Art of Murder

by Jose Carlos Somoza

  She searched the darkness with her gaze. She saw her naked legs, stretching out like two parallel lines. There were only three things in the bedroom: her, the timer, and the mattress. Behind her back, the timer was ticking off the seconds.

  She stood up, and walked cautiously over to the window. It was completely dark outside. It's incredible how scary darkness like this can be in the middle of the countryside, she thought. Her skin wanted to pull on its body stocking of fear, but the primer made it impossible. The window was a world of black lines. She went up to it. For a fraction of a second, a monster with yellow features floated before her eyes - but she knew she was only seeing her own reflection, so was not startled.

  There was nobody out there, or at least no one she could see. She listened. The wind rustled the branches.

  She protected her body with her hands, and went back to the mattress. She lay down on her back. Her heart was pounding like a hammer in her ears.

  She remembered the afternoon she had left her apartment to be primed. The feeling she had just had was like that earlier one, only much more intense.

  She was sure someone had been looking in at her through the window just before the timer went off.

  Someone who was outside the house, in the middle of the night, keeping watch on her.

  3

  The 'terrible' is in the circle.

  Slowly, menacingly, the Monsters of the Haus der Kunst come back to life.

  Tine girl floating in the glass swimming pool full of foul water is called Rita. She is the first to receive help, because she has to make a huge effort: spending six hours a day as organic waste with her hair caught up in plastic and excrement is no easy task. The work has been bought by a Swedish company, and the monthly rental has achieved the impossible: every day Rita dives into this amnion of shit and is happy to do so. In her time off she even manages to enjoy what might be called 'a social life' (although she complains that her hair smells). Now she is breathing deeply in the pool, waiting for the water level to go down. We cannot see her face, but we can see how her long legs wave in the water like pale white strands of seaweed.

  And if she complains about her hair, she should spare a thought for Sylvie. Sylvie Gailor is Medusa, a painting valued at more than thirty million dollars, and with an astronomical monthly rent. This is because she has ten live snakes painted ultramarine-blue writhing around her head which have to be fed and replaced quite often. They are about the length of an adult hand, and are held in place by a delicate network of wires disguised as hair, which allows them to move their heads and tails. Snakes in general do not know much about art, so they get very nervous if we force them to put up with being clipped immobile for six hours a day. Some of them die on Sylvie's head; others thrash about despairingly. Ecological groups and animal protection societies have denounced the exhibit and protested outside the doors of the museums and galleries where it has been shown. All of them are well known to the organisers, and are a harmless minority compared to the people who protest against the other works in the collection. But nobody thinks of poor Sylvie. It's true she is well paid, but what can compensate for her insomnia, the strange repugnance she feels at combing her hair, the ghostly feeling she gets sometimes when she is talking, laughing, having dinner in a restaurant or making love, a feeling that someone is caressing her hair, pulling at her curls, scratching her head with nail-less fingers?

  Ten metres behind Sylvie stands Hiro Nadei, an aged Japanese man painted in ochres, who holds a small jasmine flower in his right hand. Hiro is a real survivor of Hiroshima; he is sixty-six years old. When his city exploded in an atomic hell, he was five. He was in his back garden holding a jasmine in that same hand. Rescued almost unscathed from the ruins, the hardest thing was to get him to open his right hand, which was clenched like a fist. A month later, he let go: the flower was crushed beyond recognition. Two years ago, Van Tysch heard his story and called him to do a small painting. Mr Nadei was delighted: he is a widower, lives on his own, and wants to close the circle of his life dying as he should have done at that dreadful moment. The painting, entitled The Closed Hand, has been sold to an American. At the other end of the gallery, Kim, a young Filipino, is in the last stages of AIDS. He is on show lying in bed painted deathly grey, with an intravenous drip stuck like a skewer in his shrivelled arm. He has difficulty breathing, and occasionally has to be given oxygen. He is the sixteenth substitute for a work whose continuing existence makes it art: a painting which lasts as long as human tragedy. Of course, he is not doing it for the money. Like all his predecessors, Kim wants to die as a work of art. He wants his death to have a meaning. He wants to make the work last, precisely so that it will not last. Stein has found a brilliant phrase to describe it (he is very good at that kind of thing): Terminal Phase is the first painting in the history of art which will be beautiful only after it ceases to exist.

