The Death Artist (44 page)

Halfway through, a man’s shadow rolled toward them like a figure in a de Chirico painting. A tiny overhead light caught the sheen of something metallic in his hand.

Marcarini and Passatta shoved Kate behind them, pistols trained on the man’s dark contour.

But the man had seen them, too, flattened himself against the alley wall, that same tiny light illuminating his face.

The cops sprinted.

“No!” Kate called out. “Stop! It’s okay.”

Seconds later, after the cops had backed off, Willie took a deep breath. “Fuck, man.”

“You guys have got to cool it,” Kate said to the cops, though she was equally edgy. “What’s that in your hand, Willie?”

“Oh. This?” He displayed a six-inch strip of oxidized bronze, a bit of baroque filigree along the edge. “It’s a piece of old metal railing, I think. I picked it up off the street. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Do me a favor,” said Kate. “Don’t play with metal objects, okay?”

They turned into St. Mark’s Square.

“Ah, Florian’s.” She looped her arm around Willie. “Come on. I’m sure you could use a drink.”

Kate and Willie settled into one of the plush booths in the old café, just inside. Marcarini and Passatta took up their posts in the square, each leaning against a pillar, both smoking their unfiltered cigarettes.

“Bodyguards?” asked Willie.

“Stuck like glue,” said Kate, trying to smile. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Hey, so I like lost twenty years off my life. It’s no big thing.”

Kate smiled, ordered brandies for all of them, had the waiter bring glasses out to Marcarini and Passatta, who offered up a silent toast.

“I’m really glad to see you.” Kate squeezed his hand.

“Me, too,” said Willie.

The gilded cathedral’s facade illuminated in the dark piazza twinkled soft and blurry.

“Man, what a beautiful place.”

“Did you ever see this movie–it takes place in Venice, with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland? It’s even an oldie to me. You probably weren’t born yet.”

“Don’t Look Now,”
said Willie.

“How do you know that?”

“Me
? Is there a movie I
don’t
know? They’re in Venice, and their kid has died, and everywhere they look they see the kid’s ghost.”

“Exactly,” said Kate. “Well, that’s the way Venice felt to me tonight. Creepy.”

“Really? To me, Venice is like a dream.”

Kate looked into the square, at the fog settling in.
Is he out there
? She shivered.

“You cold?”

“No.” Kate laid her hand over Willie’s. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For what happened with Darton Washington, and . . . everything.”

“It’s not your fault.” For a moment, he considered telling her about Henry, but he just couldn’t.

Kate stared across the piazza, at the bell tower, an evanescent spire in the fog. She finished the brandy, checked her watch. “I should be getting back to the hotel.”

At the front entrance to the Gritti Palace, Kate bid Marcarini and Passatta
“Buona notte,”
but they wouldn’t have any of it.

Marcarini shook his handsome head. Passatta scowled. “We are to walk you into your room, signorina, and then we are to stay the night.”

“In my room?”

“In the hall,” said Marcarini, a smile tugging at his lips.

The brandy on top of the bellini had really hit. Kate was feeling woozy, the keys unsteady in her hand.

“You need for me to help?” asked Marcarini.

“I think I can manage it,” said Kate. “See you in the morning.” Bed. Pillows. Thick, soft duvet covers. That’s what she was thinking about.

But the cops insisted on checking the room first.

Just in front of her, Marcarini and Passatta had gone rigid.

Kate felt the chill–this one real, from the wide-open window–before the scene came into sharp focus–horrifying and surreal, her brain hardly able to process it.

The two cops were shouting, but Kate couldn’t hear them, that electric buzz she’d been feeling all night was now so loud, it was deafening.
Oh, God. Jesus. No.

In minutes, the room was crowded. Or had it been hours? Kate wasn’t sure. A horde of carabinieri and
polizia
were arguing, waving their hands about; someone snapped pictures of the gruesome scene, while that higher-up from the Venice police station asked Kate questions.

She stared past him.

A flashbulb lit up the night view of Venice through the open window–and Maureen Slattery, as if she were levitating, in front of it.

