Corpus Christmas

To change the subject, he walked around the bed, sat down on the edge, and began reading the titles on the other youth’s stack of cassette tapes. “Hey, what kind of music do you like, Pasc?”

Happiness suffused Grant’s beautiful features. “Pasc. That’s what my friend called me, my friend at the training center. That’s where I learned how to fix things. Are you going to be my friend?”

“Sure,” Rick said automatically.

“I’ll get us some soda, ” Pascal decided. He fetched two cans from the kitchenette, and upon returning, stretched across the bed to hand one to his new friend.

Rick continued to read the titles of the tapes as he sipped from the can. “Basie, Lionel Hampton, Cootie Williams, Gene Krupa-you’re really into classic jazz, aren’t you?”

Pascal Grant sat down on the other side of the bed and began pulling out his favorite tapes. “I like it,” he said simply. “It makes me feel good. Like the pictures do. Sometimes they-they get all mixed up together sometimes, the jazz and the pictures.”

“You have Be

“ ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’!” Pascal exclaimed. “It’s on the player. That’s my very first favorite.”

Balancing his soda, he pulled himself over the billowing cushions and punched buttons until Krupa’s hypnotic drums filled the room.

“Hey, yeah!” breathed Rick. He pushed a couple of cushions into a stack and leaned back on them. Pascal did the same at the opposite end of the bed so that they sprawled heel to head, facing each other as they drank and listened to the pounding intensity of one of the greatest outpourings of spontaneous jazz ever recorded.

The music, the warmth, the rich reds and golds and purples of the room, the vibrant posters-Pasc was right, he thought, somehow they did look like jazz would look if you could paint jazz themes-everything about this moment combined to make him feel safe and unthreatened for the first time since coming to New York.

And there was Pasc himself, his angelic face in shadows, his tangled curls turned into a golden halo by the lamp behind him. A rush of love and pity welled up inside of Rick.

Then, as Jess Stacy’s piano explored the outer reaches of the melody, he felt Pascal touch his shoe, heard his low voice say, “I’m glad you’re going to be my friend, Rick, ” and was wrenched by something deeper and terrifyingly primal.

Startled, he sat upright and saw Mrs. Beardsley’s disapproving face at the door.

“I knocked,” she said in a stern voice, “but the music’s so loud-”

Pascal Grant eeled across the end of the bed to lower the volume, then turned to smile at the woman. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Beardsley. I was showing Rick my tapes. He’s going to be my friend.”

“That’s very nice, Pascal,” said Mrs. Beardsley, “but right now, I think Mr. Evans is expected upstairs.”

“Oh, gosh!” Rick groaned. Embarrassed and guilty, he left his soda on the sideboard and bolted past the stern-faced docent.

Benjamin Peak had, on his own initiative, called this special meeting to explore-informally, he assured them archly-various ways of stemming the Erich Breul House’s rapidly growing deficit, and he was prepared to be gracious about Rick Evans’ tardy entry for dear old Jacob’s sake.

Not that Jacob had turned into a doting grandfather. A respected dealer and now senior partner at Kohn and Munson Gallery, Jacob Munson admitted to seventy although it was generally believed that he was much nearer eighty. His fierce, explosive temper had been tamed somewhat since the death of his son several years earlier, but his devotion to art and to the business of art remained strong, and his friendship had occasionally smoothed Peake’s progress in the art world.

Beside him sat Hester Kohn, daughter of his late partner, a trim and smartly dressed brunette of thirty-four, with quizzical hazel eyes and a small mouth that smiled easily. She wore gray boots and slacks, a high-collared red silk shirt, and a wide flat necklace of gold enameled in colorful Chinese chrysanthemums. She was addicted to gardenias and her heady perfume fought Munson’s cloud of peppermint to a draw.

Munson had been apprehensive when young Hester Kohn inherited her father’s half interest in the gallery, but these past two years had gone smoothly. She handled the financial side of the business as efficiently as her faœther had and seemed equally content to leave final artistic judgments to him.

Jacob Munson considered himself less fortunate than Horace Kohn in his offspring. His only son, the son he’d groomed to come into the gallery, the son who painted like an angel, had been killed in a plane crash before the lad was twenty-five. His two older daughters, resentful because he’d never encouraged their participation until after the tragedy, resisted his tardy attempts to interest them in art. One was now a doctor in Seattle, the other taught economics at a small college in Louisiana. Although the doctor had remained willfully unmaternal, the professor had eventually managed one child, Richard.

Aware of his grandfather’s reservations, Rick Evans found himself a chair just inside the director’s door and now fiddled with his camera lens.

He focused on Munson’s narrow foot, twisting the lens until his shoelaces came into sharp detail. Rick would have liked to point his camera directly at Munson’s face but knew that would a

As Dr. Peake spoke of the Breul House’s financial problems, Rick unobtrusively moved his camera toward Francesca Leeds. Lady Francesca had turned thirty-seven that year, but there was nothing in her clean-lined profile to suggest it. Her golden complexion was as clear as a girl’s, her dark red hair glossy and natural, her slender body at the peak of its physical powers, with a lithe sensuousness that was the birthright of certain fortunate women.

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 tumbledown 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.”