Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5) (6 page)

“Graz?”
      

“A city of a quarter of a million, some ninety miles south of Vienna. It’s the closest hub to Beckmeier’s estate.”

“I loved Vienna. I never got to Graz.”

“Now is your chance. You will land at the Graz airport and be met by a limousine. Other instructions will follow. You’ll be back here in three days from the time you take off.”

“All right. That all makes sense, I suppose. But tell me, Michael: what pleasure do people get in hording stolen paintings?”

“I have no idea. I’m not an expert in the human soul. I am an expert in moving paintings.
 
 
“

“What paintings are we talking about?”

“Rembrandt: Portrait of a Rabbi; El Greco: Mary Magdalen Before Christ on the Cross; Bruegel: Harvest; Van Gogh: Portrait du Docteur Gachet––the list goes on.
 

“But I have to keep asking: why me?”

“Because when I ask you to fly to Paris and rent an apartment in the Seventh, I don’t want some stupid American asking me if I’m talking about baseball innings. And if I ask you to fly to Hannover and, for two months, disappear, I want to know that you will fly to Hannover and disappear.”

She got up from the table, walked into the apartment for no particular reason, went from one nondescript and randomly placed piece of furniture to another for a time, and then returned.

“What’s the downside?”

Michael paused for a time, then said:

“The Jewish families want these paintings back. If they find out you’re carrying them…”

“What? What will happen to me?”

“You will simply disappear. No one will ever hear from you again.”

She took a deep breath:

“That’s a pretty significant downside. And what about the police?”

He shook his head:

“That is not a worry. The police will not bother you. Look at yourself: who in Interpol is going to say, ‘There’s an art thief.’”
 

Then he leaned forward:

“Now I need to leave. It’s almost nine o’clock. I have an appointment. Will you think about my offer?”

“I don’t know, Michael…”

“Just think about it.”

“I don’t think I could do this kind of thing. It’s just that, I have an elderly father back in Georgia. He’s very ill, and our farm…”

“You need money.”

“Yes. But Papa is such a traditionalist. He’s always been so proud of me…”

“I’m not surprised by that.”

“Before I left for the great city of Chicago, he just kind of waved his hand out the window and said, “Carol, Carol…beyond the peaks. Beyond the peaks…”

“So now you get the chance to go beyond the peaks.”

“I’m not sure this is what he’d have had in mind.”

“You have to decide. And you need to decide soon.”

He finished dressing and walked toward the door, then looked back over his shoulder:

“By the way, you should wait half an hour or so and then leave. The guy who lives here will probably be home around ten.”

“Who lives here?”

He smiled, cupped his hand around her neck, pulled her face gently to him, kissed her, and said:

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

CHAPTER FOUR:
 
AND THE FLOWERS BEGAN TO DANCE!

The salon in Bay St. Lucy’s Auberge des Arts was finally ready.

It had taken Margot Gavin, working in conjunction with Alanna Delafosse and Nina Bannister, two full days to prepare it properly.

And now young Carol Walker, standing inconspicuously by, in a corner of the room, looking, in her big black-rimmed glasses, like little more than a naïve school girl, was going to supply…

…what?

“You will not believe her presentations, Nina,” Margot had said repeatedly.

That, and not much more.

Just that, because with her knowledge of computer technology and audio visual capability, she had astonished the passers-through the Chicago Art Museum,
 
establishing, even after just a few months of residency there, a new standard in the ability to make art works come alive.

“A lot of people,” Margot had continued, “know about holographs, and the way to create visual worlds, to put people inside planes and tunnels and walls that don’t really exist. But these people are mostly engineers and scientists. Carol is an art lover. How she learned this stuff, I don’t know. But she did.”

Which was, Nina realized, glancing at her watch, about to begin.

She caught a glimpse of Margot, who was scurrying here and there, and who had just enough time to return a smile.

And she looked at Carol again.

Silent Carol Walker, standing straight in her corner, the only grown woman whom Nina could remember seeing who looked mousier than she herself looked, and who had even shorter brown hair—and, for that matter––a shorter body.

There––she did glance up, and around the room.

It was not a circular room, so it could not approximate the Jeu de Palme in Paris where the real Gardens sat silently, working their magic.

But, otherwise, it was a room of similar size.

Several clocks scattered around the Auberge began chiming, sonorously.

Eight PM.

 
Carol Walker moved to the small podium that had been set up against the far wall of the room.

People in the front row—somehow Alanna had been able, at very short notice, to attract a select group of art lovers, many of them French, from as far away as New Orleans––smiled at her, nodding occasionally. There were undercurrents of whispers. Nina could hear a few phrases of English, but mostly French, the long, guttural
uuuuuuhhhhh
that seemed to separate every three or four words, as though only in this language was space built in for thought. The women, most in their forties or fifties, were stylishly outfitted, but the men were dressed as European men always were when they came to the United States: they wore shorts and sandals, as though they were on safari in a third world nation.

And so, it was time.

Carol touched the first switch on a computer stand that had been set up beside the podium. Lights began to dim in the room.

Second switch: sound. Debussy from a first well hidden speaker, then a second, then a third. Quiet, elegant, clean and dreamlike Debussy, now filling the spaces between the paintings, breathing through the room.

The third switch created the hologram: there was a single gasp as silver light engulfed the island of people seated in its midst, and the fences, walls, paths leading to the Gardens of Giverney all opened and moved around them. Then Monet himself, his beard, his eyes, smiling, almost moving about through his rooms, his brushes…

….finally, all of the images in the room engulfing them, all of the holograph, all of the powers of the monitors and computer programs and encoded mathematical impersonal scientific technical amalgams stored like nuclear beauty pent up before them…all of these things exploded in color…

…and the flowers began to dance!

