Art of Murder

by Jose Carlos Somoza

  At a quarter to four she pulled the flesh-coloured jersey over her head, put on the velvet jacket and trousers, and chose a pair of sandals from the dim and distant past. She considered herself in the mirror. None of what she was wearing really suited her: she looked like a beautiful young girl disguised as a hippy, which was exactly the effect she wanted to create.

  The remaining details, which she had not thought of, caused her the most problems. What should she do with her house keys? She could not take them with her. Jorge had a set, but she did not want to have to depend on him to get in when she returned, whenever that might be. She did not trust her neighbours, and the building had no porter.

  She decided simply to do nothing. It seemed logical to her to shut the door behind her and be unable to get in again. She called for a taxi, calculated how much it would cost her, and put the money in her jacket pocket.

  It was then she found the keyring.

  She realised she had put the suit on without checking the pockets. Old clothes are the graveyard of memory. In one of the jacket pockets she dug out her father's keyring. For a long time, she had used it with the kind of blind devotion we show to objects that once belonged to the dead. When it snapped, she had to transfer her keys to a new ring. She could not recall why it was in this particular pocket, or why she had not thrown it away. Perhaps because of its sentimental value. The thought amused her.

  The keyring had a chess queen on it, a present from the club where Manuel Reyes played. Her father was passionate about chess, and her brother had inherited his love of this sober pas-rime. It was a black queen. Clara could hear her father saying,

  ‘This is Reyes' queen. They gave me the black one because it's on the losing side.'

  She considered whether to save it, but put it back in her pocket. 'I'm sorry, your majesty, but if that's where you were, that's where you'll stay.'

  So, dressed in Vicky's suit, wearing her adolescent sandals, and with the weight of her father's keyring in her pocket, Clara left her apartment and shut the door behind her.

  As she reached the street, she felt a strong sensation. It was so intense she had to look all round to make sure it was a mistake. She was convinced she was being watched. Perhaps she was wrong.

  This was the afternoon of 22 June, 2006. The sun was shining the colour of pink flesh.

  6

  Briseida Canchares woke up with a gun to her head. Seen from so close up, the barrel looked like a small metal coffin pressed against her temple. The finger on the trigger had its nail painted viridian green. Briseida looked up the bare forearm and discovered it belonged to a blonde woman. It was the emerald-eyed cat dressed in the tiny camouflage outfit who had asked Roger for a light at the Roquentins. It had happened while she was looking at the painting Invisible Orbit by Elmer Fludd, and a guard had immediately come over and warned the woman: 'You can't smoke here, miss. The smoke gets in the paintings' eyes, and makes them cough.' She had given Roger a crooked smile as she handed him back his lighter. Then she had vanished into the crowd and Briseida had not seen her again. Until now.

  The blonde woman was dressed in the same combat gear, and smiled in the same way. The only difference was the gun. She raised a finger to her lips, still training the pistol on Briseida (I'm not to speak, Briseida translated this to mean) then signalled with her other hand (I'm to get up). She suspected it was all a dream, so she obeyed, because she liked doing fascinating things in her dreams. She pulled back the sheets and stood up. The gun pressed to her temple moved as she did, as if her head were made of metal and the pistol were a magnet. Briseida turned to the side and placed her feet on the cool carpet of Roger's apartment floor as delicately as a space module landing on the moon. She was completely naked, and felt a bit chilly. It was still night (she didn't know the exact time, because the alarm clock was on Roger's side of the bed), and the room was lit only by the bedside lamp. She remembered having gone to bed very late and sharing moments of enthusiasm and struggle with Roger (that mouth of his, with its aftertaste of vintage champagne and velvety Havana cigar, his tongue a green marijuana rug) before night covered them in its cloak of drunkenness and ...

  That's right.

  Where was Roger?

  She discovered him sitting at the far end of the room. All he was wearing was the ring on the little finger of his left hand. The same ring that had left marks on Briseida's backside, but which he said he could not remove because that brought bad luck. He had got it in some remote corner of Brazil, stealing it from a shaman who could tell people's secrets. It contained a tiny emerald that glinted in its setting like a jungle-green drop of pus. According to Roger, it had great powers, although he was not sure exactly what they were. He claimed there were only five or six jewels like it in the whole world. What an incredible guy Roger was. A bit of a bastard too, of course, but Briseida had never met anyone with that amount of money who wasn't also a bastard.

