Bite (8 page)

Max couldn't just leave it to the cops. He persuaded Zoe to come with him to the bar where Erica had taken her last drink.

They sat at the same table Erica had occupied, and discussed a strategy. Max would advertise in a local newspaper, offer a reward for the return of the laptop, and scour every flea market or boot sale where stolen goods might be sold. Zoe would e-mail Erica's scientific colleagues, and chase down everyone in the conference who might have agreed to meet her. Each evening at seven Max would ring Zoe to see what progress had been made.

Once Zoe had returned to her hotel, Max stayed on at the bar, an emptiness gnawing inside him. He looked at the napkin on which he and Zoe had scribbled their plans. They both knew it was just something to make them feel better about being helpless, about not knowing. What was needed now was a big break. It was a day in coming, and from a direction he never would have expected.

Henk Schipper, the energetic Amsterdam-based art dealer who had first recognised Max's talent in New York, had provided him with an engineering workshop in the west of Amsterdam so he could prepare for his first ever European exhibition, entitled
Max Carver: A retrospective
. Henk had publicised the workshop's location as a preview to the exhibition, convinced that seeing sculpture being made enhances sales.

It wasn't what Max wanted to do any more. He could only think about Erica. Henk had a different view, and over a steaming
koffie verkeerde
in a tiny nicotine brown café, he put his words to work.

‘Look Max. You have done everything you can for Erica. The police know, the press know, there are a thousand pairs of eyes out there looking for her. Leave it to the professionals. They know the language, they know the country and they know the law. Erica wouldn't want you to waste your big opportunity. You are an artist, and you owe it to yourself and to
her
to get yourself known.'

Henk was pale and slightly built, an eggshell delicate skull stretched with fine white skin. He had magnificent poise. Clothes could fall on him from a laundry truck and he'd look like a couture model. But there was nothing precious about him. Henk Schipper slid the razor edge of art but never got cut. And the man could sell a sun bed to a vampire.

Over the years Henk had parted bankers, businessmen and galleries from millions of dollars. He had sold numerous blank canvases, a six foot stack of cheap hairdryers melted together, a tar-coated guillemot preserved in a perspex cube, and most famously of all, he had got fifty thousand bucks in 1998 for a piece called
Receding Hairline
by a rising young artist called Galoo Dipsa. Ms Dipsa, a six-foot Floridan exhibitionist, had dyed all the hair on her head and body different colours and videoed herself shaving it off. The hair was stuffed into a five hundred foot long clear plastic tube which was twisted and bent into a free-standing knot. Max had read that visitors to Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, which bought the piece, would trace the tube through its numerous tangles, trying to find the elusive silver curls which, as they could see from the video playing alongside the work, had once resided on her pudenda.

Max looked hard at Henk. ‘This publicity about Erica is too good to waste, that's what you mean isn't it?'

‘It isn't that, Max. I'm thinking of you. Working is a release, you'll go crazy if you don't occupy your mind. Making art is the best catharsis known to man. Look at
Guernica
for Christ's sake. Picasso couldn't win the Spanish civil war by going out with a gun, but with that one piece of work he made sure no-one ever forgot its savagery.'

So on Monday Max poured his loss into his muscular art. Not the delicate caress of fine tools on clay, but the crackle and flash of the oxy-acetylene welding torch, the scream and grind of power tools in heated conflict with metal.

Max was fifteen feet up a ladder in overalls reassembling
Spoorkana III: Untitled
when she arrived. And he almost missed her. Above the hiss of the welding torch he could hear the bell on the door, but didn't bother to look. He was on a difficult weld, and didn't want to have to remove the goggles. Max could feel eyes on him as he checked
Spoorkana's
long spinal seam for blemishes. He heard Henk come in from the back office and address the visitor in Dutch. She responded, and they talked for several minutes. They laughed together about something.

Something about her laugh made Max stop. He turned off the torch and looked around just as the woman was leaving. He got just one glimpse of wavy chestnut hair and the side of her face before the door closed behind her. It was unmistakably the thief.

‘Henk!' Max hissed. ‘Do you know her?'

‘No.'

‘Do me a favour. Run after her and give her a ticket for the opening. No, two tickets. Quick.'

Henk ran daintily outside. Max climbed carefully down the ladder, and looked through the door but kept his goggles on. The woman was unlocking her pink bicycle from the railings next to the workshop. She stopped when Henk spoke to her. Max saw her smile, and pocket the tickets before cycling off.

‘I promised champagne,' Henk said to Max. ‘I hope that swung it. Now I had better get some.'

‘I just hope she comes.'

Henk looked sideways at Max. ‘What about Erica?'

‘It ain't lust, Henk. It's my vigilante streak. She broke into my car and stole Erica's laptop. I need to know why.'

‘You think it may lead to Erica?'

Max nodded. ‘Yeah. Let's pray the girl adores champagne.'

Saskia Sivali looked up from the microscope and blinked in shock. She looked again at the thick film sample of Jack Erskine's blood. Among the hundreds of grey ovals, healthy red blood cells, were dozens containing a tiny purple ring, which looked like a severe infection with
Plasmodium falciparum
, the most dangerous form of malaria. If correct, it would tie in with two other symptoms: severely depressed blood sugar levels and the presence of a pigment in blood cells, but would run counter to the patient's travel history. How does someone get malaria without visiting a malarial country?

