by Cathy Ace
Spotting Bud’s worried expression, I ventured, “You said he was a good man. Did you know him well?”
The lawyer’s jaw muscle tightened. “He was my father’s friend, you understand, my mother’s too. He was one of the group of people with whom they mixed for all my life. Sometimes he was there, sometimes he was not. He was, to me, always an old man, though he truly was only twenty years or so my senior. He would bring me candies when I was small, and gave me a watercolor painting kit for my tenth birthday. I was not a good artist, though he tried to show me how to make the colors work on the paper. He was thoughtful in his gift when I married, and made a portrait of my wife’s cat at the time. It was an excellent portrait. We have it still, long after the cat has gone. He was a talented artist, and loved art with the same passion my father had for it. Have you heard of the Group of Seven?”
Bud and I both nodded.
Menno looked pleased. “Maybe it was mentioned in the letters I sent to Canada from him for you. It was Jonas, my father, and five other art lovers. They spent many years as friends. I believe you will meet the five remaining members. That was his plan.”
Both Bud and I showed our surprise. “I think we’re speaking at cross-purposes,” I said. “You don’t mean the same Group of Seven we mean.”
Menno shrugged. “I know only one.”
“Bud and I thought you meant the Group of Seven Canadian artists,” I said. “Carmichael, Harris, MacDonald, and others. A group of men from Ontario who transformed the way Canadians thought of art from the 1920s onwards.”
“Wasn’t Emily Carr one of the members of that group?” asked Bud. “She’s one of British Columbia’s most famous and respected artists,” he added by way of explanation to Menno.
“No, never a member,” I responded. “It was an all-boys club. They only invited non-Ontario guys to make sure it represented a little bit more of Canada, but no women. Emily Carr was influenced and supported by them, even exhibited with them.”
Luckily, Menno didn’t allow us to get sidetracked. “The Group of Seven I mean was Jonas, my father and five more. One was a woman. You have their information on the list.”
“Is that what he did, then?” asked Bud. “Was he an artist? We know absolutely nothing about him, you see.”
A faint smile played around Menno’s lips. “An artist? As a hobby. He was good, but not a professional. Over the years he worked at many art galleries and museums around Amsterdam as a guard. He never married, so had only himself to support. He retired when younger people were found for the jobs, then he led walking tours of the city. I believe he did this until he was around eighty years of age. Recently he had returned to his love of art in different ways, I believe. He told me he was writing a book.” Menno stopped short. Why, I wondered? “I think it must have been about art history.”
Menno’s tone became a little more terse. He hardly glanced at his watch, but I noticed it.
“Is there anything else you need to give us, or can tell us, before we leave?” I ventured. “I’m sure you have other appointments.”
Menno stood and chewed his lip. “I am late for a meeting downstairs. We have a community session this time every week. It is how we…give back. My colleagues will expect me. But I wanted you to be able to come here as late in the afternoon as possible, so you could rest at your hotel for a little time after your arrival.”
Bud stood. “Thanks for your consideration, Menno. We’ll get out of here and call you if we have any queries. We’ll see what Uncle Jonas de Smet has to say for himself, read all this paperwork, and keep you apprised of our plans. If we need help, we’ll ask.” He held out a set of keys he’d taken from the envelope. “I can see Jonas’s address here, and I guess these will get us into his place.”
Menno agreed, then led us down the narrow staircase and to the front entrance, where we parted company.
As Bud and I stepped out into the warm August sunshine we were assailed by the sights and sounds of a busy urban thoroughfare where trams clattered along and bicycles whizzed past like silent missiles. All around us, groups of tourists were addressing maps or handheld devices and pointing at things across the canal or on the front of tall, narrow brick buildings.
“It’s changed a lot since I was here last,” said Bud wistfully.
“And when was that exactly? You weren’t particularly clear when we spoke about it before,” I said pointedly. “Or will you have to kill me if you tell me more than you have already? Was it one of your CSIS-cleared trips?”
