The Resurrection Man Page 2

  “Do you know, Max, I think Lydia may have told you the exact truth, oddly enough. Bartolo offered me a job once. This was back in New York, of course; I’d no idea that he might have immigrated. Anyway, one of his conditions was that I’d have to dress as he did: velveteen smock, great flopping beret, one of those silly bow ties getting into the turps or whatever every time I bent over. Naturally I explained that wasn’t my style and that was the end of it.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Oh, quite a while. As much as twenty years, I’d have to stop and think back to give you an exact date. I’ve been something of a rolling stone, you know. It was after I’d stopped my lecture tours, but before I started doing bird calls at children’s parties and odd jobs at the Wilkins Museum. The parties were rather fun, actually. Perhaps you’d let me do one for Davy when he’s about eight years old. Eight’s a good age for bird calls.”

  “It’s a deal. Davy’s already imitating blue jays out at Ireson’s Landing. He runs around flapping his arms and squawking.” Max smiled, a trifle ruefully. “Lydia says I’ve turned into a bon bourgeois.”

  “Pah, how would she know? Max, this is extremely interesting information. Don’t you think we ought to pay Bartolo a call sometime soon, just on general principles?”

  2

  “SOUNDS GOOD TO ME,” said Max, “but it may not be that easy. I asked Lydia for the address and she wouldn’t give it to me. She says Bartolo doesn’t want anybody to know, including his clients.”

  “Then how can he conduct business?”

  “Contacts are made by telephone or by writing to a box number, then Bartolo pays a personal visit to the prospect, gives an estimate and a snow job, and takes the work away with him. When the piece is fully resurrected, he takes it back and collects his money. The rest of his money, that is; I’m sure he must extract a down payment when he takes on the job.”

  “He’d be crazy not to,” said Brooks. “Does this rigmarole suggest to you what it does to me? How do the clients find him? Through the Mafia?”

  “Yes, it does and no, they don’t, according to Lydia. She claims they come through referrals from galleries and the auction houses. She may have wrong information or she may be lying, she’s always been pretty good at both. On the other hand, supposing it’s not stolen merchandise. Can you see anybody owning a piece important enough to warrant restoration at the kind of price Bartolo must charge being dumb enough to let him cart it off to an unknown address, unless they’d first got ironclad guarantees of his bona fides?”

  “Certainly I can. What about Cousin Apollonia? Or Uncle Frederick, for that matter, though of course you never knew him. Old Fred prided himself on being an infallible judge of character, so naturally he got stung at an average of once a week. However, I do see your point, Max. Did Lydia give you any explanation for the secrecy?”

  “She claims it’s a matter of security. Bartolo’s argument is that by concealing the whereabouts of his studio, he keeps thieves from coming and pinching the clients’ treasures.”

  “I suppose that makes sense,” Brooks conceded, “though not a great deal.”

  “Lydia did mention that it’s also a way for Bartolo to keep from having to carry huge theft insurance,” Max added.

  “There is that angle to be considered.”

  “She also says Barto, as she calls him, is a very persuasive guy.”

  “And how right she is,” Brooks agreed. “Talking to Bartolo Arbalest used to make me feel rather as if I were having an audience with the archbishop of Canterbury. Not that I’ve ever so much as laid eyes on the archbishop myself, but that’s the general sort of feeling Bartolo evokes. Yes, I should say he could talk almost anybody into almost anything.”

  “He couldn’t talk you into a velvet beret, though.”

  “Don’t forget I’m a Kelling, my boy. I grew up in a tough school. You know, I’m finding it difficult to picture Bartolo as a fence’s assistant, if that’s what you have in mind. Disguising stolen paintings so they can be smuggled out of the country, that sort of thing?”

  “It happens. What’s your problem?”

  “Well, I know that times change, and people with them, but back when I knew him, Bartolo Arbalest had a very strange reputation, considering the neighborhood he worked in. He was reputed to be absolutely, scrupulously, quite disgustingly sea-green incorruptible. But you know. Max, it does boggle the mind to think of Lydia Ouspenska’s being linked up with anyone incorruptible. Oh dear, I hope she’s not in trouble again.”

