The Hypnotist (25 page)

With the easel set up and the canvas resting on its lip, he
lifted the paint box’s lid and with the first whiff of long-trapped scent that wafted up, Lucian crossed an imaginary threshold into the dorm room, the only studio he’d ever had.

Oil paints don’t dry up or harden as long as the tubes don’t crack, and these hadn’t. He looked at the labels, stained with smears and smudges, and pulled out the colors he needed to match her skin tones: Titanium White, Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Yellow and Burnt Sienna. He squeezed the colors onto the palette. The brushes, which he’d always been careful to clean because they were so expensive, felt supple between his fingers, and he picked out one with a tapered point and a flat body. Dipping it first into the white, then the red, he mixed them together. He added a very small hint of yellow and even less of the sienna.

She was facing him full on, hiding nothing, her body taut, arms by her sides, palms up, her small chin pointing up, daring him to look at her.

Lucian stroked the paint onto the canvas, slowly at first, then working up to a frenzy, not sure which he craved more—her or this utter abandonment to the act of painting, to something he’d had so much passion for but had given up and sacrificed to reason. But it didn’t matter now. This moment was beyond logic. His feelings were beyond logic.

How long did he paint? How long did she stand there naked, the look of wanting him, of wanting this, never leaving her eyes? How many times did the brush move in a flurry from palette to canvas in a hot rush of energy, the conduit of all that he was seeing and feeling? Was he hurrying to get to her, or just greedy for more of this pleasure? Because that was what it was: pure pleasure to actually see beyond the form to what made this woman so utterly beautiful—her fragility and tensile strength, her desires and fears, everything
that made her human, that made her alive—and to translate it onto the canvas with nothing more than a brush, pigment and his ability.

He might have gone on painting for longer, but Emeline chose when he would stop by finally breaking the pose and coming around to where he was standing and looking at what he’d done. She studied it but said nothing. Then she stepped between him and the painting, blocking it from his view, faced him and whispered with a voice that was grateful and excited both at once, as if he’d given her a great gift, “Thank you for seeing me like that.”

Lucian sat down on the edge of the bed, put his hands around her waist and pulled her toward him so that his face was level with her stomach. Her skin was smooth and warm, and using his tongue like the brush he’d just put down, he painted her with soft, invisible kisses, there and there and there he kept kissing her, and with every new inch of her that his lips found she arched her back a little more. Her hands reached out and gripped his head, and her fingers tangled in his hair as she pulled him closer still and made small moaning sounds that were anything but fragile. There was no pain in this pleasure for her. Lucian heard laughter mixed with wanting. It was an amazingly joyful noise—this music of their lovemaking—and he kept kissing her so he could keep hearing it. The sound was flowing into all the dark crevices of his soul and lifting him up.

Smiling some secret smile, Emeline straddled him and eased herself down, achingly slowly, onto him, and as he wound his arms tighter around her, she constricted and held him inside her tighter, too. He had one single moment of clarity before he was lost, when he saw her in violent contrasts of light and dark with her head thrown back, an expression on her face that he’d never try to name, and he recognized that he’d painted her in
the wrong moment. This was art, this ecstasy; this was what they all tried to capture and express, this moment when the senses take over and there is no thought left, nothing but being.

“What have you got today for lunch, Larry?” the security guard asked the balding construction worker who was carrying the same oversize lunch pail he brought with him every day.

“Two meatball heros. You needing one of them?”

“I sure am,” the guard said, smiling, then linking his thumb in his belt. “But I’d better not take you up on your offer.”

Larry Talbot gave the guard a grin, swung the lunch pail from one hand to the other and walked on through the entryway and into the museum. He’d shared his lunch with Tommy before, and it wouldn’t have been a big deal to share it again if the guard had wanted a sandwich. Larry knew exactly which of the two heros was stuffed with pork and beef meatballs smothered in marinara sauce and which was stuffed with meatballs made of Semtex.

Of the twenty workmen who entered the Metropolitan Museum that morning, five of them were carrying plastic explosives hidden inside sandwiches or cigarette packs or gum.

The security for employees working at the Met was not as tight in the morning as it was at the end of the day. Tommy nodded as each regular arrived, and if he didn’t recognize
someone he’d stop them and ask to see ID, but since crews from Phillips Construction had been in and out of the museum for decades, Tommy knew most of the men by sight. Incoming employees didn’t have to pass through the X-ray system, and the guard didn’t need to use his wand. There were only inspections the first few times someone new showed up for work. It was at night that the security was ratcheted up and every briefcase, lunch pail, backpack or shopping bag was inspected to ensure that no one was smuggling out any artwork or artifacts.

Even if the checks had been done, the malleable material wouldn’t have set off any alarms or been visible as anything suspect.

