Art of Murder

  Tostpone the exhibition, Mr Stein, or there'll be another work destroyed,' Miss Wood insisted, without raising her voice.

  But all Stein did was study her in silence for a long moment. Then he smiled and shook his head, as if he had seen something unbelievable in her face.

  Tind the man responsible’ he said, 'whoever he may be. Find the Artist, seize him, bring him back between your jaws, and everything will be all right. Or let Rip van Winkle do it for you. But don't try to put limits on art, fuschus. You're not an artist, April, you're just a hunting dog. Don't forget it.'

  'Rip van Winkle won't be able to do a thing, Mr Stein’ Miss Wood said. 'There's something you don't know.'

  She paused and looked round. Stein understood exactly what her attitude meant.

  'You can say what you like in front of Neve. She's like my eyes and ears.'

  ‘I’d prefer there not to be so many eyes and ears present, even if they are yours, Mr Stein.'

  The limousine had pulled up at the airport entrance. Another car was waiting at the roadside to take Miss Wood back into the city. Stein waved his hand, and his secretary left the vehicle and shut the door. Wood looked up towards the chauffeur: the glass partition meant he could hear nothing.

  'This is something no one else knows - neither the authorities in Munich, nor the members of the crisis cabinet, not even Lothar Bosch. But I want you to hear it. Perhaps it'll make you change your mind.' She fixed her cold blue gaze on Stein. 'Yesterday, as soon as we heard about Monsters being destroyed, I called Marthe Schimmel to see if she could tell me anything. She said the Walden twins had asked her to provide a young man for Tuesday night. You know that in Conservation they like to keep them happy. They were demanding a platinum blond. Schimmel was desperately trying to find a suitable candidate when she received a call cancelling their request. It was a voice she did not know, but he repeated the private number of Conservation in Amsterdam, and said he was one of Benoit's assistants. He told Marthe that the boy was no longer needed. Marthe thought of telling Benoit about this, but I told her not to. I called Benoit's assistants in Amsterdam one by one, and then his secretary. Finally I called Benoit himself. Neither Benoit nor any of his assistants ever gave that order, Mr Stein.'

  Wood was staring Stein directly in the eye, without blinking. Stein stared back at her equally unmoved. There was a silence, then she went on:

  'It cannot have been the criminal who made that call, because at that moment he was disguised as the Gigli work. That leaves only one possibility. Someone prepared things for him from inside so that there would be no problems destroying the work of art. It must have been someone high up, at least sufficiently senior to have access to Conservation's private codes. That's why I'm begging you to postpone the "Rembrandt" inauguration. If you don't, the Artist is bound to destroy another work.

  A plane had just taken off, and was soaring through the blue sky like a mother-of-pearl eagle. Stein studied it, then turned to look at Miss Wood once more. A gleam of anxiety, almost fear, veiled the chilly depths of the Head of Security's eyes.

  'However incredible it may seem, Mr Stein, one of us is helping that madman.'

  6

  When Clara awoke on that 28 June, Gerardo and Uhl had already arrived. She thought she could tell from their faces that this was going to be a very special session. They left their bags on the floor and Gerardo said:

  'We're not going to try out colours on you today. We want to draw polygons.'

  Polygons was the name for the posture exercises designed to test the canvas' physical capabilities. Clara ate a frugal breakfast and took the pills recommended by F&W to improve her muscle tone and reduce her bodily needs as much as possible. Gerardo warned her she had a difficult day ahead of her.

  'Let's get on with it then,' she said.

  They had brought a leather backless chair. Uhl carried it in from the van and put it in the living room. They moved the carpet and the sofa out of the way and began the exercises. They bent her over backwards, coccyx on the seat; they lifted one leg and then the other, stretched them both out, then bent them double. They chose a posture they liked and set the timer.

  Staying immobile is above all a matter of not paying attention to anything. We always receive warnings, signals of increasing discomfort. The brain tightens the thongs on its own rack. Discomfort becomes pain, pain becomes an obsession. The way to resist (as is taught in art academies) is based on classifying all that copious information and keeping it at bay, without rejecting it, but without considering it as something that is happening. What, in fact, is happening is that the back is bent or the calf muscles are contracting. Beyond these events, there are only sensations: discomfort, cramps, a tangled rush of stimuli and thoughts, a flood of shards of broken glass. Given proper training, the canvas learns to control this enormous flow, to keep it at a distance, to watch it grow without having to change the pose.

  Immersed in the effort of contortion, her head on the floor next to her hands, staring at the wall with her legs stretched upwards and her buttocks on the chair, Clara felt as though she were a nutshell about to crack and give way to something else. She knew of nothing better than an uncomfortable position like this to force her out of her own humanity. Her mind was stripped of memories, fears, complicated thoughts, and concentrated entirely on the masonry of her muscles. It was wonderful to cease to be Clara and become an object with scarcely any sense of pain.

  It was so slight that at first she hardly noticed it.

