Gods and Pawns (27 page)

“Jan Vermeer,” said the woman, quietly, but the kameramen Heard her.

“So! Wasn’t it really amazing about your ancestors having all these in some castle or something? And nobody knew? It sure was different back then!”

“Yes, it was,” Van Drouten agreed.

“Think maybe Jim was a friend of your family? Maybe hiding from Hitler?”

“No,” Van Drouten explained, “You’re getting your history mixed up, my dear. Jan Vermeer and Hitler lived two centuries apart.”

“Wow! That is
so
much old stuff!” Calvin winked knowingly at the kameramen. He sang a snatch of that week’s popular tune: “Can’t get it into my
pooor little heaaad
! Pretty but dumb, folks, what can I tell you? Here’s another look at the paintings on auction today!”

The kameramen relaxed, turning away as the prerecorded montage of paintings ran. Calvin Sharpey dropped his flashy smile and shouted for a glass of water, ignoring Van Drouten, who remained on her mark. She merely adjusted the drape of the gray gown that had been cut to make her look as dull as possible, a nonentity the audience would forget thirty seconds after her interview had ended, especially when contrasted with Calvin Sharpey’s rhinestones.

Now the montage was ending, to judge from the way the kameramen stiffened and swung their blank avid faces back to center stage. Immediately
on
again, Calvin Sharpey grabbed the pasteboard sheet his PA handed him. He held it up—it was a color print of the
Girl with Pearl Earring
, with the face cut away to an oval hole—and thrust his face through, mugging as the kameramen focused on him again.

“Welcome baa—aack!” he said. “It’s Calvin Sharpey! Weren’t those paintings really something?”

In a high, dark, and distant room, someone stopped pacing and regarded the floating image of Calvin Sharpey’s magnified smirk.

“Fire that dumb son of a bitch,” said a cold soft voice.

“Right away, Mr. Hearst,” said somebody else, running to a communications console, and, five minutes later on the other side of the globe, Van Drouten watched with interest as Calvin Sharpey was hustled off between two men in gray suits, protesting loudly, but the kameramen had done with him, and with her, too; they were turning away, closing like glassy-eyed wolves to See the media event of the year: the auction of the lost Vermeers.

Unnecessary now, Van Drouten faded into the sidelines, unnoticed behind the kameramen and the security forces. To be perfectly honest, she had no mystic powers of invisibility whatsoever: just fifteen centuries’ worth of experience at letting mortals see only what she intended them to see. Liz Van Drouten had been an interesting role, but there wasn’t much left of her. Two or three publicity shots, perhaps, before she could drop from sight, and a brief post-auction interview, when she would mention that she had decided to donate to charity whatever fabulous sum the auction had raised.

This was a lie, of course. All the proceeds were going straight into the coffers of her masters in the Company, and seven centuries of careful planning would pay off at last. But the words
charity
and
donation
tended to deflect an audience’s interest.

Van Drouten sighed, looking out over the faces of the crowd that waited to bid. Some watched the podium with fixed stares, willing the clock to speed up; some whispered together behind their bidding fans, or peered around at the competition to assess them. To a man and woman, they might have stepped out of one of Daumier’s engravings, might have been models for Rapacity personified, Desire, Obsession, whole-hearted Need. Van Drouten thought they were sad, and rather endearing. But then, she had always liked mortals and their passions.

There were so few passions left in this day and age.

So she savored the murmur that ran through the crowd, the audible pounding of seventy mortal hearts, the hissed or caught breath as the auctioneer stepped up to the podium at last. Intent as lovers, the kameramen dove close, Saw his rising hammer and Heard him as he drew breath and said: “Ladies and gentlemen! May I draw your attention to Item Number One?”

And it lit on the black screen behind him, the projected image of Vermeer’s
Girl with Peeled Apple.
Van Drouten smiled involuntarily: there was young Maria again, greeting her across the dead centuries.

“Jan Vermeer’s original oil on canvas, signed, circa 1668. Includes all rights of reproduction worldwide. Bidding starts at one million pounds, ladies and gentlemen, one million—”

Before he could even repeat the phrase, bidding fans had sprung up like flat flowers in a garden of greed.

