From Black Rooms (3 page)

The last one, a skinny black man named Ezra, survived long enough to pursue Wax into the corridor. The

doctor stumbled and crawled across the hal ,

hyperventilating as the dying man threatened to topple on him. When Ezra slumped halfway through the door instead, Bartholomew Wax sprang up and reloaded his gun, swapping the vials as if changing the clip in an automatic weapon. Then he cast a sheepish glance to his right.

The corporal from the front desk stood only a couple of yards away, her .45 pistol drawn and aimed at his head. She wasn't smiling.

A tal , stocky man in a navy-blue suit stood beside her. Silver threads filigreed his dark hair and thick black eyebrows, and the furrows in his face gave him a

fatherly beneficence.

He tipped his head in greeting. "Dr. Wax."

"Mr. Pancrit." The title was a deliberate slight. Wax knew that Carl Pancrit was a doctor, too, in the

technical if not the ethical sense. "I didn't expect to see you here at this hour."

"Obviously not," his col eague observed, nodding toward the man sprawled in the doorway. "But I've been expecting you. For some time now, I've suspected that your heart isn't quite in this project." Wax tightened his finger on the vaccine gun's trigger.

"Take a look around you, Carl. The experiment is a failure."

"Not if it prompts further research. Yet you haven't submitted a new proposal in months, and that makes me think you're holding out on us. You wouldn't do that, would you, Barty?"

Pancrit advanced, arms spread as if to embrace him in a paternal hug, but Wax swung the gun toward him. "I'm done, Carl."

The corporal cocked her pistol.

Pancrit raised his hands to placate both of them.

"Please! Let's be sensible about this." He motioned for the soldier to lower her weapon, then gave Wax a

sympathetic look. "I can't blame you for putting the poor devils out of their misery. I would have done the same thing myself--"

"I'm sure you would have." Wax kept the vaccine gun level with Pancrit's chest.

"--but you stil owe us for those pictures of yours. We went to a lot of trouble to get them for you. Do you want us to send 'em right back where they came from?" Wax gave a wan smile. "That won't be necessary." He drove the needle of his gun into his own carotid artery and pul ed the trigger.

As he crumpled to the floor, the corporal rushed

forward, brandishing her pistol in case Wax was

playing some kind of trick.

He wasn't.

Carl Pancrit sighed as he watched Bartholomew Wax twitch in his death throes. "Don't think you can get away from me that easily," he muttered.

2

A Slave to the Masters

FEELING A STAB OF ENVY WHEN she arrived at

Hector Espinoza's house in Laguna Beach. Working in the Corps's Art Division had made Hector rich enough to buy this white Art Deco palace by the sea, while she and her daughter and father al had to squeeze into a two-bedroom condo in Ful erton.

Just be glad he's willing to see you, she reminded
herself as she saw the sign beside the front door's buzzer. DO NOT DISTURB! it shouted. MEETINGS

BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

Natalie had phoned to arrange such a meeting a week ago, but when she pressed the buzzer button three times without a response, she began to wonder if Hector had changed his mind.

Final y, a heavy Latino man in a baggy black tank top and board shorts opened the door. His tattooed scalp had been shaved more cleanly than his face, and his violet eyes were bleary and red as he scratched crumbs of sleep dust from their corners. "Yeah?" He apparently wasn't awake enough to recognize her in the black pageboy wig and green contacts she wore to evade the Corps Security agents who tailed her. Natalie, too, kept her head shaved, for some of her fussier clients insisted upon having a SoulScan confirm that she actual y summoned the dead artists she claimed to work with.

"It's me, Hector," she prompted.

"Boo? Holy crap, is it noon already?"

"Quarter-past, actual y. I'm fashionably late."

"Sorry...I spaced." He stood to one side and waved her forward. "Come on in. And pardon the freakin' mess." He led her through several rooms that managed to look both cluttered and barren at the same time. The dining room contained a card table covered with unopened mail and one metal folding chair. The den had a flatpanel plasma TV, a black leather couch, and a shelf unit stuffed with art books, sketchbooks, and files of loose papers and drawings. Stacked pizza boxes and bal ed-up burger wrappers littered the hardwood floors, and empty beer bottles lay scattered like bowling pins. That was al the furnishing Hector had use for--indeed, al he had room for. The rest of the house he surrendered to the paintings.

