Alive in Shape and Color Page 6

  Madame Venicasse brought over a wet cloth and bandages and poured a shot of brandy into Hubert’s glass.

  Deschalles stood up. “Gather the others,” he shouted to one of his men.

  The two delivery vans they had arrived in were parked around the corner, drivers at the ready, engines idling.

  “Madame,” Deschalles said, “you must come with us.”

  “I am not leaving my home.”

  “The Germans will kill you. You have no choice.”

  “I’m grateful to you, but I do have a choice. Tie me up, gag me, and lock me in the storeroom. I will say you overpowered me.”

  Deschalles shook his head, but didn’t pursue it further. He was running out of time.

  “It’s complicated,” Hubert stammered, trying to finish his explanation. “Primary mission was Lyon . . . paintings of Gauguin’s from the Marquesas.”

  Deschalles, intent on gathering his men, was only half listening. But Madame Venicasse heard every word and grew animated.

  “Where he died,” she said.

  Hubert nodded.

  “I knew him,” she said. “When I was a girl. I watched him paint.”

  Three weeks later, still recuperating in a safe house in Nantes, Hubert heard that the RAF had bombed Arles, pinpointing targets: the German garrison, their trains and armored vehicles, and the Yellow House, which was still Gestapo headquarters. He wondered if Madame Venicasse had survived. He made inquiries, but no one seemed to know.

  8

  Tohotaua watched the cook, Vaeoho, climb the stairs to the studio and reemerge ten minutes later. A green-and-yellow parrot flew out of the forest and perched on the roof just as the painter appeared, returning from the stream. He was wearing a straw hat, white jacket, and baggy green pants. He carried a cane and walked slowly, with a limp. He was pale, his hands blotched with liver spots, his feet bloated inside straw sandals. His health, shaky when he arrived on the island three years before, was far worse now. He wore spectacles all the time, and a jacket or raincoat even in the heat of day.

  He waved to Tohotaua and Haapuani on the bench and hobbled straight to the house and up to his studio. When they joined him, he had his back to them. He was mixing paints and spreading them on his palette. The room was bright with candles and lanterns that the cook had lighted. A smoky amber light suffused the air. On a table beside the easel there were tubes of paint, two tins filled with brushes, and a red conch shell. The painter turned and bowed to them. Haapuani sat on a stool in the corner, and Tohotaua walked over to the ornate chair, where she found a white fan. She sat down and examined it. The pure white feathers did not belong to any bird she had ever seen in the islands. She ran her finger around the red dot inside a white circle, inside a larger black circle, on the handle.

  When the painter finished mixing his paints and turned to her, she held the fan as she imagined he wanted her to: in her right hand, the handle propped vertically on her left thigh, the feathers covering her right breast. That felt natural. He nodded his approval and motioned her to lean more to the left, pressing her palm into the seat of the chair and raising her left shoulder as her weight shifted. She settled herself and gazed, not at the painter or her husband, but through the open doorway, across the clearing, to the darkness flooding the forest.

  9

  In a black coat and yellow scarf, Madame Venicasse climbed the steps of the Musée des Artes in Montpellier. She had taken the bus from Arles, where she lived in an apartment on the Rue du Bac, overlooking the Rhone. Her two calico cats liked to sit on the balcony among her sunflowers. Her property was destroyed in an air raid shortly after the Allied invasion. All that survived, uncovered in the rubble, was a small strongbox that had been concealed under a floorboard. It contained a gift from Vincent van Gogh to her mother: two signed sketches he did in anticipation of painting their house in oil. Madame Venicasse sold the sketches to a dealer in Marseilles, and for the rest of her life lived comfortably off the proceeds.

  Badly damaged in the war, the museum had recently reopened after three years of repairs. Madame Venicasse’s shoes clicked on the marble steps. She paid two francs at the reception desk, and after consulting the clerk, walked down a corridor, turned right, then left, through galleries of paintings by Cezanne and Matisse, Picasso and Braque, into a gallery devoted to the works of Van Gogh and Gauguin.