  At that moment it seemed not even the ring's powers could help him. A pincer in the shape of a hand was clamped so fiercely on his jaw his cheeks were puffed up. The pincer-like hand belonged to a spectacular woman, similar to the blonde but much more impressive, like the ones Roger liked to fuck only at weekends. She was jabbing a silver-plated military pistol into his throat. Its barrel made his Adam's apple stand out starkly. This woman was wearing baize-green jacket and trousers, olive-green kerchief and beret, and pistachio-coloured gloves. One of her legs was thrust between Roger's thighs (perhaps her knee was crushing his genitals, and this was causing the look of desperation on his face), the other was firmly planted on the floor in shooting position. She was not looking at Roger but at Briseida, as if it were up to her to decide what she should do next. Her eyes were of the kind it is hard to forget. The kind, thought Briseida, you stare into a second before you see nothing any more.

  Even so, she had to admit that the make-up and the combination of greens (jacket-trousers, gloves-beret, eyes-shadow) were perfect. A paramilitary catwalk! Prêt-à-porter terrorism! What prevented police SWAT teams, army commandos or any other ad hoc armed group keeping up with the demands of fashion? Briseida wondered.

  The blonde woman was still signalling to her to stand up. She glanced over at Roger, who raised his hand as if to say: Do as she tells you, so she got up from the bed, still keeping her eyes on everyone in the room.

  Are they burglars or cops? Have they come to kidnap Roger? Let's see. What did we get up to? Last night we were at that party ...

  God, how her head hurt. She could not think straight. Perhaps that was because of the mix of alcohol, hashish and pills she had taken at the Roquentins. Besides, the scene before her was so odd that the terror she could feel starting to beat in her chest was still muffled. It looked as if it had all been set up by the God of Art: a combination of the fascinating - the blonde in her camouflage outfit; the ridiculous - Roger and her stark naked, still clammy from their dense dreams; and the absurd - the heavily made-up model in her combat gear. It was like a Cezanne painting in green - cobalt green, military green, turquoise green, green carpet, apple green of the bedroom walls. If she were to die young, thought Briseida, she would choose exactly this green moment.

  It was a shame this aesthetic impression faded a little when the blonde woman pushed her towards the men waiting in the dining room.

  They pinioned her arms, and pushed her down on to a chair in front of what appeared to be a blank computer screen. Briseida had shouted out as she was being hustled into the room, and had apparently broken some code of silence, because a few seconds later she heard noises and words in Dutch from the bedroom, then more noises in the corridor. But the next words were in English and were directed at her.

  'Don't do that again,' Fascinating Eyes Blondie said, bending over her. 'And don't try to stand up.'

  She could not have done so even if she had wanted to: two pairs of iron gloves were forcing her down on her seat.

  'Here's a glass of water. Drink some if you like. I'm going to press a key on th
e computer and a person will appear on the screen to ask you some questions. Reply loudly and clearly. Don't avoid any of the questions, and don't take too much time over them. If you don't know the answer, or want time to think about it, say so. We know you speak good English, but if there's something you don't understand, say so too.'

  The blonde pressed a key, and the face of an elderly man, bald except for some white tufts above the ears, appeared on the screen. In the top left-hand corner there also appeared an insert of a young woman with tanned brown skin, hair the colour of coal, prominent cheekbones and plump lips, gripped by the shoulders and arms by four gloved hands, and with naked breasts. Briseida realised it was her. They were filming her and sending the images in real time to heaven knows what damned spot on the planet. Diagonally across the screen from this, a timing device ticked off the seconds.

  Hallucinatory effects produced by the chaotic consumption of toxic products: that was how Stan Coleman, her unforgettable, wealthy (and asshole) professor of Contemporary Art at Columbia described all the strange things that happened after an orgy of soft drugs. That was what this must be. It could not really be happening to her.

  'Good morning. I'm sorry if we've disturbed you, but we need to know something urgently, and we're counting on your generous cooperation.'

  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 attaché 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. Mary Johnson is in the kitchen. Where'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.