A Masterpiece of Revenge

by J. J. Fiechter

  Frustrated, I went home. I had barely closed the door when the phone rang. It was Calmette, my banker and second suspect. A strange coincidence, I thought, his calling at that particular moment. We rarely talked.

  “Charles old man, so sorry to bother you, but I wanted to let you know that the fluctuations in interest rates will do a little temporary damage to your financial portfolio.”

  What a moment to discuss this! This was Calmette through and through. As if I could have cared in the slightest about long-term interest rates!

  “Your overseas investments have experienced rather heavy losses. The Asian market, you know. But this is not the moment to think of selling them.”

  I found his commiseration a little oily. He was enjoying giving me bad news. I could tell he was goading me because I had lost a little money.

  “My dear Michel,” I said in as cavalier a manner as I could manage, “this is of no importance whatsoever. I foresee no need for liquidity in the coming months.”

  My reaction seemed to deflate him a little. He explained that it would nonetheless be wise to stay in the Asian market. Things were bound to look up.

  Asian markets. What did I care? But when he told me that he himself had just returned from Japan, where he had opened a branch office, I listened carefully. Calmette was many things, but he was no liar. I believed he really had just returned from Japan.

  This meant that he could not have sent the photographs.

  Then, after hanging up the phone, I remembered there used to be a dealer in postcards who made extra money by offering to have letters or cards sent from anywhere in the world — making the recipient believe that the sender had actually been there.

  No, that was a ridiculous idea. I had to take Calmette off the list.

  I decided to search out my third suspect, Silberman, so I went down to the street to hail a cab and promptly tripped on the sidewalk. If I hadn’t managed to grab hold of a lamppost I would certainly have fallen and might have broken my leg.

  What a silly, stupid thing to do. My son was in danger and needed me. Were something to happen to me, were I immobilized for some reason, or became sick, I wouldn’t be able to face the crisis ahead. I reminded myself that I was after all sixty-two years old, no longer a young man. Life at that age is contingent. Several of my friends were already buried in Pére-Lachaise cemetery, final resting place for so many luminaries. The strain on my heart and my nerves these last few weeks was severe. I was feeling decidedly fragile.

  Hobbling on one leg, I hailed a cab and collapsed into the backseat. My ankle had begun to swell and was throbbing with pain. Probably sprained. Another sign that the world was against me.

  By this point I had begun seeing signs everywhere. Every nerve and hair was alert to them, miniature antennae alive to the slightest sound, the faintest odor. The smallest things unnerved me: a chair sticking out, a dripping faucet, the shape of a cloud.

  I felt the constant urge to check and recheck everything: the oven gas, the chain on my front door, the window locks, my wallet. I did this without thinking. I was also fretting ceaselessly about my appearance, like some insecure teenager worried whether his zipper is up. I suppose my mind was trying to distract me from greater worries.

  When I walked into Silberman’s gallery, my first reaction was that the world had gone mad, stark, raving, and completely mad. The paintings hanging on the walls were brutal and shocking. Huge clashes of colors, scenes of flagellation and sadistic devastation, bodies writhing in agony.

  It took me a moment to see what they actually were: modern depictions of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom. How, I wondered, could anyone massacre color to quite that extent?

  The gallery’s owner, Richard Dompierre, stood in the middle of these so-called works of art, barking orders and clapping his hands. The pathetic old queen.

  “Ah, Charles! My dear, dear friend,” he cried, nearly melting into my arms when I asked for news of Silberman.

  Distraught, Dompierre told me that Silberman had spent the last three weeks in jail. He stood accused of fraud, knowingly trying to sell a forgery. It was all a monstrous frame-up perpetrated by enemies and competitors. By locking up his closest friend and business associate they were trying to put him, Dompierre, out of business.

  Calmette and Silberman had alibis. I was back to Adalbert.

  I briefly offered Dompierre my sympathies and hobbled out of the gallery feeling depressed. How ridiculous all my suspicions were. They were getting me nowhere. I was a pathetic old fool unable to help his own son. All I was good for was pontificating.

