The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  For so long, he’d had a chip on his shoulder at college, thinking that as a lower-middle-class boy, he could only pose as someone with cultural knowledge. His scholarship only went so far, and each night after studies, he’d had to rush off to wait tables. But instead of adding another social skill to further his diplomatic career, he had fallen in love with art. He learned a humbling appreciation for a heritage of brushstrokes and verses and classical music (though he’d always prefer jazz).

  While living in Paris, the perks of working at the American embassy got him countless comps to all kinds of gallery shows, and he’d built up a nice, informal network of curators as friends. Crystal had told him how she wanted to check out Emily Derosier’s paintings, so he used his network now to track down the modest gallery on the Left Bank, one that amazingly still kept a tiny collection of Derosier originals. But “collection” was probably overstating it.

  When Tim and Crystal showed up, they were greeted warmly by the frumpy but pleasant, sixty-two-year-old manageress of the gallery, who had a distracting, almost de-Gaulle-like beak nose. Grateful for any visitors, she led them to seven paintings waiting on individual easels, and with a flourish, pulled the dusty sheets off each of them, one by one. Few ever came to see the work of Emily Derosier anymore except for an occasional student working on an obscure, unreadable master’s thesis. She muttered a self-satisfied “Bon” with her hands clasped, then primly walked away to leave Crystal and Tim to examine the pictures.

  The ones placed on the front easels had clearly been deemed to be the best of the artist’s work, almost as if the gallery matron had wanted to hide the others in case they drove any visitor to leave. There were scenes of a Paris market, with lonely figures, their faces obscured as they shopped. One sentimental composition depicted a lonely girl wandering a bridge while lovers nuzzled in the background under an umbrella.

  “They remind me of that fellow who did a picture of this couple dancing while some servant holds an umbrella over them,” remarked Crystal. “You see it in postcards and calendars all the time, but I don’t know who the artist is.”

  “Jack Vettriano,” replied Tim. “Yeah, I can see what you mean.”

  “They’re not brilliant, are they?” she asked, and when he looked mildly surprised over deferring to his opinion, she added, “You know what to order in a posh restaurant. I reckon you know about art, too.”

  “A little,” he answered modestly. “No, they’re not brilliant.”

  He stopped in front of one composition that showed French locals having a smoke in a lobby, just beyond where a movie theater showed a black and white film. Emily Derosier had painted on the screen her friend, Josephine Baker.

  “I always liked the Twenties,” said Tim, unable to hold back a smile of appreciation. “They make a lot out of the Depression, but it didn’t last as long as people think, especially here. Good music, more flexible morals than people are told, passionate politics… It would have been an interesting period to live in.”

  “Yeah, I suppose it would be great,” mused Crystal. “If you were white.”

  “Point taken.”

  “You Americans are so funny about history. I never think about what it would be like to live in Elizabethan England or like, Victorian times. You can’t trip over something in London without it being historical. We’re knee deep in it.”

  “And for you, it’s something to escape?” he asked.

  She stood next to him in front of the painting. “The Karma Booth would have us believe we never do, wouldn’t it?”

  He didn’t know how to respond to that. He carefully moved the easels with the city scenes out of the way and considered the pictures behind them. He and Crystal both took a step back, surprised by these new compositions. Well, these made their trip to the gallery worthwhile.

  “Different,” whispered Crystal.

  “Very.”

  There were a couple of watercolors of Buddhist temples against countryside backdrops, but what made Tim and Crystal gasp were the oil paintings next to them. Expressionist, Futurist visions of…what? It wasn’t clear. In one painting, a woman in a flowing diaphanous robe, which Derosier had clearly modeled after herself, crouched to step through a window, which in turn was a mouth of a fantastical being, its eyes and nose Cubist shards of blazing white and glacier blue. In another composition, the angle of the viewer was from below, looking up, as if submerged in water and seeing a bather paddle above. But the gorgeous nude’s body was half cut away, as if part of the painting was to be used as a Gray’s Anatomy anatomical study. The water was a storm of violent, vivid blues, greens, violets… swirling nebulae.

