On the street she bought a newspaper and confirmed the listing of Trees Near L’Havre. Although that wing of the Institute had been destroyed, many of its paintings had been carried to safety by way of the second-floor corridor.
Part of the street in front of the Institute was still cordoned off when she reached it, congesting the flow of morning traffic. The police on duty were no less brusque than those whom Mary had encountered the day before. She was seized by the impulse to postpone her mission—an almost irresistible temptation, especially when she was barred from entering the museum unless she could show a pass such as had been issued to all authorized personnel.
“Of course I’m not authorized,” she exclaimed. “If I were I shouldn’t be out here.”
The policeman directed her to the sergeant in charge. He was at the moment disputing with the fire insurance representative as to how much of the street could be used for the salvage operation. “The business of this street is business,” the sergeant said, “and that’s my business.”
Mary waited until the insurance man stalked into the building. He did not need a pass, she noticed. “Excuse me, officer, I have a painting—”
“Lady…” He drew the long breath of patience. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Yesterday during the fire a painting was supposedly destroyed—a lovely, small Monet called—”
“Was there now?” the sergeant interrupted. Lovely small Monets really touched him.
Mary was becoming flustered in spite of herself. “It’s listed in this morning’s paper as having been destroyed. But it wasn’t. I have it at home.”
The policeman looked at her for the first time with a certain compassion. “On your living-room wall, no doubt,” he said with deep knowingness.
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
He took her gently but firmly by the arm. “I tell you what you do. You go along to police headquarters on Fifty-seventh Street. You know where that is, don’t you? Just tell them all about it like a good girl.” He propelled her into the crowd and there released her. Then he raised his voice: “Keep moving! You’ll see it all on the television.”
Mary had no intention of going to police headquarters where, she presumed, men concerned with armed robbery, mayhem, and worse were even less likely to understand the subtlety of her problem. She went to her office and throughout the morning tried periodically to reach the museum curator’s office by telephone. On each of her calls either the switchboard was tied up or his line was busy for longer than she could wait.
Finally she hit on the idea of asking for the Institute’s Public Relations Department, and to someone there, obviously distracted—Mary could hear parts of three conversations going
on at the same time—she explained how during the fire she had
saved Monet’s Trees Near L’Havre.
“Near where, madam?” the voice asked.
“L’Havre.” Mary spelled it. “By Monet,” she added.
“Is that two words or one?” the voice asked.
“Please transfer me to the curator’s office,” Mary said and ran her fingers up and down the lapel of her herringbone suit.
Mary thought it a wise precaution to meet the Institute’s representative in the apartment lobby where she first asked to see his credentials. He identified himself as the man to whom she had given her name and address on the phone. Mary signaled for the elevator and thought about his identification: Robert Attlebury III. She had seen his name on the museum roster; Curator of…she could not remember.
He looked every inch the curator, standing erect and remote while the elevator bore them slowly upward. A curator perhaps, but she would not have called him a connoisseur. One with his face and disposition would always taste and spit out, she thought. She could imagine his scorn of things he found distasteful, and instinctively she knew herself to be distasteful to him.
Not that it really mattered what he felt about her. She was nobody. But how must the young unknown artist feel standing with his work before such superciliousness? Or had he a different mien and manner for people of his own kind? In that case she would have given a great deal for the commonest of his courtesies.
“Everything seems so extraordinary—in retrospect,” Mary said to break the silence of their seemingly endless ascent.
“How fortunate for you,” he said, and Mary thought, perhaps it was.
When they reached the door of her apartment, she paused before turning the key. “Shouldn’t you have brought a guard—or someone?”
He looked down on her as from Olympus. “I am someone.”
Mary resolved to say nothing more. She opened the door and left it open. He preceded her and moved across the foyer into the living room and stood before the Monet. His rude directness oddly comforted her: he did, after all, care about painting. She ought not to judge men, she thought, from her limited experience of them.
He gazed at the Monet for a few moments, then he tilted his head ever so slightly from one side to the other. Mary’s heart began to beat erratically. For months she had wanted to discuss with someone who really knew about such things her theory of what was reflection and what was reality in Trees Near L’Havre. But now that her chance was at hand she could not find the words.
Still, she had to say something—something…casual. “The frame is mine,” she said, “but for the picture’s protection you may take it. I can get it the next time I’m at the museum.”
Surprisingly, he laughed. “It may be the better part at that,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
He actually looked at her. “Your story is ingenious, madam, but then it was warranted by the occasion.”
“I simply do not understand what you are saying,” Mary said.
“I have seen better copies than this one,” he said. “It’s too bad your ingenuity isn’t matched by a better imitation.”
Mary was too stunned to speak. He was about to go. “But…it’s signed,” Mary blurted out, and feebly tried to direct his attention to the name in the upper corner.
“Which makes it forgery, doesn’t it?” he said almost solicitously.