  The painting she had come to see occupied a prominent position on the far wall. She sat down on the bench before it and met the gaze of the girl in the white dress, who had brown eyes and red hair like her own. In her hand was the white fan Madame Venicasse had given the painter sixty years before. He never returned to Arles to paint her portrait. Never sang to her from his island through a conch shell. But in the last year of his life, she thought, wiping away a tear, he had painted this girl on the other side of the world holding her fan and had preserved a precious vestige of the Yellow House, of her childhood, somehow knowing that she would see it one day.

  Many of MICHAEL CONNELLY's novels concern Detective Harry Bosch of the Los Angeles Police Department. Harry's given name is Hieronymus, and even as he has had a longstanding relationship with Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, so does his namesake's The Garden of Earthly Delights particularly resonate with him; its third panel inspired this story.

  The Garden of Earthly Delights (third panel) by Hieronymus Bosch

  THE THIRD PANEL

  BY MICHAEL CONNELLY

  Detective Nicholas Zelinsky was with the first body when the captain called for him to come outside the house. He stepped out and pulled the breathing mask down under his chin. Captain Dale Henry was under the canopy tent, trying to protect himself from the desert sun. He gestured toward the horizon, and Zelinsky saw the black helicopter coming in low under the sun and over the open scrubland. It banked and he could see FBI in white letters on the side door. The craft circled the house as if looking for a place to land in tight circumstances. But the house stood alone in a grid-work of dirt streets where the planned housing development was never built after the big bust a decade earlier. They were in the middle of nowhere seven miles out of Lancaster, which in turn was seventy miles out of LA.

  “I thought you said they were driving out,” Zelinsky called above the sound of the chopper.

  “The guy I talked to—Dixon—said they were,” Henry called back. “Probably realized that would take them half the day driving up here and back.”

  The helicopter finally picked a landing spot and came down, kicking up a dust cloud with its rotor wash.

  “Dumb shit,” Henry said. “He lands upwind from us.”

  One man got out of the chopper as the pilot killed the turbine and the rotor started free spinning. The man wore a suit and dark aviator glasses. With one hand he held a white handkerchief over his mouth and nose to filter the dust. With the other he carried a tube used to carry blueprints or artwork. He trotted toward the canopy.

  “Typical Fed,” Henry said. “Wears a suit to a multiple-murder scene.”

  The man in the suit made it to the canopy. He put the tube under one arm so he could shake hands and still keep his handkerchief over his mouth and nose.

  “Agent Dixon?” Henry asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Dixon said. “Sorry about the dust.”

  They shook hands.

  “That’s what happens when you land upwind from a crime scene,” Henry said. “I’m Captain Henry, LA County Sheriff’s Department. We spoke on the phone. And this is our lead detective on the case, Nick Zelinsky.”

  Dixon shook Zelinsky’s hand.

  “Do you mind?” Dixon said.

  He pointed to a cardboard dispenser on one of the equipment tables containing breathing masks.

  “Be our guest,” Henry said. “You might want to put on the booties and a spacesuit along with the mask. A lot of chemicals floating around in the house.”

  “Thank you,” Dixon replied.

  He went to the table and put the tube down as he swapped his handkerchief for a brea
thing mask. He then took off his jacket and pulled on one of the white plastic protection suits followed by the paper booties and latex gloves. He pulled the suit’s hood up over his head as well.

  “I thought you were driving out,” Henry said.

  “We were, but then I got a window on the chopper,” Dixon said. “But it’s a short window. They need it this afternoon for a dignitary surveillance. So should we go in, see what you’ve got?”

  Henry gestured toward the open door of the house.

  “Nick, give him the grand tour,” he said. “I’ll be out here.”

  Dixon stepped through the threshold into a small entranceway that had been remodeled as a mantrap with fortified doors on either end. It was typical of most drug houses. Zelinsky stepped in behind him.

