The Stargazey (39 page)

Jury smiled. “I did indeed, Kitty.”

All the way across the room, he was jostled to within an inch of spilling the beer.

“Thanks,” said Kate, as he set down the drinks. After he sat down himself, she put her hand through his arm and got closer. “This place is blue with smoke. Doesn't that get to you?”

“Oh, it gets to me all right, but it's good for the soul—resisting temptation.” He looked at her, smiled. “Well, some of it, anyway.” He picked up his glass. “What's an art restorer do?”

“I'll take a wild swing at the answer and say he restores art. Why?”

“Oh, just this friend of mine who helps me out, unofficially. The one from Northants. I mentioned him to you.”

“The ex-earl in that little village?”

“That's the chap. I was just talking to him. Says he wants an art restorer.”

Kate thought for a moment. “Ah.” Then she asked, “He's the one who gave up his title?”

“Titles. Had a whole raft of them: Earl of Caverness, Viscount something-and-something, Marquess of Glengarry and Glen Ross. On and on.”

Kate laughed.
“Glengarry Glen Ross
is a play by David Mamet.”

Jury shrugged. “Well, there're a couple of Scottish titles in there somewhere.”

“Was it politics? Did he want to be a commoner so he could run for the House of Commons?”

Jury laughed. “Lord, no, not him. Political is the last thing he is.” Jury drank his beer. Plant had disquieted him; he felt uncomfortable.

“Are you all right?” She put her hand on his face.

He looked at her, smiled. “Absolutely. Only”—he drank down nearly half of his beer—“I've got to get somewhere. I'll see you tonight? Your place? Or are you tired of your place? Want to go to the cinema?”

“You've got to be kidding.” Kate laughed.

M
elrose sat in his club chair, letting his late-morning coffee go cold, chewing the side of his thumb. This was a habit he had indulged in since childhood, which neither his mother nor his nanny had been able to break him of. The habit was one he resorted to when he was in deep thought. Here the thought included a rerun of the conversation with Jury he'd just had. Melrose should have been more forthcoming, more specific in telling his friend what was taking shape in his mind. But perhaps that was the problem; it was still amorphous, not yet jelled.

They had been there, the Fabricants had, in St. Petersburg at the same time Ralph was.
Flamboyant
. Pitt had used that word in speaking of the theft of the Chagall.

Melrose did not want the murder of Simeon Pitt eclipsed by this Nancy Pastis murder.

What the devil constituted “reasonable grounds,” anyway? He was absolutely sure that the Fabricants were responsible for Pitt's death.

Melrose went back to chewing the side of his thumb. Well, it wasn't Jury's fault; after all, they couldn't go in and toss the place. To get a warrant Melrose imagined one had to satisfy stringent conditions, and there were no visible ones insofar as the gallery or the Fabricants themselves were concerned.

This was why Melrose was chewing his thumb, in deep thought. The damned paintings would be gone if he didn't act immediately. Probably being wrapped and crated in that storage room at the gallery this very min—

Storage room.

Bea. Of course.

 • • • 

She was as silent on the other end of the phone as Jury had been, until she finally said, “Where did you get this idea?”

“Yesterday, at the fete. Frankie lobbed it over the net, or whatever they do to tennis balls. “ ‘If you want to hide a diamond, put it in a tiara.' ”

“Of course. It's really clever. Even if they didn't do it, you are for thinking it.”

Melrose couldn't quite sort through that syntax and didn't try. “You know they're getting the paintings ready to ship. Have they crated them yet?”

“A couple, I think. See, each one has its own separate wooden box.”

“Okay, how are they wrapped?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. Did they wrap them in brown paper, tie them with string? Twine?”

“Yes. Brown paper, twine.”

Melrose beat his head with his fist, as if this might speed up the thought process.

“Hey? Hey? You there?”

“Sorry, I'm trying to figure out—listen, have you a painting there you could wrap up”—Melrose's eye fell on the copy of the
Telegraph
he'd meant to read—“wrap up in newspaper and lug it along here?”

“I'm in Bethnal
Green
, love.”

