The Hypnotist (6 page)

The square, silver-framed glasses squeezed the bridge of his nose, and the mustache and wig of short-cropped hair—both prematurely gray, since he’d told the therapist he was just thirty-five years old—itched. It had been six weeks since Lucian had worn his James Ryan disguise, but usually he slipped into it with more ease than he had on this Monday morning. He lifted Ryan’s black briefcase with gold-embossed initials—JR, mostly rubbed away—onto the table in front of the couch.

“I’d never seen any of these women—or the one man—before I started drawing them,” Lucian said as he pulled out a sheaf of drawings and arranged five sketches on the parquet floor, and then watched Dr. Iris Bellmer inspect his work.

She had an aqualine nose, prominent cheekbones and fox-brown, chin-length hair that kept falling forward as she looked down no matter how often she pushed it back behind her ears. A silver disc hanging from a black cord slipped out from under her white blouse and swung in the air, catching the overhead light and winking at him.

“I didn’t know you were an artist,” she said without looking up.

When he’d called, he’d identified himself as an art appraiser
for Sotheby’s and explained that he was suffering symptoms no traditional doctors could diagnose.

“A hobby.”

She glanced up at him again. There were tiny lines crossing her forehead, and her hazel eyes were as intent and direct as her question. “You said you’ve never seen these women, yet you’re terribly upset that you’re not capturing them exactly. You’re describing an impossible challenge. Do you see that?”

He didn’t answer right away. Everything about being here was suddenly surreal. Standing the way he was, with his back to the windows, he had the peculiar sensation that he was both here and across the street in the studio apartment where he, Richmond and Comley had spent so much time spying on this very building. Where one of them was right now, watching and listening.

Over the past few days Lucian had relentlessly pursued Comley to allow him to pose as a patient and infiltrate the Phoenix Foundation. Ultimately, he’d won because there just weren’t any other agents available and they couldn’t afford to wait—there were secrets hidden in this building that could only be discovered from the inside. As a patient, Lucian’s access would be limited, but it might be enough for him to plant listening devices in the areas directional mikes couldn’t reach. Would that help? They had to try. Too many people connected to this place had died. If Malachai Samuels had orchestrated the robbery at the Memorist Society in Vienna last month and stolen the list of Memory Tools, he certainly wasn’t going to stop there. He’d do whatever was necessary—legal or illegal—to find and acquire the tools. Hadn’t he proved that already, evidence or no?

“James, how can you know something is missing from the drawings if you’ve never seen these women before?”

“I don’t know.” It was the truth, but James Ryan speaking Lucian Glass’s frustrating truth was as perplexing as being inside this building, on this side of the door he’d watched for so long.

Dr. Bellmer returned to studying his sketches as if she’d find better answers in the crosshatched and shaded lines than she was getting from him.

To justify seeking out a past-life regression therapist, Lucian’s alter ego, James Ryan, had needed a problem. For expediency’s sake, Lucian had chosen his own. Although he didn’t believe in reincarnation, he could imagine someone wondering if there was a past-life connection to these drawings. But this was the first time Lucian had borrowed any part of his real self for James, and it was uncomfortable blurring the line of demarcation.
Too bad.
He’d have to get used to it. He’d appropriated his own dreams to get an appointment, and it had worked. And as difficult as it was to be here baring part of his soul, it was also exhilarating to be one of the shadows he used to watch moving behind these windows. Having stepped over the threshold, he was now deep inside the magic kingdom.

Like the entranceway and hallway, Bellmer’s office was perfectly restored. Ornate molding capped high ceilings and framed the autumnal-colored, foliage-inspired Art Nouveau wallpaper. A jewel-toned stained-glass chandelier cast soft light on the drawings on the floor. But it was the doctor’s extensive collections of snow globes, various crystal rock formations and carved dragons and the scent of burnt orange that gave the room its eccentric personality and hinted at some of the complexities of the woman who was still inspecting his drawings.

“On the phone you said your dreams wake you up, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about the dream that inspired this drawing.” She pointed to a sketch. Like the others, it was done in pencil, carefully and realistically rendered, and showed a woman caught in a precise moment of fear and terror.

“I don’t remember the dreams.”

“Can you tell me how you feel when you wake up?”

“I usually have a terrible headache.”

“And you’re furious.”

She’d said it as a statement, not a question. “How do you know that?” he asked.

“Just listening to you, watching your face, paying attention to your reactions. Nothing weird, no black magic or tarot cards, don’t worry.”

“That’s reassuring. I think.”

“Do you know why the drawings frighten you?”

“I don’t think they do.”
How the hell did she know that?

