by M. J. Rose
Upstairs, he faced the familiar forest green door, rang the bell and waited. The hallway was small—there were just two apartments per floor—and quiet except for the whir of the elevator as it descended. Lucian examined the brown marble tiles shot through with gold veins, the tan, gold and white wallpaper with its slightly Oriental design, and the gilt-framed mirror hanging over the narrow table centered between the two doorways. In a cut-glass vase was an arrangement of dried flowers that looked as if someone had put them there, fresh, years ago and then forgotten about them.
Finally Lucian heard footsteps, but it wasn’t a housekeeper who opened the door. The wasted, worn-out man was a shadow of the person he’d once been. In Andre Jacobs’s watery eyes and ravaged face was the evidence of two decades of sorrow.
Lucian started to introduce himself when Jacobs interrupted.
“I didn’t call the police,” he snarled, as if he’d dismissed the idea that the law could ever be of any value to him a long time ago.
Jacobs hadn’t recognized him, but Lucian wasn’t surprised. They’d only met a couple of times, and that had been two decades ago, when he’d been nineteen years old, not yet grown into his features, just one of a group of Solange’s friends. No, Jacobs hadn’t recognized him, but surely he would remember the name that had appeared alongside his daughter’s for months in reports of the crime the press had dubbed “the art theft of the decade.”
“I’m from the FBI, Agent Lu—”
“The FBI? Well, I certainly didn’t call the FBI.”
Lucian forced himself not to react to the stink of gin that accompanied the words. It was only three in the afternoon.
“I’m here because we need your help. Can I come in, Mr. Jacobs?” He was going to have to tell the man his name, but now that he’d seen his physical state, he thought Jacobs should be seated in case it came as a shock.
“Is this about art? Because I’m not in the art business anymore. I can’t help you with information about any stolen paintings.” Jacobs spat out the words.
“This time it’s about a painting that has been found.” Lucian took a step forward, hoping that if he invaded Jacobs’s personal space it would force the man to step farther back and let him in.
“That’s been found?” There was a flicker of interest in the old man’s eyes, but then it faded. “No, I’m not in the business anymore. I can’t help you.”
Looking past Jacobs, Lucian could see into the foyer. The decor hadn’t changed in all these years. “I only need a few minutes of your time.”
“Ask me what you want to ask me, and then leave me in peace.”
“Twenty years ago, one of your clients gave you a painting to reframe…”
Jacobs leaned more of his weight on the door.
Lucian noticed and continued. “It was a Matisse…”
Jacobs slumped; he was holding on to the door for support now.
“…entitled View…”
Jacobs flinched.
“…of St. Tropez.”
Jacobs recoiled viscerally.
“The painting was stolen from your shop, on May sixteenth.” Lucian’s voice was almost a whisper now. “You remember that day, don’t you?”
Jacobs barely nodded, as if his head was too heavy to move. This was more difficult than Lucian had anticipated and he was angry with himself for not passing this part of the job on to Matt Richmond as Doug Comley had suggested. But time had brought the past full circle. This was his case and he needed to see it through.
“Mr. Jacobs, we believe the painting found yesterday is that Matisse, but there’s no way to confirm—”
“Absolutely not,” he interrupted even before he heard the full request. He shook his head as if the movement would put up a wall between the past and the present.
“Please let me just exp—”
“You…” Jacobs was staring at him. “I know who you are!” He was shouting again, as all the pieces of the puzzle came together for him at once.
“What’s wrong?” The door blocked the speaker but her voice was clear. Even laced with anxiety it had a lightness to it, as if it were being played in the upper octaves of a fine, well-tuned piano.
Lucian watched the woman as she came into view. She had alabaster skin and pale blond hair that dipped over her forehead, skimmed her shoulders and shone as if it were polished metal. She was dressed in a sleeveless cream-colored shift and wore gold ballet slippers. Everything about her seemed to glow. Later, Lucian would realize that it was sun from the living-room windows sidelighting her, but in that first moment it appeared as if she had a nimbus surrounding her.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked Jacobs as she reached his side and hooked her arm in his in a graceful gesture, offering support.
