The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  “What made you think this one was a forgery?”

  “A fake. A forgery is a piece passed off as a previously undiscovered original. I don’t know. The brushwork, I think. It…well, it’s hard to describe, but it didn’t have the precision I associate with Friedrich.”

  “You’ve seen a lot of his work?”

  She looked troubled. “No. More in the last twelve months than ever before, but the German Romantics aren’t really my field of expertise. I’m much more familiar with work from the last thirty years. My specialty is investment. For small investments, anything under a million, you get the highest returns for contemporary paintings.”

  “But you brokered the Friedrich anyway.”

  “Its provenance was impeccable. The original seller’s reputation was unimpeachable. I had absolutely no reason to doubt either.”

  “But now you do?”

  “I don’t know what to think. All I know is that I don’t think the painting I was supposed to be crating to ship discreetly to France was a Friedrich.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve described the shipping as discreet.”

  She looked surprised. “Art is almost always shipped that way to France. The French government enforces rather punitive tax laws that make it desirable for art owners to be somewhat secretive about their acquisitions.”

  “Ah.”

  “What do you mean, ah?”

  I shrugged. She would not want to hear that she was aiding and abetting what amounted to smuggling, especially from someone who didn’t even know the difference between a fake and a forgery.

  “Anyway, seeing that painting made me very nervous. So I took it over to a friend, an art historian and appraiser. I thought about calling the original client, but decided not to. After all, I didn’t know whether it was a fake or not and, besides, he had sold it for a good profit. It wouldn’t hurt him either way. But I had to tell Honeycutt, the banker, that there would be a bit of a delay. Of course he wanted to know why so I told him I had some doubts regarding the painting’s provenance. He was concerned, obviously—we are talking about a considerable investment for an individual—so I tried to reassure him. I told him how reliable and discreet my appraiser was; how he was doing all this on a rush basis for me; that I had an appointment at eleven-thirty that evening to get the definitive answer, one way or another.”

  “An appointment with Jim Lusk.”

  “Yes. With Jim. I was supposed to be there at eleven-thirty. But some things came up at work. And I know Jim. He’s…he was…a night owl. He wouldn’t mind if I was a few minutes late. But I was even later than I thought, so I’d parked and was running to his house when I bumped into you.” Her back was pressed flat against the back of her chair, creating an extra two or three inches between us. Probably reliving the look on my face as I had mused on breaking her neck.

  I thought about that writhing tiger lily of flame, and the bright stamen at the centre of that flower; the burning, curling Jim Lusk.

  “You walked away, his…the house burned, and I saw your wallet. It must have dropped when we collided.” I would give her the benefit of the doubt. “So I looked through it. And I went to the police. They more or less laughed at me. ‘Aud!’ they said. ‘Oh, not Aud! She was one of us!’ The odd thing was, underneath their bluster, they sounded uncertain, as though they thought you just might have been involved somehow. Then one of the uniformed ones came running to the detective in charge, and he sighed, and he told me he was pretty sure, given the new evidence, that this was a drug killing. I said it wasn’t. Jim always found…well, let’s just say that not only did he not take drugs, he found those who did rather amusing.” She shook her head. “I know people say this about their friends and family all the time, but believe me, I knew Jim.”

  Ah, but we never really know even our best friends. Even the spouse who snores next to us every night. We can never see behind those glistening eyes, never get beneath the skin, venture inside that shining ivory bowl to the dark dreams and slippery lusts that slide through the crocodile brain without regard for civilization or religion or ethics.

  “He was murdered for a reason. If there were no drugs, it was something else.”

  “There were drugs. Several kilos of cocaine.”

  “Then they were just window dressing,” she said impatiently, “a way to twist the truth.”

  “Very, very expensive window dressing.” Which of course played both ways: why hadn’t the firebug taken the merchandise?

  She shrugged away the importance of several hundred thousand dollars worth of evidence. “Yesterday, Honeycutt’s insurance adjuster showed up, which is normal for a claim of this size. Honeycutt had said nothing to her, of course, about the question of provenance. He would have been a fool to. I told her that, yes, everything was fine. That I had merely taken it around to the appraiser’s to get a second opinion as a matter of course.”

  “You lied.”

  “Yes. And I hate that. I resent it. But I did it because I have to consider my reputation. People trust me. It’s my job to be utterly reliable. I can’t afford clients thinking: She was the one who muddled up that Friedrich. I just can’t.”

  “Honeycutt won’t say anything—after all, he wants his insurance. The previous owner won’t say anything because as far as you’re aware, he doesn’t know anything. The picture can’t talk because it’s now no more than a few greasy atoms in the stratosphere. So explain to me what your problem might be with this.”

  “My conscience.”

  We looked at each other in the artificial fifties gloom. Conscience. Such a high-minded kind of word. In my experience, people used the word “conscience” when what they really meant was, Oh god I shouldn’t have done that it was stupid what if they find out? “Conscience” sounds better to their internal censors. “Conscience is a matter for a priest.”

