The woman striding purposefully towards the house has short hair, is very slender and is wearing expensive casual clothes: jerkin, blouse, tight jeans and boots; she has sunglasses on, and is carrying a small bag in her left hand. Her determined manner seems out of place in this peaceful scene. On both sides of the gravel path she is walking along, there is a perfectly trimmed lawn, the precise shadow of a line of trees and a hedge separating the garden from a meadow where several skewbald ponies can be seen. Further off, the landscape is one of gentle hills, carpets of tufted grass, with darker clumps of bushes and woods, the endless luxuriant reaches of Dartmoor in the southwest of England. The afternoon is drawing to a close, and the sun is dipping to the horizon to the left of the woman. The house she is headed towards has two wings: the main part is long, with two chimneys and eight windows; the second, perpendicular to the first, is not as grand. A maid in impeccable uniform is waiting at the front door. She is plump and has waxy white skin. She smiles as the woman approaches, but her smile is not reciprocated. A virtuoso bird, of a kind that would no doubt intrigue an ornithologist, is singing somewhere.
'Good evening, miss. Please, come in.'
The pleasant, ruddy-cheeked maid had a Welsh accent. Although Miss Wood did not reply, this did not seem to perturb her in the slightest. The house was comfortable and spacious, with a smell of noble woods.
'Be so kind as to wait here, miss. The master will attend you immediately.'
She was in an immense living room; three semicircular stone steps led down into it. Wood stepped down them very slowly, as though she were taking part in a spectacle. Her Ferragamo boots resounded on the stone. At first she considered taking off her sunglasses, but then the glinting glass wall at the far end of the room made her change her mind. Her Dior glasses matched her short hair with its cinnamon highlights. Her beauty adviser in the New Bond Street salon had suggested she wear sports clothes in brown and cream. Wood chose a fine cotton jerkin, a collarless blouse with ribbons and tight jeans. To go with this, she had a small, light, many-sided bag: it was as if the fingers of her left hand were holding nothing.
She cast a quick glance around her while she stood waiting. Sober, spacious, comfortable and rustic was her verdict. 'He has more money, but his tastes haven't changed,' she thought. Big native rugs, a three-piece suite in neutral colours, a huge chimney-piece and a glass wall at the far end, with a double door leading out into a kind of magnificent garden of paradise. There were only two works of art in the room: one next to the far doors, the other close to the right-hand wall, beyond the enormous rug. The latter was a blond young man of around twenty. He was naked, and shielded his genitals with both hands. He had not been painted, only lightly primed. He was openly breathing, blinked frequently, and followed Miss Wood's movements closely. It was as though he was not a painting, but a perfectly normal and attractive boy, standing naked in the room. He was called Portrait of Joe, and was by Gabriel Moritz. Moritz was one of the French natural-humanist school.
Wood knew all about them. Natural-humanism rejected any attempt to turn a person into art, and so was utterly opposed to pure hyperdramatism. To the humanists, works of art were first and foremost human beings. Their models did not have their bodies painted and were put on show exactly as they were in daily life, naked or dressed, posing almost without taking up quiescence.
The natural-humanists were also determined not to hide any of the body's blemishes: Wood could see the scar from what must have been a childhood scrape on Portrait of Joe's right knee, and the curl of a distant appendix operation. The boy seemed a little bored with being on show. While Miss Wood was looking at him, he cleared his throat, puffed out his chest, and ran his tongue over his lips.
The other work was better, but was from the same tendency. Wood already knew it, and had no need to go closer and read its title: Girl in the Shade by Georges Chalboux. The body of Girl in the Shade was less appealing than the Moritz. It looked like a university student who had decided to play a joke on its friends by taking all its clothes off and standing still.
The stands by the side of the two works displayed all the accoutrements for maintaining humanist paintings: small trays with bottles of water and wafer biscuits that the works were allowed to turn to whenever they liked, signs they could hang on the wall to say that the painting had gone for a rest or was absent for a while, even one which said: 'These people are working as a work of art. Please respect them.'
Miss Wood finished studying the works and swung her tiny bag from side to side as she walked round the room. She detested French humanist art in all its forms: from Corbett's 'sincerism' to the 'democratism' of Gerard Garcet and the 'absolute liberalism' of
Jacqueline Treviso. Works that asked permission to go to the bathroom or simply went without asking, outdoor pieces which ran for cover when it started raining, paintings which haggled over how many hours they should work, and even the poses they should adopt, who butted in to your conversations with other people, who had the right to complain if they were upset about something or to share your food if they saw you eating something they fancied. April Wood definitely preferred pure hyperdramatism.
She heard a noise and turned round. Hirum Oslo was coming up the garden path, limping and leaning on his stick. He was wearing cream-coloured trousers and jersey, with a red Arrows shirt. He was a tall, good-looking man. His dark skin seemed at odds with pronounced Anglo-Saxon features inherited from his father. He had short black hair, brushed back off his forehead, where his eyebrows were thick and expressive. Wood found him the same as ever, perhaps a little thinner, with large sad eyes that he got from his Indian mother. She knew he was forty-five, but he looked more like fifty. He was a concerned man, alert to everything going on around him, anxious to find someone with problems to whom he could lend a helping hand. Miss Wood thought it was this outpouring of solidarity that aged him: it was as if part of his good looks had been rubbed off on others.