  “You and me both. Maybe I’d better call Sarah.”

  “Good idea. Sarah’s fond of Lydia, you know. She does tend to like people; I can’t think where she gets it from. Both her parents had about as much human feeling as a pair of frozen bluefish, though I always thought Elizabeth might have amounted to something as a human being if she hadn’t married Walter and become so involved with Thoreau. But why involve Sarah? Why don’t I toddle along and—”

  “Lydia knows you too well, she’d spot you in a minute. Let’s just see who’s—hi, Kätzele, what’s up? No, no problems. I’m with Brooks at the office. Listen, I bumped into Lydia Ouspenska on the way here. She’s probably at Deluca’s by now and I want her tailed. Is either Charles or Mariposa available? Lydia knows Charles, he’d have to disguise himself pretty well. I don’t think she’s ever seen Mariposa. Okay, either or both, only tell them to make it fast. She’s wearing a black vintage outfit with white trimming and a black hat the size of a cartwheel, put on sideways. And carrying a parasol, she’d be hard to miss. No, no stakeout, I just want to know where she goes with the truffles. Over to you, kid. See you in a while.”

  Max hung up the phone. “Sarah’s going to take Davy for a short walk. She’ll try to intercept Lydia at the corner of Beacon and keep her talking till Charles gets his false whiskers on, then he and Mariposa will take over. Too bad Theonia’s out on assignment, she could have done her bag-lady act. Have you heard from her?”

  “An hour ago,” said Brooks with quiet pride. “The miniatures were exactly where you thought they’d be. I’m to meet her and Mrs. DeMorgan at Back Bay, take them to lunch at the Copley, Theonia will hand over the goods, and I’ll collect the fee. Can you manage the office till three or so? There’s that chap coming in about his Degas ballerina.”

  “No problem. What else?”

  The two occupied themselves agreeably for a while discussing various malefactions currently on the books and thinking up interesting ways to deal with them. Then Brooks went off to keep his appointment and Max began making phone calls, as was his wont. He’d completed a fair amount of business and rounded up one or two new jobs by the time Brooks got back from his luncheon with the ladies, having deposited the check on the way.

  They were beginning to think seriously of shutting up shop, turning on the answering machine, and going home to see what their secret agents might have turned up on Lydia Ouspenska when a slight, dark figure slunk furtively through the door and closed it noiselessly behind him.

  “Ah,” said Max, “enter the little brown man with the blowpipe. Still looking for the eye of the idol, Bill?”

  “Su-ure. Hi, Brooks. How’s it going, Maxie?”

  Bill Jones, as he preferred to be called, was wearing what he always wore: a cotton shirt that might or might not have been changed during the past week, a pair of chinos in somewhat worse condition, and shabby moccasins. No socks, Bill only wore socks during months that had an R in them. He also owned a dirty old raincoat, but this was hardly the weather for that. The summer sun had tanned him dark as a Bedouin, though some of it might have been dirt.

  Seeing him thus, few would have guessed his guilty secret, that Bill Jones was in fact the younger brother of Boston’s richest and most influential Greek importer and that he himself was a successful commercial artist whose idea of a wild night on the town was to attend a poetry reading with some attractive Radcliffe woman who’d either made or was about to make Phi Beta Kappa. That Bill had o
ften gone from such highbrow revels to share Lydia Ouspenska’s bed at the Fenway Studios, when she’d lived there, was no reflection on his morals. The relationship had been, in Lydia’s own words, purely Plutonic; it was just that Lydia didn’t own a spare mattress. Bill was just the man Max had been hoping to see.

  Bill might in fact have come looking for Willkie Collins’s Moonstone, he was generally looking for something. Usually it was information he sought, not for any special reason, Bill just liked to know.

  Being scrupulously honest and the epitome of discretion, Bill got to know a great deal, of which he repeated very little. He was thus an invaluable friend and ally to Max, seeking no reward except an occasional invitation to dinner at Tulip Street so that he could sneak appreciative glances at Sarah and Theonia out of the corners of his soulful dark eyes. It probably wasn’t by chance that he’d come here at so opportune a moment, he might well have been trailing Max across the Common to make sure he didn’t get into any trouble walking alone. Doing good by stealth was Bill’s forte.

