Art of Murder

by Jose Carlos Somoza

  'However much the work cost, she was still a young girl, April.'

  That's where you're wrong. It cost that much precisely because it was not a girl. It was a painting, Lothar. A masterpiece. Do you still not get it? We are what other people pay us to be. You used to be a policeman, and that's what you were paid to be; now they pay you to work as an employee for a private company, and that's what you are. This was once a girl. Then someone paid to turn her into a painting. Paintings are paintings, and people can destroy them with portable canvas cutters just as you might destroy documents in your shredding machine, without worrying about it. To put it simply, they are not people. Not for the person who did this to her, and not for us. Do I make myself clear?'

  Bosch was staring at a fixed point - he had chosen April Wood's anthracite-coloured hair, and in particular the fiercely drawn parting on the right side of her head. He kept his eyes on it as he nodded agreement.

  'Lothar?'

  'Yes, I understood.'

  'Which means we have to keep an eye on the competition.' 'We will,' said Bosch.

  'And there's also the anonymous madman,' Miss Wood sighed, and her thin shoulders hunched. 'That would be the worst of all: a freshly baked psychopath, just like all that Viennese bread. Is there anything else in the forensic report?'

  Bosch blinked and looked down at his papers. She's not being cruel, he told himself. She doesn't talk like that out of cruelty. She's not cruel. It's the world which is. All of us are.

  'Yes .. .' Bosch looked several pages further on. 'There is one curious detail. Of course, the analysis of the painting's skin is very detailed: the forensic experts don't know much about the priming process, so they haven't picked up on this. Near the wound in the breast they found traces of a substance which ... I'll read you what it says ... "the composition of which, while being similar to silicon, is different in several fundamental aspects . .." Then they give the full name of the chemical molecule: "dimethyl-tetrahydro . . ." well it's an enormously long name. Guess what it is?'

  'Cerublastyne ...' said Miss Wood, her eyes wide open.

  'Bingo. The report says it must have been part of the painting's priming, but we know that Deflowering did not have any cerublastyne on it. We called Hoffmann and he confirmed it: the cerublastyne cannot have come from the painting.'

  'My God,' Wood whispered. 'He disguises himself.'

  'That seems most likely. A few touches of cerublastyne would have been enough to change his looks completely'

  This news had suddenly made Miss Wood uneasy. She had got up, and was pacing to and fro about the room. Bosch looked at her with concern. Good God, she hardly ever eats, she's a skeleton. She'll make herself ill if she carries on like this ... A different voice, also part of him, counterattacked: Don't pretend. Look at the light reflected on her breasts, look at that tight arse and those legs of hers. You're crazy about her. You like her just like you did Hendrickje, perhaps more even. You like her the way you liked Hendrickje's portrait later on. Nonsense, the other Bosch replied. And .. . why not say it? the other voice came back. You like her intelligence. Her sharpness, her personality, the fact she is a thousand times more intelligent than you.

  It was true, April Wood was a precision instrument. In the five years they had worked together, Bosch had not seen her make a single mistake. Stein called her the 'guard dog'. Everyone in the Foundation respected her. Even Benoit seemed cowed in her presence. He often said: 'She's so skinny her soul is too big for her.' Her record was brilliant. Even though she had not been able to avoid all the attacks on the works during her five years as head of security (it was impossible to prevent them all), those responsible had been found and dealt with, sometimes even before the police had heard about the incident. The guard dog knew how to bite. Nobody was in any doubt (Bosch least of all) that now she would also find whoever it was who had destroyed Deflowering.

  And yet, outside their professional relationship, he scarcely knew her. Black holes in space, according to the scientific magazines his brother Roland collected, cannot be seen precisely because they are black, their presence can only be inferred from the effects they have on the other bodies around them. Bosch thought Miss Wood's free time was a black hole: he inferred it from her work. If Miss Wood had managed to rest, everything went smoothly. Otherwise, there were bound to be sparks. But so far, no one had so much as glimpsed what might be hidden in the dark hole that was Miss Wood's time off. Wood without her red pass, Miss Wood outside working hours, Miss Wood with feelings, if such things existed. Could there be a blot on such a perfect character? Bosch wondered about it sometimes.

