by J G Alva
They started up the marble staircase.
Robin shook her head quickly. This was ridiculous.
“You know what I’d infer from that?”
“Robin-“
“I’d infer that, without any ties, either to his country or to any existing family members, that he’s unreliable, insecure, and as a consequence, self important. When has he ever had to bear any responsibility? For anything?”
“Have you thought that it might mean he’s incredibly self sufficient? Come on.”
Robin made a noise of frustration.
“I don’t see how a painter can help us.”
Sean sighed again.
“Robin. I don’t know what else to do. Okay?”
She shook her head.
“Did you check him out?”
“Of course I did.”
“And?”
“That’s all I got – what I just told you. He’s had run-ins with the police, but he’s never had anything more than a caution. I’m assuming, doing what he does, that he’d find it difficult not to have the occasional run in with the law.” Sean shrugged again.
The guard led them around a corner and up another set of marble steps.
The ghostly shape of a sea dragon, or more accurately its head, loomed up before them, on a shelf inside a glass case. It was a monster from another age, easily five feet long. A card above the box told Robin it was from a pliosaur dug out of a clay pit at Westbury.
In the dark, this place seemed haunted by the past.
They followed the guard passed it.
“And what did Jean say about him?”
Sean gave her a look.
“That he’s intelligent. I mean, really smart. That’s what she said. Especially about people.” He paused. “And good looking.”
“Sure. Of course. Why would Jean settle for anything less?”
Robin immediately chastised herself for the comment. Sean flicked a glance at her – she couldn’t read his expression – and then looked away.
They were now on the first floor, and standing before them was a large plateosaurus. And the dinosaurs continued around the corner and along the balcony, in glass cases or wired to stands like tomato plants: a gallery of the dead.
But they were being led up again, to the next floor.
“And that was all?”
“And he’s mean,” Sean said, after a hesitation. There was a strange light in Sean’s eyes. “Hard.”
He’d have to be, Robin thought, if this was the sort of thing he did for a living.
Paintings adorned the walls on the next set of steps up, and then they were on the second floor balcony. The clack of heels made Robin and Sean turn, and they both watched a short overweight woman walk towards them from a door at the far end. She had black curly hair and reading glasses on a chain around her neck, and was wearing a beige tank top over an office blouse. She looked intelligent.
“Thank you, Frank,” the woman said, and Frank nodded and went back down the stone steps.
“You’re Maura Lane?” Sean asked, and shuffling the file folder from his right to his left hand, extended the empty one toward her.
“I am,” Maura said, and shook it. She seemed to be a happy person; there was a sense of ease about her, a smart woman who had achieved a lot, and was comfortable with herself and her abilities. “You must be Detective Bocksham.”
“I am. Thanks for letting us in.”
“Oh, no problem.” She turned a polite enquiring look Robin’s way.
“Oh,” Sean said, remembering his manners. “This is Dr. Robin Sails.”
“Nice to meet you,” Robin said, shaking her hand; it was cool to the touch.
“Doctor?” Maura enquired.
“I got my PhD in Psychotherapy.”
“Ah.” She turned to include Sean. “Well. He’s in the French Room, if you’d like to follow me.”
Maura turned to lead the way, and they followed.
“Does he do this often?” Sean asked, an idle enquiry.
“Do what?”
“Come into the museum after hours like this.”
“Yes. Quite often. An enthusiastic student, you might say. He drops in probably twice a month, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. Depending.”
“He’s lucky to be such good friends with the Museum Curator,” Sean remarked.
Maura stopped, and Robin and Sean stopped with her.
“Oh, we’re not friends.”
Sean’s eyebrows went up.
“No?”
Maura shook her head emphatically. She was in her fifties, but her smile made her seem younger, almost girlish.
“No. We’re much more than that. You see, once upon a time, he did something for me, something so important that no matter how many times I thank him, no matter how much money I give him, I’ll never be able to pay him back.” A sly look came into her eyes then. “And he still lets me win at chess. So” – she spread her hands – “any time he wants to come in here and admire the paintings in privacy, or make his sketches of them, then he is more than welcome to do so.”
Maura continued walking and with her back to them, Sean gave Robin another look, this time of amused incredulity. Robin ignored it, and they both followed behind her.
“You see, we had trouble finding him,” Sean told Maura.
“Well, you’ve found him now,” Maura replied, pushing into the French Room.
It was a large room, perhaps thirty feet by fifty, with a high ceiling. The walls were adorned with a light beige wallpaper stamped with a soft floral design. A line of paintings of differing shapes and sizes covered each wall at head height. In the centre of the room were two dark wooden tables at either end of a dark floral rug. The air smelled of paint and age.
