The Triumph of Death

by Jason Henderson

  Alex heard the others running behind him with the alarms still blaring. The man got through the door, and Alex moved fast to get in behind him. In the stairwell, the man ran up the first flight of stairs and started to turn as Alex took off after him. The door closed, and Alex suddenly heard pounding on the metal exterior as the others reached it, unable to pass.

  “Hey! Stop! Who are you?” Alex cried.

  The custodian turned at the first landing and swept around with the mop, catching Alex in the chest. Alex felt the air rush from his lungs as the mop bashed him back against the wall. The man let the mop drop as Alex kicked it aside and jumped, grabbing for the man’s ankles.

  The man went down silently, already rolling. He was an expert, and as he spun Alex’s grasp weakened. He kicked up, smashing Alex in the ear as he went.

  Within seconds, they were up again and running. They covered three flights before Alex heard the first-floor door opening down below, the security guards finally producing their own key cards.

  The man reached the top of the stairs, swiped his card at a door, and pushed, running. Alex went after him, this time barely catching the door as it started to close.

  They were on the roof of the main hall of the Prado Museum. Chill morning air swept over the gravel as Alex picked up speed.

  “What are you doing? Who are you?” Alex called again. I can run just as fast as you can. He didn’t have a go package with him or he would have seriously considered shooting the guy with a wooden bolt. But that didn’t seem right. Alex did have climbing gear in the tear-away lining of his jacket; maybe he could just grapple the guy. But no, that might injure the stranger’s neck or something, and murder was not on Alex’s list of ambitions. Vampires were dead already and didn’t count, but this man was definitely human.

  They rounded a rooftop utility building, and Alex took in the breadth of Retiro Park beyond the building, a carpet of trees with a huge pond, just across the lawn of the museum.

  And there was a flat, colorful object flapping next to the edge of the roof. It was hard to recognize until the guy stopped next to it and began to reach down. No way.

  The custodian crouched for a moment, grabbed a long, curved aluminum tube, and lifted it. An entire hang glider, thirteen feet across, swept up around him.

  “Oh, come on!” Alex shouted as he tried to close the distance.

  The custodian looked back wordlessly and leapt. For a moment he began to fall, and then Alex watched from the edge of the building as the glider caught the air, taking the custodian out over the lawns, swooping up and disappearing behind the trees of Retiro Park.

  Alex put his hands on his knees. You have got to be kidding. “It’s not that easy, Quiet Man.” He could run back down the stairs, but the doors were liable to give him trouble. Alex studied his surroundings, feeling each second of indecision tick away his chances of catching the stranger.

  They were four stories up, and the wall was slick stone, leading down at intervals to french doors with small balconies. Perhaps he could climb down. But it would take too much time.

  No, no. He looked out across the lawn and saw a light pole about thirty yards away. He reached into his Polidorium-issued jacket and pulled back a Velcro flap, producing a small hand-held grappling gun. It had a miniature hook and an air tube, but he wasn’t sure if it would reach far enough.

  He brought up the grappling hook and aimed at one of the arms of the light pole.

  “It won’t reach,” Sangster said, running up behind him. Alex heard the rest of them coming now, too. “That’s fifty feet at least and that thing won’t shoot past thirty—plus there’s gravity.”

  Alex lowered his arm, consciously willing the surge of adrenaline to drain away. “Who the heck was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Sangster said. “But he left a message.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “They will allow us one hour with the painting,” Sangster said as they stepped through a heavy metal door and into a vault of stone and steel. Alex found Astrid and Vienna standing next to glass cases displaying more jewels than he had ever seen. “This is the jewel collection of the Grand Dauphin Louis, son of Felipe V,” Sangster explained. “The vault is open to visitors during the day.”

  A white rolling table on wheels sat in the center of the room with a heavy wooden cover over it. It looked like a gurney. “Is that the painting?” asked Alex.

  “Yes.”

  “What are we doing with it?”

  “Scanning it.”

  “Hasn’t it been scanned?” Alex said. “It’s in every art book we’ve looked at.”

