Pursuit (29 page)

Plus the Internet was full of photographs of the guy, usually holding a glass of something, in a tux, at some show opening. The only thing Matt had ever opened was cans of beer, doors, and envelopes.

To his credit, Ensler tried to hide his disappointment at seeing Matt instead of Charlotte. He nodded, entered, and immediately started studying her paintings and sketches, without a word. He did it methodically, studying each work—whether an oil painting or a quick line drawing—with the same intense regard, sometimes sticking his nose so close to the canvas he could probably smell it, sometimes standing back, head tilted, but always with an intent, interested gaze, totally focused on the piece. Matt watched him make the rounds, praying for Charlotte to come back out. He was in a sweat at the thought that the guy would ask him questions. Matt knew shit about art, and in his fumbling, maybe he could harm her prospects.

Eventually she came out. She’d changed, combed her hair, put on some lipstick, and looked wonderful. Ensler finally showed signs of animation as she stepped into the room.

“Ah, Ms. Fitzgerald! How delightful to see you again.” Ensler and Charlotte went into this graceful little dance, kissing the air on both sides of their heads. She held out her hand, he kissed the back of it and smiled into her eyes, while Matt’s back teeth ground.

“Mr. Ensler, thank you for coming.”

He looked pained. “Perry, please, good Lord, calling me Mr. Ensler makes me feel like I’m a thousand years old and actually I’m only five hundred years old, or at least that’s what it feels like at the end of the winter season, which is why I love coming down to Baja so much, it’s just so relaxing, and yet I get so much work done, don’t you just love it?” He stopped, but only because he ran out of breath.

“Perry.” Charlotte smiled up at him as he finally let go of her hand. “And please call me Charlotte.”

It was as if Matt weren’t even there.

Ensler looked around the room. “I admired your work at the cantina, what I saw of it, but this is magnificent. You’ve got an amazing number of pieces here. How many years have you lived here?”

It wasn’t a question she was expecting. And after Matt’s little lecture, it all of a sudden occurred to her that too much personal info was a no-no. “Ahm . . . about . . . six months,”

she finally said, her voice a little strangled as she tried to fudge her time line. Ensler had continued looking around the room but turned his head at that, eyes wide.

“Really? Wow. All this work done in only six months, you’re incredibly prolific, I’m amazed, I might have room for you in the Montreal gallery as well, we’re always on the lookout for good representational art, and this is really good. And your portraits—such interesting studies. We do a great trade in portraits. For example, the old gentleman over there”— he pointed to the portrait of Charlotte’s father—“I could probably get about eight or nine thousand dollars for that, minus our commission—Canadian dollars of course, though lately Americans aren’t sneering so much at the Canadian dollar, such a pleasure for those of us north of the border, it makes you feel that there really is a god, eh?” Ensler watched her carefully. The man clearly loved art, but he was also clearly a businessman. If he was offering eight thousand dollars for the portrait, it was probably worth at least fifteen. Matt opened his mouth to say something when Charlotte spoke.

“The portrait of . . . the old man isn’t for sale.” Her hand caressed the frame of the picture, lingered as if for reassurance. “But I have several others you might want to look at.” She handed him a sketchbook. Matt had leafed through it himself. Sketches of San Luiseños—

the guy who sold
leche dulce
from a cart on the beach, the fisherman who always seemed to come back with a full catch, the one-eyed postman. They were all there, brought to startling life on the page.

Ensler flipped the pages, looking quickly but carefully through the drawn portraits. He set a number of them aside. “Good,” he said finally, looking up, pinning her with an intense pale blue gaze, “I’ll take fourteen of those, but the portraits we sell best are oils, do you have any besides that one, that you’re not selling? Ah, what about these?” He walked toward the west wall, where Charlotte stacked her finished oils. Without asking permission, he looked at them, pulling them out from the wall one by one, head tilted, like flipping through cards. Matt knew what was there. Landscapes, a couple of still lifes, and a portrait of a blond woman. It was third from the back.