  Near Terminal Phase is The Doll. Jennifer Halley, an eight-year-old work, is painted pink and stands wearing a black dress, cradling a doll in her arms. But the doll is alive, and looks like one of those starving embryos with a stomach like a black grape that sometimes raise their head out of the well that is the Third World. And what is apparently a child is, in fact, an adult - a dwarf and achondroplastic canvas by the name of Steve. Steve is naked, painted in dark colours, and cries and squirms in Jennifer's arms. A little further on is the hanged man, swinging on his scaffold. Next to him are the tortured girls. The pungent stench that brings tears to the eyes comes from Hitler, dressed in skins from dead animals sewn together. The mental retards in executive suits appear fascinated by the colours of their ties and the saliva dribbling down them like diamonds. Today Tuesday 27 June, four thousand people have visited this incredible exhibition. Because the screening process is so slow, it is impossible to accommodate all those waiting in a long human line down beyond the steps of the Haus der Kunst. Those who have not got in will have to come back tomorrow. The Monsters are finishing their day. Those paintings which have a brain, consciousness, limbs and faces, manage to feel happy about it, and say goodbye to their colleagues. It is time to rest. But none of them looks over at the circular podium in the centre of the room.

  The 'terrible' is in the circle.

  This is where the real Monsters are kept.

  The rattle of lifting gear, and the protective glass surrounding them is removed. Five technicians and as many security guards were waiting at the foot of the high podium. The glass is heavy, hermetically sealed, and takes a minute to be lifted off completely. It is a fifteen-centimetre thick cylinder of transparent glass, with a similar top. For the first few months the exhibition was on tour, there was no such top. A bullet-proof glass wall three metres high was thought to be more than enough to protect them. Then when Monsters was on show in Paris, a visitor threw shit at the exhibit. It was his own excrement (as he later confessed), which he had been carrying in his pocket, and which had passed unnoticed through the metal detector, the X-ray screen, the body doppler, the image analysis programmes used on bulky clothing, pregnant women's stomachs, and pushchairs.

  In the twenty-first century, as a journalist wrote about the incident, it is still possible to be a terrorist by throwing shit. Who knows, perhaps in the twenty-second century it will have become impossible. Tossed with an expert arm when the visitor reached the front row and was standing next to the security rope, the excrement flew in an arc through the air. Unfortunately, it missed: the faeces hit the top edge of the glass barrier and bounced back onto the public. Have you ever felt -asked the same journalist in his article - when you were visiting a modern art museum, that you were having shit thrown in your face?

  Ever since then, the barrier protecting the Walden brothers had a top as well.

  'How do you feel, Hubert?' 'Fine, Arnold, and you?' 'Not too bad, Hubert.'

  The grey exhibition clothes the two brothers were wearing came off easily thanks to hidden zips at the back. Stark naked, Hubertus and Arnoldus Walden looked like two huge sumo
wrestlers fawned over by their attentive trainers. The technicians wrapped them in robes with their names on the back, and they tied them over their colossal stomachs, which overhung tiny genitals as bald as quails' eggs.

  'One day you'll give us the wrong robe, and the price of the work will collapse.'

  The technicians laughed as one at this shaft of wit - they had strict instructions not to get on the wrong side of the brothers.

  'Pass me that cottonwool, Franz,' said Arnoldus. 'You're rubbing me as gently as though I were your mother.'

  'Mr Roberston called again,' an assistant commented.

  'He calls us every day,' Hubertus said mockingly. 'He's still thinking of making a film about us, written by that American Nobel prize winner.'

  'He's part of the new intelligentsia,' Arnoldus said.

  'He looks after us.'

  'He wants us.'

  'He wants to buy us, Arno.'

