Art of Murder

by Jose Carlos Somoza

  She heard a noise and turned round. Hirum Oslo was coming up the garden path, limping and leaning on his stick. He was wearing cream-coloured trousers and jersey, with a red Arrows shirt. He was a tall, good-looking man. His dark skin seemed at odds with pronounced Anglo-Saxon features inherited from his father. He had short black hair, brushed back off his forehead, where his eyebrows were thick and expressive. Wood found him the same as ever, perhaps a little thinner, with large sad eyes that he got from his Indian mother. She knew he was forty-five, but he looked more like fifty. He was a concerned man, alert to everything going on around him, anxious to find someone with problems to whom he could lend a helping hand. Miss Wood thought it was this outpouring of solidarity that aged him: it was as if part of his good looks had been rubbed off on others.

  She walked to the glass doors to greet him. Oslo smiled at her, but first of all stopped to have a word with the Chalboux work.

  'Cristine, you can take a rest whenever you like,' he said to her in French.

  'Thank you,' the painting smiled, nodding her head. It was only then that Oslo turned to greet Miss Wood. 'Good afternoon, April.'

  'Good afternoon, Hirum. Could we talk without the works of art?'

  'Of course, let's go to my office.'

  His office was not in the house but at the bottom of the garden. Oslo liked to work surrounded by nature. April Wood could see he was still a keen gardener: he grew rare plants and identified each of them with labels as though they were works of art. As he let Miss Wood pass in front of him in a narrow part flanked by tall cactuses, Oslo said to her:

  'You look very attractive.'

  She smiled without replying. Perhaps to avoid the silence, he went on quickly:

  'The withdrawal of Van Tysch's works in Europe has nothing to do with Restoration, does it? But if I'm not mistaken, it has to do with your presence here today?'

  'You're not mistaken.'

  Because of his limp, Oslo made slow progress, but Miss Wood had no problem keeping in step with him. She seemed to have all the time in the world. The shadows deepened as they reached the coolness of a clump of oaks. A murmur of water could be heard somewhere in the distance.

  'How was your journey? Was it easy to find my lair?'

  'Yes, I took a plane to Plymouth and rented a car there. Your directions were spot on.'

  'That depends on the person,' Oslo said with a smile. 'Some dolts manage to get lost coming out of Two Bridges. Recently I had a visit from one of those artists who want to put music in their works. The poor man was going round and round in circles for two hours.'

  'I see you've finally found the perfect refuge: a lonely spot in the middle of nature.'

  Oslo was not sure whether or not April Wood's comment was entirely well meant, but he smiled all the same.

  'It's much pleasanter than London, of course. And the weather is good. Today though it's been cloudy since dawn. If it rains, I'll put the outdoor pieces inside. I never leave them out in the rain. Oh, and by the way,' - Wood noticed an odd change in his voice -'You're going to get a surprise ...'

  They had reached the spot where the sound of water was coming from. It was an artificial pond. In the centre stood an outdoor work of art.

  After a pause during which Oslo tried in vain to guess what Miss Wood was feeling, he said:

  It's by Debbie Richards. I really think she is a great portraitist. She used a photo of you. Does it bother you?'

  The girl was standing on a small platform. The bobbed hair was exactly right, and the Ray-Ban glasses were very similar to the ones she wore, as was the green suit and miniskirt. There was one important difference (Wood could not help noticing it): the naked legs had been corrected and lengthened. They were long and shapely, much more attractive than hers. But it's obvious, painters always make you look more beautiful, she thought, cynically.

  The portrait stood motionless in the pose it had been placed in. Behind it was a wall of natural stone, and on its right a small waterfall cascaded. Who could the girl be who looked so like her? Or was it all thanks to cerublastyne?

  ‘I thought you didn't like portraits that used ceru,' she commented after a while.

  Oslo laughed briefly.

  'You're right, I don't. But in this case it was essential for the portrait to look like the original. I've had it for a year now. Are you annoyed I commissioned a portrait of you?' He asked, looking at her anxiously.

  'No.'

  Then we won't mention it any more. I don't want to make you waste time.'

  His office was in a glass summerhouse. Unlike the living room up at the house, it was a jumble of magazines, computers and books piled in unsteady columns. Oslo insisted on clearing his desk a little, and Miss Wood let him do so without a word. Without knowing why exactly, she felt ill at ease. Nothing about her revealed this fact, except that the knuckles on the hand gripping her bag were white.

  It had been a low blow, a real low blow. She would never have thought that Oslo still wanted to remember her, least of all in this romantic way. It was absurd, meaningless. She and Hirum had not been seeing each other for years. Of course, they heard news of each other, particularly her of him. Ever since Hirum Oslo had abandoned the Foundation and become the guru of the natural-humanist movement, almost every art magazine mentioned him, either to praise or denigrate him. At that very moment, Oslo was putting away a well-worn copy of his latest book, Humanism in HD Art, which Wood had read. During her plane journey she had planned out their meeting, and had decided to comment on some passages from the book - that way they could avoid talking about the past, she thought. But the past was there, in every inch of the office, and no conversation could avoid it. And as if that were not enough, there was that unexpected portrait by Debbie Richards. April Wood turned her head to look out across the garden. She caught sight of it immediately. 'He's placed it so he can see it from his chair while he's working.'

