Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5)

by T'Gracie Reese

  What was the rope doing…

  “Oh my,” she whispered, almost to herself.

  She’d never seen such a thing.

  For the rope, taut now, led to a pulley on the ceiling, the entire apparatus designed to haul the magnificent sparkling and flickering monstrosity upward, where it would reign over the great dining hall, the heat of a thousand candles wafting through huge open windows which looked out over the lawns and showcased the peacocks.

  There was, in this room, obviously no electricity.

  So that the innumerable white candles that fitted into the gold holders sprinkled like bits of icing around the birthday cake of a chandelier, had to be lit, one by one, by the young men and women who were now busily engaged in doing so, forming a kind of candle-bucket brigade, taking a candle out of the box lying on the floor, passing it, watching it be lighted, and then repeating the action until the room grew lighter, as the smoke from the smoldering wicks eddied and swirled more densely beneath a baroque hunting scene painted upon the ceiling, and the pulleys began to squeak and groan more threateningly as the chandelier prepared, like a hot air balloon, to rise.

  “Also,” said Franz Beckmeier, who had seated himself at the head of the table. “Beginnen wir.”

  Several leafs had been added to the table in order to make room for the prisoners who were now preparing to eat off it.

  Carol could remember each one of them, as well as the paintings each had brought or taken away.

  There, sitting beside Beckmeier: the woman in the zebra striped pants. She’d taken the St. Sebastian. And there, at the other end of the table, the innocuous man who’d climbed Nina Bannister’s staircase with an equally innocuous thing wrapped in brown paper.

  A van Gogh.

  They were all seated here, looking at each other.

  Frightened to death.

  Beckmeier, either too old to be frightened or too angry, went on about his business of being the head of the estate.

  All around them, men in paramilitary uniforms were carefully taking paintings off the dining room walls, then stacking them carefully in separate piles on the grounds, which could be seen from tall windows.

  Beckmeier’s ex-guards, bribed, and now in the service of …

  …the Red Claw.

  What a name for an organization, she found herself thinking.

  Food was being put before them.

  A gourmet meal, fit for an Austrian king.

  Which Beckmeier obviously thought he was.

  A gourmet meal:

  Dishes in highly polished silver platters, the subtle clicking of silverware mixing with a continual gurgle of white wine being poured, and the host’s unending commentary describing the various dishes as they were placed around the table.

  “As for the roast beef you see there before you, we grow the cattle here on the estate. And the venison is from our deer.”

  He seemed hardly to notice that his wondrous museum, the greatest illegal museum in all Europe, in all the world, probably, was being disassembled around him.

  Strangely, Carol watched it all taking place with a complete lack of emotion.

  She had felt no emotion at all, since earlier in the afternoon, when the armored car had delivered her like a sack of money to the front door of the estate.

  And she’d been told of the situation.

  Had been told by Baron Beckmeier that she, and at least a dozen of his other—operatives—had been kidnapped.

  By Lorca Reklaw.

  Now, as the paintings continued to be brought down the staircase, she could only think of the scene months earlier in the museum, when Rebecca Simpson had fired her.

  Boxes. Boxes in wheelbarrows, coming from many rooms at once, clattering down the staircases.

  Boxes.

  “As for the Beilagen—I think the English would say, ‘side dishes’—the one there in the center of the table is called, in Austria, Aubergine. The Germans have a different word for it. It is in English, ‘eggplant,’ I believe. Strange word. No egg connected to it. But you should all try it. With the rhubarb sauce. Quite a delicacy, the way we fix it here.”

  One of the soldiers—could one call these men ‘soldiers’?—at any rate, one of them tripped slightly going out the door.

  Beckmeier rose quickly, stared at him for an instant, then bellowed:

  “Can’t you be careful, you idiot? It’s not enough that you betray my trust and sell yourself out like whores! Now you destroy my paintings!”

  The man righted himself and kept to his job, seemingly not hearing.

  Beckmeier continued to shout:

  “So when does he come? When does he make himself known to us, seen by us—this ‘Lorca Reklaw’? Is he frightened that I should see him? That we all should see him, finally, face to face?”

  No reply.

  But now it was time for one of the guests to speak.

  The English woman, the one in the zebra-striped pants.

  The St. Sebastian woman.

  This woman rose, her face flushed, her hands knotted into fists on the table in front of her:

  “And, for God’s sakes, what’s going to happen to us?”

  No answer.

  Just the clattering of boxes.

  Of paintings.

  And Carol continued to feel nothing at all.

  For she knew exactly what was going to happen to them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE: THE RED CLAW

  The church, as Nina could see when she came abreast of it and topped the hill on which it sat, overlooked the lake which she and Michael had glimpsed upon entering the village earlier. This lake had transformed itself in the last hour though, for the snow clouds had dissipated and a full moon was shining, so that Lake Moorbach was now black cloth crisscrossed with silver lines that were wavelets, eddies, currents, motions in the water, twinkling across the surface like slender, luminous threads.

