The Hypnotist

by M. J. Rose

  There had been four or five calls every day, each too short for the police to trace.

  The woman who answered the phone at the store said Emeline wasn’t there, so Lucian took a chance that she would be at the Fifth Avenue apartment and walked across the street without calling.

  “Nice surprise,” she said when she greeted him. A breeze from inside—she must have had the terrace door open—blew her fragrance toward him, inviting him in even before she did.

  She was wearing a sleeveless white shirt, white jeans and silver ballet slippers with silver barrettes holding her blond hair off her face. Her eyes were a little more wild and worried looking than the last time he’d seen her, her skin more translucent. It felt as if it had been a long time, but it had only been three days ago. He wasn’t surprised by how great a toll the stress she was under had taken. Being hunted was horrifying. He doubted she’d slept at all unless she’d been smart and taken pills.

  “I’m so glad everything turned out all right and you’re back safe.” She hesitated and then added in a lower voice, as if it was a secret, “I very much missed you.”

  He smiled. “And I missed you, too…” He didn’t finish his sentence. She’d used the exact same odd phrase Solange used whenever she saw him after a few days apart.

  Emeline was looking at him with a combination of relief and palpable pleasure. He wanted to ask her why she’d used those specific words but at the same time didn’t want to question her about it lest it wipe her smile off her face.

  “I’m playing messenger.” He held out the envelope. She took it, glanced at the return address and then put it on a low bench by the door where there was an assortment of other mail and magazines.

  “I’d love to get out of here,” she said. “I’m going crazy between Andre and my police escort and staying away from the gallery because of the incessant calls. Could we get a drink somewhere? At least with you I’m safe.”

  They sat across from each other at a small table in the Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel, and both ordered martinis. As Lucian sipped his he noticed how, in the low light, Emeline looked as if she’d been painted by an old master. Half her face was hidden in deep shadow, the other half illuminated; the chiaroscuro making her expression mysterious and hard to read.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  She gestured to the fanciful murals of rabbits and dogs, squirrels and schoolchildren all playing in the park. “It never changes here, does it?”

  “No, never. That’s its charm, isn’t it?” He told her how when he was a boy his grandmother brought him and his sister here on Saturday afternoons for hot chocolate. “My sister, who was a huge fan of Ludwig Bemelmans’s books, would always make a pilgrimage to that wall when we got here and just stare intently at Madeline for a few minutes, enchanted by the meshing of her fantasy friend and this reality.” He took another sip of the icy gin. “That’s the power of art.”

  “Why did you give up on being an artist?”

  “I didn’t care enough anymore. And you can’t do it unless it’s the only thing you care about.”

  She picked up her martini with fingers that looked as delicate as the glass stem. “But you have all your supplies sitting right there where you can always see them. Sometimes the desire must come back?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  “And what do you do then?”

  He stared at her, unclear about what she was asking, not sure if he was being too naive or too suspicious.

  “I give in. And for a while I’m just another poor schlep who will never get what he wants.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “My fantasy was exactly the cliché you’d expect it to be, Emeline.”

  “But you didn’t even give it a chance. That’s sad.”

  “Only if you equate desire—thwarted or otherwise—with happiness. I don’t happen to buy into that equation.”

  “What equation do you buy into?”

  “Your glass is empty. I can buy into getting us more drinks.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m already feeling this one.”

  “Do you want me to take you back to your father’s apartment?”

  Her no was immediate. “You know what I’d like? To see some of your paintings.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m curious.”

  Twenty minutes later, Lucian was rifling through the rack of his old canvases. He pulled out three. They were all compositions of people visiting museums, standing in front of and mostly blocking sensuous marble statues of nude Greek goddesses or famous Renaissance masterpieces that he only hinted at with frames and corners of color and style. Looking at them after so many years, he couldn’t see talent, only drive.

  He lined the paintings up along the wall facing Emeline, who was sitting on the couch.

  “Do you have any wine?” she asked without taking her eyes off the paintings.

  When he returned with the glasses and the bottle, he found her standing, examining his work up close.

  “They’re so good, and there’s so much promise in them. You were trying to do so much.”

  “Trying being the operative word.”

  “You shouldn’t have stopped.”

  “It was a kid’s dream.”

  “What do you dream about now? Catching the bad guys?”

  He smiled. “That’s not such a bad dream. Don’t say it like you feel sorry for me.”

  “Not sorry for you. Sorry for the art you might have made. Beauty matters, too.”

  “That’s why I catch the bad guys.”

  Now she smiled.

  “What do you dream about?” he asked.

  “These days? I dream about you catching the bad guys,” she said, and then held his gaze in a certain way that made it almost impossible for him to look away.

  A feeling of inevitability overwhelmed him. There was no question about why she was here or what she wanted or what he wanted, but as he leaned forward toward her he noticed that the distance between them was greater than he’d imagined it would be, as if his ability to make judgments was off. Not one martini off and a few sips of wine off, but profoundly disturbed.

