by Estelle Ryan
“I’m so sorry, Genevieve.” He stopped in front of me. “No one should ever have to experience that.”
“I’m unharmed.” I didn’t know what else to say as Phillip studied me.
He appeared to come to a conclusion and rolled his shoulders lightly to remove the tension that had built up. “I can see that and I’m relieved.”
“This is a shockingly bad copy of Uccello’s St George and the Dragon.” Colin was standing in front of an easel in the corner of the room and turned around. Distaste was evident in the way his levator labii superioris muscle raised his top lip. “The painting is inspired by a legend that goes back to tenth- or eleventh-century Cappadocia, where Saint George killed a dragon that terrorised a small town. This dragon had been poisoning the lake that provided the town with drinking water. The locals fed the dragon two sheep every day to stop it from doing so, but then ran out of sheep and started feeding it their children.
“One day, the king’s daughter was chosen to be fed to the dragon. Saint George rode by when she was standing next to the lake awaiting her fate. Long story short, he injured the dragon very badly and took it on a leash into town. He then kindly offered to kill the dragon if everyone converted to Christianity and was baptised.
“Thousands of people converted, including the king, and the manipulating saint killed the dragon. Uccello is only one of many masters who painted this legend. Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Peter Paul Rubens are a few others. Of course it’s also been forged many times in various levels of mastery. But this?” He pointed at the painting behind him. “This is a bad copy.”
I walked towards the painting, but stopped when I was next to Alain Vernet. He was looking at the painting, emotional pain and grave concern clear on his face. He looked older than when I’d met him seven months ago. Lines formed by the corrugator supercilii and frontalis muscles because of frowning were deeper, his hair significantly greyer. Combined with the dark shadows under his eyes, I concluded that he had not experienced a lot of inner peace since his biological son had been killed and his adopted son had turned against his country and against his father.
I thought of how Phillip would approach this and took a deep breath. “Hello, Monsieur Vernet.”
“Doctor Lenard.” He pushed himself out of his chair. “Thank you for responding so quickly. I really don’t know what to do about this.”
“What makes you think Emad sent this to you?”
“A feeling.” His smile was sad and resigned. “Just a silly old man’s feeling.”
“You’re not old.” I didn’t even try to hide the stern tone in my voice. “And you’re not silly. You’re sad because your sons betrayed their country and everything you taught them.”
“Genevieve.” Phillip’s soft warning brought even more sadness to Alain’s face.
“No, Phillip. She’s right.” He sat back down. “Emad might not be my blood son, but he’s all I have left. Yet I know that I lost him many years ago. Most likely when he became a spy for France. He was such a great child. Such a happy child.”
No one spoke. Alain’s sadness affected everyone, even Manny. Vinnie reacted as usual to situations that distressed people, especially the vulnerable—he became angry. His nostrils flared and his stance widened. With effort he unclenched his fists and leaned against the doorframe, his attempt to appear relaxed not successful.
“He was a gentle child,” Alain said softly as if to himself. “He was devastated when his mother died and his biological father’s family didn’t want him. When Claude and I arrived, he immediately took a liking to Claude and they played for hours with the action figures Claude had brought with him. Emad’s family never gave him any toys. And when he came back with us, he was so happy to have his own room, play with Claude and be wanted.”
Alain blinked and a tear rolled down his cheek. He angrily wiped it away with the back of his hand. “Claude was always the difficult one. When you found out that he was smuggling goods and he was involved in that radiation threat, I wasn’t surprised. How many times did I bail him out of jail? Too many times. He never learned any lessons.
“But my Emad? He was such a good boy. And a brilliant lawyer. Brilliant enough for the CIA to take note and recruit him to spy for them. I often wonder if that was his undoing or whether he was also just a bad seed. Does the fault lie with me? Did I fail as a parent and now I’m suffering the consequences?”
No one answered his question. I considered it rhetorical, but the desperation around his eyes propelled me to answer. “There are many unanswered questions about the outcome of child rearing. There have been countless cases of children suffering from emotional and physical neglect and abuse, yet they grow up to be psychologically balanced individuals who rise above their circumstances and become great successes.
“The converse is also true. Children who grow up in emotionally and physically safe and stable homes can grow up to become abusive or even ruthless killers. The range in between is wide and fraught with variables. It is without a doubt that you made mistakes as a parent, but my research has shown me that there is no guaranteed outcome to raising children.”
Phillip’s expression was grateful as he smiled gently at me. He turned to Alain. “Genevieve is right. You did the best you could, Alain. You can’t hold yourself responsible for the decisions they made as adults.”
Alain just shook his head. Manny walked to the painting and scowled at it. “What did you say this was, Frey?”
“A bad copy of Uccello’s St George and the Dragon. Have you not been listening to anything I said?”
“Hmm.” Manny leaned forward, shook his head and straightened. “Yeah. No. I don’t see any George or any dragon. Doc, maybe you should come and look at this. To me, it just looks like the artwork from a year six pupil.”
I stepped to the painting and stood next to Colin. He was pinching his chin between his thumb and forefinger, his head tilted to one side as he studied the artwork. I turned my attention to the painting and blinked.
