by Alex Archer
At the courtyard's far end she saw what looked like a builder's yard, a big, open building with a sheet-metal roof, partial walls and wooden shelves piled with lumber and metal bar stock. On the right side of the courtyard stood a single-story structure with several doors that might lead into apartments.
As she entered the courtyard heat washed over her from the right. She looked to see a man standing by the wall, turning the crank on a sort of metal meshwork drum half-filled with green chili pods, rotating them above a set of blue propane-burner flames. That was the source of the marvelous smell.
If the sounds coming out the open door were any indication, the main action was in the building next to the gallery on her left, a two-story structure that had apparently started life as a warehouse. Though the gallery's front door stood open, she wandered past to enter the warehouse.
Inside was a blare of noise. Loud, cheerful conversation competed with riotous ska brass and the piercing whine of a cutoff saw biting metal. A sort of greeter's booth stood right beside the door to her right, covered with pamphlets about the exhibitors and Chiaroscuro itself. In a room behind it Annja saw a curious apparatus like an outsized hood for a kitchen stove above a large square table at which men and women in goggles sat doing dangerous-looking things to metal.
"Hi, I'm Randy," shouted the guy standing by the table. "Welcome to Chiaroscuro Guerrilla Arts Collective."
"I'm Annja," she replied, likewise shouting to make herself heard. "I thought it was the Guerrilla Art Compound."
"That's the place. The collective is us. Can I help you make yourself at home?"
He looked like a Kiowa – tall, burly, well bellied, with olive skin and a ponytail of heavy, glossy black hair.
She gestured past him at the big copper hood arrangement. "What's that thing?"
"Negative-air-pressure hood," he said. "Draws up nasty fumes and all kinds of other stuff we don't want getting loose. We do a lot of metalwork here. I draw and paint, myself." He handed her a business card, printed with a pen-and-ink drawing of some kind of Goth goblin girl with pointed ears and a definite attitude.
She laughed. She liked him. She liked the place, and the energy of the people. "This is very good. Do you have some work on display here?"
He nodded at the door behind her that led into the display room she had first seen from outside. "In there. But look all over the place. We have a lot of talent here."
He gestured deeper into the building. Past the partition at the other side of the metal shop lay a much bigger room. The music came from there, as did most of the other party noise. Though the band was hidden from view, Annja saw paintings and drawings hung on the walls.
"Thanks," she said. "I will. Where would I find Byron Mondragón's work?"
"Through that door right behind you, then through another door on the right. It's great stuff. He's a great guy, a good friend of mine. Although I hate him."
His big smile belied the latter. Annja could not refrain from asking, "Why?"
"He's too damned young to be so good!"
"Is he here? I'd like to meet him."
"So would everybody else. But because you're you, I'll see what I can do," he said with a wink.
****
Although Annja felt drawn into the back room and Mondragón's Holy Child paintings as if by a magnet, she resisted. Exercising her willpower was all to the good, she told herself. And if that's just token rebellion against my destiny, she thought defiantly, then good for me. I didn't ask for the sword. I just wanted to do archaeology.
Telling herself to simmer down, she took in the art on display. She looked at paintings, drawings, small sculptures of wire or stone. She was surprised by how good most of it was. Randy's artwork mostly followed the lines of his business card, pen-and-ink cheesecake. But it was cheesecake with an edge. The scantily clad females, some with pointed ears and little wings whom she presumed were punk fairies, displayed not just sexiness but a definite insouciance. As if they'd as soon kick your ass as look at you – and could. It wasn't exactly to Annja's taste. But it definitely made her smile.
She moved on. She had visited many of the great art museums in Europe and New York City. While she didn't doubt the cognoscenti would want to subject her to her famous predecessor's fate for daring to believe so, she thought to see much of the same inspiration here in this desert backwater. If that wasn't an oxymoron. She'd never claim to be an expert of fine art. But she was endlessly fascinated with the human drive to express vision with skill – whether in the caves of Lascaux, the studios of Renaissance Florence or here.
I don't know if it's art, she thought, amused at herself, but I like what it stands for.
She found herself staring intently at a huge photograph on the back wall. It was very strange. It looked for all the world like a winter snowscape, with snow dusted or clumped on bare tree limbs, drifted on the ground around dry grass bunches. Except it wasn't white. It was orange – and glowing.
It was, in fact, fire. Embers, actually, although if she looked closely she could see little blue ghost wisps of flame dancing above the brighter concentrations. It gave her goose bumps.
"I know the feeling," a voice said from behind her right shoulder. "It kind of creeps me out, too. Makes me think of a winter wonderland in Hell."
She jumped, turned. A young man stood there. He was just taller than her, wispy, with almost blue-pale skin that made the blackness of his eyes and wavy, slightly wild hair especially intense. He was dressed in black pants and white shirt, as if he'd just shucked suit coat and tie.
But for an obvious but indefinable Latino cast to his features, he might have stepped from a Beardsley drawing. Annja thought he was beautiful.
"I'm sorry," he said, smiling. "I didn't mean to startle you. I'm Byron Mondragón. My friend Randy said you were looking for me."
