Vienna (13 page)

“But there's nothing on my BlackBerry.”

Vienna's laugh was tentative as always. “Then why have it?”

“It's useless. Most of my contracts have been canceled.”

“Most?”

“I still have the Clay to Flesh series for Igor Czasky.”

“What's that?”

“You saw some of it, when I was posing next to the manikin. Clay to Flesh has me next to a set of wooden models carved by Christian Bell. The manikins in historic dress and me in modern.”

Christian Bell
. There he was:
Gentlemen of Business, Volume One
, fifth edition, Royal Printers, London, 1889. There had been a copy in Grayfield's den. Pages 335 and 336. “The subject of our next portrait is Christian Bell. Mister Bell was born in Glasgow on September 3, 1837. His father, John Bell, born June 13, 1803, was employed most of his life at Dixon's Blazes, a large ironworks located…” Her voice trailed off.

“That's him,” Justine said.

Vienna felt shame flushing her cheeks.
This is why she thinks I'm trapped inside myself.

“Hey.” Justine put her hand under Vienna's chin and lifted her head. “No pouting over life's quirks, okay? Besides, I like having a personal Wikipedia.” She stood up and started for the bathroom. “Keep reading.”

Vienna smiled, offended that Justine could make her do that when she didn't want to. “Okay.” She read more of the entry to herself. Justine returned with a brush and sat behind Vienna. Vienna felt the soft tug of having her hair combed.

“Is my hair wrong?”

“No.”

“Then why are you brushing it?”

“Because it needs it.”

Vienna frowned, but Justine had no way of seeing.

“Please continue our history lesson.”

Vienna constructed a scene where she turned around and told Justine that teasing was childish. Justine was sorry and she apologized and said she would never do it again. But Vienna knew Justine would never get her part right.

“Christian Bell carved ten life-sized female figures from tupelo.” She paused, her thoughts arcing to other sources. “Elvis Presley was born in a place named Tupelo. It used to be called Gum Pond because…” Vienna let the thought go. The world was all connected and it was beautiful, but she could tell this wasn't what Justine wanted. “Bell couldn't get big enough blocks of wood for a complete figure, and so he used a series of pieces for each work. It's sort of appropriate, because tupelo is from the genus Nyssa, which means nymph.” The brush stopped and Vienna saw an image of Justine silently laughing. She rushed ahead to a diagram she had seen in the hallways of the Cart House. Labeled in perfect block letters:
MR. BELL'S LADY
, which hadn't made any sense at all until now. “Each piece of tupelo was cut to be interlocking, like a huge puzzle box. The manikins are hollow.” Vienna studied the diagram. “It's very clever,” she said.

“You know more about it than I do. What else?”

“There was a fire in Bell's workshop. The oils he used for treating the wood were inflammable. Bell saved seven statues—amazing considering his age. They each weighed fifteen stone.” She remembered that Americans never used stones and found a conversion table. “Over two hundred pounds. Returning for the eighth, he was overcome by fumes. He died in the fire, August 4, 1888.”

Vienna went to another source—an obituary from one of Bell's descendants. It had been clipped and placed in
Gentlemen of Business, Volume One
. Who would have done that? “The remaining statues were kept in Bell's family for a generation. David Bell, Christian's eldest son, inherited them along with his father's considerable wealth.” Vienna skipped ahead. “David was an anarchist—traveling to Budapest, which was a hotbed of radical thinking. He fell in love with a woman named Lina Zahler.” Another line of words from an old history book. “Zahler was connected, through a man named Pozzio, to Luigi Lucheni, the man who killed Sisi, the Empress Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie…” She slapped at the bed in frustration and jumped back to the less interesting story. “Lina spurned Bell, and he returned home a broken man.” She paused. “Broken?”

“Rejected by his true love. A much more serious condition than you have.”

Vienna dismissed that. “He sold his father's statues to Harry Gordon Selfridge in 1910. Selfridge used them in his London department store to display clothes. After World War Two, the collection was auctioned at Christie's to collectors across Europe.”

