“There’s nobody here yet,” she said. “The gallery doesn’t open until ten.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I happen to work here.”
“Why don’t you open up?”
“I have no key. In any case,” she added primly, “we don’t allow visitors before ten.”
“I’m not a tourist, at least at the moment. I came to see Mr. Western.”
“Hugh?” She looked at me directly for the first time. “Hugh’s not here. He lives around the corner on Rubio Street.”
“I just came from there.”
“Well, he isn’t here.” She gave the words a curious emphasis. “There’s nobody here but me. And I won’t be here much longer if Dr. Silliman doesn’t come.”
“Silliman?”
“Dr. Silliman is our curator.” She made it sound as if she owned the gallery. After a while she said in a softer voice: “Why are you looking for Hugh? Do you have some business with him?”
“Western’s an old friend of mine.”
“Really?”
She lost interest in the conversation. We stood together in silence for several minutes. She was tapping her foot again. I watched the Saturday-morning crowd on the street: women in slacks, women in shorts and dirndls, a few men in ten-gallon hats, a few in berets. A large minority of the people had Spanish or Indian faces. Nearly half the cars in the road carried out-of-state licenses. San Marcos was a unique blend of western border town, ocean resort, and artists’ colony.
A small man in a purple corduroy jacket detached himself from the crowd and bounded up the steps. His movements were quick as a monkey’s. His lined face had a simian look, too. A brush of frizzled gray hair added about three inches to his height.
“I’m sorry if I kept you waiting, Alice.”
She made a nada gesture. “It’s perfectly all right. This gentleman is a friend of Hugh’s.”
He turned to me. His smile went on and off. “Good morning, sir. What was the name?”
I told him. He shook my hand. His fingers were like thin steel hooks.
“Western ought to be here at any minute. Have you tried his flat?”
“Yes. His sister thought he might have spent the night in the gallery.”
“Oh, but that’s impossible. You mean he didn’t come home last night?”
“Apparently not.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” the blond girl said.
“I didn’t know you were interested.”
“Alice has every right to be interested.” Silliman’s eyes glowed with a gossip’s second-hand pleasure. “She and Hugh are going to be married. Next month, isn’t it, Alice? Do you know Miss Turner, by the way, Mr. Archer?”
“Hello, Mr. Archer.” Her voice was shallow and hostile. I gathered that Silliman had embarrassed her.
“I’m sure he’ll be along shortly,” he said reassuringly. “We still have some work to do on the program for the private showing tonight. Will you come in and wait?”
I said I would.
He took a heavy key ring out of his jacket pocket and unlocked the bronze door, relocking it behind us. Alice Turner touched a switch which lit up the high-ceilinged lobby and the Greek statues standing like frozen sentinels along the walls. There were several nymphs and Venuses in marble, but I was more interested in Alice. She had everything the Venuses had, and the added advantage of being alive. She also had Hugh Western, it seemed, and that surprised me. He was a little old for her, and a little used. She didn’t look like one of those girls who’d have to settle for an aging bachelor. But then Hugh Western had talent.
She removed a bundle of letters from the mail box and took them into the office which opened off the lobby. Silliman turned to me with a monkey grin.
“She’s quite a girl, is she not? Trust Hugh to draw a circle around the prettiest girl in town. And she comes from a very good family, an excellent family. Her father, the Admiral, is one of our trustees, you know, and Alice has inherited his interest in the arts. Of course she has a more personal interest now. Had you known of their engagement?”
“I haven’t seen Hugh for years, not since the war.”
“Then I should have held my tongue and let him tell you himself.”
As we were talking, he led me through the central gallery, which ran the length of the building like the nave of a church. To the left and right, in what would have been the aisles, the walls of smaller exhibition rooms rose halfway to the ceiling. Above them was a mezzanine reached by an open iron staircase.
He started up it, still talking: “If you haven’t seen Hugh since the war, you’ll be interested in the work he’s been doing lately.”
I was interested, though not for artistic reasons. The wall of the mezzanine was hung with twenty-odd paintings: landscapes, portraits, groups of semi-abstract figures, and more abstract still lifes. I recognized some of the scenes he had sketched in the Philippine jungle, transposed into the permanence of oil. In the central position there was a portrait of a bearded man whom I’d hardly have known without the label, “Self-Portrait.”
Hugh had changed. He had put on weight and lost his youth entirely. There were vertical lines in the forehead, gray flecks in the hair and beard. The light eyes seemed to be smiling sardonically. But when I looked at them from another angle, they were bleak and somber. It was a face a man might see in his bathroom mirror on a cold gray hangover morning.
I turned to the curator hovering at my elbow. “When did he raise the beard?”
“A couple of years ago, I believe, shortly after he joined us as resident painter.”
“Is he obsessed with beards?”
“I don’t quite know what you mean.”
“Neither do I. But I came across a funny thing in his studio this morning. A sketch of a woman, a nude, with a heavy black beard. Does that make sense to you?”
The old man smiled. “I’ve long since given up trying to make sense of Hugh. He has his own esthetic logic, I suppose. But I’d have to see this sketch before I could form an opinion. He may have simply been doodling.”
“I doubt it. It was big, and carefully done.” I brought out the question that had been nagging at the back of my mind. “Is there something the matter with him, emotionally? He hasn’t gone off the deep end?”
His answer was sharp. “Certainly not. He’s simply wrapped up in his work, and he lives by impulse. He’s never on time for appointments.” He looked at his watch. “He promised last night to meet me here this morning at nine, and it’s almost nine-thirty.”
“When did you see him last night?”
“I left the key of the gallery with him when I went home for dinner. He wanted to rehang some of these paintings. About eight or a little after he walked over to my house to return the key. We have only the one key, since we can’t afford a watchman.”
“Did he say where he was going after that?”
“He had an appointment, he didn’t say with whom. It seemed to be urgent, since he wouldn’t stop for a drink. Well.” He glanced at his watch again. “I suppose I’d better be getting down to work, Western or no Western.”
Alice was waiting for us at the foot of the stairs. Both of her hands gripped the wrought-iron bannister. Her voice was no more than a whisper, but it seemed to fill the great room with leaden echoes:
“Dr. Silliman, the Chardin’s gone.”
He stopped so suddenly I nearly ran into him. “That’s impossible.”
“I know. But it’s gone, frame and all.”
He bounded down the remaining steps and disappeared into one of the smaller rooms under the mezzanine. Alice followed him more slowly. I caught up with her:
“There’s a picture missing?”
“Father’s best picture, one of the best Chardins in the country. He loaned it to the gallery for a month.”