The Palace Guard (12 page)

“Of course, we’d be delighted.” Sarah had an uneasy feeling that her dinner table had just gained a countess. “Countess Ouspenska is an extremely talented artist,” she remarked to the company at large, hoping that would more or less explain things.

“How wonderful to be able to create a thing of beauty and a joy forever,” said Mrs. Sorpende promptly on cue.

“Also pays off in cash sometimes,” replied the talented artist. “Eh, Chuckie?”

Palmerston jumped. “What? Er, yes, I daresay it does. Yes,” he went on with more confidence, “I’m sure Bittersohn will agree with me that it might pay off quite handsomely. Especially under certain circumstances.” He folded his arms and looked enigmatic.

The countess took no notice of the innuendo. “With me except sometimes, circumstances are stinky. I am not like your good Dolores, who claims she makes one penny do the work of two. Her pennies work not at all. They sit in the piggy bank and rest themselves.”

“Dolores Tawne is the salt of the earth,” said Brooks with dogged loyalty.

“She is not bad egg,” the countess conceded, “only no good for a touch except maybe to the crummy brother.”

“I’m afraid she finds Jimmy something of a trial sometimes,” Brooks conceded. “Still, he does his job at the palazzo.”

“Speaking of the palazzo,” Mrs. Sorpende seized her chance to get the conversation back on a decorously cultural level. “I find I am unexpectedly free tomorrow afternoon and I have promised myself the treat of a visit. Oddly enough, I have never been inside the Wilkins Museum.”

“Have you not, dear lady?” cried Palmerston. “Then you must grant me the privilege of escorting you in person.”

“My God, Chuckie, is life in the old goat yet!”

“Has it ever occurred to you, Countess Ouspenska,” Palmerston remarked stiffly, “that some people may find your witticisms a trifle offensive?”

“But of course, Chuckie.”

Miss LaValliere giggled again.

Palmerston rose. “I fear I must be getting on. Thank you for a delightful visit, Mrs. Kelling. Bittersohn, I shall expect a progress report from you in my business office Friday morning at nine-fifteen sharp. Mrs. Sorpende, I shall do myself the honor of calling for you in my car at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon if that suits your convenience?”

“Two o’clock will suit me perfectly, Mr. Palmerston.”

“Countess Ouspenska,” he concluded frostily, “perhaps you will allow me to see you safely back to your studio.”

Lydia batted her freight of mascara in surprise, then beamed. “Okay, Chuckie. Is like old times.” She blew kisses all around, then swept out on the arm of her fuming escort.

“A most refreshing personality,” Mrs. Sorpende observed.

“Who, Palmerston?” snarled Brooks.

“I was thinking of the Countess Ouspenska.”

“Oh, Mrs. Kelling, do ask her to dinner soon,” bubbled Jennifer LaValliere. “She’s a panic! I was devastated when Mr. Palmerston dragged her away. Why was he so nice to her, I wonder, after she’d called him an old goat?”

“Perhaps because he wanted to get her out of here before she called him something else,” said Mrs. Gates, who had been enjoying herself a good deal.

“Well, I’m getting out of here, too,” grunted Professor Ormsby, and went.

At last Cousin Brooks had Mrs. Sorpende to himself. “Are you going to call him Chuckie?” he demanded in a burst of jealous rage.

“I shouldn’t dream of such a thing.” Mrs. Sorpende raised one exquisite hand to toy with the satin ribbons at her bodice. “Mr. Palmerston was merely extending a gesture of formal courtesy to a member of this distinguished household. I don’t suppose he has any personal interest in me whatever. Do tell me more about the hummingbirds, Mr. Kelling.”

“Well,” said Brooks, “there’s one called the Adorable Coquette.”

One by one the others tiptoed out of the library and left them alone with the hummingbirds.

I
T WAS WELL PAST
ten o’clock and Sarah was starting to get ready for bed when she remembered something she’d meant to do about tomorrow’s breakfast. She went back to the now deserted kitchen and was attending to her chore when Bittersohn appeared in the doorway from the basement.

“I thought that must be you I heard up here,” he said rather diffidently. “I just wanted to thank you for sewing the button on my pajamas.”

Sarah flushed. “Oh, that was nothing. I was doing the room and happened to find the button and I—I wonder if we’re out of shredded of wheat.”

“I assumed it must have been Mariposa,” he went on, trying to make conversation, which was unlike him, and not showing a very good hand at it, “but when I mentioned it to her she said she can’t sew a stitch and Charlie has to do all her mending for her and I knew it couldn’t have been Charlie, because he’d already left for work when I popped the button. So I guessed it had to be you.”

