The Planet on the Table (9 page)

Naturally there was an uneasy stir among those listening.

“Several of you had reason to hate Musgrave, or to fear him. The man was a blackmailer by profession, and on Earth he had obtained evidence of illegalities in the merger Heidi and George made five years ago, that gave him leverage over both of you. This and motives for the rest of you were well established during the initial investigation, and we need not recapitulate the details.

“It is also true, however, that subsequent investigations have revealed that all of you had alibis for the moment when Musgrave was struck down. Lucinda and Delaurence were together in the kitchen until Lucinda left to investigate the shout she heard; this was confirmed by caterers hired for the Solday party. Heidi left the patio shortly before Musgrave was found, but she was consulting with Hiu and the orchestra during the time in question. George Butler went into the house with Arnold Ohman, but they were together for most of the time they were inside. Eventually George left to go to the bathroom, but luckily for him the orchestra’s first clarinetist was there to confirm his presence. And fortunately for Mr. Ohman, I myself could see him from the patio, standing in the hallway until the very moment when Lucinda screamed.

“So you see”—Freya paused, eyed us one by one, ran a finger along the frame of the big painting—”the problem took on a new aspect. It became clear that, while many had a motive to kill Musgrave, no one had the opportunity. This caused me to reconsider. How, exactly, had Musgrave been killed? He was struck on the head by the frame of one of Heidi’s hall mirrors. Though several mirrors were broken in the melee following Lucinda’s screams, we know the one that Musgrave was struck with; it was at the bend in the hallway leading from the atrium to the patio. And it was only a couple of meters away from a step down in the hallway.”

Freya took a large house plan from a table and set it before the policemen. “Sandor Musgrave, you will recall, was new to Mercury. He had never seen a Solday celebration. When the Great Gates opened and the reflected light filled this villa, my suggestion is that he was overwhelmed by fright. Lucinda heard him cry for help—perhaps he thought the house was burning down. He panicked, rushed out of the study, and blindly began to run for the patio. Unable to see the step down or the mirror, he must have pitched forward, and his left temple struck the frame a fatal blow. He crawled a few steps farther, then collapsed and died.”

Heidi stepped forward. “So Musgrave died by accident?”

“This is my theory. And it explains how it was that no one had the opportunity to kill him. In fact, no one did kill him.” She turned to the police. “I trust you will follow up on this suggestion”

“Yes,” said the one taking notes. “Death declared accidental by consulting investigator. Proceed from there.” He exchanged glances with his colleagues. “We are satisfied this explains the facts of the case.”

Heidi surveyed the silent group. “To tell you the truth, I am very relieved.” She turned to Delaurence. “Let’s open the bar. It would be morbid to celebrate an accidental death, but here we can say we are celebrating the absence of a murder.”

The others gave a small cheer of relief, and we surrounded the bartender.

A few days later Freya asked me to accompany her to North Station. “I need your assistance.”

“Very well,” I said. “Are you leaving Terminator?”

“Seeing someone off.”

When we entered the station’s big waiting room, she inspected the crowd, then cried, “Arnold!” and crossed the room to him. Arnold saw her and grimaced. “Oh, Arnold,” she said, and leaned over to kiss him on each cheek. “I’m very proud of you.”

Arnold shook his head, and greeted me mournfully. “You’re a hard woman, Freya,” he told her. “Stop behaving so cheerfully, you make me sick. You know perfectly well this is exile of the worst sort.”

“But Arnold,” Freya said, “Mercury is not the whole of civilization. In fact it could be considered culturally dead, an immense museum to the past that has no real life at all.”

“Which is why you choose to live here, I’m sure,” he said bitterly.

“Well of course it does have some pleasures. But the really vital centers of any civilization are on the frontier, Arnold, and that’s where you’re going.”

Arnold looked completely disgusted.

“But Arnold,” I said. “Where are you going?”

“Pluto,” he said curtly.

“
Pluto?
” I exclaimed. “But whatever for? What will you do there?”

He shrugged. “Dig ditches, I suppose.”

Freya laughed. “You certainly will not.’ She addressed me: “Arnold has decided, very boldly I might add, to abandon his safe career as a dealer here on Mercury, to become a real artist on the frontier.”