Bud hugged me close as a cyclist sped by with a child sitting in a precarious-looking attachment behind the seat. “I was here to liaise with international law enforcement colleagues. Part of the gangbusters team initiative I was leading just before I retired.”
“And you think the place has changed a lot in two or three years?”
Bud looked around and seemed uncertain. “Either it has, or I have.”
“More likely you, because these houses have been here since the seventeenth century, this canal hasn’t moved at all, and I’m pretty sure they’ve had trams and bicycles for a lot longer than a few years.”
Bud scratched his hand through his silver hair—his tell for stress. “Maybe it is me, then, Cait. When I was here last time I had an agenda, a purpose. I was with colleagues sharing a common goal. I filtered out a lot of the local color. Had to. I honestly don’t recall it being this noisy, bright, and busy. Then again, it was winter, and the light was different.”
“The famous Dutch light—inspiration for generations of artists,” I mused as we made our way through the busy streets. “This time of year it’s filtered differently than in the winter. Even tulip time is gone. It’s the bulb-peeling season when the nights are warm, and the days can be horribly humid.”
Bud grinned. “That’s unusually poetic for you. Know all about humid nights in Holland, eh?”
“You know very well I spent a whole summer here, peeling tulip bulbs. It was while I was at Cardiff University—and, yes, I was with my boyfriend of the time, and a couple he knew. We made it through ten weeks somehow with two tents, one cooking stove, and no money. I wanted to kill his friends by the end of it.”
“I won’t ask why, because I suspect it’s a long story that somehow revolves around food…and drink,” said Bud, distracted by a window display of hundreds of cigars. “This is an old store,” he said, indicating the sign above the door. “Look—it’s been here since 1686. Same company. Selling tobacco and cigars. That’s quite something when you think about it.”
I laughed. “You’d think you’d never left the New World before, Bud. What’s got into you?”
Bud puffed out his cheeks and gave my question some thought. “Cait, it’s all so unnerving; I believed Mom was an only child, that my entire family history was known to me, and pretty straightforward. Now it turns out that wasn’t the case.” He scratched his head again. “I guess I’m rethinking who I am.”
“That’s quite a big thing.”
“It sure is.”
“And this from a man who’s more than a little familiar with undercover work, so used to lying to get by.”
“That’s different. That’s work, not life.”
“Sometimes the lines between the two can blur.”
“And sometimes they have to be redrawn.”
As we stopped in front of our hotel, I noticed how its modern glass and chrome seemed out of place with so many ancient buildings along the street. “Shall we take a look at the CD your uncle made for you, and read his letter?”
“Yes, and let’s order some room service. I’m starving,” said Bud, flashing me a broad smile.
“You know the way to my heart so well.”
Portrait of an Artist Wearing a Hat
THIN CRÊPES, STUFFED WITH HAM and Gouda cheese, glistening with a béchamel sauce, and to
pped with almost transparent apple slices, sat beside some sugar-dusted pastries on the serviceable desk in the corner of our far-from-spacious hotel room just half an hour later. Bud and I devoured our meal, and I felt a bit guilty I hadn’t savored the food more than I had. Eventually we sat back with a bottle of Heineken beer each, and I set up the laptop so we could view Jonas’s message.
The screen was big enough to do the job and the speakers more than adequate, so we managed to each get a good view and hear what was said. It was a strange experience. Jonas de Smet sat so close to the camera that his face, and his jauntily angled tan corduroy peaked cap, filled the entire screen. As he fiddled around setting things up, I studied the man’s birthmark. From the middle of his forehead to the middle of his chin, covering most of the whole of the right side of his face, was a purple stain. The skin was lumpy and uneven. One jagged edge of the mark rounded his nose, which was unblemished, and the other descended toward the area of his neck below his ear. For a moment it was all I could see, all I could focus on. Had he been sitting in front of me as a living person, instead of as an image on a screen, I think I would have turned away—but the situation allowed me to study him without his knowing it or my being embarrassed to do so. The left side of his face suggested he might otherwise have been a good-looking man. The oddest thing about seeing him this way, however, was that he looked at me with Bud’s eyes; despite the birthmark, the eyes were unmistakable. It was an eerie sight.
