The Resurrection Man (13 page)

“I think your problem here is less of space than of efficiency, Mr. Arbalest,” he said briskly. “These long tables and backless benches are no doubt picturesquely reminiscent of the Middle Ages, but they must be hellishly inconvenient and uncomfortable to work at. Furthermore, keeping all the supplies jumbled together on those big shelves at the back of the room means that everyone must have to keep hopping up and down to get what he needs. I’d strongly recommend dividing the room up into separate cubicles, each with sufficient work space, shelves, and cabinets to meet the artisan’s specific needs, not to mention a comfortable swivel chair on casters to keep him from breaking his back. You also ought to have individually arranged lighting instead of just those overhead fluorescents.”

Brooks warmed to his new role. “This gentleman here on the end, for instance, obviously needs a sturdy turntable that could be raised and lowered with a foot pedal, leaving his hands free for his work. He also needs a rack for his chisels with an attached holder for his oilstone, a shaded drop light, and no doubt a few other things which I’d be glad to discuss with you, Mr.—”

Arbalest picked up his cue. “Oh, I beg your pardon. Mr. Brooks, this is Mr. Laer, our specialist in wood carving. Mr. Brooks and his assistant, Mr.—ah—Tickle, are here to see what we can do about improving conditions in the atelier for your greater convenience. Please, everyone, express your feelings and ideas to these gentlemen freely, you know I’m always ready to go along with whatever is in your best interests. Mr. Brooks, why don’t I just introduce you and Mr. Tickle to our artisans and leave you to poke around all you like? I have some work to do upstairs, we can discuss your recommendations later on. Might we persuade you both to join us for dinner and one of our round-table discussions?”

Brooks and Max exchanged glances. They hadn’t bargained for such an open-arms reception. All they’d need now would be Lydia bouncing back from the church, flinging herself with Slavic enthusiasm upon Max the beautiful detective and expressing loud hopes that he’d come for the purpose of investigating her personally and in detail.

“Thank you,” said the beautiful detective, “but I have a previous commitment. I believe Mr. Brooks does also. Would it bother you, Mr. Laer, if I took a few measurements?”

Mr. Laer said he didn’t care what they did so long as they didn’t mess around with his chisels. He went on with his work; Max and Brooks began doing what they’d ostensibly come for. Upstairs they’d hastily fitted themselves out with what architects’ props Arbalest could provide: a steel tape, a charming though anachronistic ivory slide rule, and a couple of yellow writing pads. They’d brought pencils of their own and plied them busily. Brooks, being Brooks, threw himself wholeheartedly into the job, jotting down notes and drawing precise little sketches. Max flapped around zipping the steel tape in and out and fiddling with the slide rule, covering his pad with figures that didn’t mean anything, trying not to look too knowledgeable about what was happening at the worktables.

Max’s real interest was not in the studio but in the men working there. Goudge hadn’t said much about Laer except that he seemed to be one of the more normal members of the guild. Max wondered how Goudge defined
normal
. He himself would not have cared to be alone for long with the woodcarver and his chisels; there was a shade too much fury in the way that Laer attacked his work, too little genuine affability in his laconic replies to Brooks’s questions and suggestions. Max could see why the offspring of a man like this might prefer to conduct their paternal relationship by long-distance telephone.

Max wondered whether Arbalest had picked his artisans for their appearance as well as their skills, Laer fitted his role so aptly. He was stockily built, of medium height, five foot eight in his thick-soled boots, as Max determined by adroit use of the steel tape. Probably he was a few years younger than his grizzled beard would suggest. When he pushed back his beret to scratch his head Max saw that he was bald, perhaps that was why he didn’t object to wearing the beret. His complexion was ruddy and weathered. Either Laer had worked outside a lot in his previous jobs or else he was the sort who went in for mountain climbing and camping outdoors in the wintertime. It seemed odd that a man of this type would choose to be cloistered with an overfed sybarite like Arbalest and spend his days in this stuffy basement where visitors were never allowed.