  Of course stealth was what Bill did everything by, even communicating. He didn’t so much speak as breathe his words, and he didn’t even breathe very often, at least not so that anybody could notice. While he could talk perfectly well when the mood was upon him, he frequently preferred to put his messages across by shrugs, glances, and drawing pictures in the air. His hands weren’t much bigger than Sarah’s. Right now they were fluttering like a pair of sparrows after the same crumb, eager to respond to what Max was about to tell. Max obliged.

  “The leg’s doing fine, Bill. I suppose you know Lydia Ouspenska’s not at the Fenway Studios any longer. I met her on the way over here just a little while ago, looking like a million bucks’ worth of two-dollar bills. Have you seen her lately?”

  “No-o-o. She just—” Bill waved his old lady friend off and shrugged her into oblivion. “I thought she must have—” either died or gone off with some man. That Lydia might have gone with a woman wasn’t even worth fluttering about, it could never have happened. “What’s she—”

  “She claims she’s working for the Resurrection Man. Know him?”

  Bill pantomimed a corpse laid out for burial. Max shook his head. “Not that kind. This guy has a business restoring antiques and paintings. His name’s Bartolo Arbalest and Brooks says he used to work in New York.”

  Bill raised his eyebrows. “Are they—?”

  “Oh sure, Lydia’s living with him, though only in the Plutonic sense, as far as I know. Arbalest prefers to have his helpers staying in the house so he can get them to the studio on time in the mornings.”

  Bill smiled a wee smile. “Lydia does that? He must be some operator. Where’s his—?”

  “Good question,” said Max. “We hope to have an answer in a while.”

  “Didn’t Lydia—?”

  “Her lips are sealed. She claims Arbalest has made all his elves take a vow of silence, for reasons of security.”

  “Hey-y-y.”

  Bill drew some rather alarming pictures. Brooks, who’d been quietly enjoying the pantomime, nodded.

  “We’ve been wondering that ourselves, Bill. Not that it’s any of our business what Arbalest is really securing himself against,” Brooks added, for the code of the Kellings was a stern one, in spots. “Though I don’t suppose that need stop us from trying to find out,” he appended further after a moment’s thought. The code of the Kellings had certainly never stopped his Cousin Mabel. “Lydia claims the idea is to keep thieves from knowing where the clients’ priceless art treasures are being taken, so that Barto, as I gather she calls him, won’t have to carry heavy insurance. She could be telling the truth, I suppose.”

  He, Max, and Bill shrugged in unison and enjoyed a merry chuckle together at this amusing fantasy. Then Bill started waving his hands again.

  “So how does he—?”

  “Make connections? House calls, according to Lydia. When I knew Bartolo in New York some years ago, he had a shop. People just strolled in with their Duccios under their arms and he touched up the bald spots. Now, it appears, he takes referrals by appointment from the more respected galleries and auction houses. It could be an upgrading of his image in the interest of higher fees, I suppose. Lydia didn’t happen to mention. Max, whether Bartolo drives up to the client’s door in a coffin brake?”

  “Hell, I forgot to ask. It hardly seems likely he’d want to call attention to his comings and goings, if he’s that secretive about where he lives. I’m surprised he’s letting Lydia run around loose.”

  “He probably isn’t,” Brooks demurred, “except for occasional errands. The truffles may have counted as a desperate emergency, Max, you know what amateur chefs are like. You’ve been out of circulation, of course, but I’m back and forth pretty much every day, as are Theonia and Charles. If she were really on the loose, it does seem one of us would have run across her somewhere along the line.”

  “Unless the studio’s out in the suburbs somewhere.”

  It wouldn’t be. Max’s guess was a re-gentrified former rooming house in the Back Bay. Lydia hadn’t specified how many people were actually living in the house, but surely they’d each want a bedroom. Unless Arbalest carried his medieval-guild concept to its limit and made his artisans sleep rolled up in sheepskins under the workbenches. Lydia probably wouldn’t mind, she’d slept in ruder places.

