The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  “You flatter my taste, Marcel.” He clapped the man on the arm and headed towards the foyer. He wanted to take a walk and think.

  Crystal could talk to the French police about the painting. He wanted somebody—somebody good at forensics—to examine it carefully. Whoever had sent that thuggish couple to hunt Emily Derosier at the Beaubourg might know by now that Tim and Crystal were also searching for her. They might also feel like playing games. So he wanted to know all about that painting before Thursday. If Emily Derosier had painted it, he wanted to know if it was one of her compositions from almost a century ago or if she had painted it last week.

  He wanted to know everything before he dared to sit down at a table in Au Dauphin.

  On an impulse, he turned and walked briskly back to the hotel, impatiently closing the doors to his elevator before the newest Hollywood ingénue and her Pomeranian could glide in. When he used his pass card to enter his room, he saw that the hotel staff had thoughtfully brought up an easel to display the painting. It was still an astonishingly beautiful piece of work. But it was different.

  He stepped closer to it. The colors still appeared to shimmer, the texture lifelike. But the actual composition was different. The nude woman’s expression was now a little sad. A face had also changed on the Cubist-block of a street musician. The hour of the day in the painting looked closer to noon. Was he kidding himself? He hadn’t looked at it that carefully down in the storage room. Maybe he was reacting unconsciously to a pentimento, traces of a previous painting or drawing under the finished work. Frankly, he didn’t delude himself that he had that good an eye.

  He carefully picked up the painting and brought it closer to the window. The painting switched again, and this time he was sure of it. There were subtle changes in the hues of light and the expressions of the Futurist figures.

  Damn right he would have a forensic expert examine this.

  Twenty-five-year-old Gudrun Merkel laughed at the two young men clumsily dueling in chain mail. This was great fun, she thought as she stood in the Royal Library courtyard. They were all students at Humboldt University in Berlin.

  The duel was supposed to be for an experiment for one guy’s thesis. He didn’t even go to Humboldt, but everyone thought the courtyard was a perfect site for it, and, of course, the fooling around with mock swords made for great horseplay. The library was used for Humboldt’s Faculty of Law, and Gudrun took studies here, so she was happy to take in the show early before morning classes and to casually accept the joint passed along by one of her friends. The pot would take the edge off.

  She and the others made Monty Python and the Holy Grail references, jokes about Highlander and of course, Lord of the Rings. All of them were getting nicely toasted and barely taking any notes for even the appearance of doing homework. Gudrun laughed and told the friend next to her that the clanging of undergraduates worked better with the retro-ska music on her iPod. It would be hard for anyone to believe that the brunette girl in a heavy woolen sweater and jeans, who didn’t take life seriously but expected she’d drift into academia or museum work, had emerged from a Karma Booth six weeks ago.

  No one treated her any differently in this moment because no one with her now actually knew.

  In fact, Gudrun Merkel’s parents and doctors had taken elaborate steps to make sure Gudrun herself didn’t know. She had been beaten to death by an abusive boyfriend, and in the moment she returned to existence in the second chamber, the doctors had fired a tranquilizer dart into her bare midriff. The poor naked girl had collapsed to the floor before she could feel the shock of resurrection—the doctors hoped. When Gudrun Merkel woke up in a hospital bed, she was informed she had been in a coma for four months.

  She asked for water. She complained of a slight headache and dryness of mouth. After ten minutes, because everyone kept assuring her that she was physically okay, and that her muscles hadn’t atrophied significantly from her “coma” and that the swelling from her head injuries had been successfully treated, she asked about Rudy, her boyfriend.

  Rudy committed suicide, they told her. It had been decided this was the most plausible scenario yet one that would allow therapists to help Gudrun Merkel move on and hopefully break the cycle of involvement with abusive partners.