  The truth of it, Mr Lothar Bosch, is that this youngster of hardly thirty, who could be your daughter but is your boss, this soulless skeleton, has completely hypnotised you.

  'April,' said Bosch.

  'What?'

  'I was thinking that maybe Diaz leads a double life. Maybe he has two voices inside his head, one normal, the other not. If he is a psychopath, there would be nothing odd in the fact that he behaved properly with friends and colleagues. When I worked for the police, I had some cases of .. .'

  Mozart rang out from the table. It was Miss Wood's mobile. Even though her features did not alter in the slightest as she took the call, Bosch was aware something important had happened.

  'AH our problems are over’ she said as she switched off her phone, smiling in that disagreeable way of hers. That was Braun. Oscar Diaz is dead.'

  Bosch leapt from his seat.

  They've caught him at last!'

  'No. Two anglers found his body floating in the Danube early this morning. They thought it was the carp of their lives, a Guinness Book of Records carp, but it was Oscar. Well, all that was left of Oscar. According to the preliminary report, he had been dead more than a week . .. That was why they wanted to keep his body hidden.' 'What's that?'

  Wood did not reply at once. She was still smiling, but Bosch soon realised it was a tremendous rage that was paralysing her.

  'It was not Oscar Diaz who picked up Annek last Wednesday.'

  This affirmation threw Bosch into confusion.

  'It wasn't . . . ? What do you mean? .. . Diaz turned up at the agreed time last Wednesday, chatted with his colleagues, identified himself, and .. .' All at once he came to a halt, as though forced to brake before coming up against the stone wall of Miss Wood's gaze.

  'It's not possible, April. One thing is to use resin to escape the police, but it's quite another to imitate someone so well that you deceive everyone who knows them, who sees them every day, the colleagues who greeted him on ... on Wednesday ... the security screens ... all of them ... to be able to pass off as someone you'd have to be a true specialist in latex. A real maestro.'

  Wood was still staring at him. Her smile froze his blood.

  'That bastard, whoever he may be, has made fools of us, Lothar.'

  She said these words in a tone Bosch recognised perfectly. She wanted revenge. April Wood could forgive other people being intelligent, just so long as they were not more intelligent than her. She could not bear any opponent to do anything she had not thought of. In the heart of this slight woman burned a volcano of the blackest pride and will to perfection. Bosch understood, with the kind of sudden certainty which sometimes grasps the deepest, most hidden truths, that Wood had slipped her chain, that the guard dog would hunt down her adversary and would not relent until she had him in her jaws.

  And not even then: once she had him, she would chew him to bits.

  'They've made fools of us ... fools of us ...' she went on in an almost musical whistle, scarcely separating her two rows of perfect white teeth, the only white showing in the darkness of the room.

  A white slash on a black background.

  Second Step

  Shaping the Sketch

  Points, lines, circles, triangles, squares, polygons ... these are the terms we should think in when we begin to sketch a human painting. Afterwards we will have to add shading.

  BRUNO
VAN TYSCH Treatise on Hyperdramatic Art

  'If you think we're waxworks ... you ought to pay, you know...' 'Contrariwise!... If you think we're alive, you ought to speak!'

  LEWIS CARROLL Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Through the Looking Glass

  A point is not really a shape. Anyone who thinks a point is round is mistaken. A point exists in so far as interconnecting lines exist. Yet lines and everything else, all other shapes and bodies, are made up of points. A point is the essential invisible, the unmeasurable inevitable. God himself may be a point, solitary and remote in His perfect eternity, thinks Marcus.

  Marcus Weiss is holding up an invisible point between his closed fingers. Friends, this is more complicated than it seems. The gesture is: left hand held out, palm of the hand facing upward, five fingers forming a little summit. If the tips are close enough together, the hole in the middle disappears in the curves of flesh. And there, right in the middle, is the point Weiss is holding up. You think it's easy? Think again, friends, it's really complicated.

