Art of Murder (27 page)

'Mr Paul Benoit, director of Conservation at the Bruno van Tysch Foundation, is sorry he cannot be here in person, and has instructed me to welcome you to Holland,' the woman said with a smile. 'Did you have a good trip?'

'Yes very good, thanks.'

'I little Spanish,' the blond man said, blushing slightly. 'Don't worry,' Clara reassured him.

'Do you need anything? Want anything? Want to say anything?'

'No, I'm fine at the moment, and there's nothing I need,' said Clara. 'Thanks all the same.'

'May I?' the woman took hold of the label round Clara's neck.

'Excuse me,' said the man, lifting her arm with his gloved left hand, and catching her wrist tag in his right.

'Sorry,' a third man she had not noticed until now said, as he knelt on the floor to grasp her ankle label.

It's comforting when they treat you like a human being occa
sionally, thought Clara. Everry
being in the universe, as well as the majority of natural and artificial objects, likes being treated kindly, so Clara did not feel ashamed to think as she did. The parallel red claws of their laser beams sneaked out over the lines of the bar codes on her three labels. She kept her silent smile throughout their inspection, examining the woman closely. She decided she was pretty, but was wearing too dark a shade of make-up. She had also put too much rouge on: it looked as though she had been slapped hard on both cheeks.

Then they stripped her: they lifted her padded plastic tunic over her head, and removed the top and miniskirt. The ceiling lights rippled across her body like luminous eels.

'Are you feeling all right? Not nauseous at all? Tired?'

While the woman practised her Berlitz Spanish, she felt
Clara's pulse with fingers as delicate as a pair of tweezers. In the pauses, Clara could hear echoes of questions in another language from a nearby room. Had more artistic goods arrived? Who could it be? She was dying to know.

The Conservation team changed instruments and started to examine her with a sort of mobile phone that gave off a loud hum. She guessed they must be checking she was all of one piece. Armpits, ribs, buttocks, thighs, backs of her legs, stomach, pubis, face, hair, hands, feet, back, coccyx. They did not touch her with their instruments: these were like red-eyed crickets all chirruping on the same note a couple of centimetres from her skin. She helped them by raising her arms, opening her mouth, spreading her legs. She felt a sudden surge of panic: what would happen if they found something wrong? Would they send her back?

Another man had joined their group, but he stayed in the background, near the exit, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, as though waiting for the others to finish before it was his turn. He was a platinum blond with a firm jaw and reflecting glasses. He looked like a bad-tempered Aryan, and perhaps that is what he was. A mobile phone cable sprouted from his right ear. Clara saw the red tag in his lapel: he was a security guard. I should start recognising them: the dark blue label is Conservation, the red one is Security; Art is turquoise
...

'All done,' said the woman. 'In the name of the Bruno van Tysch Foundation, I wish you a happy stay in Holland. Please, if you have any doubt, any problem, or if there's anything you need, call us. You'll have a number you can call Conservation on. You can ring at any time of the day or night. Our colleagues will be delighted to help.'

'Thanks.'

'Now we'll leave you in the capable hands of the security people. I should warn you that Security will not speak to you, so don't waste time asking them questions. But you can always talk to us.'

'What about Art?'

These simple words had a surprising effect. The woman's eyes opened wide; the men turned towards Clara and gesticulated; even the guard appeared to smile. It was the woman who spoke.

'Art?
...
Oh, Art does what it likes. Art has its own agenda, none of us knows what that is, and there's no way we could know.'

Clara recalled the long silences on the phone while she was being stretched, the clauses of the contract she had signed.
‘I
understand,' she said.

'No, no,' the woman responded unexpectedly. 'You'll never understand.'

They gave her some plastic slippers which she hurriedly put on. So far she was not damaged, so why run any risk at the last moment? Then they put the plastic tunic back on. She realised they had not returned the top and miniskirt, but that was not important. The tunic moulded itself around her naked body. The security man set off and Clara followed him slowly, the plastic swishing as she walked along. They left by the back door. As they passed the next room, she thought she caught a swift glimpse of a naked old man with a primed body and yellow labels. His eyes were gleaming. Clara would have liked to pause for a moment and say hello to him, but the security man was striding off unconcerned. They soon came out into a silent private parking lot. The vehicle waiting had more than enough room for her. It was a dark-coloured van with a back door and two more up by the driver. There were no windows in the rear part, so that the canvas was protected from prying eyes. The back section had optional seating, but all of them had been removed except for one, to give her even more space. Clara could have stretched out on the floor easily without reaching the driver's seat, but instead she was strapped in by four seat belts that the driver snapped shut with his gloved hands. Clara found she was pinioned to the seat back.

The journey was as brief as a dream. Through the front windscreen she could make out green road signs: Amsterdam, Haarlem, Utrecht; arrows, lines; phosphorescent signs. The night was streaked with power pylons, or perhaps they were telegraph posts, which caught the van's speeding headlights. The security man drove in silence. Clara soon realised they were not heading for Amsterdam. The lights she had seen when they left Schiphol airport began to die away, which must mean they had turned off the main highway. Now they were in the countryside. A sudden cold sensation gripped her. For just a moment she was filled with an absurd thought. Could they be heading for Edenburg? Would the Maestro receive her that very night? But what if all this was a dream, and it was not Van Tysch who was going to paint her, as she had been imagining since she found out who had contracted her? She scolded herself for thinking this way. A good painting had no right to get emotional. She had too much experience for that. She was a twenty-four-year-old canvas, for goodness' sake. She had started out with
The Circle
and Brentano had painted her on three occasions. Eight years in the profession was too long for her to give in to her nerves, wasn't it? I'll try to stay calm. You
must
feel
distant
from everything that happens to you. What was it that Marisa Monfort always said? Be like an insect. Like someone who has forgotten their own name. A linen canvas plaited with white lines. Someone once told her memories are lines on white nothingness: we have to rub them out, we have to be different, we have to
not he.