"Yes," she said, returning his smile with interest. "I'm so pleased to meet you. I'm Annja Creed."
"It's my pleasure, Ms. Creed," he said. "Have you seen my work?"
"I haven't yet had the pleasure."
He gestured toward the next room. "Would you like to?"
It was what she had come for, of course. She preceded him through the door. The ska band had finished their set and were filing past the door to the main room in their Goodwill sports coats and little hats, carrying their instrument cases.
The Alibi piece had characterized Mondragón as something of a child prodigy. He was certainly kicking up a sensation. Annja was dubious herself. The pieces pictured in the article struck her as tacky, just a step up from black-velvet paintings. She felt trepidation. She'd liked the young sensation on sight, with his pleasant, ever so slightly diffident manner. He was a far cry from the social-lion artists she was familiar with from the East Coast.
There were a half dozen of his paintings displayed, propped in a darkened corner of the room with a tracked spotlight overhead focused on each. Her first look at them in person was a disappointment. They're amateurish, she thought, and wondered if he might be no more than a beneficiary of the global attention drawn to the Santo Niño flap. Did he just win the lottery on this?
She glanced at him sidelong. He hung back. Though he maintained calm well enough, she could tell he was on tenterhooks. She opened her mouth to lie...
Then she found her eye sliding back to the middle painting. It was the largest, at least three feet high in its blond-wood frame. It was a conventional enough representation, the usual Holy Child portrait, with his archaic outfit, his staff, his little basket. She found herself noticing the intricacy of the woody vines the artist had used to frame his central figure, the detail, unobtrusive yet meticulous. They drew her attention gradually inward to the child himself.
The eyes, huge and dark, no longer looked so clown-waif tacky. They seemed to stare deep inside her, responding to her, recognizing her for who she really was, approving. Forgiving.
Odd, she thought. The skin, pale cheeks blushed faintly pink, seemed alive. It was as if she wer
e looking at a real being through a window. Despite the lifelike quality the painting was not photorealistic. It went beyond that. It transcended the appearance of reality while seeming to reveal...truth.
"It's fantastic," her mouth said before she even knew she meant it.
"Thanks," he said.
She looked at the other paintings. Each had a similar impact, but no two quite the same. She found them utterly compelling. She realized she was looking not just at remarkable skill for an artist so young, but authentic genius. He somehow used an idiom of bad taste and cutesiness to reach down and grab the viewer's soul. The semblance of vulgarity actually induced the viewer to let down her guard.
She realized she was holding her breath. After she set it free, she turned to the young man and said, "It's amazing how you've managed to capture such an overwhelming sense of innocence."
"Thank you," he said with a self-deprecating laugh. "I had a good model."
She raised a brow at that. A woman of about Annja's age, height and build suddenly appeared at Byron's elbow. She was pretty, without makeup, with big pale gray eyes, and hair dyed into a rainbow cockatiel crest. Had Annja been insecure about her own appearance she might have hated her on sight.
"Hi," she said to Annja. "Please forgive me, and thanks so much for coming out and supporting us, but I have to steal our guest of honor. Byron, the Travel Channel video crew is here."
Byron gave Annja a helpless shrug. "I enjoyed meeting you, Ms. Creed. I'd better go."
"Can I have your card?" Annja asked. Suddenly her mind was crowding with questions. She feared losing the chance to ask them.
"Sure." He gave her one embossed with a thumb-size reproduction of the main Santo Niño image.
Out in the main space a middle-aged man with a knobby face and disheveled russet hair had commenced playing an acoustic guitar. He sang a song that seemed, implausibly, to have to do with hunting tigers. A large, mostly young crowd was clapping and singing along on the choruses.
"Billie here does some great stuff," Byron said, nodding to the rainbow-haired woman. "There's some of her paintings hung in the main room. You should check them out."
Billie patted his cheek. "He's sweet, as well as pretty," she said. She firmly grasped his elbow. "Now quit stalling and come with me." With a last, apologetic smile over her shoulder to Annja she hustled him off into the large space.
Regretfully, Annja watched him go. Some of the crowd in the next room began elbowing each other and pointing. Byron Mondragón was clearly the man of the hour.
Annja's amber-green eyes, scanning right across the crowd, slammed to a halt and tracked back. She focused on a suddenly familiar form.
Father Robert Godin was wearing his scuffed bombardier's jacket open over his black silk shirt and dog collar. The Jesuit was smiling and talking to someone. He didn't seem to notice her. He had the friendly, easy face of an old hound dog. But his eyes were the eyes of a cat.
"Son of a bitch," Annja said. Half under her breath. And half not. She didn't really care if he heard her. She smelled a rat.
She turned, pushed back into the front gallery, then out into the main room. A quick glance into the main room showed no sign of Godin. She didn't waste much time searching. She felt a sudden strong desire to be gone from there.
I knew I should never trust a Jesuit, she thought. Why is he following me?
Outside it had come down almost pure night, with only a bloody line along the horizon above the river, some purple streaks in the sky and magenta underbrushings on a few clumps of cloud overhead. She made her way upstream of a fresh crowd streaming into the compound and headed out the narrow half-concealed gate right onto Broadway.