His preciseness, his imperturbability in the light of the horrendous thing he was saying, etched detail into the nightmare.
“That’s not my problem!” Mary cried, giving voice to words she did not mean, saying what amounted to a betrayal of the painting she so loved.
“Oh, but it is. Indeed it is, and I may say a serious problem if I were to pursue it.”
“Please do pursue it!” Mary cried.
Again he smiled, just a little. “That is not the Institute’s way of dealing with these things.”
“You do not like Monet,” Mary challenged desperately, for he had started toward the door.
“That’s rather beside the point, isn’t it?”
“You don’t know Monet. You can’t! Not possibly!”
“How could I dislike him if I didn’t know him? Let me tell you something about Monet.” He turned back to the picture and trailed a finger over one vivid area. “In Monet the purple is everything.”
“The purple?” Mary said.
“You’re beginning to see it yourself now, aren’t you?” His tone verged on the pedagogic.
Mary closed her eyes and said, “I only know how this painting came to be here.”
“I infinitely prefer not to be made your confidant in that matter,” he said. “Now I have rather more important matters to take care of.” And again he started toward the door.
Mary hastened to block his escape. “It doesn’t matter what you think of Monet, or of me, or of anything. You’ve got to take that painting back to the museum.”
“And be made a laughingstock when the hoax is discovered?” He set an arm as stiff as a brass rail between them and moved out of the apartment.
Mary followed him to the elevator, now quite beside herself. “I shall go to the newspapers!” she cried.
“I think you might regret it.”
“Now I know. I understand!” Mary saw the elevator door open. “You were glad to think the Monet had been destroyed in the fire.”
“Savage!” he said.
Then the door closed between them.
In time Mary persuaded—and it wasn’t easy—certain experts, even an art critic, to come and examine “her” Monet. It was a more expensive undertaking than she could afford—all of them seemed to expect refreshments, including expensive liquors. Her friends
fell in with “Mary’s hoax,” as they came to call her story, and she was much admired in an ever-widening and increasingly esoteric circle for her unwavering account of how she had come into possession of a “genuine Monet.” Despite the virtue of simplicity, a trait since childhood, she found herself using words in symbolic combinations—the language of the company she now kept—and people far wiser than she would say of her: “How perceptive!” or “What insight!”—and then pour themselves another drink.
One day her employer, the great man himself, who prior to her “acquisition” had not known whether she lived in propriety or in sin, arrived at her apartment at cocktail time bringing with him a famous art historian.
The expert smiled happily over his second Scotch while Mary told again the story of the fire at the Institute and how she had simply walked home with the painting because she could not find anyone to whom to give it. While she talked, his knowing eyes wandered from her face to the painting, to his glass, to the painting, and back to her face again.
“Oh, I could believe it,” he said when she had finished. “It’s the sort of mad adventure that actually could happen.” He set his glass down carefully where she could see that it was empty. “I suppose you know that there has never been an officially complete catalogue of Monet’s work?”
“No,” she said, and refilled his glass.
“It’s so, unfortunately. And the sad truth is that quite a number of museums today are hanging paintings under his name that are really unauthenticated.”
“And mine?” Mary said, lifting a chin she tried vainly to keep from quivering.
Her guest smiled. “Must you know?”
For a time after that Mary tried to avoid looking at the Monet. It was not that she liked it less, but that now she somehow liked herself less in its company. What had happened, she realized, was that, like the experts, she now saw not the painting, but herself.
This was an extraordinary bit of self-discovery for one who had never had to deal severely with her own psyche. Till now, so far as Mary was concerned, the chief function of a mirror had been to determine the angle of a hat. But the discovery of the flaw does not in itself effect a cure; often it aggravates the condition. So with Mary.
She spent less and less time at home, and it was to be said for some of her new-found friends that they thought it only fair to reciprocate for having enjoyed the hospitality of so enigmatically clever a hostess. How often had she as a girl been counseled by parent and teacher to get out more, to see more people. Well, Mary was at last getting out more. And in the homes of people who had felt free to comment on her home and its possessions, she too felt free to comment. The more odd her comment—the nastier, she would once have said of it—the more popular she became. Oh, yes. Mary was seeing more people, lots more people.
In fact, her insurance agent—who was in the habit of just dropping in to make his quarterly collection—had to get up early one Saturday morning to make sure he caught her at home.
It was a clear, sharp day, and the hour at which the Monet was most luminous. The man sat staring at it, fascinated. Mary was amused, remembering how hurt he always was that his clients failed to hang his company calendar in prominence. While she was gone from the room to get her checkbook, he got up and touched the surface of the painting.
“Ever think of taking out insurance on that picture?” he asked when she returned. “Do you mind if I ask how much it’s worth?”
“It cost me…a great deal,” Mary said, and was at once annoyed with both him and herself.
“I tell you what,” the agent said. “I have a friend who appraises these objects of art for some of the big galleries, you know? Do you mind if I bring him round and see what he thinks it’s worth?”