  They were eerie. Compelling yet disturbing. They didn’t testify to the inner peace and spiritual transformation Emily Derosier boasted about to reporters after coming back from Sri Lanka. Tim could imagine why these surviving canvases had been locked away for so long. With her scandalous and brutal murder, and the discovery of her nude stabbed corpse, the great socialite’s friends must have thought these paintings would ruin her reputation further, hinting at mental illness.

  “These were painted before she was murdered,” said Tim, “and almost a full century before there was any Karma Booth.”

  “But that means there’s no context.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Let’s presume for the moment her killer knows something about the afterlife,” reasoned Crystal. “Why bother to murder her at all and destroy her paintings? You can’t tell a thing from these about the Karma Booth. It hadn’t even been invented yet. These pictures wouldn’t have made sense to anyone.”

  “Not on a rational level, no,” agreed Tim. “But when it comes to imagination… There’s a book by a guy named Leonard Shlain—it’s called Art and Physics. Shlain makes a compelling case that various artists anticipated certain breakthroughs in science and how we see the physical world. Da Vinci’s drawings of flight are hundreds of years ahead of time-lapse photography. Surrealism foreshadows Einstein’s theories of relativity and space-time. Abstract art anticipates the concepts of black holes. You get the idea. Ever read George Orwell? Take away the words to express freedom or independence, and the mind will have trouble even articulating the idea. You see Picasso or Seurat, you think differently. I think what her murderer really wanted to do was to kill the inspiration for a new way to conceive reality.”

  Crystal was pensive for a moment. “Right. Well, that presumes the Karma Booth—or whatever’s beyond it—is a good thing for human evolution. I thought you were against it.”

  “I like Fourth of July fireworks as much as the next guy,” replied Tim. “That doesn’t mean I let little kids play with blasting caps. We’re children with this technology. We don’t know what the hell we have. Emily Derosier, when she was on this side of mortality, must have got an inkling.”

  “And maybe somebody else knew more. Or knows more.”

  Tim heard a musical ring tone, and Crystal reached for her cell. She looked up from scanning a text message on her screen, her large and lovely brown eyes widening.

  “They’ve spotted her. She’s in the Beaubourg.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Beaubourg was what local Parisians called the Centre Pompidou, the museum and library complex near Les Halles and the Marais. The building looked like someone had torn the skin off a metal beast, leaving all its piping, plumbing and ductwork on display in different colors. It was a high-tech abstract colossus opened in the late Seventies, one that became a landmark in spite of its critics, and almost every day jugglers and buskers entertained small crowds in the gently dipping courtyard in front of its façade.

  As the rented car zipped them over to the square in the 4th arrondissement, Crystal saw the looming structure of the Beaubourg and remarked, “Didn’t someone once call this thing a sewer on stilts?”

  Tim chuckled, grateful for a comment that broke the tension. Crystal had asked the police to hold off, to simply watch the Derosier woman and contain her. If the
officers moved in, nobody had any idea what she would do. And in point of fact, she had actually done nothing wrong, let alone criminal, in coming back from the dead. They simply needed to talk to her.

  Crystal’s cell rang again, and Tim heard her say, “D’accord” and quickly push the button to end the call. Their subject, explained Crystal, was up on the third floor in the Bibliothèque publique d’information, the vast public library in the center. And she appeared to be no threat at all, sitting quietly using a computer. Emily Derosier may have stepped into a new century but it seemed she was quite capable of navigating the Internet. Crystal steered the car for the quicker entrance to the library from the Rue du Renard.

  A uniformed officer was there to meet them at the door and escorted them as they hurried up the escalators. The library was massive, and the study tables with their picture-window views of the surrounding neighborhood were so inviting. Too bad they were here for another purpose. They passed high shelves of books, yet more shelves, and then they came to an open space for computer terminals and saw her.

  And Emily Derosier looked up and saw them.

