A Darkness More Than Night

by Michael Connelly

  A long moment went by.

  “A darkness more than night.”

  There was another long moment of silence until Scott abruptly punctuated it by saying he needed to get back to his office. He left then. And after another moment Vosskuhler finally turned from the painting. He didn’t bother flipping up the glasses when he looked at McCaleb. He slowly reached into his apron and switched off sound to his ears.

  “I, too, must go back to work. Good luck with your investigation, Mr. McCaleb.”

  McCaleb nodded as Vosskuhler sat back in his swivel chair and picked up his tiny brush again.

  “We can go to my office,” Fitzgerald said. “I have all the plate books from our library there. I can show you Bosch’s work.”

  “That would be fine. Thank you.”

  She headed toward the door. McCaleb delayed a moment and took one last look at the painting. His eyes were drawn to the upper panels, toward the swirling darkness above the flames.

  • • •

  Penelope Fitzgerald’s office was a six-by-six pod in a room shared by several curatorial assistants. She pulled a chair into the tight space from a nearby pod where no one was working and told McCaleb to sit down. Her desk was L -shaped, with a laptop computer set up on the left side and a cluttered work space on the right. There were several books stacked on the desk. McCaleb noticed that behind one stack was a color print of a painting very much in the same style as the painting Vosskuhler was working on. He pushed the books a half foot to the side and bent down to look at the print. It was in three panels, the largest being the centerpiece. Again it was a ramble. Dozens and dozens of figures spread across the panels. Scenes of debauchery and torture.

  “Do you recognize it?” Fitzgerald said.

  “I don’t think so. But it’s Bosch, right?”

  “His signature piece. The triptych called The Garden of Earthly Delights. It’s in the Prado in Madrid. I once stood in front of it for four hours. It wasn’t enough time to take it all in. Would you like some coffee or some water or anything, Mr. McCaleb?”

  “No, I’m fine. Thank you. You can call me Terry if you want.”

  “And you can call me Nep.”

  McCaleb put a quizzical look on his face.

  “Childhood nickname.”

  He nodded.

  “Now,” she said. “In these books I can show you every piece of Bosch’s identified work. Is it an important investigation?”

  McCaleb nodded.

  “I think so. It’s a homicide.”

  “And you are some kind of consultant?”

  “I used to work for the FBI here in L.A. The sheriff’s detective assigned to the case asked me to look at it and see what I think. It led me here. To Bosch. I am sorry but I can’t get into the details of the case and I know that will probably be frustrating to you. I want to ask questions but I can’t really answer any from you.”

  “Darn.” She smiled. “It sounds really interesting.”

  “Tell you what, if there is ever a point I can tell you about it, I will.”

  “Fair enough.”

  McCaleb nodded.

  “From what Dr. Vosskuhler said, I take it that there isn’t a lot known about the man behind the paintings.”

  Fitzgerald nodded.

  “Hieronymus Bosch is certainly considered an enigma and he probably always will be.”

  McCaleb unfolded his notepaper on the table in front of him and started taking notes as she spoke.

  “He had one of the most unconventional imaginations of his time. Or any time for that matter. His work is quite extraordinary and still subject these five centuries later to restudy and reinterpretation. However, I think you will find that the majority of the critical analysis to date holds that he was a doomsayer. His work is informed with the portents of doom and hellfire, of warnings of the wages of sin. To put it more succinctly, his paintings primarily carried variations on the same theme: that the folly of humankind leads us all to hell as our ultimate destiny.”

  McCaleb was writing quickly, trying to keep up. He wished he had brought a tape recorder.

  “Nice guy, huh?” Fitzgerald said.

  “Sounds like it.” He nodded to the print of the triptych. “Must’ve been fun on a Saturday night.”

  She smiled.

  “Exactly what I thought when I was in the Prado.”

  “Any redeeming qualities? He took in orphans, was nice to dogs, changed flat tires for old ladies, anything?”

  “You have to remember his time and place to fully understand what he was doing with his art. While his work is punctuated with violent scenes and depictions of torture and anguish, this was a time when those sorts of things were not unusual. He lived in a violent time; his work clearly reflects that. The paintings also reflect the medieval belief in the existence of demons everywhere. Evil lurks in all of the paintings.”

  “The owl?”

  She stared blankly at him for a moment.

  “Yes, the owl is one symbol he used. I thought you said you were unfamiliar with his work.”

  “I am unfamiliar with it. It was an owl that brought me here. But I shouldn’t go into that and I shouldn’t have interrupted you. Please go on.”

  “I was just going to add that it is telling when you consider that Bosch was a contemporary of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. Yet if you were to look at their works side by side you would have to believe Bosch — with all the medieval symbols and doom — was a century behind.”