Laer must be a strong man, it showed just in the way his stubby fingers grasped his chisels. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his smock to the elbows, his bare arms showed muscles and sinews more genuinely impressive than any professional weight lifter’s. His short, heavy-thighed legs supported a barrel-shaped torso that had no flabby bulges, his shoulders were massive from years of heavy lifting, his bull neck showed no sign of excess fat. A formidable man, Max decided.

An expert craftsman, Max had no doubt about that. At the moment, Laer was working on a small carved-mahogany cabinet that had been damaged in a fire, creating a new door to replicate the charred and battered remains that lay on the table beside him. There was just barely enough left of the old door to show what the pattern must have been; Laer was working along without hesitation or slip, not using any sort of guidelines that Max could see, checking his work by an occasional glance at the blackened fragments that had survived the fire. Max thought he’d like to know more about Peter Laer but this wasn’t the time to get too personal. He added a few more bogus figures to the incoherencies on his pad and followed Brooks over to the next table.

There was nothing of the outdoorsman over here. Jacques Dubrec, the odd-job man, was tall, pale, fiftyish, and slight, though a certain puffiness around the jawline led Max to suspect a modest potbelly under the loose-hanging smock. His beard was no more than a modest, carefully trimmed goatee, coal black on the edges, pure white down the middle like a bobolink’s back, or a baby skunk’s. His hands were long-fingered and deft, his scholarly stoop went well with his thick-lensed glasses. Nearsightedness must be an advantage in his profession.

Max wondered whether Dubrec had been trained at a museum. The project he was working on would have daunted many experts, from the looks of the many fragments that had been carefully sorted out and prepared for resurrection. Before it got dropped or smashed, the piece had evidently been a porcelain ornament in the shape of a bird cage, bedizened with more flora and fauna than an Edwardian lady’s Sunday hat. Bavarian, Max judged, designed for and possibly by Mad King Ludwig. Just picking up the pieces would have been a major undertaking. Put together, the thing must stand almost two feet high.

“I’ll bet you’re a whiz at jigsaw puzzles.”

That was the kind of dumb remark the restorer was no doubt used to hearing from laymen. Dubrec didn’t answer but flashed Max a smile that would have been pleasanter if his teeth had been in better condition, and went on studying the shard he was holding and the assemblage he was about to stick it to. He had to be absolutely certain that he knew precisely where and how the two must fit together, but not let them touch for fear he might cause some infinitesimal speck of further damage to the fractured edges. Once Dubrec’s mind was firmly made up, he applied the thinnest possible line of epoxy glue, the colorless kind, to just the middle of the break. This would flow out toward the edges when the pieces were fitted together, making a perfect bond and adding no thickness that could cause problems as more bits were attached.

Some of the ornamentation would be missing: petals gone from the roses, chips out of the birds’ beaks and feathers, nicks at joints where a perfect fit had not been possible. Dubrec would mix chalk with his epoxy, fill in the breaks, tint the filler to match perfectly with its surroundings.

Arbalest must be charging a bundle for this job, but the effect would be worth the trouble and expense. By the time Dubrec got through, there wouldn’t be a crack or a chip visible to the eye of anyone except another Dubrec.

The artisan hadn’t seemed to be minding the colleague who’d been bawling out what was probably a dirty ballad in Gaelic, Swahili, or possibly just heavily accented English ever since the visitors had arrived; but he did obviously find the strangers themselves disturbing. Brooks himself was too good a craftsman and Max too much an admirer of fine craftsmanship not to respect Dubrec’s need for concentration. They got out of his way and went over to placate the man who’d been so loudly courting their attention ever since they’d entered the atelier.

Art Queppin was as fat, hairy, and red-faced as Carnaby Goudge had described him, maybe even more so. His beard was a great tangle of reddish fuzz. His beret was shoved to the back of his head, his smock open halfway down his hairy sweaty chest. At close range, his ballad turned out to be in an atrocious imitation of Scottish dialect and was about a bonnie wee lassie who never said no. Queppin appeared to be running something like an assembly line, his table was covered with paintings in various stages of being restored. One canvas was being relined, a wood panel was in the far more drastic process of having its painted surface completely detached from the rotted and worm-eaten wood and transferred to a sound new backing.

