Art of Murder (15 page)

The man spoke English with an undeniable continental accent, perhaps German or Dutch. At the bottom half of the screen, his neck and the knot of his tie were obscured by subtitles of what he was saying in French and German. Briseida did not need any more languages to feel terrified.

'We know a lot about you: you're twenty-six, born in Bogota, have an art degree from a New York university, you father is his country's cultural attach
é
at the United Nations
...
Let's see, what else?' The man bent forward, and for a few seconds the screen became a globe featuring his polished bald head. 'Ah yes, you're engaged on a research project for the university about painters and their collections
...
this year you have been in the Netherlands to study the objects Rembrandt collected in his house in Amsterdam. And now you're in Paris, with our good friend Roger Levin. Last night you went with him to a party at Leo Roquentin's. All this is correct, isn't it?'

Briseida was about to answer yes when the fairy godmother of computers dissolved the image with an explosion of green flashes and replaced it with another face: a thin woman with her hair cut in a boyish bob, wearing dark glasses. Her subtitles were in green.

'Hello there, I'm the bad cop.' Her accent was more English than the man's, and her voice was more disturbing. Her smile was like a scythe blade. 'I just wanted to say hello. Some place Leo Roquentin has, doesn't he? I think the salon is from the eighteenth century, and the ceiling frescoes were painted by the maestro Luc Ducet and tell the story of Samson and Delilah. In the west wing, in a room with two ceiling roundels, the story of the Flood is depicted, from the building of the Ark to the return of the dove with the olive branch in its beak. We know Leo Roquentin very well
...
His HD collection is also excellent, especially the Elmer Fludd paintings in the main room. But they are just the tip of the iceberg. Did you take part in the art-shock that was going on in the huge basement underneath the mansion? It was called
Art-Chess,
and was created by Michel Gros. Twenty-four young people of both sexes, and plastic material . . . the figures, completely naked and painted in various shades of green, are pieces on a thirty-metre-square chessboard. The guests suggest the moves they should make. Any piece that gets taken is handed over to the guests to do what they like with. You didn't play the game? Of course, your little friend Roger mustn't have told you anything about it. You would have simply seen the paintings upstairs: the art-shock was for a select few. Leo astonishes them with these interactive performances, then offers them irresistible deals with even more prohibited works.'

Was what that woman was saying true? It was certainly true that Roger had disappeared for a long while to talk with Roquentin while Briseida wandered from one corner to another across green carpets, on the billiard table of guests, contemplating the magnificent oils by Elmer Fludd. Then when he returned she had told him he looked a bit nervous. And his shirt collar was undone. An art-shock consisting of a game of chess with human pieces
...
she said to herself. Why hadn't Roger told her anything? What was going on in the basement of the world, beneath the feet of all those rich people?

The woman paused, and gave another of her unpleasant smiles.

'Don't worry, men are always the same. They like to keep secrets. We women are more sincere, aren't we? At least I hope you are, Miss Canchares. I'm going to leave you with my friend the Good Cop, who's going to ask you some questions. If your replies are convincing, we'll unplug the computer, go home and we'll all be good friends. If they're not, it'll be the Good Cop who'll leave, and the Bad Cop, i.e. me, who will be back. Understood?

'Yes.'

'I'm delighted to have met you, Miss Canchares. I hope we don't meet again.'

'My pleasure,' stammered Briseida.

She didn't know what to think about the woman's warnings. Were they just idle threats? And what about all this fantasy with military uniforms? Were they trying to stir up her atavistic fear of guerrillas? All of a sudden she thought she was in the midst of a carnival, an artistically organised farce. What was the neologism Stan had invented? An
imagic,
a magical image, a cultural archetype to project our fear or passion on to, because - according to Stan - nowadays everything, absolutely everything, from publicity to massacres, from food aid for Third World countries to torture, is done with a sense of style.

Carnival or not, this performance was achieving its objective: she was terrorised. She felt close to pissing on Roger's sofa, to throwing up on Roger's carpet.

A green explosion. The man again.

This is the question
...
listen closely
...'

Briseida stiffened as much as she could under the grip of the claw-like hands on her shoulders and arms. Her thighs were aching from the effort she made to press them together to conceal her sex from view. All at once she was conscious of her total nudity.

'We know you are a close friend of Oscar Diaz. I'll repeat the name: Oscar Diaz. The question is: where is Oscar now?'

Some part of the cerebral cortex of Briseida Canchares -twenty-five years old (the man had been mistaken, she would not be twenty-six until 3 August) with a degree in Art History -carried out a swift calculation and came up with a list of provisional conclusions: Oscar Diaz; something to do with Oscar; Oscar has done something bad; they're going to do something bad to Oscar
...

'Where is you friend Oscar?' the man repeated.

'I don't know.'

Immediately, the screen was covered in a green slime that reminded Briseida of the time she had carried out chemical experiments for the restoration of paintings. A set of teeth emerged out of the green. A smile. The face of the woman in dark glasses.

'Wrong answer.'

A tuft of her scalp suddenly seemed to spring to life. She screamed, and her eyes imagined a fiesta with firecrackers, a New Year's Eve party in a hotel somewhere in the green jungle. Her neck was twisted back; her vertebra only escaped destruction thanks to the aerobics she practised every day. Two strange green planets swam into her universe (Venus was always green in the pulp science-fiction books Stan Coleman read by the sackful), and she found herself staring at a stylish and undoubtedly very expensive instrument. It was a chrome metal pencil with a sharpened tip on the end of which glistened a drop of martian blood.

