Body Work (48 page)

I tried to argue with him, but his mind was made up. He insisted that Clara call the unlisted number at Arcadia House so he could speak with his wife, and the family returned home. My one hope was that Rainier Cowles would leave the family alone now that he knew they didn’t have Alexandra’s autopsy report. Caroline told me at the meeting that Darraugh’s agent in Beirut had duly delivered the message. Still, I had to take Vesta off bodyguard duty. It was just too much to ask of an amateur in case Cowles—or, even worse, Kystarnik—wanted to attack the family.

I bought several disposable phones for my outgoing calls while my answering service was fielding all incoming ones. As long as no one could find me, they couldn’t deliver threats.
Turn over the report or we will hurt Petra—
or
Clara—
or
Lotty—
or
Mr. Contreras—
or
the dogs.
I was a Swiss cheese of vulnerability, thankful that Jake was on the other side of the world.

Although I didn’t hear from the Body Artist, I knew word about the performance was getting out around town. For one thing, we had a lot of hits on our website. For another, I got a call from Olympia. Actually, I got many calls from her. After her third, and most emphatic, message, I called her back, sitting in a window seat in Darraugh’s Hancock Center apartment.

“What are you doing?” she said. “Advertising the Body Artist’s final Chicago appearance?”

“Olympia! How are you? How are repairs to Club Gouge coming along?”

“Never mind the club. What the hell is the meaning of this announcement I saw?”

“I don’t know what you see or where you look,” I said, “so you’d better give me a hint.”

I thought I could hear her teeth grinding on the other side of the ether.

“I’ve seen the advertisements that the Body Artist is going to be at Sal Barthele’s joint on Sunday. What is the meaning of this?”

“Gosh, let me look at some tea leaves. Yep, here it is. It means that the Body Artist is going to be at the Golden Glow on Sunday.”

“Buckley is under contract with me,” she said, “and any bookings she makes—”

“Talk to the Artist or her agent. Don’t talk to me. If she has to wait for you to fix up Club Gouge before she can perform in public again, it seems like a mighty poor contract, but, not my business.”

“It’s your business if you put Sal Barthele up to it. I’ve been asking around, and everybody who knows Sal says you two are really tight.”

“Still doesn’t explain why you and I need to talk about it,” I said.

Olympia was silent. A field of gray-white clouds floated around Darraugh’s sixty-seventh-story apartment so that the city, with all its art and music and corruption and gang wars, seemed as silent and distant as if it existed only in a child’s pop-up book. Open the cover, and the characters and their world spring to life. Shut it, and you float off into your own private space.

When Olympia still didn’t say anything, I added, “By the way, I drove by the club last night, and it didn’t look to me as though anyone was doing any work. Did you know that? Or has Kystarnik cut off all your cash until you jump through some big hoops for him?”

“Where is Karen Buckley hiding, Vic?”

“Don’t you think she’d be in touch if she wanted you to know, Olympia?”

Some swallows had ventured up as high as our windows, looking for the insects sucked toward the building by the wind currents. Funny how much of nature there is to see, even from a skyscraper.

I said, “What did Anton offer you in exchange for getting her location from me? To cancel all your debts? To repair the club?”

She hung up with a bang. I laughed to myself, but not for long. I had too much work to do.

I had called Trish Walsh, the Raving Renaissance Raven, to see if she would play music as a warm-up for the show. It was her performance back in November that had brought me to Club Gouge the first time, and it seemed fitting, somehow, for her to open for the Body Artist on Sunday. I knew Trish was flying over to London to join Jake’s early-music group, but she wasn’t leaving for almost a week.

Trish readily agreed, but I had to warn her that I didn’t know what to expect—there might be a hundred people or five, the crowd could turn violent, but I hoped not.

“Vic! You’re making this sound like a
Buffy
melodrama. I’ll play for this event—I can’t wait to tell the rest of the group that I’ve been close to bloodshed—but you’ll have to write in a guarantee for my instruments.”

Her lute and hurdy-gurdy were valued at twenty thousand, for insurance purposes. I gulped, but told her to add the guarantee to the contract.

Tim Radke and Sanford Rieff from Cheviot labs were creating high-quality images for the slide show that the Body Artist had always run on big screens during her performances. Tim called in sick to his day job to help us out, and he wasn’t letting me pay him for his time. He insisted he was doing it for Chad, that I shouldn’t worry. Still, I felt a bit guilty.

Rivka was creating stencils for use in the show, although it took Vesta’s and my combined efforts to keep her working on something the Artist had never authorized. “She won’t be happy when she sees these,” Rivka grumbled every time I asked her to prepare a new figure.

She was working in the basement of the Golden Glow, where Sal stored her overstock. Marty Jepson and Mr. Contreras had moved all the cases around to create room for Rivka to spread out her materials. They’d installed floodlights and a mirror, so that the space could be used as a dressing room.

