Money from Holme Read online

  But there was something more. For this something more Cheel found that his mind had to grope. His first conviction had been powerfully confirmed, but he had already forgotten how. He was in contact – his high intelligence immediately helped him to realize – with some element within himself of psychological trauma. Something else had come under his observation, and it was something the recollection of which was painful to him.

  That! Suddenly be had remembered. But, even as he did so, he doubted as well. There was therefore nothing for it: a confirmatory examination must be made. Almost fearfully, he took a further glance around the room. His first observation was disturbing in itself. It was of the young woman at whose deliciously plump derrière he had so lately taken that carefree pinch. The young woman was looking angrily about her. It appeared likely that the Director of the Brera had got away unaspersed.

  The bearded man had moved on. He was now standing before – and seemed to be rather furtively, or at least uneasily, examining – a portrait of a bearded man! Cheel, although he felt his head fairly swimming before this further bizarrerie, managed to get to his feet and wriggle once more through the crush. What he believed he had seen he must see again. Indeed, he must touch it. The concurrent testimony of two senses was something which it would surely be irrational not to accept.

  The bearded man had again moved on. The picture he was now examining appeared to be of some sort of barbaric dance performed by luridly painted savages. It was another remarkable performance – so remarkable that Cheel, despite his extraordinary situation, found himself in some genuinely aesthetic engagement with it as he advanced. It wasn’t that this instantancity of whirling bodies and flailing limbs had been ingeniously frozen into a complex decorative arabesque, as in some amusing hunt or battle, say, by Uccello. It was rather that from this world of gesture, an irrefrangible stasis or solemn timelessness had been educed. Hulking Tom in the Tropics, Cheel thought – recalling, with his customary erudition, just what, in Italian, Masaccio means.

  This release into professional musing lasted only for seconds. Then he was up against it – and up against the bearded man. The bearded man held a catalogue in his left hand. He wasn’t consulting it (why should he, since he was the painter?), but was holding it more or less in the position of a fig-leaf. His index finger, middle finger, and thumb were employed on the job, the catalogue being gripped between the first and second of these, and the third being inserted among the pages. Cheel took one glance at the area of the bearded man’s hand thus exposed (it lay, of course, at the triangular base of the index finger and thumb), and what he had already remembered returned to him in fresh, and painful, detail.

  He remembered the party – although he couldn’t, naturally enough, remember who had given it. He remembered the girl whom (under the clever cover of withdrawing to relieve himself) he had ambushed in the alcove at the top of the stairs. He remembered the manner – embarrassing yet at the same time stimulating – in which the little trollop had decided to struggle and scream. He remembered the firm line he had consequently adopted (the excitement of a bogus rape was, of course, what she had been after) – and then be remembered the impertinent intrusion of the young dauber, Sebastian Holme. Fortunately there had been a bottle to hand; fortunately (or unfortunately) the vigour with which he had himself grasped and swung this had resulted in his shivering it against a banister. What had been left in his grasp (like the tronchon in the grasp of a medieval knight who has broken his spear) remained a weapon formidable enough. He had brought it down on Holme’s left hand. At least he had managed that, before Holme had laid him out.

  And there, before him, was the scar. He could almost see it, as he looked, dripping the blood it had once dripped. If he’d only got the right hand – he found himself reflecting – and if, at the same time, he’d got the tendon, he might effectively have cooked the goose of Sebastian Holme’s genius.

  ‘Excuse me – but I wonder whether I might glance at your catalogue?’

  Cheel couldn’t have told whether it was in a sepulchral croak or in the casual but well-modulated accents of a cultivated Englishman that he uttered these words. But he made no mistake about the accompanying action. Without waiting for a by-your-leave, he reached out as he spoke and took the catalogue from the bearded man’s hand. And he did so with a slight clumsiness that allowed a finger to brush lightly over the vital spot. Its report was unequivocal. There could be no question of mere visual hallucination. The small, hard cicatrice was palpable to the touch.