The brush stopped. “How much for one?”

“Between twenty and thirty thousand pounds.”

“Not a huge amount, even in the fifties.”

Vienna's lips kept moving as she read from an art collector's book. “All the statues had a woman's name stamped on the underside of their left feet. These names represented famous women connected to the great cities of Europe. The manikins ended up in private collections within their corresponding cities.” Her eyes opened wider. “There is a Vienna.”

“Is she broken, too?”

Vienna spoke without thinking, an odd phrase she heard back in London. “Who elected you high snarky bitch of parliament?”

Vienna was horrified but Justine was hugging her, laughing. “There you go,” she said, as if that explained everything. A soft kiss on the back of Vienna's neck. “The Clay to Flesh project started in Budapest,” Justine continued. “The manikin there was named Gisella—after an Austrian princess I think.”

Vienna didn't know how to spell the name so she skipped over it. “What does any of this mean?” She turned to face Justine.

“My ex-boyfriend mentioned Budapest. He said he never wanted to go back.” Justine set the brush on the bed. “I met David Andries two weeks after the project was announced. How long do you suppose he had been living under the name Grant Eriksson?”

“Do you think he knew about the manikins?”

“He knew art.”

“But the manikins aren't worth that much,” Vienna said.

“Everything goes back to them. Budapest to Paris to Rome to Prague to Brussels. I thought the statue in Prague moved between sessions. I joked about it and James flew out to see if I was okay. I understand that; he has millions tied up in me. But then Grant came to see me here in Brussels. I wonder if he knew about Prague.”

“The statue moved?”

“It seemed different the second day; I couldn't say why. We looked at the pictures from both nights and they were the same.”

“Do you still have the pictures?” Vienna asked.

“We can check the dailies folder in my portfolio.”

“Do it now.”

Justine laughed. “Yes, master.” She moved to the desk and called up the Prague photos on her Sony. She selected two that showed the skipping manikin. “Here. The one on the left is from the first day, the right one from the second. They're the same.”

Vienna clapped several times and laughed. “You're blind!” She skipped around Justine. “Blind, blind, blind.”

“What?”

Vienna stopped and pointed at the images. “The one from the second day is smaller.”

Justine squinted. “I don't think so—”

“Blind and stupid.” She fell to the bed. “They aren't the same. Your shape is the same both days, it fits within itself. The statues don't.”

“How can you be certain?”

Vienna enunciated her words, as if speaking to a child. “I put the second one in the first one, and the first one overlaps all the way around. Just like your right breast is larger than your left.”

“Well, there's more information than I bargained for. Maybe humidity caused the change? I mean in the manikin, not my breast.”

“No. They are not the same statue.”

“Vienna, they look—”

“Stop being stupid!” She realized she was shouting and that was wrong because the doctors told her shouting might hurt the person she was shouting at. She lowered her voice. “Any tosser can see they aren't the same. The left arm of the smaller one is lower by a centimeter. They. Are. Not. The. Same. Show me the others.”

It took Justine thirty minutes to call up pictures for each statue, one from the initial setup and one from the following photoshoot. Vienna looked at each paired set of images.

She doesn't see it!
“They all changed overnight.”

Justine shook her head. “It makes no sense.”

Delight in the discovery faded. There had to be a reason. A purpose that followed Justine from Budapest to Brussels.
It's here. It killed David Andries.

She wanted to tell Justine but she didn't know how to explain and when she started talking all the wrong words came out, like they always did with Justine. “Why did you tell Lord Davy that love with me was like rain?”

Justine put her hand over Vienna's. “Where I come from, spring rain is like heaven.”

“In London, rain is cold and tedious. And anyway, it's supposed to be private.”

Justine answered so softly that Vienna barely heard. “He needed to know you are not so broken after all.”

And then the words Vienna had meant to speak at first suddenly were there. “I'm scared and I don't know why.”

“We'll be fine.”

Vienna remembered her foster father in London saying, as clearly as if he had written it:
You must learn to know what people are hiding behind words.

