Читать книгу Art Kills - Eric van Lustbader - Страница 5

It was a strange, sultry day in Manhattan. A cadmium yellow sky smudged with clouds and wind-whipped debris arched over Fifth Avenue like an unfinished painting. And, as I say, there was a certain strangeness in the air that made my nostrils flare.

It being lunchtime, I was at my accustomed sidewalk table at Max’s, the restaurant occupying the ground floor of the landmark hotel across the avenue from the Empire State Museum of Art. It is a truism that food, no matter how deliciously prepared, lacks a certain piquancy without a view from which to savor it. Traffic whizzed by the beautiful white stone façade of that treasure trove where, these days, I spend a good deal of my time. My father had taken me to this very museum when I was six, introducing me to Picasso, Monet, and Seurat. Years later, just before he sent me off to school in Paris, we again found ourselves in the high galleries. To his delight, it was I who pointed out the stylish nuances I had been taught about the artists he so adored. I did this faultlessly not because it was what he wanted, but because by that time I was wearing his passion for art as comfortably as a silk slip.

When he had seen me off at the airport, he had said, “Take in everything, Tess; reject nothing. This is the artist’s secret.”

I reached into my handbag for my agenda to check my afternoon appointments. I like to think that my father would have been proud of the business I had built up finding and examining paintings for private clients. In any event, since over his lifetime he had given the museum a great deal of money, he would have been pleased that I donate time each week to combing their permanent collection in search of fakes. That was one of my specialties.

It was sad that I would never really know my father’s reactions to what I had become; I had just been starting out when the first of his strokes felled him. My father had made his considerable fortune extracting elements both precious and mundane from the earth. Because of this, I feel sure, he harbored a great need to give back something of what he had plundered.

In all ways he had been a closed man – shut tight as a clam. No one had really known him – not even my mother, especially not my mother, who had run off to Europe with an Italian count of dubious repute – save me. In his image, I had perfected a grave and penetrating gaze that gave the impression that I had neither humor nor a lightness of spirit. This suited me perfectly, since I could see no earthly reason for offering my true nature like a lamb to anyone the wind blew in my direction. When I was growing up, my father spent hours teaching me how to play poker. He said it was the best way he could think of to teach me about life. He taught me that winning in poker depends on two things: memory and emotion. You had to have a whole lot of one and none of the other. I was such an adept pupil that when I was older, he would occasionally bring me into his high-stakes games as a ringer so we could both clean up.

Willie arrived with my lunch – seared trout over wilted spinach. I inquired about his wife and three children, and he thanked me yet again for helping him find a tutor for his dyslexic eldest son. This tutor was too dear for Willie to afford so I had instructed him to quote a price half his usual fee. I made up the difference without anybody being the wiser. Willie asked me how Peter was, and I told him that Peter and I had broken up. That was a shame, Willie said. Peter was such a nice young man.

I sighed. As usual, Willie was right on the mark. Peter was a nice young man. He was also crazy about me. That hadn’t stopped me from pushing him away; in fact, it might have been a contributing factor. Peter had been the fourth nice young man I’d dated in the two years since my father’s death. In the eighteen months between my father’s two stokes, I’d been too busy working and tending to him for any kind of social life.

There was a hole inside me into which all these nice young men plunged like stones, sinking without a trace. Take Peter, for instance. He was kind and sweet and generous. He also knew how to kiss. But he hadn’t been able to touch me deep down where it mattered, so when he wanted to take our relationship to the next logical level, I told him as gently as I knew how that I could not. I hadn’t disliked any of them; I simply hadn’t felt anything at all. While it was true that when I saw them, more often than not I had fun, the moment they left my side they disappeared from my consciousness as if they had never existed. What was wrong with me?

I looked down at my trout, which by now had lost all its heat. No matter; I had no appetite for it anyway. Thinking about my shortcomings made me as depressed as when studying a bleak Vlaminck land landscape.

