Art of Murder

by Jose Carlos Somoza

  Later on, as she was going to bed, her anger subsided. She decided that Gerardo must be a novice. The refinements of pure hyperdramatism were obviously way beyond him. What most surprised her was that a painter like him had been given a position of such responsibility. Apprentices should not be allowed to sketch on originals, she thought. That should be reserved for experienced artists. Maybe all was not lost though. Perhaps Gerardo's clumsiness, the huge stain he had tipped over her, could be cleaned up thanks to Uhl's exquisite artwork. It could be that Uhl would find some way of increasing the pressure and making it part of the painting process again.

  She was sure she would be frightened again. As she fell asleep, this was her last wish.

  When she woke up, everything was still incredibly dark. She had no way of knowing what time it was, even whether it was still night-time or not, because before she had gone to sleep she had closed the house shutters. She guessed it must still be night, because she could not hear any birdsong. She drew her hand across her face, then turned over, confident she could get back to sleep.

  She was about to do so when she noticed it.

  She sat bolt upright on the mattress, terrified.

  The distinct sound of floorboards creaking. In the living room. It had possibly been something similar that had awakened her. Footsteps.

  She was all ears, listening. All her tiredness and aching muscles disappeared as if by magic. She could hardly breathe. She quickly tried a relaxation exercise, but it did not work.

  There was someone in the living room, by God.

  She swung her feet on to the floor. Her brain was a whirling maelstrom of thoughts.

  'Hello?' she called out in a quaking, horrified voice.

  She waited without moving for several minutes, ready to confront the dreadful possibility that the intruder might burst in at any moment and fling himself on her. The silence all around her made her think she might have been mistaken. But her imagination - that strange diamond, that polygon with a thousand faces - sent fleeting sensations of terror to her mind, tiny inventions like slivers of pure ice. It's the man facing the other way: he's stepped out of the photo and now he's coming for you. But he's walking backwards. You'll see him walk into the room backwards, heading straight for you, guided by your smell. It's your father, in his huge square glasses, coming to tell you that...' She made a great effort to dismiss these recurring nightmares from her mind.

  'Is there anybody there?' she heard herself say again.

  She waited another prudent moment, her eyes fixed on the closed bedroom door. She remembered that all the light switches were in the hall. She had no way of lighting her room without leaving it and walking in the dark to the front wall. She did not have the courage to do it. Maybe it's a guard, she thought. But what was a security guard doing entering the farm at night and creeping about the living room?

  The silence continued. Her heartbeats too. The silence and the heartbeats stubbornly measured their own rhythms. She decided she must have been wrong. There are many reasons wooden floorboards creak. In Alberca she had become accustomed to chance and its shocks: a sudden breeze bringing dead curtains back to life, the creaking sound of a rocking chair, a mirror suddenly disguised in darkness. All of this must be a false alarm raised by her weary brain. She could get up calmly, walk past the living room and switch the house lights on, just as she had done the night before.

  She took a deep breath and put her hands on the mattress.

  At that moment the door opened and her attacker swept into the room like a hurricane.

  7

  The New Atelier building in Amsterdam housed the headquarters of Art, Conservation and Security for Bruno van Tysch's Foundation in Europe. It was a rather outrageous building, combining Dutch cheerfulness and Calvinist sobriety, with white-framed windows and seventeenth-century-style gables. To give it a cosmopolitan feel, the architect P. Viengsen had added twin columns a la Brunelleschi to the facade. It was on Willemsparksweg Avenue, near the Vondelpark in the Museum District, where all the artistic jewels of the city are to be found: the Rijkmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, and the Stedelijk. The Atelier was eight storeys high, with three different blocks. Not unusual in Amsterdam, the entrance hall and first floor were below sea level. In his fifth-floor office, Bosch was probably safe from any threat of flood, although he didn't seem particularly aware of his good fortune.

  His office - which included a V-shaped mahogany desk with four old-fashioned telephones on one end and three framed photographs on the other - looked out on to the Vondelpark. The photos were placed so that no one sitting opposite Bosch could see them.

  The one closest to the wall was a portrait of his father Vincent Bosch. Vincent was a lawyer for a Dutch tobacco firm. The man in the portrait wore a moustache, had a penetrating gaze, and a huge head, which Lothar had inherited. He looked like a methodical, scrupulous character. The guiding maxim he tried to pass on to his children - achieve the best possible results with the means available - appeared to be chiselled into each and every one of his features. He would have been pleased with the results.

