Corpus Christmas

Earlier in the afternoon, Mrs. Beardsley had slipped across the square and changed into her own holiday dress, a black wool sheath topped by a red Chanel jacket, her grandmother’s three-strand pearl choker and earrings, and an emerald-and-ruby pin that seemed appropriate for the season. Now she decided it was time to complete her own costume, to exchange her sensible low pumps for the patent leather T-straps waiting for her in the cloakroom.

As she crossed the hall, the door swung open for Francesca Leeds, her windswept red hair swirling upon the collar of a dark mink coat, which she wore like a cloak over an evening suit of raw gold silk. “Show time! ” she caroled.

Uptown, along the broad avenues, Salvation Army Santas were jostled for sidewalk space by three-card monte dealers and free-lance Santas who hawked “genuine Rolex watches, jus’ twenny dollar-check it out ” between nips from their hip flasks.

Skaters twirled and circled before the blazing tree at Rockefeller Center; a string quartet sheltered in the street-level jog of a huge skyscraper to play German carols, while an artist chalked the sidewalk in front of St. Thomas ’s Church with an ambitious choir of angels. Further up Fifth Avenue, wide-eyed toddlers, blissfully indifferent to the monetary worth of diamonds and rubies, were lifted up by their parents to watch Muppets romp among the gems in Tiffany’s windows.

As customers streamed through the doorways of lavishly decorated stores, seasonal Muzak occasionally floated out to mingle with the Salvation Army bells. The vaguely religious music fell equally upon the warmly dressed and upon the shabby bundles of rags who tried to hunker deeper into the few dark corners. For many, the street people added just the right tinge of guilt to the general thank-God-I’m-making-it aura of self- satisfaction, a sort of memento mori that made modern yule tide hedonism all the more pleasurable.

In the art gallery just off Fifth Avenue, Oscar Nauman refilled his empty cup from the fat china pot on Jacob Munson’s desk, leaned back in the comfortable leather chair, and smiled at his friend. “I must be getting old, Jacob, when I prefer your hot chocolate to your cold whiskey.”

“Ja, sure, ” the old man jeered, unwrapping another of his perpetual peppermints. They were imported from France especially for him and were made with particularly pungent oils that bit the tongue and almost compensated for his forbidden cigarettes. “Wait till you are my age. At least you don’t have doctors telling you what you can drink. I look at you, Oscar, and I see still the boy who first came through this door with those charcoal drawings of Lila under his arm.”

“The hair, ” said Oscar.

It was true. That thick mane of hair had turned completely white before he was thirty. His height helped, as did the probing intelligence in his intensely blue eyes, but it was the white hair that gave him such an aura of timelessness. Munson tried to look at him objectively, to catalog the fine wrinkles around his eyes, the lines beneath his firm chin, but it was hard to perceive the softening of age in that strong face. He did recognize that inward-turning melancholy however. Lila’s name still had that power.

If only the woman would die, he thought. Die or be cured. God knows she’d tried to kill herself often enough in the past twenty-five years. Jacob sipped his cocoa and refrained from looking at Oscar’s left ear. He knew that the scars Lila’s knife had left there were almost invisible. And the scars on Oscar’s psyche should have faded as well, but how could they while the woman remained alive in that prison for the criminally insane?

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m a stupid old man to mention her.”

“It isn’t just Lila.” Nauman cradled the cup with the fingertips of both hands and gazed at it bleakly. “That’s the worst of this retrospective business, Jacob. I’ll have to look again at so many things I thought I was finished with. I don’t think I want to do that.”

“For a real retrospective, perhaps not, ” Munson agreed, stroking his wispy beard. “But the Breul House-this we will treat like a preview, ja?” he said coaxingly. “The space is small. Friendly. This you will do for your old friend?”

“Preview?” Nauman growled.

“Ja, sure. How much longer can I keep working, Oscar? I tell you alone: I am eighty- two. Most men my age are dead but I cannot retire before we do your retrospective.” He tried to sound frail and pathetic, but his small body was still too wiry and agile and there was a jaunty glint in his black eyes. “You are killing me.”

“Ja, sure,” Oscar said sardonically.

The office door was ajar and Hester Kohn, vivid in red and purple, stuck her head in. The lush scent of her gardenia perfume floated in ahead of her.

“Car’s here,” she said, holding out Jacob’s coat and muffler.

Munson beamed. “Good, good! Now we meet your lady fireman.”

“Lady policeman,” Oscar grinned.

Sigrid had intended to leave work early enough to allow herself plenty of time for a long hot shower and a leisurely hour to dress, but in the late afternoon, she’d been called to an unexpected meeting that ran past six- thirty.

If she hoped to make Sussex Square before the party was over, Sigrid knew she could forget about that shower, much less changing into something more glamorous than the shapeless black wool suit and white turtleneck sweater she’d pulled from her closet this morning.

She rummaged in her shoulder bag and found a tube of lipstick and some mascara. She’d been running late the day before yesterday and had planned to duck into the locker room here at work, then completely forgot about makeup as soon as she saw the papers that had accumulated on her desk over the weekend.

Well, mascara and lipstick were better than nothing, she thought, and headed for the locker room where she washed her face and hands, pushed her hair into place and started on her eyes.

It looked so simple when other women did it. And really, what was so difficult? A steady hand, a bit of bravura and voila!

“Oh, damn!”

“Something wrong, Lieutenant?”

Sigrid whirled to see Detective Elaine Albee peering around the bank of lockers.

“No. ” She turned back to the mirror where she saw that the pretty blond officer was frankly staring at the smeared dark black rings around her eyes.

Sigrid was torn with frustration and embarrassment. “I’m supposed to be at a cocktail party in Sussex Square in exactly thirteen minutes and I look like a goddamned panda!”

“I was wondering if someone had given you a black eye,” the younger woman ventured. This was the first time she’d ever known the lieutenant to worry about her looks and Elaine wasn’t quite sure how to react. Lieutenant Harald could freeze a blast furnace with her tongue when annoyed.

“It’s probably because the light’s so bad in here,” she said diplomatically.

“This is ridiculous,” Sigrid said, grimly washing off the smeared mascara. “I’ll just call and say I can’t make it.”

“Let me help,” Albee offered. “I keep a few things in my locker for emergencies.”

“You have emergencies like this?” Sigrid asked curiously. “You always look so put together.”

“Come with me,” Elaine grinned and Sigrid soon found herself seated on a bench in front of the other woman’s locker.

Five minutes later, her eyes were expertly lined and shadowed, the planes of her cheeks subtly enhanced with blusher, her lips-

“My lip gloss is wrong for you,” Elaine frowned. “I’m blond, you’re brunette. You need something richer than anything I have here.”

Sigrid brought out her own lipstick. “Will this do?”

Elaine uncapped it, examined it critically and handed it back with approval. “Perfect for you. How did you stumble-” She caught herself. “I mean-”

“I know what you meant,” Sigrid said dryly as she leaned toward the mirror on the door of Albee’s locker and applied the lipstick. “It was the woman who cut my hair last month. She picked it out. I’ve just tried to follow her directions.”

She capped the lipstick and looked at the finished result as impersonally as if her face belonged to someone