Video Nasties

by Ralston, Duncan

  Guess he really is allergic, after all, Mr. McAllister mused as he surreptitiously slipped the EpiPen out of his pocket. "Found it," he shouted, popping up from the floor with the epinephrine in hand. He bit the top off and, hesitating for only a moment, jammed the needle into Jessie's leg.

  Jessie began to cough immediately, his hands falling limp to his sides. His freckly pallor returned as he coughed and coughed. When he had the breath to speak, he said, "That hurt, you dick."

  Then he allowed the ghost of a grateful smile to creep onto his lips.

  Mr. McAllister patted the boy's back as a smattering of applause began in the back of the bus, Barclay Robbins furiously clapping, the others following suit, adding, "Way to go, Mr. McAllister," and "You da man," and slapping him genially on the shoulder as he made his way to the front of the bus.

  "Atta boy!" Mrs. Plimpton said, her smile eating the bottom of her face.

  Janey picked up her backpack, and looked up at him as he approached the front of the bus. "Where was it?"

  "What's that, Janey?"

  "Where was the EpiPen?"

  The suspicion in her eyes made him flinch. "Well, Janey, I s'pose it musta fell and got trampled to the back of the bus when you kids rushed off to school."

  "It was on the floor then?"

  Mr. McAllister laughed. "Where else would it have been, Janey?"

  She squinted past him, where Jessie was getting his own shoulder claps and praise, the boy smiling like a kid who'd won a trophy, as if he finally fit in. Janey's eyes softened, and she favored her bus driver with a brace-faced smile. She said nothing to him, only nodded, as if she understood exactly what had happened here, and she approved of the outcome, whatever he'd been planning.

  Well, the world don't favor heroes, Mr. McAllister thought, driving the kids toward school just like he'd always done, but liars seem to do okay.

  IN THE SHADOW

  OF THE MASTERS

  Be cursed, plunderers and imitators

  of the work and talent of others.

  - Albrecht Dürer

  YANNICK TREMAINE HAD never seen a painting he couldn't copy, and Abrecht Dürer's Self-Portrait was no exception. Still, the forgery had troubled him since he'd begun it, and he often half-jokingly mused that the so-called Forger's Curse might be responsible, not that he believed in such things.

  Tremaine's Kraków studio was quite large, with a spectacular view of the old synagogues and the flat, cool waters of the Vistula River, beyond which the Jewish Ghetto once stood. The apartment itself lay above a Turkish-run fabric store in a crumbling relic built long before the Great War, like most of the buildings surrounding it. With his considerable wealth, he'd converted his suite to suit his needs. Here, he painted Vermeers and Caravaggios and Monets--sometimes from memory, sometimes from books, often from stolen originals his benefactor kept hidden in temperature-controlled basement vaults, large humidors, and abandoned salt mines, like Göring had before him.

  The day Mr. Ziminski came to check on his investment a final time, Tremaine snapped out of a trance at the sound of the doorbell, feeling like he'd run a marathon. Sweating, his mouth dry, eyes red from not blinking, from staring transfixed into Albrecht Dürer's haunting golden eyes, he blinked the haze from his own eyes and plopped the brush he'd been using into a Dripol fruit cocktail can he kept half-filled with linseed oil. Once again, he found it difficult to draw himself away from the long-dead painter's gaze. It troubled Tremaine how few people outside of the art community seem to know Dürer's Self-Portrait, also called Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight Years Old Wearing a Coat with Fur Collar. Like many painters, he considered the piece worthy of the Mona Lisa's fame. The stark interplay of light and dark, with a black void behind him, as if Dürer had deliberately painted himself adrift in time and space. A metaphor? Tremaine would leave it for the scholars to decide. Dürer's hand, slightly raised to handle the fur of his collar, thought to mirror portraits of Christ. But it was the eyes that held him in their sway--always the eyes. He lit a cigarette from a pack of Sobieski Premiums with a quivering hand, and took a long drag, consciously avoiding eye contact with the painting.

  The nicotine calmed him enough to chuckle at his foolishness. Does anyone believe in curses anymore? he wondered as he crossed his flat to the door.

  Through the peephole he was greeted by the mashed nose of his benefactor's beefy Russian bodyguard. He muttered "Fuck" under his breath--quiet enough, he thought, but the ex-Spetsnaz raised his eyebrows and peered back into the dim hall.

