Art of Murder Page 4

  'Then spent his time tearing off her clothes in the open air,' Miss Wood chimed in, 'ignoring the risk that those amateur birdwatchers might have decided to study their owls a night earlier.'

  'Yes, that's odd, isn't it? But as I already said, these people behave—'

  ‘I understand,' said the woman, interrupting him as she put her glasses back on. They were dark Ray-Bans with gold frames. The policeman thought it must be impossible for Miss Wood to see anything in the red-tinged gloom of this office. Reflected in the glasses, the red curve of the desk formed two pools of blood. 'Could we hear the recording now?'

  'Of course.'

  The detective bent over to reach into a leather briefcase. When he straightened up, he was holding a portable cassette recorder. He placed it on the desk next to the photos, as if it were just another souvenir of a tourist trip.

  'We found it at the feet of the corpse. A two-hour chrome-coloured cassette with no writing or marks on it. It seems to have been recorded on a good machine.'

  He jabbed at the start button. The sudden roar led Bosch to raise his eyebrows. The policeman quickly lowered the volume.

  'Sorry, it's very loud,' he said.

  A pause. A whirring sound. Then it started.

  At first there was heavy breathing, Then the crackling sound of a fire. Like a bird enveloped in flames. Then a hesitant breath, and the first word. It sounded like a complaint, or a moan. Then it came again, and this time it was audible: Art. More anxious breathing, then the first tentative phrase. The voice was nasal, interrupted by panting, the sound of paper, microphone hiss. It was an adolescent's voice, speaking in English:

  'Art is also destruc ... destruction ... in the past that's all it... was. In the caves they painted what . .. what they wanted to sa ... sacri... sacri...'

  Whirring sounds. A brief silence. The policeman pressed the pause button.

  'He stopped recording here, probably to make her repeat the phrase.'

  The next part was clearer. Each word was pronounced slowly and clearly. What came over from this new declaration was a desperate attempt by the speaker not to get it wrong. But something else, that could well have been terror, broke through the icy pauses:

  the caves they painted only what they wanted to sacrifice . . . Egyptian art was funerary art... Everything was dedicated to death ... The artist is saying: I have created you to hunt and destroy you, and the meaning of your creation is your final sacrifice ... The artist is saying: I have created you to honour death ... Because the art that survives is the art that has died ... where beings die, works endure...

  The policeman switched off the recorder.

  'That's all there is. We're analysing it in the laboratory, of course. We think he did it in the van with the windows closed, because there's not much background noise. It was probably a written text they forced her to read.'

  An intense silence followed these words. It's as if by hearing her, hearing her voice, we've finally understood the horror of it all, thought Bosch. He was not surprised at this reaction. The photos had impressed him, of course, but to some extent it was easy to keep your distance from a photo. In his days as a member of the Dutch police, Lothar Bosch had developed an unexpected coldness when confronted with the ghastly red phantoms that appeared in the darkroom. But hearing a voice is very different. Behind the words lay a human being who had died a horrible death. The figure of the violin player appears more clearly when we hear the violin.

  To Bosch's eyes, accustomed to seeing her posing in the open air or inside rooms and museums, naked or semi-naked and painted in many different colours, she had never been a 'little girl' as the policeman had called her. Except once, two years earlier. A Colombian collector called Cardenas with a somewhat obscure past had bought her in The Garland by Jacob Stein. Bosch had been concerned what might happen to her in that hacienda on the outskirts of Bogota while she was posing eight hours a day for her owner wearing only the tiniest of velvet ribbons round her waist. He had decided to give her extra protection, and summoned her to his offices in the New Studio in Amsterdam to tell her this. He still had a clear memory of it: the work of art came into his office dressed in T-shirt and jeans, her skin primed and eyebrows shaved off. She was wearing the customary three yellow labels, but apart from that had not been painted at all. She held out her hand: 'Mr Bosch,' she said.

  It was the same voice as the girl in the recording. The same Dutch accent, the same smooth quality.

  Mr Bosch.

  With a simple gesture and these few words, the canvas had been transformed into a twelve-year-old girl right before his eyes. It happened in a flash. Bosch's mind was flooded with images of his own niece, Danielle, who was four years younger than Annek. All of a sudden he realised he was allowing a 'little girl' to go and work more or less naked in the house of an adult male with a criminal record. But the giddiness soon subsided, and he became neutral and level-headed once more. She's not a girl, she's a canvas, of course, he told himself. As it turned out, nothing had happened to the work of art in the Bogota hacienda. Now though, someone had cut her to pieces in a Viennese wood.

  Listening to the recording, Bosch had been recalling the gentle pressure of her right hand, and the words 'Mr Bosch' pronounced with such unconscious delicacy. Two different sources for his impressions, but they gave the same reply: softness, warmth, innocence, softness . . .

  The policeman was leaning forward, as if expecting him to say something.

  'Why would he leave a recording?' Bosch asked.

  'This kind of madman wants the whole world to hear how he sees things,' the policeman said.

  'Has the van been found yet?' Miss Wood wanted to know.

