The Murals

by William Bayer

  I know what he did with them. We all knew. He sold them, for quite a pretty penny too, is what I heard. One day Nora’s boyfriend, Hans, searched on the internet and found they were being sold at a Lucerne gallery for tens of thousands of Euros.

  He was the Great Docteur DeJonghe d’Ardoye, of high Belgium nobility, trained in Jungian psychoanalytic practice, owner and proprietor of the exclusive Privatklinik DeJonghe. What a hoot! I think the name’s as phony as he is. We all call him Dr DeJ. As for his Jungian training, Nora and I did some research on that. Turns out he was dismissed from the Jung Institute for – guess what? – inappropriate sexual comments and non-consensual touching. Women there regarded him as a serial predator.

  So why, you may ask, do we continue to work for an employer for whom we have so little respect? One reason only: he pays better than anyone else on the lake. In return, he expects loyalty and ‘amorous availability.’ I’m sure you know what that means.

  So, are we sluts? Some call us that in order to shame us. In truth, we’re keen to see how this charade of his plays out. We await the debacle.

  Two things you should know. First, the charges for residential treatment at the clinic are exorbitant, far higher than at comparable facilities. The monthly rate can exceed forty thousand Swiss francs. Can you believe it?

  I don’t know what Agnès’s family pays. She’s been there for years, the most senior long-term resident. Her fee arrangement is probably less, perhaps 250,000 Francs per year. What does she get for that? Twice-a-week psychotherapy sessions with the Great Man, customized drug treatment, special macrobiotic diet, lovely two-room suite with a lake view on the second floor of the main chalet, and all the bits and pieces of fabric rags she needs to create those bizarre dolls of hers.

  Here’s something else you should know. I have been working there for seven years, and never once in all that time has she had a visitor. Not one! Nurses who’ve been there longer report the same. It’s possible she hasn’t had a visitor in decades! I don’t know the exact number of years she’s been there. All the patient files are locked. Only the Great Doctor can access them. But, yes, decades seems about right. I hear that before she started making the dolls, she did a lot of sketching. There’s a big stack of sketchbooks in one of her closets. I expect they represent many years of work.

  She rarely speaks. When she does, it’s usually in a whisper. She doesn’t fraternize with other patients, yet she doesn’t appear to be lonely. She seems to live very much in her own world. I’d describe her as gentle, but then those dolls she makes aren’t gentle at all. She doesn’t require much care from us. She pretty much takes care of herself in terms of dressing, bathing, that sort of thing. Basically, she’s being stored. In certain ways I’d describe Privatklinik DeJonghe as less a psychiatric facility than a place to store difficult people about whose very existences their families would just as soon forget.

  But then along came Johnny!

  He’s nineteen, still has adolescent spots on his face, is brilliant and also quite disturbed. Like several patients there, he says his family doesn’t care for him. At least he talks about it, which is more than Agnès does. In fact, that boy will talk on and on, even if no one’s listening.

  I’m not sure why he started coming on to Agnès. She’s more than twice his age. Now they’re inseparable. This strange, silent American woman, who couldn’t abide the company of anyone, now hangs out a good part of every day with this gay English lad.

  None of us can explain it. When I asked Johnny, he shrugged.

  ‘I like her, plain and simple,’ he told me. ‘Does there always have to be an effing explanation?’

  He likes to throw curse words into conversations. He thinks they shock us. They don’t.

  Maybe he’s right: there is no way to explain it, except to view them as two lost souls who found one another in the crazy little hot-house world of the clinic.

  I’ll tell you something else about Johnny. He’s kind. He feels a lot of pain, I think, on account of rejection by his family. Far as I know, his only visitor has been his older sister. He worships her. Maybe that’s why he’s bonded with Agnès. Even though he’s gay, he likes strong older women. Agnès, being so self-sufficient, could appeal to that need. He told me once that he was ‘honored’ by her acceptance of him. The fact that she opened herself to friendship with him, while rejecting interaction with everyone else, tells him he has value in her eyes. Also, he admires her artwork.

