Art of Murder (23 page)

Second Step

Shaping the Sketch

Points, lines, circles, triangles, squares, polygons
...
these are the terms we should think in when we begin to sketch a human painting. Afterwards we will have to add shading.

BRUNO
VAN
TYSCH
Treatise on Hyperdramatic Art

'If you think we're waxworks
...
you ought to pay, you know
...'
'Contrariwise!... If you think we're alive, you ought to speak!'

LEWIS
CARROLL
Tweedledum
and
Tweedledee
in
Through the Looking Glass

A point is not really a shape. Anyone who thinks a point is round is mistaken. A point exists in so far as interconnecting lines exist. Yet lines and everything else, all other shapes and bodies, are made up of points. A point is the
essential invisible, the unmea
surable inevitable. God himself may be a point, solitary and remote in His perfect eternity, thinks Marcus.

Marcus Weiss is holding up an invisible point between his closed fingers.
Friends, this is more complicated than it seems.
The gesture is: left hand held out, palm of the hand facing upward, five fingers forming a little summit. If the tips are close enough together, the hole in the middle disappears in the curves of flesh. And there, right in the middle, is the point Weiss is holding up.
You think it's easy? Think again, friends, it's really complicated.

When she first started her sketches, Kate Niemeyer put a ping-pong ball on the tip of his fingers. In the next sketch, the ball was replaced by a marble; after that a bean, and then a pea, just like in children's stories. Finally, Kate decided there should be nothing. 'The idea is the ball is still there, but invisible. You're offering it to the public. People will look at you and ask: what's he got between his fingers? That will catch their attention, and they'll come closer.' Marcus understands that curiosity is a terrific bait for any artist who knows how to use it.

'That afternoon, he had been holding up the invisible point for several hours. A girl with blonde curls, orange dress and red glasses (one of the last visitors) had stood up on tiptoe to see what Marcus was hiding in his fingers. Weiss was unable to see her expression when she eventually realised there was nothing there - as a work of art, he was forced to continue looking straight out in front of him, his eyes painted white. He wondered what on earth such a small child was doing in the gallery, where the works were meant to be for adults. Marcus would have banned himself to children under thirteen. He had no children of
his own (what painting could have?), but he felt a great respect for them, and considered his 'attire' as Niemeyer's work far from suitable for them: he was completely naked, his body spray-painted bronze, his penis and testicles (hairless, visible) a matt white colour, the same as his eyes. A crown of yellow and blue feathers with purple tips, shaped like an Aztec plume or a tropical bird's crest, covered his brow. His crafted muscles, shaped over the years with the patience of a carpenter, shone individually with a metallic bronze, throwing off shifting shadows and glints under the halogen lights.

Tired of holding up nothing, he was pleased it would soon be time to close. He realised the gallery had shut when he saw the maintenance man for Philip Mossberg's
Rhythm
/
Balance
come into the room.
Rhy
thm
/
Balance
was the painting on show opposite him. It was a seventeen-year-old canvas called Aspasia Danilou, painted in gentle, almost washed-out colours, which hid nothing of her anatomy. Her pubic hair was visible, because Mossberg always used non-depilated canvases for his works. Aspasia blinked, stirred, handed the satin sheet she had been holding in her left hand to the technician, and skipped off to the bathroom, waving to Marcus as she left. Until tomorrow, Marcus, see you then; of course you will, we'll be staring at each other all day
-
Beautiful Aspasia was not a bad canvas. Marcus thought she would go far, but she was only seventeen and this was her first original. When she had arrived in the gallery, he had tried to pick her up, but she had made several excuses and systematically refused his advances, until he was forced to realise that, in some areas of life, Aspasia already had considerable experience.

Marcus was Kate Niemeyer's work
Do You Want to Play With Me?
He was priced at twelve thousand euros, and was not sure he would be sold. He was the last to leave the gallery. There was no technician to help him, no one came to take his plume of feathers off: he had to make his own way out. The hand he used to hold nothing up with hurt a little. The whole arm, in fact.

'Au revoir,
Habib.'

'Au revoir,
Mr Weiss.'

He kept his bare black and bronze painted feet well away from the smooth track Habib's vacuum cleaner was making. He got on very well with the cleaning foreman on that floor. Before coming to Munich, Habib had lived in Avignon, and Weiss, who knew and admired that city (he had twice been exhibited in a gallery on the banks of the Rhone), liked to offer the Moroccan cleaner beer and cigarettes, and to practise his French. Habib the Great also went in for Zen meditation, which was guaranteed to endear him to Marcus. The two of them shared their books and thoughts.

That night though all he said to Habib was goodbye. He was in a hurry.

Would
she
be waiting for him? He hoped so, because he could not bear to think otherwise. They had met the previous evening, but Marcus had enough experience to know she was not the kind to take things lightly. Whoever she might be, and whatever she wanted from him, Brenda was
serious
about it.

He walked down the stairs to the bathroom on the second floor. Sieglinde, who was
Dryad
by Herbert Rinsermann, was already bent over the wash basin when Marcus came in. She had her head under the tap and was briskly rubbing her hair. Her athletic figure was like a flesh longbow, without an atom of fat. The fake brambles that were wrapped around her in the work were now propped against the wall, glistening with red points of artificial blood. The intricate swirl of Rinsermann's signature decorated her left ankle. Marcus and Sieglinde had met two years earlier during classes Ludwig Werner had held in Berlin for canvases of all ages. They had been friends ever since. Now they had coincided again in the Max Ernst gallery.

Marcus bent over next to her, taking care not to damage his plume of feathers, and boomed out a greeting.