  "He hear hims," Vladimir said to his employer, lurking somewhere in the shadows beyond Tremaine's sight.

  "I'm coming!" Tremaine called over his own shoulder, attempting to throw his voice. He unlocked the latch and chain barring the behemoth from entry, and Vladimir--Ziminski's very muscular, very ex-Russian paramilitary bodyguard--barged in. He eyeballed the large room with a hand held over the Desert Eagle Mark 1 carried in a leather sling holster over his black turtleneck, as if expecting a Navy Seal team crouched behind the kitchen counter, ready to get the drop on him.

  "Is clear," he said to the open door.

  Ziminski buzzed in then, his motorized wheelchair tracking dirt all over Tremaine's new floors, like the tracks of Nazi Panzers through the streets of Kraków. And like the city officials of the time, there wasn't much Tremaine could do but accept it.

  Parked in the living room, his employer looked up with cold blue eyes, a colorful shawl holding in what little warmth his elderly body still created. "Well, Tremaine? Aren't you going to offer us a drink?" he asked, his accent faint--Americanized.

  "Where are my manners?"

  He would have offered Ziminski a can of turpentine if he hadn't switched to linseed oil to keep his brushes clean. Just looking at the old man's pale, yellowed-parchment skin always made his own flesh crawl... but Ziminski's money had paid for the flat and all its renovations. It kept the pimps from pounding down his door. And it was Ziminski's money that allowed Tremaine to paint for a living, which was all he'd ever wanted to do for as long as he could remember.

  Reminding himself of this, he poured the evil man an American whiskey, and cracked a Tyskie for the Russian. Vladimir blew foam off the top of the can before taking a healthy swig.

  "So what brings you here, Mr. Ziminski?"

  "I've come to see my Dossi," Ziminski said, speaking of the reproduction Tremaine had been working on concurrent to the Dürer: Dosso Dossi's Triumph of Bacchus. "Coming along nicely, I hope?"

  "It's getting there."

  In truth, he hadn't been able to focus on it since he'd started the Self-Portrait. He'd been having trouble getting Dossi's depiction of the god Bacchus right, and he realized why just then: the nude minions hoisting him up in that throne, carrying him toward the endless after-party, reminded him too much of Vladimir lugging Ziminski and his wheelchair up the apartment stairs. He'd been subconsciously painting the youthful god as a decrepit old ghoul in effigy of his benefactor.

  "Let's take a look, shall we?" Without waiting for his say-so, Ziminski zipped past him, over the fucking Berber shag--mercifully without dirtying it--and into the daylight bright studio.

  "Mój Boże..." Ziminski breathed before Tremaine had even caught up, and he understood instantly the old man was looking at the Dürer and not the Dossi. He'd been so astounded by its likeness, he reverted to his mother tongue to say, My God.

  When Tremaine laid a hand on the old man's bony shoulder, the bald, scabrous head jerked upward. The look of shame in his eyes--at least Tremaine thought it was shame--almost made him feel sorry for the old man. Ziminski brought his shawl up to his lips with a quivering hand and wiped away a runner of drool. Ice cubes tinkled in the glass in his other claw.

  "Here's the Dossi," Tremaine said, directing his attention to the other painting.

  "Lovely, lovely," Ziminski remarked dismissively. Then he clucked his tongue in disapproval, as something caught his eye--the Dürer forgotten now his critic's hat was on. "The breast i
s wrong. Too full. You've been sleeping with too many whores, Tremaine. Forgotten what a real tit looks like, hey?"

  "It's still a work in progress," Tremaine said, barely hiding his annoyance. Worse than the insult, Ziminski had been able to see with his deteriorating eyesight what Tremaine himself couldn't, being too close to the work. The breast in Dossi's original was plump but not full, the nipple pointing downward. The breast Tremaine had painted could have belonged to an American stripper, a hard-rock thing with its nipple aimed toward the heavens.

  Tremaine had always been a skilled technical painter. His teachers, back in art school, had said this of his work all the time. What he lacked, they had told him, was that creative spark the da Vincis and Picassos of the world seemed born with. A good painting drew you toward it, you could feel its meaning like an ache in your chest. You could hear it, whispering its untold secrets in your ear. An exceptional piece of art could move you to tears with its tale--it lived. A masterpiece, like Dürer's woefully underrated efforts, could make the work and its artist immortal.