It would be easy to be mistaken. This was only her second week on secondment to Tropical Medicine. Holding her belly carefully, she reached up for a textbook on a high shelf and hurriedly flipped it to the identification pictures for malarial types. What she saw in the microscope did not exactly match any of the shapes or descriptions in the book for any stage of the disease, so she flipped through the pages for other parasitic infections: Chaga's disease, African tryosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis, onchocerciasis. Nothing matched.

She called over the regular laboratory technicans to look down the microscope. Ben Hazelhof and Marja Veldhuis had thirty years' experience between them, and spent all day examining blood slides.

They were as mystified as she was.

‘We should do a fluorescence sample,' said Hazelhof. ‘Then we can see more clearly what has gone wrong here.'

He showed Saskia how to prepare a centrifuged blood sample to separate out the differing life cycle stages of any malarial parasites according to weight. Once centrifuged, the sample of Erskine's blood was a two inch long needle of glass, clear at the top, crimson, maroon and finally almost black at the bottom. They took the sample to the blackout room and inserted it under the fluorescent light microscope.

Hazelhof pressed his eye to the device and adjusted the focus, examining the length of the sample. ‘My God! Where did you get this sample?' He looked up at Saskia.

‘An American patient we brought in yesterday afternoon. We just couldn't find out what was wrong with him. His travel history is not indicative for malaria, so it was about the last thing we tried.'

‘He's got something, that's for sure. Almost every stage of parasitic infection: trophozoites, merozoites, and even gametocytes. That is what we could expect in a well-advanced infection. But look at the shapes, they're all deformed.'

Saskia looked into the microscope. ‘They're not like any of the charts, are they?'

‘Damn right. I've never seen anything like it.'

‘In that case let's get Van Diemen down here,' Saskia said.

Hazelhof blew a sigh. ‘He's not upstairs, he's at the RAI for the parasitology conference, he's been looking forward to it for months. You know what his temper is like. If he finds there's been a mix up in the samples or it's a false alarm he'll crucify us. If you prepared the sample wrongly it'll be on your head, Saskia.'

‘And if I didn't page him and it turns out to be a new strain? Someone dies,' Saskia said. ‘I know which mistake I'd prefer to make.'

The stars were very bright this evening. Tomas and I usually go to the rocks beyond the termite mounds, but tonight we headed towards the monkey tree. It is a dead yellow fever tree on the edge of the bush, with one low split bough resting on the ground. It was there we had seen a family of colobus monkeys on the day we arrived. We climbed up on the bough and sat there, counting shooting stars and absorbing the buzz of the crickets.

It was a new moon and the Milky Way was clearer than I had ever seen it. Not just an oblique glittering stripe, but a gigantic wheel in three dimensions with a dense hub of billions of suns. From it curved a spiral arm, dripping with worlds, beckoning towards the earth and to us. It seemed impossible that such a spectacle made no sound whatever.

We didn't speak. There was nothing we needed to say now we understood each other. He just touched my hand, and I shivered. I knew I would always remember the touch of his hand.

(Erica's Diary 1992)

Schipper's gallery was a giant loft which took up the roof space of three high, narrow canal houses on the Brouwersgracht. Originally used to hold ginger, cardamom and cloves, the timbers of the three hundred year old warehouses still transmitted an aromatic hint. Now they trilled to the clink of glasses and the subdued conversation of Schipper's thirty-five media and arts trade guests.

Max had been cornered by Joop Westermanns, the arts correspondent of local newspaper
Het Parool
. ‘So when did you devise the term
Metalgeist
for your work?'

‘It wasn't my idea, to be honest. Henk came up with it, as shorthand for the revealing of the soul and structure of metals which is what my art comes from.'

Over Westermanns' shoulder Max caught his own new reflection, distorted in the polished tin flank of
Oxymania IX
, for sale at 27,000 euros. In a two hour stint earlier that evening Max had had his curls cropped, and his designer stubble shaved off. Now he sported a bleached flat top and a single large zinc earring. He had swapped his checked jacket and corduroys for a canary yellow shirt and maroon leather trousers. The idea was that if the woman showed up, she wouldn't recognise him. But Max was worried. It was nine-thirty. Just a half hour to go, no sign of her.

‘And I understand that when you were working in New York, you didn't have a dealer there?' Westermanns said.

‘That's right. Henk has a shrewd eye for newcomers, and spotted me then. Now I show in New York through an associate of his.'

Max took a slug of champagne and slid his eyes towards the open door. Henk was showing in a giant leather-clad Viking. He was six feet eight, four-hundred raw pounds, with shoulder-length coarse dark hair and a Frank Zappa moustache. His T-shirt, jeans and leather jacket were black, and he was missing the top joint of his left thumb. Beside him was a slim woman wearing an expensive silvery cocktail dress.

It was the thief. And she was
gorgeous
.

