by M. J. Rose
Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady was an evocative, mysterious painting. There was yearning in the dark-haired woman’s almond-shaped eyes and a certain petulance in her full lips. The deep green-blue background hinted at the forest, and in her light yellow dress, she might have been an unexpected and glorious wildflower.
The fourth painting, the smallest, was a jewel. The Renoir was only ten inches by twelve inches, but the bouquet of pink roses was so exuberant and lush, Shabaz had been fooled more than once into thinking their scent was perfuming the room.
Now there was a fifth painting to join the others.
Carefully Shabaz stripped away the butcher paper and multiple layers of Bubble Wrap, finally revealing a cacophony of colors. As if he were handling butterfly wings, he lifted the canvas and placed it on the only empty easel.
Stepping back, he took his first full look at the Matisse masterwork, View of St. Tropez.
The exuberant brushstrokes, which appeared so primitive up close, created a luminous beach scene when viewed from a few feet away. It was brighter and louder than the Monet—there was more joy in this painting, less contemplation. It might be the best of the lot.
His hands trembled, and he felt slightly nauseated. It had taken him over two years and had cost six million dollars to assemble this particular group of paintings. Step one of his plan was finally complete. His eyes drifted from one masterpiece to the next. Which one was he going to choose? Maybe the Renoir—perhaps the still life might be less intimidating.
It wasn’t the money that bothered him but the act he was about to commit. The cost was certainly substantial, but he’d paid far less for all of the paintings together than what any one of them was worth; fencing stolen paintings of this caliber was difficult. None ever sold for close to their real value. The Renoir was worth eight million, but he’d paid only a million. The Matisse would cost thirty-five million with a clean provenance, but he’d paid only two and a half.
Which one? Which one should he choose? Of all the paintings the Van Gogh was the most valuable, so he’d hold that one out as a carrot. The Klimt would be the least devastating loss.
A Williams-Sonoma shopping bag had been sitting in a corner of the vault for the past month. Inside was a single item, a Shun Kaji Paring knife that he’d purchased for $134.95 in cash. The time had come. Was it going to be the Monet or the Matisse?
Shabaz walked up to the Monet, then over to the Matisse. He paced between them slowly for the next ninety seconds.
Finally, he came to a decision. With the point of the knife mere inches from the canvas, Shabaz noticed the serene blues and greens mirrored on the blade. How on earth could he do this? Even the reflection was a masterpiece.
Chapter
FIVE
“He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.”
—Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Lucian tore the page off the pad. Even before it landed on the pile of previously discarded drawings, his pencil was streaking across a new sheet with grace, authority and an economy of motion. The human face that emerged looked out at him, terror in her eyes. It had taken him less than fifteen minutes to bring the stranger to life, and although the portrait was more than competent, he wasn’t satisfied. Ripping the page off, he started again on a clean sheet.
It was the hour before first light when New York City was still gravely quiet—especially downtown, where he lived in an old, refurbished factory on Sullivan Street. The large loft had a separate sleeping area and bathroom but otherwise was wide open, with oversize windows facing north that offered a sliver of skyline, beautiful in the abstract, not hinting of the danger that was always lying in wait.
He stopped drawing, lifted his head up and listened to a car roar down the street, curious that such an ordinary sound could take on such ominous overtones. It was the hour when otherworldly visitations seemed possible even to someone who’d never believed in ghosts. Or in life after death. Or in God. Or in anything that he couldn’t prove. Lucian was a disciple of logic, of action and reaction. Long ago he’d trained himself never to waste any time looking backward, but that had changed in the two weeks since a still unknown assailant had discovered the hidden entranceway into the Memorist Society’s library and had lain in wait until Dr. Erika Alderman handed Lucian the paper that detailed a partial list of Memory Tools.
The list was gone, and Alderman had died of sustained injuries. Lucian had spent a week in the hospital with a concussion that caused dizziness and constant headaches. The symptoms the doctors feared most never manifested; he had no loss of memory, muscle weakness or paralysis—any of which would have suggested progressive brain damage. Arming him with powerful painkillers and telling him the headaches might take several weeks or months to completely resolve, the doctors had released him and cleared him to travel as long as he promised to rest when he got home.
Yesterday he’d tried to go back to work, but his boss, Doug Comley, had kicked him out, insisting that Lucian heed the doctors’ orders and spend at least another week recuperating.
His hand moved in long sweeps across the sheet of paper as he filled in the lines of the woman’s jaw, her neck, her collarbone. There was no conscious thought involved in the action; his hand was moving on its own. He was thinking about what else Comley had told him.
When Malachai Samuels was well enough to be interrogated about the list of Memory Tools that had been stolen from the Memorist Society during the murder of Dr. Erika Alderman, Matt Richmond was going be the agent to interview him, not Lucian.
Matt was the optimistic, energetic dynamo on their team. Lucian trusted him implicitly, but this wasn’t Matt’s case.
“That should be my interview, Doug.”
