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.
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 opinion 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.
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 –
Cheel pulled up on the verge of mere indulgent musing. What he had to acknowledge was that he had failed to get out of Braunkopf any information which he couldn’t quite easily have picked up elsewhere. And he had been left entirely guessing as to whether or not Braunkopf knew that Holme was still alive. He rather hoped that Braunkopf
didn’t
know. The fewer people who did – it was obscurely coming to him – the more there might well prove to be in it for Mervyn Cheel.
But just how? It was only with the eye of faith, so to speak, that be could as yet distinguish on the horizon of the affair the first warm glimmer and glow of likely material benefit. And between him and that comfortable dawn great tracts of darkness still lay. What, for instance – and here surely was the central riddle – had prompted Sebastian Holme to be dead?
Sophocles, it was true (and here, as so frequently, Cheel’s generous classical education took a hand), had maintained that no man was to be counted happy until he was precisely that. But Sophocles’ ideas were often on the gloomy side, and he had lived in what were, one way and another, decidedly rugged times. Nowadays people did, on the whole, prefer to be alive. And to be dead even in the figurative sense in which Holme was dead must be attended with great inconveniences. It was – again if only figuratively – to have gone underground. And what was the fun of being an underground man?
A man might, of course, do something of the sort for merely freakish reasons – like a prince or husband in an old play, giving himself out to be defunct, or on a journey, in order to potter round in disguise, spying on his principal ministers or his wife. But nothing quite of this sort seemed to fit the present situation. And something else – something a good deal more promising – did!
Discerning this, Cheel was able to feel that real daybreak was in sight. One went
under
ground, in nine cases out often, because things had ceased to be healthy
above
it. To be dead was the simplest and most conclusive way of going into hiding that could be conceived. Sebastian Holme had done something so disgraceful that he just
had
to be dead. Probably he had put himself within reach of the criminal law. And it was up to Cheel to discover just how. It was up to him to unearth the facts, and then to make what he could of his knowledge – always keeping a wary eye, of course, on the criminal law himself.