  Oslo finished tidying up, and turned to face the pale, slender figure in dark glasses. Is she annoyed? he wondered. She never shows her feelings. You never know what's really going on inside. He decided he could not care less if she were annoyed. She was the last person to reproach him for his memories.

  'Sit down. Would you like a drink?'

  'No, thanks.'

  'I'm preparing my little talk for next week. There's going to be a big retrospective of the French open-air school. There are papers, round tables. I'm also responsible for the conservation of thirty of the works, among them ten underage ones. I'm trying to arrange for the minors to be on show for less time and to have more substitutes. And I still haven't received the site inspection reports. It's in the Bois de Boulogne, but I need to know exactly where. Well...'

  He gestured as though to excuse himself for talking about his own problems. There was a pause. Oslo, who was trying to avoid an embarrassing silence, was relieved when Miss Wood began to speak.

  'You're doing well as Chalboux's adviser, I see.'

  'I can't complain. French natural-humanism started modestly, but now it's fashionable all over Europe. Here in England we're still reluctant to import it, because of Rayback's influence. And because we tend not to worry so much about other people. But some English artists are already changing their attitude, and have joined the humanist tendency. They've suddenly discovered they can produce great works of art and still respect human beings. In general though it's very difficult here.'

  Oslo talked in his usual even tone, but April Wood could detect the emotion behind it. She knew it was something close to his heart.

  A moment later, his features relaxed.

  'Well, I suppose you haven't come all the way from London to learn about my menial responsibilities. Tell me about you, April.'

  April Wood began reluctantly, but eventually spoke much more than she had intended. She began with a few details about her private life. Her father was in his final hours, she told him, and they had phoned her urgently from the hospital to tell her death could come at any moment. She wa
s very busy in Amsterdam but had felt obliged - that was the word she used, 'obliged' - to come to London for a few days, in case anything happened. Yet she was not wasting her time. From her London home she had been able to send faxes and emails, and held lengthy talks with specialists all over the world, as well as with her own team. And she had decided finally to ask Oslo for his help. But she preferred to come and see me, he thought with a sudden rush of emotion.

  'We're in crisis, Hirum,' Miss Wood said. 'And time is running out.'

  'I'll do whatever I can to help you. Tell me what's happening.'

  In less than five minutes, Miss Wood explained the situation to him. She did not go into all the details, but left them to his imagination. Nor did she tell him the titles of the works that had been destroyed. Oslo listened in silence. When she had finished, he asked anxiously:

  'What works were they, April?'

  Wood looked at him for a while before replying.

  'Hirum, what I'm going to tell you is absolutely confidential, as I'm sure you understand. Apart from a small group we've called the "crisis cabinet", nobody knows anything, not even the insurance companies. We're preparing our ground.'

  Oslo nodded, his black, sad eyes wide with concern. Miss Wood told him the title of the two works, and there was silence again. The muffled sound of the waterfall in the garden could be heard through the glass windows. Oslo was staring down at the floor. Eventually he said:

  'My God ... that poor child ... that little girl .. . I'm not so sorry for those two criminals, but that poor little girl. ..'

  Monsters was just as valuable, if not more so, than Deflowering, but Miss Wood was well aware of Oslo's ideas. She had not come to discuss them.

  'Annek Hollech . . .' Oslo said. 'I last talked to her a couple of years ago. She was charming, but she felt completely lost in that terrible world of human works of art. It wasn't just that lunatic who killed her. We all contributed to her murder.' He turned to face Wood. 'Who? Who can be doing this? And why?'

  'That's what I want you to help me find out. You're considered one of the most important specialists in the life and work of Bruno van Tysch. I want you to tell me names and motives. Who could it be, Hirum? I don't mean the person destroying the canvases, but the one who is paying for their destruction. Think of a machine. A machine programmed to annihilate the Maestro's most important creations. Who would have the motive to programme a machine like that?'

  'Who do you think it could be?'

  'Someone who hates him enough to want to do him as much harm as possible.'

  Hirum Oslo leaned back in his chair, blinking.

  'Everyone who has ever met Van Tysch both loves and loathes him. Van Tysch succeeds in producing masterpieces precisely because he creates that kind of contradiction in people. You know the main reason why I left him was because I found out how cruel his working methods were. "Hirum," he used to say, "if I treat the canvases as people, I'll never make works of art out of them.'"

  Who am I telling this to, Oslo thought. Look at her sitting there, her face sculpted in marble. My God, I reckon the only person who has ever managed to really move her has been Bruno van Tysch.

  'It's true that life hasn't helped him to be any different. His father, Maurits van Tysch, was probably even worse. Did you know he collaborated with the Nazis in Amsterdam? ...'

  ‘I heard something to that effect.'