Even with Darraugh’s help providing me a place to stay, the expenses were staggering, and I knew I could pass very few of them on to the Vishneskis. They were uneasy enough with what I was doing without my suggesting they pay for messenger service between the Gold Coast and the northern suburbs, rental of the Glow, insurance on the Raving Raven’s hurdy-gurdy. I entered the figures by hand on a spreadsheet, and the totals made me feel faint.

Every morning that I woke up without anyone on my team having been shot or stabbed, I was relieved. And every night when we’d made it through yet another day intact, I had a moment to relax, however short, before the next day’s maniacal routine began again.

Chad Vishneski’s welfare was a big worry, too. John and Mona Vishneski decided to take him to John’s apartment for the weekend. Chad was definitely on the mend. He was alert for as long as fifteen minutes at a stretch now. But he had no recollection of the night of the murder, and there were big gaps in the rest of his memory, too.

John and Mona wanted to see the show, and two of John’s construction buddies agreed to stay with Chad, but it made me nervous to move a vulnerable man away from a doctor and closer to killers. Lotty wasn’t happy, either: although she didn’t want the burden of his protection falling on Beth Israel, she also didn’t want him far from medical help at such a fragile stage in his recovery.

When Sunday afternoon finally arrived, when the webcams and the security cameras were in place, the microphones set up, the screens for projecting the images hung over the shuttered windows, I couldn’t sit still.

Rivka didn’t help: she kept saying, “I told you she wouldn’t come. I don’t know why I believed you and did all this work when it was all just a big con job.”

By eight-thirty, when the doors opened, I felt as though every nerve in my body had pierced its sheath and was dancing naked on the surface of my skin.

TONIGHT
and
TONIGHT ONLY

At the

GOLDEN GLOW

The Body Artist

in her
FINAL CHICAGO APPEARANCE

THE RAVING RENAISSANCE RAVEN at 9

THE BODY ARTIST at 10!

Doors open at 8:30 P.M.

$20 COVER

52

The Naked and the Dead

U
nder the bright spotlights, the thick foundation stripped the Artist’s face of expression. The cream paint covered her completely, obliterating her race, her age. Her hair was pulled back from her face, lacquered heavily so that it stood straight up like a small shrub. Peering out from the middle of its leaves were a couple of Barbie dolls. Their plastic high heels bit into the Artist’s scalp.

The crowd on the other side of the lights whistled and catcalled. The Artist turned slowly. She felt exposed, powerless, and it took all her concentration to hold herself upright, to pretend that if she noticed the audience at all, she disdained it.

Behind her, two giant television screens kept changing slides. One zoomed in on a pink-and-gray fleur-de-lis on her left breast, another showed her shoulder with Alexandra Guaman’s face, surrounded in flames, as Nadia had painted it.

Off to one side, the Raving Renaissance Raven played her amplified hurdy-gurdy. The words were so out of harmony with the Purcellinspired melody that it took some time for the audience to realize what they were hearing:

Little girl, little girl
What’s your sister?
A toy
Played with by big boys
Until she’s broken
Little boy, little boy
Where’s your brother?
Dead
Blown up by big boys
Into small pieces

As the Raven sang, the images on the screen began to change from the pictures painted on the Artist’s body to shots of soldiers’ bodies, maimed and charred, in a desert; a woman clutching a torn dress around her bleeding body; a group of men, roaring with laughter, toasting one another at a black-tie dinner.

Text replaced the images.

Will a Change of Owner Change Achilles’ Fortunes?

Someone in the audience yelled, “Get to the show, get to the show,” but at a table near the stage three men stopped drinking and began looking around the room, as if checking for anyone who recognized them.

The Artist—a giant doll, really, not a woman at all—perched on a high stool in the middle of the jerry-rigged stage and sucked in a breath. The Raven wound her hurdy-gurdy more slowly, and after another few seconds fell silent. The Body Artist’s program began.

It’s story hour, boys and girls, girls and boys. And everyone’s stories come together through the Body Artist. She is the blank canvas where your dreams come to life. Your dreams may be nightmares, but you’ll realize them all in the Artist’s body.

The screens began flashing images from
embodiedart.com
, first the Body Artist’s original
Pieces of Flesh
, the field of lilies growing from her vagina, the tiger mask, the winking eye. They switched to the more disturbing images of the woman-faced deer being savaged by dogs, the crucified woman with a spike through her vulva. A horrified murmur ran through part of the crowd, but others began yelling explicit sexual commands. At me. At my body.

“For the Body Artist’s final Chicago appearance, I’m going to treat you to a fairy tale. It begins, as all good stories do:”

Once upon a time, there was a Chicago boy who loved to play football, loved to fool around with his buddies, loved beer. But, above all, he loved his country. So when his country invaded Iraq, he dropped football and a college scholarship and went off to war.

The screens showed pictures of Chad as a small boy splashing in a wading pool, then in his Lane Tech football uniform, finally as a soldier heading for Iraq.

He served cheerfully through his first two deployments, but the third time he was sent, his squad came under fire, and every one of them died except for him. They’d all worn body armor, but the armor had failed them.