He fixed his rheumy gaze on her and tried to smile, but all he managed was the remembrance of a smile. Jacobs looked like someone who’d just seen a ghost.
And Lucian was that ghost.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked again. Her voice was both soft and hoarse at the same time, the way velvet felt different depending on which way you brushed the nap.
Jacobs nodded, but she didn’t seem reassured. Lucian didn’t blame her. She had probably heard the shouting and all she had to do was look at Jacobs to know he wasn’t well. Dissatisfied, she turned to Lucian. Her eyes were a fiery amber color, like honey made by electrified bees.
“I’m from the FBI—” Lucian started to say.
“He isn’t well,” she interrupted. “Is this really necessary?”
“It is. I’m sorry.”
She frowned. “Can I at least help him to a chair first?”
“Sure, absolutely.”
“I’m not sick. I can get to a chair myself,” Jacobs interjected, but he continued to lean on her as they walked across the foyer.
Lucian followed her inside and looked around, reacquainting himself with the apartment. On the left was the dining room with celadon walls, ivy-covered latticework covering the windows and collection of still lifes worthy of a small museum. On the right was the living room, where afternoon light spilled in from the large windows overlooking the park. Two late-period Matisse watercolors and two Degas ballet dancer pastels hung on the walls, and an Art Deco black-and-green rug covered the floor. Everything was the same. Suddenly he could smell lilies of the valley mixed with turpentine and linseed oil—the perfume and art supplies that made up Solange’s one-of-a-kind scent. Was her bedroom still intact? When he’d last seen it, it was a collage of leaves painted in every shade of green and affixed to the walls in a way that at first seemed haphazard but then succeeded in making you believe you were in a thicket deep in a primeval forest.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Dad?” the woman asked as she helped Jacobs into a chair at the antique card table by the window.
Lucian had been remembering Solange’s scent, remembering her in this apartment, thinking about her bedroom. That had to be why he thought he’d heard this woman call Jacobs Dad. Twenty years ago Andre Jacobs had had only one daughter, a nineteen-year-old who’d been murdered during the robbery of a Matisse painting from his framing store. Even if he and his wife had had another child right after Solange’s death, she’d be only nineteen now. This woman was in her late twenties or early thirties.
“Now, what is this about? What do you want with my father?” she asked without preamble when she returned to Lucian, who was still in the foyer.
He held out his badge. “I’m FBI, Art Crime Team. Special Agent Lucian Glass, and I—”
Her gaze intensified as she reacted to his name. “No wonder my father’s so upset. You were in the papers a few weeks ago when they reported on that mass hypnosis session in the Viennese music hall. The reincarnation concert, they called it, right? It was terrible for him seeing your name…remembering…”
“Emeline?” Jacobs called out feebly.
“I’ll be right back,” she said to Lucian as she ran out.
So Jacobs had see
n the press. Although Lucian had refused to answer any questions about what had happened during that performance of Beethoven’s Eroica, it hadn’t stopped the reporters from writing about his presence there. Forensics still hadn’t found any evidence of a chemical attack that might have caused a drug-induced delirium. Had reincarnation been proven in the Austrian concert hall? The possibility was so provocative, the story wouldn’t die. In newspapers, magazines and Internet sites and on TV and radio talk shows, reincarnation had itself been reincarnated into a hot topic that no one seemed to tire of.
“My father was upset for days just reading about you in the paper,” the woman said when she returned. “The past isn’t ever very far from his thoughts, and seeing your name in print brought it that much closer.” She paused as if it had been difficult for her, as well. “Now that I know who you are, I think it would be better if you’d go.” They were standing two feet apart, but her tone put an even greater distance between them.
Lucian couldn’t force Andre Jacobs to talk to him. The man wasn’t a suspect.