“But
why?
”

Freya wagged a finger at Arnold. “You must write us often.”

Arnold made a strangled growl. “Damn you, Freya. I refuse. I refuse to go.”

“You don’t have that option,” Freya said. “Remember the chalk, Arnold. The chalk was your signature.”

Arnold hung his head, defeated. The city interfaced with the spaceport station. “It isn’t fair,” Arnold said. “What am I going to do out on those barbaric outworlds?”

“You’re going to live,” Freya said sternly. “You’re going to live and you’re going to paint. No more hiding. Understand?”

I, at any rate, was beginning to.

“You should be thanking me profusely,” Freya went on, “but I’ll concede you’re upset and wait for gratitude by mail.” She put a hand on Arnold’s shoulder and pushed him affectionately toward the crossing line. “Remember to write.”

“But,” Arnold said, a panicked expression on his face. “But—”

“Enough!” Freya said. “Be gone! Or else.”

Arnold sagged, and stepped across the divide between the stations. Soon the city left the spaceport station behind.

“Well,” Freya said. “That’s done.”

I stared at her, “You just helped a murderer to escape!”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Exile is a very severe punishment; in fact in my cultural tradition it was the usual punishment for murder committed in anger or self-defense.”

I waved a hand dismissively. “This isn’t the Iceland of Eric the Red. And it wasn’t seif-defense-—Sandor Musgrave was outright murdered.”

“Well,” she said, “
I
never liked him.”

I told you before: she has no sense of right and wrong. It is a serious defect in a detective. I could only wave my arms in incoherent outrage; and my protests have never carried much weight with Freya, who claims not even to believe them.

We left the station. “What’s that you were saying to Arnold about chalk?” I said, curiosity getting the better of me.

“That’s the clue you provided, Nathaniel—somewhat transformed. As you reminded me, Musgrave was pointing at the patio, and Heidi’s patio is made of a block of the Dover cliffs. Dover cliffs, as you know, are composed of chalk. So I returned to the painting, and cut through the back to retrieve samples of the chalk used in the underdrawing, which had been revealed to me by infrared photography.” She turned a corner and led me uptown. “Chalk, you see, has its own history of change. In Monet’s time, chalk was made from natural sources, not from synthetics. Sure enough, the chalk I took from the canvas was a natural chalk. But natural chalk, being composed of marine ooze, is littered with the fossil remains of unicellular algae called cocoliths. These cocoliths are different depending upon the source of the chalk. Monet used Rouen chalk, appropriately enough, which was filled with the cocoliths
Maslovella barnesae
and
Cricolithus pemmatoidens
. The cocoliths in our painting, however, are
Neococcolithes dubius
. Very dubious indeed—for this is a North American chalk, first mined in Utah in 1924.”

“So Monet couldn’t have used this chalk! And there you had your proof that the painting is a fake.”

“Exactly.”

I said doubtfully, “It seems a subtle clue for the dying Musgrave to conceive of.”

“Perhaps,” Freya said cheerfully. “Perhaps he was only pointing in the direction of the patio by the accident of his final movements. But it was sufficient that the coincidence gave me the idea. The solution of a crime often depends upon imaginary clues.”

“But how did you know Arnold was the forger?” I asked. And why, after taking the trouble to concoct all those paints, did he use the wrong chalk?”

“The two matters are related. It could be that Arnold only knew he needed a natural chalk, and used the first convenient supply without knowing there are differences between them. In that case it was a mistake—his only mistake. But it seems unlike Arnold to me, and I think rather that it was the forger’s signature. In effect, the forger said, if you take a slide of the chalk trapped underneath the paint, and magnify it five thousand times with an electron microscope, you’ll find me. This chalk never used by Monet is my sign. —For on some level every forger hopes to be discovered, if only in the distant future—to receive credit for the work.

“So I knew we had a forger on Mercury, and I was already suspicious of Arnold, since he was the dealer who brought the painting to Mercury, and since he was the only guest at Heidi’s party with the opportunity to kill Musgrave; he was missing during the crucial moments—”

“You
are
a liar.”

“And it seems Arnold was getting desperate; I searched among his recent bills, and found one for three suction plates. So when we found him on the track I was quite sure.”