Today, for the fifth day in a row, five workers had brought something into the museum that they wouldn’t leave with that night, but Don Albertson, the long-time worker who had taken over after Victor Keither died, didn’t notice anything about those five that made them stand out. They weren’t a clique; they fit in with their coworkers and none of them had ever caused any trouble.

Later it would be noted that they had all been hired over the same three-week period to replace workmen who’d been stolen away by Manhattan Construction. When questioned, Albertson would tell the police that maybe he should have paid more attention to them since they were relative newcomers, but they were good workers who just hadn’t drawn any attention to themselves. What he wouldn’t tell them about was the cash payment he’d been given by a man who smoked cigars and spoke with a heavy accent in exchange for Albertson not noticing much of anything.

To communicate with his team, Talbot, whose real name would have given away his heritage, used predetermined signs and signals that escaped notice by anyone else. The short, olive
skinned man with hair cropped so close you couldn’t tell what texture it was knew at any moment of the day where each of his team members were and what they were doing.

Later, when asked about Talbot specifically, Albertson would shake his head and say that of all his men, Talbot was one of the better carpenters; never the last one to get there in the morning and never the first one out at night. And that was true, but the reason wasn’t the man’s work ethic. Talbot purposely hung back at the end of each day, taking extra time to clean up and put away his tools, waiting until Albertson left so he could take the Semtex he’d cautiously collected from his men when no one was around or watching and deposit it in a carton that, according to its labels, contained six quarts of Benjamin Moore Bone White #3 paint.

The renovation of the Islamic galleries was at least three months away from the point of needing paint, so while there was no truly safe place for the explosives, this carton was as close as Talbot could get to a secure hiding place. He took every precaution to ensure that the cache remained hidden. So far he’d been lucky, but how long would that last? Talbot wanted his superiors to pull the trigger so they could do the job they’d trained for and get out of there. Despite the suicide belts loaded with explosives that they’d be wearing, Talbot and his men intended to accomplish their task and live to reap their rewards.

That Thursday evening, before Talbot put more Semtex in the carton, he checked to be sure the box hadn’t been tampered with and that the stash of explosives hadn’t been discovered. Everything looked intact. The tape he’d put down last night hadn’t been touched.

And then he heard what sounded like footsteps. He stopped to listen. Someone was heading this way. He stole a second to look at his watch. What was going on? The security patrol for this area wasn’t expected for another half hour.

The footsteps echoing on the marble floor were getting closer. He wasn’t going to be able to put the rest of the explosives in the box, get it closed up and slide the carton out of the way in time. He was going to have to improvise if—

“You still here?” The guard sounded cautious, but was he also suspicious?

Talbot finished tying his shoelace, then looked up. On his right was the carton filled with over three pounds of Semtex, enough to blow up more artwork than he could even calculate. On his left was his lunch pail. Leaning on the carton, he rose to a standing position, careful to slouch in a nonthreatening way.

“I got all the way downstairs and realized I didn’t have my cell phone. I came back up to see if it was here. I’d moved these cartons around this afternoon and the phone must have fallen out of my pocket then.” He held it up.

“You leaving now?”

“As soon as I straighten up. Put this stuff back where it was.” Talbot’s heart pounded as he lifted up a second carton and put it down on top of the one he’d been filling.

“I’m going to have to wait for you,” the guard said.

“No problem. You have your job to do and I have mine,” Talbot said as he shoved both cartons back into the shadows. “Albertson would be furious if I left anything out of place. He’s practically an old lady like that.”

The guard smiled.

Talbot purposefully moved a few more boxes around and then glanced up. The guard didn’t seem to be paying any attention. Talbot’s heart settled down to an almost normal rhythm. Wasn’t it time to set this plan into action already? What were they waiting for? Every night he and the other four men met on a private Internet message board at midnight to await orders to proceed.

Once they got the communiqué, on the following day each of them was to create an excuse to stay behind when the first rush of workers left. One would go to the bathroom. Another would get a phone call from his wife. A third would trip and sit down to nurse his ankle for a few minutes. A fourth would stop to help him. A fifth would take longer than was necessary cleaning up a mess. After the construction site cleared out, all members of the team would convene in the storage area and unroll the suicide belts they’d smuggled in. Made of canvas, each had holders for ten two-inch cylinders of Semtex. The men would connect the cylinders with red detonating cords. All it would take to fire the det-cords was the electrical impulse from the ring voltage of a cell phone. Not set to a predetermined time, the plan here was to wear the pretty ornaments for all to see and guarantee that if anyone was thinking of being a hero, they changed their mind. The goal was to get the sculpture out of the museum, not start a holocaust.

Done rearranging the boxes, Talbot stood up. “I’m ready.”

The guard looked around, gave a cursory glance to the cartons, the walls, the tarps, the tools, the worktables. “When’s all this going to be finished?”