  As he was changing the position of her legs in the air, Uhl stroked her buttocks unnecessarily. He did it gently, avoiding any brusque or obvious fondling. He simply slid his hand down her tensed left thigh and cupped her rounded gluteus muscles. But hardly had he squeezed them than he took his hand away. Another confused length of time later, and Clara felt rough fingers on her right thigh. She blinked, raised her head and saw Uhl's hand descending towards her groin. Uhl was not looking at her as he touched her. She did not move, and once again Uhl moved his hand away almost immediately.

  The incursion was more obvious the third time, when, after moving both her legs to a different position, Uhl felt clumsily for her sex. Startled, Clara doubled up and curled into a ball.

  'Pose,' Uhl ordered, in an annoyed tone of voice.

  Clara merely stared at him.

  'Pose.'

  From where she lay curled up, Uhl looked a threatening figure. But Clara was not really afraid. Something about the painter's attitude turned what had happened into something perfectly staged, gave it all the proper artistic touch. She decided to obey. Despite her protesting tendons (there is nothing harder than losing a difficult position and having to get back into it without any warming up), she got back on to the chair, lifted her legs in the air, and lay immobile with her head and arms on the floor. She thought Uhl was going to return to the attack, but all he did was stare at her for a while and then move away.

  Clara knew that Uhl could be pretending to molest her for hyperdramatic reasons. The brushstrokes were so well done though, that despite all her experience as a canvas she found it impossible to tell where the real Uhl ended and the artist began. Besides, his pretence might equally well mean the molesting was real on the sidelines. Uhl could have received instructions from the main painter, but Clara had no idea how far he might be abusing his privileged situation. It was almost impossible to establish limits, because between a painter's gesture and a caress there are endless, unfathomable gradations.

  The timer went off. The two assistants came back into the room and changed the sketch. They made her stand up, and took the leather chair away. Then they laid her out face down and tried different positions once more: head raised, right arm stretched out, left one pointing backwards, left leg in the air. The pose reminded her of someone swimming. They pulled on her extremities until her joints protested. It was obvious they wanted to sketch her stretched. A simple contraction was not enough: they wanted to emphasise the movements. When they were satisfied wit
h the firm outline of her extended limbs, they set the timer again and left her on the floor.

  It happened at some moment while she was in this new pose. She could hear his footsteps crossing the room and saw him kneeling beside her. Her position meant that her left breast and her sex were exposed: Uhl's hands took possession of both of them.

  The gesture was so brutal Clara could not stop herself abandoning the pose and protecting her body. At that point something happened that took her breath away.

  Uhl grasped her arms violently and spread them apart with unexpected, unnecessary force. She cried out in pain. It was the first time he had been violent towards her. In fact, it was the first time anyone had used violence against her since she had been primed. She was so surprised she could neither speak nor defend herself. The painter bent even closer, and buried his mouth in her neck, still pinioning her arms. She could feel his saliva, his tongue like a freshly caught octopus flung at her throat, his panting breath at her jugular.

  'Are you crazy?' she groaned. 'Let go of me!'

  Uhl did not seem to hear her. The frame of his glasses twisted under Clara's chin as his mouth slid down towards her breasts. She stopped struggling for a moment.

  All at once, just as she had given up fighting him, Uhl came to a halt, sighed deeply, straightened up and released her wrists. He was breathing even more heavily than she was, and his face was all red. He pushed his glasses back on properly, and smoothed the hair at the nape of his neck. It was as if a sudden sense of shame had prevented him going any further. Clara was still on the floor, rubbing her wrists. For a few seconds they just looked at each other, getting their breath back. Then Uhl got up and left.

  Clara thought she now had some idea what was going on: it had been her sudden passivity that had inhibited Uhl, as it had done on the previous occasions.

  In itself, this did not change anything. It could have been a human rather than an artistic reaction: perhaps Uhl had not dared take things any further, or perhaps he was one of those men who only gets pleasure when they meet resistance. Yet Clara wanted to believe that the brushstroke meant he had to stop as soon as she no longer resisted. She filed the information away for use at a later date.

  The new assault did not catch her unawares. They had sketched her as a table: face up, hands and feet on the floor, head thrown back and legs wide apart. At a certain moment, Uhl came towards her. She looked him in the eye and realised that it was all going to start again. This time she decided to resist. She abandoned her pose and stood up. 'Leave me alone, will you?'

  Without warning, those long arms of his, as hairy as strands of hemp rope or brush bristles, grabbed her and forced her back towards the floor. Uhl's mouth opened and sought out hers. Disgusted, she turned her face aside and pushed against his chest with her elbows. Uhl resisted without much effort. Clara tried again, but met only a brick wall. It was true she had been weakened by all the exercises she had been put through, but still it was obvious that Uhl was amazingly strong. The painter clamped her cheeks in one of his hairy paws and forced her mouth towards his, then slid his tongue over her primed, lipless mouth. Clara gathered her strength and struck out with both knees. This time she was more successful: she pushed Uhl aside and rolled over to protect herself. 'Stay still,' she heard.

