else.
“Uh, Lieutenant?”
“Yes?”
Elaine reached into her locker for a plastic bag with the name of a dress shop located in the next block. “I picked this up on my lunch hour today. It was on sale and looked like something that might come in handy during the holidays. You can borrow it, if you want.”
It was a scoop-necked shell of gold sequins that glittered and sparkled like Christmas lights when Elaine lifted it from the bag.
Sigrid made one weak protest, then shucked off her jacket and sweater, remembering just in time not to smear her lipstick. The sequinned top fit fine. Albee was curvier, but she was taller, so it balanced. With her jacket left unbuttoned, she looked almost glamorous.
Elaine was getting into the sport of it now and pulled out some gold-colored costume jewelry: bracelets and a pair of earrings.
Sigrid accepted the bracelets but regretfully confessed, “My ears aren’t pierced.”
“You have to have earrings.”
Another woman entered, greeted Albee by name, then gave Sigrid a formal nod and a curious glance.
“I’m late,” Sigrid said, looking at the clock on the end wall, but Albee was lost in thought. “Quarante!” she exclaimed suddenly. “In Records. She keeps a wad of costume jewelry in her desk.”
“I have to go,” Sigrid objected.
“Not without earrings,” Albee told her firmly and neither woman noticed that in this area it was now Albee who commanded. “I’ll meet you by the elevators on the first floor in two minutes.”
She sprinted for the door. Sigrid folded her turtleneck and left it in her own locker, put on her heavy coat, then took an elevator downstairs.
True to her word, it wasn’t much more than two minutes later that Elaine Albee raced down the stairs with a glittery dangling earring in each determined hand. Without a shred of self-consciousness, she stood on tiptoe to clip them on Sigrid’s ears, then fluffed her hair and stepped back to look at what she’d wrought.
“Your coat!” she cried. “I think I know someone-”
“No!” Sigrid protested, clutching her camel hair topcoat protectively.
“Well-” said Elaine. “But take it off the minute you get there, okay?”
“Okay.” Sigrid hesitated and awkwardly held out her hand. “Thanks, Albee.”
“Any time, Lieutenant.” Feeling almost maternal, the younger woman watched as her boss hurried out into the winter night, earrings swinging with each long stride.
“There you are,” said Jim Lowry when she returned to the squad room. “What’s funny, Lainey?”
“Nothing,” she grinned. “Except that now I know how the fairly godmother felt when she sent Cinderella off to the ball.”
“Huh?”
“Skip it. Didn’t you want to make the early movie?”
The cabbie had bent the speed limit, and Sigrid, who normally hated fast driving, gratefully added a little extra to her tip as he let her out in Sussex Square. It was only nineteen minutes past seven. Fashionably late, she told herself and hurried up the brick walk.
Remembering her promise to Elaine Albee, she slipped her coat off as soon as she entered the Erich Breul House. There she was greeted by a dignified gray-haired woman in a red jacket and beautiful pearls.
“Welcome to the Erich Breul House,” said the woman, directing her to the cloakroom. “I’m Eloise Beardsley, senior docent.”
“Sigrid Harald,” she responded and handed her coat over to an attendant. “I think Oscar Nauman’s expecting me?”
“Ah, yes.” Mrs. Beardsley led her past an ornate Christmas tree and gestured toward the arched doorway near a wide marble staircase. “There he is now.”
Suddenly all the silly panic over her clothes and makeup seemed worth it for the look in Nauman’s eyes as he crossed the hall to her.
“Very nice,” he said, handing her a bourbon-and-Coke. “I was afraid you might not come.”
“Not come?” she asked. “Why would you think that?”
Seated at the desk in his makeshift office up on the fourth floor, Roger Shambley happily fingered the pack of letters. He had read them so many times since last night that he’d virtually memorized whole passages. For the most part they chronicled the usual unexceptional adventures of an earnest young man released from schoolbooks and given permission to play for a year or two before settling into adult responsibilities.
After graduation in the spring of 1911, young Erich Breul Jr. had spent the summer at the family’s vacation “cottage” near Oswego on the eastern end of Lake Ontario. (Nowhere near as grand as the “cottages” at Newport, the Breuls roughed it each summer with a mere eighteen rooms and a live-in staff of only five.)
In August he sailed to England for a month in London, then entrained for Vienna by way of Antwerp, Cologne and Frankfurt. Christmas and most of January were passed with his mother’s people in Zurich. Spring found him in Rome. In each great art center, he dutifully visited the appropriate museums and churches, attended the expected concerts and operas, and afterwards, with filial rectitude, recorded his impressions of each for his “dear Mama and Papa” back home.
As spring turned to summer in those letters, Shambley could read between the lines and sense young Breul’s growing saturation with the old masters, lofty music, and approved lectures in fusty rooms. June made him restless for open air and manly exercise. Accordingly, he had sent his luggage ahead to Lyons and, in company with several similarly minded youths, had hiked along the Mediterranean coast from Genoa to Marseilles.
At Marseilles, he had somehow acquired a pet monkey, Chou-Chew. The details of that acquisition were glossed over; Shambley suspected a rowdy night in one of those waterfront taverns frequented by seamen from all over the world.
In any event, Breul had parted from his friends, who were going on to Barcelona, purchased a bicycle, and, with the monkey in an open wicker basket on the front, had pedaled northward up the Rhone valley. He meandered through small villages where he bought bread and cheese or a night’s lodging; and as he entered the fertile plains north of Avignon, he enjoyed both the blazing sun overhead and the cool shaded avenues of plane trees that lined the irrigation canals.
It was mid-August and the young vagabond was dawdling along a back road near the nondescript village of Sorgues-sur-l’Ouveze when his innocent reveries were suddenly interrupted by an enormous white dog that bounded over the hedgerows, barking with such deceptive ferociousness that the startled young American promptly crashed his machine into the nearest tree.
Enter Picasso and Braque, thought Shambley, who had spent most of the night reading everything he could put his hands on concerning their summer of 1912.
The dog was Picasso’s, a Great Pyrenees, one of those shaggy white creatures as big as a Newfoundland or Great Dane. His whole life long, Picasso had adored animals, from exotic zoo specimens to the most common domestic cat. How could he resist a monkey?
Braque, himself a cyclist, was more concerned about the damage done to Breul’s new bicycle.
While Picasso quieted his dog and charmed the frightened monkey from the tree with his dark expressive eyes and coaxing voice, Braque hoisted the crumpled machine over his broad shoulder. Together, they led the youth to the nearest blacksmith’s, left the bicycle for repairs, and insisted that he go with them for a glass of wine.
As so often happens-even with strictly reared young Lutherans-one glass of wine led to two and before long, the first bottle was empty and Picasso ordered a second in which to toast “
Eventually, the blacksmith’s apprentice tracked them down and informed M’sieu Breul that it would be three days before his bicycle could be repaired. His master had sent to Orange for the necessary part. One must be