“I know. But couldn't you get a couple of hours off from your job? I mean, it's not going to take more than a half hour once you get here. The gallery's only ten minutes away.”

“Yeah, I expect they'll let me.”

“And, Bea, listen. What we're doing is undoubtedly larcenous. But I'm working it out that if we're caught you'll be an innocent participant, manipulated by me, Fingers Plant.”

“You are a caution. Manipulate
me
? Don't make me laugh, Fingers.” She hung up.

 • • • 

Melrose was less than a minute getting up the stairs with the newspaper. He wasn't more than five minutes using it to cover his already gallery-wrapped snow painting. He carted it downstairs, returned to his club chair, and signaled Young Higgins, pointing to his cold coffee. When the steaming pot arrived, he told the porter to watch out for a guest; he was expecting a young lady within the next half hour.

It was difficult to tell if this request sent Young Higgins into cardiac arrest, for that was what he looked to be in most of the time. Finally, but frostily, he said, “Certainly, sir.”

It wasn't, after all, Ladies' Day.

 • • • 

While he waited for Bea, he wandered into the saloon, once a gaming room, now a library filled with dark leather volumes and dim lamps, room of permanent twilight. On a bulletin was a notice from the Managers announcing a candidate for election. Melrose remembered his father, the old Earl of Caverness, saying that one's name would be down in the book a decade or even two before coming up for election. He wondered if a candidate could still be blackballed by one vote. He enjoyed the image of members filing up and dropping a white or black ball in the box. He turned to see a portrait of Wellington on the far wall, regarding him coldly.

The shelves contained tooled-leather volumes of various histories of Europe, all under a layering of dust that spoke sadly of their lack of use. On a lower shelf, gaudily jacketed guidebooks sat beside leather-bound ones that looked to be somewhere around a hundred years old, but that didn't matter. Greece and Turkey—the one he pulled out—never changed much. It was quite interesting. He could take a ferry to Delos and visit a flea market in Athens if he wanted.

Melrose disliked shopping—really, what had he to shop
for
, what with Mr. Beaton making his clothes and Ruthven and Martha buying the food?—but he liked reading about it.

From Rhodes he could hop up to Turkey and shop at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul—my lord, three thousand shops on sixty streets! . . . Here was a title for you:
Grand Vizier of Suleyman the Magnificent
(that was one he would divest himself of in a New York minute). He wondered if he'd get elected to Boring's.

He wandered around Turkey for a while, looking for bargains, and then skipped over to Morocco. Marrakech. He could walk through Djemaa el Fna square and see jugglers and acrobats and snake charmers—Covent Garden, in other words. He could bargain in the souk for copper and carpets. Look at those rugs! And then up to Casablanca, where he pictured himself in Rick's club behind a veil of smoke, with Claude Rains behind another demanding to see his passport. Thence to Tangier—how the very air thickened with romance!—where he could buy a carpet or a camel for a pittance. Well, a camel would certainly spiff up the Blue Parrot, Trevor Sly's pub. He saw himself in a fez, babbling in tongues, bargaining with the vendors for silver and leather.

It was a mere hop, skip, and a jump across the Straits of Gibraltar to southern Spain, but he'd have to search out another guidebook for that. He reshelved Turkey and found garishly covered Fodor's and Nicholson's guides for Paris, remembered that swank marketplace beloved by Sophie McBride, and looked it up in the Fodor's index.

Fauchon's . . . grocery to billionaires . . . famous for the artistic arrangement of its fruits and vegetables . . . smiling salespeople
. . . . He read on, and his frown deepened. He checked the Nicholson guide also. He looked at the far wall, as if some explanation might come from the portrait of the Iron Duke, and read it again, and jumped when Higgins slid up to him out of seeming nowhere to tell him his guest had arrived.

 • • • 

M
elrose took it as a good omen that Nicholas was in charge, Sebastian having taken a client to lunch at the Ivy. The fellow, said Nick, was
an old bore and he himself hadn't wanted to go. To Beatrice he said, “Wonderful to see you, darling.”

Melrose thought that if it was at the “darling” stage, Bea was becoming a valuable commodity.