  Good heavens. I would be late for my weekly lecture at the College.

  When I reached the lecture hall, the eyes of fifty restless students trained on me — young, leering, vibrant faces. What had I to teach them? I was suddenly seized with the desire to fling up my hands and run away. Couldn’t they see I wasn’t who they thought I was? What was the point of chatting on about art? It was so pointless and so silly

  Nonetheless, my lecture that day was — I must say — quite brilliant. I discussed the symbolic rites and rituals frequently involved in artistic creation. My anxieties must have given me a nervous energy, for my remarks sparkled. Afterward, curiously, I felt a little better. So did my ankle.

  Back home, I did three very small things that helped reestablish order in my life, restore a semblance of peace: I cleaned up a bit, opened the curtains to let in some light, and put on a Vivaldi concerto. The best medicine of all was when Jean-Louis called, sounding as happy and full of life as ever. For a moment my fears dissolved.

  The next morning, when I went down to get the mail, they returned in full force. With each step, my heart tightened. I looked with terror at the little pile of mail in my box, like a sick old man staring at a letter containing his test results.

  It was there of course. The envelope. Postmarked Oslo.

  I attempted to control my breathing. I climbed the stairs slowly and deliberately, and opened the door to my apartment without haste. Then I sat in my chair and calmly slit open the letter, as if it were a mailing from a charitable society. All this took an enormous effort of will.

  I drew out the photograph of Jean-Louis. He was captured jogging through some beautiful countryside. You could see the sea far off in the distance, in the middle distance were towering trees, and, on the left-hand side, some large rocks. The photo had the composition of a painting, I noted. It was slightly overexposed.

  I was forcing myself to maintain my composure, when something in the picture made me cry out in rage and fear.

  On Jean-Louis’s forehead, exactly between his eyes, was a small point of red light, perfectly round and precise. My God. A laser sight from a high-powered rifle, the sort that can kill from two hundred yards away. That was what made that sort of light. Practically every Hollywood action film these days featured them.

  Part of me knew that this idea was crazy, but the supposition was enough to unhinge me. The word “laser” echoed over and over in my brain, followed by images of… of— I couldn’t bear it — images of horror. A voice was telling me something.

  “Terrible forces are at work here.”

  A voice? Whose voice? Where? I was inside my apartment. Was somebody else also inside? I ran down the hall into the kitchen, then into my bedroom. I was dimly aware that I was throwing open drawers in my dresser — looking for what I now have no idea — then collapsed in a heap on my bed and broke down in sobs.

  I was a complete mess, a creature of hysteria and madness, alternating moans and prayers and incoherent cries of anguish. I implored God, I implored my invisible enemy. Had I known who my tormentor was I would have run to him and prostrated myself. I, Charles Vermeille!

  For weeks I had been caught in the black magic of despair. Nothing made sense but everything was ominous, and fanatically, terribly meaningful. I grasped at straws. It was all like Kafka, or Emile Zola.

  Emile Zola. My apartment building was located on rue Vineuse, which was the se
tting Zola had chosen for that grim melodrama, A Page of Love. The novel is about a good woman whose heart is supposedly taken over by “evil.”

  It all starts with the death of her child. Suddenly this had deep resonance in my soul.

  I ran to my library to find a copy of that dreary little book. It had been years since I’d read it, but I was sure I had one somewhere. I found it.

  One never reads the same book twice. That is a simple and profound truth. It is not the words that have changed, but the person reading them. I had hardly remarked on the novel the first time I read it. On that day, however, every sentence seemed a reflection of my predicament. That poor woman! She falls in love with a married man, and for this she must endure horrific punishment. The child must die.

  What did that mean? Was I to be the cause of my son’s death? Instead of rooted in a father’s love, were my feelings for him rooted in destructive selfishness? Did my sin lie in believing Jean-Louis was mine alone?

