Art of Murder (40 page)

'Of course, make yourself at home. Get comfortable.' They sat down together. The grass was an army of tiny, elegant soldiers. Nothing in the clearing jarred. Clara stroked the grass and closed her eyes: it was like sliding your hand through a fur coat. She felt happy. Gerardo on the other hand seemed increasingly sad.

'Nothing will make the birds settle here, you know. They realise at once that it's all a
trompe-l’
oeil
and fly off at once to real trees. And they're right, dammit: trees should be trees, and people, people.'

'In real life, of course: but art is different.'

'Art is part of life, sweetheart, not the other way round,' Gerardo replied. 'Do you know what I'd like to do? To paint something in the natural-humanist style of the French school. But I don't, because hyperdramatism sells better and gives more money. And I want to earn lots of money' He threw open his arms and exclaimed: 'Lots and lots of money so I can say to hell with all the plastic woods in the world!'

'I think this place is beautiful.'

'Are you serious?'

'Aha.'

He looked at her curiously.

'What an incredible woman you are. I've worked with a lot of canvases, sweetheart, but none of them was as formidable as you.'

'Formidable?'

'Yes. I mean
...
as
determined
to be a complete canvas, from head to toe. Tell me something. What do you do when you stop working? Do you have friends? Are you going out with someone?'

'Yes, I'm going out with someone. And I have male and female friends.'

'Anyone special?'

Clara was gently combing the grass. She merely smiled. 'Don't you like me asking you these things?' Gerardo wanted to know.

'No, it's all right. There is someone, but we don't live together, and he's not really my "boyfriend". He's a friend I feel attracted to.'

She smiled again, trying to imagine Jorge as her boyfriend. She had never thought of him that way. She went on to wonder exactly what Jorge was for her, what else they shared apart from their night-time moments. All at once, she realised that she used him as a spectator. She liked Jorge to know every detail of what happened to her in the strange world of her profession. She tried not to hide anything from him, not even its most vulgar aspects, or what Jorge considered as vulgar: everything she did with the public during the art-shocks for example, or her work for
The Circle
or Brentano. Jorge was taken aback at this, and she enjoyed watching his face at those moments. Jorge was her public, her astonished spectator. She needed constantly to leave him with his mouth open.

'So when you're not a canvas, you lead a normal life,' Gerardo said.

'Yes, pretty normal. What about you?'

‘I
dedicate myself to work. I have a few friends here in Holland, but above all, I dedicate myself to work. And I'm not going out with anyone at the moment. I did have a Dutch girlfriend a while back, but we split up.'

After that there was a silence. She was still convinced Gerardo was a skilful painter, but now she was almost ce
rtain this was a real break. Wh
at did he mean by talking to her
sincerely?
There could be no sincerity between a painter and a canvas, and both of them knew that. In the case of artists such as Bassan or Chalboux, who were followers of the natural-humanist school, the sincerity was forced, another brushstroke, a sort of 'now we're going to be sincere', a technique along with all the others. Yet here was Gerardo apparently wanting to talk to her as if she was someone he had met on a train or bus. It was absurd.

'Look, I'm sorry, but isn't it getting rather late?' she said. 'Shouldn't we be getting back?'

Gerardo looked her up and down.

'You're right,' he finally admitted. 'Let's go back.'

Then suddenly as they were getting up, he spoke to her in a different, urgent whisper.

'Listen, I wanted
...
I wanted you to know something. You're doing very well, sweetheart. You've understood the response right from the start. But keep on doing the same thing, whatever happens, got it? Don't forget, the key is to
yield.'

Clara listened to him in disbelief. It seemed incredible to her that he was revealing the artist's secrets to her. She felt as though in the middle of a gripping drama one of the actors had turned to her, winked, and said: Don't worry, it's only a play. For a moment she thought it might have been a hidden brushstroke, but she could see from Gerardo's face that he was genuinely concerned. Concerned about her! The key is to yield. No doubt about it, he was referring to her reaction to Uhl: he was encouraging her to continue on the correct - or at least the safest - path. If you continue to yield the way you did yesterday afternoon, he was saying, Uhl will stop. Gerardo was not painting her: he was revealing secrets, the solution to the mysteries. He was the unfortunate friend who tells you the end of the film.

Clara felt as though he had deliberately tipped an inkpot over a sketch he had only just begun. Why on earth had he done it?

The poses continued all afternoon in complete silence. Uhl did not bother her again, but she had already forgotten him. She thought that Gerardo's slip was the worst mistake she had ever come across in her entire professional life: not even poor Gabi Ponce, who was not exactly subtle when it came to hyperdramatism, had been so crass. Even though she had suspected that Uhl's harassment was not for real, it was one thing to suspect it, another to
know
it for sure. With a single sweep of his brush, Gerardo had ruined the careful landscape of threats that Uhl and he had been painstakingly creating around her. Now any return to that make-believe was impossible: the hyperdramatism as such had disappeared. From now on there could only be theatre.

Later on, as she was going to bed, her anger subsided. She decided that Gerardo must be a novice. The refinements of pure hyperdramatism were obviously way beyond him. What most surprised her was that a painter like him had been given a position of such responsibility. Apprentices should not be allowed to sketch on originals, she thought. That should be reserved for experienced artists. Maybe all was not lost though. Perhaps Gerardo's clumsiness, the huge stain he had tipped over her, could be cleaned up thanks to Uhl's exquisite artwork. It could be that Uhl would find some way of increasing the pressure and making it part of the painting process again.