  When she first started her sketches, Kate Niemeyer put a ping-pong ball on the tip of his fingers. In the next sketch, the ball was replaced by a marble; after that a bean, and then a pea, just like in children's stories. Finally, Kate decided there should be nothing. 'The idea is the ball is still there, but invisible. You're offering it to the public. People will look at you and ask: what's he got between his fingers? That will catch their attention, and they'll come closer.' Marcus understands that curiosity is a terrific bait for any artist who knows how to use it.

  'That afternoon, he had been holding up the invisible point for several hours. A girl with blonde curls, orange dress and red glasses (one of the last visitors) had stood up on tiptoe to see what Marcus was hiding in his fingers. Weiss was unable to see her expression when she eventually realised there was nothing there - as a work of art, he was forced to continue looking straight out in front of him, his eyes painted white. He wondered what on earth such a small child was doing in the gallery, where the works were meant to be for adults. Marcus would have banned himself to children under thirteen. He had no children of his own (what painting could have?), but he felt a great respect for them, and considered his 'attire' as Niemeyer's work far from suitable for them: he was completely naked, his body spray-painted bronze, his penis and testicles (hairless, visible) a matt white colour, the same as his eyes. A crown of yellow and blue feathers with purple tips, shaped like an Aztec plume or a tropical bird's crest, covered his brow. His crafted muscles, shaped over the years with the patience of a carpenter, shone individually with a metallic bronze, throwing off shifting shadows and glints under the halogen lights.

  Tired of holding up nothing, he was pleased it would soon be time to close. He realised the gallery had shut when he saw the maintenance man for Philip Mossberg's Rhythm/Balance come into the room. Rhythm/Balance was the painting on show opposite him. It was a seventeen-year-old canvas called Aspasia Danilou, painted in gentle, almost washed-out colours, which hid nothing of her anatomy. Her pubic hair was visible, because Mossberg always used non-depilated canvases for his works. Aspasia blinked, stirred, handed the satin sheet she had been holding in her left hand to the technician, and skipped off to the bathroom, waving to Marcus as she left. Until tomorrow, Marcus, see you then; of course you will, we'll be staring at each other all day - Beautiful Aspasia was not a bad canvas. Marcus thought she would go far, but she was only seventeen and this was her first original. When she had arrived in the gallery, he had tried to pick her up, but she had made several excuses and systematically refused his advances, until he was forced to realise that, in some areas of life, Aspasia already had considerable experience.

  Marcus was Kate Niemeyer's work Do You Want to Play With Me? He was priced at twelve thousand euros, and was not sure he would be sold. He was the last to leave the gallery. There was no technician to help him, no one came to take his plume of feathers off: he had to make his own way out. The hand he used to hold nothing up with hurt a little. The whole arm, in fact.

  'Au revoir, Habib.'

  'Au revoir, Mr Weiss.'

  He kept his bare black and bronze painted feet well away from the smooth track Habib's vacuum cleaner was making. He got on very well with the cleaning foreman on that floor. Before coming to Munich, Habib had lived in Avignon, and Weiss, who knew and admired that city (he had twice been exhibited in a gallery on the banks of the Rhone), liked to offer the Moroccan cleaner beer and cigarettes, and to practise his French. Habib the Great also went in for Zen meditation, which was guaranteed to endear him to Marcus. The two of them shared their books and thoughts.

  That night though all he said to Habib was goodbye. He was in a hurry.

  Would she be waiting for him? He hoped so, because he could not bear to think otherwise. They had met the previous evening, but Marcus had enough experience to know she was not the kind to take things lightly. Whoever she might be, and whatever she wanted from him, Brenda was serious about it.