  “I assume the captain filled you in on the basics when you talked,” Zelinsky said.

  “Let’s not assume anything, Detective,” Dixon said. “I’d rather get the rundown from the case lead than the captain.”

  “Okay then. This place was a sample house built before the crash in oh-eight. Nothing else was ever built out here. Made it perfect for cooking meth.”

  “Got it.”

  “Inside we have four victims—all in different parts of the house. Three cooks and a guy you would call the house security man. There are several weapons in the house, but it looks like nobody got off a defensive shot. It looks like they were taken out by fucking ninjas, to tell you the truth. All four are heart shot with arrows. Short arrows.”

  “Crossbow?”

  “Most likely.”

  “Motive?”

  “It doesn’t appear to be robbery because there are bags and full pans of product in all the rooms and all of it readily visible for the taking. It just looks like a hit-and-run. And there is something else we didn’t put out on the bulletin that I think you’ll want to see.”

  “On the phone I think the captain mentioned this is a Saints and Sinners operation.”

  “That’s right. Lancaster and Palmdale is their territory and this is their place, so it’s not looking like a turf thing either.”

  “Okay, let’s see the rest.”

  “First, your turn. What made the FBI jump on the bulletin we sent out?”

  “The arrows. The crossbow. If it connects to something else we have working, I will tell you once I confirm it.”

  Dixon stepped through the second door and paused to look at the front room of the house. It was furnished like a normal living room, with two leather couches, two other stuffed chairs, a coffee table, and large flat-screen television on the wall. There was another smaller screen on the coffee table, and it was quadded into four camera views of the scrubland and desert surrounding the house.

  There was a dead man sitting on the couch in front of the security screen, his body turned to the left, his right arm reaching across his body toward a side table where a sawed-off shotgun waited. He never got to it. A black graphite arrow had pierced his torso, back to front, a heart shot, as Zelinsky had said, penetrating the leather vest he wore with the Saints & Sinners motorcycle club logo—the grinning skull with devil horns and angel halo tilted at a rakish angle. There was very little blood because the arrow had struck with such high velocity that the entrance and exit wounds sealed around its shaft.

  “We have this guy as victim number one,” Zelinsky said. “Name is Aiden Vance, multiple arrests for drugs and acts of violence—ADWs and attempted murders. Did a nickel up in Corcoran. Your basic motorcycle gang enforcer. But it looks like they got the drop on him here. He apparently didn’t see them coming on the monitors, didn’t hear them pick the lock or come through the mantrap. Until it was too late.”

  “Neat trick,” Dixon said.

  “Like I said, ninjas.”

  “Ninjas? More than one?”

  “Doesn’t feel like a one-man op, you ask me.”

  “The cameras—are there digitized recordings?”

  “No such luck. Purely for live monitoring. I guess they didn’t want digital evidence of their own goings and comings here. It could have put them away.”

  “Right.”

  They proceeded farther into the house. There were several evidence technicians, photographers, and detectives working throughout. Yellow evidence markers were placed on the floor, on furniture, and on walls everywhere Dixon looked. The place had been used as a cookhouse for crystal meth, which was the main income stream for the Saints & Sinners. Zelinsky explained that this was only one of several such houses operated by the group and scattered through the desert northeast of Los Angeles, where the finished product was shipped to and distributed to dealers and then to the hapless victims of the devastatingly addictive drug.

  “The starting point,” Dixon said.

  “Starting point of what?” Zelinsky asked.

  “The trail of human misery. What was cooked in this house destroyed lives.”

  “Yeah, you could say that. A place like this—it was probably producing seventy, eighty pounds a week.”

  “Makes it hard to feel sorry for these people.”

