Authors: M.J. Rose
It was ordinary typewriter paper. Each item was numbered and handwritten in both English and German in blue ink. He started to read down.
He never finished because of two things that happened so close together he couldn’t distinguish which came first: a slight gust of wind blew into the room and the doctor gasped. Instinctively, he let the paper fall as he reached for his gun, but just as his fingers touched the comforting metal something came down hard on the back of his head.
The pain was instantaneous and intense. Sharp, jagged and overwhelming. He was seeing darkness and then titanium-white brightness, and even as he fought to breathe through the pain, he wondered how someone could have gotten into the room, because he’d seen Dr. Alderman lock the door from the inside.
The second blow came almost immediately. He’d suffered
pain like this a long time ago, and that was what he was remembering when the third strike hit. From far away he heard moaning but didn’t realize it was coming from his own lips. Before he lost consciousness, Special Agent Lucian Glass was thinking that he didn’t really care very much if he died—as long as this time he stayed dead.
The boy was only sixteen years old, but he stood over the fallen soldier with a look of total control and calm. The soldier writhed and moaned, a coward’s crying. Around them the battlefield was still; there were bodies everywhere. It seemed that these two were the last men left alive, except the boy wasn’t alive in the same way the soldier was.
The undead can’t be.
“Please,” the soldier begged. “I was only following orders.”
The look in the pale boy’s eyes said that had been the wrong answer. “All this…” He spread his hand out over the devastation. “And you didn’t even believe in the reason you were fighting?”
The wounded soldier stared up at him.
“You could have at least died a hero,” the boy said almost wistfully.
“There are no heroes anymore…” The bloodied fighter managed a disgusted snort.
The expression on the boy’s face was both an answer and a promise. “There will be, there have to be,” he whispered. And then the zombie turned and walked into the encroaching darkness.
For a few seconds there was total silence.
“And that’s a wrap!” Darius Shabaz’s deep voice boomed out, his French accent very much evident. “Bravo!”
The director watched the actors break character, the grips shut down the lights and the set become flat and two-dimensional again. This transitional time when fantasy became reality again always left him depressed.
Making the rounds, he thanked the cast and crew for all their hard work and invited everyone to the final wrap party later that evening.
“Masterful job, Mitch. Thank you, once again,” Shabaz said when he reached his director of photography.
“It’s your vision, Darius. We’ve got another winner here.”
At six-and-a-half feet tall and only 160 pounds, Shabaz towered over everyone and moved faster than any of them. He exuded so much energy one of his assistants once joked that she used to wait for the thunder to follow his lightning.
It took the better part of an hour to talk to everyone. It had been a long day—they’d started filming outdoors at six that morning to catch the early light—but Shabaz wasn’t tired. At fifty-three, he ran fifteen miles a week, lifted weights, never drank and was fanatical about what he ate. The silver threads in his thick black hair were the only outward signs of his age. Shabaz had been brought up to revere his body. “We are all we own,” his grandfather had always told him.
Outside the shooting stage, the sun was just starting to drop down and the orange groves that stretched out almost a mile in every direction were suffused with a warm glow. Glancing at his watch, he calculated that his driver would be getting back from Santa Barbara in twenty minutes and paced himself accordingly as he set off on his end-of-the-workday walk.
Shabaz had come to America to attend film school when he was seventeen, and while he retained his French citizenship,
he’d never gone home again. He was directing by the time he was twenty-two and was responsible for one of the highest grossing horror pictures of all time by the age of thirty. Five years after that he started his own studio. He focused on supernatural plots about the dead coming back to life—vampires, zombies and mummies—but always for noble purposes.
While critics labeled him as a B movie director with messianic delusions, filmgoers ignored the negative reviews. Word of mouth kept people standing in line even in the dead of winter without complaining when a new Shabaz movie debuted. It was often remarked that fans preferred to see his films in theaters as opposed to renting them. It wasn’t just because his grand and gory visions were better suited to the big screen, but because seeing them in a roomful of people who collectively gasped was exhilarating.
Passing the main gatepost, Shabaz circled the compound, which included four soundstages, a theater, an editing studio, an employees’ gym, a day-care center, a medical building, a commissary and a dozen bungalows. His architect had relied on natural woods and stone so all the structures seemed to have sprung out of the earth and looked as indigenous to the landscape as the orange and eucalyptus trees.
