Ellery Queen’s Anthology. Volume 38, Fall/Winter 1979

Victor Canning A Stroke of Genius

Lancelot Pike planned a little caper down to the smallest detail. It was really a simple affair, and should have worked. But the strangest thing happened... a tale of the Minerva Club...

The Minerva Club, in a discreet turning off Brook Street, is one of the most exclusive clubs in London. Members must have served at least two years in one of Her Majesty’s Prisons and be able to pay £50 a year dues. In the quiet of its Smoking Room, under the mild eye of Milky Waye, the club secretary, some of the most ambitious schemes for money-making, allied of course with evasion of the law, have been worked out. But, although notoriety is a common quality among members, fame — real honest solid fame — has come to few of them.

Lancelot Pike is one of these few but, although he is still a member, he is not often seen in the august halls of the Minerva. However, over the fireplace in the Smoking Room, hangs one of his greatest works — never seen by the general public — a full assembly, in oils, of the Management Committee of the club; it shows thirty figures of men whose photographs and fingerprints are cherished lovingly by Scotland Yard.

Lancelot’s road to fame was a devious one and the first step was taken on the day that Horace Head, leaning against a lamppost in the Old Kent Road and reading the racing edition, saw Miss Nancy Reeves. Without thinking, Horace began to follow her, some dim but undeniable impulse of the heart leading him. And, naturally, Lancelot Pike, who was leaning against the other side of the lamp-post, followed Horace, because he was Horace’s manager and was not letting Horace out of his sight.

Horace Head at this time was at the peak of his brief career as a professional middleweight fighter. He was younger then, of course, but still a wooden-headed, slow-thinking fellow with an engaging smile bracketed by cauliflower ears. He was wearing a gray suit with a thick red line in it, a blue shirt, a yellow bow tie, and brown shoes that squeaked.

He squeaked away after Miss Nancy Reeves and there wasn’t any real reason why he should not have done so. She was a trim slim blonde with blue eyes and a pink and white complexion that made Horace think — and this will show how stirred up he was — of blue skies seen through a lacing of cherry blossoms. It had been a good many years since Horace had seen real cherry blossoms too.

Lancelot Pike followed him. Lancelot was a tall, slim, handsome, versatile number, with a ready tongue, a fast mind, and a determination to have an overstuffed bank account before he was thirty no matter what he had to do to get it. At the moment, Horace — at one fight a month — was his stake money.

If Miss Nancy Reeves knew that she was being followed, she showed no signs of it. She eventually went up the steps of the neighborhood Art School and disappeared through its doors.

Horace continued to follow. He was stopped inside by an attendant who said, “You a student?”

Horace said, “Do I have to be?”

“To come in here, yes,” said the attendant.

“Who,” said Horace, “is the poppet in the green coat with blonde hair?” He nodded to where Miss Nancy Reeves was almost out of sight up a wide flight of stairs.

“That,” said the attendant, “is Miss Nancy Reeves.”

“She a student?” asked Horace.

“No,” said the attendant. “She’s one of the art teachers. Life class.”

“Then make me a student in the life class,” said Horace, the romantic impulse in him growing.

At this moment Lancelot Pike intervened. “What the devil are you after, Horace? You couldn’t paint a white stripe down the middle of the road. Besides, do you know what a life class is?”

“No,” said Horace.

“Naked women. Maybe, men, too. You’ve got to paint them.”

“To be near her,” said Horace, “I’ll paint anybody, the Queen of Sheba or the Prime Minister, black all over. I got to do it, Lance. I got this sort of pain right under my heart suddenly.”

“You need bicarbonate of soda,” said the attendant.

Horace looked at him, reached out, and lifted him clear of the ground by the collar of his jacket and said, “Make me a student.”

Well, it had to be. There was no stopping Horace. Lancelot helped to fill out the form and, in a way, he was glad because he knew that the classes would keep Horace away from the pubs between training. Horace was the kind who developed an enormous thirst as soon as training was finished.

So Horace became a student in the life class. It was a bit of a shock to him at first. He came from a decent family of safe crackers, holdup men, and pickpockets. He didn’t approve of naked women posing on a stand while a lot of people sat round painting them.

To do him credit, Horace seldom looked at the models. He sat behind his easel and looked most of the time at Nancy Reeves. Naturally he did very little painting — but he saw a lot of Nancy Reeves.

She was a nice girl. She soon realized that Horace was almost pure bone from the shoulders up; but she was a great believer in the releasing power of art, and she was convinced that Horace would never have joined the class if there had not been some deep-buried longing in him for expression.

Now Horace, of course, had not the faintest talent for drawing or painting; but, realizing that he could not sit in the class and do nothing, he would just smack an occasional daub of paint on his canvas in a way that loosely conformed to the naked shape of the model before him. Nancy Reeves soon decided that Horace was — if he was going to be anything — an abstract painter. She would come and stand behind him at times and her talk went straight over his head — but Horace enjoyed every moment of it.