Finished canvases leaned against the wal s and armrests of the sofa, some stacked five-deep with sheets of cardboard in between. Works in progress rested on easels erected with the careless arrangement of highway roadwork signs: here a Monet, the vibrant purples and reds of its water lilies stil sticky and shiny with damp paint; there a crucifixion by Raphael, awaiting its fifth glazing. The styles ranged from the dark Baroque

palette of Velazquez to the drop-cloth paint spatter of Jackson Pol ock's Abstract Expressionism. The place might have been a warehouse for the world's great museums, yet only one artist's work actual y hung on the plain white wal s--Hector's.

"These some of your latest?" Natalie recognized his signature style: spray-painted scenes of L.A. urban life with the exaggerated cartoon figures of graffiti art. "I like them."

He shrugged. "Eh! I thought, hel , if no one else wants

'em, I'l put 'em up myself."

His offhand tone couldn't quite disguise his bitterness. Natalie knew that serving as a Violet in the Corps's Art Division was rather like being the lead singer in a cover band. The audience didn't care about your originals, only other people's hits.

"Hope you won't mind if I help myself to some breakfast," Hector said as they entered the kitchen. Teetering piles of dirty dishes shared counter space with jars of paintbrushes that bathed in blackened fluid while waiting to be cleaned. The heavy, refried-bean scent of microwaved burritos mel owed the sharp odors of

turpentine and stale Heineken that saturated the air. Hector snatched a bottle opener from among the chaos and took a beer from the fridge. "How about it, Boo?

Want to join me?"

"No. And I told you not to cal me that," she said, referring to her old nickname. When she was a kid, al the Violets who went to the Iris Semple Conduit

Academy with her cal ed her "Boo," since everything seemed to scare her. She stil displayed a

hypochondriac's concern for her health, which was why she didn't drink alcohol--a fact Hector knew wel .

"Suit yourself." He popped the cap off the bottle with a grin and sucked up the geyser of foam that gushed from it.

"I thought you gave up drinking."

"I did."

He downed half the beer in the time it took for them to climb the stairs to his studio. As always, Natalie suppressed a sigh when she saw the size of the room, with its enormous picture windows providing a

panoramic view overlooking the stippled waves of the Pacific Ocean. She usual y had to paint on her condo's narrow balcony, or sometimes in the kitchen.

Stil more paintings crowded the studio, most of them barely beyond the pencil-sketch stage. Beside one easel, a tal wooden bar stool supported a stained palette and an assortment of what looked like multicolored

toothpaste tubes, which had been gnarled and kneaded and rol ed up to squeeze the last gob of oil paint from them. A Soul Leash dangled from a nail driven into one leg of the stool. Worn like a pair of stereo headphones, it served the same emergency function as the Panic Button on a SoulScan device. If the inhabiting soul attempted to take the Violet's body out of the room, the Leash would deliver an electric shock to the brain, thereby driving out the electromagnetic spirit and restoring control to the Violet. A conduit like Hector who worked alone with unpredictable souls could not afford to take chances.

On the ledge of the easel, a pair of thick, round-rimmed eyeglasses rested against the nearly blank canvas. Natalie recognized those glasses from the last time she had come to ask Hector for a favor. They had once belonged to Claude Monet, who near the end of his life had worn them to compensate for the cataracts that progressively dimmed the vision that had once helped to begin the Impressionist movement.

A glass-fronted cabinet opposite the picture windows contained an eclectic assortment of such memento mori. Touchstones--personal effects of the deceased that stil bore a quantum link to the electromagnetic energy of their souls. Keys that could unlock the afterlife and summon the dead from the black rooms that confined them. Natalie knew a few of these items. A pathetic, yel owed letter from Vincent van Gogh to his brother, Theo, begging for more money. A plaster bust of

Caligula from the personal col ection of Rembrandt van Rijn, who had to sel it along with most of his other possessions when he declared bankruptcy in 1656. The Corps had used three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old

auction records to track down the sculpture. There were at least two dozen other antiques in the case as wel , but Natalie could only guess at the identities of the artists who had once possessed them.