  Tremaine's own paintings had always been derivative of someone else's, even artists he'd never before seen, let alone glimpsed their body of work--this according to men and women whose own landscapes and portraits and bowls of fruit were so middle of the road they'd had to resort to teaching middle-class suburban children the Golden Ratio and color theory just to make a living. And how he could copy something he hadn't known existed had always eluded Tremaine, up until the day he'd taken their criticism to heart and decided to try his hand at forgery.

  Eventually he became grateful for their criticism. Aside from having to paint at the literal barrel of a gun, he'd lived a decent life, and the thing he'd come to learn in his late-twenties that he hadn't been able to accept during school was that his teachers had been right. He'd never had that spark. Never would. His mind was a blank canvas, never to be filled with an image of his own design. Tremaine and his work would forever be left standing in the shadow of the Masters.

  Ziminski had seen that in him. When Tremaine was still trying to make a name for himself, pimping his derivative art in as many galleries as would allow him, the old man saw a hunger in Tremaine's work, in him, that spoke of someone with big dreams--if only he hadn't lacked the "spark." And so Tremaine had appealed to Ziminski's vanity, as an artist must do with a potential patron. He professed admiration of the old man's appreciation and indisputable knowledge of art.

  The first time he met Miłogost Ziminski, the old man had been standing with a group of glitterati, entertaining them with his critiques. This was before the wheelchair. Ziminski had once had dreams of his own to be a painter, in his youth. Even with the wealth he'd amassed since, he knew he couldn't sell a single watercolor, not without critics accusing him of using his money to buy acclaim. His skill had been middling at best long before the accident that had made his hands clumsy with a brush.

  Ziminski liked to keep desirable things for himself, particularly, but not limited to, artwork. Back when he'd been married, Ziminski would only trot his wife Magda out during big gala occasions. This buxom blonde thing--and he'd criticized Tremaine's taste for whores--who wore furs and glittery dresses and offered her hand for strangers to kiss like she was royalty, Ziminski would parade her around at all the big parties, but when the event was over she'd vanish. He'd tuck her away in a closet somewhere in his hundred-room mansion. He'd lock her back up in her gilded cage.

  Always wanting things he couldn't have, Tremaine had taken her in one of Ziminski's toilets during one of Ziminski's events. He'd fucked her again in the old man's vault, and had wondered more than a few times what had happened to her since the last time he'd seen her. He didn't have the nerve to ask the old man, knowing how easy it would have been to erase her from his life. Everyone would simply have assumed she'd left him for a younger man, gone to live on the French Riviera on the old man's dime.

  Ziminski stroked his wispy Fu Manchu beard, admiring the texture of the Dürer. "Look at the craquelure," he marveled. "So much like the real thing."

  Tremaine agreed the aging process was coming along nicely, despite having done most of it in a trance, applying layers of umber and water he'd snuffed cigarette butts out in to simulate centuries of wear.

  Ziminski reached out to touch it with one shriveled, liver-spotted claw, causing Tremaine to shout "Don't!" The old man peered back with sullen ferocity, like a bad kid who'd had his hand slapped away from the cookie jar, and wetted his lips with his cankered tongue.

  "It's still drying," Tremaine explained hastily, catching a darker disapproving glare from Vladimir, who cracked his knuckles in response. Cold sweat dripped from his armpits as he awaited Ziminski's reaction, imagining his ribs would make a similar sound caught in one of Vladimir's big Russian bear hugs.

  The old man nodded at his monstrous companion. "Stand down, Igor," he said, blithely mocking a man who could crush him like a Soviet brand cigarette underfoot. "The man values his art more than his life. If that's not a quality worth admiring, I don't know what is."

  Vladimir merely sipped his beer, eyeballing the artist over the rim.

  "It will be ready in a week, I presume?"

  "The Dürer? I thought the deadline was two?"

  "The deadline--" Ziminski seemed to savor the word. "--is whenever I say it is. I've lined up another job for our technician in Munich a month from now. She'll need time to prepare."

  "I need time, Mr. Ziminski."

  "Tosh," the old man scoffed. "Fix the breast on the Dossi and keep up with that craquelure. Honestly, Tremaine, you're such a perfectionist. It doesn't have to fool them very long."