“Well, it was,” Sarah replied inanely. Were they going to stand here making stupid remarks about that button all night? “I must say,” she said in an effort to get off that silly subject, “I was surprised when both Mr. Palmerston and your old friend Lydia showed up here tonight. What do you suppose brought them?”

“Hard to say. It couldn’t have been prearranged, I shouldn’t think. They didn’t seem any too happy to see one another.”

“I suppose we’ll have to assume Mr. Palmerston’s idea was to make a little time with Mrs. Sorpende and Lydia thought she’d try her hand with you.”

“Why me?”

“She thinks you’re magnificent. She keeps telling me so.”

“But you don’t go along with her.”

“Mr. Bittersohn, if you’re fishing for compliments, you’ll have to choose a time when my mind isn’t running on Professor Ormsby’s porridge. Have you ever in your life seen anybody eat the way he does?”

“Yes, My Uncle Hymie on the night after Yom Kippur. I was wondering, how’d you like to crash the party with me tomorrow?”

“What party? Do you mean invite ourselves to chaperone Mrs. Sorpende and Mr. Palmerston? How could we?”

“We have our methods. Seriously, can you get away from here for a couple of hours?”

“Yes, if I work like a beaver all morning. What should I do?”

“Meet me at the Little Building on the corner of Tremont and Boylston at half-past one. I keep a sort of apology for an office there that I use sometimes for odd jobs.” He gave her the room number. “Take the elevator and come straight on up. I’ll be inside. Don’t expect anything fancy.”

“But why not meet somewhere closer to the palazzo?”

“Because we’ll need a place to change our clothes.”

“From what to what?”

“That depends on what I can scare up at the costume shop.”

“Heavens to Betsy! You do know how to make life exciting, Mr. Bittersohn. It’s not going to be anything silly like Mickey Mouse ears, is it?”

“Madam, we high-class detectives do not wear Mickey Mouse ears on secret missions. Unless, of course, it happens to be a Mickey Mouse sort of job, and I’m not at all sure this won’t be. Do you have a pair of sandals Mrs. Sorpende wouldn’t be apt to recognize?”

“Yes, but they’re in sad shape.”

“That won’t matter. Bring them in a bag. And if Mariposa or anybody asks where you’re going, lie. Tell her you’re going to see your lawyer about the mortgage lawsuit again.”

“I’ve already milked that man for all he’s worth.”

“Cheer up, he’s probably milking you, too.” Bittersohn hesitated a moment, then said rather hastily, “See you tomorrow,” and was gone.

He breakfasted early for a change, and was out of the house before Sarah could exchange a word with him about their clandestine rendezvous. Nevertheless she was ascending to the fifth floor of the Little Building that afternoon at half-past one on the dot, sandals in hand. To her surprise, she was met at the door of what proved indeed to be a poky hole of an office by an East Indian, the sort whom she had often seen around a city where foreign students of all races and descriptions abound. His face was bronzed his short beard and mustache jet black, his hair completely hidden by a turban made from yards and yards of some gauzy pale green material. He wore a cream-colored suit and carried a plastic briefcase.

“I—I beg your pardon,” she stammered. “I was expecting—”

“You were expecting maybe Menachem Begin?”

“Mr. Bittersohn! I’d never have known you.”

“Such was the intention. Hurry and get into your sari.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Yes, you do and
tempus,
as my new employer would say,
fugit.”

“But I don’t know how they go.”

“They threw in a diagram.” He produced a costumer’s box. “See, you put on this blouse thing first, then wrap the curtain thing around you and tuck it in and drag the free end up over your shoulder.”

“What if it comes unwrapped?”

“Think positive. I suppose you’d prefer that I step out into the corridor?”

“Considering what I’m going to have to take off to get this rig on, yes.”

Bittersohn went out, though he stayed close to the door. She could see his shadow against the ground glass panel. After a minute or so he called, “How are you doing?”

“This blouse is awfully tight,” she gasped. “I think it’s supposed to button down the front and they haven’t made an opening.”

“Rise above it.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“Want some help?”

“Don’t you dare.” She’d had to shed her brassiere as well as her slip. At last she managed to cram her round little bosom into the skin-tight bodice, then battled the seemingly endless folds of the sari until she achieved something that bore a remote resemblance to the diagram. “All right now, as long as I don’t breathe. You may come in.”

Bittersohn reappeared. “Not bad, for a beginner. Where’s your lipstick?”