  She gave me an odd look. “You would look good in the old-fashioned clerical garb, the long black coat and dog collar. Those pale, pale eyes, the way you nod intently and sit so still…” She laughed then, a brittle vocal shimmer that tried to hide the loss and bewilderment, tried to turn it all into an amusing game. “So here I am, confessing my sins. But what I want isn’t forgiveness. Or penance. It’s information.”

  “You know as much about all this as I do. More.”

  “I want you to help me find out who did this to Jim, and why.” Her voice was raw, believable. “You would be paid by my company, Lyon Art. You would be paid well. Not quite as well as your investments, perhaps, but surely it would be better than…than grubbing about in the police gym with nervous rookies. Much more exciting.”

  I wondered what excitement meant to her. A frisson, a brief hormonal thrill to flutter the muscles and pull tendons tight for a moment. Excitement is the product of facing something dangerous. I like excitement from danger that is carefully controlled: the bungee jump, skydiving, free diving off the coast of Belize. Danger of the uncontrolled variety has a nasty tendency to lead to people with guns or knives appearing out of the dark and a split second to live or die. Danger is that place where the space between one breath and another decides your fate, where your life and theirs are like two ice cubes sliding down a hot blade and the fulcrum is speed, where survival means the ability to move from one state to another faster than thought. It means suspending consideration and just being, acting and reacting, moving through a world where everything but you cools and slows down so you can glide between the blows and bullets and take out someone’s heart. Danger is desperately seductive.

  “No. Thank you. I’m perfectly happy as I am.”

  She leaned back in her chair, until the top of her head was almost touching the hideous orange shade on the hanging lamp and strange shadows pooled on her face. “If you’re so happy, why did you resign from the police? Why do you walk the streets in the middle of the night looking haunted by demons? Why do you hang out with dangerous, filthy people in loud, foul-smelling night clubs where no one would even give you t
he time of day if they knew who you are, knew that your mother is King Harald’s ambassador to the Court of St. James?”

  My face is my most useful tool. I made it smile. “Did you practice that?”

  Her high cheekbones stood out sharply in the light but the shadow hid her eyes and mouth. “I’m not a trained investigator like you, but Jim was my friend. I’m going to try to find out what happened. I’ll do it on my own if I have to—I’m smart and I learn fast—but you could help me, and I’m willing to pay.”

  I know police work and death, I understand the intricacies of diplomacy and the strange sharp angles where performance art and outlaws, tattoos and high society meet and mingle. I also knew what she didn’t: that stalking a professional killer is not a game, not a hobby you can learn at the weekend. Not when the stakes are your life.

  The lamp was warming her sleek, French-twisted hair, and through the brown bitter smell of coffee I caught a quick scent of her shampoo, light and sunshiny and sharp, the way cloudberries on the fjord smell when the sun comes out after a quick summer rain, and I saw her clearly. An innocent who believed herself a cynic, one too innocent even to understand that the timing of that incendiary device had been carefully planned; that she had to have been as much the target as Lusk or the painting. Someone had tried to kill this woman who had read my record and asked for my help, and if she blundered around making noise, they would try again. So I surprised myself, and said yes.

  While I read through my transcribed statement, Denneny, immaculate in white linen short sleeves, leaned back in his chair on the other side of the desk and polished his spectacles.

  “There is no ‘e’ in lightning.”

  He ignored me. The spectacles had left deep indentations on either side of his nose and he had to bring the lenses very close to check for blemishes. His expression was utterly focused, as pure and concentrated as that of a boy studying the dissected body of his first goldfish.

  I signed and dated the statement. “You should really pay for better-educated clerks.”

  He slid the spectacles back on and his face was a man’s again. He picked up the statement, looked at my signature, and put it on the top of a pile on his left.

  “Your new rookies were particularly raw this time.”

  “I hope you didn’t hurt anyone,” he said, more distracted than concerned.

  “You should take a session yourself.”

  “I’ve spent too much time lately sitting behind a desk—”

  The lack was more in his soul than his body.

  “—besides which they wouldn’t listen to a captain. They’d say, ‘Yessir!’ but their eyes would glaze and they wouldn’t really hear a word I said.” Just as he wasn’t hearing a word I said, not really.

  I stood. “If any of them don’t measure up, I’ll let you know.”

  “Yes.” He made an effort. “I appreciate this, Torvingen. The department can’t afford to pay warm bodies to spend time in the hospital instead of patrolling the streets.”

  His rookies had once been more than entries in a ledger, cogs in his cost-effectiveness machine. I tried to remember the last time I had seen him shout or laugh. I failed. Twenty years in the police force had killed everything, bit by bit: his ambition, then his passion, then his wife.

  three

  I don’t like being surprised, especially by my own behaviour, and I had no idea why I had taken Julia Lyons-Bennet’s card and agreed to be at her office tomorrow morning at eight-thirty. When a machine acts oddly, it’s easy enough to take it apart and look for the fault. If it’s a computer, say, which freezes while you’re online trying to read e-mail, you just shrug and hit the reset button.

  My preferred reset button is adrenalin.