She had no idea how long it was before she began to notice the van was slowing down. The headlights picked out scrawny trees. A track. She caught sight of wheelbarrows, rakes, buckets, objects that reminded her of the garden tools which helped her father enjoy the summers in Alberca. The man from Security drew up outside a hedge. He got out, opened the gate, then drove the van inside. Soon afterwards he had parked and undone Clara's seat belts. As soon as she stepped down on to the gravel in her plastic slippers, she realised this could not be Edenburg. But it did not seem to be any other town either. The lights showed it was some kind of market garden. To the right and left, she could see the night was not invulnerable, there were signs of civilisation, a row of lines which perhaps betrayed the presence of houses or factories, or even some kind of airport or small village. It was cool, and the wind was tugging at the edges of her tunic. The moon was a curved, clipped length of wire. She sniffed the air: it smelt of woods and marsh. The smell of the earth became distinct in her mouth, as if she were tasting it. She pushed back a fleck of hair from her eyebrow-less face. At her feet, her shadow on the gravel was dark and twisted.

The man from Security waited for her, and then the two of them walked towards the house. It was a small, one-storey affair, with a porch and little else of note, as though it were waiting for her to arrive to start to exist. The crickets were tapping out their night-time morse code. I'm sure all this will be very nice in the morning, but at the moment it's a bit scary, Clara thought. As they climbed the few steps up to the front of the house, the sound of the man's shoes on the wooden boards reminded her of a horror movie she had seen years earlier with Gabi Ponce.

There was a glint of keys. The inside of the house smelt of bathroom fresheners. There was a small hallway, with a staircase on the right and, to the left, a closed door. Clara suddenly noticed that the light switches to all the rooms were in the hall. The man flicked them on, and light filled the house, revealing what appeared to be part of a living room on the far side of the staircase: white walls, cream doors, a full-length mirror on a mobile frame, and a floor of white wood. Clara later discovered the whole house had the same parquet. The black lines of the gaps and the white of the boards made the floor look like a sheet of paper for calligraphy or for a study of perspective foreshortening. The closed door on the left opened into a simple kitchen. The other half of the living room stretched to the back of the house, parallel to the kitchen. A sofa, a faded carpet (once a crimson colour?), a small chest of three drawers that had a telephone on it, and another full-length mirror, were all the furniture she could see. Placed opposite each other, the two mirrors suggested infinity. There was only one ornament on the walls: a framed, medium-sized photograph. It was a very odd one. It showed the head and shoulders of a man facing away from the camera, on a black background. His dark, well-cut hair and his jacket blended in so well with the surrounding shadows that only his ears, the half-moon of his neck and the shirt collar were visible. It reminded Clara of a Surrealist painting.

The bedroom was on the right. It was a big room, with a mattress on the floor and no other furniture. The mattress was a bright blue. A door led to the bathroom, already equipped for hyperdramatic needs. A couple of bathrobes were hanging on the back of the door.

The man had gone into all the rooms. Rather than showing her the house, he seemed to be inspecting it. Clara was looking at all the things in the bathroom when she saw a shadow over her shoulder. It was him. Without a word, he bent down and started to lift off the plastic tunic. She understood what he was trying to do, and raised her arms to help. The man finished removing the tunic, folded it up, and put it into a big bag. Then he bent down again and look off her slippers, which he stored in the same bag. Then he left the room, bag under his arm. She heard his footsteps across the floorboards, the door, the lock. She breathed in deeply as she heard the sound of the van engine fade into the distance. She left the bedroom and went to the front window just in time to see the pen of light drawing parallel lines across the darkness. Then everything was black again.

She was alone. She was naked. But she didn't feel at all bothered by this.

She went up to the front door and examined it. Locked. She tried the window and found it was locked too. She tried all the windows in the house as well as a back door she discovered in the living room, and found that none of them would open without keys. She preferred to think of it another way: she was not locked in, she was
in storage.
She was not alone, she was
unique.

Unique and stored in a locked house.

She was a precious object.

She went into the living room and looked for the phone. It was cordless. She picked it up. A dead silence. She saw a dark blue rectangle next to the receiver, a card with a number on it. She guessed it must be Conservation's details ('You can ring at any time of the day or night') but it would be useless if the phone was not working anyway. She followed the cable back and saw it was properly connected. She tried again, tapping in numbers haphazardly. The phone was dead. She dialled the number on the card. As her finger touched the last digit, she heard the call go through. So it worked in certain cases. She hung up. She immediately knew what was going on.

You can ring us,
but only us.

Of course.

She gazed around at the silence, the emptiness of the lined floor. The house was anonymous and naked, just like her. She ran her hands over the incredible smoothness of her primed thighs, the harsh rigidity of the labels attached to her body, and looked all around her. She needed to start from scratch, and that was where she was, at the start of
everything,
polished, smooth, reduced to a minimum, labelled.

Having nothing better to do, she approached one of the mirrors.