  “Damn.”

  “What is it, Michael?”

  “The moon. It would have been better for us if it had not come out.”

  “You don’t think the boat will come now?”

  “I don’t know. Come on.”

  The church stood beside her now, a sign of some kind, backlit and legible to anyone who cared to read it, and could.

  She could not, save for a number that repeated itself, and seemed to be a part of each paragraph.

  846.

  Eight hundred and forty six.

  Surprising, she thought, that so many people would belong to a church in a village of this size, where hardly so many people could be thought to live anyway.

  Then she realized.

  She was indeed a long way from Bay St. Lucy.

  Eight hundred and forty-six was not the number of people on the roll.

  It was the year of the church’s founding.

  Almost thirteen hundred years ago.

  The thought preoccupied her for an instant or so.

  Then she let it sift back into her mind, where it milled and jostled with other thoughts, sensations, sounds, tastes, smells, remembrances—all things, ultimately, that would bury the thoughts she did not want to deal with.

  Somewhere behind her, down the hill that led past the tavern, a dog started barking.

  Thirteen centuries.

  The figure kept re-entering her mind.

  Had the trees been different then? The lake? Had dogs barked, signaling to each other on a cold moonlit mid-December night?

  Did people steal paintings then, and kidnap each other, and blow up buildings?

  “All right. Here we are. Last chance to back out Ms.—sorry, Nina.”

  “No. I want to go see Carol.”

  “Well, then…”

  He pulled the church door open.

  It swung easily toward them.

  The church revealed itself.

  Like so many of the churches of Austria, it had begun as a primitive edifice of some sort, then, transformed itself into a sparse Romanesque one, then been rebuilt for the
purpose of attacking heaven with spectacular flying buttresses and gothic arches, and finally modified by the middle class so that it served now more to inundate the senses of the citizenry here below than frighten the essences of angels somewhere above.

  Colors, candles, circles, gold paint, fat celestial arms, children’s faces robed in saffron and white—a baroque world painted over a gothic one. Nina sniffed. She perceived a never before smelled odor of ancient stonework, centuries of incense and timeless human suffering.

  She stopped for a second, let her hand rest on the back pew, and prayed:

  “Let Carol be all right,” she found herself asking the darkly painted Christ just to her right, encased in gold frame and headed by the numeral one, “and take care of all of us.”

  The numeral one.

  The first stage of the cross.

  Perhaps their first stage.

  “Help us through all of this.”

  They walked further into the church, toward the ambulatory.

  They’d passed beneath the pulpit—it still seemed impossible that a minister should be up there, halfway to the roof, preaching down at people instead of looking out toward them—when she began to look more closely at the paintings on the walls of the church.

  Some marked the stages of the cross, certainly.

  But others…

  …they were like the ossuary itself.

  Full of bones.

  Paintings full of bones.

  Not separate bones, she realized as she moved closer to one and examined it. Death’s Heads. Skeletons. All images of skulls and scythes, horrid, gaping mouths, ribcages blown open with organs spewing from them.

  Here and there, human forms––either dead or dying, gaunt, meager, being carried toward graves by monsters.

  The other face, she found herself remembering, of the Baroque world.

  Swirls and angels plastered across light blue ceilings above.

  But just beneath, remembrances of past plagues, floods, invasions, armies, and wagon loads of rotting corpses.

  “In life,” she found herself whispering, “we are in death.”

  And there, before her, written on the wall, was the word:

  KARN.

  “What does that mean, Michael?”

  “Charnel House. Ossuary. Repository of bones.”

  They approached the altar.

  A door stood closed before them.

  Michael opened it.

  Stairs descended.

  “We go down here.”

  “All right. Lead the way.”

  “Close the door behind us.”

  For some reason, she dreaded doing so.

  There was no reason, she told herself, for being afraid.

  No.

  Actually, there were plenty of reasons for being afraid.

  But none of them lurked in this tunnel.

  The stairs corkscrewed down before them, a black metal rod acting as banister, colorless concrete steps adding to the general feeling of thickness, of solidity, of immobility that enveloped her, as though she were descending through not a religious edifice but a Masonite glacier.

  Yellow electric lights glowed in the stairwell.

  Were they kept on at all times?

  Apparently.

  The church was open at all times.

  The tunnel was open at all times.

  Death was always near.

  Escape from enemies was always to be possible.

  She could see now that net wire enclosed them.

  What was beyond the net wire? What were all those objects through which this downward leading tunnel was taking them?

  “Oh God.”

  For the first time she realized, not merely intellectually but viscerally, what an ossuary really was.

  “Oh God.”

  Everywhere around them there were bones. To the left, the right, immediately above them…

  …just bones.

  Not merely were there bones that had been thrown in indiscriminately, haphazardly, a shovel full at a time. No, these bones had been arranged by type—skulls in one section, clavicles in another, legs in another, arms in another—and carefully, artistically, jammed so tightly together that not one space remained unfossilized, not one millimeter of breathing room remained available for these no-more-breathing parts of human beings, who would never again care one way or another.