“Ah, mon Dieu!”

“Mon dieu, mon dieu!”

The gardens, the gardens, moved in sequence, orbiting around them. Everywhere there was light. Splendid light. Light as Monet must have seen it, clearly had rendered it. But he had rendered it condensed, captured with frames; now it gloried out as it must have existed in his own head, filling the room that now represented his brain, overwashing the walls and wires and doorways that disappeared before its heat and intensity and magnificence…the light of Monet’s mind, brush––the light of Monet’s magnificent Gardens.

The gasp continued as the flowers appeared, darkened, emerged, budded, sang around them.

Then Carol began to recite:

Laforgue:

“Au-desssus des etangs, au-dessus des vallees,

Des montagnes des bois, des nuages, des mers,

Par dela le soleil, par dela les ethers,

Par dela les confines des spheres etoilees…”

(Above the brooks, the valleys,

The mountains of trees, the clouds, the seas…

Beyond the sun, beyond the firmament,

Beyond the confines of starry spheres…)

The words were
known
, Nina realized immediately, rather than memorized, because Laforgue could not be memorized but simply had to appear, as the light did. Nina could never understand how people memorized poetry. Memorizing a poem violated it, hardened it, took from it its passion and birth.

No, it was clear that Carol Walker loved this poem and thus knew it, in precisely the same way she loved and knew the pictures radiating around her.

“La Nature et un temple ou de vivants piliers

Laissant parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

L’homme y passé a travers de forets de symbols

Qui l’observent vec des regard familiers.”

(Nature is a temple where living pillars

Let, from time to time, confused words escape,

Men pass from time to time through the forest of symbols,

Observing them with familiar indifference.)

Nina could only watch, only listen, fascinated.

The person at the podium was not herself while reading these lines…this was not her voice, her consciousness. She had become someone else, as, probably, all great artists do from time to time. But that did not matter. Important was only that the lines be read perfectly, with the same somnolence and meter that the works themselves…that the light itself and the mirroring images, the blues and aquiline grays…demanded. The light changed; it obscured, focused, contracted, limiting itself in frame to one painting,
The Waterlilly Pond
, with the marvelous bridge overspanning it; the crowd turned slightly to see that the picture itself hung directly behind them––but then they forgot about the thing within the frame as the water and flowers and arc exploded outward around them and a new light flooded through the room drawing from their collective sense of wonder even more gasps, more repetitions of:

“Mon dieu––mon dieu…”

The Waterlilly Pond was not behind them in a box; it surrounded them. They all, under the spells of Lamartine, de Muset, Cambriole, Debussy—and of course Monet––became part of a new world that the computer had allowed them to fuse into.

And then it ended.

The last thing needing saying was said.

Carol turned off the computer.

The actual world, white and noisy and
 
bare-floored and useless, returned.

For a moment there was silence…

…and then the crowd engulfed her. English, French…it all flowed over her:

“It was so beautiful!”

“How did you do it?”

“C’etait merveilleuse! Vraiment merveilleuse!”

“What––what was it, how did you make the light be so––so…all over!”

“Your French is so wonderful Are you born in Paris? Where did you learn this?”

“When will it be again? Does it happen for all paintings?

“When will you do this again?”

And on and on.

Nina could only stand, fascinated, at the back of the crowd, while this young woman answered question after question, all with perfect aplomb.

Until finally there was Margot standing nearby, bending, whispering harshly:

“Nina, we’ve got to get her out of here; she’ll collapse with exhaustion.”

“She seems,” answered Nina, “to be doing all right.”

Margot shook her head:

“Yes, but that has to be exhausting. Let’s spirit her away on some excuse of other. We’ll depend on Alanna to take over hostess duties, and we’ll go…I don’t know, maybe to a restaurant or something. Maybe to Elementals.”

“No, let’s go to my place.”

“You’re certain?”

“Sure I am. Carol’s a painter. She’ll love sitting out on my deck and looking out at the ocean by night.”

Margot nodded:

“You may be right.”

And so the matter was decided.

And within half an hour, the three of them––Margot, Nina, and Carol––were, in fact, sitting ensconced above the incoming tide, a half moon glowing above them, cold Chardonnay simmering in three glasses in front of them, and Carol speaking of the water in the same amazed tones that the crowd had been speaking of her presentation only a short time before.

“How long have you had the place, Nina?”

“Several years now. Ever since my husband passed.”

“My God, how I envy you! I have a little efficiency apartment near the Montrose stop on the Brown Line. It’s all right, but, when I look out my one barred window, I see streetcars. You see this. I can’t imagine why you’re not constantly painting portraits of it.”

“Well, in fact I…”

“Ummm,” interrupted Margot.

There was an uncomfortable silence for a time, then the crashing of a particularly large wave, then Nina:

“I’m probably better as an English teacher than a painter.”

This led Margot, who obviously wished to speak of Nina’s painting skills as little as possible, to say:

“But we want to hear more about you, Carol. Some friends called me two weeks ago to tell me about the multi media grant. How much is it, exactly?”

Carol sipped her wine and said quietly:

“It’s a quarter of a million dollars.”

“My God. And how are you planning on using it?”

“I don’t think that decision has been made yet.”

“Well, I’d assume some of it will go to pay you a much higher salary than you’re getting as a docent.”

“My salary is going to change, that’s true.”

“Are you getting a new title? You won’t be a docent anymore, I assume.”

“You’re right again. No more docent.”

“Nina, when Rebecca Simpson first interviewed Carol for the job, she asked her how much she’d expect to earn, and Carol answered…”

“I’m fired, Margot.”