  “This is not your ordinary scanner,” Sangster replied.

  Tomás the curator and Minister Cazorla conferred for a moment, and then Tomás turned to an electronic keypad on the wall at a second door in the back. A glass case of rubies, diamonds, and gold swung open slowly to reveal a circular metal door seven feet high. The curator tapped a long code into another keypad, and then Alex heard a series of heavy clicking sounds buried deep in metal.

  With a pneumatic hiss the second door opened inward, swinging wide to reveal a vault. Sangster and Cazorla held either end of the gurney and lifted it over the lip of the door.

  The room within was sterile and cold, and in the center stood a tall frame that looked like an airport metal detector. The frame itself had four spindly metal arms half folded, hanging there like the door expected to defend itself. Tomás looked back at the gurney and pressed a button on the inside of the frame. The frame widened slowly, sliding along tracks in the ground, until Tomás seemed satisfied it was wide enough.

  He nodded to the two men and they rolled the gurney the rest of the way, stopped it at the edge of the frame, and slowly removed the wooden cover. Now the five-foot-wide painting lay between the metal posts, naked on the table.

  When Tomás touched a button on the side, Alex heard a churning sound and watched as the painting lifted slowly off the table, borne by countless tiny Plexiglas posts, until the painting seemed to float a half inch off the tabletop.

  “You’re making a 3-D image of the painting.”

  Sangster nodded at Alex’s guess as the robot arms unfolded and began to sweep slowly back and forth, all the way down the table and back up and over, again and again, streams of red laser light faintly visible from the glowing edges of the arms. The arms crawled like a spider over the painting as the frame slowly moved along its tracks.

  “We need to know everything,” Sangster said. “What might be painted under it and what might be hidden in it. This is the best way we have of capturing the entire painting.” He turned and pointed to a display screen on the wall behind the frame, which was now showing the entire Triumph of Death at twice its normal size. Alex was once again filled with horror by the images of the people with their mouths open, screaming. But this time he could see the countless brushstrokes.

  Alex saw a shimmer coming from the painting again. “You said the guy left a message.”

  Sangster nodded and asked Cazorla something, who turned to Tomás. The curator spoke and Cazorla translated as he directed their attention to the screen.

  “This is the painting. We can display different layers of it already. We’re just getting more details now.” The image shifted, and the entire painting seemed to lift toward them and away, revealing white and gray pencil strokes underneath. “These are the original pencil drawings underneath, the guides that Señor Bruegel used.”

  Now the layer of colors and brushstrokes lowered back over the pencil marks and seemed to recede. A new image came into view in the lower right corner, looking like spray paint on the screen—the mark left by the custodian, a simple X. Tomás fiddled with the controls to sharpen the image. “This is this morning’s addition to the work,” Cazorla said, sounding annoyed.

  “We saw it the moment your man ran,” Sangster told Alex.

  “X marks the spot?”

  “We’ll be able to remove it, gracias a dios,” Cazorla said. “It is a ver
y mild hair spray.”

  Alex looked at Sangster. “I don’t get what this is about. The custodian was not one of the Scholomance. Not Hexen. And he wasn’t an amateur. And he left this just as we got here. So what is the message?”

  “We’re not sure, but he was careful not to damage the painting,” Sangster said.

  Tomás suddenly let out an agitated curse.

  The curator waved a hand, looking at a computer screen nearby, and then sent the image to the main screen.

  The camera zoomed in again on the corner of the painting below the X, and the X lifted away as the curator dismissed that layer. Now Alex saw two human figures, a man and a woman singing as a skeleton crept up behind them. “No es azul,” Tomás said in what sounded like shock.

  “It’s not blue,” Vienna translated from over by the wall.

  “What does that mean?” Alex asked.

  Tomás spoke rapidly in Spanish, and Cazorla said, “He says there’s a layer of paint, very thin, on the woman’s dress. It’s—you see, it has always been blue.”