I had just ordered a single-malt Scotch when I happened to spot Howard Lenz hurrying down the museum’s expensive front stairs, a well-worn leather briefcase clutched in one fist. He was sweating like an ice-monkey at a Hawaiian wedding. If my mind had not wandered into dangerous and unpleasant territory, my curiosity might never have been piqued, but I needed an immediate distraction and Lenz was it. It was just after one-thirty. All the curators were in an interdepartmental conference and had been so for an hour. What was Lenz, a dodgy little art dealer, doing exiting the museum now? Knowing his rather sordid predilections as I did, it was a sure bet he hadn’t been inside admiring the artwork.

Lenz, with a rather awkwardly distracted look on his ferret-like face, stepped off the curb and scurried across Fifth Avenue on his bandy little legs. He was heading more or less directly toward me, though in his agitated state he had not yet seen me. His long, yellow-white hair was slicked down, tied back in a ponytail that had long since gone out of style. It shone in the sunlight like a helmet. He was almost across when he spotted me. Oddly, a smile broke out on his face, and I’m sure he was just about to say something when a large black sedan running the red light on Eightieth Street plowed right into him. Lenz, looking quite stunned, was hurled into the side of a parked white Lexus and dragged all the way to the car’s front end, where he fetched up against the rear bumper of the Chrysler parked just in front.

I describe this horrific scene in retrospect. At the time, it was merely a blur. All that registered was Lenz’s body bouncing like a ball off the side of the white Lexus and blood exploding like paint on a Pollock canvas. My stomach seemed to rise up into my throat, threatening to disgorge its contents.

People were screaming, running from every direction. An elderly woman at the table next to mine fainted, adding to the confusion and panic. Crowds formed as if from thin air, teeming like ants over a mound of earth. I joined them, slipping over the restaurant’s low, wrought-iron railing. I could see Lenz’s face now, horribly smeared with blood. Some teeth were outside his lower lip, as if he had been struck down like a mad dog. There was no question of him being alive. I could see that. When one has lived in Europe as I have, one comes to recognize death, which has a different significance than it does in America. In Paris and Venice, I had lived in apartments and villas where people had died, sometimes generations of them. The stonework, the small exquisite gardens, the interior beams are all infused with the blood of the dead, a patina that becomes one’s connection to history.

“For God’s sake, call the police!” I shouted to Dominic, the maître d’, who nodded as if waking from a trance and hurried into the restaurant.

The crowd, weaned on electronic voyeurism, pressed in, hungry for their view of the carnage. Through the mounting frenzy, I saw a pencil-thin man with a long El Greco face expertly making his way toward the inner edge of people. He never pushed or shoved people aside, but rather took advantage of the tiny pockets of space that developed within the jostling throng. At the edge of the curb, he flexed his knees and scooped up the briefcase Lenz had been clutching. Producing a handkerchief, he quickly wiped off the blood. In one fluid motion he was up and moving away. He walked neither quickly nor slowly, but in an altogether normal manner so as to not draw attention to himself.

Instinctively, I followed him. I was both outraged and intrigued. I remember thinking that if Lenz couldn’t do anything about this theft, I would. Not that I had any love for Lenz. As I said, he was a filthy little creature who made his dubious living off of people too ignorant to know that what he was purveying was often as phony as his Austrian accent. The weasel had been born in Canarsie; he’d never even set foot in Vienna, let alone been born and raised there as he claimed. And yet, looting the dead seemed to me so indecent, so despicable that I could not simply turn my back on it. I could hear my father, protector of the underdog, urging me on. Justice would be done, Lenz, even though in life he’d had no concept of the word himself.

Besides, I had a desire to find out just what it was Lenz had in the briefcase.

The man with the El Greco face ducked into a late-model Ford parked on Seventy-eighth Street. As he turned over the ignition, I hailed a cab. We went through the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse, with me following the Ford while giving elaborate hand signals to the cabbie. I’d tried English and French, but apparently he spoke only Farsi.