  'No, but it soon will be, if he hasn't got rid of it somehow. We know the make and the licence number, so . . .'

  'He was very clever,' Bosch said.

  'Why do you say that?'

  'All our vans have a tracking device. A GPS satellite system which transmits the position of the vehicle at all times. We installed it a year ago to guard against the theft of valuable works of art. On Wednesday night we lost the signal from this van soon after it left the museum. He must have found the device and deactivated it.'

  'Why did you take so long to get in touch with us? You only contacted us on Thursday morning.'

  'We didn't realise we had lost the signal. The tracking device sets off an alarm if the van leaves the pre-established route, if there's an accident, or if it's stationary for a long while before reaching the hotel. But in this case, the alarm did not go off, and we did not realise we could not pick up the signal.'

  'Which means the guy knew about the device’ the policeman observed.

  That's why we thought Oscar Diaz must have been in on it, or have murdered her himself.'

  'Let's see if I've got this straight. Oscar Diaz was the person responsible for taking her to the hotel. He was some kind of security guard employed by you, is that right?'

  'Yes, one of our security agents,' Bosch agreed.

  'But why would one of your own security agents do something like that?'

  Bosch looked first at the policeman, then at Miss Wood, who still sat without saying a word.

  'We have no idea. Diaz has an impeccable record. If he was crazy, he managed to hide it very well for years’

  'What do you know about him? Does he have family? Friends? ...'

  Bosch reeled off the details he had learned by heart from looking at the file a hundred times over the previous few days.

  'He's single, twenty-six years old, born in Mexico. Father died of lung cancer, mother lives with his sister in Mexico City. Oscar emigrated to the States when he was eighteen. He's athletic, enjoys sport. He worked as a bodyguard for Hispanic businessmen living in Miami or New York. One of them had a hyperdramatic work of art in his house. Oscar asked for information about it, then started as a guard in small New York galleries. Then he came to work for us. We helped him get on, because he was intelligent and a hard worker. The first impo
rtant Foundation work that he was security for was a Buncher shown at the Leo Castelli gallery.' 'A what?'

  Miss Wood explained drily.

  'Evard Buncher was one of the founders of orthodox hyperdramatism, together with Max Kalima and Bruno van Tysch. He was Norwegian. During the Second World War he was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Mauthausen. He managed to survive. He travelled to London, where he met Kalima and Tanagorsky and began to paint his pictures on human beings instead of canvases. But he enclosed them in boxes. Some people say he was influenced in this by his experiences in the concentration camp.'

  This woman is like a computer, the policeman thought to himself.

  'They're small boxes, open on one side,' Miss Wood went on. 'The work is put inside and stays there for several hours.' She turned her head towards the wall behind her and pointed to the large photo on it. 'That's a Buncher, for example.'

  The policeman had noticed it as soon as he'd arrived, and had wondered what on earth it meant. Two naked bodies painted red were crammed into a glass box, which was so small they had to cling together in a complicated knot. Their genitals were visible, but not their faces. To judge by the former, they were a man and a woman. The enormous photo filled almost the entire wall in this room in the MuseumsQuartier. So that is meant to be a work of art, the policeman thought. And anyone could buy it and take it home. He wondered if his wife would want something like that decorating their dining room. How on earth did they manage to stay in those impossibly contorted positions for such lengths of time?

  He recalled the exhibition he had seen that same afternoon.

  As a detective in the homicide squad of the Austrian police force's Criminal Investigation Department, art had never particularly interested Felix Braun. Like all good Viennese, his predilection for art started and ended with nineteenth-century music. Of course, he had seen various hyperdramatic works of art exhibited in public in Vienna, but before that afternoon he had never been to a full exhibition.

  He had arrived at the MuseumsQuartier - the artistic and cultural centre containing most of Vienna's modern art museums -forty minutes before his appointment with Miss Wood and Bosch. Having nothing better to do, and given the special circumstances of the case, he decided to visit the exhibition in which the murdered girl had been taking part.

  It was being shown at the Kunsthalle. An enormous poster of one of the figures (he learnt soon after that it was Marigold Desiderata) filled the entire facade of the museum. The title of the exhibition was written in German in huge red letters: 'Blumen' by Bruno van Tysch. A simple enough title, thought Bosch. 'Rowers'. Before gaining access to the exhibition, every visitor had to pass through a metal detector, an X-ray machine, and an image analysis cabin. Of course, his police revolver set off the alarm at the first stage of the screening process, but Braun had already explained who he was. He pushed open double doors, and found himself in the inhuman darkness of art. At first he thought the exhibits were painted statues placed on pedestals. When he came closer to the first work, he could hardly believe it was a real flesh and blood person, a living human being. Waists bent like hinges, legs raised vertically, backs arched like bridges over rivers . .. None of them moved, or blinked, or took breaths. Their arms imitated petals, from a distance their ankles looked like stalks. He had to approach the security rope and peer very closely before he could distinguish muscles, breasts crowned with the red bud of nipples, genitals that had lost all their hair and their obscenity, genitals as free of sexual associations as the corollas of flowers. Then Braun's nose took over, telling him that each of them was giving off a distinctive, penetrating perfume that could be perceived even above the different smells (not all of them pleasant) produced by the general public crowding into the room, just as one hears a solo instrument above the orchestral accompaniment.