Sure enough, Ensler’s long fingers stopped at the canvas. He shunted the others to one side, carefully, and set the portrait up on a side table, leaning it against the wall where it could catch the light.

It was a young blonde woman, in casual dress. She was pretty enough, though not remarkably so. What set her apart was a feeling of energy crackling through her. Everything about the woman suggested movement, as if she could scarcely stay still for more than a minute or two. The woman was sharply painted, so true to life the oil could have been a photograph, but the background was slightly blurred, as if in motion. Even Matt—art bonehead that he was—could see that it was stunning.

“I’ll take it,” Ensler said, not lifting his eyes from the portrait for long minutes. Silence. Finally he looked up, eyebrows raised. “This isn’t for sale, either?”

Charlotte was fairly quivering with some unnamed emotion. She took a sharp breath, two, realizing that she had to make something available to the guy. “No,” she said on a sigh.

“No . . . that can be sold.”

“Done,” Ensler said promptly. “Six thousand five. This will go into our permanent collection.” He stuck his nose close to the painting again, then pulled back. “Wonderful luminosity, masterful brushstrokes . . . superb flicker, direction and tone—perfect balance of volume.”

Ensler walked around to look at the canvas Charlotte had been working on. Matt’s portrait.

“Whoa.” Ensler’s head reared back. For the first time, he seemed to be at a loss for words. Though Matt had had strict instructions from Charlotte not to look until it was done—
don’t
look
and
don’t move
had been repeated until his ears rang—he couldn’t resist. Ignoring her glare, he rounded the easel and stared. And stared.

It was . . . magnificent.

He was a former soldier, in a red tee shirt, sitting on a plain wooden chair, hands on knees, slightly bent forward. As ordinary as they come. And she’d turned him into this . . . this
king
, sitting on the wooden chair that she’d somehow made look like a throne. Matt was looking straight ahead, gaze intense, as if looking directly into the eyes of the viewer. He didn’t realize how grim he usually looked until he saw himself through Charlotte’s eyes. Though the objects in the picture were all modern, they were also timeless—a bright green bowl on a nearby table, a tapestry hanging from the wall behind him in bold, bright colors, a slice of intensely blue ocean visible in the window behind him.

Ensler broke the silence. “I’ll offer you ten thousand dollars for this, and I can tell you right now, it’s being shipped straight to Canada.”

“No,” Matt said softly, suddenly. “It’s not for sale.” Buying it himself would nearly wipe out his savings, but there was no question in his mind that the painting was
his
. He’d go into debt to have it, if necessary. “It’s mine.”

For once, Ensler had nothing to say. He looked at Charlotte.

“That’s right,” she said softly, with a nod. “I’m afraid it’s not for sale, Mr.—Perry. It’s my gift to Matt. But we’ve already agreed to the purchase of four oils and fifteen drawings, so you should have enough material for the show. When will you be picking them up?”

Ensler touched the unpainted side of the canvas gently, with lingering regret. “I’m really really sorry this isn’t for sale, the composition is stunning and the colors, wow—you’re absorbing subconsciously the Mexican palette, it’s amazing to see, I just love it when artists absorb, process, refine, move on, if you squint your eyes, this could be part of a Rivera mural, where on earth did you get that red?”

Charlotte reached over behind him and held up a tube. “Cochineal, the real thing.”

Matt heard something like cochy-kneel. Was that a
color
?

“Well, that’s not something you see every day. It’s fairly rare nowadays,” Ensler said, taking the tube from her. “Hard to find and not used much anymore, such a pity, it’s really effective, so bold, so clean, so bright—” This with a last, lingering glance at Matt’s portrait. He gave a gusty sigh of regret and stuck out his hand. “Well, it’s been a real pleasure doing business, these won’t be the last things I buy from you, but it’s a good start, particularly if you’re moving into these intense colors, I can tell you right now they’re going to sell, my partner and I will stop by tomorrow to pick them up, see you tonight, eh?”