“On my lips, I thought.”

“I mean the rest of it. You need a caste mark.”

“I need a safety pin.”

“Cut the cracks and give me the watsis.”

She handed him her lipstick out of her purse. He tilted up her chin so he could see to make a dot on her forehead between the eyes. His hands felt almost hot and Sarah was surprised to feel them tremble a little.

“There. I made a small one so you’re only a half-caste.”

“I think I’m totally miscast.”

“Funny today, aren’t you? Why didn’t you put on the sandals?”

“Why didn’t you remind me before I got into this cocoon? Now I’m afraid to bend over.”

“Where are they? In this bag?” Bittersohn snatched them out, knelt at Sarah’s feet, and changed her shoes while she perched on a banged-up desk that was almost the room’s only furnishing. “Now the makeup and the wig.”

“Makeup? What was the sense of painting that business on my forehead if I have to put makeup over it? And how can I get my arms up to my head in this straitjacket of a blouse?”

“I knew you’d turn out to be a nagger. Hurry it up, we’ve got to get moving.” He crammed the black wig down on her head and flipped its long, thick braid over her shoulder. Then he took a long time trying to poke the little tendrils of brown up off her cheeks. Sarah at last had to finish the job herself.

“There, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. But what about our eyes? Yours are bluish gray and mine are sort of greeny-hazel. Aren’t Indian people’s always brown?”

“We’ll have to keep these on.” Bittersohn handed her a pair of cheap sunglasses and put on another pair himself. “And remember, you don’t speak a word of English. If anybody speaks to you, just smile and shake your head.”

“What if the person is another Indian?”

“You speak a different dialect. Can’t you quit grabbing at the sari as if you were afraid it might fall off any second?”

“But I fully expect it to. May I wear my coat or shall I freeze to death in the interests of artistic verisimilitude?”

“Would Mrs. Sorpende recognize the coat?”

“I don’t see how she could. It’s an old one of my mother’s that I’ve hardly ever worn and she never sees me dressed for the street anyway.”

“Then sling it over your shoulders. Here, allow me.” Bittersohn bundled Sarah and her assorted garments into the elevator, took them down, and got them a cab. Using what he fondly believed to be a British accent with weird sibilant overtones, he directed the driver to the palace of Madam Wilkins. Then he settled back to develop his role while Sarah huddled in the opposite corner wondering whether to die of embarrassment right away or wait until she was hooted into extinction at the Madam’s.

She needn’t have fretted. Nobody noticed her at all. Mrs. Sorpende had arrived immediately before them. Even the ticket taker at the door was sighing, “Cripes, I didn’t think they built ’em like that any more.”

Sarah was hurried through the turnstile, then left to string along as best she might. Perhaps Indian wives were expected to trail submissively behind their spouses. Anyway, Bittersohn’s efforts to get close to Mrs. Sorpende were unlikely to attract remark either, since every other man in the palazzo was trying to do the same. Hatless women in sensible drip-drys threw angry glances as she sailed up the Grand Staircase with her entourage.

Like Sarah, Mrs. Sorpende had left her coat in the cloakroom as the vast skylights provided an effect of solar heating inside the palazzo. She had on her one and only black daytime dress, a garment that would have been sedate enough if it hadn’t happened to fit so divinely. At throat and ears were pearls so discreet as to seem genuine. On her intricately dressed hair perched a whimsy of creamy satin and veiling that would have driven Anatole of Paris to screaming frenzy. On her hands were gloves of a dazzling whiteness. About her wafted a subtle hint of roses. She was, in a word, sensational.

C. Edwald Palmerston was beaming. He kept patting Mrs. Sorpende’s arm to call her attention to one exhibit or another, and orating about the paintings with as much gusto as though he hadn’t been informed they were copies. As they reached the Grand Salon and he started gushing about the Romney, a remark of Dolores Tawne’s flashed through Sarah’s mind: “If you can’t tell, what difference does it make?”

So that was how he planned to handle the situation. If Max Bittersohn should fail to recover the stolen paintings, and there were so many of them gone for so long a time that how could he possibly get them all?—then Palmerston would simply go on pretending no robbery had ever happened. The copies would stay where the originals should have been, gathering more layers of dust and varnish that would make it more difficult for even experts to spot the fakery. For so long as Palmerston managed to hold on to his trusteeship, he could see to it that no drastic cleaning or restoration was done. His own face would be saved and another segment of Boston’s cultural heritage would be down the drain. Sarah made an involuntary gesture of protest, and her sari came unwrapped.