The Path to the Tomb, 1673

“See?”
Mevrouw
Van Drouten was telling him gleefully, pointing to the easel. “You don’t even have to think anymore. All you have to do is paint them in!”

He tried to reply but the words stuck in his dry mouth. He could only moan in horror at the line of little gray canvases stretching to the horizon, as many as the days of his life; and they were numbered. He couldn’t breathe.

“See?”
Mevrouw
Van Drouten put a brush in his hand, a housepainter’s brush of all things. “All the spaces marked with a One you paint in blue. All the spaces marked with a Two, you paint in yellow. What could be easier? And look, here, the paint is already mixed for you. But you have to crank them out quickly, or you’ll lose the light!”

And with revulsion he felt himself drawn to the canvases, because she was right: he only had so much time before he lost the light. He slapped on the thin color over the meaningless black-and-white images, and
Mevrouw
Van Drouten watched, grinning, but looked constantly over at the clock, the enormous clock, saying: “Not much time. Not much time,” but somehow he could never paint fast enough, and meanwhile the house was getting shabbier and more bare, the children thinner, his cough was getting worse, and Catharina was staring at him, crying, “Soup!”

“…nice soup the lady next door sent, won’t you even try?”

“I don’t have time, I’ll lose the light!” he told her, but she slipped the spoon into his mouth and he realized with a start that he was in bed. Catharina was leaning over him, looking sadly into his eyes. She gave him another spoonful of soup and felt his forehead, felt his stubbled cheeks. Her palm was cool.

“The fever broke, anyway. Did you think you were painting again?” she asked, and gave him another spoonful of soup before he could reply.

“Has she been here?” he demanded, wheezing.

“Who?”

“
Mevrouw
Van Drouten!”

“No, she hasn’t. Don’t worry, Jan. We can get by the next month or two, if we don’t see her.”

He lay still a moment, thinking that over, as she fed him soup. “You sold some of the stock,” he guessed, noting the bare places on the walls. “You found another buyer!”

She smiled at him, and rubbed her eyes with her free hand. With the light full on her face, as it was, he was struck by how much silver was in her hair, and felt a pang at what she’d endured with him. And still another baby on the way, Jesus God…If only they hadn’t loved each other.

“A gentleman came to see your stuff,” Catharina told him, determinedly cheerful. “I explained we didn’t have anything of yours for sale right now, you know, I played up how fast your stuff sells, and I think I’ve almost got him talked into commissioning something. And he did buy a couple of the old canvases. So, you see? You don’t have to depend on the little witch paintings. You’re good enough to paint your own work, too.”

“As long as it sells.”

“It’ll sell, my heart.”

He pushed himself up on the pillows, took the soup from her in his shaky hands, and tilted the bowl to drink. Handing it back to her, he gasped: “If I can talk him into an allegory—say a nice big canvas, maybe three or four figures on it, eh, that we can get a good price for? Maybe a heroic theme!—Lord God, if only I can stretch my muscles for a little with some reds and violets, won’t that be something?”

“I had an idea about going to the priests, too,” Catharina told him seriously. “They’ve got the money for paintings, and they know what’s good.”

“That’s right, they do.” He turned and considered his studio. “Can we afford a good sized canvas? Or even paper and charcoal. I’ll get ideas, Catsi, I want to be able to block out a study.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and bent to kiss him. “You sleep some more, now. Think about your allegory. We’ll manage this somehow.”

Jan lay still listening to her descend the stairs, and tried to close his eyes and sleep again; but the light in the room was too strong. He looked at the beautifully empty spots where the old paintings had been, and his eye filled them with new canvases. Should he rework
Diana and Her Nymphs?
With each figure in a different-colored gown, pink, green, purple! Or something else classical, one of the Muses maybe? Pull out all the stops, lots of little emblematic detail, a painting the viewer could mull over for hours! Or a religious one the priests would be sure to like, yes, say a risen Christ with a robe scarlet as the blood of martyrs…

He glanced over at the cabinet resentfully, the black void that had swallowed up so much of his strength, so much of his time. What a devil’s bargain! And what a paradox, to spend his days in darkness to preserve the light.