Talbot thought about the two answers he could give. The one the man expected would be the date the museum had set for the renovation to be completed by; the other was his guess of a much closer date that was going to bring this job to a very different and disturbing kind of end.

Paris, France

After three intense days of negotiating, on Saturday afternoon Darius Shabaz’s lawyer contacted the FBI and agreed to their terms: his client was willing talk to them in exchange for leniency, but only if they would come to Paris. Seven hours later, Lucian and Matt Richmond were on the last Air France flight out of Kennedy Airport. They arrived, groggy and needing showers, early Sunday morning and took a taxi to their hotel on the Left Bank.

“Who made these reservations?” Lucian asked as the cab approached 9 rue de l’Université and he saw the hotel’s name in brass letters on the marble lintel of the front door.

“Someone in the office, why?”

“Its name…” Lucian pointed to signage that read Hôtel Lenox.

“Yes?”

But the cab had pulled up in front and there was no time to explain.

While Richmond paid the driver, Lucian grabbed their luggage out of the trunk. It wasn’t until after they’d checked in,
dropped their bags in their rooms and met up again downstairs for coffee that Richmond had a chance to find out why Lucian had been surprised by the hotel’s name.

“Frederick L. Lennox was an industrialist and a founding member of the original Phoenix Club. Elgin Barindra has found quite a bit of correspondence from him to Talmage. I think copies are on your desk somewhere.”

“I haven’t gotten to that stuff yet…”

Lucian laughed. “You never will. Your desk is like a black hole.”

The waiter arrived with café au lait and croissants. While Richmond stirred in two heaping teaspoons of sugar, Lucian continued his explanation in between sips of the hot coffee.

“Lennox wanted to examine the Sanskrit list of Memory Tools that the Memorist Society owned and he planned on going to Austria to see it. There’s no correspondence confirming whether or not he ever did, but we do know he bought a sculpture found in Persia that he believed contained a Memory Tool. He bequeathed the statue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

“Are we talking about the same sculpture Darius Shabaz wanted?”

“Might be. Lennox donated over a hundred pieces to the Met, all of them from the Middle East.”

“But there could be a connection between Hypnos and the Phoenix Foundation? Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“It’s in the notes—”

“On my desk. I know. I know. Crazy coincidence, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, and since no one but Doug and I and your desk know about it, it’s just another coincidence that we’re booked in here.” Lucian broke off a corner of the flaky croissant and ate it. “It really does taste better, doesn’t it?”

“The coffee, too. So Lennox thought Hypnos was a Memory
Tool? Do you think that’s why Shabaz wanted it? We’ll have to find out if he has any connection to Malachai Samuels.”

Lucian took another bite of the croissant. He needed to think through how to answer and make sure that his response only referenced facts uncovered by their investigation as opposed to information he had gleaned in the strange regression sessions he’d had with Iris Bellmer. In his memories he couldn’t see the treasures in the crypt; he didn’t know if Hypnos was there. He only could see the actions he—Fouquelle—took and the terrified faces of the couple who owned the house.

“I don’t think Malachai Samuels knew about any of this until Elgin Barindra found the letters from Lennox to Talmage.”

“Any details about what that Memory Tool is?”

“Nope, nothing. Malachai must be going crazy.” Lucian couldn’t help himself; he smiled.

Richmond drained his coffee and observed his partner over the rim of his cup. After a few seconds he asked, “What else is going on with you?”

“No idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’ve been working with you for five years. You’re always wrapped up in work to the point of distraction. You use it to keep the demons away. I get that. Lots of us do. I don’t want to pry. But you’re in deeper than usual on this one. Are you all right? Really?”

“Never better.”

“You’re holding back.”

“Don’t you know me well enough to know I’d never hold back anything that mattered to a case we’re working on?”

“I’m not talking about the case. I’m talking about you. What’s wrong with you? Have you looked in a mirror? You look exhausted all the time. Worried. You’re always drawing. I know it’s a habit, but it’s habitual. You’re popping painkillers like Tic Tacs. What the hell is wrong?”

“Other than the headaches—it’s just work. We’re closing in on one, maybe two cases. We’re doing our jobs. We’re rescuing paintings. It’s just work.”

“Nah. You’ve got secrets, man. More than before, and that’s saying something. And you’re in some kind of trouble because of them.”

Lucian was tempted. It would be a relief to talk about the strange dreams and drawings, the regression sessions that had opened up horrifying nightmares, to tell him about Emeline and the crazy idea he was fighting—and at the same time embracing—that she and Solange were connected. Matt was someone he trusted, literally, with his life.

“Let’s get going,” Lucian said, standing up, brushing croissant crumbs off his hands. Now wasn’t the time to update Matt on his personal hell.