 

11

Their passports were returned by spit-and-polish representatives from the American and United Kingdom embassies. Justine tossed hers in her carry-on bag. With more resignation than anticipation, she called Adelina and rescheduled her London itinerary. Running home now would be one defeat too many. Or at least that made a good rationalization.

She reserved a seat for Vienna on British Air and made certain the girl was registered at the Savoy. Two beds, because that seemed prudent. Or prudish. The amount was too trivial to worry over even if Vienna decided to stay. Which seemed likely. The girl remained anchored to the bed, rocked side-to-side by undercurrents of eidetic memory.

Shepherding her through airport security would be a thrill.

Justine sat at the suite's table, searching for the kill switch to whatever machine was hell-bent on shredding her life. She could almost see whirring gears. The original Clay to Flesh proposal mentioned that the Budapest manikin had long ago been vandalized. Giselle's name scratched out and replaced with “Lina.” A complete mystery according to the owner. But Vienna's stuttered history made David Bell the number one suspect, pining away for his anarchist girlfriend, Lina Zahler.

Vienna had also said Zahler was connected to the murder of someone named Sisi. The name was vaguely familiar, but Justine was too distracted to dredge up the memory. Google had it anyway. Elisabeth of Bavaria, Queen of Hungary and Empress of Austria, assassinated on September 10, 1898.

Headlines over a century old. There had to be something more relevant.

Three hours of paging through the BlackBerry failed to find it. A hundred names and numbers, useless now. A note from Simone Dyer, contracts attorney for Carrie Ltd. Justine opened it, expecting legal threats she had no way to fight.

Heather:

You are stronger for facing the cameras while I remain hidden. Not sure why there would be any questions about your new direction, but if there are, do not hesitate to call me, as a friend if nothing else.

Justine recalled meeting Simone at a party in Tribeca. The lawyer had the exotic allure of Mediterranean blood tempered with cold-weather genes—Scandinavian or Russian. Pretty and witty enough to draw a sizable crowd of male admirers. Apparently not what she wanted.

I know the feeling.
Note Exhibit V, staring at the ceiling in a hyper-focused trance. Squeaking nonverbals and pounding the bed every fifteen minutes. Hair reverted to a fractal weave of tangles.
What the hell was I thinking last night?

Love never used to be so complicated.

A moot point because here she was obsessing over Vienna again. Justine tried to rationalize the sexual pull as collateral damage from her career. Vienna didn't demand fireworks with every kiss and Justine had so often been victimized by such expectations. But that wasn't it.

She would do anything I asked.
The exact warning Lord Davy had come to deliver—a truth as perilous as the sun setting.
And didn't you always know the scariest monsters came out after dark?
Was the damage already done?

Performances Justine had witnessed in L.A. and Bangkok made her session with Vienna look banal. Quiet exploration in a world where high velocity and higher risk had become the preferred mode of bedroom communication. Perhaps Vienna's innocence remained unscarred? But it was the most dangerous kind of lie; one that told the truth for all the wrong reasons.

Justine forced herself to refocus on the BlackBerry. Had Vienna been right in thinking Grant died looking for something here? Even as the thought came, Justine paged across her favorite picture of him. They were on a sailboat off a private island in the Caribbean. Sun-filled turquoise water so pure it was as if light itself provided buoyancy. A triangle of lemon yellow sail to the side; a contour of white sand behind them. A sleek GPS in Grant's left hand, and Justine snuggled in the arc of his right arm. Grant hadn't known a thing about sailing, but his Greek sailor's cap and tanned chest worked well enough for Justine. He'd titled the picture before sending it to her. “My wonderful mermaid, captured at N48º 14'079; E 16° 15'031.” God, he was beautiful.

Justine turned the BlackBerry off. If Grant pretended to be nice to her, didn't that mean, in a way, that he really was nice to her? She missed him after all. His easy confidence. Never angry or upset. It would be so perfect now.

As compared to Vienna, who hadn't said a recognizable word in hours. Misery: the world's oldest sexually transmitted disease.