When the idea hit him, it seemed to shake him physically, it was so powerful. He gaped at the blank wall, seeing the allegory there in all its detail. It wasn’t
Diana and Her Nymphs
he’d rework, no. Another allegory entirely. It would be his revenge.

Sliding his skinny legs from under the blanket, he staggered upright and found a stick of charcoal. He lurched across the room and braced himself at the wall, blocking in the cartoon in a few quick swipes on the plaster, just far enough to see that his initial instinct for the composition had been correct. The charcoal dust was making him choke; but everything made him choke these days. Dropping the charcoal, he wiped his hands on his nightshirt and looked around for his breeches. This couldn’t wait. He needed pen and ink.

Van Drouten walked through the echoing rooms of the old house in the Herengracht, which had been her home for nearly a thousand years. She had run the Company operation out of it, in one mortal disguise or other, since 1434, and every room was furnished with memories.

Here was the parlor where Spinoza had embraced her, before leaving for Rijnsburg; in this chamber, she still had the chair in which Rembrandt had sat when he’d come to supper. Upstairs was the bed in which Casanova, nasty fellow, had romped with her mortal maid. The kitchen had long since been modernized, but still around the baseboard ran the painted tiles at which Van Gogh had stared unseeing, gaunt young man with such good intentions, while he’d wolfed down the hot meal she’d offered him along with advice: that he might serve God best by painting His light.

And here was the broom closet hiding the so-narrow passage leading up to the attic rooms where she’d sheltered so many Jewish children from the Nazis, too many to count as they’d been smuggled through, but she could still summon each little frightened face before her mind’s eye.

It was a quiet house, now, in this last age of the world, and her work was nearly over. There were only a handful of Company operatives left on duty in Amsterdam, where once they had come and gone like bees in a hive. Van Drouten sighed as she climbed the stair to her room. She had always liked a noisy house. She liked life. Some immortals grew weary and sick of humanity after a few millennia, but she never had.

Her private quarters, at least, were still comfortable and cluttered. She edged past centuries’ worth of souvenirs on her way to the clothes closet, where she slipped out of her gray gown. This time she remembered to take off the little cloisonné pin before she hung it up, the emblem of a clock face without hands, and when she had slipped into denim coveralls she refastened it on the front pocket.

The pin was not a favorite piece of jewelry. Its supposed intent was to honor those who had the job of traveling through time, effectively defeating time’s ravages; that was why the clock had no hands. Company policy, however, had recently tightened to require all operatives of her class to wear the badge at all times, to enable them to be readily identified by Company security techs on Company property.

Van Drouten avoided her own gaze in the mirror, steadfastly refusing to think as she made certain the pin was securely fastened and visible. There were just things you couldn’t think about. Hadn’t that always been so? The brevity of mortal life, for example. You had to keep yourself distracted from the sad things. You had to have an escape.

She glimpsed over her shoulder the painting in its alcove, and turned to regard it with a certain pleasurable nostalgia. It had cost her a lot, good hard cash out of her own household budget, because the Company had abandoned Vermeer once they’d got what they wanted; but she had never been sorry she’d spent the money. The picture gave her an escape, always. For a little while.

The Empty Room, 1675

Catharina, red-eyed with weeping and a little drunk, had looked up at her as she’d stepped into the chilly parlor.

“You’re out of luck, my dear,” she’d told Van Drouten. “No more paintings for your damned cheap doctor. Jan’s dead.”

“I heard,” she said, as gently as she could. “I am so sorry. How are the children?”

“Scared. They’re at Maria’s.”

“They’ll be all right, I’m certain,” said Van Drouten, wishing she could say more. Clearing her throat, she continued: “That was Leeuwenhoek I passed outside, wasn’t it? The microscopist? Was he able to help you at all?”

“Oh, no.” Catharina gave a sour laugh. “Respectable
Mynheer
Leeuwenhoek is going to be appointed executor of the estate, if you must know. He’s only interested in seeing that all the debts get paid. So if you’re looking for a bargain, you’d better hurry. They’re coming in to do the inventory this afternoon. And you’d better pay cash!”

“I have cash,” said Van Drouten, hefting the small chest she’d brought. Catharina looked at her sidelong.