“What makes you want to draw the women?”

“It’s not that I want to draw them…it feels like they need me to draw them. To commit them to paper. As if that act will alleviate their suffering.”

“Their suffering? Are you sure?”

“As opposed to what?”

“As opposed to your suffering?”

He didn’t answer.

“Dreams can be tricky,” she said. “Are you a religious man?”

“Not at all.”

“Did you have any religious training? Even if you turned your back on it?”

“None. My father was Protestant and my mother is Jewish, but neither of them practiced.” He was telling her about himself again, but he needed to give her answers and in all the years he’d posed as the appraiser, he’d never invented this part of Ryan’s backstory.

“Do you believe in life after death?”

He answered almost before she finished asking. “No. Do you?”

In traditional therapy he knew it would be unusual for a therapist to answer, but this was anything but traditional.

“I don’t believe in the Christian view of heaven or hell, but I do believe in the soul living on after our bodies die. You must, too, a little, or you wouldn’t have sought me out.”

“I’ve tried everything else.”

“The last resort.” She laughed. “I’m used to that. But back to you. Have you lost many people you were close to, James?”

“I never thought much about reincarnation before.” If she noticed he’d ignored her question, she didn’t show it.

“Are you in some kind of personal hell? Professional hell?”

“Other than what’s going on with these drawings? No.”

“Are you married? Living with anyone?”

He shook his head. “Not married. I lived with a woman for the past few years, but we broke up a few months ago, and I’m okay with it. No one I care about is ill or in any kind of trouble.”

“Do you get any relief from the intensity of your feelings or the headaches once a drawing is done?”

“Yes, the headaches are usually gone.”

“For how long?”

“Two hours. Sometimes longer.”

“Do you take meds for the pain?”

“Yes.”

“Do they offer relief?”

“Usually, at least for a few hours.”

“This is a very obvious question, but have you looked into the possibility that you’re having a reaction to your pain meds?”

“I wish. But no, we checked that out already.”

As she wrote in her notebook, Lucian studied her. She re
minded him of the women pre-Raphaelite painters favored, and he understood why painters like Rossetti and Burne-Jones had been attracted to this type of woman. She could carry bigger themes, grander emotions.

Dr. Bellmer looked up and, self-conscious that he’d been caught staring, Lucian pointed to the framed drawing on the wall right behind her. “That looks like an authentic William Blake. Is it yours?”

“No, it belongs to the foundation. One of the directors, Dr. Malachai Samuels, is an avid collector.”

“I recognize his name.”

She nodded. “He gets his fair share of press.”

“Does he only collect Blake?”

“No. He collects all kinds of things, from playing cards to antique pistols.” She capped her pen. “James, I’d like to talk to you about hypnosis. It can be a shortcut to the kinds of unconscious memories that are very often at the root of our problems. Have you had any experience with hypnosis?”

“Yes, with pain management self-hypnosis.”

“Where did you learn it?”

Again, the truth was easier and harmless.

“Here in the city—at the NYU pain center.”

“For your headaches?”

“No. It was a while ago.”

“When?”

“I was hurt when I was a kid.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

He could remember every moment of that evening twenty years ago and relive it without making any effort. “I don’t remember much. I was in an accident, lost six pints of blood and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”

“You’re talking about dying pretty casually. It’s an extremely
traumatic experience to go through. I’m so sorry you had to experience that.”

“It was a long time ago…it feels like it happened to someone else.”

“An event like that could change the trajectory of your life.”

“I don’t think it did in my case,” he lied.

“How long did it take for them to revive you?”

“Approximately ninety seconds.”

“Did you remember anything about that minute and a half?”

Her voice was like smoke, curling around him, tempting him to let go, give in. He was sorry now that he’d come. He’d never discussed this with anyone. Lucian lifted his hands as if he were throwing the question up in the air and getting rid of it.

He shrugged. “I’m sure you’ve heard it all before.”

“Even if I have, it’s fine if I hear it again.” She smiled. “It could help explain some of what you are going through now.”

“I was aware of a warm light that seemed to be illuminating a path…” He felt himself slipping into the memory and fought back. “In art school,” he said evenly and without emotion, “you learn that white light is made up of other colors—red, green and blue—I could see all the different colors streaking by as if the light was fracturing. There was a sound, like a beating heart…it’s all such a cliché, isn’t it?”

“Go on.”

“Everyone says they want to stay in the light. Well, I didn’t. It was the last place I wanted to go.”

“Because?”

“It was punishment.”
Where the hell had that come from? Punishment?

Dr. Bellmer nodded. “Thank you.”

He shrugged.