Finally, digital Jonas settled and smiled. His perfect teeth, surrounded by unblemished lips, were even, white, and a stark contrast to his skin. When he grinned, the right side of his face puckered, but the left side had lines upon it that suggested he was used to smiling. That was the one other striking aspect of the marked side of his face—it had no wrinkles, whereas his unblemished side was aged, as you’d expect of a man in his eighties. The birthmarked side, though uneven, had withstood the ravages of time. An odd side effect of the condition, I surmised.
Tipping his cap at the camera, Jonas de Smet spoke. He had an extraordinary voice. I don’t know what I’d expected, but his deep baritone wasn’t it. He had none of Bud’s parents’ singsong Swedish intonation; it was pure Dutch pronunciation of perfect, yet formal, English. He began with a laugh—deep and throaty, as if he’d just heard a good joke. I got the impression this was a natural state for him. I analyzed his every expression as he spoke, while listening to his words. Bud watched with his mouth open just a little, his eyes transfixed; it was as though he was trying to look through the screen to see the man himself.
“Welcome, welcome to my city,” said Jonas. “Isn’t she beautiful? Of course she is. Her canals, her architecture, her history, and, of course, her art. That is why I came here—for her art. I don’t know what Ebba has told you about me, but whatever it was she was probably wrong. Ebba was always certain she was right, but quite often she was not. It’s funny how we humans can be like that. I have been the same. I thought I knew everything when I was sixteen, but what I have seen and felt since then—well, let’s say I now know how wrong I was about life, art, and love.”
The vision of Bud’s uncle disappeared as the man moved beyond of the scope of the camera for a moment then reemerged, a thin trail of blue smoke streaming out of the side of his mouth.
“If everything has happened correctly,” he continued, “you are Bud Anderson and Cait Morgan watching this. Bud, you are my nephew, my heir, and my chosen messenger from beyond my grave. You have received a key and a list of contacts, as well as this recording and a letter. I suspect you are puzzled, so let me explain.
“If I tell you, in this form or another, about who I am and what I have done with my life, it will mean nothing. Well, next to nothing. I want you to learn about me for yourself, from my friends, then tell my sister what you have discovered. It will be real. It will be an investigation, and I know you are good at those.
“The delivery of bequests will allow you access to the people I have known my whole life. Since I left Sweden, that is. I never went back. It is my biggest regret, a huge loss for me, but I knew it would be that way when I walked out of my parents’ home when I was no more than a boy. Of course, at that time I didn’t know how it would make me feel. I did it with a light step because I wanted something I could never have there—I wanted to bathe in the light of the Dutch Masters and feel its luminosity on my skin. I wanted to touch the corn Van Gogh had conjured on canvas, and drink at bars where he drank. I wanted so much, and none of it was in Sweden. So I left.
“My father was a brute. He doted on Ebba, but to me he was harsh. I didn’t want to become like him. He hated my disfigurement. It came from his side of the family, and he hated seeing what he had given me. He couldn’t look at me, so he hit me. Ebba would not know this, and I would prefer she never knows. But she is your mother, so you will decide.”
Jonas took a deep draw on the small cigar he’d been holding outside the frame, then winked at the camera. “I have cut down, but only because…it is so expensive now.” He aggressively stubbed the cigar into what I assumed was an ashtray beside the camera, leaning forward to do so. As his birthmark approached the camera it was as though we were seeing a close-up of the surface of a purple planet. My reaction was to wince; his blemish looked as though it would be painful.
“I wish we had met. You will go to my house and find what I have left and know what to do. I have chosen you because you are a good, law-abiding man, which means you are unusual. I trust you to follow my wishes and do the right thing. The letter you have been given upon your arrival in Amsterdam should be read while you sit at the window in my bedroom. Only there. Nowhere else. It will not make sense anywhere else. Then you will know what to do. Exactly what to do.”
Jonas sighed, and sat back in his seat. The marked side of his face showed almost no micro-expressions, but the unmarked side suggested subtle delight. He was feeling smug, but trying not to show it. To be fair, he did a pretty good job of it.
