The Hypnotist

by M. J. Rose

  “Which one of those brought you to Vienna?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

  She nodded and went back to describing the architecture. “This is all original—the building and the decor. We’ve done some restoration, of course, but everything is as it was.”

  They passed columns that stood like sentries and an Egyptian mural that covered an entire wall. Beneath their feet was a gemtoned carpet and above their heads was a cupola painted the cobalt of a night sky where stars—tiny mirrors that caught and reflected light from below—twinkled. Every corner was crammed with too many gleaming objects and artifacts for him to take them all in.

  Alderman didn’t stop to introduce him to any of the society’s members, but he was aware that they were looking at him curiously, even suspiciously, and he pressed his upper arm against the gun in his shoulder holster. His talisman. Long ago he had given up looking for reassurance from the people in his life and had come to rely only on this inanimate object.

  “Of specific interest to the society’s founders,” Alderman continued, “was reincarnation—a belief common to the newly discovered Hindu Shruti scriptures, teachings of the Kabbalah, mystery schools of ancient Egypt, Greek philosophers and Christian doctrine prior to the fifth century ACE. And this is our library,” she said as she reached the threshold, her timing perfect.

  This room was smaller than the public spaces and, like them, was windowless. Wall sconces illuminated four walls of bookshelves crammed with volumes that gave off a slightly musty scent.

  Shutting the door behind her, Dr. Alderman locked it with a key hanging from a gold chain around her neck. The tumblers clicked efficiently. When she tried the knob to make sure it was secured, he wondered if her paranoia was justified or an over-reaction to recent events.

  “Have a seat, please,” she said, gesturing to a grouping of worn leather club chairs. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Water would be fine.”

  The bar was ornately carved and well stocked with crystal decanters and heavy glasses that gleamed in the room’s soft lights. She filled a tall glass with water and then poured herself an inch of amber liquid. “I’d like to thank you for seeing me so late in the day,” Alderman said as she sat down opposite him. “I’ve just taken over as the head of the society, and there’s a lot to deal with rather quickly.”

  He nodded and waited for her to continue, choosing not to tell her yet that he wanted to talk to her, too.

  Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes, took one, and then offered them to him. So many people in Vienna smoked it had made him rethink his abstinence. “I quit, but allow me…” he said as he reached into his pocket.

  She lit her cigarette from the steady orange flame he offered. “If you quit, why carry the lighter?”

  “To prove I’m the one in control of the habit, not the other way around.”

  She smiled.

  “So, how can I help you, Doctor?” he asked.

  “Is it true the US is the world’s largest bazaar for stolen art?”

  “One of them, yes.”

  The combination of a largely unregulated marketplace, so many buyers anxious for a deal and so many unscrupulous sellers had created a four- to six-billion-dollar global industry that now fueled everything from terrorism to drug running.

  “Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, art crime has become the third largest worldwide crime, following the drug trade and illicit arms deals,” he told her. “Dealers, collectors and academics who are less than stringent are, in effect, helping the terrorists now. At ACT we try as best we can to alert everyone, but…”

  He hadn’t meant to lecture her, but it was precisely because people didn’t recognize the link between the removal and transport of cultural objects and the funding of terrorism that the crimes continued to increase at such alarming rates.

  Raising awareness would help, but the last important article on the subject had been a 2006 op-ed in the New York Times written by Matthew Bogdanos, a colonel in the marine reserves who described how, during an Iraqi raid on terrorists in underground bunkers, marines had found automatic weapons, stockpiles of ammunition, ski masks, night-vision goggles and a cache of precious artifacts including vases, seals and statues. In the past ten years the trail of terrorists had led more and more to looted artwork. Antiquities were as valuable as drugs and often easier to transport and trade.

  “You have a reputation for being very successful at recovery,” Dr. Alderman said as she put out her cigarette. “One of the most successful.” She stopped and sipped her drink as if she needed fortification. “That’s why I would like to hire you.”

  “Thank you. But I’m already employed.”

  “I am well aware of that. I’m not proposing to you that you quit your job. It is in fact precisely because of your FBI affiliation, as well as how closely you work with Interpol, that I am making this proposition.”

  “I appreciate that, but I don’t freelance, either.”

  “Perhaps, then, our needs will overlap and by doing your job you’ll be able to help me do mine?”

  “A much more likely scenario.”

  She leaned forward and spoke sotto voce. “An ancient copper booklet that dates back to approximately 2000 BCE has been in the society’s possession for hundreds of years.”

  He saw she was searching his face for a reaction. Not finding one, she continued. “Recently our historian came to believe it was a list of deep meditation aids that could help people access past-life memories.”

  “Do you mean a list of Memory Tools?” He kept all intonation out of his voice and fought the urge to push her. The Malachai Samuels case he’d been working on for the past eighteen months, which had cost the bureau hundreds of thousands of dollars and had brought him to Vienna, centered on a cache of precious stones thought to be Memory Tools.