  “But he wasn’t.”

  She shook her head as though she felt sorry for Bosch.

  “He and Leonardo da Vinci were born within a year or two of each other. By the end of the fifteenth century, da Vinci was creating pieces that were full of hope and celebration of human values and spirituality while Bosch was all gloom and doom.”

  “That makes you feel sad, doesn’t it?”

  She put her hands on the top book in the stack but didn’t open it. It was simply labeled BOSCH on the spine and there was no illustration on the black leather binding.

  “I can’t help but think about what could have been if Bosch had worked side by side with da Vinci or Michelangelo, what could have happened if he had used his skill and imagination in celebration rather than damnation of the world.”

  She looked down at the book and then back up at him.

  “But that is the beauty of art and why we study and celebrate it. Each painting is a window to the artist’s soul and imagination. No matter how dark and disturbing, his vision is what sets him apart and makes his paintings unique. What happens to me with Bosch is that the paintings serve to carry me into the artist’s soul and I sense the torment.”

  He nodded and she looked down and opened the book.

  • • •

  The world of Hieronymus Bosch was as striking to McCaleb as it was disturbing. The landscapes of misery that unfolded in the pages Penelope Fitzgerald turned were not unlike some of the most horrible crime scenes he had witnessed, but in these painted scenes the players were still alive and in pain. The gnashing of teeth and the ripping of flesh were active and real. His canvases were crowded with the damned, humans being tormented for their sins by visible demons and creatures given image by the hand of a horrible imagination.

  At first he studied the color reproductions of the paintings in silence, taking it all in the way he would first observe a crime scene photograph. But then a page was turned and he looked at a painting that depicted three people gathered around a sitting man. One of those standing used what looked like a primitive scalpel to probe a wound on the crown of the sitting man’s head. The image was depicted in a circle. There were words painted above and below the circle.

  “What is this one?” he asked.

  “It’s called The Stone Operation,” Fitzgerald said. “It was a common belief at the time that stupidity and deceit could be cured by the removal of a stone from the head of the one suffering the malady.”

  McCaleb leaned over her shoulder and l
ooked closely at the painting, specifically at the location of the surgery wound. It was in a location comparable to the wound on Edward Gunn’s head.

  “Okay, you can go on.”

  Owls were everywhere. Fitzgerald did not have to point them out most of the time, their positions were that obvious. She did explain some of the attendant imagery. Most often in the paintings when the owl was depicted in a tree, the branch upon which the symbol of evil perched was leafless and gray — dead.

  She turned the page to a three-panel painting.

  “This is called The Last Judgment, with the left panel subtitled The Fall of Mankind and the right panel simply and obviously called Hell.”

  “He liked painting hell.”

  But Nep Fitzgerald didn’t smile. Her eyes studied the book.

  The left panel of the painting was a Garden of Eden scene with Adam and Eve at center taking the fruit from the serpent in the apple tree. On a dead branch of a nearby tree an owl watched the transaction. On the opposite panel Hell was depicted as a dark place where birdlike creatures disemboweled the damned, cut their bodies up and placed them in frying pans to be slid into fiery ovens.

  “All of this came from this guy’s head,” McCaleb said. “I don’t . . .”

  He didn’t finish because he was unsure what he was trying to say.

  “A tormented soul,” Fitzgerald said and turned the page.

  The next painting was another circular image with seven separate scenes depicted along the outer rim and a portrait of God at center. In a circle of gold surrounding the portrait of God and separating him from the other scenes were four Latin words McCaleb immediately recognized.

  “Beware, beware, God sees.”

  Fitzgerald looked up at him.

  “You obviously have seen this before. Or you just happen to know fifteenth-century Latin. This must be one strange case you are working on.”

  “It’s getting that way. But I only know the words, not the painting. What is it?”

  “It’s actually a tabletop, probably created for a church rectory or a holy person’s house. It’s the eye of God. He is at center and what he sees as he looks down are these images, the seven deadly sins.”

  McCaleb nodded. By looking at the distinct scenes he could pick out some of the more obvious of the sins: gluttony, lust and pride.

  “And now his masterpiece,” his tour guide said as she turned the page.

  She came to the same triptych she had pinned to the wall of the pod. The Garden of Earthly Delights. McCaleb studied it closely now. The left panel was a bucolic scene of Adam and Eve being placed in the garden by the creator. An apple tree stood nearby. The center panel, the largest, showed dozens of nudes coupling and dancing in uninhibited lust, riding horses and beautiful birds and wholly imagined creatures from the lake in the foreground. And then the last panel, the dark one, was the payoff. Hell, a place of torment and anguish administered by monster birds and other ugly creatures. The painting was so detailed and enthralling that McCaleb understood how someone might stand before it — the original — for four hours and still not see everything.