“No, I don’t mind,” Mary said in utter resignation.
And so the appraiser came and looked carefully at the painting. He hedged about putting a value on it. He wasn’t the last word on these nineteenth-century Impressionists and he wanted to
think it over. But that afternoon he returned just as Mary was about to go out, and with him came a bearded gentleman who spoke not once to Mary or to the appraiser, but chatted constantly with himself while he scrutinized the painting. Then with a “tsk, tsk, tsk,” he took the painting from the wall, examined the back, and rehung it—but reversing it, top to bottom.
Mary felt the old flutter interrupt her heartbeat, but it passed quickly.
Even walking out of her house the bearded gentleman did not speak to her; she might have been invisible. It was the appraiser who murmured his thanks but not a word of explanation. Since the expert had not drunk her whiskey Mary supposed the amenities were not required of him.
She was prepared to forget him as she had the others—it was easy now to forget them all; but when she came home to change between matinee and cocktails, another visitor was waiting. She noticed him in the lobby and realized, seeing the doorman say a word to him just as the elevator door closed off her view, that his business was with her. The next trip of the elevator brought him to her door.
“I’ve come about the painting, Miss Gardner,” he said, and offered his card. She had opened the door only as far as the latch chain permitted. He was representative of the Continental Assurance Company, Limited.
She slipped off the latch chain.
Courteous and formal behind his double-breasted suit, he waited for Mary to seat herself. He sat down neatly opposite her, facing the painting, for she sat beneath it, erect, and she hoped, formidable.
“Lovely,” he said, gazing at the Monet. Then he wrenched his eyes from it. “But I’m not an expert,” he added and gently cleared his throat. He was chagrined, she thought, to have allowed himself even so brief a luxury of the heart.
“But is it authenticated?” She said it much as she would once have thought but not said, Fie on you!
“Sufficient to my company’s requirements,” he said. “But don’t misunderstand—we are not proposing to make any inquiries. We are always satisfied in such delicate negotiations just to have the painting back.”
Mary did not misunderstand, but she certainly did not understand either.
He took from his inside pocket a piece of paper which he placed on the coffee table and with the tapering fingers of an artist—or a banker—or a pickpocket—he gently maneuvered it to where Mary could see that he was proffering a certified check.
He did not look at her and therefore missed the spasm she felt contorting her mouth. “The day of the fire,” she thought, but the words never passed her lips.
She took up the check in her hand: $20,000.
“May I use your phone, Miss Gardner?”
Mary nodded and went into the kitchen where she again looked at the check. It was a great deal of money, she thought wryly, to be offered in compensation for a few months’ care of a friend.
She heard her visitor’s voice as he spoke into the telephone—an expert now, to judge by his tone. A few minutes later she heard the front door close. When she went back into the living room both her visitor and the Monet were gone…
Some time later Mary attended the opening of the new wing of the Institute. She recognized a number of people she had not known before and whom, she supposed, she was not likely to know much longer.
They had hung the Monet upside down again.
Mary thought of it after she got home, and as though two rights must surely right a possible wrong, she turned the check upside down while she burned it over the kitchen sink.
Mon
ey to Burn
MARGERY ALLINGHAM
Margery Allingham (1904-66) was a writing prodigy whose first novel, the swashbuckler Blackkerchief Dick (1923), was published by major American and British firms when she was still a teenager. The London-born author, who came from a literary family, served an apprenticeship as a prolific writer of formula magazine fiction before becoming one of the key figures of the Golden Age of Detection between the two World Wars. Her first mystery novel, The White Cottage Mystery (1928), anticipated a least-suspected-person device later used by Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie, and her second, The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), introduced the inconspicuous and self-effacing Albert Campion, one of the most celebrated gentleman detectives of his time and, with a hint of royal blood in his veins, probably the highest born. Like that other aristocratic sleuth, Dorothy
L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, Campion gradually developed from a semi-comic “silly ass” caricature to a fully realized character.
Of the celebrated Golden Age detective-story writers, some (like Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh) stuck to the pure who-dunnit formula for decades thereafter; others (like Sayers and Anthony Berkeley) left the field for other sorts of writing or retired altogether; and a few (like the Ellery Queen team) stayed with the basic format but deepened their exploration of character and theme. Allingham, whose understanding of human foibles and keen social observations were always manifest, belongs to that third group. While Mr. Cam-pion continued to appear through most of her writing career, her post-war novels laid less stress on the formal puzzle, and in some of them Campion was relegated to a secondary role. (Campion received
name-in-the-title billing only after his creator’s death in two novels written by her husband and sometime collaborator, Philip Youngman Carter.) Of Allingham’s early novels, Death of a Ghost (1934) and The Fashion in Shrouds (1938) are often cited as highlights; of the postwar group, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), with its unflinching examination of pure evil, is considered a crime classic.
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