  “And it is blue,” Alex said, confused, looking at the woman, whose dress was indeed a blue-colored satin.

  “But the blue is new,” Minister Cazorla said. “Or, not so new, but newer than the painting.”

  Tomás shifted his hand in the air as if estimating and spoke while Vienna translated. “He says it’s a modern pigment, probably less than fifty years old.” The curator tapped a few buttons and, in the computer image on the screen, the layer of blue color on the dress lifted off and away.

  The woman’s dress was a sort of burnt red underneath.

  They all stood staring. “So,” Alex said, “someone changed the red dress to blue.”

  “Right,” Cazorla answered. “That is stunning. This is an amazing discovery.”

  “But just so we’re clear,” Alex said, “this alteration that the custodian marked for us was probably done fifty years ago.”

  “Give or take.”

  A bell chimed and the sweeping arms retracted themselves and lay silent. Tomás was still enrapt at the image of the blue dress. But it didn’t get them any closer to stopping the Triumph that the Queen had in mind.

  “That’s it,” Sangster said. “We’ll take the image and look at it. We need to go.”

  “Wait.” Alex gestured toward Astrid. “She said maybe she could get something off it. Can she touch the painting?”

  The curator and Minister Cazorla conferred briefly, and then Cazorla nodded to Sangster. “The corner flap only. Not on the surface of the painting.”

  Astrid nodded and asked them all to stand back. She approached the painting as though it were a patient in a hospital bed. For a long time she waited at the edge of it, her bare hand at her side, her fingers twitching.

  Who was this girl? Why was she here?

  Suddenly Astrid’s hand shot out and she touched the edge and closed her eyes, the many peculiar pigtails in her hair quivering above her thin neck. She whispered, “An assignment. A secret contract to make a painting. The master painter, traveling in his peasant’s hood, left in the middle of the night, disappeared to a place unknown to him, a castle of great black towers, somewhere far from home. His patrons told him what they wanted, showed him visions of the Triumph, and rewarded him well.”

  Astrid shook her head and then let go of the painting.

  “So it’s confirmed.” Sangster nodded slowly. “The painting was to be a guide.”

  The team had a mystery now. They also had a confused curator eager to get everything back to normal.

  Within half an hour, they were far from the arriving museum crowds, and at the palatial pensione of Vienna Cazorla.

  CHAPTER 12

  “At this time of day, there is nobody out.” Vienna dragged Alex and Astrid to one of the sets of french doors in the living room of her pensione. She opened the doors, and they stepped out onto the balcony. Alex pulled his jacket a little tighter as the breeze blew in. The mid-morning was cold and gray, and below, a great square was empty except for a newsstand where an attendant rearranged magazines and helped himself to a Fresca from one of the refrigerator units.

  Astrid looked around. “I thought these kinds of apartments—uh, pensiones—were usually hotels.”

  “This one was.” Vienna nodded. “But when we moved from Seville, my mother fell in love with it.”

  The pensione that Vienna Cazorla shared with her parents took up two entire floors of an ancient building in the Chueca neighborhood in Madrid. Vienna’s mother was traveling to visit her brother up north, leaving the place to just Vienna and her dad. It was a cavernous apartment of sculptures and fresh flowers, and Alex heard parrots talking somewhere. He had the sense he could get lost here.

  Behind Alex, Sangster and Armstrong were turning Vienna’s dining table into an op center. “Okay,” Sangster called.

  Alex turned to see that Sangster had found butcher paper and had laid it out across the table, while Armstrong had a few Polidorium computers plugged in and sitting to the side. The teacher was writing key words with a marker.

  “Where did you find butcher paper?” Vienna asked.

  “At the butcher’s in the square.” Sangster underlined the word CUSTODIAN. “Your dad pointed it out to me when he went back to work.” He paused. “Okay. Let’s talk about the janitor.”

  “Well, he shows up for one reason and one reason only,” said Alex. “Doesn’t want to fight, doesn’t want to talk. All he does is put an X on the painting.”

  “Exactly marking a place where the painting has been altered,” said Astrid.