'Good evening.'

Sieglinde's face emerged from the water, streaked with tiny pearls.

'Hi there, Marcus! How are things?'

'Not too bad,' he smiled enigmatically as he removed his crest. 'You're very pleased with yourself today. Has someone bought you?'

In your dreams.'

'Another original in sight then?'

'Maybe.'

Sieglinde turned towards him, hands and buttocks pressed against the edge of the washbowl. Her short hair was like a wet golden helmet. She looked at Weiss with all the mockery of a smart nineteen-year-old.

'Hey, that's great. I'm fed up with seeing you painted bronze. And might I be allowed to know the name of the artist who wants to go down in history by doing something with you, Mr Weiss?'

'Mind your own business,' Marcus said, only half jokingly.

Sieglinde burst out laughing and carried on drying herself. Marcus went into the shower and hung a bottle of solvent on the taps. The oil paint on his body began to wash down below his knees. He turned and splashed in the welcome, pleasurable jet of water. Through the half-open door he caught glimpses of Sieglinde's anatomy, brief flashes of her youthful muscles. Ah youth, a point of no return, he thought. They buy you more quickly and pay more when you're a young canvas. He recalled that Rinsermann had been able to sell Sieglinde as a seasonal outdoor piece to an ancient Bavarian family. It's never easy to sell a seasonal work, because they are on show for only a few months each year, the summer in
Dry
ad's
case. Marcus had seen the work several times. He did not particularly like Rinsermann, but he thought
Dryad
was quite good. It was a sort of wood nymph painted in diluted orange, ochre and pink tones, and covered in brambles whose thorns were apparently caught in the naked body. The expression on the work's face was a triumph: a mixture of fear, surprise and pain. But in Marcus' opinion, the best thing about the work was its owner. One of those a painting only meets once every ten years or so. Not only had he decided to install Sieglinde in his garden for three years before he substituted her (which meant steady work for three months and the possibility of more the rest of the year) but he also saw no problem with lending her for temporary exhibitions in the city, like this one at the Max Ernst, which allowed Sieglinde to earn an extra one thousand five hundred and thirty-two euros a month as a sold work. Weiss was pleased for her, but could not deny feeling a sharp stab of envy. His friend's face radiated with the happy glow of a bought canvas. But no one wanted to play with
Do You Want to Play With Me?
He was convinced Kate would not manage to sell him this time either. Was that Kate's fault or his?

He turned off the shower and looked down at his body, feeling its contours with his hands. He kept fit, of course. His muscles, faithful, well-trained dogs that they were, continued their endless task of construction. People like Kate Niemeyer would go on painting him (or at least, so he believed) for a few more years, but he knew that at forty-three he should be thinking of a different career. The market for human ornaments was growing irresistibly. Collectors privately amassed Chairs, Pedestals, Tables, Flower Vases and Carpets, and firms such as Suke, Ferrucioli Studio or the Van Tysch Foundation designed, sold and used flesh and blood ornaments every day. Sooner or later it was bound to become legal for these objects to be sold openly, because otherwise, where did old canvases and the young ones who did not make it as works of art have to go? Marcus suspected he would end up being sold as an ornament for some merry spinster's home. Why not take a souvenir from Germany with you, madam? Here's Marcus Weiss, with lovely nacreous buttocks, a fine Aryan object that would fit in nicely alongside your chimneypiece.

Weiss had only a few more opportunities left. Opportunities are points too, atoms, interconnecting lines, tiny, invisible dots, the remains of nothingness. How many had he missed? He had lost count. He had been a model from the age of seventeen. He had studied HD art in his home town of Berlin, and had worked for some of the best artists of his generation. Then suddenly it had all gone sour. He started turning down offers, partly because he want to live in peace. He liked being a painting, but not enough to sacrifice all his love life for it. He was well aware that masterpieces live alone, isolated, and don't get married or have children, don't even love or hate, don't enjoy life or suffer. True masterpieces like Gustavo Onfretti, Patricia Vasari or Kirsten Kirstenman could scarcely be called people: they had given
everything -
body, mind and spirit - to artistic creation. Marcus Weiss missed life too much, and perhaps that was the reason he had slowed down. And now it was too late to change things. The worst of it was that he was still on his own. So he was not a masterpiece, but he wasn't the human being he would have liked to have been either. He hadn't achieved one thing or the other.

He got nervous when he calculated that what Brenda was going to propose that evening might well be his last real opportunity.

As he was leaving, he found Sieglinde waiting for him at the changing-room exit. They often left together. They walked down the stairs with their rucksacks on their backs: he was carrying his Aztec headdress of artificial parrot feathers, she had the brambles. The labels on their wrists clinked as they descended the stairs. Sieglinde did the talking: Marcus gave only monosyllabic replies. He felt increasingly nervous. If Brenda had not kept her word, if she was not waiting for him outside as she had promised, he could say goodbye to that last big chance.

He decided he should say something, to avoid any indiscreet question from his friend.

'Guess what? This afternoon a nine- or ten-year-old girl stood looking at me for half an hour at least. I don't understand what's going on. The laws against child pornography get tougher and tougher, but there's no one to prevent any kid walking into an adult gallery.'

'You
know we're considered as artistic heritage, Marcus. Kids can go and see Michelangelo's
David,
so why shouldn't they see
Do You Want to Play With Me?
as well? That would be discrimination.'

'I still think children are a special case
’
Marcus insisted.
I
don't like them as viewers, but I like them even less as paintings. No painting less than thirteen years old should be allowed.'