Art of Murder (14 page)

'I'd do anything for art, sweetie,' she told her. 'Anything. I couldn't care less about anything but art: not emotions or justice, or pity, family health, love or money
...
Well
...'
she hesitated, 'perhaps money is an exception. Art is money.'

Sweet Nothings
was bought by a Madrid collector at double its list price. Clara was on show in his house for a whole month.

Early in 2005, Vicky tried to kill herself with a heroin overdose.

This was not Clara's fault, but that of her new love, Elena Valero, who Clara had worked with on
Instant.
The day they were taking her into the intensive care unit in La Paz, it was announced that the Van Tysch Foundation had awarded her their Max Kalima prize for the totality of her work. Groggy from the effects of her oxygen mask, Vicky heard the news from a nurse. When she recovered, she declared she had also rediscovered her emotional stability. Although she was planning another work with Clara for the end of the year, she no longer phoned her as often. Then after
Strawberry
they had not seen each other again. Clara was unsure what she felt about her: was she in love with Vicky, or was it admiration for her talent? The truth was that although she wanted to, she could not forget her. Sometimes she pictured herself lying on the velvet cloak in the
Sweet Nothings
collector's room, one knee drawn up under her stomach, with the heel pointing down to her sex, her eyes shut and face livid with that 'pallor the colour of disgust' that Vicky had managed to produce in her. Perhaps this was all the painter had left her when she disappeared from her life: the feel of velvet, and her bloodless cheeks.

So she pulled the velvet suit out of the cupboard and threw it on the bed. Then she found another beige jersey and trousers, which reminded her more of Jorge because she had worn them during the early days of her relationship with him.

She hesitated for a while, looking at the two sets of clothing as if judging them (Vicky or Jorge? Jorge or Vicky?), before finally condemning Vicky Lledo to destruction. She would be too hot during the journey, but that did not matter.

It was almost three in the afternoon when she realised she should eat something. She threw together a salad and a couple of sandwiches, and polished them off with a bottle of mineral water.

Then as she still had some time left, she decided to prepare herself for what was to come. Rummaging in her medicine cabinet, she chose a couple of muscle toner tablets and a pill that would hold back her period, and swallowed them with the last of the bottled water. She took off her bathrobe, went into the kitchen for a salt cellar, an airline passenger's mask that she found in one of the drawers, and several weights. She started exercising in a very different way from her usual routine on the mat. She stood motionless on tiptoe, with salt on her tongue. She walked around her apartment with the mask on. She rolled herself into a ball, placing a weight on the highest part of her body. The exercises were designed to curb her will without breaking it, to help her see herself as a blind object, something that could be used, transformed. She had become used to this kind of preparation since her days with
The Circle.
It was the only way she had been able to bear the work Brentano did with her.

At a quarter to four she pulled the flesh-coloured jersey over her head, put on the velvet jacket and trousers, and chose a pair of sandals from the dim and distant past. She considered herself in the mirror. None of what she was wearing really suited her: she looked like a beautiful young girl disguised as a hippy, which was exactly the effect she wanted to create.

The remaining details, which she had not thought of, caused her the most problems. What should she do with her house keys? She could not take them with her. Jorge had a set, but she did not want to have to depend on him to get in when she returned, whenever that might be. She did not trust her neighbours, and the building had no porter.

She decided simply to do nothing. It seemed logical to her to shut the door behind her and be unable to get in again. She called for a taxi, calculated how much it would cost her, and put the money in her jacket pocket.

It was then she found the keyring.

She realised she had put the suit on without checking the pockets. Old clothes are the graveyard of memory. In one of the jacket pockets she dug out her father's keyring. For a long time, she had used it with the kind of blind devotion we show to objects that once belonged to the dead. When it snapped, she had to transfer her keys to a new ring. She could not recall why it was in this particular pocket, or why she had not thrown it away. Perhaps because of its sentimental value. The thought amused her.

The keyring had a chess queen on it, a present from the club where Manuel Reyes played. Her father was passionate about chess, and her brother had inherited his love of this sober pas-rime. It was a black queen. Clara could hear her father saying,

‘
This is Reyes' queen. They gave me the black one because it's on the losing side.'

She considered whether to save it, but put it back in her pocket. 'I'm sorry, your majesty, but if that's where you were, that's where you'll stay.'

So, dressed in Vicky's suit, wearing her adolescent sandals, and with the weight of her father's keyring in her pocket, Clara left her apartment and shut the door behind her.

As she reached the street, she felt a strong sensation. It was so intense she had to look all round to make sure it was a mistake. She was convinced she was being watched. Perhaps she was wrong.

This was the afternoon of 22 June, 2006. The sun was shining the colour of pink flesh.

6

Briseida Canchares woke up with a gun to her head. Seen from so close up, the barrel looked like a small metal coffin pressed against her temple. The finger on the trigger had its nail painted viridian green. Briseida looked up the bare forearm and discovered it belonged to a blonde woman. It was the emerald-eyed cat dressed in the tiny camouflage outfit who had asked Roger for a light at the Roquentins. It had happened while she was looking at the painting
Invisible Orbit
by Elmer Fludd, and a guard had immediately come over and warned the woman: 'You can't smoke here, miss. The smoke gets in the paintings' eyes, and makes them cough.' She had given Roger a crooked smile as she handed him back his lighter. Then she had vanished into the crowd and Briseida had not seen her again. Until now.