We emerged from the park heading west until the Ford ran the light on West End Avenue, leaving us stalled in traffic. I threw some bills through the scarred plastic divider, leapt out of the taxi, and, dodging cars, ran down the street. The Ford headed up West End and then made a hard left onto Eighty-third. I sprinted up the block, made the light, and crossed the avenue in time to see the man with the El Greco face double-park his car in front of an old pre-war apartment building. When he got out, I could see he held Lenz’s battered briefcase under one arm. He was holding it as if it was filled with eggs.

By that time, I was halfway down the block. I went into the building so close after him that he held the door open for me. I said something under my breath then rummaged in my handbag as if looking for my key. He opened the lock on the inner door, and, with another murmur of thanks, I stepped through after him. The lobby smelled of old lives, as if each separate scent was a sepia-toned snapshot of its long-ago inhabitants. There was no one in it but us.

I ducked into the mailbox alcove, turned right around, and peeked out. The man with the El Greco face stepped into the elevator, the door closed, and I sprinted across the lobby. I pressed the elevator call button as I saw the indicator stop at the seventh floor. When the elevator returned to the lobby, I took it up.

Arriving on the seventh floor, I was faced with another dilemma. Which apartment had my quarry gone into? There were five on the floor, which told me they had been spared the brutal downsizing some people called modernization. As I made my slow, careful circuit of the hallway, I noticed that one door appeared unlatched. Sure enough, when I turned the knob and pushed ever so gently, I found myself inside the apartment. It had one of those long entryways that led into the living room. Black-and-white photos of sleek-hulled ketch lined both walls. In one of them, I could make out the three faces of the crew standing just aft of the mizzenmast: two men and a woman. One man was older, the other two a generation younger. The older man looked familiar. I was racking my brains to put a name to his face when I heard a noise like the skittling of a baby’s rattle bouncing around the floor.

I went quickly down the hall and peered around the corner. The living room- all browns and taupes and beiges in a classic 1930s color scheme – looked comfortable and empty. Through the west-facing windows, the leafy trees of Riverside Park provided a frame for a lovely composition of the Hudson River and the New Jersey palisades that Frederick Church would have greatly admired. As I peeked out a little farther, I could see the open archway into a cozy-looking kitchen the color of butterscotch. Further to my right, a short hallway led straight to a bedroom. I froze. Through the open doorway, I could see two men struggling. One of them was the man with the El Greco face.

What the hell was going on?

I crossed the Oriental rug, took my high-heels off, and went down the inner hallway. The thin, bloodless lips of the man with the El Greco face were drawn back, revealing a set of tobacco-stained teeth that reminded me of my father’s antique ivory chess set. Breath hissed out between his clenched teeth in that odd skittling sound, sending a small chill down my spine.

I was also close enough to see that the other man was big and beefy in the manner of a professional wrestler or bodyguard. His bunched-up muscles put so many wrinkles in his suit jacket you would have thought it was made of crepe paper. Both men were concentrating so hard that I could have lifted my skirt and neither would have noticed.

The bull was in the process of strangling the man with the El Greco face. Not that I cared. On the contrary, I could feel the outrage that had brought me to this moment silently egging him on. Now that he was taking care of the man with the El Greco face, I turned my attention to finding Lenz’s briefcase. I had come this far; I wasn’t going to leave without it.

I saw it on the bedspread and leaned over toward it. Unfortunately, the man with the El Greco face chose that moment to expire, and the bull, no doubt seeing movement out of the corner of his eye, glanced up.

“Fuck” he said and reached for a gun I saw lying on the floor where I assumed the man with the El Greco face had kicked it. He was probably expecting me to go white in the face and yell “Eek!” Instead, I lunged toward him and, as the gun swung toward me, slammed him on top of the head with the heel of my shoe. He toppled over, making an odd mewling sound. As I reached over him, snatching up the briefcase, he grabbed the hem of my skirt. I could see from his expression that he was semi-conscious, so I drove my knee into the side of his head. I felt the contact all the way into my hip.