She was nude, strung up with the curtains, one of them coiled around her neck, the other pulled through her thighs and wrapped like a loincloth. Her body was pierced in a dozen places with arrow-like spears, jutting out like deadly porcupine quills. Streams of blood striped her body, ran over her bound feet, collected in an amoeba-shaped puddle, and soaked into the carpet.

But not the sky, which was appropriately gray with heavy clouds, the threat of rain.

First the mayor. Then Chief of Police Tapell. Short speeches. Official, but heartfelt.

A cop’s funeral.

Maureen Slattery’s funeral.

Kate stared at row after row of tombstones disappearing into perfect one-point perspective. It took her back to Giovanni Bellini’s illusionistic church-within-a-church painting, and how much Maureen had loved it. One more artist, one more memory, destroyed by the death artist.

Was that only two days ago?

The plane ride home had been a nightmare, Kate’s attempt to fortify herself with Scotch a total failure. Nothing helped. How could it? With Slattery’s body in the airplane’s hull.

She glanced at Maureen’s parents beside the gravesite, tears streaking both of their faces.

She gripped Richard’s arm.

Kate pushed her sandwich aside. No chance she could eat. “I still can’t believe it.” She stared through the glass front of the coffee shop at passersby, cars blurring.

Liz offered a sympathetic look, but her words were tough. “Look, Kate. Slattery was a cop. On an assignment. She knew the danger. It could just as easily have been you.”

“It was
supposed
to be me.”

“A lot of good that would have done.” She stared into Kate’s eyes. “You can’t let it get to you. It’ll destroy you–and you know it. You were–
are
–a cop. You know the rules. So did Slattery.”

“I just keep playing it back, Liz. Thinking if only the Italian cops had split up, one with me, the other with her. If only–”

“You can play the ‘if only’ game forever, Kate. But it won’t do any good. Maureen’s loss is a tragedy. No question. But right now you have to focus. The death artist is still out there.”

Kate took a deep breath, nodded agreement. Liz was right. There was only one way to survive this.

She had to get this guy. She had to make him pay.

There were cops in every chair, leaning against walls, crowding into doorways. The squad room vibrated with rage.

Kate was sitting beside Brown, in the front row, staring at cracks in the old plaster ceiling until they reminded her of Venice, of aging and decay, of bodies on slabs, of Elena in the morgue, and now Slattery, too, hanging in front of that open window. She shut her eyes, took a breath.

Tapell flicked her finger against the microphone. “Everybody. Everybody.”

Kate thought the chief looked old today, anxious, not so
unflappable
.

“We’re going to deal with this,” said Tapell. “But we have to keep our heads.”

“When?” someone shouted from the back of the room. Others joined in: “Yeah,
when
? How
long
? Come on already!” The voices commingled into a single garbled cry.

“We almost had him,” said the chief. She sighed, obviously feeling the inadequacy of the words as she said them.

One more time the cops started shouting at once.

“That’s not going to get us anywhere,” said Tapell. “I know you’re frustrated. We’re
all
frustrated.” She stopped, let her dark eyes sweep the room. “Just
listen
for a minute. Randy Mead is going to update every one of you.”

Mead sucked his teeth, then explained the rescue of Bea Sachs–how close they’d come to capturing the death artist. Old news, but it was enough to garner the crowd’s attention. Then he laid out plans for activating all departments. Also old news. But it sounded good; words like “full-scale mobilization” and “manhunt” seemed to calm them. “We will catch this motherfucking cop killer,” he said.

That produced cheers, detectives and uniforms shouting, punching one another, the old camaraderie of blood lust. Kate could see it in their eyes.

Mitch Freeman stood to the side with two crew-cut FBI men who were whispering, their otherwise immobile faces with expressions that betrayed nothing but the slightest trace of disdain.

Kate looked over at them, two of the
robots
she’d spent half a day with, explaining over and over every detail of what had happened in Venice. The Bureau had now set up a small campsite in the Sixth Precinct, and they were strutting up and down the aisles, faxing Quantico every five minutes, producing reams of paper and whispering to one another, always whispering.

Mrs. Prawsinsky’s tight bleached curls were crimped against her scalp. She patted her hair. “I had it done,” she said to Kate. “Cost me an arm and a leg, dahlink. You shouldn’t know from it.”

