She slipped on her coat, stowed the pad in one of its pockets, and pulled out her gloves.
“Did you leave a trail of bread crumbs coming in?” Francesca asked.
“No,” Sigrid smiled, “but I think I can find my way out.”
As she said good night and opened the door, Francesca suddenly slid on her boots and said, “Better let me point you toward the nearest gangplank. Back in a minute, Søren.”
They walked down the wide passageway to the elevator. Sigrid said, “Do you suppose the ship’s doctor is on board tonight? Someone ought to take a look at that eye.”
Francesca was amused. “I’m sure Søren’s had worse knocks than that. He made a pass at you, didn’t he?”
“Not exactly.”
They rang for an elevator and Sigrid felt the other woman’s appraising eyes as they waited.
“He’s really not like that,” said Francesca. “You probably won’t believe me, but I’ve been seeing him for two months now and underneath all that diamond-in-the-rough facade, he’s been a perfect gentleman. Too perfect, in some respects.”
The elevator arrived and they stepped inside. “In feet,” she added, “I was beginning to wonder if he marched to a different drummer or if I was losing it.”
“You?” Sigrid murmured, feeling like a drab country mouse next to Francesca’s rich shimmer of brown-and-gold taffeta.
As the elevator doors opened for them, Francesca laid her hand on Sigrid’s arm. “Does it make a difference to you, Sigrid? About Oscar and me, I mean? I saw your face last night when you realized what Roger Shambley meant.”
Sigrid was silent. She rather doubted if Francesca Leeds had seen any more in her face than the redhead expected-or wanted?-to see; and she had never felt comfortable exchanging girlish confidences.
Evidently Francesca felt differently. “What Oscar and I had was wonderful while it lasted, but it’s been over for more than a year.”
And what, Sigrid wondered mutely, was the proper response to that? I’m sorry? I’m glad? Were you glad when it ended? Was Nauman?
“Ah! There’s the door I came in,” she said, pulling on her gloves and raising the hood of her coat. “I think I can find my way out from here.”
And beat a coward’s quick exit.
It was after nine when Sigrid got home. She’d stopped off at a bookstore along the way to begin her Christmas shopping. This was a young cousin’s first Christmas and she couldn’t decide whether to get him a traditional Mother Goose or a lavish pop-up book, so she bought both. Baby Lars had been named for her favorite great-uncle, but she couldn’t neglect the other five in Hilda’s brood, especially when one stop could take care of the whole Carmichael family so simply.
She had spent a happy hour browsing through Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Watership Down, Treasure Island and Charlotte’s Web, leafing through dozens more before adding a newly published and beautifully illustrated book of fairy tales for Hilda, who collected them.
A book for Hilda’s husband wasn’t quite as simple. What does one give a CPA who has everything? Impulsively she chose a book on building Chinese kites. A man with six children might find that diverting.
Laden with bundles, she arrived at number 42½, a sturdy green wooden gate set into a high nondescript wall on an equally nondescript street full of rundown buildings at the western edge of Greenwich Village. She unlocked the gate and found Roman Tramegra stringing lights on the dogwood tree that stood in the center of their small garden. He was bundled against the icy December night in a bizarre white ski mask, multicolored scarves, and three layers of sweaters and he greeted her gaily in his deep booming voice as she piled her packages on a stone bench.
“Ah, there you are, dear Sigrid! Had I realized you’d be home so soon, I would have waited. No matter. I shall be the president and you can be the little child that leads us.”
It had been almost a year since this late-blooming flower child, to use Nauman’s phrase, had wandered into her life and, by an odd set of circumstances, wound up sharing with her an apartment he’d acquired through arcane family connections.
Although only a few years older than she, he had adopted an avuncular manner and by now felt free to comment on her clothes, her hair, her makeup, and whether or not she was eating properly and getting enough sleep. He was so easily deflected, however, that Sigrid, by nature a solitary person, found him less of an intrusion than she’d feared. She discovered that she enjoyed coming home to a well-lit apartment full of occasionally entrancing dinner aromas-Roman was an adventurous cook; not all his adventures had a happy ending- and his magpie curiosity and verbal flights of fancy kept her amused more often than not.
He was tall and portly and there was just enough light in their tiny courtyard to make him look like a cross between a Halloween ghost and Frosty the Snowman. The eye and mouth holes of his white ski mask were outlined in black and the dark toggles of his bulky white cardigan marched down his rounded torso like buttons of coal on a tubby snowman as he positioned the last light and held out to Sigrid the plug end of the tree lights and the receptacle end of an extension cord that he’d snaked from the house.
“Everything’s ready,” he caroled. “Come along, my dear. No speeches, though I really should hum something appropriate. What did the Marine Band play the other night when they lit the White House tree?”
In his deep basso profundo, he began to hum the national anthem.
Laughing, Sigrid stepped up to the tree and, in a Monty Python imitation of ribbon-cutting royalty, plugged the two electric cords together and said, “I now declare this Christmas season officially opened.”
A blaze of colorful lights twinkled through the bare twigs of the dogwood.
“God bless us, every one!” said Roman.
Although Mr. Breul never summarily disregarded expert opinion, he had no use for pedantry. Being well-educated and well-informed, he preferred to trust his own eye to pick out the one good thing from a gallery full of old pictures and to leave the bad behind and he had no need to lean upon the advice of others in so doing. So secure was he in his own taste, that he was never disturbed when, as it occasionally happened, an attribution of his purchase was afterward discredited.
“It matters not who actually painted it. The picture still retains the lofty qualities for which I chose it,” he would say as he continued to give it high place within the collection.
Erich Breul-The Man and His Dream, privately published 1924 by The Friends and Trustees of the Erich Breul House
VIII
Friday, December 18
Sigrid moved the morning session briskly through the usual update on current cases. Matt Eberstadt brushed powdered sugar from his dark green shirt and maroon tie and reported a conviction in the drug-related homicide trial that finally went to the jury yesterday. “They were only out twenty minutes.”
The neighborhood canvass around the house that held those infant remains had turned up no one else who could remember the Jurczyks or their tenants from the thirties, but Bernie Peters had already been on the phone to the nursing home in Staten Island, where a staff doctor confirmed Mrs. Palka’s fears about her former East Village friend.
“Mrs. Barbara Jurczyk Zajdowicz has had a series of small strokes this past year,” Peters said as he tore open a packet of dry creamer and added it to his coffee. “She’s in a wheelchair now and the doctor says some days she’s cogent, most days she’s not. He suggests that we try her immediately after Saturday morning confession.”