She walked to the glass doors to greet him. Oslo smiled at her, but first of all stopped to have a word with the Chalboux work.
'Cristine, you can take a rest whenever you like,' he said to her in French.
'Thank you,' the painting smiled, nodding her head. It was only then that Oslo turned to greet Miss Wood. 'Good afternoon, April.'
'Good afternoon, Hirum. Could we talk without the works of art?' 'Of course, let's go to my office.'
His office was not in the house but at the bottom of the garden. Oslo liked to work surrounded by nature. April Wood could see he was still a keen gardener: he grew rare plants and identified each of them with labels as though they were works of art. As he let Miss Wood pass in front of him in a narrow part flanked by tall cactuses, Oslo said to her: 'You look very attractive.'
She smiled without replying. Perhaps to avoid the silence, he went on quickly:
'The withdrawal of Van Tysch's works in Europe has nothing to do with Restoration, does it? But if I'm not mistaken, it has to do with your presence here today?' 'You're not mistaken.'
Because of his limp, Oslo made slow progress, but Miss Wood had no problem keeping in step with him. She seemed to have all the time in the world. The shadows deepened as they reached the coolness of a clump of oaks. A murmur of water could be heard somewhere in the distance. 'How was your journey? Was it easy to find my lair?'
'Yes, I took a plane to Plymouth and rented a car there. Your directions were spot on.'
'That depends on the person,' Oslo said with a smile. 'Some dolts manage to get lost coming out of Two Bridges. Recently I had a visit from one of those artists who want to put music in their works. The poor man was going round and round in circles for two hours.'
'I see you've finally found the perfect refuge: a lonely spot in the middle of nature.'
Oslo was not sure whether or not April Wood's comment was entirely well meant, but he smiled all the same.
'It's much pleasanter than London, of course. And the weather is good. Today though it's been cloudy since dawn. If it rains, I'll put the outdoor pieces inside. I never leave them out in the rain. Oh, and by the way,' – Wood noticed an odd change in his voice -'You're going to get a surprise…'
They had reached the spot where the sound of water was coming from. It was an artificial pond. In the centre stood an outdoor work of art.
After a pause during which Oslo tried in vain to guess what Miss Wood was feeling, he said:
It's by Debbie Richards. I really think she is a great portraitist. She used a photo of you. Does it bother you?'
The girl was standing on a small platform. The bobbed hair was exactly right, and the Ray-Ban glasses were very similar to the ones she wore, as was the green suit and miniskirt. There was one important difference (Wood could not help noticing it): the naked legs had been corrected and lengthened. They were long and shapely, much more attractive than hers. But it's obvious, painters always make you look more beautiful, she thought, cynically.
The portrait stood motionless in the pose it had been placed in. Behind it was a wall of natural stone, and on its right a small waterfall cascaded. Who could the girl be who looked so like her? Or was it all thanks to cerublastyne?
‘I thought you didn't like portraits that used ceru,' she commented after a while. Oslo laughed briefly.
'You're right, I don't. But in this case it was essential for the portrait to look like the original. I've had it for a year now. Are you annoyed I commissioned a portrait of you?' He asked, looking at her anxiously. 'No.'
Then we won't mention it any more. I don't want to make you waste time.'
His office was in a glass summerhouse. Unlike the living room up at the house, it was a jumble of magazines, computers and books piled in unsteady columns. Oslo insisted on clearing his desk a little, and Miss Wood let him do so without a word. Without knowing why exactly, she felt ill at ease. Nothing about her revealed this fact, except that the knuckles on the hand gripping her bag were white.
It had been a low blow, a real low blow. She would never have thought that Oslo still wanted to remember her, least of all in this romantic way. It was absurd, meaningless. She and Hirum had not been seeing each other for years. Of course, they heard news of each other, particularly her of him. Ever since Hirum Oslo had abandoned the Foundation and become the guru of the natural-humanist movement, almost every art magazine mentioned him, either to praise or denigrate him. At that very moment, Oslo was putting away a well-worn copy of his latest book, Humanism in HD Art, which Wood had read. During her plane journey she had planned out their meeting, and had decided to comment on some passages from the book – that way they could avoid talking about the past, she thought. But the past was there, in every inch of the office, and no conversation could avoid it. And as if that were not enough, there was that unexpected portrait by Debbie Richards. April Wood turned her head to look out across the garden. She caught sight of it immediately. 'He's placed it so he can see it from his chair while he's working.'
Oslo finished tidying up, and turned to face the pale, slender figure in dark glasses. Is she annoyed? he wondered. She never shows her feelings. You never know what's really going on inside. He decided he could not care less if she were annoyed. She was the last person to reproach him for his memories. 'Sit down. Would you like a drink?' 'No, thanks.'
