“Because they eat their carrots. Now tell me where your benefactor, if that’s what he is, gets his millions?”
“This is nothing,” Moses said. “Come. I’ll show you some of the paintings he doesn’t even bother to display upstairs.”
Moses led him into another room, pressed one of the sequence of buttons under the wall thermostat, and out slid a long rack: a Francis Bacon, a Graham Sutherland, a Sidney Nolan.
“He’s going to think we’re snooping down here. Let’s go, Moses.”
A cloth covered a painting leaning against the wall. “Let’s take a peek,” Moses said.
“I don’t think we ought to.”
“It’s probably the new Bonnard he bought.”
Moses lifted the cloth and revealed what appeared to be the most conventional of portraits. A lovely young bourgeois lady seated in a wicker chair. She wore a broad-brimmed straw hat with a pink bow, a multi-layered chiffon dress, also with a pink bow, and held a bouquet of sweet williams in her hands. But there was something quirky about the portrait. The young lady’s eyes were of a different colour. One eye brown, one eye blue.
“Oh my God,” Moses howled. “Oh Christ!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Let’s go.”
“I haven’t finished my drink.”
“Let’s go, I said.”
Sir Hyman was chatting with a group in the living room.
“I’ve got to speak to you,” Moses said.
“Now?” Sir Hyman asked, eyebrows raised.
“Right now.”
“Oh. Well. Yes. Certainly. The library.”
Moses waited an exasperating five minutes before Sir Hyman joined him there.
“How come, Sir Hyman Kaplansky, how come, Sir Hyman,” Moses shouted, “that sitting on the floor downstairs there is a portrait of Diana McClure née Morgan?”
“Ah.”
“Have you brought me any pages, dear boy. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward—”
“I’d all but given up on you. I was beginning to think you’d never find it,” Sir Hyman said, deflating him with a stroke.
“Does Lucy know?”
“Nor Henry. And you are not to say anything to them, now or ever. I want your word on that.”
“Dear boy.”
“Yingele.”
“Bastard.”
Two couples, carrying champagne glasses, drifted into the library. “Oh dear, are we intruding, Hymie?”
“Most certainly not. I was just telling Moses about my latest acquisition,” he said, indicating the picture hanging over the fireplace. A raven perched on a half-open sea shell, human beings struggling to emerge from it.
“This is the raven that stole the light of the world from an old man and then scattered it throughout the skies. After the great flood had receded, he flew to a beach to gorge himself on the delicacies left behind by the water. However, he wasn’t hungry for once.” Looking directly at Moses, a stricken Moses, he went on to say, “But his other appetites—lust, curiosity, and the unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures—these remained unsatisfied. The raven, his wings crossed behind his back, strolled along the beach, his sharp eyes alert for any unusual sight or sound. Taking to the air, he called petulantly to the empty sky. To his delight, he heard an answering cry, a muffled squeak.
“Scanning the beach something caught his eye. A gigantic clamshell. He landed and found that the shell was fill of little creatures, cowering in the terror of his menacing shadow. So the raven leaned his great head close to the shell, and with his smooth trickster’s tongue that had got him in and out of so many misadventures during his troubled and troublesome existence, he coaxed and cajoled the little creatures to come out and play.”
Sir Hyman paused as a waiter brought everybody more champagne.
“As you well know, Moses, the raven speaks in two voices, one harsh and dissembling, and the other, which he used now, seductive. So it wasn’t long before one after another the little shell-dwellers timidly emerged. Bizarre they were. Two-legged like the raven, but without glossy feathers or thrusting beak or strong wings. They were the original humans.”
Sir Hyman paused again for a sip from his glass and the two couples, more than somewhat bored, took advantage of the break to retreat from the library.
“I have so many questions,” Moses said.
“And my house is full of guests. We’ll talk on Wednesday.”
“Why not tomorrow?”
“Because tomorrow noon you are flying to Paris. A package to deliver. You are booked into the Crillon for three nights. A certain M. Provost will join you for breakfast on Monday or the very latest Tuesday, and you will hand over the package with my compliments.”
Provost did not appear on Monday morning. Tuesday morning Moses sat down to breakfast, opened the Times, and read that Sir Hyman Kaplansky, the noted financier, had apparently drowned in stormy seas. Sir Hyman, as was his habit, had set out early Monday morning for his pre-breakfast swim in spite of gale warnings, and did not return. His beach robe, slippers, and the book he was reading, were found abandoned in the sand. Lady Olivia told reporters that Sir Hyman, who suffered from a weak heart, had been cautioned not to swim unaccompanied or in rough seas, but he was an obstinate man. Foul play was not suspected. Fishing trawlers in the area had been alerted and lifeboats were out searching in high seas.
They needn’t bother, Moses thought, bitterly amused. Obviously the raven with the unquenchable itch was at it again, playing tricks on the world and its creatures. Once by air, he thought, and now by water.
Provost failed to appear again. A frustrated Moses retired to his room, lit a cigar, and considered the package on his bed for a long time before he tore it open.
It contained three morocco-bound volumes of the journals of Solomon Gursky and a letter addressed to Moses Berger, Esq. The letter advised him that he was the recipient of an income of thirty thousand dollars a year to be paid quarterly by Corvus Trust, Zurich.
Moses lay down on the bed, picked up a volume of the journals, and opened it at random.
“Fort McEwen, Alberta. 1908. Late one winter afternoon I found my grandfather waiting for me on his sled outside the school house. Ephraim stank of rum. His cheek was bruised and his lower lip was swollen.…”
Two
A ceiling-to-floor bookcase in the living room of Moses’s cabin in the woods was crammed with books, newspaper and magazine clippings relating to the life of the elusive, obscenely rich Sir Hyman Kaplansky, as he then styled himself.
The index of the third volume of the celebrated diaries of a British MP with impeccable Bloomsbury bona fides revealed several entries for Sir Hyman Kaplansky.
May 17, 1944
Lunch at the Travellers with Gladwyn and Chips. We were joined by Hyman Kaplansky, his cultivated dandyish manner insufficient to conceal the ghetto greaser within. He allowed that he was frightened of the V.11s. I suggested that he ought to think of his loved ones on the battlefield who were at far greater risk than he was.
Hyman: “That wouldn’t work for me at all, dear boy. I have no loved ones on the battlefield. They are all in firewatching right here. The buggers’ battalions, don’t you know?”
An earlier entry was dated September 12, 1941.
Dined at the Savoy with Ivor. When Hyman Kaplansky stopped at our table I told him how triste I felt about the martyred Jews of Poland and how after Eden had read his statement in the House we all stood up as a tribute.