  ❚❚

  IN TREMAINE'S DREAM Dürer stepped out of the painting, his gaze unwavering, as undying as the colors in which he'd painted himself, his golden eyes focused on Tremaine through the darkened bedroom doorway. The man from the painting crept across the studio floor in the moonlight, bare feet padding over Tremaine's Berber shag, and entered the room.

  Standing over the bed while Tremaine slept, fingering the fur of his collar, eyes glimmering in the gloomy abyss of night, Tremaine couldn't get a clear look at him in the darkness of his dream, but he was able to see Dürer whispering--staring at him and whispering. Cursing him in German. The Forger's Curse. Tremaine tried to wake up, to defend himself, to defend his work, but he couldn't move. Eventually, he woke up screaming: "I have to! It's all I can do!" Sweating, heart beating hard, he looked around, the sun already high above the Vistula, shimmering on its glassy surface.

  Catching his breath, he padded out barefoot to the studio, following the path of Dürer's ghost, and found the dead painter still where he should be, still in the painting, those golden eyes challenging Tremaine to continue his day's work.

  Fraud, they said. Forger.

  Tremaine threw a drop cloth over the painter's head, and went to work on the Dossi. Forger. He could feel the young Master's stare through the fabric, couldn't fool himself into believing the eyes had closed, that they'd turned away. Fraud. Judging him. Watching him paint.

  Tremaine dropped his brush in the Dripol can, threw on a jacket, and hurried out of the flat. He walked for miles, trying to clear his head. He ate brunch in the Rynek. Downed shots at a vodka bar in Old Town. When he returned, he was sufficiently drunk to finish the Dossi untroubled by thoughts of Dürer's judgment. The curse made him laugh aloud, and he eyed the pale drop cloth with reproach.

  Returning to his Dossi, a little yelp escaped him, and he backed into the table, spilling his liquor and the contents of the Dripol can all over the floor. Somehow he'd painted the eyes of Bacchus to look like Dürer's. Tremaine got down on his knees to wipe up the spill, grabbing a cloth and patting the stain down, worried it would spread to his Berber shag rug. Finally satisfied he'd soaked it all up, he stood and turned to fix the Dossi--

  His heart leapt. "Where is it?" The drop cloth was gone and Dürer stared into his soul. Tremaine scoured the studio, cursing himself, cursing the paint
ing. Finally, he stopped moving around in angry endless circles, and found he'd used it to mop up the spill.

  "Idiot!" He smacked himself on the forehead, hard enough to cause stars in front of his eyes. "Fucking idiot!"

  Tremaine turned to the painting, his curse, throwing all of his anger and frustration toward it. Dürer returned the glare with a frozen smirk.

  Burn it, he thought. Burn it and be done with it.

  "And then what? Ziminski would have me killed."

  Flee the country. Go back home.

  "Home..." he said mockingly. "There's nothing for me there."

  At least you'd be alive. Put the drop cloth back, and push it a scooch closer to the ashtray... you could say it was an accident. Left a cigarette burning.

  "He'd never believe me."

  It would buy you some time...

  Tremaine gave Dürer a baleful look. The Master said nothing.

  A perfect forgery. His best.

  An idea occurred.

  "I'm not going to burn you," he cooed, approaching the painting. He picked up his brush, dipped it into a brownish yellow blot of paint on his palette. It was the only way, his drunken mind told him. The only way to break the curse.

  A counter-spell. An incantation.

  By the time he'd blended the words into Dürer's fur collar to be almost indistinguishable, it began to seem a little less crazy.

  ❚❚

  "YOU KNOW WHAT Dürer said about forgers, don't you?" the thief asked as they approached Wawel Castle from Kazimierz. In the distance Tremaine heard the hejnał mariacki, the historical call of a lone bugler atop St. Mary's Cathedral. The trumpeting stopped abruptly, as it always did, the same note left hanging in the cool night air as legend said it had during the Mongol invasion, when the bugler signaling the horde's approach had been shot in the throat by an arrow.

  Tremaine wondered how the trumpeter must have felt, his life's work ended with a sudden realization his throat no longer held the breath to produce sound. He'd always believed his own need to create would only ever end with his death. Break his hands, and he would have found a way to paint without them, like Christy Brown, the painter born with cerebral palsy. Hell, he would have painted with his cock if it came down to it.