The blonde woman was dressed in the same combat gear, and smiled in the same way. The only difference was the gun. She raised a finger to her lips, still training the pistol on Briseida (I'm not to speak, Briseida translated this to mean) then signalled
with her other hand (I'm to get up). She suspected it was all a dream, so she obeyed, because she liked doing fascinating things in her dreams. She pulled back the sheets and stood up. The gun pressed to her temple moved as she did, as if her head were made of metal and the pistol were a magnet. Briseida turned to the side and placed her feet on the cool carpet of Roger's apartment floor as delicately as a space module landing on the moon. She was completely naked, and felt a bit chilly. It was still night (she didn't know the exact time, because the alarm clock was on Roger's side of the bed), and the room was lit only by the bedside lamp. She remembered having gone to bed very late and sharing moments of enthusiasm and struggle with Roger (that mouth of his, with its aftertaste of vintage champagne and velvety Havana cigar, his tongue a green marijuana rug) before night covered them in its cloak of drunkenness and
...

That's right.

Where was Roger?

She discovered him sitting at the far end of the room. All he was wearing was the ring on the little finger of his left hand. The same ring that had left marks on Briseida's backside, but which he said he could not remove because that brought bad luck. He had got it in some remote corner of Brazil, stealing it from a shaman who could tell people's secrets. It contained a tiny emerald that glinted in its setting like a jungle-green drop of pus. According to Roger, it had great powers, although he was not sure exactly what they were. He claimed there were only five or six jewels like it
in
the whole world. What an incredible guy Roger was. A bit of a bastard too, of course, but Briseida had never met anyone with that amount of money who wasn't also a bastard.

At that moment it seemed not even the ring's powers could help him. A pincer in the shape of a hand was clamped so fiercely on his jaw his cheeks were puffed up. The pincer-like hand belonged to a spectacular woman, similar to the blonde but much more impressive, like the ones Roger liked to fuck only at weekends. She was jabbing a silver-plated military pistol into his throat. Its barrel made his Adam's apple stand out starkly. This woman was wearing baize-green jacket and trousers, olive-green
kerchief and beret, and pistachio-coloured gloves. One of her legs was thrust between Roger's thighs (perhaps her knee was crushing his genitals, and this was causing the look of desperation on his face), the other was firmly planted on the floor in shooting position. She was not looking at Roger but at Briseida, as if it were up to her to decide what she should do next. Her eyes were of the kind it is hard to forget. The kind, thought Briseida, you stare into a second before you see nothing any more.

Even so, she had to admit that the make-up and the combination of greens (jacket-trousers, gloves-beret, eyes-shadow) were perfect. A paramilitary catwalk!
Pr
ê
t-
à
-porter
terrorism! What prevented police SWAT teams, army commandos or any other
ad hoc
armed group keeping up with the demands of fashion? Briseida wondered.

The blonde woman was still signalling to her to stand up. She glanced over at Roger, who raised his hand as if to say: Do as she tells you, so she got up from the bed, still keeping her eyes on everyone in the room.

Are they burglars or cops? Have they come to kidnap Roger? Let's see. What did we get up to? Last night we were at that party
...

God, how her head hurt. She could not think straight. Perhaps that was because of the mix of alcohol, hashish and pills she had taken at the Roquentins. Besides, the scene before her was so odd that the terror she could feel starting to beat in her chest was still muffled. It looked as if it had all been set up by the God of Art: a combination of the fascinating - the blonde in her camouflage outfit; the ridiculous - Roger and her stark naked, still clammy from their dense dreams; and the absurd - the heavily made-up model in her combat gear. It was like a Cezanne painting in green - cobalt green, military green, turquoise green, green carpet, apple green of the bedroom walls. If she were to die young, thought Briseida, she would choose exactly this green moment.

It was a shame this aesthetic impression faded a little when the blonde woman pushed her towards the men waiting in the dining room.

They pinioned her arms, and pushed her down on to a chair in front of what appeared to be a blank computer screen. Briseida had shouted out as she was being hustled into the room, and had apparently broken some code of silence, because a few seconds later she heard noises and words in Dutch from the bedroom, then more noises in the corridor. But the next words were in English and were directed at her.

'Don't do that again,' Fascinating Eyes Blondie said, bending over her. 'And don't try to stand up.'

She could not have done so even if she had wanted to: two pairs of iron gloves were forcing her down on her seat.

'Here's a glass of water. Drink some if you like. I'm going to press a key on the computer and a person will appear on the screen to ask you some questions. Reply loudly and clearly. Don't avoid any of the questions, and don't take too much time over them. If you don't know the answer, or want time to think about it, say so. We know you speak good English, but if there's something you don't understand, say so too.'

The blonde pressed a key, and the face of an elderly man, bald except for some white tufts above the ears, appeared on the
screen. In the top left-hand cor
ner there also appeared an insert of a young woman with tanned brown skin, hair the colour of coal, prominent cheekbones and plump lips, gripped by the shoulders and arms by four gloved hands, and with naked breasts. Briseida realised it was her. They were filming her and sending the images in real time to heaven knows what damned spot on the planet. Diagonally across the screen from this, a timing device ticked off the seconds.

Hallucinatory effects produced by the chaotic consumption of toxic products: that was how Stan Coleman, her unforgettable, wealthy (and asshole) professor of Contemporary Art at Columbia described all the strange things that happened after an orgy of soft drugs. That was what this must be. It could not really be happening to her.

'Good morning. I'm sorry if we've disturbed you, but we need to know something urgently, and we're counting on your generous cooperation.'