Styx (17 page)

The flood of seawater from the Opel had ebbed to a trickle. Two patrolmen were poking around the soggy interior, looking for—what?

“What about the information he gave me?”

“What information?”

“The yellow rain slicker and hat. The Ensor mask.”

“That's all bullshit,” said Crevits. “First of all, your ‘witness' has disappeared. And second, half—”

“I know, half of Ostend has a yellow slicker and hat. I just thought that—”

“Thought what?” Crevits barked.

Delacroix held his tongue. “Nothing, never mind.”

“Now you're starting to make some sense, son. Your imagination ran away with you for a while there. Go home. Sleep it off, and come back with a clear head in the morning. We'll laugh about this tomorrow.”

But Delacroix knew there was nothing to laugh about.

“We can't afford to drop the ball on this investigation,” said Crevits, resting a fatherly hand on his shoulder. “It's much too important. The department's reputation is at stake—Styx's is already shot. Let's not turn this whole thing into a farce.”

Delacroix watched Crevits walk away, past the leaking carcass of the dead patrol car.

Later, still leaning on the
railing, Delacroix watched a couple of guys in orange coveralls load the Opel onto a tow truck. They drove off, and the beach settled back into stillness.

Yes, fine, Delacroix had had a drink or two the night before. But he had a drink or two every day: a glass of wine with lunch, a shot of
jenever
during the afternoon, a martini before dinner, and a cognac after. But he was a sapeur, and he could handle it. He hadn't been
drunk. He knew what he'd seen, and he knew what he'd heard, straight from the mouth of Raphael Styx:

A yellow oilskin slicker and a sou'wester hat. Or maybe the jacket had a hood, I couldn't really tell.

Long ago, Delacroix knew, you used to see them by the hundreds, all of a type, those hardy fishermen, up at the crack of dawn and out in their yellow uniforms to brave the vagaries of the North Sea.

Half an hour later, he remained at his post. Nothing moved out there save the rolling breakers, but in his imagination the ripples took and gave back the shape of Raphael Styx's face.

He could hear Styx whisper to him from beneath the waves:

Go, Delacroix. Do it. Be a cop. Don't let me down.

A few weeks ago he'd been sent to the forensics lab's pathology department to pick up a copy of the autopsy report on Reinhilde Debels, the Stuffer's first victim, for Crevits.

And he remembered catching the briefest glimpse, through the open door to the chief pathologist's office, of a bright yellow rainjacket hanging on a coat stand.

He stayed at the railing for another ten minutes, watching the place where the Opel had gone into the water, thinking about Raphael Styx and their preternatural encounter.

In the morning, there would be nothing for him to sleep off. But there would be work for him to do. Just like the old fisherfolk, he would be up and out the door early.

Without Crevits's blessing, he was on his own now.

Just like Styx.

The gentle current carried Styx along the coast, and, by the time he squelched out of the sea, he was half a mile south of the point where he'd crashed into it. He wasn't sure if he should rejoice at the discovery that he was apparently immortal or despair at his eternal condemnation to the kingdom of the damned.

Weirdly, he had never felt so completely alive as when he'd sat there talking with Joachim Delacroix. He had almost felt his heart thrumming in his chest—though he knew a bullet had stilled it.

Was it the fact that they'd been talking about Isabelle which had revived his spirits, or the fact that he now saw a possible break in the Stuffer investigation? He tried to convince himself that it had been Isabelle, but he knew better.

For the second night in a row, he hobbled through the deserted
streets of Ostend. He didn't even notice his drenched clothing plastered to his body. His lot in life—or rather, death—had become this endless wandering through the city.

He was headed for his father-in-law's house, which seemed destined to serve as his lair. When a distant church clock tolled the hour, he remembed the broken old pocket watch he'd been carrying. It was completely ruined now, surely—but, when he took it from his sopping-wet pocket, it seemed miraculously undamaged. He clicked it open, and a rush of heat went through him, like a furnace turning itself on as the outside temperature fell.

Just past the Belgian Coast Tram's Ravelingen stop, almost halfway back to the place where he'd roared off in Delacroix's patrol car, he saw a figure on the other side of the tracks, an older gentleman with longish gray locks, like Einstein on a good hair day. A tourist who had lost his way? A fisherman out ahead of the pack, waiting for a tram to take him to his boat?

Styx was transfixed. He'd felt this same strange sensation at the train station. He couldn't quite put it into words, but it was at the same time both bizarre and completely comfortable, both real and surreal. A man, all alone, bathed in moonlight beside the tracks.

He wanted to call across to him, to test whether or not the man was just a figment of his imagination. He held himself back, though. He'd already had contact with one living being tonight—Joachim Delacroix—and that hadn't exactly worked out well.

But his feet walked him closer. No need to look left and right for an oncoming tram at that hour of the night. As he approached the stranger, he put his age at about seventy and was surprised to see him standing behind some sort of high-backed chair.

No, he realized as he narrowed the distance between them, it wasn't a chair: it was an easel, and without any conscious intention Styx found himself saying, “Good evening. A good night for painting?”

Not looking up, the man went on sketching pencil lines on his canvas. He took a step back to study the results, and to make room for Styx to get a better view.

“I don't know yet,” said the man. “You
never
know, at night. The world at night is a dream: everything looks one way at one moment, and the next moment it's all different. I paint what I see, not what's
there
, and what I see is always changing. Is that a contradiction? A paradox? I don't know. Is that why they call me a Surrealist? I don't really agree with the label.”