The painting could not be seen at this stage, it was being stabilized by a sort of cardboard made by pasting first a layer of cotton, then layers of newspaper over its surface. Each layer had to dry overnight, then another would be pasted over it until a thickness of about a quarter of an inch had been achieved. Eventually Art Queppin, or more likely his as-yet-invisible assistant the dauber and chipper, working from the back, would scrape away the old wood down to the gesso ground on which the actual painting had been done. Then the new canvas would be applied and Bartolo Arbalest would collect another fee.

At the moment, Queppin was engaged in the less heroic process of mixing tiny puddles of paint and applying them with finicky dabs to the freshly cleaned surface of what must have been a sadly flaked floral painting by one of the less distinguished members of the Dutch School. He didn’t mind a bit having company while he worked, he couldn’t have been more cordial. The problem was that he didn’t want to talk about improvements to his work space, he wanted to sing Max and Brooks all the verses of “Roll Me Over in the Clover.”

It was no use. Try as they might, they could not shut their scatological serenader up long enough to get any sense out of him. The self-styled architects made play with their tapes and their pads until Queppin got to number eight and was knocking at the gate, then they thanked him for his splendid cooperation and went to find Marcus Nie.

Nie did have a room to himself, as Goudge had mentioned, but it wasn’t much of one, just a walled-off slice of the laundry room. Despite the fact that the entire atelier was air-conditioned, no doubt as much for the artworks’ protection as for the artisans’ comfort, and that an exhaust fan was turned on in the one narrow, grated window, the air in here was flavored with fumes of turpentine, mineral spirits, denatured alcohol, and a few more exotic scents that Max didn’t even want to think about. Thymol, he deduced, and ether, and maybe even a dash of cyanide; chemicals to be used rarely and with utmost discretion.

There was a long, shallow sink on the wall under the window that had the fan in it. This would be where the trickier processes were carried out. The restorations they were doing here might not be precisely museum quality, but then most of the pieces Arbalest’s elves were working on wouldn’t be up to museum standards, either. Not that there wasn’t a lot of stuff in museums that Max Bittersohn himself wouldn’t have given house room to; and furthermore, much of the restoring that had been done by alleged experts over the centuries ought better to have been classed as vandalism. As far as Max could see, Bartolo’s artisans were turning out work that was as good as most and a damned sight better than some he’d run into. He turned his attention away from technique and toward the technician.

Marcus Nie would never be hanged for his beauty. His head was shaped much like an old-time cheese box, long and angular, covered with yellowish skin that sagged down in folds like an elderly bloodhound’s. The hair on top was fair, sparse, and fine, plastered down with some kind of goo to let the yellow scalp shine through, meandering down along the sides of his face in the shape that Sarah’s grandfather would have called Dundreary weepers, stopping short of the chin as if Nie hadn’t felt it worthwhile to play out the farce to its end.

Nie was probably as tall as Dubrec. It was hard to tell, the way he was hunched over a large drafting table with that voluminous smock hanging around him, but his arms were long and so were his badly stained hands. He had on a black-rubber photographer’s apron, transparent plastic cuffs were pulled up over his sleeves. He paid no attention to the two visitors but went on soaking bits of cotton in whatever solvent he was using—most likely a standard mixture of denatured alcohol and turpentine—and dabbing at the dirty, darkened shellac on the canvas before him.

Sure enough, this was an animal painting: a head-on portrait of two remarkably stupid-looking sheep and a handsome goat with longish tawny golden fleece, great curly horns, and a disconcertingly knowing expression. If this was supposed to be one of those Victorian moral allegories, then Max Bittersohn’s money was on the goat.

G
ETTING MARCUS NIE TO
take an interest in the possible refurbishment of his workroom was a lost cause from the start. Even Brooks, who could coax a friendly tweet out of a hermit thrush, wasn’t able to raise anything more than a curt, “It’s okay the way it is.”

He and Max poked around a while, dodging piles of stretchers and plywood sandwiches that lay on the concrete floor, held down by concrete blocks and concealing bulged canvases that were being flattened out by this simple process for cleaning and restretching. Sure at last that Nie wasn’t going to open up, they called it quits and went looking for the one member of the household on whom they hadn’t yet laid eyes.