She strode down the half block as fast as her long legs could carry her without appearing to hurry. She wondered now at her reaction. After all, Godin had expressed an interest in the Holy Child. Indeed, he had given her the impression he had a professional interest, as it were. He might have come to Chiaroscuro for the same purpose she had. Quite innocently.
Innocent, she thought. She snorted. A Jesuit. Right.
She turned right on the side street and walked quickly toward her parked Honda. Fishing in her jeans pocket for the key, she heard a car's tires squeal as it turned off Broadway. Its engine snarl crescendoed as it accelerated behind her.
Without knowing why, she launched herself in a long dive, just clearing the ornamental but still perilous spear tips topping a wrought-iron fence sprouting from a hip-high wall of whitewashed brick.
As she fell to the neat but dry lawn behind it the white front of the cinder-block house strobed yellow as an automatic weapon yammered at her back.
Chapter 12
Glass exploded from behind security bars on the house's big front window. The slats of the venetian blinds behind made musical twangs as bullets plucked them like strings.
The car roared by. Cautiously Annja raised her head. Her heart hammered in her chest, and her pulse was drumming in her ears. She hardly believed in drive-by shootings in the real world. She couldn't imagine gangbangers targeting her.
Unless the shooting was connected with the recent attacks on her in Mexico City and the none-too-distant campus of UNM. But that's conspiracy theory! she insisted.
And this was lethal and immediate reality. The vehicle was an American muscle car of some kind, low-slung and painted dark. She saw its brake lights go on just short of the next corner. Then it accelerated backward toward her.
For a moment she lay frozen, unsure what to do. The car screeched to a stop right in front of the house. The doors swung open. Young men in long plaid shirts piled out. They carried guns. Serious guns. Short, blocky MAC-10s with stub barrels, shotguns with barrels sawed back to the end of the pump action.
"Where'd she go?" the driver asked in Spanish.
"I think she went over the wall," the one getting out the passenger door replied.
A whistle came from the direction of Broadway. Annja looked that way to see a small knot of young men rounding the corner from the north. In the shine of the streetlight she saw they were similarly attired to the five who had emerged from the car. And similarly armed.
Gotta go, Annja thought as the thugs from the car approached the front fence with cocky assurance.
She leaped up and sprinted east, down the block away from the traffic on Broadway. The lights and the witnesses drew her like a siren song. But the second contingent of bangers had her thoroughly blockaded.
A dry rosebush clutched a low chain-link fence on the far side of the house's empty driveway. Annja was hurdling wall and bush before her hunters even reacted by shouting startled curses and raking the house front with random gunfire.
On the far side of the fence she immediately tripped over a hunched ceramic bunny. She went sprawling with a yelp of alarm. Then she jumped up and was off again. Her right ankle hurt ferociously but nothing seemed broken. The leg held, in any event.
Bullets cracked past her. She heard more glass breaking. A motion-sensor light came on from the porch to her right and was instantly shattered, most likely by a stray shot.
She vaulted another low fence. The block sloped slowly upward before her. With her long legs and natural speed she was quickly distancing her pursuers.
There was no question of charging this much firepower, sword or no. Her only hope was to make herself as poor a target as possible while pulling away from the cursing, puffing gangbangers. She continued running at top speed, dodging garden gnomes and plaster Virgin of Guadalupe shrines and jumping fences and hedges.
It finally occurred to somebody that she couldn't outrun a car any more than she could bullets. A second vehicle snarled around the corner and whipped past her, a pimped little Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution with a huge spoiler and pointy tribal-tattoo decals on the sides. It skidded to a stop a couple of houses ahead of her. Three more thugs leaped out.
The driver leveled another sawed-back pump gun at her from the hip. At that range the pellet spread gave him a chanc
e to hit her even with lousy aim. She immediately launched herself in a long, low dive, past a front porch and between a garage door and the front of an old Ford Taurus.
Annja scraped elbows and knees on concrete. She was grateful for long pants and a jacket. Her left knee banged painfully on the pavement but didn't buckle when she came up to a crouch with a juniper hedge right in front of her, separating the drive from the next yard.
She called forth the sword. A banger appeared at the end of the driveway. He fired a MAC-10 at her. Bullets skipped off concrete and punched through the metal garage door as she ducked down in front of the Taurus. By chance she was in the safest location possible in the immediate circumstances. The little pointy 9 mm slugs would never make it through the big car's engine block.
Her attacker still tried. He held the piece up above his head two-handed, firing downward at a shallow slant. Bullets went into the car body through the roof, sent the windshield cascading away in glittering particles, thumped through the hood to clang into the engine. None came close to the crouching Annja.
The gunfire broke off as the magazine emptied. With no notion where his two buddies were, but certain the rest of the pack was catching up quick, Annja moved fast. She darted around the driver's side of the sedan and charged straight back just as the banger hopped out on the same side into a straddle-legged stance, screaming and firing his reloaded machine pistol from the hip.
She dived beneath his bullets. She smelled burned propellant and lubricant. Oddly she heard nothing. She rolled up with the yellow muzzle flare dazzling her eyes and fast-flung primer fragments stinging her cheeks. She swung the sword down.