  “As it is,” Brooks went on, “I haven’t heard so much as a whisper of her since Ernie Haire left Boston, much less of Bartolo Arbalest’s having arrived. Bartolo never struck me as the sort to hide his light under a bushel. All this secrecy suggests to me, as I’m sure it does to you, that he’s got himself into rather a bad fix in New York and is lying low till the dust settles. I just wish we knew what it’s all about, one can’t help worrying a bit on general principles. Lydia has about as much sense as a common coot.”

  “I’ve never found anything common about Lydia,” Max objected. Except her love for the common man, he didn’t have to mention that. “Well, let’s not start tearing our hair till we see what the undercover agents have to report. What else is new, Bill?”

  There was quite a lot, Bill told it graphically. More graphically than verbally, anyway. Brooks made careful notes in his own secret code, nodding from time to time as some piece of information fitted snugly into one of the various webs he and Max were weaving. They had all but wrapped up two of the cases on their docket, and were interestedly dissecting a rumor that had filtered through to Bill by way of Montenegro and Lima when a stage-caricature anarchist of the old Bolshevik school breezed in.

  “Hi, Dmitri,” said Max. “Sit down and park your bomb.”

  “Oh, fudge, you rumbled me.”

  Charles C. Charles, for this could be none other, removed half a pound or so of bushy black-crepe hair from pate and chin, detached the matching eyebrows, and revealed himself in his Lord Peter Wimsey guise, except for the monocle he’d been too pressed for time to remember.

  Charles, a professional actor, had done a magnificent Mr. Hudson for Sarah during her boardinghouse days, but had been forced to depend for spending money on a job in a plastics factory. Since Max’s accident, he’d been doing much of the legwork for the agency and was proving himself a man of more parts than he’d ever got to perform on Boston theater stages. Even as he picked spirit gum off his chin, he was turning into Sergeant Charles C. Charles, CID. First, however, he did a brief aside.

  “Mariposa went back to the house, she thought moddom might be needing her in the kitchen. And now, sirs, to report. Pursuant to orders received and understood, M and I liaised with Mrs. B and son at the corner of Charles and Beacon. Finding her already in conversation with Countess O, we lurked until the latter party had kissed both Mrs. B and son D several times and prepared to cross on the walk light to the Public Gardens.”

  “You mean the PG?” Max asked.

  “Yes, sir, if you prefer, sir. Countess O was carrying a little weeny brown grocery bag, indicating to M and me that
the truffle-procurement operation had been successfully carried out. That the bag was so small suggested to us that the countess hadn’t had money enough left to buy anything else. Otherwise she no doubt would have, she being the way she is. Neither the size of her handbag nor the cut of her costume was conducive to successful shoplifting and O has never been much good at it anyway. She might conceivably have snuck something into her parasol, but they were most likely keeping an eye on her in the store, knowing Countess O as they do.”

  “So, in short, you trailed her.” Unless firmly taken in hand, Charles did tend to pad his roles. Max was eager to get at the nub.

  “Yes, sir, we did, sir, my partner and I. M, I mean. We trailed Countess O to an address on—is it okay to say Marlborough Street? I’ve already used up the M.”

  “It’s perfectly okay,” Max reassured him. “Between Arlington and Berkeley?”

  “No, Berkeley and Clarendon, on the Beacon side. It’s the house with the fancy iron grilles on all the windows, both downstairs and up. New ones. Newish, anyway. The door’s painted a sickly olive green and has a brass knocker with a face on it.”

  “Anybody’s we know?”

  “I hope not. It’s more of a symbolic face, like a satyr or a dryad or maybe a gargoyle. I’m not too swift on dryads. Not shiny brass, the other kind.”

  “Is the knocker strictly germane to the report?” asked Brooks, trying not to sound waspish.

  “Oh yes, sir, strictly germane, because Countess O used it to knock with. On the door,” Charles added in the interests of perfect accuracy. “M and I walked on a short way, then paused for M to remove a hyperbolical pebble from her shoe while I employed my trusty see-back-o-scope in the hope of spotting the person who let her in. Unfortunately, the door was opened just far enough for Countess O to squeeze through. All I got to see was a hand with paint stains on it, and a little bit of a green velvet sleeve about the same shade as the door.”