  They certainly couldn’t tell her they had traded his young life for hers. Or that Rudy, whom she swore she loved so much, had insisted before his execution that he hadn’t done anything wrong, and that “if she just did what I told her to do I wouldn’t have to hit the bitch at all!” He had escaped going to prison for assaulting another girlfriend two years ago because his father was a member of the European Parliament and had called in a few favors. But there was no way his father could clean up the fallout over what was done to Gudrun Merkel.

  “Poor Rudy,” she had whispered in her hospital bed. With a wet sniff, she had rubbed her moist eyes.

  The truth was that the German government had been waiting for a case like the murder of Gudrun Merkel. Her boyfriend’s fate was sealed as soon as her time of death was declared. Declared, but never announced—not to anyone beyond her parents, who had to sign official documents ensuring their silence. The Merkels were happy to do so, given the lurid stories about Karma Booth victims in America and other parts of the world. So all those involved in the ruse—the physicians, the authorities, her parents—felt Germany was taking a mature, enlightened step that other nations with this technology should have tried before: minimize the trauma and sensationalism.

  They would try bringing a victim back but simply not tell the individual. They would see if the intelligence from the Americans and British was true about Booth victims returning with unusual heightened perception. The Germans were skeptical. Somebody in Washington or London had wanted to start an urban myth, that’s what all the nonsense was about. Take away the astonishing flashes of light in the procedure, the noise and drama, and we’ll see if these victims are still special when they wake up in a gown in an ICU bed, won’t we?

  But Gudrun Merkel wasn’t a foolish girl, despite how her boyfriend had gradually whittled away and eroded her self-esteem, isolating her from her friends and family before he stole her life. She paid attention. She saw things. Her last few nervous months in her previous life had developed her radar for the nuances of evasive rationales and secretive behavior, even if it couldn’t save her from her boyfriend’s lethal blows.

  At the hospital, her parents and the doctors and everyone else seemed to treat her coming out of the coma as if such a thing were banal. Their responses were muted, guarded, which she thought was extremely strange. There was a man with a briefcase who often came around, and in the patients’ recreation room, she asked a young woman on chemotherapy if she knew who this man was.

  “Oh, the nurses say he’s from the Chancellor’s office,” her new friend explained.

  Was there a political celebrity in their wing? Why else would someone that high up come to visit?

  But no one knew at all why the man came around two or three times, always intently listening as he was briefed by doctors—Gudrun’s same doctors. No one knew why the man often drifted past the doorway of her room, doing his best not to stare—at her.

  She could read the papers. She watched the television news. They thought she couldn’t make the connection, that by simply having her admitted and placed in this bed and not mentioning the details, she wouldn’t put it together. She wasn’t a complete idiot.

  She realized she was one of them.

  And there was something else, too.

  Because of her ordeal with domestic violence, Gudrun Merkel knew not to talk to people about subjects they didn’t raise in conversation. She was nothing, nobody. Whatever this was about, there was a purpose that was more important than her, and she should keep her mouth shut for them. It was like her law studies. Her father had told her since her mid-teens she must be in a profession that was secure, and though she found the law crushingly dull, she knew Daddy was right. Her father had alwa
ys been right.

  So now in the courtyard of Humboldt’s Royal Library, Gudrun Merkel didn’t pay much attention as the tall man walked up to her, fishing a badge out of his inside pocket. Viktor Limonov was shaved, his hair trimmed, and instead of his signature polo shirt and jeans he had opted for a dark navy blue suit and tie.

  He held up the badge, saying briskly in fluent German, “Polizei. Gudrun Merkel?”

  She stared into space for a moment, barely looking at him before she responded. “You’re not police.”

  “True. But you’re not running away.”

  “It wouldn’t do me much good, would it?”

  Limonov’s blue eyes closed to slits, his mouth opening a little in a canine impression of a smile. “Not much. Where were you just now? Meditating?”