“Yes, we’ll be there.” Charlotte put a cloth over her portrait of Matt that reminded him of a shroud. Gave him the creeps. It took him a second to run over what they’d said in his mind.

“We’ll be where?” he asked Charlotte.

She turned, surprised. “Why, the concert,” she said, just as Ensler said, “The concert.”

Concert? Oh sweet Jesus, he’d completely forgotten about it. Matt wasn’t real big on concerts. Sitting around listening to music in a crowd when you’d had to get dressed up to do it seemed insane to him when you could slip a CD into the player and listen in shorts and a tee shirt, with a beer in your hand. “What kind of music?” he asked suspiciously.

Please don’t let it be long-hair music
.

“Classical,” Charlotte said, with a smile. “Mozart.”

San Diego, California

April 28

Barrett pulled to the side of the road and braked to a stop. He kept his hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead, thinking ahead.

This was the point where he couldn’t make a mistake, the point of no return. This was where the decision tree branched out into speculation. If he chose the wrong branch, he could find himself chasing his own ass forever and he could kiss two hundred thou goodbye. That was why he’d pulled off the road that led out of San Diego to Tijuana, to reason it through. A mistake now was unthinkable. He couldn’t afford it.

The motel in San Diego was the last place he could be certain Charlotte Court had been. He’d walked the ground she’d walked two months before. Seen what she’d seen, heard what she’d heard.

Court had made herself an arrow and had shot herself across a continent because she was aiming at something specific. Somewhere specific.

And that could only be Mexico.

Mexico, where bored Mexican customs officials barely looked at the ID bored drivers held out from their car windows, a hundred of them an hour. Totally unlike the hard-eyed scrutiny passports now received in airports. If she had a fake passport, security in an airport would pick it up. A Charlotte Court trying to get into Mexico would in all likelihood have been waved through after a cursory glance at a passport held open, the bright sunlight glinting off the new plastic-coated pages.

Definitely Mexico.

He let that thought settle in his mind, picturing her in some artists’ colony, adobe houses, bright colors, brilliant sunshine.

Barrett was proud of the way his mind worked. He had a neat, logical mind that could think things through carefully and rationally. But the rational part of his mind was only one weapon in his armamentarium. Underneath the rational, superbly logical mind was a subconscious that was constantly churning, taking bits of data and analyzing them, twisting them this way and that, seeing what fit and what didn’t, and when something fit, the message was sent to his conscious mind in the form of a hunch. Barrett trusted his hunches. He trusted his instincts because invariably they were backed up by logic, only not always immediately accessible.

Everything told him she was aiming at exiting the country and that the point of exit would be San Diego. His mind and his instincts were on the same page.

Okay, he’d taken his decision and committed himself to the new course. He put the car in motion and eased into the traffic, heading south.

Convent of San Agustìn San Luis April 28

“Turn here,” Charlotte said suddenly.

She didn’t have to say it.

Though the road in the desert wasn’t lit, and there were no signposts, Matt could have figured the turnoff himself, seeing as how there was a long line of cars—almost a procession—all going in the same direction in the twilight, all peeling off to the right, turning off the two-lane blacktop angling eastward out of town, and onto a narrow dirtpacked road. Matt was going to a concert. A
classical
concert no less, and he wouldn’t have done it for anyone on this Earth but Charlotte. To make her happy and to guard her six. He was even dressed up—in black slacks and a white shirt, which was just about his own personal limits of formality. Charlotte herself was all dressed up in a simple turquoise . . . thing—frock?

gown? whatever the fuck it was called—and strappy black sandals that showed off her neat little ankles and pretty feet. She was made up in some unobtrusive, classy way that nonetheless made her a wet dream. She’d done something that made her eyes mysterious, her lips dark—some female alchemy that somehow made her even more beautiful than before. When she’d come out of the bedroom, Matt had nearly swallowed his tongue, and instead of “Wow, you look great,” a sophisticated “Gah” had come out of his drooling mouth.