  Since he lacked the resolution to venture a straight glance at Sebastian Holme, Cheel was unable to tell whether the man had taken alarm. He himself continued for the moment simply to be dead scared – although indeed there may already have been dawning in the recesses of his capacious mind the staggering realization that he was on to something in a big way. He managed to contrive some sort of appearance of consulting the catalogue for information on the painting before him, and then to hand it back with a muttered word. After that he moved away – as expeditiously as the crowd of gazers and gapers would permit. It was the characteristic of Holme’s right fist, he seemed to remember, that it came rather rapidly from below, and that its impact on your jaw had the effect of lifting you some inches off your feet before dropping you with a brutal absoluteness on your back.

  But he mustn’t now let Holme out of his sight. This fact, coming to him with all the mysteriousness of a categorical imperative, had the effect upon him of that first quiver of the curtain which speaks of the imminent unfolding of some vast and exciting drama. Very definitely, his mind was beginning to work.

  He had retreated – but to a strategic position from which he could command (as he brought his analytical faculties to bear on the situation) the only public exit from the Da Vinci Gallery. He had so retreated when – with a dastardly lack of all advertisement – he was struck a violent blow on the face. The pain was considerable, and filled his eyes with tears. The bewilderment (since Holme must be a dozen paces away) was extreme. And then he heard a voice. It was a woman’s voice, and what it said was, ‘Poisonous little man!’ His eyes cleared; for a moment he saw the plump young woman before him; her gloves were clasped in her right hand; he realized that what he had been subjected to was their application to his person with much the force of a whip.

  A number of people had, inevitably, witnessed this untoward incident. They reacted variously. Some made distressed, shocked and deprecating noises. Others looked away and pretended not to have seen. One or two males placed themselves obtrusively before their womenfolk, as if to protect them from outrage or occlude the spectacle of vulgar violence. But nobody intervened, and within seconds catalogues were being consulted again as if nothing had occurred.

  But, for Mervyn Cheel, something more disastrous than a mere passing public humiliation had occurred. Sebastian Holme had vanished.

  3

  There was no point in rushing from the building. Whether or not Holme had departed in alarm, he would by now be swallowed up in the traffic of London’s West End. At least – Cheel noticed – the woman who had perpetrated the atrocious assault on him seemed to have departed too. The reasonable course would be to retreat into the next room, discreetly screen himself behind his catalogue from any residual curiosity, and think the thing out. Already, indeed, he was thinking. He was thinking that the mystery had a future for him.

  The second room was largely an affair of drawings, sketches, gouaches and watercolours, together with a few early and quite undistinguished experiments with collages and papiers collées. Holme having died young (only he hadn’t), his total output would have been small anyway – in addition to which a fire or some similar catastrophe had rather more than decimated what there was. The catalogue said something about that, and Cheel must clearly study it with attention. Meanwhile, there were preliminary bearings still to take.

  What came first into his head – oddly, perhaps, but then he did possess a high degree of literary cultivation – was the op
inion of Aristotle in his treatise on Tragedy to the effect that Discoveries made by way of Scars (or External Tokens, like Necklaces) are inferior to Discoveries arising from the Incidents Themselves (whatever that might mean). This might be true about trinkets, Cheel thought, but no competent policeman would back the Stagirite in playing down the solid utility of a precisely located and ineradicable bodily sign. That gash on Holme’s hand had certainly needed stitches, and somewhere a medical record of it must exist. It might be one means, if required, of dragging Sebastian Holme back to life screaming.

  But why had the fellow decided to be dead? How many people knew he wasn’t? Who was he being, if he wasn’t being Sebastian Holme? It was all highly mysterious. And the more one looked at it (Cheel found himself reflecting hopefully) the more did it appear decidedly shady. This was the thought uppermost in his mind when he became aware that the proprietor of the Da Vinci Gallery was advancing upon him.

  ‘Ah, the goot Mr Cheel!’

  Mr Hildebert Braunkopf, upon whose spherical form the straight lines of his newly acquired frock-coat sat with grotesque effect, had extended a pudgy hand to Cheel on his settee. Cheel accepted momentary contact as a matter of distasteful necessity. He didn’t at all care for Braunkopf’s tone. To be invocated as the good Mr Cheel was, in form, a totally unnecessary tribute to his moral probity; in fact (he was indignantly aware), it was a piece of damned patronage. Until the present notable coup he would only have had to stick his head inside the obscure Da Vinci place to have this awful little man crawling. But now the Duveen image was decidedly in control. Braunkopf was directing upon Cheel the affable condescension to which that Napoleon among art dealers might have treated a minor and temporary assistant to his henchman the late Mr Bernard Berenson. The realization of this naturally prompted in Cheel a strong feeling of hostility towards Braunkopf. Hostility in its turn bred suspicion. And suspicion provided at least a working hypothesis. Whatever the shady business he had come upon might be, Braunkopf’s was probably the mind behind it.