  “Is there something important about the woman in the blue dress?” Alex asked.

  Armstrong was tapping away and stopped to scan an article on the painting. She held up a hand. “They’ve actually been written about. There’s a poem—”

  “Plath,” Sangster said. “Sylvia Plath, yeah, it was a…that’s right, she wrote a poem called “Two Views of a Cadaver Room” about the couple in the corner. She was impressed with them because they’re blissfully unaware of their approaching death.”

  “It’s a common thesis,” Armstrong offered.

  “Yeah, but what does it mean?” Alex wrung his hands. “Be of good cheer? Be blissfully unaware? Don’t be blissfully unaware?”

  “And, of course, there’s the altered color itself,” Astrid said. “From red, a color of passion, to blue, a color of…what? Cold? Death?”

  “We don’t need an alteration to remind us to think about death,” Alex said. “It’s called The Triumph of Death.”

  “No, the alteration has to be a pointer to something beyond the painting. Something we would miss otherwise. Someone made this alteration in the last fifty years and someone else marked it for us today. Whoever they are, they are leading us to something.” Sangster sat down, running his fingers through his hair. “Everybody get reading. We’ll break for lunch in an hour.”

  They dug into everything they could find on The Triumph of Death. Essays, articles, poems, tribute paintings by modern artists. Alex knew what they were doing—they were swimming through details deliberately, waiting for something to pop. Outside, Alex was aware of the ebb and flow of traffic, bursts of people followed by near-desertion of the streets. By noon the plaza below was filled with people.

  Just as Alex felt his brain turning to Jell-O, he heard a knock at the door and Vienna ushered in a full meal, a paella of rice, scallops, chicken, and shrimp, with red wine for the agents. “Take a break,” Sangster ordered.

  Alex wolfed down his paella, suddenly aware of his hunger, as Astrid and Vienna chatted.

  Astrid asked Vienna a thousand questions, drawing out the girl’s history and her time at Glenarvon-LaLaurie and even a hint of her dark adventure with the vampires. When Vienna grew uncomfortable, Alex saw that Astrid expertly charmed her, touching her shoulder and turning her attention to the pensione. Vienna had a great deal of art of her own, but Alex recalled that Vienna was a writer—or at least had been produc
ing manga with Minhi back at school before her sudden departure.

  “What do you write now?” Astrid asked. They had risen and wandered about the room, and Alex joined them.

  “What does everyone write?” Vienna’s eyes crinkled. “Some poetry. I’m trying to understand short stories but they’re maddening. It’s a curse that there are so many great Spanish short story writers to contend with.”

  Vienna stopped at the window, looking down at the flower vendors on the streets below. “The first time I found out about your strange double life,” she said suddenly, cocking her head at Alex, “we were standing at a window like this.”

  Alex did remember. “Yeah, Elle was below, waiting.” It seemed like a long time ago.

  Vienna shivered. “I think we need a fire to warm things up in here.”

  At one stucco wall next to a case of crystal, a low fireplace sat with a redbrick stoop, the entire fire and chimney recessed behind the stucco. Vienna dropped primly onto a settee by the fireplace. She turned a gas key in the wall and a pilot light ignited a small stack of wood. She stoked the flames lightly.

  Astrid looked up at a high-pitched cheeping sound from the chimney. “What is that?”

  “Birds—chimney swifts.” Vienna adjusted the logs on the fire. “They’re dear little things.”

  Alex joined Vienna by the fire and rubbed his face.

  “Your friend follows you everywhere,” Vienna whispered. Alex looked back and saw that indeed Astrid had moved a few steps in his direction.

  Alex glanced sideways at Vienna’s scarf and whispered, “So how have you been? Is that thing still…”

  Vienna’s eyes reflected the fire, but she didn’t look at him as she smiled. “Alive? Yes. But it no longer holds my head on.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” Alex rubbed his hands before the fire. “I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye. I’m sorry for what happened at the ball. I’m sorry our date got all…screwed up.”