On the canvas, Styx saw a naked woman against the detailed background of . . . a train station. She stood beside the tracks, lush and lifelike, lit by the moon, staring emotionlessly ahead, a visitor in a world where she didn't belong.

“It's beautiful,” said Styx.

“I hope not,” the painter replied matter-of-factly. “Beauty is boring. I want it to make you
think
. I'm trying to create an entirely new world. A world between worlds. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” Styx said. “I think I know exactly what you mean. A different reality.”

“You could call it that. A reality that isn't real. A contradiction.”

“Do you do this often?”

“What?”

“Paint in the middle of the night.”

“Why not? The Impressionists set up their easels in the middle of a cornfield, so why shouldn't I set my—”

“But you're no Impressionist, are you, Mr. . . . Delvaux?”

The painter leaned in closer to examine his creation's breasts.

“You know me?”

“Your work is well known.”

“That would surprise me. But why not? And, as I began to say, why shouldn't a Surrealist—if that's how they're going to insist on
pigeonholing me—set
his
easel up where my imaginary model and I can choose to lose ourselves?”

“May I ask you something? Where
are
you when you paint a scene like this? Are you still in this world, or do you go to that other world? Or are you—like your subject—somewhere in between?”

“That's a difficult question,” the painter replied.

He turned toward Styx at last. He was smiling peacefully, a reaction Styx wouldn't have expected. The artist switched his pencil to his left hand and put out his paint-smeared right. Styx took it.

“Paul Delvaux.”

“Raphael Styx.”

Styx was perplexed by the man's calm. Why wasn't he gathering his easel and canvas and paints and brushes together and putting as much distance as he could between himself and a sight far more surreal than a naked woman in a train station: a waterlogged zombie.

But the dead cop was more confused by his surroundings, which he saw now were out of joint. There were no cars on the street, but he had the feeling—no, he was absolutely convinced—that, if there were any cars to be seen, they'd be vintage models from the turn of the twentieth century. Delvaux's easel and supplies were professional and expensive, but they were
old
, not aged but old-fashioned, the type of equipment that had last been in use decades ago or even longer. And then there was the painter himself, the personification of a dream, who, like Styx, had somehow reappeared from the land of the dead.

He glanced at his pocket watch and saw the second hand turning. It couldn't be a coincidence . . .

“You're interested in my work?” said Delvaux.

“It has a few connections to something I'm working on myself.”

“May I ask you to explain?”

“She looks familiar to me.”

“The nude?”

Styx examined her. “She's striking,” he said. “Especially since—”

“Since?”

“She radiates pure beauty. But in the case I'm working on, that beauty has been perverted into horror.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

The Stuffer's first victim, Reinhilde Debels, a prostitute working in the Ostend harbor, had been found naked in the Mu.ZEE sculpture garden in the exact same posture as the woman on Delvaux's canvas. Until now, all that linked the three victims was that they were women. But now . . .

“I don't think our paths crossed tonight by coincidence,” said Styx.

“How do you mean?”

“Do you believe in signs, Mr. Delvaux? Visions, omens?”

“My good man, that's
all
I believe in.”

“I think this is more than a sign. I think it's a trail, a clue, a signpost to the truth.”

“I'm a painter,” said Delvaux. “But you are surely a poet?”

“No,” Styx told him. “Not at all. I'm a cop, a policeman.”

He knew full well he was speaking in the present tense.

As he studied the naked woman in the painting, her pale face seemed to dissolve into the elegant features of Reinhilde Debels.

“A signpost to what truth?” asked Delvaux, bringing him back out of the painting to whatever world this was.

“I'm not sure yet,” said Styx. “All I know is it's a clue, but I don't know where it will lead me.”

“That is the essence of art, and of Surrealism in particular,” said the painter. “Our mission is to stimulate questions, not to answer them.”

“First Delvaux, then Ensor, then Magritte,” Styx gasped, as he saw at last the link between the Stuffer's first three victims. James Ensor had painted a woman on a flight of seaside stairs, surrounded by
masks, the sea a field of blue behind her. And then there was René Magritte's headless, armless, legless nude torso of a woman planted on a sterile beach.

“Why me?” asked the painter.

“I'm sorry?”

“You, too, lump me in with the Surrealists?”

“Not me,” said Styx. “Someone else.”

“He's made a mistake.”

“A costly mistake for the women in your paintings—”

“They're not real women,” Delvaux explained patiently.

Not anymore
, Styx thought.

The artist returned his attention to his canvas. He was ready to get back to work.

Raphael Styx was, too.

Delvaux stepped closer to his easel. He looked as though he was preparing to dive into his imaginary world. There was so much left to draw, to paint, to create.

“If you don't mind,” said the artist, “I'd like to finish this by dawn. Once the sun comes up, I lose interest. It's the moon that moves me. The sunlight makes everything so obvious.”

“We disagree there,” said Styx, who was hungry for the day to begin.

Delvaux winked at him, and Styx crossed the tracks and set off for the city center, the road to a solution stretching out before him.

A really
big
show
, the Stuffer's boast rang in his ears.

The Ostend Surrealists.

He was beginning to understand.

As he trudged on toward his father-in-law's house, he was all alone. Only later did it strike him that he had always worked alone—first as a man, and now as a zombie.

As a zombie, though, would he be on his own by choice, as he'd
been in his previous life, or did he even
have
a choice anymore? Were there more of his kind—and, if there were, where were they? An existential loneliness washed over him: even as a zombie, he seemed destined to travel solo. Was that part of his penance? A natural consequence of the way he'd lived his life as a human being?