'This toy is an optical laser brush
’
the blonde said,
an
inch away from her face. 'I'll not bore you with all the technical details. Let's just say it's an improved version of the brushes painters use to work on the retinas of their primed canvases. The retina is the pigmented layer on the back of our eyes, which among other things allows us to distinguish colours. Usually it is very boring, but it's very useful when we want to see the world. I'm going to paint your retinas dark green. First your left eye, then the right one. The problem is, I'm going to use permanent paint, which is totally unadvisable in this kind of situation. You won't have any scars or external bruising, it will all be very aesthetic and so on. But by the time I've finished, you'll be so blind you'll have to suck your fingers to be sure they're yours. But it will be a very beautiful blindness, everything will look a wonderful bottle-green colour. Now, don't move.'

The order was not necessary. All Briseida could move was her mouth and her right eyelid. Something was forcing open her left eyelid to the point where she was on the verge of tears. It smelt of imitation leather: a glove. Leather vultures had seized her wrists, knees, ankles, throat, and hair. She wanted to say something in English, but all that came out was mangled Spanish. But she had to speak English. English is vital in situations like this, when you are being tortured by a foreigner.
OK, Johnson family at
holidays. Mar
y Johnson is in the kitchen. Wh
ere's Mary Johnson?
Then, along the left-hand side of her optic nerve there appeared a spectacular universe of such a kitsch green and red colour it reminded her of a phosphorescent buddha she had seen in a street market. Or the postcards by Pierre & Gilles she used to send her parents from Europe. She thought she was going blind.

At that point the hand pulling her hair back let go, and another one pressed down on the back of her neck forcing her head forward as though wanting to smash it into the computer screen. She found herself with her nose pressed up against the French and German subtitles. She fought back a sudden wave of nausea.

'Your second opportunity.' It was the woman again. 'Our colleague simply brought the brush close to your pupil
...
Listen, and don't scream
...
if you give the wrong answer again, she will draw a comma on your retina
...
after she's done that, you'll be able to see a green crescent moon even in the light of day. A curious aesthetic effect, don't you agree? Stop snivelling and pay attention
...
After this second session, you might as well keep your left retina in a jar. I can assure you, it will glow green in the night like one of those virgins of Lourdes
...
So please, concentrate. The prize is your eyesight.'

'The same question again.' It was the man once more.

Since the hands clasping her shoulders and arms were still there, and the one on the back of her neck was still pressing her down, Briseida was convinced her cervical vertebra was about to crack apart like rotten wood. She decided that would be the best thing that could happen.

'I don't know, I swear, please, I don't know, I swear I've no idea, in Vienna, yes, in Vienna, but I don't really know,
‘
swear, I swear
...!'
Saliva, tears and words came pouring from her face as if her glands were secreting them:
'I've no idea where, it's true, I've no idea where, I swear it, please, please, please, plea

A
bout of vomiting cut her off.

Seated at his portable computer in the MuseumsQuartier office, Lothar Bosch pressed a button on his mobile memory and called the number that appeared. He had a brief but forceful discussion with one of his men in Paris. Miss Wood had her back turned to him, and was staring out at the Vienna dawn through the glass wall. Bosch noticed she was sm
oking one of her disgusting eco
logical cigarettes, the mentholated green smoke formed halos on the window round her head.

'Mr Lothar Bosch, always a gentleman where ladies are concerned,' he heard her say.

'Don't you think we've scared her enough with that game of the optical brush?' Bosch snapped back, wounded by his colleague's cold irony. 'That's no way to start a conversation. We won't get anything out of her like that.'

Her eye was undamaged. They were quite kind to her, really. They had even let go of her so she could vomit more easily.

Briseida was sick as she used to be as a child: with one hand on her forehead, and the other clutching her stomach. That was how it always was with her. Strange moment this bilious
d
é
j
à
vu.
According to her mother, she threw up like a cat. Her grandmother said it was because she didn't know how to be sick. The little kitten would suffer all her life because she did not know how to vomit properly. She didn't take after her father in that, especially after he had been boozing. Stan was also an expert in vomiting, it was easy, prolonged and abundant. The same was true of most of the fluids emanating from her Art Professor. The same could not be said of Luigi, her Aesthetics Professor, whose stomach was toughened by a diet of pizzas laced with chilli: he was stiff, repressed and impotent. By their vomit shall ye know them, not by their ejaculations. Sneezing, vomiting and death were the only three truly unforeseeable, uncontrollable and instantaneous reactions of the body. Semi-colon, fullstop; new paragraph, full stop, end of dictation about life: as a teacher at her Swiss school had once told her.

She stemmed her retching with a sip of cold water. God, what a state she had left Roger's dining-room carpet in. A man with such an aesthetic sense as Roger (could it be true he had played chess last night with twenty-four human pieces?) and just look what she had deposited on his carpet, it looked like radish juice all over his spotless Italian floor. Briseida was forced to separate her knees to avoid the pool, and in doing so opened her thighs. But since they were no longer holding her down, she could cover her sex with her hands. The Good Computer (or was it the Good Cop?) was waiting, a gold Montblanc pressed against the side of his head. The blonde and the soldiers had retreated to behind the chair, ready to swing into action at any moment. A Windows icon called 'Bad Cop' crouched in the opposite corner to Briseida's. But Good Cop had told her that, for the moment, Baddie wanted a rest.