Art of Murder (72 page)

He came over and pushed her hands away from her neck as gently as a lover.

A glass bee stung her throat. Then the dimensions of the room began to fade.

The first thing she saw when she came round was Krupka. He was staring at her from the floor, a horrified expression on his face. She understood she must also be on the floor, like him and like Rodino, who was flat on his back breathing heavily.

Her head hurt. And either the floor was extremely cold, or she was completely naked. The hard layers of her skin told her she was still painted. But she could not recall what she was doing there, under this surgery lamp, laid out like a patient awaiting the knife. Krupka and Rodino were also naked.

A pair of white shoes moved around her head. The shoes came and went, as if they had no fixed destination. At times, she could see a shadow looming over her. Krupka was staring upwards, his eyes dilated with terror. Rodino was groaning. Clara also tried looking up towards the ceiling, but the fluorescent lights blinded her.

'What are you doing?' she heard Krupka say. Or perhaps he had said: 'How are you?' Krupka's English (especially in circumstances like these) was hard to grasp.

Footsteps again. Clara lifted her head and saw the man coming over wielding that strange instrument. He bent over her, and grabbed a handful of her painted hair to force her head down. It hurt as it jerked back. She wanted to raise her arms or move, but felt too weak and dizzy. All at once she remembered who this young man was, with his plastic face staring down at her as blank as a white wall. His name was Matt, and he had told them he was going to repair them according to Van Tysch's instructions.

Matt brought the instrument close to her eyes. What was it? It looked like something typical of a dentist or barber.

Matt's fingers came to within two centimetres of her face, and the instrument started up. Clara could not help shrinking back. It was a kind of spinning disc that made a deafening whine. It set her teeth on edge, as though someone were dragging a metal table across a tiled floor towards her head.

She was scared. She should not have been, because all this was art, but she was. She screamed.

22.00.

Bosch listened to April Wood as he watched Postumo Baldi bending over the girl, canvas cutter in hand.

'Shouldn't we go in?' Wuyters shouted desperately.

A sober traffic policeman, Bosch held up all movement with an imperious wave of the hand, while he listened intently through his earpiece.

He was listening to April Wood. To the woman he most loved and respected in all the world. When she paused, he managed to get out a faint plea.

'April, I don't understand
...'

‘I
didn't understand either,' said April Wood,
'but
now I do. You ought to see it, Lothar. You ought to be here to see it
..
. It's called
Shade
and it's
...
it's a
very
beautiful painting
...
Van Tysch's
most beautiful and personal
work
...
It's a biographical self-portrait. Even the crossings out his father made on his drawings are here
...
You ought to see it, Lothar
...
My God, but you should see this!'

April, you should see this, thought Bosch. My God, April, but you should see this!

Jan Wuyters' face, scarlet with rage, fear and sweat, loomed in front of him.

'Mr Bosch, he's
cutting up
the girl!.. . What should we do?'

The room was soundproofed. Even so, Bosch could have sworn that the girl's screams, as sharp as the finest needles, were piercing the walls like ghosts and lodging themselves in his hearing. Her silent protest deafened him far more than Wuyters' horrified shouts or April Wood's frenzied commands.

'You're not a policeman any more, Lothar!' she had said before she hung up. 'You work for Art and for the Maestro. Tell your men to protect Baldi when he's finished, and to bring him to Edenburg safe and sound!'

After that, Bosch's headpiece gave off only an intermittent buzz.

What's there in that room are not cursed works of art, they're human beings
...
and that guy is slaughtering them! He's cutting them to pieces like cattle in an abattoir!
...
They're not works of art, they're not works of art! They never were! . . .

That was what he wanted to tell her, but she had already rung off. April Wood's silence was terrible, cruel. But what did that matter now? His whole life had been a miserable failure. He felt sick, overcome with nausea. He had never had what it takes. As if that were not enough, it was Van Tysch who had given him the only really important job he had ever had. His brother had done much better than him: Roland had known how to carve out a future for himself. Having a decent salary was one thing, but what about convictions
...
what had happened to his convictions?

Baldi had finished with the girl and stood up again (oh, pure virginal flame!). Now he was busy doing something on the table. Perhaps he was playing with money, because he seemed to be throwing away some coins and picking up others. No: he was changing the blade to cut up the next figure. There was no blood to be seen. What a pure, luminous creature. What perfection in every one of his features. What beauty. Beauty can be terrible. A German poet used to say so: Hendrickje liked to read him. Bosch did not read German poets or understand modern art, but nor did he blush when asked his opinion of a Ferrucioli, a Rayback or a Mavalaki. Shit, he might not be as cultured as Hendrickje, or as much as his father had wanted him to be. But he knew what beauty was.

Baldi was as beautiful as a snowy dawn in the outskirts. Bosch stared at Baldi. The painter was no longer looking at the girl. He did not want to see the work until it was finished.

They are not works of art. No human being is art. Art isn't human. Or perhaps it is. It doesn't matter what it is. What matters, what really matters is
...

He pulled off the phone headpiece and peered at it as if he had no idea what such a strange thing was doing there in the palm of his hand.

What really matters are people.