  'He sold his fellow countrymen, Dutch Jews; he handed them over to the Gestapo. But he was clever about it; he made sure there were hardly any witnesses left. So nothing could ever be proved against him. He knew how to swim with the current.

  Even today there are some people who question whether Maurits was a collaborator. But I think that was the reason why, immediately after the war, he emigrated to the tiny, peaceful town of Edenburg. It was there he met that Spanish woman, a child of Spanish Republican exiles, and they got married. She was almost thirty years younger than him, and I've no idea what attracted her to Maurits. I suspect he had the gift his son inherited twice over: the ability to dominate other people and turn them into marionettes for him to use for his own ends. A year after Bruno was born, his mother died of leukemia. It's easy to imagine how this embittered Maurits still further. And he took it out on his son ...'

  'As I understand it, he was a painting restorer.'

  'He was a frustrated painter,' Oslo said with a wave of his arm. 'He took on the job of restoring pictures in Edenburg castle, but his dream was to be an artist. He was not much good at either task. Do you know, he used to thrash Bruno with his paintbrushes?'

  ‘I don't know anything about my boss' life,' April Wood responded, smiling briefly.

  'Maurits used long-handled brushes to reach some of the paintings hanging high up on the castle walls. Apparently, he never threw away the worn-out brushes. I don't think he kept them specially to thrash Bruno with, but that's what he did.'

  'Did Van Tysch tell you this?'

  'Van Tysch never told me anything. He's as silent as the grave. It was Victor Zericky who told me. He was Bruno's childhood friend - perhaps his only friend, because Jacob Stein is nothing more than a worshipper. Zericky is a historian who still lives in Edenburg. He gave me a couple of interviews, and I managed to get a few facts from him.'

  'Go on, please.'

  'Everything could have ended there: a child mistreated by his parents who later perhaps might have become another restorer and frustrated artist... worse even than Maurits, because Bruno couldn't even draw properly,' Oslo giggled nervously. 'Whereas we know his father could ... Zericky showed me some water-colours Maurits did that Van Tysch had given him: they're very good ... But then the miracle happened, the "fairytale" as the Foundation's history calls it: Richard Tysch, the North American millionaire, crossed his path. And everything was changed forever.'

  Wood was writing some of this down in a notebook she had taken out of her bag. Oslo paused, and gazed out of the window at the encroaching dusk in the garden.

  'Richard Tysch was the person who made it possible for the Maestro to become the boss of an empire. He was a madman, a useless and eccentric millionaire who inherited a fortune that he threw away and several steel firms he sold as soon as his father died. He was born in Pittsburgh, but he saw himself as the direct descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers, those Puritan pioneers to the United States. He was obsessed with finding out about his family. He investigated where his name came from. Apparently, the Van Tyschs of Rotterdam split into two branches during the heyday of the Dutch West India Company. One ancestor went to North America, and founded the line that became steel and business barons. Richard Tysch wanted to find out about the "other branch", the European side of his family. At that time, the only two people of that name were Bruno's father and his Aunt Dina, who lived in The Hague. In 1968, Tysch went to Holland and paid a surprise visit to Maurits. He had been planning just a short, uneventful visit. He wanted to talk to Maurits about art (he had learnt he was a restorer), pick up some mementoes, and return to the United States loaded down with photos and historic "roots". But then he met Bruno van Tysch.'

  Oslo was staring down at the filigree inlay on the knob of his cane. He caressed it absent-mindedly as he went on with his story.

  'Have you seen photos of Bruno as a child? He was incredibly attractive, with his thick black hair, pale face and dark eyes, that mixture of Latin and Anglo-Saxon he has. A real young faun. His eyes had a strange fire to them. Victor Zericky says, and I believe him, that he could hypnotise people. All the girls in the village were crazy about him, even the older ones. And quite a few men felt the same, I can tell you. He was thirteen at the time.

  Richard Tysch met him and fell for him. He invited him to go and spend the summer in his Californian mansion, and Bruno accepted. I suppose Maurits saw nothing wrong with it, especially considering how generous this god from the other side of the Atlantic had been. From then on, the two of them saw each other every summer, and kept up an extensive correspondence while Bruno was at s
chool. Van Tysch later destroyed the letters. Some people say they had a Socrates-Alcibiades kind of relationship, others put it more crudely. All we can be sure of is that six years later, Richard Tysch left Bruno his entire fortune, and shot himself in the mouth with his shotgun. They found him propped on the trunk of a column in his palazzo on the outskirts of Rome. His brain was decorating the wall mosaics. Now the palazzo belongs to Van Tysch, as do all his other European properties. His will came as quite a surprise, as you can imagine. Of course, what relatives he had, all of whom had quarrelled with him, challenged it, but without success. Add to this the fact that Maurits had died two years earlier, and we can conclude that all of a sudden Bruno found himself with all the money and freedom in the world.'

  Oslo's attention was caught by something that brought him to a halt: two workmen were out in the garden helping the model portraying Miss Wood out of the tank. Her hours on show were over. Oslo continued watching the removal of the portrait as he carried on speaking.