'I'm preparing my little talk for next week. There's going to be a big retrospective of the French open-air school. There are papers, round tables. I'm also responsible for the conservation of thirty of the works, among them ten underage ones. I'm trying to arrange for the minors to be on show for less time and to have more substitutes. And I still haven't received the site inspection reports. It's in the Bois de Boulogne, but I need to know exactly where. Well…'
He gestured as though to excuse himself for talking about his own problems. There was a pause. Oslo, who was trying to avoid an embarrassing silence, was relieved when Miss Wood began to speak. 'You're doing well as Chalboux's adviser, I see.'
'I can't complain. French natural-humanism started modestly, but now it's fashionable all over Europe. Here in England we're still reluctant to import it, because of Rayback's influence. And because we tend not to worry so much about other people. But some English artists are already changing their attitude, and have joined the humanist tendency. They've suddenly discovered they can produce great works of art and still respect human beings. In general though it's very difficult here.'
Oslo talked in his usual even tone, but April Wood could detect the emotion behind it. She knew it was something close to his heart. A moment later, his features relaxed.
'Well, I suppose you haven't come all the way from London to learn about my menial responsibilities. Tell me about you, April.'
April Wood began reluctantly, but eventually spoke much more than she had intended. She began with a few details about her private life. Her father was in his final hours, she told him, and they had phoned her urgently from the hospital to tell her death could come at any moment. She was very busy in Amsterdam but had felt obliged – that was the word she used, 'obliged' – to come to London for a few days, in case anything happened. Yet she was not wasting her time. From her London home she had been able to send faxes and emails, and held lengthy talks with specialists all over the world, as well as with her own team. And she had decided finally to ask Oslo for his help. But she preferred to come and see me, he thought with a sudden rush of emotion.
'We're in crisis, Hirum,' Miss Wood said. 'And time is running out.' 'I'll do whatever I can to help you. Tell me what's happening.'
In less than five minutes, Miss Wood explained the situation to him. She did not go into all the details, but left them to his imagination. Nor did she tell him the titles of the works that had been destroyed. Oslo listened in silence. When she had finished, he asked anxiously: 'What works were they, April?' Wood looked at him for a while before replying.
'Hirum, what I'm going to tell you is absolutely confidential, as I'm sure you understand. Apart from a small group we've called the "crisis cabinet", nobody knows anything, not even the insurance companies. We're preparing our ground.'
Oslo nodded, his black, sad eyes wide with concern. Miss Wood told him the title of the two works, and there was silence again. The muffled sound of the waterfall in the garden could be heard through the glass windows. Oslo was staring down at the floor. Eventually he said:
'My God… that poor child… that little girl… I'm not so sorry for those two criminals, but that poor little girl…' Monsters was just as valuable, if not more so, than Deflowering, but Miss Wood was well aware of Oslo's ideas. She had not come to discuss them.
'Annek Hollech…' Oslo said. 'I last talked to her a couple of years ago. She was charming, but she felt completely lost in that terrible world of human works of art. It wasn't just that lunatic who killed her. We all contributed to her murder.' He turned to face Wood. 'Who? Who can be doing this? And why?'
'That's what I want you to help me find out. You're considered one of the most important specialists in the life and work of Bruno van Tysch. I want you to tell me names and motives. Who could it be, Hirum? I don't mean the person destroying the canvases, but the one who is paying for their destruction. Think of a machine. A machine programmed to annihilate the Maestro's most important creations. Who would have the motive to programme a machine like that?' 'Who do you think it could be?'
'Someone who hates him enough to want to do him as much harm as possible.' Hirum Oslo leaned back in his chair, blinking.
'Everyone who has ever met Van Tysch both loves and loathes him. Van Tysch succeeds in producing masterpieces precisely because he creates that kind of contradiction in people. You know the main reason why I left him was because I found out how cruel his working methods were. "Hirum," he used to say, "if I treat the canvases as people, I'll never make works of art out of them.'"
Who am I telling this to, Oslo thought. Look at her sitting there, her face sculpted in marble. My God, I reckon the only person who has ever managed to really move her has been Bruno van Tysch.
'It's true that life hasn't helped him to be any different. His father, Maurits van Tysch, was probably even worse. Did you know he collaborated with the Nazis in Amsterdam?…' ‘I heard something to that effect.'
'He sold his fellow countrymen, Dutch Jews; he handed them over to the Gestapo. But he was clever about it; he made sure there were hardly any witnesses left. So nothing could ever be proved against him. He knew how to swim with the current.
Even today there are some people who question whether Maurits was a collaborator. But I think that was the reason why, immediately after the war, he emigrated to the tiny, peaceful town of Edenburg. It was there he met that Spanish woman, a child of Spanish Republican exiles, and they got married. She was almost thirty years younger than him, and I've no idea what attracted her to Maurits. I suspect he had the gift his son inherited twice over: the ability to dominate other people and turn them into marionettes for him to use for his own ends. A year after Bruno was born, his mother died of leukemia. It's easy to imagine how this embittered Maurits still further. And he took it out on his son…'
'As I understand it, he was a painting restorer.'