  The photo in the middle was of Henrickje. She was pretty, with short blonde hair, a broad smile, and a certain horsiness about her jaw owing to over-prominent teeth. Bosch could vouch for the fact that her body was perfectly well proportioned: Hendrickje liked to show it off in attractive stripey dresses. She was twenty-nine, five years younger than Inspector Bosch, and was rich. They met at a party where an astrologer got them together because of their zodiac signs. Bosch was not attracted to her at first; they ended up getting married. The marriage worked perfectly. Hendrickje - tall, slender, wonderful, attractive, sterile (a problem diagnosed ten months after the wedding), ladylike and positive ('You have to think positively, Lothar', she used to tell him) enjoyed the privilege of having several lovers. Bosch, stubborn, serious, solitary, silent and conservative, only had Hendrickje, but felt that the mere fact of loving her did not mean he could hold her against her will, like the criminals he so detested. Respecting other people's wishes was part of the ideas of freedom that the young inspector had lived by during his troubled adolescence, when he was an okupa in a building on the Spui. It was almost perverse that the same Lothar Bosch who threw stones at the anti-riot squads from the Golfillo statue should a few years later join the city police. On the rare occasions when he still asks himself why he took that decision, he believes he can find the answer in the portrait of his father (back to him), and his sceptical Calvinist gaze. His father wanted him to study

  Law, he wanted to be useful to society, his father wanted him to earn money, he did not want to work with his father. So why not become a policeman? A logical decision. One way 'to achieve the best possible results with the means available'.

  To some extent, Hendrickje liked him being a policeman. This gave a certain security, or 'stability', to the image of their marriage. Their fights were as rare as were their moments of love, so that in this way, at least, their relationship was balanced. Then one foggy morning in November 1992, it had all come to a sudden end: Hendrickje Michelsen was returning by car from Utrecht when a lorry trailer guillotined her. The impact not only spilled her brains instantaneously, but took with them her head (her beautiful blonde-haired horsey head, the one we can see in the photo), and also her slender neck and part of her upper body. She had gone to Utrecht to visit a lover. Bosch heard the news while he was questioning a man suspected of several murders. He went numb, but chose to go on with the interrogation. Eventually the suspect proved to be terribly innocent. Then one evening in March, four months after the tragedy, a supernatural event took place in the house of the lonely, widowed inspector. The doorbell went, and when he opened it Bosch found himself face-to-face with a girl with straw-blonde hair who said her name was Emma Thorderberg. She was wearing a leather jacket and jeans, with a bag slung over her shoulder. She explained why she had come, and an astonished Bosch let her in. The girl went into the bathroom and an hour later it was Henrickje who ca
me out, wearing her striped dress. She took several long, elegant strides with the bare, shiny legs of someone risen from the dead, and then took up a position in the dining room without so much as a glance at the open-mouthed Lothar. The painting was by Jan Carlsen. Like all artists, Carlsen had reserved the right to change the original: he had shortened the skirt and lowered the neckline to make her more seductive. Apart from that, the cerublastyne had created an exact equivalent: it was as if Hendrickje were alive.

  Afterwards he found out who had sent him this surprise gift. 'It was Hannah's idea,' his brother Roland explained on the telephone. 'We weren't sure how you would take it, Lothar. If you don't like it, send it back. Carlsen assured us we could sell it on.'

  At first Bosch was tempted to get rid of the work of art. He felt so disturbed he could not eat in the same room but had to move elsewhere to avoid looking at it. He had no idea whether this feeling was due to the fact that Hendrickje was dead, or that he did not want to have to remember her, or for God knows what other obscure reason. Like the good policeman he was, he began by discounting the least likely reasons. If he kept photos and mementoes of his wife, why couldn't he bear that? This meant the first two possibilities could be dismissed. The final conclusion he reached was surprising: what disturbed him so much in the portrait had nothing to do with Hendrickje, and everything with Emma Thorderberg. What most intrigued him was not knowing who was hidden behind the mask. In order to free himself from this fascinating horror, he decided to approach the canvas. One night as she was leaving (the contract stipulated six hours on show at his house), he kept her back with a few banal questions about her profession. They both had a drink, and Emma turned out to be talkative and impetuous, not as educated as Hendrickje, with a less well-defined personality. She was more beautiful, more sympathetic, much less selfish. Bosch discovered something: Emma was not Hendrickje and never could be, but she was very worthwhile in her own right. Once he had discovered this (that Hendrickje was in fact Emma Thorderberg in disguise) the portrait became a carnival joke. He was no longer disturbed when he looked at it, or ate and read in its company. When he realised this, he decided to return it. After quickly compensating Carlsen, they succeeded in selling it to a collector his brother was treating for a throat infection. They even made a profit on the sale. So now Hendrickje is living with someone else. The only thing Lothar regrets is that Emma has gone, too. Because it's not art that is important, according to Bosch, but people.

  Having met Emma Thorderberg led him to say yes when, a few years later, Jacob Stein called him to offer him the post of security supervisor at the Foundation. Bosch consoled himself thinking that it was not the hefty raise in salary that led him to quit the police force (not just that, at least). To Bosch, protecting works of art was the same as protecting people. In the end, as Hendrickje used to say - things tend to even out.

