Corpus Christmas

phone number, if you wish, and you can also ask the maitre d’. He’ll tell you I was there.”

Sigrid jotted down the names and numbers, then asked, “What about your key to the Breul House? Do you carry it with you?”

“On my key ring, yes,” said Francesca. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to see it.”

She moved so beautifully, Sigrid thought, watching as the other woman crossed to her fur coat. Tonight she wore a dark brown taffeta dress edged with a stiff, narrow self-ruffle at the neck and wrists, shot with gold threads that gleamed with every swing of the skirt. Her lustrous hair fell in copper tangles about the perfect oval of her face.

Even as Sigrid went through the formalities of this interview with one level of her mind, another level catalogued Francesca’s almost flawless beauty. Thorvaldsen’s advances had been clumsy and insulting and she should have decked him harder, but she could almost sympathize with his basic confusion. How could Oscar Nauman possibly be attracted to her when he’d had one of the most beautiful women in New York?

Last night she had meant it when she told Nauman she wasn’t jealous of the women he’d known before her. Tonight, on this ship, she found herself wondering who had initiated their split-Francesca or Nauman?

Francesca Leeds dug into one of the deep pockets and came out with a handful of keys. She detached one and handed it to Sigrid. It was tagged EBH.

“I’d like to keep this for now,” Sigrid said, wrapping it in a clean sheet of notepaper. She quickly wrote out a receipt for it. “One more question: do you know why Roger Shambley was killed?”

The copper-haired woman resumed her place on the couch and her brown eyes regarded Sigrid humorously. “Because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut?”

Sigrid looked up inquiringly.

Francesca shrugged. “I only know what I’ve heard.”

“Which is-?”

“Word around art circles is that Roger Shambley liked to know things. He listened and he heard and he was a bloody genius with insinuations. People often thought he knew more than he did, but by the time they realized he didn’t, it was too late because they’d already let too much slip.” She looked into her glass and laughed. “Does that make any sense?”

“He was a roven af fjerde division,” Thorvaldsen growled, the ice cube still held to his eye.

“That, too, if it means what I think it does,” Francesca nodded. “He liked to know unpleasant things about you and then rub your nose in it.” She tilted her glass to her lips and drank the rest of her undiluted whiskey. “Or so I’ve been told.”

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.

“Soren?”

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 planned to do?”

“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, froken 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 Alborg. 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 Kobenhavn 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 Leger, 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