She opened the door and he stepped out into the hallway. He turned, about to ring for the elevator, then turned back. She was about to shut the door. The light from the chandelier shimmered on her hair. Nothing about her looked familiar, and yet he felt as if they knew each other well.
“There’s one thing…”
She stopped.
“We need your…your father to identify a painting. The Matisse stolen from his store.”
“That would be torture for him,” she whispered in a voice that reminded Lucian of the smoke that wafts up after a candle is extinguished.
“I am aware of that.” It’s also torture for me.
“Then why him?” There was nothing aggressive about the soft-spoken words themselves, but in his ears each one snapped like an expletive.
“Before the Matisse was stolen it had been in a private collection for over forty years. The owners, the original dealer, even the adjuster who insured it—have all passed away. Your father is the only person left who can identify it.”
“He’s not an art historian. Doesn’t the museum have people to do that?”
“We found some uncharacteristic markings on the canvas that a framer might have seen and noted. We’d like Mr. Jacobs to come to the Met and take a look. Believe me, there is an enormous amount at stake or I wouldn’t be asking. The man who sent this painting might be able to lead us to whoever stole it. And then we’d know, after all this time, who killed Solange.”
Emeline was staring at him. He noticed her fingers were gripping the edge of the door so hard her knuckles were white.
“Will you ask your father if he’ll help?”
“It’s been a long time. It would be better for him to leave the past in the past.”
As it would be for me, too.
Her cat’s eyes fixed on him. “As it would be for you, too.”
Chapter
NINETEEN
The sounds of hammers, electric drills, saws and sanders accompanied a very angry Henry Phillips as he walked through the Met’s unfinished Islamic art wing inspecting his firm’s work, accompanied by the job’s foreman, Victor Keither.
There was of course no art on display, nothing to look at except for the work Keither’s crew was doing. As far as Phillips was concerned there was nothing artistic about that.
“All of these inconsistencies in workmanship are not up to our standards,” he said.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Keither agreed. “But I wanted you to see for yourself. I need better men, Henry.”
They’d stopped in front of an exposed stone wall with an oculus in its center. The round opening must have once displayed a piece of art, then been closed up and forgotten until Keither had discovered it a few months ago. When you dealt with such an old building there were always surprises. Having the original architectural drawings helped, but alterations over the years weren’t always annotated. The committee from the museum that was overseeing the construction had checked this out weeks ago and none of them felt this anomaly was architecturally significant or worth preserving.
“This should have been closed up by now, and the wall should have been plastered over.”
Keither took off his helmet and ran his hand through his orange hair. His fair skin, sprinkled with freckles, reddened. “There’s been too much turnover, Henry.” A competitor, Manhattan Construction, was recruiting Phillips’s men and overpaying them by fifteen percent to move. “We’ll get back on track if you’ll approve additional men.”
Since taking the job with Phillips in 1985, Keither had worked on every museum job the firm had handled—six of them, almost back-to-back. He’d started out a member of the crew and now was in charge of the whole operation. Except for the days his children had been born, two bouts of the flu and an appendicitis attack, he’d never missed a day of work, even showing up during two blizzards only to discover that the museum was closed.
“That would take us over budget,” Phillips said.
“Over budget or late? Take your pick. The replacements aren’t as good as the guys we lost. Can’t you keep them?”
“Manhattan Construction is playing an expensive game.”
“What do you know about Manhattan?” Keither asked.
“Other than the fact that they’re poachers?” Phillips shook his head. “How about if I pull some men off the hotel job and move them here for a few weeks temporarily? We haven’t lost anyone on that crew.”
“You haven’t?” Keither asked. “Not a single man?”
“No. Everyone they’ve stolen has been from this job. Everyone knows you train them the best.”
“I wish that was the reason.”
“Me, too. Any ideas?”
“Not yet, but I’m going to work on it.”
Chapter
TWENTY
The blinds were drawn, but Dr. Iris Bellmer dialed down the rheostat so that the room was shrouded in darkness. “I’d like you to sit back on the couch, James, and make sure you’re comfortable. Put your arms by your sides, uncross your feet and close your eyes. Relax.”