  “Yes, we believe so. No one had ever been able to figure out what language it was written in or translate it until two years ago when our historian read an article about an archaeologist named Harshul Parva, who’d found the key to Harappan, a language used in the Indus Valley. Apparently, despite a large cache of writing samples from the Harappa mature period, which lasted from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE, there’d never been any developments in breaking the language.”

  “Did Parva translate the list?”

  “No, our historian wouldn’t let anyone else see it. But he did get help from Parva.”

  “Was the list translated properly?”

  “I don’t know.” Alderman paused to take another drink. “But let’s assume it was. If you knew what was on the list and one of those items came on the market, you’d be in a position to identify it and let us know it had surfaced, yes?”

  “Are you in possession of the list?”

  Again he watched Alderman search his face, trying to gauge his interest. It was part of an agent’s training to learn how to hide emotions, but the last woman he’d lived with complained he’d learned too well. Gilly had told him once that all she ever saw reflected in his eyes were the room’s lights. You’ve got a cat’s unblinking gaze, she’d said. Not a real cat, though: a small jade animal I once saw in a museum. Cold, precise, perfect—but a facsimile. Her comment had stung because he feared it was the truth.

  “Last night, after the funeral, I discovered that the booklet is missing from the vault,” Alderman said. “I’m hoping our historian secreted it away someplace even more secure and we’ll find it.”

  “In case it’s been stolen, I’d like a detailed description so I can log it in with Interpol if you haven’t already reported it missing.”

  She nodded. “I have the translation of the list, though. That wasn’t in the vault. Would you like to see it?” While Alderman opened her leather agenda, the library took on the immutable silence of a tomb. Pulling out a single sheet of paper, she put it on the table between them and then rested her right hand on top of it as if she were keeping it from blowing away ev
en though the room was windowless.

  “I never believed Memory Tools existed, even after a colleague of mine in New York, a well-respected reincarnationist, claimed to have found one of them,” she said. “But I do now and am prepared to offer you anything you want to help us find these.”

  “Have you shown this to anyone?” Like the reincarnationist from New York you just mentioned, he wanted to ask but didn’t.

  “No one. I’m fairly certain the only other living person who knows there even is a list is in jail and will be for a long time.”

  “Dr. Alderman, if the tools listed here belonged to the society and have been stolen, both the FBI and Interpol need to know about it.”

  “They haven’t been stolen because, as far as I know, they haven’t been found. At least, most of them haven’t.”

  The list could be critically important to his investigation, he thought. It could mean the difference between going back to New York having failed and succeeding. His fingers inched forward. “May I see that?”

  It was ordinary typewriter paper. Each item was numbered and handwritten in both English and German in blue ink. He started to read down.

  Pot of fragrant wax

  Colored orb

  Reflection sphere

  Bone flute

  He never finished because of two things that happened so close together he couldn’t distinguish which came first: a slight gust of wind blew into the room and the doctor gasped. Instinctively, he let the paper fall as he reached for his gun, but just as his fingers touched the comforting metal something came down hard on the back of his head.

  The pain was instantaneous and intense. Sharp, jagged and overwhelming. He was seeing darkness and then titanium-white brightness, and even as he fought to breathe through the pain, he wondered how someone could have gotten into the room, because he’d seen Dr. Alderman lock the door from the inside.

  The second blow came almost immediately. He’d suffered pain like this a long time ago, and that was what he was remembering when the third strike hit. From far away he heard moaning but didn’t realize it was coming from his own lips. Before he lost consciousness, Special Agent Lucian Glass was thinking that he didn’t really care very much if he died—as long as this time he stayed dead.

  Chapter

  FOUR

  The boy was only sixteen years old, but he stood over the fallen soldier with a look of total control and calm. The soldier writhed and moaned, a coward’s crying. Around them the battlefield was still; there were bodies everywhere. It seemed that these two were the last men left alive, except the boy wasn’t alive in the same way the soldier was.

  The undead can’t be.

  “Please,” the soldier begged. “I was only following orders.”

  The look in the pale boy’s eyes said that had been the wrong answer. “All this…” He spread his hand out over the devastation. “And you didn’t even believe in the reason you were fighting?”

  The wounded soldier stared up at him.

  “You could have at least died a hero,” the boy said almost wistfully.

  “There are no heroes anymore…” The bloodied fighter managed a disgusted snort.

  The expression on the boy’s face was both an answer and a promise. “There will be, there have to be,” he whispered. And then the zombie turned and walked into the encroaching darkness.

  For a few seconds there was total silence.

  “And that’s a wrap!” Darius Shabaz’s deep voice boomed out, his French accent very much evident. “Bravo!”

  The director watched the actors break character, the grips shut down the lights and the set become flat and two-dimensional again. This transitional time when fantasy became reality again always left him depressed.

  Making the rounds, he thanked the cast and crew for all their hard work and invited everyone to the final wrap party later that evening.

  “Masterful job, Mitch. Thank you, once again,” Shabaz said when he reached his director of photography.

  “It’s your vision, Darius. We’ve got another winner here.”