  That's what I said, Hubert. Could you spray some more solvent on my back, Franz? The paint is itching.'

  'We only interest that old bastard because he wants to buy us.'

  'Yes, but the Maestro wouldn't sell us to that asshole.' 'Or maybe he would: who knows? He's made interesting offers, hasn't he, Karl?' ‘I think so.'

  'He "thinks" so. Did you hear that, Arno? ... Karl "thinks" so.' 'Be careful with the top step from the podium ...' 'We know that, idiot. Are you new? Is this your first day in Conservation? .. . We're not new to this, you idiot.' 'We're old. We're eternal.'

  Jennifer Halley's dress has been taken off. She was wearing only a pair of white socks with pompons (Steve, the achondroplastic model, was being wheeled away on a trolley). Several technicians were rubbing Jennifer's shiny body with cottonwool dipped in solvent. As the Walden brothers passed by her, Hubertus tried to bow his head, although all he succeeded in doing was to lower it into his triple chin.

  'Bye, my virginal fairytale princess! May angels fill your dreams!'

  The girl turned towards him and gave him the finger.

  Hubertus carried on smiling, but as he lumbered like a listing boat towards the exit, he screwed up his eyes until they were two dark hyphens.

  'How uncouth our little whore is. I've a mind to teach her some manners.'

  'Ask Robertson to buy her and put her in your house. Then both of us can teach her a lesson.'

  'Don't talk nonsense, Arno. Besides, you know I prefer a good male lobster to a female oyster. Do you mind getting out of the way, miss, we're trying to leave.'

  The girl from Conservation leapt out of their path, smiling and saying she was sorry. She was looking after the mental retards. The Walden brothers swept onwards, followed by a group of assistants. Hubertus' robe was purple; Arnoldus' carrot-coloured with green flecks. They had velvet hoods, with cords long enough to go round seven ordinary men.

  'Hubert.'

  'What is it, Arno?'

  'I have to something to confess.'

  '...?'

  'Yesterday I stole your Walkman. It's in my locker.' 'And I've got something to confess to you, Arno.' 'Tell me, Hubert'

  'My Walkman is completely fucked.'

  Laughing their high-pitched laughs, the enormous twins left the gallery by an emergency exit.

  The Haus der Kunst in Munich is a dull white oblong screened by columns, built next to the English Garden. Its detractors call it the 'Weisswurst'. It was inaugurated seventy years earlier with a triumphal procession by none other than Adolf Hitler, who wanted to use it as a symbol of the purity of German art. In the procession were young girls dressed as nymphs, who all moved like dolls and blinked their eyes at the same time as though being switched on and off. The Führer did not like that very much. Coinciding with this lavish opening, another small but no less important exhibition was taking place. This was of 'Degenerate Art', where works by painters banned by the Nazis, such as Paul Klee, were being shown. The Walden brothers knew the story, and they could not help wondering, as they plunged on majestically down the museum corridors towards the changing rooms, which of the two collections the great Nazi leader would have put them in. In the one symbolising the purity of the German race? Or with the 'Degenerate Art'?

  Circles. Arno likes drawing circles. He draws himself as joined-up circles: at the top, his round head; then a big belly for body; and two legs sticking out of the sides.

  'What's the matter with you, Hubert?'

  'My skin is very sensitive since they changed the glue they put on, Arno. After the shower it stings.'

  That's strange, the same happens to me.'

  They were in the labelling room, fully dressed, combing their hair with a neat parting. The technicians had just fixed on their labels and served them an abundant seafood dinner, which they had attacked with gusto.

  The Waldens were two symmetrical beings, one of nature's rare exact photocopies. As usual in these cases, they wore identical clothes ( made to measure by Italian tailors) and had identical haircuts. When one fell ill, the other did not take long to succumb as well. They had similar tastes, and were irritated by the same things. In childhood, they had been diagnosed with the same syndrome (obesity, sterility and antisocial behaviour), had gone to the same schools, performed the same jobs in the same firms, and been in the same prisons together, accused of the same offences. Their clinical and criminal records said the same: pederast, psychopath, and sadist. Van Tysch had called the two of them up one afternoon in the autumn of 2002, shortly after they had been declared innocent in the case of the dreadful murder of Helga Blanchard and her son. He had made them both works of art simultaneously.