  'Blumen - Flowers.' Bruno van Tysch's collection of twenty flowers. Marigold Desiderata, Iris Versicolor, Rosa Fabrica, Hedera Helix, Orchis Fabulata. The titles were almost as fantastic as the works themselves. He remembered having seen photos of some of these flowers in a magazine, a newspaper or on television. They had already become cultural icons of the twenty-first century. But never until now had he contemplated them an naturel, all together, on show in that vast room of the Kunsthalle. And of course, he had never smelt them. For half an hour Braun wandered from one podium to the next, slack-jawed with shock. It was an overwhelming experience.

  It was the one painted in scarlet that attracted him most. The colour was so intense it produced a kind of optical illusion: an aura, a stain on the retina, the shimmering effect an extremely hot object produces. Braun drew closer to the podium as if in a trance. He believed he could detect something familiar in the perfume, as penetrating and fantastic as a marketstall of Arab essences. The work was crouching down on tiptoe. Both her hands were covering her sex, and her head was tilted down to her right (Braun's left). She was completely shaven and depilated. At first he thought the work had no features at all, but beneath the intense vermilion mask he could discern the prickle of eyebrows, the swelling of the nose and the bas-relief of a pair of lips. Two tiny breasts indicated it was a young woman. Braun walked right round the podium without spotting any kind of support that would allow the woman to stay on tiptoe for so long. The work was a naked, shaven girl balancing on the tips of her toes.

  It was then he thought he recognised the fragrance. The figure in front of him reminded him of the perfume his wife used.

  When he got out into the street, still bemused, he tried in vain to remember the title of the flower that smelt like his wife. Purple Tulip? Magic Marigold?

  Even now, he was still trying to identify it.

  'Buncher created a collection called "Claustrophilia",' Bosch was explaining. 'Oscar spent a long period of time at the house where Claustrophilia 5, the model Sandy Ryan, was being exhibited. She was the seventh substitute. He was polite with the works: occasionally he talked too much, but he was always respectful. In 2003 he bought an apartment in New York and made that his base, but since January this year he has been in Europe, looking after the paintings in the "Flowers" exhibition. Here in Vienna he was staying in the same Kirchberggasse hotel as the rest of the team. The hotel is very close to the cultural centre. We've questioned his colleagues and immediate superiors: none of them noticed anything strange about him in the past few days. And that's all we know.'

  Braun had begun taking notes in a small notebook.

  ‘I know where Kirchberggasse is,' he said. His tone seemed to emphasise that he was the only person from Vienna in the room. 'We'll have to search his room.'

  'Of course,' agreed Bosch.

  They had already searched the place, and his apartment in New York, but he was not going to tell the policeman that.

  'There's also the possibility that Diaz is not to blame for this,' Bosch added, as though wanting to play the devil's advocate against his own theory. 'And if that's the case, we have to ask ourselves why he's disappeared.'

  Braun waved his hand dismissively as if that kind of question was not Bosch's concern.

  'That's as may be,' he said, 'but as long as we have no proof to the contrary, we'll have to consider Diaz as our prime suspect.'

  'What does the press know?' Miss Wood asked. 'As you requested, we have not given out the identity of the young girl.'

  'What about Diaz?'

  'We have not made his identity public, but we've set up controls at Schwechat airport, the train stations and at our frontiers. We have to take into account though that today is Friday, and we only received the information yesterday. The guy had more than a day to slip abroad.'

  Miss Wood and Bosch nodded their agreement. They had been thinking along the same lines. In fact, they had swung into action much quicker than the Austrian police: Bosch was aware that ten different security teams were already scouring Europe for Diaz. Still, they needed the national police's help: this was no time to spare any effort.

  'As far as the victim's family goes ...
' Braun said, casting a nervous glance at Bosch.

  'She only had a mother, but she's away on a trip. We've asked permission to inform her personally. By the way, we can keep the photos and the tape, can't we?'

  'Of course. They're copies for you.'

  'Thanks. More coffee?'

  Braun paused before replying. He had been gazing at the maid who had just crept silently into the room. It was the dark-haired girl with the long red dress and the silver coffee pot who had served him earlier. While there was nothing particularly unusual or beautiful about her features, there was something about her that Braun could not define. The way she moved, what seemed like a rhythm she had learned, the subtle gestures of a secret dancer. Braun knew about human utensils and ornaments. He also knew they were banned, but this girl stayed within the limits of the strictly legal. There was nothing criminal about her appearance or movements, and everything Braun imagined while looking at her could well have been simply in his own mind. He said yes to more coffee, and watched as the girl poured the dense, steaming jet of Viennese mokka into his cup. As before, he was convinced she was barefoot, but the length of her dress and the darkness of the room meant he could not be sure. She too gave off waves of perfume.