“You look lovely.” Kate forced a smile, tried to get Elena’s downstairs neighbor to focus.

The police artist’s rendering was on the table. So far, it had produced nothing.

Kate had lugged out a dozen bound books of mug shots–everything from misdemeanors to murder, all committed within the past five years.

Mrs. Prawsinsky turned the pages slowly. “Oh, this one has a very nasty face.”

Kate practically tore the book out of the old woman’s hands. “Is it him?”

“Oh, no. No.” She turned another page. “Just that his face, you know, it’s such a mean one.”

Kate sighed. She could be here for days. But they were trying everything, and this was something they should have done before–and would have, if they had not been chasing after the wrong man.

Mrs. Prawsinsky stopped. “Ooh,” she said. “Look at him.” She pointed with an arthritic finger.

“What? What!”

“He looks just like Merv Griffin, doesn’t he, dahlink?”

Oh, brother.
Kate needed a break, coffee, anything. “I’ll be back.” She managed to smile at Mrs. Prawsinsky, whose nose was an inch from a page of mug shots. “But you keep looking.”

They are streaming down the street, hordes of people, threatening, terrifying, advancing upon him.

But he is not afraid.

One at a time he picks them off. Arms, legs, torn from sockets. A head lobbed off. A throat slit. The street is littered with broken bodies. Sidewalks, gutters, running red.

He is all-powerful. A warrior.

But why is that stupid man smiling at him? Doesn’t he see that the warrior, the death artist, has just reached into his rib cage and ripped his heart out, that he is dying?

Oh, now he gets it. He acts so normal, they don’t even know it’s he who does them harm.

By the time he reaches his refuge by the river, he knows for sure that he is invincible as well as invisible.

But the sight of his messy table, the remnants of hours spent conceiving of Kate as Saint Sebastian, dampens his spirit.

It should have been over in Venice. She, her, should have been over. It was time. That was the plan. And it would have been if it hadn’t been for that stupid cop.

He smashes his hand down onto the table. Scissors, glue, pencils hop, skip across the surface in a sort of cockeyed marathon.

How was he to know that someone else would be there, in the hotel room–in the tub, of all places? He wishes he could have come up with another bath scene. But on such short notice? Not possible. He’s not a machine. He’s an artist.

And now, worst of all, he has no pictures, no documentation at all.

Whose fault is that
?

“I forgot the goddamn camera. I had too much to carry. I’m human, you know.”

I thought you were superhuman.

“Fuck you!”

You didn’t forget. You were lazy. Now I have no proof. Maybe you never even did it.

“You want proof?” He snatches the newspaper off the table, holds it up. “Read all about it!”

FUNERAL FOR HERO COP

Oh, I see. She’s the hero. Not you.

“Are you kidding? She cried like a little girl.” He mashes the newspaper into a ball, pitches it to the floor. “What a waste. To use up Saint Sebastian on the likes of her.”

And you call yourself an artist
?

“It looked great! Anyone could see that!” He slumps into his chair. It’s quiet now. The voices have subsided, taking his anger, as well as his strength, with them. He feels so tired. So . . . depleted. The thought of continuing, of taking one more breath is agony.

The sound of pigeons. He raises his eyes toward the high broken ceiling. If only he could join them, fly above all the filth and rot and disgust of this world–of his life. Flashes: flayed skin, hacked-off hands, screams, tears, so much pain.

How many times has he wished he could stop? Promised himself that he would?

I’ll be good. I promise, Daddy. I promise.

He twitches in his chair. Who was that talking? He’s so confused.

He seeks refuge in the small altarpiece he took from Bill Pruitt. He’s come to think it has special powers–the Madonna, with her beatific smile, watching over him, the innocent Christ Child, a symbol of himself. If only he could curl into the sanctity of her lap, have her protect him.

Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? It’s so much better than Saint Sebastian. She the Madonna. He the Child. The two of them. Together.

Immediately he’s up, collecting what he needs, his little arsenal–a pistol, the hypodermics, even the stun gun, the kind they use on animals. Amazing what one could buy on-line these days, what they will send to absolutely anyone.