  This sudden and fruitful thought seemed to make a certain temporizing civility expedient. Cheel therefore said something to the effect that Mr Braunkopf’s current exhibition appeared to be a gratifying success.

  ‘My goot Cheel, that, for the Da Vinci, is all in the veek’s vork. All our puttikler choice exhibitings are assisted at by the importantest figures the great vorlt of art. You have had the champagnes, yes?’ Braunkopf, Cheel noted, didn’t import any genuine interrogatory quality into this. Rather he made a briskly dismissive statement of it. Cheel, even if worth a little affability, definitely didn’t rate the broaching of another bottle. And Braunkopf was glancing round as if in search of some less expensive gratification. ‘What shames,’ he said, ‘it being a little too late to introduce you my goot freunts the Keeper of the Kink’s now the Queen’s Pictures, the Chairman the National Art Collections Funt, the Trustees the National Gallery, Mr Onassis, Mr Gulbenkian Two, Mr Mellon Four. All my very goot close freunts, no.’

  No – Cheel thought – was the correct word. It would have gone for Mr Rockefeller Six as well. Controlling himself, however, he murmured that these would have been pleasures indeed. Braunkopf, he discerned, was in an exuberant and expansive mood. Considering that he must be clearing thousands, this was only natural. Perhaps the circumstance could be exploited to winkle some vital information out of him.

  ‘Dr Braunkopf,’ he asked respectfully, ‘were you associated with this remarkable Sebastian Holme for long before his death?’

  This bold conferring upon the proprietor of the Da Vinci Gallery of academic distinction honoris causa was a success. Braunkopf beamed. He even made a gesture – ineffective, indeed – in the direction of an elderly and battered waiter who was tottering round with a bottle.

  ‘Misfortunately, no,’ he said. ‘This puttikier prestidigious genius Holme went before, alas, before ever contacting high-class puttikler fully ethical concern like mine.’

  ‘Went before?’ Cheel repeated.

  ‘Passed out. Was dropped to rest.’ Braunkopf made a gesture of vaguely pious and even liturgical character. ‘Entered into–’

  ‘I see. By the way, just how did he enter into it?’

  ‘Enter into it?’ Braunkopf appeared bewildered in his turn.

  ‘Into eternity, or whatever you were going to say. How did the man die – if he did die?’ Cheel snapped this out with the sudden vigour of a pouncing barrister. But Braunkopf merely looked surprised.

  ‘How did Holme die, yes? But it is all there, my goot Cheel’ – he leant forward and tapped Cheel’s catalogue – ‘or nearly all there. It is a little softened on account the high-bred feelings all these nobles gentry delicate ladies my goot clients.’ He gestured largely about the room. ‘Holme was assinated, my goot Cheel. He was assinated in a revulsion.’

  ‘He was what?’ For the moment Braunkopf’s peculiar species of ultra-demotic English had Cheel beaten.

  ‘In Wamba. First there was a Fascist revulsion. Then there was a Communist revulsion. And after that there was the revulsion of the Moderate Democrats. That was the worst, yes? The Moderate Democrats assinated Holme in the Wamba Palace.’

  ‘You mean that this assassination took place during some sort of palace revolution?’

  Braunkopf looked puzzled. He also looked slightly restive, as if feeling that the unimportant Cheel had already received more than a fair share of courteous attention.

  ‘The Wamba Palace,’ he said, ‘was the hotel. The European hotel. The Moderate Democrats burnt it. And cooked the cooks.’

  ‘They what?’

  ‘In the ovens, yes. The cooks and the scullions. Also some quite few the guests. It was the end of an exciting day, and the Moderate Democrats were peckish, no? Almost this most prestidigious painter of all time was cooked too. But happily his body was reupholstered, yes.’