I had to pry his fingers off the material. Then I was out of there. In the hallway, I put on my shoes. Then, not wanting to run into anyone, I took the fire stairs all the way down to the lobby. Once or twice my knee, unhappy about the abuse I had subjected it to, nearly gave way. On the third floor landing, I stretched it out so that by the time I reached the lobby, it felt fine. I stayed inside the stairwell while an elderly couple shuffled through the lobby. They took so long I wanted to scream. I had no idea how long the bull would be unconscious, but I had no intention of being anywhere in the vicinity when he regained consciousness.

At last, the couple reached the elevator, and, striding across the lobby, I made my hasty exit. Out on the street, the sunlight seemed blinding, colors supersaturated. My heart was beating hard and fast in my chest, and, to my horror, my hands were trembling. I hurried to West End Avenue and hailed a cab.

All the way downtown, I watched in a daze the city blur by me as the taxi sped through midtown, Chelsea, the Village, and then into Soho. I was dying to know what was inside the briefcase, but after everything that had happened since I had first seen it, I felt an odd kind of superstition that compelled me to keep it closed until I was safely inside my apartment. I say “odd” because I am not by nature a superstitious person. I don’t give a fig about Friday the thirteenth or care if I step under a ladder or on a crack in the sidewalk. But in this case, two people were dead and another had been injured. Already, a certain aura had commenced to encircle this battered briefcase. I found that I was clutching it to my breast, much as Lenz had done as he had hurried down the Empire’s grand stone staircase.

With a sign of relief, I turned the keys in the upper and lower Medeco locks and entered my loft apartment. The high-pitched beeping of the security system ceased when I punched the code into the wall-mounted keypad.

Then, as I always did, I lit the dozen candles I had scattered about the main living space and gazed at my old friends hanging on the walls – paintings by Picasso, Monet, Dufy, Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Delacroix, and Renoir. Many of them I had inherited from my father, but others I had acquired on my own. They were like my children, these pieces of history, these blissful doorways into the true glory of the world, the pinnacle of man’s achievements. With only the soft, diffused illumination drifting through the room, these paintings had the appearance of an intimate gathering of dinner guests who, having long ago shed their mortal coils, had nevertheless left behind a distinct aura of intent.

After a time, I hit the light switch and turned on the stereo. Miles Davis’s exotic Sketches of Spain flooded the room. I poured myself a very large Oban Scotch and took a deep sip as I watched the last of the afternoon’s sunlight burnish the scuffed and scarred leather briefcase. The thing seemed to breathe like a winded animal.

I sat down and without a moment’s further hesitation, opened it up. I pulled out a soft, square package, swaddled in a protected skin of bubble wrap. As I peeled off the layers of plastic, I could see an image emerging.

It was a small painting, unframed and unlovely. No Old Master or Postimpressionist had created this. It was a rather stiff and awkward portrait of a woman of indefinite age. There was no life whatsoever in her face. I picked it up and held it in front of me. I wondered what poor sucker Lenz had targeted to buy this worthless painting – one could hardly call it art. Well, I had done my good deed for the day; that was certain. On the other hand, what was Lenz doing with this at the museum? And, even more puzzling, why was this homely painting the object of so much violence?

I continued to study the portrait. As far as I could see, there was nothing out of the ordinary about it. It was the kind of thing one might see anywhere around the city for a couple of hundred dollars. Sipping on my Scotch, I brought it into my studio where I routinely checked paintings for authenticity. I scraped off a piece of pigment from the lower left-hand corner and checked its date. An hour later- after completing my series of chemical tests – I had determined by the level of lead that, indeed, the painting had been done in the 1940’s. Nothing extraordinary about that. Then why had the man with the El Greco face gone to the trouble of snatching it from Lenz? And why had he, in turn, been murdered by the bull? It made no sense.

I put the painting aside and picked up the phone. I stared at it as I ordered hot and sour soup, an egg roll, and Kung Pao Chicken, extra hot, from my local Chinese take-out. It was getting late, and I hadn’t eaten much of Max’s trout. As I cradled the receiver, I noticed something. The angle of light changed, and I chanced to see a darker area in the corner where I had scraped off the pigment. I peered at it through my overhead lighted magnifier, and sure enough, there was paint underneath. That was typical. Almost all painters coated bare canvas with pigment so their colors would take better. This, however, appeared different. The hue was a deep umber, making it extremely unlikely that any artist would have used it to “cure” his canvas.