  The painter threw himself at her again, but Clara easily avoided him and kicked out a second time. She did not want to hurt him, but she was keen to see what would happen if she did not yield. By now she knew - or suspected - that Uhl was using a very simple method to paint her: he added a further degree of violence if her response was violent, but became gentler if her behaviour was submissive. When she yielded, he took the brush away. Clara wanted to find out exactly where this journey to absolute darkness that the painter was apparently proposing would lead them.

  All at once everything took on the uncontrollable rhythm of a desperate struggle. Uhl seized her by both arms, she kicked out, Uhl's glasses clattered to the floor with a strangely disagreeable sound. He raised his hand as if about to hit her. Then she was really afraid. He could damage me, she thought. It was not the possibility of being hit that frightened her. She had been struck by the public or other canvases in some art-shocks, but that had always been planned by the artist, and agreed with her beforehand. What frightened her was the lack of control. He's getting more and more nervous, he could really hurt me and ruin my priming.

  This thought led her to relax. Uhl threw himself on her, and started licking her chin and throat with his tongue.

  But then he stopped once more.

  Clara was still lying breathless on the floor, while Uhl struggled to his feet. They looked like two athletes at the end of some violent exercise. She stared him in the eye, but could make out nothing in his face apart from his weak gaze hidden deep behind the lenses of glasses that Uhl had just put back on with a neat gesture. A few moments later, the painter stepped back, and left the room, heading for the front porch.

  Things had taken such a spectacular turn that when it was time for lunch, Clara scarcely wanted to eat. She did not want to have to break off from the sketches to immerse herself again in cold routine. She forced herself to do so, because she knew it was necessary to pause for a moment in this frenetic escalation. Before eating she went to the bathroom and washed, getting rid of all traces of Uhl from her mouth and neck. She stared at her reflection in the mirror. There were no marks apart from a slight redness on her wrists. Primed skin was much tougher than normal skin, so that Uhl would have had to paint her much more violently to leave lasting traces. She smiled, and her face took on the mischievous look that Bassan liked so much. I've found you out: you use force if I do. You want to sketch me as aggressive, she told herself. Her eyes were smarting, but she knew this was from having to keep them open all the time she was in the poses. She rinsed them with saline solution.

  She ate lunch naked with Gerardo sitting opposite her. Uhl was somewhere unknown. Gerardo had already finished and observed her quietly.

  'Did you see the man at the window again?' he asked.

  For a moment she did not understand what he was talking about.

  'Yes, but I called Conservation. They told me they were security guards, so I felt reassured. I slept very well for the rest of the night.'

  'So it was as I said: guards.' 'Aha.'

  They fell silent. She finished her sandwich and began to spread cheese on a slice of bread. All her muscles ached, but that did not bother her. She felt refreshingly angry, as effervescent as a fizzy drink shaken for hours. From time to time she glanced at the door to see if Uhl was coming in. She remembered his breath, and his violence. And also how everything came to a halt when she yielded. But what would have happened if she had not yielded? How far would his brushstrokes have gone, what remote shade of darkness might they have reached? That was what obsessed her. What would happen if next time she decided not to surrender at all, not to yield for anything? The possibilities were staggering.

  'How did you get on this morning?'

  Gerardo's question made her blink. The last thing she needed at that moment was banal conversation. 'Fine,' she said.

  He put his elbows on the table, leaned over to her, and adopted a serious tone.

  'Listen, there's something I have to tell you.'

  They stared at each other in silence. Clara chewed her food quietly, waiting.

  'Justus is annoyed.'

  She said nothing. Her heart started beating faster.

  'And it's not good if Justus gets annoyed, because if that happens, you and I are out on the street, right?'

  'What do you mean?' she asked, innocently.

  Gerardo appeared to be searching for the right words. He stared down at his hands on the tablecloth.

  'We... we have some rules regarding young female canvases, if you follow me. And the canvases have to respect them. I don't like talking about this, but sometimes as in your case it becomes necessary - it seems you don't get it at all, do you?'

  'What am
I supposed to get?'

  'That you are in a privileged position. You are a canvas contracted by the Van Tysch Foundation, which is quite something, believe me. But that could vanish at any moment. I already told you, Justus is a senior assistant. In other words, he's a painter of some importance here in the Foundation. You have to be aware of that. I'm not telling you this to scare you, but so that you understand .. . and do whatever is necessary, OK?'

  'But I don't understand a thing.'

  He puffed, and sat back in his seat.

  'Then you really must be dumb. I'm warning you: Justus could throw you out on the spot if he wanted to.'

  'And what am I supposed to do to prevent that?'

  'You know perfectly well. Don't pretend to be stupid. He likes you a lot. You'll see.'

  This fascinating exchange did not make sense to her. She guessed this might be due to Gerardo's clumsiness, his rough, unconvincing way of doing things, the way he tried too hard to control his voice, his timid approach as if he were a kid playing at being the tough guy. For Clara, the most exciting thing was that Gerardo could be telling the truth. There was no way to be certain that all this was the farce it seemed on the surface.