Free Corpus Christmas by Margaret Maron Page A

had
     been mailed from Southampton, England; the last from Lyons in
Octobre
1912. And
si! si! SI!
—near the bottom was an envelope postmarked
XXXI Août 1912.
    His hand was shaking so that he could hardly read the faded city.
    Lyons?
    If he remembered rightly from his one course in Post-Impressionism, Sorgues lay south from Lyons in the Rhône River valley.
    In 1912, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the co-founders of cubism, had spent the summer in Sorgues, where, in a burst of
     creativity, the two friends had invented the first collages.
    For a moment, as he experienced a pure rush of excitement, Shambley’s ugly face was almost attractive. Here was every scholar’s
     dream: the discovery of primary documents, a chance to become a permanent footnote in history. He wanted to sit down and read
     them immediately; but innate, self-serving caution made him put the letters back in the glove case and slide it and the catalogs
     into his briefcase until he could be certain of no interruptions.
    Leaving the storage room as he’d found it, he switched off the light and retraced his steps. Beyond the stairs, he noticed
     a door that was slightly ajar, and when he pushed it open, he realized he’d found the janitor’s bedroom. No janitor, though.
    In his state of excitement, the room’s ornate sensuousness neither surprised nor interested him. All he cared about was scribbling
     the dummy a note—assuming the dummy could read—that he’d left the house for the evening.
    He propped the note on the mantelpiece and, from force of habit, read the signature of the saccharine oil painting there.
     Idly, his eyes drifted over the posters with which the janitor had lined his walls and at the doorway, he paused, amused by
     the coincidence of seeing a reproduction of an early Braque collage when his head was so full of the possibility that Erich
     Breul had actually met Braque.
    He hesitated, eyes on the poster. Braque or Picasso?
    In later years even Picasso had trouble identifying which works were his and which were Braque’s, so why should he be any
     more knowledgeable? The wood-grained paper overlapping a sketchy violin said Braque, but something about the lines of the
     head—a monkey’s head?—said Picasso.
    Curious, Shambley leaned closer, searching for a signature. There was none. Suddenly, a frisson of absolute incredulity shot
     through his very soul. This wasn’t some poster issued by the Museum of Modern Art. That scrap of yellowed newsprint at the
     edge of the picture was real! He ran his hand ever so lightly across the surface of the picture and felt the irregularities
     where one piece of paper had been layered over another.
    Very gently, he removed the bottom two thumbtacks by which the paper was held to the wall and lifted it up. With a minimum
     of contortion, he could read the words scrawled in charcoal on the back by two clearly different hands: “
A notre petit singe américain—Picasso et G. Braque.
”
    Hardly daring to breathe, he carefully replaced the thumbtacks precisely as before and moved to the two pictures nearby. Even
     in this soft light, he could now see that they, too, were no mere reproductions but oil paintings unmistakably by Fernand
     Léger, another master of cubism. Indeed, the canvases still held faint crease marks from where they had been rolled and squashed.
    The trunk, Shambley thought. The collage was small enough to lie flat on the bottom, but the pictures must have crossed the
     Atlantic rolled up in that trunk and there they’d stayed for the next seventy-five years because Kimmelshue had his ass stuck
     firmly in the nineteenth century and Peake was too damn lazy to get off his. A goddamned fortune thumbtacked to a janitor’s
     bedroom wall.
    “And little ol’
píccolo mio
’s the only one who knows,” he gloated, wanting to kick up his heels and gambol around the room.
    The distant sound of a closing door and young male voices raised in laughter alerted him. He