“How many reasons do you want why you’re wrong? Let’s start with the fact that you helped save the man’s life in Vienna. He knows that. You know that. Think there’s objectivity there? Next, you’re still recovering from injuries inflicted during the crime in question. You’re one of the victims, Lucian.”
“It’s still my case.”
“What happened in Vienna is the department’s case, Agent Glass.”
When Comley started addressing agents formally, it was time to back off, but Lucian couldn’t. “Are you removing me entirely?”
“No. You’re not off the case, but I don’t want you near Malachai Samuels.” He handed Lucian a file. “This is where we are. It’s everything we have. If you want my advice don’t even open it. Go home, Lucian. Sleep. Go to the movies. Read a book. Eat some good food. Call Gilly and talk to her, see if you can patch things up—”
“Because suddenly she won’t care that as soon as you let me I’ll be back working as hard as I ever did? Thanks, Doug,” Lucian interrupted. He put the folder under his arm and stood up.
“I want my agents to be committed, but at some point this stopped being your job and became your mission. And obsessions can be unhealthy.”
Lucian wished he appreciated his boss’s paternal efforts, but Comley wanted him married with two kids. On the other hand, he knew Lucian well enough to know how much he needed to review the file. It was disturbingly lacking in substantive evidence. While the Austrian police had been thorough, they had no suspects. The Memorist Society’s locked library had been violated via a tunnel running beneath the structure. Apparently Vienna had a complex underground: layers of ancient communities going back to Roman times that included burial sites, sewers and tunnels, making it possible to cross from one part of the city to another without going aboveground.
The file included hand-drawn maps showing a series of passageways that snaked through thirteenth-century Christian catacombs under the Karmeliterkirche—a baroque church in the Leopoldstadt area—and miles later wound up in the subbasement of the Memorist
Society. From there, a staircase that was part of the original eighteenth-century structure led to a secret entrance to the library. The police had found evidence confirming that was how the perpetrator of the attack on Dr. Erika Alderman and Lucian Glass had gotten into and out of the locked room. Now, as he continued to draw, Lucian turned over the same litany of questions that had been plaguing him since he’d regained consciousness in the hospital. Who had attacked him? A member of the Memorist Society? Someone working for Malachai Samuels? Or someone working for Dr. Alderman in a convoluted plot of her own invention?
Ripping the sketch off the pad, he let it, too, fall on the floor and started again. Maybe this time he’d get the woman’s expression right. He could see her so clearly in his mind’s eye.
Although Lucian had stopped painting and quit art school after Solange’s death, he’d never stopped sketching. In his capacity as an FBI agent he drew suspects the way other agents took notes. But this was something new. Ever since the attack he had felt the need to draw these faces…was driven to it.
Once he’d come back to New York he’d sought out a neurologist, who looked at his X-rays and concurred with the doctors in Vienna: his injury wasn’t severe, he’d recover fully and the headaches would eventually subside. The neurologist didn’t think the early-morning sketching sessions were a side effect—he’d never encountered anything like it before but would investigate, and if he discovered any similar cases he would let Lucian know. He also suggested, because of Lucian’s medical history, that he visit a psychologist. Since he’d been violently attacked before, he might be suffering from PTSD. Lucian hadn’t followed up.
The face looking up at him now was suffused with fear but still not what he saw in his head. She might have been his tenth or his twentieth attempt—he’d stopped counting. There was always some elusive quality missing to his predawn sketches. Except he wasn’t drawing these women from life, so how did he know there was something absent? He’d never seen her or any of the others, so why did he feel as if he’d spent months looking at her?
Lucian had never been someone to feel fear, but in the days since his return from Austria, he woke up afraid, bathed in sweat, with his heart pounding. He’d lie in his bed feeling where his legs and torso and shoulders and spine met the sheets, aware of his naked body as if it were new to him—as if, while he’d been sleeping, he’d traveled off without it, left it behind, and was slipping back into it. He was relieved by its suppleness. He’d try to fall asleep again, but his need to draw was too strong, even though it was unreasonable. So he’d give in.
But it wasn’t quite giving in, because he’d come to crave the frenzied sketching the way some people craved sex. Even though he knew the process of rendering the faces wouldn’t end in orgiastic ecstasy but in despair, he was still addicted. While he couldn’t recollect the details of the nightmares that woke him, the faces of the women he saw during those dreams remained with him, their eyes filled with anger, sadness or fear, and the time he spent committing their pain to paper was wrenching. It was as if by exposing the darkness of these lost souls he was exposing his own darkness and forcing himself to look into an abyss that he had long since abandoned as unfathomable.
Of all the dozen people whose portraits he’d drawn over and over, two women reappeared more often than the others. He knew the texture of their hair and the exact arches of their brows. He knew how the shadows fell across their faces and the structures of their bones. And he knew they were accusing him. But of what?
As the dark sky gave way to the first rays of light, Lucian put down the pencil. The pile of discarded drawings was on the floor. He looked at them and then kicked them away.