  “There are people dreaming,” answered Gudrun. “In Mexico City, a girl lies sleeping in the back of a pickup truck under a blanket. She’s four. In her mind, she’s thinking of fluffy rice while a puppet character comes to the dinner table and sings for her—he’s one of those famous felt puppets from American TV, I can’t remember the name. In Munich, there is a twenty-four-year-old systems analyst having a nocturnal emission, only he’s confused because he became aroused over the idea of his coworker friend, Ludger, naked. In Australia, an aboriginal woman cleaning houses is dreaming she’s on holiday in Sydney. There are no strangers’ toilets to clean, no disappointment in her son’s eyes, and her sister has married far better than she expected. She’ll wake up in a few minutes but feel rested.”

  “How nice,” said Limonov. “I suppose if I drifted off right here, you could tell me what’s in my head.”

  Gudrun swallowed hard, really seeing him for the first time. “There’s no need. You’re very proud that you make nightmares real. You’ve said it—you’ve said you make nightmares real, but people think you are self-aggrandizing. They don’t know that you have lucid dreaming, or that you can exercise conscious control over your REM atonia. For most people, release of specific neurotransmitters is shut down, so that the body’s muscles don’t move while they dream, and they don’t hurt themselves or others.” She paused a moment, swallowed hard again and added, “I don’t know how I know that. The point is: you’re already asleep.”

  “What a clever girl. And you know this because I’m dreaming now, aren’t I?”

  “Yes. You’re about to come out of it. It’s because you’re summoning the images of raping me and stabbing me to provoke a reaction, and it’s getting you excited, making you lose some of your control.”

  Limonov chuckled, and then he heard his laughter and blinked once, twice, truly awake now as the girl predicted. She looked at him with eyes of dread, suppressing a shiver. It was nice that they could feel fear, he thought, even if her type had come back with special advantages.

  He had expected this conversational intimacy, both of them knowing oh-so-much more than the true sleepwalkers walking around them, going about their mundane lives. But the girl’s rising terror was a bonus. Sweet.

  “It won’t be like your dreams,” she warned him flatly. “The rape. The blood. I don’t sound like that when I scream.”

  “That’s very good. I wonder if you were this assertive and confident before your lover killed you.”

  “No.”

  “If you know all these things, you should know why I’m really here.”

  “You think murdering me will help you get what you want. But it won’t. You’ll find out you can’t see the way I do. You have a… You’re blocked.”

  Limonov studied Gudrun Merkel carefully, noticing her eyes were moist with grief for herself but still she showed no impulse to flee.

  “It’s not a gift for you, this extra life, is it?” he asked. He meant no cruelty in his question and was genuinely interested in the answer. “You didn’t think it was a gift at all, being brought back. You don’t have to fake gratitude and joy over your second chance—not with me. We can be honest with each other.”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose this is why you do not run. Because no matter what I do to you, in the end, when your heart stops, you will be rewarded with what you didn’t get last time. Peace. Final peace… You assume I will fail, and I won’t change things.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I suppose if I tear off your clothes, push up your legs and defile you, if I slash at your breasts with my blade and cut your face, you will simply float away in the heads of someone in Peru or Albania, won’t you? You will disconnect and defy me with a stupor.”

  “Yes,” she mumbled.

  There was a boy of thirteen in Norway, his mind replaying a hiking trip through lovely woods. It was very green and bright there. It would be enough for the duration of what he would do to her. She would focus hard. Woods. Sunshine. Crunching leaves under boots and the birds twittering, calling to each other across the gorgeous trees…

  Limonov sent his knife in a vicious arc across her throat. He felt cheated out of pleasure, cheated out of what he had come for, but… Like he always said, spare the blade, spoil the victim.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “It’s not paint,” said Miller flatly, studying the picture.

  “It’s a painting,” laughed Tim. “It’s got brushstrokes, it’s on canvas, it’s got a nude for Christ’s sakes.”

  “I don’t care if it looks like a painting,” said Miller. “That’s not paint. The forensics guys over at the French police looked at it, and then they gave it to a couple of biochemists at the Pasteur Institute, and I’ve confirmed their findings with my own tests. It’s not paint, but it is organic. It’s fucking freaky is what it is.”