I had no expertise in analysing the skills of an artist, but I felt comfortable categorising this as undeveloped. To the left was a stick figure that I assumed was a woman. She held something in her hand that connected her to something to her left that could be any kind of monstrous animal. But since I knew the name of the painting, I once again assumed that this was the dragon. To their right was another stick figure on what I assumed to be a horse. Even in my limited knowledge of art, I would never have insulted any abstract artists by suggesting this fell in that genre. It was simply inept.
Something about this painting registered in my brain, but did not filter through to my cerebral cortex—my thinking brain. I stared at it, hoping for whatever anomaly my subconscious had noted to come to the fore. It didn’t.
Conversation flowed around me. Manny, Alain and Phillip were speculating about the meaning of the painting. I stopped listening to their uninformed and amateur guesses at the psychology behind the colours and style used. Instead I started mentally playing Mozart’s Symphony no.31 in D major.
As I listened to another rushing scale, my eyes narrowed on the horse. The strings continued, but I turned the volume down in my head as I searched the rest of the painting for a pattern. I found it. It was hidden all over the painting.
I turned to Colin, who had not moved. “What do you see?”
“I don’t know. Apart from the obvious, that is.” He inhaled deeply, shook his head and looked at me. His eyes widened when he registered my expression. “What did you find?”
“Show me the original painting first.”
Colin reached into his trouser pocket. “Will the smartphone screen be big enough for you?”
“It will suffice.” I waited patiently until Colin found the painting online and handed his phone to me. I tilted the phone to eliminate the glare from the overhead lights on the screen. The painting on the small screen bore little resemblance to the one on the easel in front of me.
The difference was staggering. The only simila
rities were in the princess and the dragon being to the left of the painting and St George on his horse to the right. In the original, the dragon’s head was lowered to the ground, his head low in submission. The princess controlled him with a leash and St George defeated him with a lance, blood dripping from the dragon’s wound. In the background behind St George, a storm was building and the princess and the dragon were standing in front of a cave.
“Should I get a tablet in here?” Manny asked.
“No. This is...” My mind was distracted by what I was seeing. I zoomed in on the photo on Colin’s phone and compared it to the juvenile-looking painting on the easel.
Colin leaned in to see what was on the screen, then also looked at the painting. By the time I confirmed a fourth pattern, Colin’s breathing changed. “In my life.”
“What?” Manny got up and walked towards us.
“I would not have seen it.” Colin shook his head. “If it had been on an original artwork, maybe. But on this? Wow.”
“What the bleeding hell are you babbling about?” Manny stood on Colin’s other side, not crowding me. “Talk, Frey.”
“It seems like Emad has cleverly disguised letters in his painting.” Colin pointed at the point of the princess’ cloak. “See the lines that look like they are folds in her cloak? That is an elongated ‘V’ and that is an ‘I’. That one is also an ‘I’. Oh, wait. There’s another one.”
“Oh, my.” Alain got up and sat down again. “When they were children, I often played Scrabble with them. The boys loved it and were both really good at it. They got a bit bored with it in their early teens, so I found a way to make it more interesting. We would hide letters everywhere in the house. It had to be in a clever place, not a sock drawer.” His smile was sad. “Emad was the best at finding smart hiding places and also finding the letters that were hidden. On Mondays and Tuesdays we would hide the letters, Wednesdays and Thursdays were for finding the letters and Friday was the day we got to use the letters we found to have a head start at making words.”
“Well, we’re not going to make a word with one ‘V’ and two ‘I’s.” Manny looked at me. “Any more letters, Doc?”
“So far I’ve found three bundles of letters.” I pointed at the top of the painting, just right of the centre. “In the original, the clouds are further to the right, but here you can see an ‘I’ and two ‘X’s’.”
“Want to tell me what you think this means?” Manny’s tone was the one he used when he was losing patience with me.
“Not yet. I want to make sure I have all the numbers.” I turned my attention back to the two paintings. I don’t know how long I stood there comparing the original to the badly copied masterpiece. I turned to share the conclusion I’d reached and my eyes caught the fresh coffee on the table.
“You found it all, Doc?” Manny pushed a steaming mug towards me.
“Yes.” I took a sip of the coffee and exhaled in pleasure. “There are six batches of letters. I believe these are Roman numerals. There are only X’s, I’s and V’s on Emad’s painting. On their own they can’t form words. But as Roman numerals, they might have value.”
“What value, Doc?”
I turned to Alain. “Did you play any mathematical games with your children?”
“They didn’t enjoy number games. Scrabble was our thing.”
When I was at university, an acquaintance had invited me to play Scrabble with them. I had liked the concept and had excelled in combining letters to form words. An unpleasant argument had broken out when I had formed a fourth word they had never heard of. They had been resentful of my vocabulary as well as my intolerance of their ignorance. I hadn’t received a second invitation.
“And you played no other games?” Phillip asked. “Maybe some other word games?”
“We did, but like I said, Scrabble was something that bonded us for many years.” Alain rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Just before all this insanity started, Emad uploaded a Scrabble-type app to my phone. I never used it. It just didn’t seem right to be doing something that reminded me of the time when they were still good boys. The time before both my sons became traitors and criminals.”