  He walked down the stairs to the bathroom on the second floor. Sieglinde, who was Dryad by Herbert Rinsermann, was already bent over the wash basin when Marcus came in. She had her head under the tap and was briskly rubbing her hair. Her athletic figure was like a flesh longbow, without an atom of fat. The fake brambles that were wrapped around her in the work were now propped against the wall, glistening with red points of artificial blood. The intricate swirl of Rinsermann's signature decorated her left ankle. Marcus and Sieglinde had met two years earlier during classes Ludwig Werner had held in Berlin for canvases of all ages. They had been friends ever since. Now they had coincided again in the Max Ernst gallery.

  Marcus bent over next to her, taking care not to damage his plume of feathers, and boomed out a greeting.

  'Good evening.'

  Sieglinde's face emerged from the water, streaked with tiny pearls.

  'Hi there, Marcus! How are things?'

  'Not too bad,' he smiled enigmatically as he removed his crest. 'You're very pleased with yourself today. Has someone bought you?'

  In your dreams.'

  'Another original in sight then?'

  'Maybe.'

  Sieglinde turned towards him, hands and buttocks pressed against the edge of the washbowl. Her short hair was like a wet golden helmet. She looked at Weiss with all the mockery of a smart nineteen-year-old.

  'Hey, that's great. I'm fed up with seeing you painted bronze. And might I be allowed to know the name of the artist who wants to go down in history by doing something with you, Mr Weiss?'

  'Mind your own business,' Marcus said, only half jokingly.

  Sieglinde burst out laughing and carried on drying herself. Marcus went into the shower and hung a bottle of solvent on the taps. The oil paint on his body began to wash down below his knees. He turned and splashed in the welcome, pleasurable jet of water. Through the half-open door he caught glimpses of Sieglinde's anatomy, brief flashes of her youthful muscles. Ah youth, a point of no return, he thought. They buy you more quickly and pay more when you're a young canvas. He recalled that Rinsermann had been able to sell Sieglinde as a seasonal outdoor piece to an ancient Bavarian family. It's never easy to sell a seasonal work, because they are on show for only a few months each year, the summer in Dryad's case. Marcus had seen the work several times. He did not particularly like Rinsermann, but he thought Dryad was quite good. It was a sort of wood nymph painted in diluted orange, ochre and pink tones, and covered in brambles whose thorns were apparently caught in the naked body. The expression on the work's face was a triumph: a mixture of fear, surprise and pain. But in Marcus' opinion, the best thing about the work was its owner. One of those a painting only meets once every ten years or so. Not only had he decided to install Sieglinde in his garden for three years before he substituted her (which meant steady work for three months and the possibility of more the rest of the year) but he also saw no problem with lending her for temporary exhibitions in the city, like this one at the Max Ernst, which allowed Siegli
nde to earn an extra one thousand five hundred and thirty-two euros a month as a sold work. Weiss was pleased for her, but could not deny feeling a sharp stab of envy. His friend's face radiated with the happy glow of a bought canvas. But no one wanted to play with Do You Want to Play With Me? He was convinced Kate would not manage to sell him this time either. Was that Kate's fault or his?

  He turned off the shower and looked down at his body, feeling its contours with his hands. He kept fit, of course. His muscles, faithful, well-trained dogs that they were, continued their endless task of construction. People like Kate Niemeyer would go on painting him (or at least, so he believed) for a few more years, but he knew that at forty-three he should be thinking of a different career. The market for human ornaments was growing irresistibly. Collectors privately amassed Chairs, Pedestals, Tables, Flower Vases and Carpets, and firms such as Suke, Ferrucioli Studio or the Van Tysch Foundation designed, sold and used flesh and blood ornaments every day. Sooner or later it was bound to become legal for these objects to be sold openly, because otherwise, where did old canvases and the young ones who did not make it as works of art have to go? Marcus suspected he would end up being sold as an ornament for some merry spinster's home. Why not take a souvenir from Germany with you, madam? Here's Marcus Weiss, with lovely nacreous buttocks, a fine Aryan object that would fit in nicely alongside your chimneypiece.