Corpus Christmas

Model of a Modern Major-General.”

With catlike tread, she stole to the door and there was Elliott Buntrock, his lips pursed in music as he slid one picture after another from a large wooden storage rack, removed its brown paper covering for a quick examination, then carelessly recovered it.

Sigrid leaned against the doorjamb, one hand in the pocket of her loose gray slacks. “Found anything interesting?”

Buntrock jumped like a startled bird, but made a quick recovery. “Nothing worth keeping,” he said cheerfully. “Biggest pile of junk you ever saw.”

“I thought nineteenth-century art was outside your area of expertise.”

“Good art is timeless. You don’t have to be an expert to recognize it. All you have to do is trust your eye.”

“As Peake trusted his at the Friedinger?” she asked sardonically.

“Ben Peake couldn’t tell his armpit from his-” He broke off with a laugh and undid another picture.

“What about Roger Shambley? Could he tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoflanies?”

Buntrock leaned the picture against the others, put his hands on his hips, and straightened up to give her his full attention.

“Well, well, well!” he said, cocking his head to look down at her from his full six foot two. “And here I thought Oscar was merely becoming eccentric in his old age. A policewoman who actually knows her Gilbert and Sullivan.”

Sigrid shrugged. “Tarantara, tarantara,” she said modestly.

“Now don’t show off,” he admonished.

She laughed and came over to look at the last picture he’d uncovered. It was a bathetic sickroom scene: an expiring young matron, a doctor who held her limp wrist with a hopeless air, the grief-stricken young husband being comforted by his innocent curly-haired toddler and a couple of weeping older women. There was a bronze title plate at the bottom of the picture frame but it was written in old-fashioned German script and Sigrid didn’t recognize any of the words. Nor the artist’s name.

“Probably part of Mrs. Breul’s dowry,” Buntrock hazarded. “Godawful, isn’t it? Picasso painted scenes like this when he was about fifteen.”

“Are all the pictures like that?”

“This is one of the better ones. Most of them are ladies, either at their spinets or spinning, or landscapes oozing with moral uplift, like the one hanging over the hearth in the janitor’s room. Have you been in there?” A mock shudder shook his bony frame.

“Not yet. I keep hearing that it’s an interesting experience.”

“Don’t bother,” he advised her. “You’d find it a visual nightmare.”

Buntrock watched as Sigrid pulled another picture from the rack.

“So how long’ve you known Oscar?” he asked.

“Since April. Do you think Shambley examined these pictures?”

He ignored her question and pounced on her answer. “April? That’s when Riley Quinn was poisoned, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And in the process of catching his killer, you also caught one of the greats of American art?”

“Is he?”

“He must be. After all, I once called him the master of effortless complexity in an article I wrote for The Loaded Brush.”

Sigrid pulled a picture of a snow-covered mountain from the rack. It depicted a late afternoon when the snow was cream and rose. Long purplish shadows stretched across the slopes, and the needles on a scrub pine in the foreground looked almost real. “Why? What makes a Nauman abstract a better picture than, say, this snow scene? It looks effortless enough.”

Buntrock started to laugh, but something in her steady gaze stopped him. Instead, he found himself answering seriously. “Effortlessness is one thing, a breezy want of substance is quite another. True art’s always been made for an elite, Lieutenant. The elite of the eye. It places visual demands on the viewer and it rewards with visual delights. That snow scene demands nothing. It’s only meant to soothe and please or, at worst, edify, for God’s sake.

“Nauman goes to the core of experience and makes visible the invisible. His pictures are more than the merely fungible formulations of generic abstraction, and they’re never ever tricked-up literary sentimentality like that thing!”

Caught up in the heat of his rhetoric, Buntrock flung out a hand and thumped the offending canvas scornfully. “Nauman’s pictures deal with critical masses and elemental tensions. His best are like the moment before the big bang!”

Buntrock’s arms fluttered erratically as he searched for the precise phrases, as if he expected to pluck them from the walls of this cramped storage room. “It’s as simple as that, Lieutenant: Oscar Nauman makes the invisible visible. Either you see it or you don’t.”

He flexed his bony shoulders and assumed his contemplative pose. “Nauman was the quintessential risk-taker in his time,” he said with a valedictory air. “He may no longer be on the cutting edge. The parade does move on. Modernism gives way to postmodernism as day yields to night. But his place within the matrix of aesthetic discourse is secure. And do you know what triggers his genius?”

A bit dazed, Sigrid shook her head.

“He knows what to leave out!” Buntrock said triumphantly. “He is the master of elision.”

She had listened without comment and when he finished, she formally inclined her head-rather an interesting head now that he looked at it closely-and said, “Thank you.”

Buntrock was intrigued. She was almost like a Nauman painting herself: a seemingly simple surface that concealed unexpected complexities. “Don’t you like his work?” he asked.

“It’s not that. There are things that I can like that I don’t understand. That’s not the point. It’s the things I don’t like that I want to like that give me trouble.”

“Ah,” he smiled. “I think we’re not talking about art anymore.”

There were hurried footsteps out in the kitchen and Lowry’s voice called, “Lieutenant?”

“Down here,” she answered.

“Could you come up? They’ve found something interesting in Shambley’s briefcase.”

Sigrid turned to go. “If you find something interesting among these pictures, you will share it, won’t you?”

In a series of jerky movements, Buntrock threw up his hand and touched his thumb to his little finger. “Scout’s honor.”

A faint expression of surprise flitted across his bony face. “Oddly enough, I mean it,” he said and rearranged his long fingers to form a Vulcan peace sign.

Oddly enough, thought Sigrid as she joined Lowry and started up to the attic, she believed him.

In the attic, Elaine Albee introduced Sigrid to Dr. Ridgway of Special Services, who immediately described how she’d found Roger Shambley’s briefcase under the desk. “Inside were the usual papers, and this.”

“This” was a heavily-embroidered pink satin envelope lined in white satin and tied with red cords. It measured approximately twelve inches long by seven inches wide and although it was now empty, they could clearly see that it had once held something that had left an imprint upon the lining, a rectangular object that measured ten by four and a half inches.

“Any guesses?” asked Sigrid.

“Could be anything,” said Dr. Ridgway. “A diary, letters, maybe even a jeweler’s box. I haven’t come across anything here that fits though.”

In fact, she reported, she’d been through everything on Shambley’s makeshift desk and had found nothing untoward among the murdered man’s papers. “It seems to be the usual scholarly hodgepodge of raw data right now,” she said, running her fingers through her extravagantly curly hair. “He had cross-referenced Erich Breul’s bills of sale for various pictures with what similar pictures were fetching in the U.S. at the time. He wanted to check what a middleman like Bernard Berenson got for some of the pictures he represented as compared with dealing