After two weeks of this, Horace finally got to the point of asking her if she would go to a dance with him. Surprisingly, she agreed, and she enjoyed it because, whatever else he was not, Horace was quick on his feet at that time and a good dancer.

Now, a week after the dance, Horace and Lancelot had fixed up a little private business which Lancelot had carefully planned for some time. This was to grab the payroll bag of a local building firm when the messenger came out of the bank on a Friday morning.

Lancelot Pike had the whole thing worked out to the dot. Horace would sit in the car outside the bank, and Lancelot would grab the moneybag as the man came to the bottom of the steps and they would be away before anyone could make a move to stop them. It was a bit crude, but it had the merit of simple directness and nine times out of ten — if you read your papers — it works.

It worked this time — except for one thing. The man came down the steps carrying the bag, Lancelot grabbed it and jumped into the car, and Horace started away; but at that moment the messenger shoved his hand through the rear window and fired at Lancelot Pike.

But the gun wasn’t an ordinary one. It was a dye gun full of a vivid purple stain. The charge got Lancelot full on the right side of the face, ran down his neck, and ruined a good suit and a silk shirt.

Well, there it was. They got back to the Head house, where Lancelot had a room, without any trouble from the police. Lancelot nipped inside with the moneybag and Horace drove off to ditch the car.

When Horace returned he found Lancelot hanging over the wash basin trying to get the dye off. But it wouldn’t budge. It was a good rich purple dye that meant to stay until time slowly erased it.

“You won’t be able to go out for a while,” said Horace. “Months, maybe. The police will be looking for a purple-faced man.”

“Lovely,” said Lancelot savagely. “So I’m a hermit. Stuck here for weeks. You know what that’s going to do to a gregarious person like me?”

Horace shook his head. He didn’t know what a gregarious person was.

“We got the money,” he said.

“And can’t spend it. Can’t put it to work to make more. Cooped up like a prisoner in the Tower. Me, Lancelot Pike, who lives for color, movement, people, the big pageant of life, and golden opportunities waiting to be seized.”

“I could go to the chemist and ask him if he’s got anything to take it off,” suggested Horace.

“And have him go to the police once he’s read the story in the evening newspaper!”

“I see what you mean,” said Horace.

So Lancelot — very bad-tempered — was confined to his room. For the first few days he kept Horace busy running to and from the public library getting books for him. Lancelot was a talented, not far from cultured type — things came easily to him and idleness was like a poison in his blood that has to be worked out of his system. But it was people and movement that he missed. Every evening Horace had to recount to him all that he had done during the day and, particularly, how he was getting on with Miss Nancy Reeves at the Art School.

Curiously enough, Horace was getting on very well with her. There was something simple, earthy, and engagingly wooden about Horace which had begun to appeal to Nancy Reeves. It happens that way — like calling to unlike... think of the number of men, ugly as all get-out, with beautiful wives, or of dumb women trailing around with top intellects.

Anyway, Lancelot began to take a great interest in Horace’s romance, and he knew that the time would come when Horace would ask the girl to marry him, and he was offering ten to four that she would not accept.

Horace wouldn’t take the bet, but he was annoyed that Lancelot should think he had such a poor chance.

“What’s wrong with me?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Lancelot, “except that you really aren’t her type. To her you’re just a big ape she’s trying to educate.”

“You calling me a big ape?”

“Figuratively, not literally.”

“What does that mean?”

“That you don’t have to knock my head off for an imagined insult.”

“I see.”

“I wonder,” said Lancelot. “However, forget it. You ask her and see what answer you’ll get.”

Meanwhile Lancelot helped Horace with his homework from the Art School.

Each week each student did a home study composition on any subject he liked to choose. Lancelot got hold of canvas and paints and went to work for Horace. And then the painting bug hit him — and hit him hard.

He gave up reading books and papers, gave up listening to the radio and watching television, and just painted. It became a mania with him in his enforced seclusion — and it turned out that he was good. He had a kind of rugged, primitive quality, with just a lick of sophistication here and there which really made you stop and look.

Naturally, Nancy Reeves noticed the great improvement in Horace’s work and her spirit expanded with delight at the thought that she was drawing from the mahogany depths of Horace’s mind a flowering of his true personality and soul. There’s nothing a woman likes more than to make a man over. They’re great ones for improving on the original model.

Well, one week when Lancelot’s face had faded to a pale lilac, Horace came back from the Art School saying that the home study that week had to be “The Head of a Friend,” and Lancelot said, “Leave it to me, Horace. Self-portrait by Rubens. Self-portrait by Van Gogh—”

“It’s got to be a friend,” said Horace. “I don’t know no Rubens—”

“Quiet,” said Lancelot, and he began to ferret for a canvas in the pile Horace had bought for him. As he set it up and fixed a mirror so that he could see himself in it, he went on, “How’s tricks with the delicious Nancy?”

“Today,” said Horace, “I asked her to marry me. A couple more good fights and with my share of the wages snatch, I can fix up the furniture and a flat.”