  Back to the Great Doctor. He’s got everyone there, including Agnès and Johnny, on serious drug regimes, capsules he has specially made up by a German compounding lab. He claims these drugs are both antidepressant and antipsychotic. When I asked him what was in them, he said it was a custom combination similar to a mix of Zyprexa, Celexa and Tranxilium and a few other things. Sounds nutty to me, but I’m just a psychiatric nurse.

  I don’t know where things are going with Agnès. I’ve detected changes in her since she’s gotten close to Johnny. There’s something conspiratorial about them of late – whisperings and knowing glances, that sort of thing. Dr DeJ has noticed too. He’s asked me about it several times. ‘I have a feeling they’re cooking something up,’ he said. ‘Any idea what it could be?’

  I shrug. Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell him. We’ll just have to see, won’t we? Personally, I think it would be good if they did cook something up and actually saw it through …

  Jason Poe

  I’d been more upset than I let on by Elizabeth Schechtner’s query: What is it about those murals, Jason, that has you so riled?

  Yes, she wanted to deflect us from inquiring too deeply into the odd way she and Dr Ted had behaved. Still, she had a point. I knew my obsession with the murals was based on something more than their visual power. They had reached me on a subconscious level, probably because I read them as being about trauma and pain. Was that what drove my obsession? Was my quest to solve the mystery of the murals actually a quest to understand myself? I couldn’t help wonder about that even as so much new info poured in.

  Hannah and I had not only located the Ragdoll Artist, we also had photos which left no doubt that she and Courtney Cobb were one and the same. And then there was our recording of the rant of the nurse, Thérèse, a bizarre tale to the effect that Courtney, friendless and alone, had been sealed up for decades by her family in an ultra-expensive Swiss sanatorium where a Svengali-like psychiatrist kept her on a drug regime while covertly selling her much-coveted rag dolls, apparently for his own account.

  I had a lot of trouble grappling with that, and it infuriated Hannah. She saw evil and wanted us to do something about it.

  ‘What can we do?’ I asked.

  ‘Try to get her out of there.’

  ‘How? And to what end? She’s clearly disturbed. From everything we discovered, she’s been that way most of her life.’

  ‘But to be abandoned by her family, locked away in a foreign country under another name, unvisited for decades – truthfully, Jase, don’t you think that’s a scandal?’

  Of course it was a scandal! But how could we get her out of that clinic? What standing did we have to do so? And if we did get her out, where would she go? In spite of her circumstances, she’d continued to make art. In fact, I suggested, maybe her situation wasn’t all that awful. She was, I reminded Hannah, a permanent resident at one of the most luxurious private clinics in Europe.

  That’s when Hannah got really pissed. She knew what I’d said was true, but felt that we, as artists, had a responsibility. A fellow artist was in trouble. Didn’t we have an obligation to do something about it?

  ‘When you acquiesce to something like this, you become an accomplice,’ she told me angrily. ‘Think about that, Jase.’ And with that she returned to her loft.

  I did think about it. I asked myself if indeed we did have that responsibility. The longer I thought about it, the more clearly I saw that Hannah was right. I think what got to me most was Courtney’s loneliness. I couldn’t bear the thought
that she’d been living in that clinic for decades without having once been visited by anyone. In effect, she’d been left behind, discarded the same way those objects I photographed for Leavings had been – abandoned and forsaken.

  Hannah’s sense of indignation was one of the things I loved best about her. I phoned her, told her how much I regretted not immediately seeing her point.

  ‘Yes, we have to try to get her out,’ I said.

  ‘I knew you’d come around, Jase. I’m going to see my brother tomorrow, get his advice. Maybe there’s nothing we can do for Courtney, but I don’t want to give up without giving it a shot.’

  Hannah’s brother, Noah Sachs, was a prominent Calista attorney. His firm, Conway & Sachs, specialized in the representation of white-collar defendants. Noah, Hannah told me, would be the first to admit that he often represented unpleasant people. To compensate, he undertook carefully selected pro bono cases representing illegally fired whistleblowers, victims of lawyers who’d weaponized the legal system, people whose reputations had been damaged by slanderous and libelous statements. So perhaps, Hannah reasoned, Noah would take on a pro bono case on behalf of Courtney Cobb.