  “I am sure you are grasping the ideas of Bosch’s often repeated themes by now,” Fitzgerald said. “But this is considered the most coherent of his works as well as the most beautifully imagined and realized.”

  McCaleb nodded and pointed to the three panels as he spoke.

  “You have Adam and Eve here, the good life until they eat that apple. Then in the center you have what happens after the fall from grace: life without rules. Freedom of choice leads to lust and sin. And where does all of this go? Hell.”

  “Very good. And if I could just point out a few specifics that might interest you.”

  “Please.”

  She started with the first panel.

  “The earthly paradise. You are correct in that it depicts Adam and Eve before the fall. This pool and fountain at center represent the promise of eternal life. You already noted the fruit tree at left center.”

  Her finger moved across the plate to the fountain structure, a tower of what looked like flower petals that somehow delivered water in four distinct trickles to the pool below. Then he saw it. Her finger stopped below a small dark entrance at the center of the fountain structure. The face of an owl peered from the darkness.

  “You mentioned the owl before. Its image is here. You see all is not right in this paradise. Evil lurks and, as we know, will ultimately win the day. According to Bosch. Then, going to the next panel we see the imagery again and again.”

  She pointed out two distinct representations of owls and two other depictions of owl-like creatures. McCaleb’s eyes held on one of the images. It showed a large brown owl with shiny black eyes being embraced by a nude man. The owl’s coloring and eyes matched that of the plastic bird found in Edward Gunn’s apartment.

  “Do you see something, Terry?”

  He pointed to the owl.

  “This one. I can’t really go into it with you but this one, it matches up with the reason I am here.”

  “A lot of symbols are at work in this panel. That is one of the obvious ones. After the fall, man’s freedom of choice leads him to debauchery, gluttony, folly and avarice, the worst sin of all in Bosch’s world being lust. Man wraps his arms around the owl; he embraces evil.”

  McCaleb nodded.

  “And then he pays for it.”

  “Then he pays for it. As you notice in the last panel, this is a depiction of hell without fire. Rather, it is a place of myriad torments and endless pain. Of darkness.”

  McCaleb stared silently for a long time, his eyes moving across the landscape of the painting. He remembered what Dr. Vosskuhler had said.

  A darkness more than night.

  12

  Bosch cupped his hands and held them against the window next to the front door of the apartment. He was looking into the kitchen. The counters were spotless. No mess, no coffee maker, not even a toaster. He started to get a bad feeling. He stepped over to the door and knocked once more. He then paced back and forth waiting. Looking down he saw an outline on the pavement of where a welcome mat had once been.

  “Damn,” he said.

  He reached into his pocket and took out a small leather pouch. He unzipped it and removed two small steel picks he had made from hacksaw blades. Glancing around he saw no one. He was in a shielded alcove of a large apartment complex in Westwood. Most residents were probably still at work. He stepped up to the door and went to work with the picks on the deadbolt. Ninety seconds later he had the door open and he went inside.

  He knew the apartment was vacant as soon as he stepped in but he covered every room anyway. All of them were empty. Hoping for an empty prescription bottle he even checked the bathroom medicine cabinet. There was a used razor made of pink plastic on a shelf, nothing else.

  He walked back into the living room and took out his cell phone. He had just put Janis Langwiser’s cell phone on the speed dial the day before. She was co-prosecutor on the case and they had worked on Bosch’s testimony throughout the weekend. His call found her still in the trial team’s temporary office in the Van Nuys courthouse.

  “Listen, I don’t want to rain on the parade but Annabelle Crowe is gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “I mean gone, baby, gone. I’m standing in what was her apartment. It’s empty.”

  “Shit! We really need her, Harry. When did she move out?”

  “I don’t know. I just discovered she was gone.”

  “Did you talk to the apartment manager?”

  “Not yet. But he’s not going to know much more than how long ago she split. If she’s running from the trial she wouldn’t be leaving any forwarding addresses with the management.”

  “Well, when did you talk to her last?”

  “Thursday. I called her here. But that line is disconnected today. No forwarding number.”

  “Shit!”

  “I know. You said that.”

  “
She got the subpoena, right?”

  “Yeah, she got it Thursday. That’s why I called. To make sure.”

  “Okay, then maybe she’ll be here tomorrow.”

  Bosch looked around the empty apartment.

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  He looked at his watch. It was after five. Because he had been so sure about Annabelle Crowe, she had been the last witness he was going to check on. There had been no hint that she was going to split. Now he knew he would be spending the night trying to run her down.