“Have you discussed this with a doctor before?”

“No.”

“A friend? Family member? Girlfriend?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“Are you ashamed of what happened?”

“Do you really need to know this stuff?”

She smiled. “It helps. Honest.”

“Okay. No. I’m not ashamed.”

“When you hypnotize yourself, what kind of imagery do you use?”

Briefly, he described a process that must have been familiar to her because she nodded as she listened.

“I use a similar method. Would you be willing to let me hypnotize you and see if we can get somewhere? If you need some time to think about it…”

She was offering him exactly what he was paying her for: the opportunity to return to the heart of Malachai Samuels’s lair. He knew enough about hypnosis to fake it.

“Do you have any open appointments later this week?”

Tyler Weil herded the second-graders through the double glass doors of the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The children immediately responded to the hangar-size space and broke ranks. Some ran toward the sloping north wall where the thirty-foot-tall floor-to-ceiling windows looked out into the park; others wanted to see the shallow moat where copper and silver coins sparkled underwater. But the majority of them clambered up the stone steps to the eighty-two-foot-long Temple of Dendur.

When their teacher started to protest and tried to rein them in, Weil shook his head and said, “There’s no better way to interest them in art than to let them play around it and in it.”

The Met’s new director always looked forward to Tuesday mornings, when he left his fourth-floor office and gave these guided tours to schoolchildren. He felt that he was discovering the museum through their eyes in a way that would help him steward it.

Today’s group was special because among the children was Veronica Keyes, the granddaughter of a director of the museum’s board and one of its most generous benefactors. Nina
and Veronica were regulars at the Trustees Dining Room for Sunday brunch.

The little girl was standing in front of the fifteen-foot-tall temple—not running around it, playing in it or ignoring it like some of the other kids, but surveying it. Nina had called him earlier that morning to ask him to keep an eye out for Veronica. As much as she loved the museum, she’d become distraught the past few times she’d visited, panicking when she walked into the main lobby, shrieking and wailing as if she were being chased or hunted. When Tyler had met the class at the school entrance earlier he’d been on alert, but Veronica had been fine.

Tyler found her by the moat, looking up at the temple, very contemplative for a seven-year-old.

“Do you like the temple?” he asked.

She nodded. “It came a far way.”

“Yes, all the way from Egypt. Do you want to see on the map?”

“Don’t you think I know where Egypt is?” she said, so indignant that Tyler had to swallow a smile. “It should have more trees around it,” she added.

“Why?”

“So the people who pray and make sacrifices here have somewhere cool to rest afterward.”

Nina often regaled the board of directors with Veronica’s precociousness. She read at a fourth-grade level already and devoured history books. “As if she’s on a quest to find out,” Nina had said.

“I’ll let the head gardener know and see if we can fit in a few more trees.”

“Can we go see the rocodial now?”

Weil smiled at the way she pronounced the word. “Yes, we can.”

Together they walked over to the moat surrounding the temple, where two boys were pointing to the stone sculpture
of a small crocodile and making faces at the red granite, first-century-BCE crocodile.

“Have any of you ever seen a real crocodile?” Weil asked.

The taller of the two boys, whose shirt was pulled out of his pants and whose shoelaces were undone, shook his head without taking his eyes off the sculpture. The other, who had a bruise on his chin, said, “I did. In Florida. It had ginormous teeth. Can we see this crocodile’s teeth?”

Weil explained how it was a sculpture and static. “Just like in Florida, they had crocodiles in ancient Egypt, too. They lived on the banks of the Nile and were extremely dangerous—some even say the most dangerous creatures the Egyptians had to deal with.”

“Didn’t they have bears?” asked the child with the bruise.

“Don’t be silly, of course not,” Veronica said.

“Well, maybe they did,” the boy countered.

Before Weil could intervene, he felt the vibration of his cell phone against his hip.

It was his assistant saying it was urgent Weil meet Nicolas Olshling in the shipping department.

Weil had been director of the MMA for five months and this was his first potential crisis. A knot formed in the pit of his stomach as he searched the light-filled room for one of the teachers to let them know he needed to cut the tour short.

Five minutes later he was standing in the windowless shipping room of New York’s greatest museum looking at the contents of an unpacked crate, at what he could only describe as a tragedy, staring hypnotically into a lemon-yellow sun shining over a watery azure sea. The bright orb—or what was left of it—burned his eyes. He felt as if someone had just knifed right through his soul, even though it was the Matisse seascape that was no longer intact.

The painting that lay like a corpse on the stainless steel table had been slashed into ragged ribbons, the irregular strips of canvas attached only at the top to the stained wooden stretcher.