Shabaz’s loop ended at the southwest corner where bungalow number six sat on the edge of a small pond. His office was here, along with a private screening room and a bedroom suite for when he stayed over. His olive-drab Range Rover was parked in the driveway, his driver leaning on the car, having a smoke.
“Hey, Mr. Shabaz,” the driver said, tipping his Shabaz Films baseball cap with its distinctive emerald-green lightning bolt.
“How badly did they soak us this time, Mike?”
“Not too bad. Everything was under warranty but the new tires. These were a couple of hundred dollars more, but they
should last seventy-five thousand miles instead of twenty, which was all we got out of the last set.”
“Which means these will get us about forty-five?”
“If we’re lucky.” The driver grinned. “Are you going to be needing me tonight?”
Shabaz shook his head. “No, I’m working late, so either I’ll drive myself home or stay over. See you tomorrow.”
The driver doffed his cap for the second time and walked off toward the main parking lot while Shabaz inspected the new wheels. Or so it would have looked to anyone watching. In reality, he was checking to ensure no one was around. Even though there was nothing suspicious about a man taking a package out of his own car, he didn’t want an audience.
Inside the bungalow, he greeted the night guard on duty and proceeded to the screening room. With the door locked behind him, Shabaz walked down the aisle past the dozen black leather lounge chairs. The floor and walls were covered with industrial carpet in a subtle pattern of squares in different shades of gray, and in the low light it was impossible to tell that one of the panels was actually a door.
The room on the other side was paneled in similar modular squares, but these were constructed from a blend of concrete and additives engineered for maximum crush resistance. Each was only three inches thick but ten times as strong as an eighteen-inch-thick panel of regular formula cement. They were both fireproof and watertight; nothing but a full-out nuclear attack would destroy them.
There were three identical vaults on the lot, all with the same specs: twenty-five-hundred square feet and designed to withstand an earthquake—or as close to it as engineering could come. Shabaz had never corrected his architect’s assumption that film negative would be stored here as well as in the other
two vaults. And since no one but the movie director had ever been in this room once it had been completed, the contents of this vault remained a secret.
Tonight, Shabaz didn’t focus on any of the precious art objects that lined the shelves. It was the easels set up in a semi-circle that commanded all of his attention. Four of the five had paintings resting on them—paintings that Shabaz, who had a connoisseur’s eye, believed were among the finest examples of each artist’s oeuvre.
View of the Sea at Scheveningen,
by Vincent Van Gogh, was a gray-green, stormy painting: a turbulent emotional reaction to a cloudy, raw day at the beach resort near The Hague. Since the artist was known to paint
en plein,
it was not surprising that there were actual grains of sand mixed in with the paint that Shabaz had felt with his fingertips the few times he dared touch the impasto canvas.
Beach at Pourville,
by Claude Monet, was as peaceful as the Van Gogh was violent. It had a lushness that made Shabaz feel as if he were breathing in the salty air. The lavender blue sky, the green sea and sandy shore were painted with a loose brush, but the overall impression was more transportive than a photograph could have been.
Gustav Klimt’s
Portrait of a Lady
was an evocative, mysterious painting. There was yearning in the dark-haired woman’s almond-shaped eyes and a certain petulance in her full lips. The deep green-blue background hinted at the forest, and in her light yellow dress, she might have been an unexpected and glorious wildflower.
The fourth painting, the smallest, was a jewel. The Renoir was only ten inches by twelve inches, but the bouquet of pink roses was so exuberant and lush, Shabaz had been fooled more than once into thinking their scent was perfuming the room.
Now there was a fifth painting to join the others.
Carefully Shabaz stripped away the butcher paper and multiple layers of Bubble Wrap, finally revealing a cacophony of colors. As if he were handling butterfly wings, he lifted the canvas and placed it on the only empty easel.
Stepping back, he took his first full look at the Matisse masterwork,
View of St. Tropez.
The exuberant brushstrokes, which appeared so primitive up close, created a luminous beach scene when viewed from a few feet away. It was brighter and louder than the Monet—there was more joy in this painting, less contemplation. It might be the best of the lot.
His hands trembled, and he felt slightly nauseated. It had taken him over two years and had cost six million dollars to assemble this particular group of paintings. Step one of his plan was finally complete. His eyes drifted from one masterpiece to the next. Which one was he going to choose? Maybe the Renoir—perhaps the still life might be less intimidating.