  Revolution is not the hippest women’s dance club in Atlanta, but it’s the biggest, a huge building in Ansley Mall. When I slid the Saab into a parking slot, the place was already filling with the vehicles so loved by Southern dykes with money: apple-green Samurais, blood-red Jettas, peach Cabriolets, dignified gold Camrys, two silver Isuzu Troopers. It was only ten o’clock and the air was still soft and sooty with rush-hour fumes. Dogwood blossoms lay underfoot, and the parking lot smelt of rubber and asphalt and perfume: an exciting, urban scent. I made sure I was wearing my open, friendly face.

  On Tuesdays, there is no cover. I slipped in unnoticed and got a Corona from the bar. There were already about two hundred people in the club: half on the dance floor, the rest drinking and talking. Two of the three pool tables were occupied. The third had money lying on the side. I put down my own quarters, looked around a little, and took a pull of my yellow beer. Lovely cold bite.

  “Toss for the break,” said a clear-skinned, long-haired woman who looked as though she were just off the farm.

  I smiled. “Sure.”

  We exchanged names—she was Cathy—and played the first round amiably. I let her win.

  “Another?”

  “Why not?” I got another beer, too.

  This time I won, and there were more women in the club. It got warmer. I got another beer.

  Cathy left and was replaced by Ellie. I didn’t much care. I was waiting, enjoying the beer, taking the pulse of the audience because there is always an audience. Of the women at the small tables surrounding the pool area, some were talking, drinking and watching, but some were just drinking and watching.

  When Ellie was replaced by Jodie and I realized the club was nearly full, I decided it was time. I smiled at Jodie, tucked my hair behind my ears—to show my jaw and the small muscles in my neck—and opened myself to the audience. As I racked the balls I held the last one in my palm, the way you cradle the weight of a breast when your lover moves over you and your breath is searing in and out, in and out. As I leaned over the cue I let the yellow light hanging low over the table slide over the hollows in my wrist, up the long smooth muscle of my bare arms and lose itself in the dip and shadowed curve of collarbone and breasts. As I drew the cue—the long beautifully polished warm strong cue—back over the sensitive webbing between thumb and index finger, I enjoyed the sensation, and let my face show it, and then I thrust with my hips with my arm with my cue into the ball, through it, and the pretty-coloured triangle exploded into a dozen rolling pieces. I threw back my head and laughed as the balls dropped in the pockets: one, two, three. Around the table with the cue now, picking up the chalk—stroke it rub it over the tip, the rounded, velvet tip, cherish it, make sure that not a millimeter is ignored—laying my left breast plump against the felt and stroking that cue back and forth, back and forth, calculating, measuring, waiting as my breathing quickened and the moment trembled then thrusting again, and round the table and again, and again and again and again until the felt was all green and clean and I straightened, nipples hard against the silk of my waistcoat, and smiled a slow, satiated smile. And then she smiled back at me from a table and stood and stepped forward like a young deer leaving the shelter of the trees.

  I ordered us a beer each. She was Mindy, up from Birmingham for two days, interviewing with Coca-Cola for a job in their budgeting department. She was staying in a nice hotel downtown but didn’t know anyone and was I here on my own? Oh yes, I said, and touched her lightly on the wrist, and now I had her scent, light and flowery but not innocent, and she brushed against me with her hip, her just-a-bit-old-fashioned-from-Alabama-jean-clad hip, and she lifted her chin a little and blinked and I kissed her.

  “Such pale, pale eyes,” she said.

  And we had another beer and played more pool and drank more beer and danced, and at one o’clock I took her back to the hotel and took off her clothes and, to the sound of a late-breaking thunderstorm, took my time. I kissed her, and stroked the soft planes of flank and thigh, teased with fingertip and breath and gaze, and when she was shuddering like a kite on a long line, when she began to whip and plunge, when she begged me, I turned her and steadied her and let her loose.

  It was always the same. They flew and I flew, but to different places.
>
  Later, she stroked my cheek drowsily. “Your eyes are different in this light. No colour at all. Like cement.”

  The Bedouin definition of day is when the light is strong enough to tell the difference between a black hair and a white hair. There are no colours in the dark.

  Eventually she slept. I listened to the rain and contemplated the relaxed face, smooth and fine and very young. No doubt she thought herself worldly, sophisticated, but what would she think if she knew she was sleeping next to a woman who had killed for the first time when she was just eighteen? What did she know of that blank look that always touched their eyes before they spat blood or tried to rattle out one last breath?

  I looked at my hands, turned them over in the tarnished shine of streetlights seeping through a crack in the curtains. They were long; strong and competent with nicely shaped nails; hard enough for a palm strike, soft enough to trace gentle arabesques on a taut trembling stomach or along a soft inner thigh. The stains did not show.

  I woke up just after dawn, lying on my side, with a greasy headache and a craving for eggs and the bite of grapefruit juice. She scootched up behind me, tucked her belly against my back and ran a hand up my thighs. I stopped thinking about eggs. This time it was simpler, more straightforward, with grins on both sides. Angst was for the dark.

  She moved away from me then, and I understood she was done: it was six-thirty, time to resume her job-seeking mask of brisk, detached efficiency. After I showered I was not surprised to find her encased in a business suit and hiding behind impersonal makeup. She didn’t have time for breakfast, but I was to feel free to use her room number in the hotel dining room. I thanked her politely, we nodded instead of touching, and I left.