At the far end a set of marble steps led up to another room full of paintings, but beside the steps an easel had been set up. On it was a simple line drawing, wrought in pencil, with blocks of harsh black shadows scratched into it. Robin could see that it was a copy of a painting hanging on the wall not four feet from the easel. It was a dark piece, of two women, one of whom was sitting at a piano, while the other leaned attentively toward the player: a piano lesson.
The man responsible for the sketch, the man they had come to see, stood a little apart from the drawing on the easel, studying it. In one hand he held a long black pencil. He was perfectly still, as silent and as motionless as a cat, and for a moment Robin flashed back to the statues on the ground floor. He might have been made of marble himself.
“Sutton?” Maura said pleasantly. “You have guests.”
He moved. It was an uncoiling, like a panther woken from a deep slumber. In that moment it was almost as if Robin could see the muscles moving in him, sliding under the skin of his back and arms, but that was simply too fanciful. And her nerves were too raw for such flights of fancy.
But there were muscles, and the black suit jacket over the black shirt could not hide them. They were mostly in his arms and shoulders, and seemed to stretch the fabric, as if they could not contain them. His arms were thick and long, hanging heavily by his sides, and his hands on the end of them were like spades.
He had dark hair, long enough to cover his ears. Her first impression was that he was Spanish, but she quickly saw that that wasn’t right. He might have been, but his face was too sharp. Almost Nordic.
He had dark eyes beside a thin blade of nose. There was something about the nose, as if it had been broken and reset. The mouth was wide, and the chin was a little hard. A cruel face.
And he was tall. Well over six foot. Next to Sean’s compact frame, he would seem like a giant. Dimly, she realised that he was good looking, but it wasn’t important. She just needed to know that he was competent. After all, their hopes rested on what he might be able to do.
She was totally unprepared for the voice. It was deep, dark, like barrels rolling off a boat, but surprisingly cultured.
“I see,” he said. He gave them both a casual ins
pection. “Police.” He nodded to Sean. “Or at least, one policeman.”
“Sean Bocksham,” Sean said. “Of the Major Crime Investigation Unit. Can we talk? It’s very urgent.”
“Sure,” Sutton said, putting the pencil down on the bottom edge of the easel.
But as if to belie his words, he turned instead to Maura and said, “Maura, I have a new one for you.”
Maura smiled and said, “let’s hear it.”
The man paused, as if for effect, and then said, “some time after Salvador Dali’s death, his younger brother became famous as – believe it or not – a surrealist painter. This younger brother had great international success and the word ‘genius’ was used to describe him. His name was Dali and he did not change it. Yet today, the world remembers only one Dali, and few people even know that he had a brother. Why is that, do you think?”
Maura smiled wider.
“Oh, Sutton. That’s easy. Salvador Dali died at the age of seven. Nine months later his brother was born and also named Salvador. It was the second Salvador that became the famous painter.”
“Quite right,” Sutton said. He indicated his sketch. “Can you look at this?”
As Maura moved toward the easel, Robin shot a look at Sean, to try and get him to do something about this interruption. Sean made a face and shrugged: they’d have to wait it out.
When Robin turned back, Sutton was staring at her, and she felt the colour come into her cheeks, as if she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t. But she did not turn away, and so they stared at each other. It went on so long that Robin began to feel slightly uneasy, but she would not look away; it was as if to do so would mean losing something, some contest.
Maura bent forward to peer at the sketch, and then fetched her glasses on their chain and held them an inch from her face to stare through them, before letting them fall back around her neck.
“It needs more work,” Maura said, and at her voice, Sutton broke the staring match.
He nodded, as if he already knew it.
“The forms are there, but the contrast is all wrong.” She peered up at him. “That’s what you’re after, isn’t it? Chiaroscuro. The light against the dark.”
Sutton nodded again.
“That’s why I picked Eugene Carriere’s The Pianist. Almost an absence of colour, focusing more on the contrast.”
“Well. It’s a start.”
“It’s a load of shit, is what it is.”
Incongruously, Maura giggled. It was a small spark in the dark, like a firecracker, and she immediately clapped a hand over her mouth to cover it. Her eyes stared guiltily over the top of her hand at Sutton.
Sutton smiled, a dazzle of white teeth in that dark face.
“Thanks for the confirmation.”
Maura began, “I didn’t mean-“
“Shush. I need to know when it’s shit, and it’s shit. How am I meant to learn anything, if I’m not given the truth? What did Boris Vallejo say? ‘I learn more from my failures than my successes’?”
“Hm. Something like that.”
“Well. Thank you for letting me know. The mode in which you did so, however, we will discuss later.”
Sean cleared his throat.
“Mr. Mills,” he said. Sutton’s head flicked up and stared at him. “If I could talk to you? It really is very urgent.”
Sutton nodded. He looked to Maura.
“Can we use your office?”
Maura said automatically, “of course.”
Sutton smiled and said, “and can we also have some of your delicious coffee?”