  Tim shivered with a jolt of electricity down his spine, a sensation of uncanny knowledge that struck him right between the eyes. He had met celebrities and political figures before. He had felt the strange jarring that comes from a famous person resembling their photos but they always looked a little different in the flesh. Shorter, more lines in the face, reduced to the smallness of reality—plus some little difference, some tiny factor. The woman yards ahead of him was unique.

  He had watched the video of her stepping out of the Booth and had seen only a beautiful nude woman. But after days of looking at her in black and white photos from a bygone age, she had taken on a mythic physicality for him. It would be as if Ingrid Bergman had suddenly stepped off a screen showing Casablanca and sat there at the computer terminal. No, it was even beyond that. Someone more impossibly distant: Florence Nightingale or Arthur Conan Doyle, an anachronism suddenly introduced to you.

  And now here she was, monochrome flesh made living flesh: pink and young and healthy. Slender arms, the unmistakable oval face, full lips, green intelligent eyes. She wore a modern, beige halter top with a brown peasant skirt, the long hem on the skirt a vague reminder of her place out of time. As they walked up, he noticed her posture was unusually straight, her fingers poised over the computer keyboard downward instead of flat. It was the way he typed, too, because he had learned on an old Underwood typewriter in high school, not an ergonomic, plastic keyboard. They hadn’t been invented yet. The woman had kept a few habits of her past.

  Looking right at them. And she smiled at them.

  No, not at them. At him. Crystal caught it, too, whispering, “How does she know…?”

  And then Emily Derosier stood up and moved to go. But she wasn’t fleeing them. Her eyes were elsewhere, and now Tim and Crystal saw who was making her bolt, and the uniformed cop was shouting Stop but it wasn’t clear who the order was for. Crystal yelled to the intruders in French, “Who are you?” Her small hand touched Tim’s shoulder, giving him the briefest of pushes to go after Emily Derosier. She and the officer would take care of—

  A man and a woman were running down the open room after their mystery woman, but they suddenly faced Crystal and the policeman in their way. Their clothing was nondescript, semi-formal. They might have been plain-clothes detectives for all Tim and Crystal knew, but there was clear aggression in their manner. It was the man who stood out, with his long lantern-jawed face and broken nose, his eyes canine and seething. He didn’t seem to care at all that a cop was right there with his hands raised, asking him where he was going. The woman was a redhead with a washed-out, sallow complexion, her tangled red curls wild and bouncing with her long jogging stride. What the hell did they want? As Tim looked over his shoulder, Crystal reached inside her jacket for her service weapon.

  Emily Derosier had also paused, looking beyond Tim to the confrontation about to explode. Then as she turned on her heel, she vanished.

  Incredible. Her body seemed to pass through a funhouse mirror, frames taken out of the strip of film. Gone.

  He was on the same spot in seconds, right where she had stood. Nothing there. If he had taken his eyes off her, he could understand it, but she had started to run, and then nothing. Damn it.

  He was frozen for an instant, not knowing what to do, but the strange couple was still there, at least, and he had to help Crystal and the cop.

  Crystal couldn’t pull out her gun fast enough because the lantern-jawed man closed the distance and knocked it out of her hand with a grunt. Tim watched, amazed, as the petite detective didn’t betray any shock, any outrage, but smoothly grabbed the man’s wrist and spun in place in a tight circle. Then he was flying in an undignified tumble against a wall. Aikido.

  The uniformed officer was left with the redheaded woman. It happened so fast, so fast—her right hand came up in a mauling action, and the policeman staggered as his face was raked with vivid, bloody lines across his cheek. The woman screamed something guttural, no words in it, and then she was sprinting away. Tim rushed over to the strange man as he picked himself up from the floor. Crystal was now yards away, her eyes on the cop. Tim knew nothing about fighting—hell, he hadn’t been in a fight since he was a kid. The blow that walloped into his temple was an explosion, and the carpet rose up and slapped him in the face.

