“Then come along, Dr. Herschel, come along.” Caudwell led them to a small hallway, exchanging genial greetings with his guests as he passed, pointing out a John William Hill miniature they might not have seen, picking up a few other people who for various reasons wanted to see his prize.
“By the way, Gioia, I was in New York last week, you know. Met an old friend of yours from Arkansas. Paul Nierman.”
“Nierman?” Gioia seemed to be at a loss. “I’m afraid I don’t remember him.”
“Well, he remembered you pretty well. Sent you all kinds of messages — you’ll have to stop by my office on Monday and get the full strength.”
Caudwell opened a door on the right side of the hall and let them into his study. It was an octagonal room carved out of the corner of the building. Windows on two sides looked out on Lake Michigan.
Caudwell drew salmon drapes as he talked about the room, why he’d chosen it for his study even though the view kept his mind from his work.
Lotty ignored him and walked over to a small pedestal which stood alone against the paneling on one of the far walls. Max followed her and gazed respectfully at the statue. He had seldom seen so fine a piece outside a museum. About a foot high, it depicted a woman in classical draperies hovering in anguish over the dead body of a soldier lying at her feet. The grief in her beautiful face was so poignant that it reminded you of every sorrow you had ever faced.
“Who is it meant to be?” Max asked curiously.
“Andromache,” Lotty said in a strangled voice. “Andromache mourning Hector.”
Max stared at Lotty, astonished equally by her emotion and her knowledge of the figure — Lotty was totally uninterested in sculpture.
Caudwell couldn’t restrain the smug smile of a collector with a true coup. “Beautiful, isn’t it? How do you know the subject?”
“I should know it.” Lotty’s voice was husky with emotion. “My grandmother had such a Pietro. An alabaster given her great-grandfather by the Emperor Joseph the Second himself for his help in consolidating imperial ties with Poland.”
She swept the statue from its stand, ignoring a gasp from Max, and turned it over. “You can see the traces of the imperial stamp here still. And the chip on Hector’s foot which made the Hapsburg wish to give the statue away to begin with. How came you to have this piece? Where did you find it?”
The small group that had joined Caudwell stood silent by the entrance, shocked at Lotty’s outburst. Gioia looked more horrified than any of them, but he found Lotty overwhelming at the best of times — an elephant confronted by a hostile mouse.
“I think you’re allowing your emotions to carry you away, doctor.”
Caudwell kept his tone light, making Lotty seem more gauche by contrast. “I inherited this piece from my father, who bought it — legitimately — in Europe. Perhaps from your — grandmother, was it?
But I suspect you are confused about something you may have seen in a museum as a child.”
Deborah gave a high-pitched laugh and called loudly to her brother, “Dad may have stolen it from Uncle Grif, but it looks like Grandfather snatched it to begin with anyway.”
“Be quiet, Deborah,” Caudwell barked sternly.
His daughter paid no attention to him. She laughed again and joined her brother to look at the imperial seal on the bottom of the statue.
Lotty brushed them aside. “I am confused about the seal of Joseph the Second?” she hissed at Caudwell. “Or about this chip on Hector’s foot? You can see the line where some Philistine filled in the missing piece. Some person who thought his touch would add value to Pietro’s work. Was that you, doctor? Or your father?”
“Lotty.” Max was at her side, gently prizing the statue from her shaking hands to restore it to its pedestal. “Lotty, this is not the place or the manner to discuss such things.”
Angry tears sparkled in her black eyes. “Are you doubting my word?”
Max shook his head. “I’m not doubting you. But I’m also not supporting you. I’m asking you not to talk about this matter in this way at this gathering.”
“But, Max: either this man or his father is a thief!”
Caudwell strolled up to Lotty and pinched her chin. “You’re working too hard, Dr. Herschel. You have too many things on your mind these days. I think the board would like to see you take a leave of absence for a few weeks, go someplace warm, get yourself relaxed.
When you’re this tense, you’re no good to your patients. What do you say, Loewenthal?”
Max didn’t say any of the things he wanted to — that Lotty was insufferable and Caudwell intolerable. He believed Lotty, believed that the piece had been her grandmother’s. She knew too much about it, for one thing. And for another, a lot of artworks belonging to European Jews were now in museums or private collections around the world. It was only the most god-awful coincidence that the Pietro had ended up with Caudwell’s father.
But how dare she raise the matter in the way most likely to alienate everyone present? He couldn’t possibly support her in such a situation. And at the same time, Caudwell’s pinching her chin in that condescending way made him wish he were not chained to a courtesy that would have kept him from knocking the surgeon out even if he’d been ten years younger and ten inches taller.
“I don’t think this is the place or the time to discuss such matters,”
he reiterated as calmly as he could. “Why don’t we all cool down and get back together on Monday, eh?”
Lotty gasped involuntarily, then swept from the room without a backward glance.
Max refused to follow her. He was too angry with her to want to see her again that afternoon. When he got ready to leave the party an hour or so later, after a long conversation with Caudwell that taxed his sophisticated urbanity to the utmost, he heard with relief that Lotty was long gone. The tale of her outburst had of course spread through the gathering at something faster than the speed of sound; he wasn’t up to defending her to Martha Gildersleeve who demanded an explanation of him in the elevator going down.
He went home for a solitary evening in his house in Evanston.
Normally such time brought him pleasure, listening to music in his study, lying on the couch with his shoes off, reading history, letting the sounds of the lake wash over him.
Tonight, though, he could get no relief. Fury with Lotty merged into images of horror, the memories of his own disintegrated family, his search through Europe for his mother. He had never found anyone who was quite certain what became of her, although several people told him definitely of his father’s suicide. And stamped over these wisps in his brain was the disturbing picture of Caudwell’s children, their blond heads leaning backward at identical angles as they gleefully chanted, “Grandpa was a thief, Grandpa was a thief,”
while Caudwell edged his visitors out of the study.
By morning he would somehow have to reconstruct himself enough to face Lotty, to respond to the inevitable flood of calls from outraged trustees. He’d have to figure out a way of soothing Caudwell’s vanity, bruised more by his children’s behavior than anything Lotty had said. And find a way to keep both important doctors at Beth Israel.
Max rubbed his gray hair. Every week this job brought him less joy and more pain. Maybe it was time to step down, to let the board bring in a young MBA who would turn Beth Israel’s finances around.
Lotty would resign then, and it would be an end to the tension between her and Caudwell.
Max fell asleep on the couch. He awoke around five muttering,
“By morning, by morning.” His joints were stiff from cold, his eyes sticky with tears he’d shed unknowingly in his sleep.
But in the morning things changed. When Max got to his office he found the place buzzing, not with news of Lotty’s outburst but word that Caudwell had missed his early morning surgery. Work came almost completely to a halt at noon when his children phoned to say they’d found the surgeon strangled in his own study and the Pietro Andromache missing. And on Tuesday, the police arrested Dr. Charlotte Herschel for Lewis Caudwell’s murder.