“What numbers did you find, Jenny?” Colin glanced at the painting.
“If I put them in the order they appear next to each other, it would be XXXIV, XXI, XIII, VIII, V and III.” A small smile pulled at the corners of my mouth when Colin’s eyes widened. “You recognise this.”
“Yes.” Excitement lifted the corners of his mouth. “What do you think this means?”
“Doc! Frey!” Manny slapped his palm on the table. “What are you talking about?”
“The Fibonacci sequence.” Phillip raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “Is there a possibility that it could be something else, Genevieve?”
“There is always that possibility, but since those are the only numbers that appear in the painting”—I drew a spiral with my finger in the air—“and since they appear in what would be the golden spiral, I doubt that it could be anything other than thirty-four, twenty-one, thirteen, eight, five and three.”
“The sequence is not complete though.” Colin leaned back in his chair. “We still need two ones.”
“I don’t want to speculate on what we don’t have or why we don’t have it. I’d rather focus on these numbers.” This excited me.
“For the love of all the saints, would someone please tell me what this Fibrazzi sequence is?”
“Fibonacci.” I sighed and looked at Colin. He would explain this complex mathematical marvel in a way more suited for Manny to understand.
He winked at me and turned to Manny. “It’s a series of numbers where a number is added to the number before it to form the next number. So, zero plus one is one, one plus one is two, one plus two is three, three plus two is five and so on.”
“And the purpose of this bloody exercise in counting is...?” Manny lifted both hands, his expression confused.
Colin shook his head and looked at the opposite wall for a moment before he looked back at Manny with a sigh and a look of disdain. “This sequence is said to have first been observed in the Hindu-Arabic arithmetic system. Fibonacci grew up in North Africa and studied it while there. These numbers are all around us. You can see it in hurricanes, galaxies, but the most common example is in sunflowers. Their seeds are uniformly distributed no matter how large the seed head may be. It all adds up.”
“Someone better tell me what the hell this has to do with that painting.” Manny shook his index finger at Emad’s artwork.
“Maybe nothing, but most probably a lot,” Colin said. “These numbers are used in the Fibonacci spiral, which is an approximation of the golden spiral. This is a series of connected quarter-circles inside a square, using the Fibonacci numbers for dimensions. This can be observed in many paintings from the Renaissance era, including the Mona Lisa.”
“It will be easier to show you.” I looked at Colin. “But for that I’ll need my computer or at the very least my tablet.”
“Should I get it for you?”
“Not now.” Manny waved his hand as if to remove the suggestion. “Doc, just draw with your finger on that painting and show me.”
I reared back. “I’m not touching a painting.”
“I’ll show you.” Colin stepped closer to the horrid copy of Uccello’s masterpiece and pointed at the bottom left corner. “It starts here, then curves up to include the princess and the dragon, tops out where the clouds start.” He groaned. “The clouds are not supposed to start there, but I suppose Emad needed to make his point. Anyway, it then curves down around Saint George and his horse. The Fibonacci spiral continues to curve inward and here the final curve ends between the horse’s front legs. It’s a perfect fit for the spiral.”
“Huh.” Manny slumped deeper into his chair. “That’s quite something.”
“Do you think Emad is sending me some kind of message with this?” Alain tried to hide it, but hope was evident around his eyes, his mo
uth, even his posture.
“To quote Doc, it would be speculation.” Manny shrugged. “But knowing what we do about Emad? Yeah, he’s sending some kind of message.”
“The question though is what that message is,” Alain said. “We never talked about this mathematical sequence and I can’t remember him ever mentioning something like this. I’m so sorry I can’t be of any more help.”
“You helped us a lot by bringing in the painting.” Phillip put his hand on Alain’s shoulder. “We’ll figure this out.”
“Hi, everyone.” Francine walked into the conference room and stopped in front of me. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
I studied her expression and saw her sincerity as well as her concern. It took me a second to remember why she would be concerned. The mystery of Emad’s painting and the Fibonacci sequence had taken my mind off Otto being assassinated next to me. “I’m unharmed. Emad sent a painting.”
“I know.” She glanced at one of the hidden security cameras in the room. “I’ve been watching. And listening.” She turned to Alain. “Would you consent to me cloning your phone?”
“Why?” Alain lifted both shoulders.
“I heard you say that Emad had downloaded an app on your phone.” She paused. “Did he have full access to your phone?”
“Before all of this, yes.” He took his smartphone from his trouser pocket and put it on the table. “This is my private phone. He would use it to search for something on the internet or update my apps and programmes. He never touched my work phone. And I gave that back when I resigned.”
Francine looked at the phone on the table. “I don’t want to take your phone and leave you without your device, but if I have an exact copy—a clone—I might be able to find something that we can use to track Emad.”
Alain thought about this. “I no longer have access to any confidential information. And I have nothing to hide.” He pushed his phone across the table towards Francine. “Clone it. Find my son. But please, don’t kill him.”
“I’m confident they’ll do their utmost to bring him in safe,” Phillip said.