  The third photo was a snapshot of his beloved niece Danielle, his brother's daughter. Roland Bosch, who was five years younger than Lothar, had studied medicine and become an ear, nose and throat specialist. He ran a prosperous private practice in The Hague, but was one of those people who only feels happy doing something out of the ordinary - risky sports, suddenly buying shares, impulse buying and selling, and so on. When looking for a wife he chose a famous and stunningly beautiful German TV actress who he had met in Berlin. He easily overcame the ugliness characteristic of the Bosch family, and was confident his only daughter would inherit her mother's looks. Danielle Bosch was pretty, it was true, but she was also a ten-year-old child, and Lothar felt she did not deserve such a family. Roland and Hannah had brought her up with a magic mirror that rendered her homage every day. The year before they had wanted their little goddess to go into cinema. They took her to various castings, but Danielle was a pretty poor actress, with rather too deep a voice. She was turned down, to her parents' disgust and her uncle's secret joy. Only two months ago, however, things had taken a new and unsuspected turn: Roland had decided to educate Danielle seriously and had sent her to a private school in The Hague. Bosch was surprised at the news, but he was also worried on Danielle's behalf. He wondered how the girl would get on in this atmosphere, so distant from her parents' uncritical adoration. Lothar loved Danielle with a passion only explicable in a childless widower of around fifty: not the Danielle that Roland and Hannah were creating, but the little girl who occasionally shared smiles and thoughts with him. Hendrickje had never met Danielle, but Bosch was sure they would have got on. Hendrickje and Roland were great friends.

  According to Lothar Bosch, the world is divided into two categories of people: those who know how to live, and those who protect those who know. People like Hendrickje and his brother Roland belong to the first category; Bosch to the second.

  He was staring intently at Danielle's photo, when Nikki Hartel came into his office.

  'I think we've got something, Lothar.'

  April Wood's office is on the sixth floor of the New Atelier. It is full of artworks. They are flesh-coloured nudes or near-nudes. No artifice, no fascinating colours, nothing complicated. Wood likes abstract body art, where the figures are shown as simple virgin anatomies in uniform colours: always white Caucasians, nearly always female, built like ballet dancers or acrobats. They are very expensive, but she can afford it. And the Foundation allows her to decorate her office as she likes. Almost all the works are by the new British school. By the door is a Jonathan Bergmann called Body Cult which Bosch particularly likes, perhaps because of its beautiful ballet posture. Standing at the far end of the room, legs apart and hands on hips, there is an Alec Storck painted with tanning lotions and sunscreens of different strengths. There are also three Morris Bird originals: a girl painted lunar blue standing on her head by the window, a boy balancing on one leg next to the desk - his yellow buttocks brushing against the telephone cable - and another ochre and fuchsia girl crouching on the floor like a frog about to leap.

  Although he was used to this by now, Bosch was always taken aback when he went into the office.

  'Yes?'

  'April, good news.'

  She was pacing up and down, hands behind her back, dressed in a silver-grey tubular dress. (Joan of Arc in her armour, he thought.) She looked like a queen surrounded by naked statues. Her face showed her concern.

  'Let's go to the other room,' she said.

  This small room was connected to her office by a short, mirror-lined corridor. It had no windows or human ornaments. Miss Wood closed the door so that the works could not hear them, and offered Bosch a seat. She sat opposite him. Bosch handed her the documents Nikki had brought him. There were several laser-printed photos.

  'Look at this blonde woman. She was filmed on three different occasions by the video cameras in the entrance to the Vienna MuseumsQuartier in May. Now look at this man. He was filmed four times by the same cameras, on different days from the girl. And now the most incredible part.' He showed her a third sheet of paper with computer graphics. 'The morphometric analysis of their faces shows a high correlation. There's an eighty per cent probability that it is the same person.' 'What about Munich?'

  'Here are the results. Three visits by her, two by him, on alternating days, during the second fortnight in May.'

  'Perfect. We've got him. He had enough time to get back to Vienna and change into the girl without papers. But it would be even more perfect if we could compare him to the fake Diaz or the fake Weiss ...'

  'Surprise.'

  Bosch handed her another sheet of paper. As he bent over Miss Wood, he could see how pale her face was beneath the shadow of her fringe. My God, she puts make-up on like a pharaoh, as if she were scared of anyone seeing her without protection, he thought. It was also true that she seemed different since their return from Munich. He guessed that the work did not help, but he wondered whether there was something else as well. His finger trembled as he pointed to the photo: it was of two men, one facing away, the other towards the camera. The one facing the camera was of athletic build, ha
d long hair and wore sunglasses.

  "This is taken by the video camera in the Wunderbar hotel. It shows the moment when the fake Weiss arrived at the hotel on Tuesday afternoon to do the Gigli work. The man with his back to the camera is one of our security agents checking his documents. We processed the image at once. The morphometric analyses coincide ninety-eight per cent with the man in Vienna and Munich, and ninety-five per cent with the woman. The possibility of false positives is around fourteen per cent. It's the same person, April, we're almost sure of it.'

  'It's incredible.'

  'I'm sorry, April, is something wrong?'

  Bosch was alarmed that all of a sudden his colleague was sitting staring intently at a fixed point on the wall.

  ‘I got a call from London’ said Miss Wood. 'My father is worse.'