'He was a frustrated painter,' Oslo said with a wave of his arm. 'He took on the job of restoring pictures in Edenburg castle, but his dream was to be an artist. He was not much good at either task. Do you know, he used to thrash Bruno with his paintbrushes?'
‘I don't know anything about my boss' life,' April Wood responded, smiling briefly.
'Maurits used long-handled brushes to reach some of the paintings hanging high up on the castle walls. Apparently, he never threw away the worn-out brushes. I don't think he kept them specially to thrash Bruno with, but that's what he did.' 'Did Van Tysch tell you this?'
'Van Tysch never told me anything. He's as silent as the grave. It was Victor Zericky who told me. He was Bruno's childhood friend – perhaps his only friend, because Jacob Stein is nothing more than a worshipper. Zericky is a historian who still lives in Edenburg. He gave me a couple of interviews, and I managed to get a few facts from him.' 'Go on, please.'
'Everything could have ended there: a child mistreated by his parents who later perhaps might have become another restorer and frustrated artist… worse even than Maurits, because Bruno couldn't even draw properly,' Oslo giggled nervously. 'Whereas we know his father could… Zericky showed me some water-colours Maurits did that Van Tysch had given him: they're very good… But then the miracle happened, the "fairytale" as the Foundation's history calls it: Richard Tysch, the North American millionaire, crossed his path. And everything was changed forever.'
Wood was writing some of this down in a notebook she had taken out of her bag. Oslo paused, and gazed out of the window at the encroaching dusk in the garden.
'Richard Tysch was the person who made it possible for the Maestro to become the boss of an empire. He was a madman, a useless and eccentric millionaire who inherited a fortune that he threw away and several steel firms he sold as soon as his father died. He was born in Pittsburgh, but he saw himself as the direct descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers, those Puritan pioneers to the United States. He was obsessed with finding out about his family. He investigated where his name came from. Apparently, the Van Tyschs of Rotterdam split into two branches during the heyday of the Dutch West India Company. One ancestor went to North America, and founded the line that became steel and business barons. Richard Tysch wanted to find out about the "other branch", the European side of his family. At that time, the only two people of that name were Bruno's father and his Aunt Dina, who lived in The Hague. In 1968, Tysch went to Holland and paid a surprise visit to Maurits. He had been planning just a short, uneventful visit. He wanted to talk to Maurits about art (he had learnt he was a restorer), pick up some mementoes, and return to the United States loaded down with photos and historic "roots". But then he met Bruno van Tysch.'
Oslo was staring down at the filigree inlay on the knob of his cane. He caressed it absent-mindedly as he went on with his story.
'Have you seen photos of Bruno as a child? He was incredibly attractive, with his thick black hair, pale face and dark eyes, that mixture of Latin and Anglo-Saxon he has. A real young faun. His eyes had a strange fire to them. Victor Zericky says, and I believe him, that he could hypnotise people. All the girls in the village were crazy about him, even the older ones. And quite a few men felt the same, I can tell you. He was thirteen at the time.
Richard Tysch met him and fell for him. He invited him to go and spend the summer in his Californian mansion, and Bruno accepted. I suppose Maurits saw nothing wrong with it, especially considering how generous this god from the other side of the Atlantic had been. From then on, the two of them saw each other every summer, and kept up an extensive correspondence while Bruno was at school. Van Tysch later destroyed the letters. Some people say they had a Socrates-Alcibiades kind of relationship, others put it more crudely. All we can be sure of is that six years later, Richard Tysch left Bruno his entire fortune, and shot himself in the mouth with his shotgun. They found him propped on the trunk of a column in his palazzo on the outskirts of Rome. His brain was decorating the wall mosaics. Now the palazzo belongs to Van Tysch, as do all his other European properties. His will came as quite a surprise, as you can imagine. Of course, what relatives he had, all of whom had quarrelled with him, challenged it, but without success. Add to this the fact that Maurits had died two years earlier, and we can conclude that all of a sudden Bruno found himself with all the money and freedom in the world.'
Oslo's attention was caught by something that brought him to a halt: two workmen were out in the garden helping the model portraying Miss Wood out of the tank. Her hours on show were over. Oslo continued watching the removal of the portrait as he carried on speaking.
‘I have to admit that Bruno made the most of both. He travelled all over Europe and America, and set himself up for a time in New York, where he met Jacob Stein. Before that he had been in London and Paris, where he had been in touch with Tanagorsky, Kalima and Buncher. It's hardly strange that he should have been so enthusiastic about hyperdramatic art: he was born to tell other people what they should do. He had always been a painter of people, even before Kalima started to build a theory around the new movement. Bruno used his fortune to make HD the most important art of this century. The truth is, we owe a lot to Van Tysch,' Oslo ended, perhaps more cynically than he had intended.
'This is getting us nowhere,' said Miss Wood, tapping her notebook with her pen. 'From what you tell me, Van Tysch could have as many enemies as he does admirers.' 'Exactly.' 'We'll have to approach it differently.'