“I think we've sold him your Limehouse painting, sweetie. Seb's client.”

“The old bore? Sounds likely for one of my lot, right?”

Despite this careless-seeming soignée attitude, Melrose could feel her excitement.

“And what do you mean, you think?” said Bea.

“I'm fairly sure. He'll be back after lunch, and he told me quite firmly to take it down. See?” Nick pulled Bea's painting out from under the counter.

Melrose was again struck by its freshness. There was something about Bea's paintings that made the viewer think he was seeing a place for the first time.

“D'ya mind if he takes these two back to the storage room? I just want to set them up against the ones I brought in yesterday and see if they got a prayer. I'm not really sure about them, especially the big one.” She tapped the one Melrose was carrying and handed over the smaller of the two, also wrapped in newspaper. “Can he just take them to where my others are?”

Nicholas graciously waved Melrose along to the rear of the building, and he started down the hall with both paintings.

When Beatrice saw Nicholas start to follow after, she said, “Wait just a tic, Nicholas, will you? I want to talk to you about frames. I don't much like the one you used.”

As Melrose went into the storage room he could hear them arguing amiably in the background. He saw the individual crates immediately. Two of the paintings were inside wooden crates, but they were as yet not nailed shut. Inside each was a brown-paper-wrapped painting. The other two—and, Melrose bet, the poor cousins—were leaning against the stone wall. He knew all he could do was guess, but he worked it out that he had better than a fifty-fifty chance, if he was reasoning correctly. All
he had to do was pull one out, remove the newspaper from the one he'd brought with him, and slip it in the crate instead. He positioned the one he'd removed by a lone painting of a water spaniel in its declining years—what was
that
doing with the Fabricant brothers?—took the newspaper from around Bea's own painting, only half the size of Ralph's, and set that against the other. He left the room. The operation had taken only a minute. Nicholas would have no sense of his malingering back here.

As he walked up to them, he said, “I'd certainly say the small one's wonderful, Beatrice. As good as, if not better. Go back and have a look. Cigarette?” Melrose snapped open his gold case and shoved it in front of Nick's face.

Beatrice excused herself. When she was halfway down the hall, Melrose called, “Oh, wait a tic,
darling”
(he was fast picking up the lingo). He quickly reached her, said, “It's by the dying dog,” and as quickly returned in time to light Nicholas's cigarette. “What on earth's the problem with this river scene of hers? It's gorgeous.” Melrose had picked it up and was holding it at arm's length.

Exhaling a thin stream of smoke that turned lavender against Bea's sun-drenched water, Nicholas agreed. “God, these people are such perfectionists.”

Melrose laughed, was laughing still when Bea came trotting along with a newspaper-wrapped painting and her own smaller one, now unwrapped. She handed the larger over to Melrose and directed Nicholas to study the smaller. “I like this one, but I got to do more work on the big one, Nicky love.”

Nicky love? Ye gods, he wouldn't last for a moment in the art world. Melrose had to give Nicholas credit for a quiet study of the painting before he broke out in compliments. The Fabricants were, after all, serious lovers of art. Too serious, probably. It occurred to Melrose that Nicholas might not even be in on it. Melrose even doubted that Ralph himself was in on it, although he couldn't explain to himself how they'd managed the trick if he weren't. If, indeed, they had managed a “trick.” He could be dead wrong.

“We'd better be going if we're going,” said Melrose, “if we're to catch that show at Bingham's.” A showing of avant-garde work was being advertised in the arts section wrapped around the painting he was holding.

Nicholas screwed up his face in distaste. “You going to that thing? I can guarantee you won't see anything worth the visit.”

Melrose laughed as his glance slipped down the ad again. “He's one of my dear aunt's favorite people. Shamus Neeley.”

Nick looked at him uncertainly. “Neeley's the owner, not the artist.”

“I know.” Idiot, stop trying to be clever. “My aunt always goes to his shows. She's a big supporter of the gallery.”

Nicholas smiled. “Well, if she's that sort, tell her we're here, won't you?”

“Will do. Come on, Beazy.”