“You’ll enjoy the tasks I’ve set for you, Bud. Success, lycka till! Good luck, my boy.”
The digital Jonas reached forward, then he was gone. Bud kept staring at the screen, shaking his head. I waited.
“I cannot imagine what it must have felt like to go through life with a face that’s so tough to look at,” were Bud’s unexpected first words. “What would that do to a person, do you think?”
I gave the matter some thought. Bud deserved a serious answer to a serious question. “So much depends on the person, and the family of the person in question—how they are brought up in their earliest years to be able to cope with the way society will treat them. How to deal with the reactions of others. If, as Jonas said, he had a difficult relationship with his father, it might be that the anger your grandfather displayed was the outward expression of guilt he felt within himself. That could mean your uncle grew up feeling guilt, projected onto him by his father, or both parents. If your mother was the family favorite, that could have further embittered Jonas. It’s hard to say. What I saw on the screen was a man who faced the world as though he were no different from anyone else. That could be because he was facing a camera, not a room full of strangers, but I got the distinct impression he was at peace with his looks. He might have worked hard to rationalize that the responses he saw on the faces of people he met were more their problem than his. Given what Menno told us he’d done for a living—working with the public the whole time, it seems—maybe he’d seen every possible reaction to his condition, and had learned to cope with it.”
“Maybe his never marrying, as Menno told us, means Mom was right; perhaps it was too much for any woman to bear?”
I shook my head. “Oh, come on, Bud, you know better than that. If one person can get to know another as a friend, there’s every likelihood they’d get past the physical aspects and relate to the inner person. Beauty might be in the eye of the beholder, but when there’s a physical abnormali
ty involved, there’s no reason to think there mightn’t have been someone prepared to see past that to the man inside. You can see past all this extra padding I’ve developed since our wedding, right? Why couldn’t someone see past his birthmark?”
Bud grinned and stood up. “It’s the padding that keeps me warm at night, Wife—and you know I love you. I don’t get all caught up in this weight business. Though I get what you’re saying about Jonas. It could just be that he never met the right woman.”
I agreed. “It’s possible he met too many of the wrong ones and kept himself occupied that way,” I added wickedly.
Bud’s expression told me he didn’t agree, but it set my mind off on a different tangent. “I wonder if he had models for his paintings. He certainly seemed to have a pretty forceful personality in that little video, and he’s not been short on giving you, and Menno, instructions. He might have used the fact that people were embarrassed to look him in the face to be able to dominate them. Who knows?”
“Not me, for one,” replied Bud.
“And not me, for two,” I grinned back. “We can find out. It seems that’s what he wanted. Even if he wasn’t a victim of foul play, I could profile him as such.”
“Want to go to his house to unearth what we can?”
“The words ‘Pope’ and ‘Catholic’ come to mind.”
The Artist’s Home: A Sketch
IN AMSTERDAM, BICYCLES ARE BOTH silent and deadly. Luckily, negotiating the bike lanes in Vancouver had me pretty well-trained for this foray into the land where two wheels reign supreme, but even I had to be on my guard. Far be it from me to suggest the people who ride bicycles are all homicidal maniacs, but I began to get the feeling they were taking aim every time I made my move to cross the cobbled streets. And my word, could they shift!
Jonas’s house fronted onto a canal—not so unusual in Amsterdam, of course, but it wasn’t what I was expecting; it seemed like a highly desirable spot, and not somewhere a man who had low-paying jobs could have afforded to buy. It was an old house, built in the seventeenth century by the looks of it, with a brown-brick façade decorated with white trim, and one of those delightful gingerbread-style pointed roofs. A large, white-painted wooden arm poked out above the topmost window, where I knew pulleys would be set up to allow for furniture to be hoisted up from the street and through the windows—the internal staircases not allowing for the moving of large pieces. It made me pause for thought. If Bud and I were to take on the responsibility of clearing Jonas’s house, I wondered, how much of a logistical nightmare might that be?