  Lucian fell into the kiss, lingering there on the edge of her mouth for a time that lost measure. He could feel her bony shoulders against his and her small breasts pushing into his chest. At some point he undid her barrettes and loosened her silky hair and her scent, that curious combination of spicy amber and innocent vanilla swirled around him.

  Their embrace had an intensity, a wholehearted energy, as if there was nothing else that could matter right then but them being together, now, tonight, this way.

  It had been like this with her on Sunday in the park, and like this with Solange years ago. The two sets of experiences merged too easily into one. No. He didn’t want to remember but just be here in this moment with this woman.

  As if she sensed what he was thinking, Emeline pulled back, turned, walked over to the couch, sat down and picked up her wine. She took a sip, then another. The lamp in the corner of the room cast her shadow across the floor, and it spilled onto the paintings.

  Lucian went to her, sat beside her and took her hand. He turned it over, then bent down and kissed her palm. Lifting his head, he looked into her eyes, held her gaze. “I want you.” He whispered the answer to the question that this time, for the first time, she hadn’t asked.

  Emeline leaned forward and answered him by kissing him, full on the mouth. His hands twisted in her hair, his fingertips wrapped in the silk. His lips didn’t leave hers and if either of them stopped to breathe they weren’t aware of it.

  He’d said “want,” but he didn’t want her. He didn’t want to unbutton her blouse and push up her brassiere and feel her breasts and touch her skin—it wasn’t want—it was a crazy, desperate hunger, and as he did those things and touched her cool skin and felt her small nipples pucker and as she shuddered in his arms he knew that he was gone, that he’d slipped
into another dimension that somehow was and wasn’t his past but might be his future. She was breathing his breath, inhaling the air he was exhaling, and he was inhaling hers. And all the while the ghosts of him and his first love sat across the room, watching, because he and Emeline were breathing in each other’s air the same way and touching each other the same way and living on the edge of their passion for each other the same way and his heart wanted to break for the awful loveliness of this woman who was alive and the one who wasn’t.

  “I want you, too,” Emeline whispered in his ear with hot breath that was his breath, and the only thing in the world that mattered then was to sink into her and become lost in the time warp that folded around him and held him in a brutally cruel embrace for all that it promised and teased.

  Once they were in his bedroom, even before he had a chance to touch her, Emeline was stepping out of her silver shoes and then stripping off her clothes. Not undressing for him, he thought, but proving something to herself.

  Naked, she stood before him, staring at him with a brave and brazen look in her eyes, and when she spoke they were the last words he ever expected to hear, the exact words he should have been prepared for even though he didn’t know how or why. This woman had been a child when Solange had been killed. There was no way that she could have known what Solange had said to him the first time they were together. Not make love to me, not sleep with me or touch me—but paint me, and he had. He’d spent hours standing in front of her naked body and working on that painting.

  Emeline’s words traveled across the room to embrace him or slap him, he wasn’t sure which. As he listened to what she said, under her voice, he heard Solange’s voice. How did Emeline know these things that no one could have told her because no one knew about them except for a woman who had been dead for twenty years?

  “Paint me, Lucian.”

  He couldn’t fight it—or he didn’t want to fight it—he didn’t know which and didn’t care. Everything was there—the battered beechwood box, the stained palettes, the can of sable brushes and old bottles of linseed oil and turpentine—all there just waiting. Most of the canvases were used, but there was one that had just a few blue brushstrokes in the upper corner, as if he’d started to lay in a background, been distracted and then never gotten back to it.

  With the easel set up and the canvas resting on its lip, he lifted the paint box’s lid and with the first whiff of long-trapped scent that wafted up, Lucian crossed an imaginary threshold into the dorm room, the only studio he’d ever had.

  Oil paints don’t dry up or harden as long as the tubes don’t crack, and these hadn’t. He looked at the labels, stained with smears and smudges, and pulled out the colors he needed to match her skin tones: Titanium White, Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Yellow and Burnt Sienna. He squeezed the colors onto the palette. The brushes, which he’d always been careful to clean because they were so expensive, felt supple between his fingers, and he picked out one with a tapered point and a flat body. Dipping it first into the white, then the red, he mixed them together. He added a very small hint of yellow and even less of the sienna.

  She was facing him full on, hiding nothing, her body taut, arms by her sides, palms up, her small chin pointing up, daring him to look at her.

  Lucian stroked the paint onto the canvas, slowly at first, then working up to a frenzy, not sure which he craved more—her or this utter abandonment to the act of painting, to something he’d had so much passion for but had given up and sacrificed to reason. But it didn’t matter now. This moment was beyond logic. His feelings were beyond logic.

  How long did he paint? How long did she stand there naked, the look of wanting him, of wanting this, never leaving her eyes? How many times did the brush move in a flurry from palette to canvas in a hot rush of energy, the conduit of all that he was seeing and feeling? Was he hurrying to get to her, or just greedy for more of this pleasure? Because that was what it was: pure pleasure to actually see beyond the form to what made this woman so utterly beautiful—her fragility and tensile strength, her desires and fears, everything that made her human, that made her alive—and to translate it onto the canvas with nothing more than a brush, pigment and his ability.