Out in the garden, the Debbie Richards model was now completely naked, and one of the workmen was carefully folding up the painted clothing while the other helped her into her robe. Miss Wood studied the girl's physique (even barefoot, she was several centimetres taller) and vaguely wondered if Oslo thought she was equally attractive. The cerublastyne joins around the neck were clearly visible. What could her real face be like? Miss Wood did not know and did not want to know.
As she was thinking this, she took off her sunglasses and rubbed her eyes. Oslo thought: My God, she's so thin, so skinny. Me guessed that April Wood's nervous problems about eating must have increased in recent years. The 'guard-dog' was all skin and bone. He had known her as a puppy.
It was in Rome in 2001, during a series of courses Oslo was giving on the conservation of outdoor pieces. He had never worked out what it was about this slender girl of only twenty-three that had attracted him so much. At first sight, it seemed easy enough: April Wood was beautiful, she dressed with striking elegance, and her culture and intelligence were obvious. Yet there was something within her that led people to immediately reject her. In those days she was working as the security chief for Ferrucioli, and despite the fact that she was already wealthy, she lived on her own and had no close friends. Oslo thought he had discovered what kept her isolated: a deep, slowburning hatred that was like a hidden poison. April Wood emanated hate through every pore.
With the infinite patience he had always shown when it came to helping others, Oslo took it on himself to find the antidote. He managed to find out something about her life. He learnt that her father, an English art dealer living in Rome, had put pressure on April as an adolescent to become a canvas. He also learnt that she was being treated for a problem of nervous anorexia that dated from the time when her father wanted at all costs to make her into a work of art. 'He would call second-rate painters to sketch me in the nude’ April confessed to him one day. 'Then he took photos of me and sent them to the great masters. But I discovered just in time I didn't have the patience to be a canvas. So I devoted myself to protecting them instead.' But to her, 'protecting canvases' meant exactly that. It was as though she did not see them as human beings. The two of them often had arguments about it. Finally Oslo understood that Miss Wood's worst poison was Miss Wood. An antidote to that poison would only have done her more harm.
When April Wood joined the Foundation as its new security director, the distance between them grew. In 2002 they saw each other still less, and by 2003 absence threw its chilly mantle over them both. The word 'end' had never been pronounced. They were still friends, but knew that anything there might have been between the two of them had finished. Oslo thought he was still in love with her. Wood put her glasses on the desk and looked at him.
'Hirum, I'll be straight with you: the person destroying the canvases has the advantage over me.' 'Has the advantage?'
'One of our own people is helping him. Someone from the Foundation.' 'My God’ murmured Oslo.
For a tiny instant, a split second, he thought she had become a little girl once more. Oslo knew that behind her indomitable will there was concealed a poor, lonely and frightened creature which occasionally surfaced in her gaze, but which he was astounded to see at this very moment. But that moment soon passed. Wood took control of her facial expression once more. Not even an expert in cerublastyne could mould a mask as perfect as April Wood's real features, thought Hirum Oslo.
‘I have no idea who it is’ she went on. 'It could be someone in the pay of our competitors. Someone anyway who is in a position to pass on restricted information about when our security people are working, the places where we have our models for safe-keeping, and lots more. We're being sold, Hirum, from inside and outside the Foundation.' 'Does Stein know?'
'He was the first person I told. But he refused to help. He's not even going to try to get the next exhibition postponed. Neither Stein nor the Maestro wants to get mixed up in this. The problem when you work for great artists is that you have to sort your life out for yourself. They're on another plane. They see me as a guard dog – they even call me that – and I don't blame them: that is exactly what they employ me to be. And until now they've been happy with what I've done. But now I'm on my own. And I need help.' 'You've always had me, April. And I'm here for you now.'
They heard laughter out in the garden. It came from young people of both sexes. They were talking and laughing like students on a picnic as they came up to the summerhouse. They were wearing sports clothes and carrying bags on their shoulders, but their skin looked as shiny as polished mirrors in the light from the electric bulbs that had just come on among the trees. They had an almost supernatural appearance, like angels with well-defined bodies, beings from a far-off universe that Hirum Oslo and Miss Wood felt exiled from. They found it hard to look on them without regret. Oslo muttered an apology to Miss Wood, and went to the door.
Wood understood at once that this must be a daily ritual: Oslo's paintings were saying goodbye to him. He talked to them, smiled and joked. She thought of her own house back in London. She had more than forty artworks, almost half of them human ornaments. Some of them were so expensive they carried on in their poses even when she was not there, even if she was away for several weeks. But Miss Wood never said a word to any of them. She crushed out her cigarettes in Ashtrays that were naked men, lit Lamps that were adolescents with depilated, virgin sexual organs, slept next to a painting of three youngsters painted blue who were in perpetual balance, washed alongside two kneeling girls who held gold soap dishes in their mouths, but at no time, not even when they finally left her house at the end of a long day's work, did it ever occur to her to talk to them. But here was Oslo, relating to his paintings like an affectionate father.