  This. This was a charnel house.

  And it seemed to go on forever.

  She thought of Dante’s lines:

  “I had not thought, death had undone so many.”

  So many.

  On down they went.

  On and on and on…

  Finally they took a turn.

  And beyond it, a different kind of light.

  Could that be moonlight?

  Then sounds.

  Water.

  Water lapping on stone.

  The opening appeared as though by magic. Within half a minute, they found themselves standing at the entrance to the escape tunnel.

  And silently, a dark black shape approached like flotsam over the surface of the lake.

  “All right,” Michael said quietly, motioning to the oarsman, who merely grunted in response. “We go to Palace Eggenburg.”

  Nina stepped gingerly into the boat, which rocked beneath her as she thought of stages of her journey, and of the human bones that she and everyone else would ultimately become.

  The room in which Carol was to spend the night—if that was, in fact, what remained in store for her—was like a salon in an elegant clothing store.

  There were full-length mirrors everywhere. Armoires stood side by side, like burnished, twin-corpse coffins upended and standing mute, elegant wood carvings tracing their exterior while subtle keys protruded from their bellies.

  There were small tables, small sofas, small ashtrays, small silver platters with nothing on them—and large windows, two of them, lace-curtained, overlooking a magnificent pond in the middle of which, at the precise moment Carol spied it, a fountain began to erupt in blue and neon red, its splashing barely audible through the window glass.

  “How can they do this to us? What are they thinking?”

  She did not respond to the woman opposite her, whose voice was shaking with anger and fear.

  “They have no right! They have no right.”

  “But they do have,” she found herself saying, quietly, “the power.”

  She opened one of the armoires. Then she stepped close to it, inhaling an aroma of dead money and enchanting perversity so strong as to be undeniably French.

  She let her fingers slide across the inner collars of the gowns hanging before her.

  The labels:

  Elie Saab

  Collette Dinnigan

  Oscar de la Renta

  Vera Wang

  Miu Miu

  She found herself reading descriptions of the gowns.

  And sizes.

  Red Plus Size Formal Dress Halter Rhinestone Beading Full-Length Long V Neck (Turquoise/Size 20).

  Look at it.

  Full-length it was, the hem brushing the bottom of the armoire. A magnificent red, a burgundy wine red, the red of a zodiac scar.

  Rhinestone beads like stars about the décolleté…

  She understood the reason for the dresses, the reason many of these upstairs castle rooms had been transformed into salons.

  Beckmeier would bring women out here from the village, or perhaps from Graz.

  Or for that matter, from Vienna. Or Paris.

  The guest for the evening would be led here, offered champagne, and given the opportunity to dress for the evening meal. With the understanding, of course, that whatever gown was chosen, and whatever jewelry, was to be accepted as a gift.

  A gift for services rendered.

  Or to be rendered, sometime after the meal was finished.

  A dessert, so to speak.

  “It would have been better if they’d simply shot us!”

  “No,�
� she found herself whispering into the hem of a Vera Wang. “No, it wouldn’t have.”

  She found herself becoming very sick of this woman, whoever she was.

  “What we did was not that wrong! We carried paintings from one place to another!”

  “For a lot of money.”

  “All right, so maybe we deserve to go to jail. But not to…to…”

  “Die?”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “All right. I won’t.”

  “And where is this man, this Claw?”

  “Lorca Reklaw.”

  “Yes, whatever the name is! Is he too ashamed even to show himself to us?”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Then where is he? Where?”

  “Probably,” she said, “closer than we think.”

  “Then why does he not…and look! Look at that!”

  The woman pointed to a corner of the room.

  There on a small stool, undoubtedly designed for it, sat a magnum of champagne, its neck protruding from glistening ice crystals, two glasses sitting rim-down around it, as though they were champagne planets caught in mid orbit around the bottle that, being their sun, was to fill and replenish them.

  “He expects us to drink champagne?”

  “It would probably,” said Carol, “not make things any worse.”

  Had Lorca Reklaw left this champagne? she wondered.

  Or had Beckmeier left it earlier in the day, before his grounds were invaded by armed troops, many of whom he’d thought were in his own employ?

  Was there to have been another special guest for the night?

  Probably Carol would never know.

  Certainly it did not matter.

  She walked to the corner, grasped the bottle, took it into the small alcove that was the bathroom, and poured it out.

  The woman behind her was continuing to rant:

  “If they would only allow us to…”

  But they were not going to, whatever it was that she was about to demand.

  For the door opened behind her at that moment and a uniformed guard—or soldier, or Ranger, or paramilitary operative or whatever Red Claw had chosen to call his men—took a step into the room.

  He gestured curtly at the woman and barked:

  “Out!”

  “But I only want to…”

  “You do not need to be here! Go back to your own room! One thief, one room!”