“And what did she say?”

“She got to think it over. Something about it being a big decision, a reckonable step.”

“Irrevocable step.”

“That’s it. That’s what she said.”

“Means she don’t believe in divorce. If she says Yes, which she won’t, you’ll have her for life. When do you get your answer?”

“End of the week.”

“Twenty to one she says No.”

“You’ve lengthened the odds,” said Horace, wounded.

“Why not? Deep knowledge of women. When they want time, there’s doubt. Where there’s doubt with a woman, there’s no desire.”

“Why should she have doubts? What’s wrong with me?”

“You’re always asking that,” said Lancelot. “Some day somebody is going to be fool enough to tell you. Horace, face it — you’re no Romeo like me. I’ve got the face for it.”

“I love her,” said Horace. “That’s enough for any woman.”

Lancelot rolled his eyes. “That anyone could be so simple! A man who has only love to offer is in the ring with a glass jaw. Now then, let’s see.” He studied himself in the mirror. “I think I’ll paint it full face, kind of serious but with a little twinkle, man of the world, knowing, but full of heart.”

Well, by the end of the week the self-portrait was finished and Horace took it along to the school. He set it up on the easel and pretended to be putting a few finishing touches to it. When Nancy Reeves saw it she was enraptured.

“It ain’t,” said Horace, who had learned enough by now to play along with art talk to some extent, “quite finished. It needs a something — a point of... well, of something.”

“Yes, perhaps it does, Horace. But you’ll get it.”

She put a hand gently on his shoulder. They were in a secluded part of the room. “By the way, I’ve come to a decision about your proposal. It’s better for me to tell you here in public because it will keep it on a calm, sane, level basis — a perfect understanding between two adult people who considered carefully, very carefully, before making an important decision. I feel that by producing in you this wonderful flowering of talent that I’ve completed my role, that I have no more to give. Marriage after this would be an anticlimax, since my attachment to you is really an intellectual and artistic one, rather than any warm, passionate, romantic craving. I know that you will understand perfectly, dear Horace.”

“You mean, no go?” asked Horace.

Nancy nodded gently. “I’m sorry. But for a woman, love must be an immediate thing. There must be something about a man’s face that is instantly compelling. Now take this painting of yours — there’s a man’s face that is full of the promise of romance, of tenderness and yet manly strength. I’d like to meet your friend.”

For a moment Horace sat there, the great fire of his love just a handful of wet ashes. That Nancy Reeves could go for Lancelot just by seeing his portrait filled Horace with bitterness — a bitterness made even blacker by the fact that Horace had taken Lancelot’s bet at twenty to one, and now stood to lose £100.

“You mean,” said Horace, “that you could go for him?”

“He’s certainly got a magic. You’ve caught his compulsive personality and—”

“You should really see him,” said Horace jealously. “One-half of his face is as purple as a baboon’s... well, like this—”

In a fit of pique, Horace picked up his brush, squirted some purple paint onto his palette, and slapped the purple thickly over the right side of Lancelot’s face.

From behind him Nancy Reeves’s voice said breathlessly, “But Horace — that’s just the defiant abstract touch it needed! The unconventional, the startling, the emphatic denial of realism... Horace, it’s staggering! Pure genius. Don’t do a thing more to it — not another stroke!”

Horace stood up, looked at her, and said, “There’s a lot more I could do to it. But if you like it so much — keep him. Call it ‘A Painter’s Goodbye.’ ” He walked out and he never went back to Art School again.

A week later, while Horace was sitting dejectedly in Lancelot’s room watching him work at a painting, the local Detective-Inspector and a Constable walked in unexpectedly.

The Inspector nodded affably and said, “Hello, Horace. Evening, Lance. Forging old masters, eh?” He was in a good mood.

Horace gave him a cold stare, and Lancelot kept his hand up to his face to cover his pale lilac cheek.

The Inspector went on, “Funny — I never connected you two with that wages snatch. Bit out of your line. Thought it was strictly an uptown job.”

He leaned forward and looked at the painting on which Lancelot was working. “Nice. Nice brushwork. Fine handling of color. Bit of a dabbler myself. Bitten by the bug, you know. Great relaxation. Go to all the exhibitions. They had one at the Art School yesterday. Picked up this little masterpiece by Horace Head.”

The Constable stepped forward and brought from behind him Lancelot’s self-portrait with Horace’s purple-cheeked addition.

“Fine bit of work,” said the Inspector. “Sort of neo-impressionistic with traces of nonobjective emotionalism, calculated to shock the indifferent into attention. It did just that to me — so you can take your hand away from your cheek, Lance, and both of you come along with me.”

And along they went — for a three year stretch.

But it didn’t stop Lancelot painting. He did it in prison and he did it when he came out. Gets 500 guineas a canvas now, and his name is known all over the country.

But he’s not often in the Minerva Club. His wife — who was a Miss Nancy Reeves — doesn’t approve of the types there and rules the poor fellow with a rod of iron.