  ‘They recovered Holme’s body?’ Brandy rather than champagne, Cheel felt, would be the welcome recruitment at this moment. His inside wasn’t standing up well to Braunkopf’s cheerful recital of these horrors.

  ‘The body, yes. But that is small consolidation, Cheel. For what is a mere mortal rusk? Oaks to oaks, Cheel. A fistful of dust. Better they had saved all those other immortal chefs-d’oeuvre this puttikler eminent genius now exclusively exhibited by pre-eminent Da Vinci Gallery.’

  ‘You mean those savages cooked some of Holme’s paintings too?’ Cooking paintings, Cheel darkly thought, was probably something that was precisely Braunkopf’s own line. ‘He’d stored a lot of his pictures in this rotten tropical pub?’

  ‘Holme had arranged an exhibition in the lounge.’ It was almost in a tone of delicacy that Braunkopf disclosed this low-class and unethical course of conduct on the part of the unhappily deceased painter. ‘All was looted, burnt, trampled by heffalumps, fed to sacred crocodiles in one puttikier great monstrous outrage. Result: all the authentic high-value vorks Sebastian Holme extant in the vorlt today visible to one prestidigious coup d’oeil Da Vinci Gallery.’

  ‘Do you mean you own the things? You’ve bought them from Holme’s executors, or whatever they’re called?’

  Braunkopf shook his head, suddenly a sobered man.

  ‘There is a viddow, my goot Cheel. Misfortunately, she and her husband were deranged.’

  ‘They were both deranged?’

  ‘But natchally.’ Braunkopf was puzzled. ‘He was deranged from her, so she was deranged from him. But there was no divorcings, not even any legal separatings, no. So this goot Mrs Holme inherits his estate. Da Vinci simply has high-principled ethical arrangement conduct all sales commission forty per cent.’

  ‘I see. But that wouldn’t apply to anything that couldn’t be proved definitely within Holme’s estate at the time of his death?’

  ‘Supposings not.’ For the first time, Braunkopf looked a trifle suspiciously at his interrogator. ‘But that is nothings or almost nothings. Holme, my goot Cheel, is here.’ Braunkopf gave another of his large waves around
the room.

  ‘I’d call that hotel business quite lucky, eh?’ Cheel found himself momentarily prompted to frank utterance. ‘Scarcity value is half the racket, I’d say, in an affair like this. If there proved to be twice as many Holmes in the world as people think there are, then the prices of your lot here would drop by precious nearly a half.’

  ‘But my lot, my goot Cheel, is all almost every one sold already.’

  Braunkopf, having announced this with simple glee, seemed suddenly to remember his ethical principles. He raised an admonitory hand and addressed Cheel seriously and with a certain hauteur. ‘But that is commercials, my goot sir. That is mere financials unworthy professional personages concerned only with enriching the voonderble vorlt of art.’

  ‘Oh, quite so. Your principles do you credit.’ Cheel spoke coldly. Humbug in others was repugnant to him. ‘Is Mrs Holme, by the way, here now?’

  ‘Supposings not.’ Braunkopf hadn’t glanced round. Instead, he had looked at Cheel with a sudden intensified suspicion.

  ‘She lives in London, I take it?’

  ‘Mr Cheel, these are confidentials.’ Braunkopf had stiffened his virtually boneless person as if seriously offended. ‘It is like clubs and banks. Puttikiers of clients is not given.’ He glanced past Cheel’s shoulder, and his face lit up with a cordial recognition suggestive of the sudden espying of a very old friend. ‘Lort Snowdon,’ he murmured in Cheel’s ear – and walked brazenly off in the direction of nobody in particular.

  4

  It was in some dissatisfaction that Mervyn Cheel relaxed on his settee. The time was nearly one o’clock, and it still looked as if his luncheon must be of his own providing. What was chiefly in his mind, however, was the small success attending his encounter with the absurd Braunkopf. The trouble was that the man appeared to be just the absurd Braunkopf – with enough cunning, indeed, to run a hitherto obscure joint like the Da Vinci, but surely lacking in those larger intellectual resources which would be necessary for the contriving of any deep and bold design. Whereas Cheel himself –