After saying goodbye to them, Hirum Oslo sat down again, and lit the desk lamp. The light flamed in Miss Wood's cold blue eyes. 'What time do you have to leave?' he asked. it doesn't matter. I've got a private plane waiting for me in Plymouth. And if I don't feel like driving, I can call a chauffeur to come and pick me up. Don't worry.'
Oslo put the tips of his finger together. His face showed he was worried about something. ‘I suppose you've thought of going to the police.' Miss Wood's smile was heavy with tiredness.
'This guy has all the police forces of Europe on his trail, Hirum. We're getting help from organisations and defence departments that only swing into action in very special cases, when the security or the cultural heritage of one of their member states is threatened. Globalisation has made the methods of a Sherlock Holmes seem very old-fashioned, I suppose, but I'm one of those who prefer old-fashioned methods. Besides, their reports end up with the crisis cabinet, and I'm convinced one of the members of that cabinet is the person who is helping our suspect. But worst of all, I have no time.' She paused, and then added: 'We suspect that he's going to try to destroy one of the paintings in the new exhibition, and that he's going to do it now, during the exhibition. Perhaps in a week or two, perhaps earlier. He might even attack on the day of the opening. I can't wait much longer. Today is Tuesday 11 July, Hirum. There are four days left. I am des-per-ate. My people are working on it day and night. We've devised some very complex protection plans, but this guy has a plan of his own, and he'll dodge us just as he has until now. He's going to destroy another painting. And I have to stop him.' Oslo thought for a minute. 'Tell me a bit about his modus operandi.'
Wood told him about the state the paintings had been found in, and the use of the canvas cutter. She added:
'He records the voices of the canvases saying weird things which we reckon he must force them to read. I've brought you written copies of both recordings.'
She pulled some sheets of paper out of her bag and passed them to him. By the time Oslo had finished reading them, the garden was dark and silent.
The art that survives is the art that has died,' he read aloud. 'That is odd. It sounds like a declaration of principles of hyperdramatic art. Tanagorsky always said that HD art would not survive because it's live art. It may sound like a paradox, but that's the way it is: it's made from real flesh-and-blood people, and so is ephemeral.'
Miss Wood had abandoned her notebook, and was leaning forward, elbows on the edge of the desk.
'Hirum, do you think that the recorded phrases reveal a deep artistic knowledge?' Oslo raised his eyebrows and thought before he responded.
'It's hard to say, but I think so. "Art is also destruction," it says further on. "Before it used to be just that." And it names cave artists, and the Egyptians. I see it this way: until the Renaissance, broadly speaking, artists worked for "destruction" or death: bison on cave walls, figures on tombs, statues of terrifying gods, medieval descriptions of hell… But from the Renaissance onwards, art began to work for life. And that went on until the Second World War, believe it or not. After that conflict, there was a shrinking of awareness. Painters lost their virginity, became pessimistic, no longer believed in their own craft. Even today, well into the twenty-first century, we're still suffering the consequences. All of us are the inheritors of that dreadful war. This is our Nazi inheritance, April. This is what the Nazis have achieved…'
Oslo's voice had diminished to almost a whisper. It was as dark as the nightfall closing in around them. He was speaking without looking at Miss Wood, staring instead at his desk.
'We've always thought humanity was a mammal which could lick its own wounds. But in fact we're as fragile as a huge painting, a beautiful but terrifying mural painting which has been creating itself over the centuries. That's what makes us so fragile: slashes on the canvas of humanity are hard to repair. And the Nazis slashed the canvas to ribbons. Our convictions were smashed, and their fragments scattered throughout history.
There was nothing we could do with beauty, except to grieve over it. There was no way we could get back to Leonardo, Raphael, Velazquez, or Renoir. Humanity became a mutilated survivor whose eyes are wide open to horror. And that's the Nazis' real victory. Artists still suffer from that inheritance, April. In that sense, in only that sense, it's true to say that Hitler won the war forever.'
He raised his sad eyes to look at Miss Wood, who sat listening to him silently.
'Just like in the university, I'm talking too much,' he said with a smile. 'No, go on, please.'
Oslo stared down at the elaborate knob of his cane while he went on.
'Art has always been very sensitive to the currents of history. After the war, painting fell apart; canvases became daubs of bright colours, a sort of crazy revolution of amorphous shapes. Art movements and tendencies lasted less and less time. One painter even said, quite rightly, that the avantgardes existed simply to provide material for the following day's tradition. There were action paintings, live art, performances, pop art and art that defied classification. Schools were born and died in a day. Each painter became his own school, and the only acceptable Rile was that there were no rules. Then hyperdramatism came on the scene: and that in many ways is closer to destruction than any other artistic movement.' 'How's that?' Miss Wood asked.
'According to Kalima, the great theorist of HD art, humanity is not only contrary to art, it cancels it out. That's what he says in his books, I'm not inventing it. To put it simply: an HD work is more artistic the less human it is. That is what hyperdramatic exercises are aimed at: stripping the model of their condition as a person, getting rid of their convictions, their emotional stability, their willpower, undermining their dignity in order to transform them into a thing they can make art out of. "We have to destroy the human being in order to create the work," say the hyperdramatists. That's what the art of our time has become, April. That is the art of our world, of this new century of ours. And not only have they dispensed with human beings: they've also dispensed with all the other arts. We live in a hyperdramatic world.'