  Helga Blanchard was a German TV actress, a former lover of a Bayern Munich fullback. She had a boy of five from a previous marriage, and was fortunate to have won substantial maintenance from the divorce. Nobody really knows what took place, but early on the morning of 5 August, 2003, the outskirts of Hamburg were very misty. When the mist cleared, Helga and her son Oswald were found naked and nailed with tent pegs half an inch thick to the floorboards of their country cottage. One of the pegs joined the two corpses (her right hand and his left). They also shared the fact that their tongues had been cut out, they had been raped with a screwdriver, and their eyes had been gouged out, or almost: Helga's right eye had been left untouched so that she could get a good look at what was happening to her son. The crime caused such a scandal that the authorities were forced to make an immediate arrest, without any proof: so they took in a lesbian couple who were Helga's closest neighbours, and who around that time had been trying to get official permission to adopt a child. A mob of furious citizens tried to burn down their chalet. Twenty-four hours later they were released without charge. The younger of the two appeared on a TV programme, and the next day a lot of people were imitating the stabbing gesture she made with her forefingers when she insisted she had nothing to do with what had happened, and that neither of them had seen or heard anything. The arrests continued: first Helga's former husband (an impresario), then his current wife, after that her ex-husband's brother, and finally, the footballer. When the footballer was taken in, news of the case spread beyond Germany and was talked about throughout Europe.

  Then a surprise witness came forward: an old-fashioned painter who still used canvas for his paintings, and had been working that day on a countryside scene he was thinking of calling Trees and Mist. He was a doctor by profession, and a family man. That quiet holiday morning he had been working on his canvas when he saw two big circles rolling from tree to tree through wisps of mist; they did not seem to him to have a naturally healthy colour. He looked more closely, and could make out two naked, immensely fat men gliding through the woods very near Helga Blanchard's cottage. So fascinated was he by their anatomies that he abandoned all attempts to carry on with his painting, and instead started to draw them in his sketchbook.

  The sketch was published as an exclusive in Der Spiegel. After that, it was easy: the Walden brothers lived in Hamburg and had lengthy criminal records. They were arrested and put on tr
ial. The young lawyer nominated to defend them was brilliant. The first thing he did was to cleverly destroy the evidence put forward by the doctor-painter. The trap he set for the witness is still remembered: 'If your painting is entitled Trees and Mist, and you, yourself, say you are inspired by the landscape around you, how could you be certain of seeing the defendants in a place filled with trees and mist?' Next he played on the jury's sentiments. 'Are they to be judged guilty simply because we don't like their appearance? Or because they have a criminal record? Are we to sacrifice them so our consciences can sleep soundly?' There was no way to prove that the Walden brothers had been at the scene of the crime, and the case quickly collapsed. As soon as they were released, the twins were visited by a very friendly dark-skinned, sharp-nosed man who reeked of money. When he pressed his fingers together, he showed elegantly manicured fingernails. He talked to the brothers about art, and the Bruno van Tysch Foundation. They were secretly primed and sent to Amsterdam and Edenburg. There, Van Tysch told them: ‘I don't want you ever to tell anyone what you did, or what you think you did, not even yourselves. I don't want to paint with your guilt, but with the suspicion.' The work ended up being very simple. The Walden twins were posed standing face to face, dressed in grey prisoners' clothes and painted in diluted colours that emphasised the evil look on their faces. On their chests, like a row of medals, their criminal records were printed in small capitals. On their backs, a photo of Helga Blanchard hugging her son Oswald - standing out against a background of Venice, where they had had a holiday - with the obvious question: Was it them? Helga's family tried to stop Van Tysch using the image, but the matter was settled to the satisfaction of both parties thanks to a considerable sum of money. As far as hyperdramatic work went, there was no problem.