  I asked to come along.

  ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘We’re in this together.’

  Noah always struck me as headstrong, rigid in his convictions. Hannah assured me that was just the front he presented to the world.

  ‘He takes after our grandfather,’ she said.

  Hannah had told me a lot about David Sachs, a tough businessman who’d built a small bicycle company into the country’s largest manufacturer of ball bearings. He’d made a fortune on government contracts during World War II, built himself a Tudor-style lakeside mansion where he resided in baronial splendor surrounded by paintings by his beloved artists of what he called the ‘Jewish School of Paris’ – Pissarro, Chagal, Soutine, Kisling, Sonia Delaunay, Max Jacob, Leopold Gottlieb and Louis Marcoussis.

  ‘Noah, like Grandpa, wears a hard mask, but he’s got a gentle heart. If we can interest him in Courtney, he’ll think of a way to help her.’

  The offices of Conway & Sachs were on the fortieth floor of the Tower of the Great Lakes, one of Calista’s landmark twin skyscrapers. The firm’s reception area was done up in high modern – sleek black leather couches, marble table for the receptionist, one of Hannah’s large abstract weavings displayed on the wall behind.

  We were greeted by a well-groomed brunette. She introduced herself as Kim Barnes and escorted us back to Noah’s office. Noah, whose features resembled Hannah’s, had grown a goatee since I’d last seen him. When I admired his office view, he led me to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it?’ he said, ‘The city, I mean. It even looks good on miserable rainy days. From here, you’d never know what a dump it is.’ He turned to Hannah. ‘Shouldn’t say that, should I, Sis? This town’s been good to us.’ He took a seat behind his desk. ‘I’m glad the Swiss detective worked out. What can I do for you today?’

  Hannah did most of the talking, with me throwing in a detail here and there. She laid out Courtney’s situation with accuracy and passion. Watching Noah, I could see him getting hooked.

  ‘Holy shit!’ he said when she finished. He turned to me. ‘All this because you happened to stumble into some murals in the attic of an abandoned house!’

  Hannah brought out our portable model of the murals to show him what we were talking about.

  He studied them. ‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘Also strange. I can see why you got into this.’ He sat back. ‘So, twenty-five years ago this girl was abducted. Now she’s a middle-aged woman living in a Swiss clinic. Even if she needs care, I doubt you can commit an adult without consent to a mental facility in a foreign country. Here’s how I see the issues: Did she give consent? Does she understand where she is and why she’s there? Has her family forgotten her, or are they fully aware of her situation? Is this shrink actually selling her artwork for his own account or is he applying the money to her maintenance at his clinic? If she’s the heiress to a fortune, who controls her money? And the big one: Was there family abuse, and, if there was, is she capable of coming back and giving coherent testimony to that effect?’

  He pushed a button on his intercom. ‘Kim, find out if there’s a statute of limitations on family abuse.’

  He turned back to us. ‘Way I see it, if she’s been abandoned in this clinic without her consent, and if her doctor is stealing from her, and if her inherited funds are being illegally kept from her, and if a provable case can be made for past abuse, then, if she wants to leave, there’s an excellent chance she can be rescued.’

  He paused. ‘You know how powerful the Cobbs are. If I get into this, they won’t like it. I knew them slightly at school. Never liked them. I’ve heard lots of unsavory stories over the years about their business practices and personal lives. All that makes me inclined to take this on. Let’s say we go to war on Courtney’s behalf. Let’s say we get her free of the clinic with her funds restored. What then? Where does she go? Is she capable of living on her own? If not, who’ll take care of her? Have you considered all that?’

  Hannah told him that we had. One of our ideas was that she could voluntarily commit herself to a top-notch American institution where she could continue making art.

  ‘There’s this famous Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama, now nearly ninety,’ she said, ‘More than forty years ago she committed herself to the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill. She’s lived there ever since.’