The big guy made straight for the champagne table where he quickly drained two glasses, and grabbed one more for each hand. The woman looked around, and gravitated to
Zinctank
, a two foot zinc sphere suspended from a thick copper wire. Max watched as she ran her hand over its polished exterior. She peered into its green glass porthole, and smiled her surprise when she saw what was inside. He always enjoyed the reaction of people to his work.

Henk spoke to the woman, and following instructions, brought her over to Max. The gallery's halogen lights gave her dress a rainbow sheen as she rustled towards him.

‘This is the artist, Max Carver,' Henk said. ‘He can explain all about his work to you.' He grinned meaningfully at Max before departing.

‘Hello. I'm Lisbeth.' She pronounced it Lease-bet. She had cobalt blue eyes and honey-coloured skin. Her wavy hair was pulled back into a ponytail, revealing a slender neck and elegant sloping shoulders which reminded him of Erica.

‘I'm glad you could make it. Here, let me get you some champagne.' Max looked towards the drinks table. The big guy was still drinking from two glasses in the corner, conversing with a tiny woman with winged spectacles.

‘I don't like alcohol. Perhaps a fruit juice?'

‘Sure.'

Max returned with the drink. Their hands briefly touched as he gave it to her. For a few seconds they just stared at each other. He saw something in her eyes and it wasn't recognition, he was sure of that.

‘I was just admiring your big metal ball,' she said, waving at the sphere.

‘Oh,
Zinctank
.'

‘Yes. What is the meaning of the small man inside?'

‘Well, the bronze figure is supposed to be cracking some big problem. But he has fallen asleep at his desk, and as you can see the waters are rising, a symbol for time running out.' An image of Erica flooded his mind, and he felt guilty for being here, drinking and talking while she was lost out there somewhere. Perhaps through this woman he would be able to find her.

‘And you made the water from glass, like the small window?'

‘Yes.'

‘And this piece is really worth twenty-two thousand euros?'

Max laughed. ‘Well, that's the sale price. Whether it is worth it depends on whether you like it. If you hate it, it is worth nothing to you. From my perspective, on the number of hours it took to make, I easily have to get that much just to break even.'

‘I have never been to an art show before. But I am enjoying your work.' She stared around at the other guests. ‘Am I expected to buy something?'

‘Not at all. This is only the press and media day anyhow. Most of the big buyers are getting private viewings later in the week. Of course, if you do want to buy something and this is all too expensive, I have a number of drawings and sketches for sale for around fifty euros.'

Her eyes flicked up and narrowed, assessing him. ‘Henk said it was you that invited me. Why?'

Max's throat dried up. ‘There is a good reason.' He couldn't just confront her about the theft, here. She might run, or…Max imagined the damage the big guy could do. ‘I saw you at the workshop. You seemed interested in art.'

She smiled, and folded her arms. ‘Bull
shit
.'

‘No. Really.'

‘Was it you on the ladder?'

‘Yes.' Max started to drain the remainder of his champagne.

Lisbeth watched him. ‘Did you invite me because you want to have sex with me?'

For a second Max inhaled his drink. He coughed and spluttered, shaking drops off his hand. Lisbeth produced a handkerchief and mopped his shirt. When he got his breath back, everyone was watching him.

‘Full marks for directness, Lisbeth,' he whispered.

‘I am Dutch,' she shrugged. ‘We say what we think. It saves a lot of time.'

‘If that's what you think, then I guess you wouldn't have come unless…' Max realised the dangerous direction of his words.

‘Very big assumption, Max. I might just like art.'

Max ducked the stare and glanced at the big guy, who was now lounging on a couch with a bottle of champagne grasped by the neck in one meaty paw, and an art magazine open on his lap.

‘Does your boyfriend like art?'

‘Janus likes sculpture. But he isn't my boyfriend.'

‘What is he then?'

‘Many years ago someone who loved me went away, and asked Janus to look after me until he returned. Months later, bad news came from abroad, my lover had died. At the funeral, Janus promised me he would look after me, always.'

‘That was a nice gesture.' Max guided her towards one of the huge windows, and looked out over the darkened rooftops, the canals as smooth as oil. He sipped his champagne and let the bubbles fizz on his tongue. ‘To be honest I invited you because we hadn't had many people walk into the gallery in the last few days, and we wanted to make sure we had a chic crowd for tonight. And you seem pretty cool to me.'

She stared into his eyes, as if trying to divine some hidden meaning from him. ‘I see. Like an extra in a film, then?'

Max laughed. ‘Yeah. Except you don't get paid.'

Behind Max the floorboards groaned. Lisbeth's gaze left his face and moved high over his shoulder. Max didn't have to turn around to know who was standing there.

‘Max, meet Janus,' Lisbeth said. ‘European power-lifting champion in...1999 wasn't it, Janus?'

‘It was 1998,' Janus said, switching the half-full champagne bottle to his left hand and with his right briefly swallowed Max's hand to the wrist.

‘And how many champagne bottles could you lift in 1994?' Max asked, looking pointedly at the Moet et Chandon.

‘More than you drank in your whole life,' he said, swigging from the bottle. ‘And I still can.'

‘Maybe we can use you to shift the empties outside to the garbage later.'