It wasn’t the money that bothered him but the act he was about to commit. The cost was certainly substantial, but he’d paid far less for all of the paintings together than what any one of them was worth; fencing stolen paintings of this caliber was difficult. None ever sold for close to their real value. The Renoir was worth eight million, but he’d paid only a million. The Matisse would cost thirty-five million with a clean provenance, but he’d paid only two and a half.
Which one? Which one should he choose? Of all the paintings the Van Gogh was the most valuable, so he’d hold that one out as a carrot. The Klimt would be the least devastating loss.
A Williams-Sonoma shopping bag had been sitting in a corner of the vault for the past month. Inside was a single item, a Shun
Kaji Paring knife that he’d purchased for $134.95 in cash. The time had come. Was it going to be the Monet or the Matisse?
Shabaz walked up to the Monet, then over to the Matisse. He paced between them slowly for the next ninety seconds.
Finally, he came to a decision. With the point of the knife mere inches from the canvas, Shabaz noticed the serene blues and greens mirrored on the blade. How on earth could he do this? Even the reflection was a masterpiece.
“He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.”
—Hermann Hesse,
Siddhartha
Lucian tore the page off the pad. Even before it landed on the pile of previously discarded drawings, his pencil was streaking across a new sheet with grace, authority and an economy of motion. The human face that emerged looked out at him, terror in her eyes. It had taken him less than fifteen minutes to bring the stranger to life, and although the portrait was more than competent, he wasn’t satisfied. Ripping the page off, he started again on a clean sheet.
It was the hour before first light when New York City was still gravely quiet—especially downtown, where he lived in an old, refurbished factory on Sullivan Street. The large loft had a separate sleeping area and bathroom but otherwise was wide open, with oversize windows facing north that offered a sliver of skyline, beautiful in the abstract, not hinting of the danger that was always lying in wait.
He stopped drawing, lifted his head up and listened to a car roar down the street, curious that such an ordinary sound could take on such ominous overtones. It was the hour when otherworldly visitations seemed possible even to someone who’d never believed in ghosts. Or in life after death. Or in God. Or in anything that he couldn’t prove. Lucian was a disciple of logic, of action and reaction. Long ago he’d trained himself never to waste any time looking backward, but that had changed in the two weeks since a still unknown assailant had discovered the hidden entranceway into the Memorist Society’s library and had lain in wait until Dr. Erika Alderman handed Lucian the paper that detailed a partial list of Memory Tools.
The list was gone, and Alderman had died of sustained injuries. Lucian had spent a week in the hospital with a concussion that caused dizziness and constant headaches. The symptoms the doctors feared most never manifested; he had no loss of memory, muscle weakness or paralysis—any of which would have suggested progressive brain damage. Arming him with powerful painkillers and telling him the headaches might take several weeks or months to completely resolve, the doctors had released him and cleared him to travel as long as he promised to rest when he got home.
Yesterday he’d tried to go back to work, but his boss, Doug Comley, had kicked him out, insisting that Lucian heed the doctors’ orders and spend at least another week recuperating.
His hand moved in long sweeps across the sheet of paper as he filled in the lines of the woman’s jaw, her neck, her collarbone. There was no conscious thought involved in the action; his hand was moving on its own. He was thinking about what else Comley had told him.
When Malachai Samuels was well enough to be interrogated about the list of Memory Tools that had been stolen from the
Memorist Society during the murder of Dr. Erika Alderman, Matt Richmond was going be the agent to interview him, not Lucian.
Matt was the optimistic, energetic dynamo on their team. Lucian trusted him implicitly, but this wasn’t Matt’s case.
“That should be my interview, Doug.”
“How many reasons do you want why you’re wrong? Let’s start with the fact that you helped save the man’s life in Vienna. He knows that. You know that. Think there’s objectivity there? Next, you’re still recovering from injuries inflicted during the crime in question. You’re one of the victims, Lucian.”
“It’s still my case.”
“What happened in Vienna is the department’s case, Agent Glass.”
When Comley started addressing agents formally, it was time to back off, but Lucian couldn’t. “Are you removing me entirely?”