“He stuck himself to the track?”

“Yes. The one on his right wrist was electronically controlled, so after setting the other two he tripped the third between his teeth. He hoped that we would discover him there after missing him at the museum, and think that there was someone else who wished him harm. And if not, the cowcatchers would pull him free. It was a silly plan, but he was desperate after I set up that appointment with him. When I confronted him with all this, after we rescued him from the tracks, he broke down and confessed. Sandor Musgrave had discovered that the Monet was a fake while blackmailing the Evans family in England, and after forcing Heidi to give him a job, he worked on the painting in secret until he found proof. Then he blackmailed Arnold into bankruptcy, and when on Solday he pressed Arnold for more money, Arnold lost his composure and took advantage of the confusion caused by the opening of the Great Gates to smack Musgrave on the head with one of Heidi’s mirrors.”

I wagged a finger under her nose. “And you set him free. You’ve gone too far this time, Freya Grindavik.”

She shook her head, “If you consider Arnold’s case a bit longer, you might change your mind. Arnold Ohman has been the most important art dealer on Mercury for over sixty years. He sold the Vermeer collection to George Butler, and the Goyas to Terminator West Gallery, and the Pissarros to the museum in Homer Crater, and those Chinese landscapes you love so much to the city park, and the Kandinskys to the Lion of the Greys. Most of the finest paintings on Mercury were brought here by Arnold Ohman.”

“So?”

“So how many of those, do you think, were painted by Arnold himself?”

I stopped dead in the street, stunned at the very idea. “But—but that only makes it worse! Inestimably worse! It means there are fakes all over the planet!”

“Probably so. And no one wants to hear that. But it also means Arnold Ohman is a very great artist. And in our age that is no easy feat. Can you imagine the withering reception his work would have received if he had done original work? He would have ended up like Harvey Washburn and all the rest of them who wander around the galleries like dogs. The great art of the past crashes down on our artists like meteors, so that their minds resemble the blasted landscape we roll over. Now Arnold has escaped that fate, and his work is universally admired, even loved. That Monet, for instance—it isn’t just that it passes for one of the cathedral series—it could be argued that it is the
best
of them. Now is this a level of greatness that Arnold could have achieved—would have been
allowed
to achieve—if he had done original work on this museum planet? Impossible. He was forced to forge old masters to be able to fully express his genius.”

“All this is no excuse, for forgery or murder.”

But Freya wasn’t listening. “Now that I’ve exiled him, he may go on forging old paintings, but he may begin painting something new. That possibility surely justifies ameliorating his punishment for killing such a parasite as Musgrave. And there is Mercury’s reputation as art museum of the system to consider…”

I refused to honor her opinions with a reply, and looking around I saw that during our conversation she had led me far up the terraces. “Where are we going?”

“To Heidi’s,” she said. And she had the grace to look a little shamefaced—for a moment, anyway. “I need your help moving something.”

“Oh, no.”

“Well,” Freya explained, “when I told Heidi some of the facts of the case, she insisted on giving me a token of her gratitude, and she overrode all my refusals, so… I was forced to accept.” She rang the wall bell.

“You’re joking,” I said.

“Not at all. Actually, I think Heidi preferred not to own a painting she knew to be a fake, you see. So I did her a favor by taking it off her hands.”

When Delaurence let us in, we found he had almost finished securing
Rouen Cathedral—Sun Effect
in a big plastic box. “We’ll finish this,” Freya told him.

While we completed the boxing I told Freya what I thought of her conduct. “You’ve taken liberties with the law—you lied right and left—”

“Well boxed,” she said. “Let’s go before Heidi changes her mind.” .

“And I suppose you’re proud of yourself.”

“Of course. A lot of lab work went into this.”

We maneuvered the big box through the gate and into the street, and carried it upright between us, like a short flat coffin. We reached Freya’s villa, and immediately she set to work unboxing the painting. When she had freed it she set it on top of a couch, resting against the wall.

Shaking with righteous indignation, I cried, “That
thing
isn’t a product of the past! It isn’t
authentic
. It is only a
fake
. Claude Monet
didn’t paint it
.”