  ‘The one who makes the polka-dot stuff?’

  Hannah nodded. ‘I think she’d be a good model for Courtney, if Courtney wants to go that way.’

  ‘That’s the underlying issue. What does Courtney want? Suppose she’s happy where she is and doesn’t want to leave? Moving after all these years could be traumatic. And it’s possible she’s designated this shrink as her agent.’

  ‘Good questions,’ Hannah told him. ‘We don’t know the answers.’

  The intercom buzzed. Noah switched it on.

  ‘The limitation’s twenty years,’ Kim said.

  He turned back to us. ‘That settles it as far as making this a criminal matter. But we could still bring a civil action if we could prove abuse.’

  He peered at Hannah. ‘I had no idea you were bringing me something like this. Believe me, I’m appalled. I suspect her money’s in trust and the trust is paying the clinic. I’ll look into that. Something tells me the Cobb boys may have written her off since their parents’ deaths. That no one’s ever visited her in all the years – that could make for a good argument that someone outside the family should take over as legal guardian. But you two are going to have to find stuff out. It won’t be easy. Someone’s gotta talk to her, hear her side of this. Most important, find out what she wants. As for the shrink, if he refuses to let anyone talk to her, that would suggest she’s being held against her will. In that case, the dirty deal you taped in Lucerne could give you leverage. I can’t imagine he’d be happy to be exposed for stealing and selling a patient’s artwork. Finally, if you can get some evidence of childhood abuse, that would help a lot. Think about it. Meantime, I’ll do my part. This’ll be pro bono. Aside from the considerable merits of the case, I can’t tell you how much I’d love to take the Cobb boys down.’

  We left his office totally wired. There was a ritzy restaurant-bar, Comme Chez Soi, on the ground floor of the Tower of the Great Lakes.

  I peered in through the window. ‘Looks like they’re having a happy hour. How ’bout we have ourselves a quiet drink?’

  Hannah said she thought that was an excellent idea.

  ‘I’m starting to like your brother,’ I told her after we sat down and ordered. ‘He is smart. And your idea of Courtney following the example of Yayoi Kusama is brilliant. But proving abuse twenty-five years after the fact – how can we possibly do that? We don’t even know if she actually was abused. If she testifies that she was, it’ll be her word against theirs. Sti
ll, I doubt they’d want to answer to that in a public trial.’

  ‘Noah made it obvious that he despises them.’

  ‘Any idea why?’

  ‘They went to Richmond when it was still an all-boys school. Maybe something happened there. Back then Richmond only went through eighth grade, then the kids went east to boarding schools. Noah went to Exeter. I think the Cobb boys went on to St Pauls.’

  ‘So you think it could be an old rivalry thing?’

  ‘More likely it’s about those unsavory stories he’s heard. Noah’s always been a moralist.’

  ‘Whatever the reason, he’s motivated. To me, that’s really all that matters.’

  Something was gnawing at me. What if I was wrong and the Cobbs didn’t care if they went to trial? What if they said, ‘Go ahead, put her on the stand, she’s schizo, no one’ll believe her.’ How the hell do you prove abuse so long after the fact?

  I was deep into sleep that night … then suddenly woke up.

  The bedrolls!

  I checked the clock. Two a.m.

  Those fucking bedrolls – why didn’t I think to look inside?

  I waited until eight to call Cindy.

  ‘I need to go back in,’ I told her. ‘This time I hope you’ll come in with me.’

  ‘Not sure I’m up for that,’ she said.

  ‘I think you owe it to yourself to really look at the murals. There’re on your walls. You own them. Maybe you can put aside your feelings about betraying the Schechtners and look at them as a work of art.’

  ‘You sound edgy, Jason.’

  ‘I am edgy. I need to get in there.’

  ‘What’s the big deal?’

  ‘The girls’ bedrolls. There’re still up there. Maybe there’s something inside them. Sketches, notebooks, a diary … or maybe nothing. Won’t know till I look.’