  At six-and-a-half feet tall and only 160 pounds, Shabaz towered over everyone and moved faster than any of them. He exuded so much energy one of his assistants once joked that she used to wait for the thunder to follow his lightning.

  It took the better part of an hour to talk to everyone. It had been a long day—they’d started filming outdoors at six that morning to catch the early light—but Shabaz wasn’t tired. At fifty-three, he ran fifteen miles a week, lifted weights, never drank and was fanatical about what he ate. The silver threads in his thick black hair were the only outward signs of his age. Shabaz had been brought up to revere his body. “We are all we own,” his grandfather had always told him.

  Outside the shooting stage, the sun was just starting to drop down and the orange groves that stretched out almost a mile in every direction were suffused with a warm glow. Glancing at his watch, he calculated that his driver would be getting back from Santa Barbara in twenty minutes and paced himself accordingly as he set off on his end-of-the-workday walk.

  Shabaz had come to America to attend film school when he was seventeen, and while he retained his French citizenship, he’d never gone home again. He was directing by the time he was twenty-two and was responsible for one of the highest grossing horror pictures of all time by the age of thirty. Five years after that he started his own studio. He focused on supernatural plots about the dead coming back to life—vampires, zombies and mummies—but always for noble purposes.

  While critics labeled him as a B movie director with messianic delusions, filmgoers ignored the negative reviews. Word of mouth kept people standing in line even in the dead of winter without complaining when a new Shabaz movie debuted. It was often remarked that fans preferred to see his films in theaters as opposed to renting them. It wasn’t just because his grand and gory visions were better suited to the big screen, but because seeing them in a roomful of people who collectively gasped was exhilarating.

  Passing the main gatepost, Shabaz circled the compound, which included four soundstages, a theater, an editing studio, an employees’ gym, a day-care center, a medical building, a commissary and a dozen bungalows. His architect had relied on natural woods and stone so all the structures seemed to have sprung out of the earth and looked as indigenous to the landscape as the orange and eucalyptus trees.

  Shabaz’s loop ended at the southwest corner where bungalow number six sat on the edge of a small pond. His office was here, along with a private screening room and a bedroom suite for when he stayed over. His olive-drab Range Rover was parked in the driveway, his driver leaning on the car, having a smoke.

  “Hey, Mr. Shabaz,” the driver said, tipping his Shabaz Films baseball cap with its distinctive emerald-green lightning bolt.

  “How badly did they soak us this time, Mike?”

  “Not too bad. Everything was under warranty but the new tires. These were a couple of hundred dollars more, but they should last seventy-five thousand miles instead of twenty, which was all we got out of the last set.”

  “Which means these will get us about forty-five?”

  “If we’re lucky.” The driver grinned. “Are you going to be needing me tonight?”

  Shabaz shook his head. “No, I’m working late, so either I’ll drive myself home or stay over. See you tomorrow.”

  The driver doffed his cap for the second time and walked off toward the main parking lot while Shabaz inspected the new wheels. Or so it would have looked to anyone watching. In reality, he was checking to ensure no one was around. Even though there was nothing suspicious about a man taking a package out of his own car, he didn’t want an audience.

  Inside the bungalow, he greeted the night guard on duty and proceeded to the screening room. With the door locked behind him, Shabaz walked down the aisle past the dozen black leather lounge chairs. The floor and walls were covered with industrial carpet in a subtle pattern of squares in different shades of gray, and i
n the low light it was impossible to tell that one of the panels was actually a door.

  The room on the other side was paneled in similar modular squares, but these were constructed from a blend of concrete and additives engineered for maximum crush resistance. Each was only three inches thick but ten times as strong as an eighteen-inch-thick panel of regular formula cement. They were both fireproof and watertight; nothing but a full-out nuclear attack would destroy them.

  There were three identical vaults on the lot, all with the same specs: twenty-five-hundred square feet and designed to withstand an earthquake—or as close to it as engineering could come. Shabaz had never corrected his architect’s assumption that film negative would be stored here as well as in the other two vaults. And since no one but the movie director had ever been in this room once it had been completed, the contents of this vault remained a secret.

  Tonight, Shabaz didn’t focus on any of the precious art objects that lined the shelves. It was the easels set up in a semi-circle that commanded all of his attention. Four of the five had paintings resting on them—paintings that Shabaz, who had a connoisseur’s eye, believed were among the finest examples of each artist’s oeuvre.

  View of the Sea at Scheveningen, by Vincent Van Gogh, was a gray-green, stormy painting: a turbulent emotional reaction to a cloudy, raw day at the beach resort near The Hague. Since the artist was known to paint en plein, it was not surprising that there were actual grains of sand mixed in with the paint that Shabaz had felt with his fingertips the few times he dared touch the impasto canvas.

  Beach at Pourville, by Claude Monet, was as peaceful as the Van Gogh was violent. It had a lushness that made Shabaz feel as if he were breathing in the salty air. The lavender blue sky, the green sea and sandy shore were painted with a loose brush, but the overall impression was more transportive than a photograph could have been.