  I got up and opened the window. Much about the city had changed since Zola’s day, of course, but on that night his description in the book matched what I saw: “Paris, illuminated by a luminous cloud, the fiery blast of a furnace hovering over the city, produced by the groaning lives that it devours and spews out as fire and brimstone, like the clouds of smoke and steam that gather around the mouth of a volcano.”

  I snapped the book shut and picked up the photograph of Jean-Louis, the most recent one. Something strange was stirring within me, struggling to rise to the surface of my consciousness. Memories, images. I could neither stop them nor explain them. A countryside; trees looking as if they had been painted, leaf by leaf; expanses of sky; a small waterfall and — over on the left — a fallen tree in the foreground; a play of light.

  I knew this vision.

  The scenes evaporated like bubbles, like words that form on the tip of the tongue and then dissolve. I was left with a feeling of unease and uncanny strangeness. Deja vu.

  “Columns. Where are the columns?” a voice within me asked.

  I went into my study and put the photo under ultraviolet light, then pored over every square inch, convinced now that I would find something to help me understand. No, nothing. I decided to enlarge it on a screen with a projector. I stood in front of it for half an hour, forcing myself to look at it not as a photograph of my son, but as a composition, as a work of art.

  I focused all my attention on that tiny point of light. Could it be a reflection from a mirror — a watch crystal, or a magnifying glass, perhaps — made to look like a laser point? For that to be so, my son would have had to have been a willing participant, holding his pose while the reflection could be beamed on the point between his eyes.

  That was not possible. It had to have been a reflection, an accident, a fluke. For the first time in hours, my breathing slowed.

  Now that the point of light no longer drew all my attention, I began to look at the landscape around him, staring at it until my eyelids began to get heavy and the need to sleep overpowered me. I went into the bedroom and collapsed onto the bed fully clothed, and then fell into a deep sleep.

  How many times since this whole miserable business began I had been jolted from sleep, seized with a spasm that gripped my guts and set my throat on fire. I would barely make it into the bathroom to vomit into the sink, my whole body wracked with nausea.

  Then, straightening up, I would look at my reflection in the mirror. I was a vision of horror in the dim morning light — gasping like a carp on a kitchen table, trying to take in large, milky gulps of air.

  This time I awoke feeling refreshed. My body seemed to have rid itself of torpor and was preparing itself for combat — though with whom or with what I had no idea. I didn’t feel threatened so much as challenged. I felt a sense of dark jubilation at what lay ahead.

  Here was what I had realized: if someone were threatening me for some reason other than money, it was because they were afraid of me. I was the threat to them, not the other way around. What I was therefore experiencing was their fear — my system was reacting as if to a foreign body. The question was, why?

  I felt I would soon learn the answer. Waiting was now not only the only thing to do, it was the only reasonable thing to do. Reason, at last, reason.

  6

  The following night I had the oddest dream. I was cleaning the sky and the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens with a sponge soaked in mercury chloride. I was trying to uncover an image of Jean-Louis. Instead appeared one of the three Arcadian shepherds in that famous painting by Poussin, the shepherd on bended knee in the right-hand side of the painting. He was pointing toward some Roman ruins in the background and saying, “Over there. Over there is where you should scrub. Can’t you see it’s filthy?”

  I dreamt that I tried to make my way toward the ruins, but the wind was blowing hard against me and I couldn’t reach them.

  I woke with the sensation that I had been in touch with something deep in my subconscious. That I had found some kind of key.

  The landscape, that strange dream, the Arcadian shepherd. Uniting them all was a distinct impression of deja vu. I was on the threshold of a mystery and the solution was inside me. I wasn’t waiting for a phone call, or a telegram, or a knock at the door. No, I was waiting for … myself. What I was sensing was the approach of an answer, a denouement. Danger is oddly less threatening when it is imminent.

  For the first time in weeks I was able to keep down a little breakfast, and make at least a half-hearted stab at my old morning chess ritual.