  He might have gone on painting for longer, but Emeline chose when he would stop by finally breaking the pose and coming around to where he was standing and looking at what he’d done. She studied it but said nothing. Then she stepped between him and the painting, blocking it from his view, faced him and whispered with a voice that was grateful and excited both at once, as if he’d given her a great gift, “Thank you for seeing me like that.”

  Lucian sat down on the edge of the bed, put his hands around her waist and pulled her toward him so that his face was level with her stomach. Her skin was smooth and warm, and using his tongue like the brush he’d just put down, he painted her with soft, invisible kisses, there and there and there he kept kissing her, and with every new inch of her that his lips found she arched her back a little more. Her hands reached out and gripped his head, and her fingers tangled in his hair as she pulled him closer still and made small moaning sounds that were anything but fragile. There was no pain in this pleasure for her. Lucian heard laughter mixed with wanting. It was an amazingly joyful noise—this music of their lovemaking—and he kept kissing her so he could keep hearing it. The sound was flowing into all the dark crevices of his soul and lifting him up.

  Smiling some secret smile, Emeline straddled him and eased herself down, achingly slowly, onto him, and as he wound his arms tighter around her, she constricted and held him inside her tighter, too. He had one single moment of clarity before he was lost, when he saw her in violent contrasts of light and dark with her head thrown back, an expression on her face that he’d never try to name, and he recognized that he’d painted her in the wrong moment. This was art, this ecstasy; this was what they all tried to capture and express, this moment when the senses take over and there is no thought left, nothing but being.

  Chapter

  FIFTY-THREE

  “What have you got today for lunch, Larry?” the security guard asked the balding construction worker who was carrying the same oversize lunch pail he brought with him every day.

  “Two meatball heros. You needing one of them?”

  “I sure am,” the guard said, smiling, then linking his thumb in his belt. “But I’d better not take you up on your offer.”

  Larry Talbot gave the guard a grin, swung the lunch pail from one hand to the other and walked on through the entryway and into the museum. He’d shared his lunch with Tommy before, and it wouldn’t have been a big deal to share it again if the guard had wanted a sandwich. Larry knew exactly which of the two heros was stuffed with pork and beef meatballs smothered in marinara sauce and which was stuffed with meatballs made of Semtex.

  Of the twenty workmen who entered the Metropolitan Museum that morning, five of them were carrying plastic explosives hidden inside sandwiches or cigarette packs or gum.

  The security for employees working at the Met was not as tight in the morning as it was at the end of the day. Tommy nodded as each regular arrived, and if he didn’t recognize someone he’d stop them and ask to see ID, but since crews from Phillips Construction had been in and out of the museum for decades, Tommy knew most of the men by sight. Incoming employees didn’t have to pass through the X-ray system, and the guard didn’t need to use his wand. There were only inspections the first few times someone new showed up for work. It was at night that the security was ratcheted up and every briefcase, lunch pail, backpack or shopping bag was inspected to ensure that no one was smuggling out any artwork or artifacts.

  Even if the checks had been done, the malleable material wouldn’t have set off any alarms or been visible as anything suspect.

  Today, for the fifth day in a row, five workers had brought something into the museum that they wouldn’t leave with that night, but Don Albertson, the long-time worker who had taken over after Victor Keither died, didn’t notice
anything about those five that made them stand out. They weren’t a clique; they fit in with their coworkers and none of them had ever caused any trouble.

  Later it would be noted that they had all been hired over the same three-week period to replace workmen who’d been stolen away by Manhattan Construction. When questioned, Albertson would tell the police that maybe he should have paid more attention to them since they were relative newcomers, but they were good workers who just hadn’t drawn any attention to themselves. What he wouldn’t tell them about was the cash payment he’d been given by a man who smoked cigars and spoke with a heavy accent in exchange for Albertson not noticing much of anything.

  To communicate with his team, Talbot, whose real name would have given away his heritage, used predetermined signs and signals that escaped notice by anyone else. The short, oliveskinned man with hair cropped so close you couldn’t tell what texture it was knew at any moment of the day where each of his team members were and what they were doing.

  Later, when asked about Talbot specifically, Albertson would shake his head and say that of all his men, Talbot was one of the better carpenters; never the last one to get there in the morning and never the first one out at night. And that was true, but the reason wasn’t the man’s work ethic. Talbot purposely hung back at the end of each day, taking extra time to clean up and put away his tools, waiting until Albertson left so he could take the Semtex he’d cautiously collected from his men when no one was around or watching and deposit it in a carton that, according to its labels, contained six quarts of Benjamin Moore Bone White #3 paint.

  The renovation of the Islamic galleries was at least three months away from the point of needing paint, so while there was no truly safe place for the explosives, this carton was as close as Talbot could get to a secure hiding place. He took every precaution to ensure that the cache remained hidden. So far he’d been lucky, but how long would that last? Talbot wanted his superiors to pull the trigger so they could do the job they’d trained for and get out of there. Despite the suicide belts loaded with explosives that they’d be wearing, Talbot and his men intended to accomplish their task and live to reap their rewards.