  Distantly, he heard Crystal crouched down by the policeman, grabbing his shoulder radio, calling for the two suspects and the Derosier woman to be intercepted at the exits. Then she retrieved her gun as Tim recovered.

  “Well, that was bloody stupid,” she said matter-of-factly. “You’re not a cop—you’re not anything here. When there’s a perceived threat, leave it to law enforcement professionals.”

  “Can we save the lecture for after we stop them?”

  “Let’s go!”

  A library security guard was already hurrying over to help the wounded policeman. Tim ran as fast as he could. He jogged four times a week, but he was still fifteen feet behind Crystal. She didn’t slow down until they were in one of the glass walkway tubes of the Pompidou Center, and the gunshot made a terrifying crack in his ears. He heard her shout something like “Down!”

  Then he felt her body tackle him and push him for the best cover they could find in this naked, open space. Glass shattered, and suddenly there were large holes in the transparent curves above their heads. Tim heard rapid footsteps again, and Crystal took off once more after Lantern Jaw.

  They were in the signature piping that winds its way along the façade, running against the stream of the escalator when Crystal shouted, “I see our girl! She’s in the courtyard!”

  Emily Derosier. But the redheaded woman had managed to escape to the street as well. Lantern Jaw was at the bottom of the escalator, shoving a tourist out of the way, and there were screams as he fired his gun point blank at a policeman calling for him to halt. He aimed the gun again, trying to shoot Emily Derosier. But in the courtyard the crowd was soon busy shouting over something different.

  The redheaded woman had caught up to her target, her hand clawing and raking at her. Emily Derosier cried out and fled towards a set of book and magazine kiosks. A handful of tourists were frozen in shock, most of them frightened by the gunfire, while others stampeded in every direction along the courtyard. Then the man and the woman tried again to corner Emily Derosier—

  And it happened once more. Frames cut out of context from the running loop of film—she was gone, then back again.

  Whatever magic trick she pulled, it was as if the redhead could see through it, past it. The woman pulled a knife out, a stiletto, and people stopped and stared in bewilderment as the lantern-jawed man raised his gun arm. Time crawled. The gun arm raised…

  But as Tim and Crystal hit the street, Emily Derosier gave him another look, this time a bizarre expression of grief, as if she were asking him silently for an apology. When she looked back at her a
ttackers, Tim suddenly understood why.

  Because it hit them all.

  Whatever she did, it was like a blast hit Lantern Jaw, the redhead, Crystal, himself and a few of the confused, frightened pedestrians and tourists in the courtyard. It staggered them, making Crystal fall to her knees, bending over as if about to be sick, and causing Tim to crumple onto his side, his brain on fire, worse than any pain he’d ever felt before. He couldn’t see past his own agony to what was happening with Lantern Jaw and the redhead—

  Emily Derosier. She invaded him. She invaded them all. Filling them up until there was nothing left of them.

  He felt it. He felt it as the he of his being became a communal you. And then something came into him as it must have come into the others like a searing metal bolt of psychic force, it burned and scalded, scraping the core of him. His mind flared with images but not only his own. A confused jumble that must have come from the minds of the crippled, sobbing and screaming others. His fingers touched the cobblestone dust, his mind trying to focus, trying to repeat that they were real, not the images, the cobbles. But still the onslaught persisted.

  Blinded by the intimacies of others and feeling his own pour out of him into this pool of collective consciousness, he tried to force out words for what felt like hours until he finally found the strength to yell, “Enough!”

  Emily Derosier turned, and he saw her face go blank, shocked back to the immediacy of the moment. Her lips parted in a small o as if she’d only slapped him out of a flash of temper. It obviously took her a second to realize how vast the impact had been.

  He looked into Crystal’s eyes and saw a mirror reflection of haunted self-loathing. Let it pass. Jesus, let it pass like a bad aftertaste. Where was she? Where was—

  Gone. When he looked over at the murderous couple, they, too, were recovering, and a police car came to a screeching halt in the middle of the square.