“No. You’re not off the case, but I don’t want you near Malachai Samuels.” He handed Lucian a file. “This is where we are. It’s everything we have. If you want my advice don’t even open it. Go home, Lucian. Sleep. Go to the movies. Read a book. Eat some good food. Call Gilly and talk to her, see if you can patch things up—”
“Because suddenly she won’t care that as soon as you let me I’ll be back working as hard as I ever did? Thanks, Doug,” Lucian interrupted. He put the folder under his arm and stood up.
“I want my agents to be committed, but at some point this stopped being your job and became your mission. And obsessions can be unhealthy.”
Lucian wished he appreciated his boss’s paternal efforts, but Comley wanted him married with two kids. On the other hand, he knew Lucian well enough to know how much he needed to review the file. It was disturbingly lacking in substantive evidence. While the Austrian police had been thorough, they had
no suspects. The Memorist Society’s locked library had been violated via a tunnel running beneath the structure. Apparently Vienna had a complex underground: layers of ancient communities going back to Roman times that included burial sites, sewers and tunnels, making it possible to cross from one part of the city to another without going aboveground.
The file included hand-drawn maps showing a series of passageways that snaked through thirteenth-century Christian catacombs under the Karmeliterkirche—a baroque church in the Leopoldstadt area—and miles later wound up in the subbasement of the Memorist Society. From there, a staircase that was part of the original eighteenth-century structure led to a secret entrance to the library. The police had found evidence confirming that was how the perpetrator of the attack on Dr. Erika Alderman and Lucian Glass had gotten into and out of the locked room. Now, as he continued to draw, Lucian turned over the same litany of questions that had been plaguing him since he’d regained consciousness in the hospital. Who had attacked him? A member of the Memorist Society? Someone working for Malachai Samuels? Or someone working for Dr. Alderman in a convoluted plot of her own invention?
Ripping the sketch off the pad, he let it, too, fall on the floor and started again. Maybe this time he’d get the woman’s expression right. He could see her so clearly in his mind’s eye.
Although Lucian had stopped painting and quit art school after Solange’s death, he’d never stopped sketching. In his capacity as an FBI agent he drew suspects the way other agents took notes. But this was something new. Ever since the attack he had felt the need to draw these faces…was driven to it.
Once he’d come back to New York he’d sought out a neurologist, who looked at his X-rays and concurred with the doctors in Vienna: his injury wasn’t severe, he’d recover fully
and the headaches would eventually subside. The neurologist didn’t think the early-morning sketching sessions were a side effect—he’d never encountered anything like it before but would investigate, and if he discovered any similar cases he would let Lucian know. He also suggested, because of Lucian’s medical history, that he visit a psychologist. Since he’d been violently attacked before, he might be suffering from PTSD. Lucian hadn’t followed up.
The face looking up at him now was suffused with fear but still not what he saw in his head. She might have been his tenth or his twentieth attempt—he’d stopped counting. There was always some elusive quality missing to his predawn sketches. Except he wasn’t drawing these women from life, so how did he know there was something absent? He’d never seen her or any of the others, so why did he feel as if he’d spent months looking at her?
Lucian had never been someone to feel fear, but in the days since his return from Austria, he woke up afraid, bathed in sweat, with his heart pounding. He’d lie in his bed feeling where his legs and torso and shoulders and spine met the sheets, aware of his naked body as if it were new to him—as if, while he’d been sleeping, he’d traveled off without it, left it behind, and was slipping back into it. He was relieved by its suppleness. He’d try to fall asleep again, but his need to draw was too strong, even though it was unreasonable. So he’d give in.
But it wasn’t quite giving in, because he’d come to crave the frenzied sketching the way some people craved sex. Even though he knew the process of rendering the faces wouldn’t end in orgiastic ecstasy but in despair, he was still addicted. While he couldn’t recollect the details of the nightmares that woke him, the faces of the women he saw during those dreams remained with him, their eyes filled with anger, sadness or fear, and the
time he spent committing their pain to paper was wrenching. It was as if by exposing the darkness of these lost souls he was exposing his own darkness and forcing himself to look into an abyss that he had long since abandoned as unfathomable.
Of all the dozen people whose portraits he’d drawn over and over, two women reappeared more often than the others. He knew the texture of their hair and the exact arches of their brows. He knew how the shadows fell across their faces and the structures of their bones. And he knew they were accusing him. But of what?
As the dark sky gave way to the first rays of light, Lucian put down the pencil. The pile of discarded drawings was on the floor. He looked at them and then kicked them away.