léger, a wonderful Brancusi sculpture, and a number of works by lesser-known practitioners of what I call ‘cerebral abstraction’.”

Francesca slipped off her brown high-heeled boots and tucked her legs up under her skirt with a rustle of taffeta, but Sigrid remained motionless as Thorvaldsen abruptly reached for his glass.

“And for all these works,” he said, “I have documents, bills of sale, certificates.” He drank deeply. “But every now and then, people come to me with very beautiful, very rare things and they don’t always have documents and I don’t always ask for receipts. Shambley knew this.”

Thorvaldsen gave Francesca a crooked smile. “Or, as you said, min dame, he made me think he knew this.”

“He offered to sell you a stolen painting?” Sigrid asked.

“Not in those words, but yes,” Thorvaldsen admitted. “At the same time, he made me think that if I didn’t come, questions would be raised by others. Just now-”

He broke off and gave a sardonic shrug of his broad shoulders. “Lets say that at this particular moment, I don’t want controversy. Any controversy. Next month, okay. Now, no.”

“So you went to the Breul House?”

“Not immediately. But the more I thought of this other matter, the more I decided I had to go, at least hear what he wanted to say. I walked over to Eleventh Avenue and caught a cab going downtown. Got out near Sussex Square. He said to come in without ringing; the front door would be unlocked.”

“Was it?”

His affirmative grunt was halfway between a ja and a yeah.

“And the time?”

“A few minutes past eleven, I think. The great hall was dim inside. I called his name. No answer. A light was on in the library, so I went in there and sat until I almost fell asleep. Finally, I began to think it was some kind of stupid joke, so I left.”

“What time was that?”

“Midnight.” A more genuine smile flitted across his rugged features. “As I came down the steps, the lights on the Christmas tree in the middle of the park went off.”

Sigrid found it hard to believe that a man like Søren Thorvaldsen would sit meekly in a library and wait almost an hour for someone like Shambley to jerk him around and she said as much.

Thorvaldsen finished off his drink and set the glass on the table between them with a decisive clink. “Think what you like. You wanted my statement. That’s it.”

The lump beneath his eye was nearly purple now and Sigrid saw that he winced when he touched it absentmindedly. It was probably pointless to continue with Thorvaldsen tonight, she thought. Better to wait and get him down to her office when he was less belligerent. Time enough then to ask if he’d had a look around for whatever shady art object Shambley may have pla

She slipped on her coat, stowed the pad in one of its pockets, and pulled out her gloves.

“Did you leave a trail of bread crumbs coming in?” Francesca asked.

“No,” Sigrid smiled, “but I think I can find my way out.”

As she said good night and opened the door, Francesca suddenly slid on her boots and said, “Better let me point you toward the nearest gangplank. Back in a minute, Søren.”

They walked down the wide passageway to the elevator. Sigrid said, “Do you suppose the ship’s doctor is on board tonight? Someone ought to take a look at that eye.”

Francesca was amused. “I’m sure Søren’s had worse knocks than that. He made a pass at you, didn’t he?”

“Not exactly.”

They rang for an elevator and Sigrid felt the other woman’s appraising eyes as they waited.

“He’s really not like that,” said Francesca. “You probably won’t believe me, but I’ve been seeing him for two months now and underneath all that diamond-in-the-rough facade, he’s been a perfect gentleman. Too perfect, in some respects.”

The elevator arrived and they stepped inside. “In feet,” she added, “I was begi

“You?” Sigrid murmured, feeling like a drab country mouse next to Francesca’s rich shimmer of brown-and-gold taffeta.

As the elevator doors opened for them, Francesca laid her hand on Sigrid’s arm. “Does it make a difference to you, Sigrid? About Oscar and me, I mean? I saw your face last night when you realized what Roger Shambley meant.”