Using a combination of chemicals, I carefully stripped off a larger section of the portrait. Now, through the lens of my magnifier, I could see that the texture of the pigment was altogether different from that of the painting on top. I recognized that texture and tone, and my heart skipped a beat.

Miles Davis’s music faded, the walls fell away from the studio, and I was alone, floating in the infinite of history with this square of canvas, wood, and pigment. I felt a mounting frenzy grip me, and I tried to calm myself. But as I worked, I could hear the beating of the painting’s long-buried heart.

When I was halfway done, I knew that I was looking at a genuine Raphael. The color palette of rich muted umbers that abruptly faded to pale gold and pinks as light from an unseen source struck the subject and the beautifully controlled brushwork made the work unmistakable. What I couldn’t figure out was the subject itself. It looked like none of the great master’s paintings, and, believe me, I am familiar with the entire œuvre.

It wasn’t until I had washed away the last of the execrable portrait that I knew what I held in my hands. This was a portrait, delicate, breathtaking, and erotically intimate, of Venus rising from the sea. Ever since my first trip to Venice, I had heard stories, unsubstantiated rumors, that Raphael had painted his own rendition of the birth of the Greek goddess that Botticelli had made famous. That was unsurprising, since Raphael’s powerful fresco of the nymph Galatea was inspired by the same poem by the Florentine Angelo Poliziano that had fired Botticelli’s brush. Though the Raphael Venus was described in a number of texts, no one in the current art world had claimed to have seen it – in fact, some scholars argued it never existed. And so it had slipped into the realm of legend.

But I had seen this painting once before – or, rather, a painting Lenz had claimed to be Raphael’s Venus. By exposing it as a fake, albeit an exceedingly clever one, I had cost Lenz an enormous commission. At first, he’d seemed bitter about that and had at every opportunity tried to smear my reputation. When that had failed, he had lapsed into a kind of stylized chumminess that would have been inappropriate if it hadn’t had about it the heavy stench of irony.

Speaking of ironic, now, somehow Lenz had come into possession of the real Raphael Venus. The legend had come to life. The portrait was just as it had been described in the now not-so-apocryphal texts. This painting was virtually priceless.

No wonder two men were dead. I had been suspicious of Lenz’s death from the first. Now it was easy for me to understand the lengths someone would go to procure such a rare and magnificent painting. This was art on the most exalted level.

Venus, immersed in the early morning sunlight, gazed out at me from her dark eyes, at once enigmatic and laughing. What had she been thinking at the moment of her birth? Using the alchemy of genius, Raphael had infused the goddess with a serenity as vibrant as it was numinous. In this altogether astonishing portrait, he had made certain that one could recognize in the goddess’s face all the stages of life – childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age.

I was rapt by the magic Raphael had wrought. I could not take my eyes off his vision of Venus, even when the downstairs buzzer rang. Reluctant to leave my new friend, I put her away. Then I went back through the apartment to the intercom. My take-out order had arrived, and I buzzed in the delivery boy. I was fumbling through my purse when the doorbell rang.

“Just a minute,” I called as I fished my wallet out and unlocked the door. Two men shouldered their way in. Neither of them was Chinese.

“Hello, Ms. Chase,” the one with the silver hair said.

“Do I know you?”

“Not really,” he said with a smile that meant nothing. “But I know you.”

“Carmine don’t make jokes,” the other man said. He had hair the color and texture of a stoat’s pelt, and there was so much green in his complexion that he looked half-dead.

“That’s Leon,” Carmine said. “Don’t mind him; he’s got no sense of humor.”

“Carmine, Leon – fine, we’ve been introduced,” I said. They both wore sharkskin suits and ties that were meant to be fashionable but were simply loud. “Now what are you doing in my apartment?”

“Delivering the chinks,” Carmine said, handing me a large, warm brown bag. I could smell the stir-fried chilies and fresh cilantro.