She was sure she would be frightened again. As she fell asleep, this was her last wish.

When she woke up, everything was still incredibly dark. She had no way of knowing what time it was, even whether it was still night-time or not, because before she had gone to sleep she had closed the house shutters. She guessed it must still be night, because she could not hear any birdsong. She drew her hand across her face, then turned over, confident she could get back to sleep.

She was about to do so when she noticed it.

She sat bolt upright on the mattress, terrified.

The distinct sound of floorboards creaking. In the living room. It had possibly been something similar that had awakened her. Footsteps.

She was all ears, listening. All her tiredness and aching muscles disappeared as if by magic. She could hardly breathe. She quickly tried a relaxation exercise, but it did not work.

There was
someone
in the living room, by God.

She swung her feet on to the floor. Her brain was a whirling maelstrom of thoughts.

'Hello?' she called out in a quaking, horrified voice.

She waited without moving for several minutes, ready to confront the dreadful possibility that the intruder might burst in at any moment and fling himself on her. The silence all around her made her think she might have been mistaken. But her imagination - that strange diamond, that polygon with a thousand faces - sent fleeting sensations of terror to her mind, tiny inventions like slivers of pure ice.
It's
the
man
facing
the
other
way:
he's stepped
out
of
the
photo
and
now
he's
coming
for
you.
But
he's
walking backwards.
You'll
see
him
walk
into
the
room
backwards,
heading straight
for
you,
guided
by
your
smell.
It's
your
father,
in
his
huge square
glasses,
coming
to
tell
you
that...'
She made a great effort to dismiss these recurring nightmares from her mind.

'Is there anybody there?' she heard herself say again.

She waited another prudent moment, her eyes fixed on the closed bedroom door. She remembered that all the light switches were in the hall. She had no way of lighting her room without leaving it and walking in the dark to the front wall. She did not have the courage to do it. Maybe it's a guard, she thought. But what was a security guard doing entering the farm at night and creeping about the living room?

The silence continued. Her heartbeats too. The silence and the heartbeats stubbornly measured their own rhythms. She decided she must have been wrong. There are many reasons wooden floorboards creak. In Alberca she had become accustomed to chance and its shocks: a sudden breeze bringing dead curtains back to life, the creaking sound of a rocking chair, a mirror suddenly disguised in darkness. All of this must be a false alarm raised by her weary brain. She could get up calmly, walk past the living room and switch the house lights on, just as she had done the night before.

She took a deep breath and put her hands on the mattress.

At that moment the door opened and her attacker swept into the room like a hurricane.

7

The New Atelier building in Amsterdam housed the headquarters of Art, Conservation and Security for Bruno van Tysch's Foundation in Europe. It was a rather outrageous building, combining Dutch cheerfulness and Calvinist sobriety, with white-framed windows and seventeenth-century-style gables. To give it a cosmopolitan feel, the architect P. Viengsen had added twin columns a la Brunelleschi to the facade. It was on Willemsparksweg Avenue, near the Vondelpark in the Museum District, where all the artistic jewels of the city are to be found: the Rijkmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, and the Stedelijk. The Atelier was eight storeys high, with three different blocks. Not unusual in Amsterdam, the entrance hall and first floor were below sea level. In his fifth-floor office, Bosch was probably safe from any threat of flood, although he didn't seem particularly aware of his good fortune.

His office - which included a V-shaped mahogany desk with four old-fashioned telephones on one end and three framed photographs on the other - looked out on to the Vondelpark. The photos were placed so that no one sitting opposite Bosch could see them.

The one closest to the wall was a portrait of his father Vincent Bosch. Vincent was a lawyer for a Dutch tobacco firm. The man in the portrait wore a moustache, had a penetrating gaze, and a huge head, which Lothar had inherited. He looked like a methodical, scrupulous character. The guiding maxim he tried to pass on to his children - achieve the best possible results with the means available - appeared to be chiselled into each and every one of his features. He would have been pleased with the results.

The photo in the middle was of Henrickje. She was pretty, with short blonde hair, a broad smile, and a certain horsiness about her jaw owing to over-prominent teeth. Bosch could vouch for the fact that her body was perfectly well proportioned: Hendrickje liked to show it off in attractive stripey dresses. She was twenty-nine, five years younger than Inspector Bosch, and was rich. They met at a party where an astrologer got them together because of their zodiac signs. Bosch was not attracted to her at first; they ended up getting married. The marriage worked perfectly. Hendrickje - tall, slender, wonderful, attractive, sterile (a problem diagnosed ten months after the wedding), ladylike and positive ('You have to think positively, Lothar', she used to tell him) enjoyed the privilege of having several lovers. Bosch, stubborn, serious, solitary, silent and conservative, only had Hendrickje, but felt that the mere fact of loving her did not mean he could hold her against her will, like the criminals he so detested. Respecting other people's wishes was part of the ideas of freedom that the young inspector had lived by during his troubled adolescence, when he was an
okupa
in a building on the Spui. It was almost perverse that the same Lothar Bosch who threw stones at the anti-riot squads from the Golfillo statue should a few years later join the city police. On the rare occasions when he still asks himself why he took that decision, he believes he can find the answer in the portrait of his father (back to him), and his sceptical Calvinist gaze. His father wanted him to study