Chapter
SIX
“It is again a strong proof of men knowing most things before birth, that when mere children they grasp innumerable facts with such speed as to show that they are not then taking them in for the first time, but are remembering and recalling them.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero
Twilight was settling over the city, casting it in a grayish haze. Dr. Malachai Samuels always loved this time of day, the hour lost between darkness and light, when everything became indistinct. Slowly he eased himself out of the chauffeur-driven Mercedes and stood for a moment to catch his breath. He was still sore. He’d been shot—by accident—in Vienna three and a half weeks ago. The bullet had missed his vital organs, but he’d suffered a severe loss of blood. There was little satisfaction that the man who had inflicted this wound on him had been arrested and would spend years in jail. Malachai had lost what he had almost, finally, found—an intact Memory Tool—and that loss was proving to be a wound that refused to heal.
The lugubrious strains of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata followed him out of the car, the appropriate accompaniment to the dusk. Standing under the shadows of the linden trees with all their bright new green leaves, he inspected the Queen Anne–style villa he’d last seen on April 27, when he’d departed for what he’d hoped was going to be a short but successful trip. Warm light glowed through the glass sunburst above the door, but all the windows downstairs, where the offices were, and upstairs, where his aunt lived, were dark. At least no one would be here to witness his ignominious return.
It was demoralizing to return without a Memory Tool, but emotion was a weakness to be conquered, not indulged in, so he buttoned his suit, squared his shoulders and proceeded toward the front door. Although an average-looking man of medium height with unremarkable features and a receding hairline, he was impeccably groomed, wore expensive clothing and carried himself like an old-world aristocrat. His father—his detested, distant father, who’d favored his firstborn, now deceased son—had always berated Malachai for putting on airs and pretending to be a Brit, even though his mother had been English and he’d grown up in the UK after their divorce. It was there, as a lonely and insecure little boy, that Malachai had discovered the study of magic. Mastering tricks had taken patience, a virtue which served him well even today in his work with children. But taking it slow and steady wasn’t an option any longer. His father was an old man. Malachai was going to have to prove what he’d always suspected about his own past life soon if he wanted his father to spend his last days suffering and regretting the indifference he’d shown his second-born son.
Before tackling the steps to the front door, Malachai paused to catch his breath. Even in this murkiness, the elaborate building with its gables, scrolled wrought-iron railing and dozens of gargoyles tucked under the eaves was an impressive sight. It was a symbol of power and wealth that had been standing on this spot since 1847, when Malachai’s ancestor, Trevor Talmage, had founded the Phoenix Club along with Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Bronson Alcott and other well-known transcendentalists. Their mission, the search for intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, had been narrowed to reincarnation research and practice when in 1876 Talmage’s brother became obsessed with protecting his wealth for his future lives.
With a burst of energy that promised full recovery, Malachai hurried up the last two steps, opened the front door, with its bas-relief coat of arms of a giant phoenix rising from a pyre, and stepped inside.
Yes, it was good to return and to do it standing on his own, unassisted. It was important to concentrate on the positive instead of being consumed by the all-pervasive negative truth—that for the second time he’d failed at obtaining a Memory Tool. Next time, he would succeed. And next time might be fairly soon if all had gone according to plan and the instrument he needed to begin a new search was here waiting for him.
The foyer’s priceless Tiffany chandelier cast soft light on the gleaming wood paneling and the polished black-and-white marble floor. This was where the present and the past came together and created an oasis out of time devoted to an ageless belief system which he’d dedicated his life to proving.
“Hello, Dr. Samuels.”
Malachai was surprised to find the receptionist at her desk. “Good evening, Frances. It’s late. You shouldn’
t still be here.”
He’d planned his arrival for when all the employees would be gone for the day and his aunt would be tucked upstairs in her apartment.
“You have an appointment.”
“I don’t believe I do.”
She nodded to the waiting area where an anxious-looking man sat at the child-size table beside a little girl of about seven who was busy playing with a wooden puzzle.
“Dr. Talmage asked if you would see her new patient,” she said, lowering her voice, “if she didn’t get back in time from the doctor.”
“Is something wrong?” His aunt, who was the co-director of the foundation, had MS but had been doing well for the past six months.
“Nothing too serious. Just some back pain she didn’t want to ignore, and she couldn’t get away during regular office hours today. She’s lucky to have a doctor who will stay late for her.”
“Yes, she is. Please just give me five minutes,” he said, and started to walk away.
“Dr. Samuels…”
Malachai turned.
“I wanted to tell you…” She was having a hard time. “We’re all glad you’re back,” she blurted out.
“I appreciate that very much, Frances.”
“We were all very concerned.”
“Thank you.”
It was a short but tiring walk down the hall to his office, which once had been the manse’s library. Opening the door, Malachai heard the familiar ticking of the ormolu clock on the marble mantel. Back. At last. Easing into his leather chair, he winced, but there was no time now for pain. On top of his desk were two large cordovan leather boxes that contained the mail that had accumulated in his absence. This was why he’d disobeyed his doctor’s orders and come back to work two days early: to see if the package from the bookshop on the Left Bank in Paris had come. During his recuperation its whereabouts had been on his mind, but there’d been no way to inquire without calling undue attention to it.