  I felt fit in body and mind, though more keenly alert than ever to signs and omens. But now I was enjoying puzzling over their meanings. They were auspicious. With almost childish relief I saw a crow land briefly on my balcony and then fly off, as if frightened. Several days before one had perched there for hours on end.

  In the reproductions of all the final works by celebrated painters I had chosen for the Magnificent Trembling of Age I no longer saw only the memento mori, but a larger frame of reference, the greater and more life-affirming game of images within images, as in Lucas Cranach’s Melancholy, where a large bay window opens onto a whole new picture.

  My thinking had become magnetized, drawing to it thoughts and ideas like iron filings. For example, when examining a painting of Mary Magdalene by Jacques Bellange, who depicted her with her eyes lifted to the heavens, the name of a famous astrophysicist suddenly popped into my head. I had never met the man, but there his name was. I felt a desire to meet him.

  The next morning I was reading a magazine and came across an interview with that same astrophysicist. The article featured a photograph of him, taken at his office. Behind his desk was a reproduction of Bellange’s painting.

  The coincidence was unnerving but fascinating. Why would I think of this astrophysicist? What did the Mary Magdalene have to do with any of this? Because her eyes were looking to the heavens?

  Questions begot questions. I thought a great deal about my helpful Arcadian shepherd, and when I did I found both that my anxieties eased and that images and ideas started springing to mind. At first the sensation was exhilarating, but as time passed it became irritating and dizzying. It reminded me of the way one’s head spins when one lies down after having had too much to drink.

  It was in this state that I answered the phone when it rang at precisely five o’clock.

  “May I please speak to Professor Vermeille?” asked a voice unknown to me, with a slight accent. Belgian, I guessed.

  “This is he,” I replied.

  “Forgive me for disturbing you. My name is Quentin Van Nieuwpoort. Sir, Fm calling you because, well, I've got something that might interest you.”

  “You have my attention.”

  “It involves a painting by Claude Lorrain.”

  Good God, not another, I thought. In fact I very nearly hung up the phone, but politeness kept me from doing so.

  “A painting that might be attributed to Lorrain. Is that what you mean?”

  I
had seen so many Lorrain copies in my time that I had long become used to disappointing dealers and collectors. Still, my response seemed not to have fazed this man.

  “Believe me, Professor Vermeille, I am not wasting your time. The painting has been declared authentic by both the Oxford Institute for Art Research and the Griffith Institute in Los Angeles. I have certificates. This is the real thing. Except — well — it lacks your conclusive opinion.’’

  It was the painting I'd heard about in Los Angeles. After the Griffith’s director had taken me into his confidence I'd gleaned more details about the painting in question from a friend at Sotheby’s. I’d also looked through my own notes. Identifying the work had been easy, thanks to the painter’s own Libro di Veritá, carefully conserved in the manuscript collection at the British Museum.

  As I’ve mentioned, the Libro was essentially an inventory, in which Lorrain had himself patiently redrawn, in pen and wash, his entire oeuvre. He’d based the drawings on his working sketches. The Libro provided valuable information about the paintings: the dates and places of their genesis, the dimensions of the frames, the clients who had commissioned them, and even, in certain cases, the names of their eventual purchasers.

  The work had to have been number six of the Libro: Fort Scene, painted by the artist during his stay in Naples in 1636, and last seen in Scotland in the middle of the nineteenth century.

  “Can you bring the work to me? I have everything I need to study it here in my home.”

  “Certainly. Tomorrow afternoon,” replied Van Nieuwpoort. “Sotheby’s is handling everything.”

  “Yes, fine. Then come tomorrow afternoon. Two o’clock, if that’s all right.” It was. I gave him my address.

  I was very anxious to see the painting. No believer in miracles was Charles Vermeille, particularly when a Lorrain was involved, but I had never entirely given up hope that someday another one of his works would resurface.

  My hands shook as I took my mail out of my box the next morning. While I was sorting through the stack of magazines and ads an envelope fell to the floor. I recognized it immediately. Mailed from Paris. I picked it up, then opened it.