*
Sutton Mills liked puzzles almost as much as he liked Art.
But if asked how to define that affection, he would not have been able to put it into clearly definable terms. He could be amused at the irony: that his love for puzzles was in itself a mystery.
He did not think he was any great thinker; it was only his tenaciousness that gave him an edge. A puzzle should be solved; it was a universal equation. Perhaps even the oldest one. Some people he knew could look at a grouping of letters and codes and be able to decipher it at a glance, and it was a gift he envied. To be able to discern the whole of something with only one look…It would be a very handy talent to have. He believed every unknown facet of human existence was merely a puzzle to be unravelled; a puzzle in itself was only a system too complex to immediately grasp, and he could not think of a single facet of his life – of anybody’s life – that did not invoke the complex workings of an already established system: from passing your driving test to getting that much sought after position of employment. If you could solve puzzles, if you understood the system, then life, and all it had to offer, was considerably more accessible to you. If you held the key, then the door could be unlocked. Or conversely, if you knew how a lock was manufactured, and you could manipulate the pins to disengage it, then a key was no longer necessary. It was Mystery’s surrender.
This was not however true of everything. Some puzzles existed as an enigma in themselves, and Sutton believed they should remain so.
Art, for example.
If puzzles were structured mystery, then Art was a free form enigma, with no right or wrong answer. And what could more tantalising to a lover of puzzles than that?
Although he loved Art, his love was tempered by a continual grinding envy. Sutton had no illusions about his talents. You could strain against your limitations for a life time and still only be mediocre; an elastic band, after all, only had so much give. He had a laymen’s ability to capture the essence of a form, to create an illusion of three dimensions, and he could even splash a bit of paint over it to give it vitality…but he knew he was never going to be able to set the world on fire.
And as he got older he was not so sure he wanted to.
He did not understand the world of Art as it had now become. It was full of long and meaningless phrases, was comprised more of posturing in front of your painting than the painting itself. It was as if a work of Art could not stand alone, not without the artist rattling off well worn and unoriginal snippets of wisdom about what he or she had intended to achieve with his or her offering.
It just sounded like so much bullshit to his ears.
He believed it was his inability to embrace this way of thinking, this type of behaviour – an inability to divorce himself of his practicality – which meant that this new world of Art and its artists would always be foreign to him; that he was so suited to this world, and all its ignoble manifestations, that he could not join another.
It was this perhaps, more than his ability, or lack of it, that prevented him from coveting any real success with his work. Which of course meant that he would never be able to earn a living from painting alone.
If this new world was foreign to him, then he was considerably better versed with the old one.
But he would never lose his love of Art, and he had moulded a good part of his life around it. There was the City Museum of course, to which he visited frequently. And there was the Tate, which he had visited half a dozen times in the last decade. He had even flown to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, with a like minded young graphic designer he had been seeing at the time. When they made love she would giggle. Which had been kind of distracting.
His life was good.
So why then did he risk it for this?
Money was one reason. It was an ugly thing, but it was necessary for the kind of life he wanted.
But money was not the only reason.
It was the puzzle. The puzzle and the challenge.
But if Sutton liked puzzles and Art, then he was completely enamoured with women.
Puzzles and Art held mystery, but any attraction paled in comparison to the enigma of the feminine equation; they could not hold a candle to the strange and uncharted depths of the opposite sex.
He liked watching them, liked the way they moved, the hair, the eyes, the smiles; liked their attention to detail, their complexity, their practicality in the
face of their own complexity. He liked their fairer natures, their dependency, their stubbornness against dependency, their softness, their strength; he liked the dates, the phone calls, the way their minds could always put a heretofore unconsidered slant on a subject he had exhausted.
He liked the sex.
But of all the women he had been with, he had never been engaged in a liaison of a purely sexual nature. This too was an enigma. There had always been a very definitive emotional connection with the women he took to bed. Without this, he felt the act of coitus became just that, an act, friction without depth, as mindless, if not a little more enjoyable, than lifting weights at the gym. He was simply not built that way.
Maybe then it was connection he sought. He had, after all, been alone for most of his adult life.
He often worried that he liked women too much. He wasn’t a score keeper, and despised any man who was; he believed such a person was flawed, and knew it, and that each conquest was super glue for a fractured ego.
But should any lists ever need to be produced, then he had numbers that might be deemed as impressive.
He worried about that too.
But more often than not, he became invested in the women whose company he sought, became invested in their hopes and dreams, however practical and impractical, however dependent or independent. And at this point he began to question his involvement, because aside from all his good intentions, there was a darker side to him that he could not compromise.
He did not understand it. He was a puzzle to himself.
He knew only that he could not give it up.
Any relationship demanded compromise, for it to work, and this was the one thing he would not give, could not.
And so, in any relationship, he began to see himself more and more like a faulty numeral that skewered an otherwise sound equation.