Oslo paused. Miss Wood could not help thinking yet again of the Debbie Richards portrait. That woman who was more attractive than she was, whom Hirum had on show in his house to remember her.
'As is usually the case,' Oslo went on, 'this savage tendency has given rise to opposite reactions. On the one hand, people who believe you have to go to the absolute extreme and degrade the human being to an unbelievable extent: that was how art-shocks, hypertragedies, animarts and so on were born, and human artefacts… and the corollary, the ultimate degradation of stained art… But on the other, there are those who believe you can create works of art with human beings without having to degrade or humiliate them. And that's how natural-humanism came about.' He raised his hands in the air, and smiled. 'But I'm not trying to convert you.'
'You mean,' Miss Wood said, 'that whoever wrote those texts was thinking in hyperdramatic terms?'
'Yes, but there are strange phrases. For example, the one at the end of both texts: "If the figures die, the works persist." I can't see how an HD work can persist if its figures die. That's taking Tanagorsky's paradox to the extreme. They are confused texts, and I'd like more time to be able to analyse them at greater leisure. At any rate, I don't think we should take them literally. I remember that in Alice, Humpty Dumpty reckoned he could make words mean whatever he wanted. Something similar is going on here. Only the person who wrote them can tell us what he meant.'
'Hirum,' Miss Wood said after another short pause, 'I've read that Deflowering and Monsters were considered very special in Van Tysch's output. Why is that?'
'It's true, they are very different from the rest of his production. In his Treatise on Hyperdramatic Art, Van Tysch says that Deflowering is based on a vision he had as a child, when he was going to Edenburg castle with his father. Maurits wanted Bruno to observe him at work so that he could learn the skills of the trade. Bruno used to go with him every summer in his school holidays, and they would walk together along a path bordered with flowers. In one part, there was a bank of wild narcissi, and one day Van Tysch thought he saw a young girl standing among the flowers. He might really have seen her, but he thinks it must have been a dream. The fact is that Deflowering became for him a symbol of his childhood. The smell of wet wood that the work gives off… that the work gave off… is a reference to the summer storm that broke over Edenburg on the day he saw the vision.' Oslo twisted his lips. ‘I met Annek when Van Tysch was painting that work with her. The poor child thought he cared for her. And he used her feelings in his work.'
There was another pause. Miss Wood was staring at him out of the shadows.
In Monsters his aim was to represent Richard Tysch, and perhaps Maurits as well. Of course, the Walden brothers did not look anything like them, but it was a caricature, a sort of artistic revenge against people who had been influential in his life. He chose a couple of psychopaths and hung a criminal record round their necks which has still not been properly confirmed. The Walden brothers were capable of a lot of things, but Van Tysch probably made them seem even more perverse than they were by using the notoriety of the case in which they were accused of murdering Helga Blanchard and her son. So the comparison between the two figures in the work of art and those in his past is perhaps concealing something else. Maybe Van Tysch is trying to tell us that neither Richard Tysch nor Maurits were as evil and perverse in reality, as they are when he remembered and painted them: deformed, grotesque, pederasts, criminals, just like one another. The only link between Monsters and Deflowering then is the past. No other painting he has done is so directly related to his own life.'
'What about "Rembrandt"?' Miss Wood leaned forward in her seat. 'Do you know the description of the works in his new collection?' 'I've heard something about it, like all the critics.'
'I've brought you a catalogue with the most up-to-date information,' she said, pulling a black pamphlet out of her bag. She opened it out on the desk. 'There's a short descripdon of each work. There are thirteen of them. I need you to tell me which of them, in your opinion, could be specially related to Van Tysch's past like those other two.'
'April, it's impossible for me to tell that on the basis of a description in a catalogue…'
'Hirum: in London all the past week I've been sending this catalogue to the four corners of the earth. I've talked to dozens of art critics on all five continents, and I've drawn up a list. All of them told me exactly the same as you, and I've had to insist with all of them, although you're the only one to whom I've told the whole truth. They protested, but eventually all of them gave me their opinion. I need you to do the same.'
Oslo stared at her, feeling sorry for the desperate gleam in her eyes. He thought it over for a moment before replying.
'It's very hard to say whether there'll be any work like those two in "Rembrandt". I think it's a very different collection to "Monsters", just as that was different to "Rowers". On one level, it's a homage to Rembrandt on the four hundredth anniversary of his birth. But we also have to remember that Rembrandt was Maurits' favourite painter, and perhaps for that very reason, because he was his father's favourite, the collection has some very odd things in it. In The Anatomy Lesson, for example, instead of a body there's a naked, smiling woman, and the students look as though they're just about to throw themselves on her. The Syndics shows Van Tysch's teachers and colleagues: Tanagorsky, Kalima and Buncher… The Jewish Bride could hide references to his father's collaboration during the war; it's even been said that he has disguised the female model as Anne Frank. .. the Christ on the Cross is a kind of self-portrait… Gustavo Onfretti, the model, is painted to look like Van Tysch and is hanging from a cross… in other words, in "Rembrandt" nearly all the works are directly related to Van Tysch and his world, in one grotesque way or another…'
'But this guy is only going to destroy one of them,' Miss Wood snapped. 'And I need to know which one.' Oslo could not bear to meet her imploring eyes.