Although the NAACC could have arranged for a Corps Violet like Hector to use a dead artist's painting as a touchstone, the government general y favored using more mundane objects. Picasso's shaving brush was a lot easier to obtain and transport than Guernica. Since Natalie did not have the luxury of access to either the artists' masterpieces or their toiletry gear, she had to rely on her connection with Hector. A decade older than she, he had been like a big brother to her back in their days at the School.

Hector squatted beside the glass case, scanning the contents as if selecting a doughnut from a bakery display. "So you real y want to mess with the crazy Norwegian, eh?"

"It's what the client asked for." Natalie crossed her arms in a manner she hoped was nonchalant rather than defensive. "Ever since The Scream disappeared, Munch's become trendy."

Hector chuckled. "Yeah, that's the way it goes. Any artist worth stealing is worth owning. You and me, we couldn't pay thieves to take our stuff."

The remark nettled her, mainly because it was true. She'd offered her original work for sale in several of the local coffeehouses at prices less than what most

col ectors paid for prints. Nothing.

Hector swigged more beer. "I just hope you know what you're getting into."

"I summoned Vincent without shooting myself in a wheat field," she pointed out.

"Munch's different. He's got...issues with women." Natalie bristled. "Gender mismatch" had been the primary reason the Corps cited when it denied her application to the NAACC's Art Division. According to some of the Corps's psychologists, deceased artists who inhabited a Violet of the opposite gender might find the experience too jarring, making them uncooperative. Since most of the artists in demand happened to be Dead White Guys, the Corps told Natalie, male Violets were more suited for the job. They had no problem, however, with al owing her late friend Lucy Kamei to work with Mozart and Beethoven, so Natalie suspected the rationale was merely the Corps's excuse for

shunting her into the Crime unit, where they were short on conduits.

"I can handle Munch," she muttered.

"Yeah...that's what I thought." Hector's lips moved as he opened one of the case's glass doors, and Natalie knew that he was already reciting his protective mantra. That way, the soul couldn't knock when he made

contact with the touchstone.

"I have to do this," she said, as if he'd asked for a reason. "I have a family to support."

"I know. I wouldn't have let you come otherwise." Nudging aside a couple of objects on one shelf, he took a scuffed, spattered paintbrush with coarse bristles from the cabinet. Hector twirled it around his fingers like a baton before offering it to Natalie handle-first. "Bring it back when you're done."

Natalie hesitated. Before taking the brush, she began repeating her own protective mantra in her mind: The
Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to
lie down in green pastures...

"Sure you don't want a beer, Boo? If you're hanging with Munch, you might need it." Hector downed the dregs from his bottle. "I did."

She avoided the unblinking gravity of his gaze.

"Thanks, but no thanks."

...He leadeth me beside the stil waters, she continued, until she had placed the brush deep within her canvas tote bag.

As she drove back home to Ful erton, Natalie's selfconfidence slid into uncertainty. Although she hadn't dared to admit as much to Hector, she actual y shared his misgivings about working with Edvard Munch. The Norwegian real y was crazy--an agoraphobic subject to paralyzing panic attacks and nervous breakdowns-and he real y did have issues with women. Handsome yet shy and morbidly sensitive during his youth, he endured a string of disastrous affairs, as duplicitous beauties seduced and manipulated him. One of his

lovers, Tul a Larsen, threatened to shoot herself to keep Munch from leaving her. When he tried to wrest the pistol from her, the gun fired, taking off the tip of Munch's left middle finger.

He depicted another paramour, the statuesque violinist Eva Mudocci, as Salome, smiling in satisfaction as she posed with a likeness of the artist's severed head. Given such a history, it was not surprising that in Vampire Munch painted a man curled in fetal helplessness upon a woman's lap while she pressed her mouth to his neck, either kissing or feeding, as her long red hair drizzled over him like stolen blood.

How would a man who portrayed females as carnal,

castrating creatures--vixens and murderesses--feel about inhabiting one of the very beings he so mistrusted and feared? Natalie had no way of knowing. She would have to rely on the psychological skil s she'd developed during her years of summoning murder victims for the NAACC in order to keep Edvard Munch calm,