In the end, what else could he do? Stein had been the one who had made the mistake when he put his trust in such a mediocre individual as him. Van Tysch would never have taken him on. Bosch felt himself to be grotesque and vulgar, an overgrown child examining glass filigree with burlap gloves. He loathed his own vulgarity. Hendrickje had seen how vulgar he was. Maybe that was why he had always thought she detested him. Now April Wood detested him, too. It was strange how all these superior spirits could suddenly come to detest you. Contempt was a bolt the gods struck you with. How pityingly they smiled at you, how padently they looked on you! Hendrickje and April Wood, Van Tysch, Stein and Baldi, Roland, even Danielle: they all belonged to the superior race, the chosen ones, the race of those who
did
understand life and art and could decide the meaning of both. He was born to protect this race, them and their works, and he was not even any good at that.

He sighed deeply and gazed sadly at young Wuyters' despairing face.

'Put your weapon away, Jan. We're not going to intervene. That guy is working for Van Tysch. He's creating a work of art.'

‘I
don't understand,' Wuyters murmured, his white, drained face turned towards the interior of the room.

1 know, I don't either,' said Bosch. 'It's modern art.'

22.01.

Postumo Baldi, the Artist, was not a creator but a tool of creation, like the beings he was destroying. Some day it would be his turn, and he was ready for it. He was an empty bag which needed to be filled with things. It had always been like that. He tried to be better each day, to develop his perfection to fit in with the artist's desires. A blank sheet of paper, as the Maestro called him.

It had taken him a long time to reach this stage. Now all he had to do was to go on. Van Tysch's preparation had been exquisite: not a single mistake, everything perfect, everything gliding along gently. This was thanks to the painter, but also thanks to him. Van Tysch had laid his hand on him, and he (an extraordinary glove) had adapted to his ways. His mother had also been an extraordinary, if undervalued, canvas. Now he was reaching a summit she could never have dreamed of. In twenty-four thousand years, people would still be talking of Postumo Baldi and the absolutely perfect way he carried out the Maestro's instructions, of how he had become the Artist without really being him. For centuries they would speak of how he had carried out the obscure aims of the most important painter of all time. Because there is a moment when
work and painter become as one.

Jan van Obber had once told him he was very ambitious. Baldi was happy to admit it. Of course he was. An empty bag fills up with air, after all.

He had brought the whirling blade close to the girl's face neatly and precisely. She had screamed. They all screamed at this point. Postumo suffered with them, he was horrified, carried away by the brutal tidal wave of horror he himself was producing. Postumo was as smooth as the skin he cut to perfection in straight strips ('Don't forget,' Van Tysch had told him, 'four crosses and two parallel cuts. You must do it the same always'). He could understand the canvas' pain as it was cleaved to the core. The Maestro wanted the canvas to understand it, too, so Postumo tried to make sure the paintings were alive, and almost aware of what was going to happen to them, what was happening to them. This was not cruelty, it was art. And he was not a killer, but simply a sharpened pencil. He had killed and tortured according to very precise drawing instructions. He had suffered and wept together with the canvases. And if necessary, when the time came he too would submit to the terrible test of steel.

The girl with red-painted hair squinted desperately as Postumo brought the blade up to her face.

It was then he realised his mistake.

He had not chosen the right blade. He had decided to destroy the largest of the figures, the Second Elder, first of all, but then he had changed his mind and chosen to start with the female figure. But the canvas cutter he had was for the biggest body. If he cut the smaller one up with it, the face would be reduced to a mass of splinters. He did not want to crush it: he had been told the crosses had to stand out.

He let go of her hair, switched the blade off, and stood up. He went back to the table and chose the finest blade. He used different kinds, sometimes for each part of the body, depending on the bone structure. For the twins he had scarcely needed to change blades at all, but the young girl had been a nightmare, because she had such a tiny, almost ethereal, anatomy. He tried not to remember all the different changes of blade he had needed to cut up
Deflowering,
all the interruptions with the girl's body half destroyed, the blood gleaming as it spouted from a still-beating heart. His task might have been simpler if he had used several different canvas cutters, but he could not risk carrying so many objects on him. His work was meticulous; he was forced to go slowly.

He found the blade he needed. It was next to the digital video camera he had taken out of his oilskin bag to use to film the results of his work. Behind his back, the canvases seemed finally to have gone to sleep. That was no problem: they would wake up with the first cut.

He unscrewed the thick blade from the metal handle and threw it on the table. He snapped in the fine one. He switched the cutter on to test it.

Then he turned round and walked towards the girl once more.

22.02.

She was about to cross it. The looking glass. At last.

She had approached its smooth, chill surface and discovered this iceberg world fascinated her. She was frightened, of course, frightened to open the door into a closed room, to penetrate the darkness. The fear of a small girl: a feeling that was unpleasant but tempting, the sweet hidden in the witch's gingerbread house. Come and get it, Clara. And she would walk in and take the sweet, whatever happened. She would do anything to get the deserved, the terrible reward.

'Look at yourself in the mirror
’
the painter ordered her. His eyes were colourless, the rest of him endless white. 'Look at yourself in the mirror
’
he repeated.

A moment earlier, Matt had let her go, but now he grasped her hair again and brought that strange whirling, deafening object up close to her face.

She knew that
the thing
she was about to see, that she was on the verge of seeing, was
the horrible.
The finishing touch to her body in the art work that was her life. Let's do it, she told herself. Let's do it. Be brave. What else was
real
art, what else was a masterpiece, if not the profound result of passion and courage?