'And what will you do if I say a probability among the thirteen? You'll give that one more protection, won't you? What if
I'm wrong? Will that make me responsible for a death? Or more than one, perhaps?'
Toil won't be responsible for anything. I've already told you, I'm collecting the opinion of experts all round the world, and I'll choose the work that gets most votes.' 'Why not ask Van Tysch?'
'He didn't want to see me,' replied Wood. 'The Maestro is inaccessible. And besides, he hasn't even been told that Deflowering and Monsters have been destroyed. He is on top of his private summit, Hirum. I can't reach him.' ^What if the majority of experts are wrong?'
'Even if that's the case, nothing will happen. I'm not going to put the original work at risk.'
All of a sudden it was Hirum Oslo who felt nervous. As he stared at Miss Wood's face lit by the desk lamp, he realised what she was proposing. His whole body went tense.
'Hang on a minute. Now I understand. You're going to… you're going to put a copy as bait for this madman… A copy of the work that gets most votes…'
There was another pause. Oslo was convinced he had hit the nail on the head.
That's your idea, isn't it? And what will happen to the copy? You know very well we're talking about human beings…' 'Weil protect the copy,' she said. Oslo was quick to realise she was being insincere.
'No, you won't. It wouldn't be of any use to you if you protected it… you want to use it as bait. You want to set a trap. You're going to hand over one, or more, innocent people to this psychopath, in order to save the others!'
'A copy of a Van Tysch work is only worth fifteen thousand dollars on the market, Hirum.' Oslo could feel the old fury gripping him.
'But they are people, April! The copies are people, too, just like the original!' 'But they're not worth anything as art.' 'And art isn't worth anything compared to people, April!' i don't want an argument, Hirum.' 'All the art in the world, all the damned art in the world, from the Parthenon to the Mona Lisa, from the statue of David to Beethoven's symphonies, is rubbish compared to even the most insignificant of people! Can't you understand that?' 'I don't want an argument, Hirum.'
There she was, thought Oslo, there she was, unmoving, and the world would go on turning. We are defending the world's heritage, she always said, we are defending the great human creations, pyramids, sculptures, canvases, museums, all of them built on dead bodies, bones on bones. We are protecting the heritage of injustice. We buy slaves to haul blocks of granite. We buy slaves to paint their bodies. To make Ashtrays, Lamps, and Chairs. To disguise them as animals and men. To destroy them according to their price on the market. Welcome to the twenty-first century: life is disappearing, but art survives. Some consolation.
'I'm not going to have anything to do with an act of injustice,' said Oslo. Unexpectedly, Miss Wood smiled at him.
'Hirum: you've seen lots of works by Van Tysch in your life, and you know a copy can't compare, artistically, with an original by the Maestro, can it?' – Oslo agreed – 'You say that both of them are human beings, and I agree with you. It's precisely because the material is the same that the value is different. And when one has to make hard choices, one has to choose the more precious thing. I've already told you I don't want to argue, but I'll give you an example. Your house is on fire and you can only save one work of art. Would you save Bust by Van Tysch or a copy of Bust? In both cases we're talking about an eleven- or twelve-year-old girl. But which of the two would you save, Hirum? Which of the two?'
This time there was a long silence. Oslo wiped the sweat from his forehead. Miss Wood continued, with another smile: That's the kind of "act of injustice" I'm asking you to commit.'
'You haven't changed,' Oslo replied. 'You haven't changed a bit, April. What is it you're really trying to prevent? The loss of a painting, or of confidence in yourself?' 'Hirum.' That electric whisper of hers. That frozen murmur which paralysed you the way the bifid taunt of a snake paralyses its tiny victim. Wood leaned over forwards as though her body had lost its centre of gravity. She spoke very slowly, in a tone that made Hirum squirm in his seat.
'Hirum, if you want to help me, tell me your damn opinion once and for all.'
Another pause and then, in the same tone of voice and with her blue quartz eyes fixed on him, she added:
'Forgive me for such a rapid visit, Hirum. In fact, you've helped me a lot already. You don't have to do any more.'
'No, wait, pass me the catalogue again. I'll study it and give you a call tomorrow. If I see one painting that looks more likely than the others, I'll tell you.'
He hesitated a moment before he went on, as if wondering whether it was worth obtaining any kind of promise from someone who looked at you the way she did, and who could talk in such a terrible whisper.
'Promise me you'll do all you can to make sure no one is injured, April.'
She agreed, and handed him the catalogue. Then she stood up, and Oslo walked back to the house with her. Night was falling on the world.