“I’ll remember,” he said brusquely. “
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,
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.
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-
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.
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, he 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
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 Rhone 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 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: “
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 Leger, 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’
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.