  “Well, then it’s a nice conversation piece,” replied Tim, shrugging. “I guess everybody picked up on that weird 3-D effect or holographic…”

  “Tim, there’s no hologram in there,” insisted Miller. “For 3-D, you need three different compositions going on to create the illusion, and for a hologram, you need lasers and shit and—look, I’m sure Weintraub can explain it. There are no other images in this picture except the one you see—at the moment. And then the next moment. I told you, it’s organic.”

  “Right, okay, you’re doing that thing again,” piped up Crystal.

  “What thing?” asked Miller.

  “The thing where you confuse the bloody hell out of us.”

  Miller clicked on YouTube on his computer. “Check this out. It’ll make things easier to understand.”

  Tim waited as the scientist brought up links to a couple of videos pirated from BBC Nature documentaries. Soon they were watching footage of a floating octopus. The creature drifted along the bottom of the ocean, past spiky plants and alien-looking fish. Then it suddenly shifted and transformed color with all the whimsical choice of a disco ball, switching patterns to blend in with a patch of algae.

  “Whoa!” said Crystal. “That is freaky!”

  “An octopus uses chromatophores,” explained Miller. “They’re cells with pigments that reflect light. Cephalopods like the octopus have complex chromatophoric organs controlled by muscles and their nervous systems. An octopus can also change the texture of its skin, by the way, which makes for even better camouflage.”

  “So what are you saying?” asked Tim, still mystified.

  “The picture has this stuff?” asked Crystal.

  “Or something like it,” said Miller, “but yeah, essentially, it’s a painting of chromatophores. When you brought it near the window, it adapted to its surroundings and in reaction to the changing light source. I’m saying this whole painting is a living organism.”

  Tim looked again, as did Crystal. The colors stayed brilliant, the nude locked in place, wandering in her frozen graceful stance amid the street musicians of this Futurist café scene. They looked at the picture, waiting unconsciously for its colors and composition to change. They couldn’t help but wait, now that they knew.

  The next day they were on the move. While Tim, Crystal and Miller had dealt with Leary and the st
olen Booth in Northern Ireland, the French police had been quietly, patiently circulating the photo of Ana Tvardovsky to one- and two-star hotels and short-term rental apartments in Paris and its suburbs.

  It turned out that despite her grim mission to track down Emily Derosier, their redheaded assassin preferred to stay in relative comfort. She had booked a room at a beautiful wine warehouse from the 1800s converted to timeshare suites, one located out in Bercy in the 12th arrondissement in the west. They were in luck. A caretaker for the property recognized Tvardovsky as “Ana Cara,” a woman who supposedly held a Romanian passport.

  It was clear from the moment they let themselves in that Ana Tvardovsky had done little in these rooms except eat and sleep. Her overnight bag was unzipped and still open on a chair, and the remains of a Thai takeout meal were still in a recyclable plastic container in the fridge. One jacket and skirt set was hung up in drycleaner’s plastic in a closet.

  “Nothing much here,” said Crystal flatly, surveying the rooms. They had been told by the French police not to expect much, but she had insisted on being thorough.

  “She was a genuine mob hitman—I mean hitwoman,” remarked Tim. “She’d know enough to cover her tracks in case she had to bolt, wouldn’t she?”

  Crystal began to sift belongings out of the brown leather suitcase on the chair. The Paris cops had tagged it as evidence but hadn’t taken it away because they knew she would want to inspect it. “There’s always something. People can’t help being who they are, and they show themselves in tiny ways. Had an old criminology professor hammer that into my brain. Knickers, pantyhose, skirts, blouses, trousers, and in the pockets—”

  She yanked out a packet of tissues still in their plastic wrap, a pen, a jingling collection of coins and a few bank notes. “Nothing.”

  “Maybe not,” said Tim. He scooped up the money to take a look. One of them didn’t look right, and when he fanned the packet, there was more than one of them. “These aren’t euro notes.”