Relax at four in the afternoon with two cases weighing on him? Two cases—the Malachai Samuels investigation and the vandalism and extortion situation at the Metropolitan—both of which were fraught with tension and personal conflict. It was hardly ideal, but even if ACT hadn’t been understaffed, Lucian—aka James—was too committed and involved to consider withdrawing from either one.
“The concept of what we’re doing starts out identical to the process you said you learned from your pain specialist. Once you achieve a deep state of relaxation I’ll make a few suggestions that your subconscious will hear and work on, and hopefully we’ll make some discoveries. Any questions?”
“Let’s do it.” He was certain he knew enough about the process to fight her efforts and stay alert. Despite having another upsetting dream this morning that had forced him out of bed to once again draw the young girl whose eyes were filled with fear, he was here as an investigator, not as a patient. Certainly, part of him wanted to understand, but whatever was causing his delusions, it had nothing to do with past lives. The stories Bellmer’s patients told her under hypnosis were just that—stories. If humans could manufacture entire fantasies at will—dreaming while sleeping and daydreaming while awake—certainly the mind could create narratives at the suggestion and urging of a trained therapist.
“All right, James, I’d like you to take four deep breaths… slowly…one…two…three…four…now picture a staircase in your mind…as you walk down the steps, count them backward from twenty…nineteen, eighteen, one step after another…one foot after another…counting until you reach the bottom…” She paused, waited and then resumed in the same low, modulated voice. “When you reach the last step you’ll see that you’ve reached a place you know well…the same underground grotto you told me about from your pain therapy…it’s comforting here…easy here…”
Lucian’s head
ache was abating. That didn’t surprise him. Hypnosis was a well-known remedy for pain. As he’d told Dr. Bellmer, he’d used it himself.
“You’re in the grotto now…the lights are low…”
He’d slept little the night before, and he was so tired. Her voice was so soothing.
“There’s a pool with turquoise water that’s warm and waiting for you…”
Lucian focused on the street noises outside the office instead of on what she was saying. No matter how tempting, he couldn’t enter this imaginary oasis, not even if he found respite there from the melancholy that had overwhelmed him since visiting the Jacobs apartment yesterday. He was here as a federal agent investigating a potential suspect, not as a patient.
“You’re walking into the pool…slipping into the water. Its warmth embraces you and feels wonderful.”
And it did, but it was a luxury he couldn’t afford.
“Warm, welcoming water. You’re lying on your back now…floating on the surface…comforted by the warm water…by the soft sound of water dripping from the rocks into the pool. You are very comfortable…there’s no worry and no stress…no one needs anything from you…you’re completely at ease. Now…slowly…look up…up toward the roof of the grotto. It’s a mirror, and you can see yourself floating. You can see how relaxed you are…you feel relaxed…in every part of your body…your feet…your ankles…calves…knees…hips…your shoulders and neck are relaxed…your hands…your arms…your diaphragm…you’re completely relaxed.”
For the next fifteen seconds Iris Bellmer watched James Ryan’s breathing, checking its evenness, assessing his state of relaxation, imagining he was slipping back through the layers of time. Some people were afraid of hypnosis, fearing they’d become suggestible and do things against their better judgment. But it was not magic or mind control. You were never more connected to your core being than when under hypnosis. Iris knew that firsthand. Two years ago she’d been working in a psychiatric hospital when one of her patients, who had exhibited no violent tendencies before, attacked her and started to rape her. A guard stepped in and prevented a full assault, but Iris was traumatized and sought out therapy. The doctor used hypnosis to file down the edges of her anxiety. During one session, Iris had a spontaneous past-life memory. Frightened by the intensity of the experience but fascinated, she sought out Dr. Beryl Talmage. Their meeting led to Iris becoming the first full-time therapist to work with adults in the Phoenix Foundation’s history.