  It was a three-bedroom house and each bedroom was a separate cookroom that was probably in operation twenty-four hours a day with two or three shifts of cooks and security men. In each cookroom there was another body pierced by an arrow and sprawled on the floor. Each one a man in a protection suit and wearing a breathing mask. No blood, just a clean heart shot each time. Zelinsky gave Dixon their names and criminal pedigrees as part of the tour.

  Dixon didn’t seem to care who they were, just how they died. He squatted down and studied the arrows protruding from each of the bodies, seemingly attempting to find some clue or confirm something from the markings on each shaft.

  Zelinsky took Dixon into the master bedroom last because there was the only anomaly and the only visible blood. The victim there was on the floor on his left side. The sleeve of his protection suit had been pulled back, and the right hand was cleanly severed at the wrist.

  “Guys,” Zelinsky said. “Give us some space.”

  Two forensic technicians stepped back from the wall where they had been working. There above a meth drying pan on a folding table was the victim’s severed hand, pinned to the wall by the long-bladed knife most likely used to hack it off the body. The fingers had been manipulated. The thumb and first two fingers were up and tightly together, the second two were folded down over the palm. On the wall surrounding the hand was a circle drawn in the victim’s blood.

  “Seen anything like that before, Agent Dixon?” Zelinsky asked.

  Dixon didn’t answer. He leaned down and in close to the wall and studied the hand. Blood had dripped down the wall, into the drying pan below.

  “Kind of like the Cub Scouts salute, if you ask me,” Zelinsky added. “You know, two fingers up?”

  “No,” Dixon said. “It’s not that.”

  Zelinsky was silent. He waited. Dixon straightened up and turned to him. He held his hand up, making the same gesture as the hand pinned to the wall.

  “It’s the gesture of divinity often seen in the paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance period,” Dixon said.

  “Really?” Zelinsky said.

  “Have you ever heard of Hieronymus Bosch, Detective Zelinsky?”

  “Uh, no. What or who is that?”

  “I’ve seen enough here. Let’s go outside and talk.”

  Under the canopy they cleared space on a table and Dixon took the end cap off the cardboard tube. He slipped out a rolled print of a painting and stretched it out on the table, using the boxes of latex gloves and paper booties to weight the ends.

  “This is a to-scale print of the third panel of a painting that hangs in the Prado in Madrid, Spain,” Dixon said. “The original is five centuries old, and the artist who painted it was named Hieronymus Bosch.”

  “Okay,” Zelinsky said, his tone betraying in the one word that he knew that an already weird case was about to go weirder.

  “It’s part of a triptych—thr
ee panels—considered to be Bosch’s masterwork. The Garden of Earthly Delights. You may never have heard of this guy, but he was sort of the dark genius of the Renaissance. While Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were painting angels and cherubs down in Italy, Bosch was up in northern Europe creating this nightmare vision.”

  Dixon gestured to the print. It was a tableaux of vicious creatures torturing and maiming humans in all kinds of religious and sexually suggestive ways. Sharp-toothed animals moved naked men and women through a dark labyrinth leading toward the fires of hell.

  “Have you seen this before?” Dixon asked.

  “Fuck no,” Zelinsky said.

  “Fuck no,” added Captain Henry, who had stepped over to the table.

  “The first two panels, which I don’t have here, are bright and blue because they are about earthly matters. The first is a depiction of Adam and Eve and the garden and the apple and so forth, the creation story from the Bible. The second—the centerpiece—is about what came after. The debauchery and life without moral responsibility and respect for the word of God. This, the third panel, is about Judgment Day and where the wages of sin lead to.”

  “All I can say is this guy had one hell of a warped mind,” Henry said.

  Dixon nodded and pointed to a face at the center point of the panel.

  “That’s supposedly the artist there,” he said.

  “Pious son of a bitch,” Henry said.

  “Okay,” Zelinsky said. “So he was a dark fucking guy and all of that, but he’s been dead five hundred years and is not our suspect. What are you telling us? What do we have here?”

  “You have the third panel uprising,” Dixon said.

  “What the fuck is that?” Henry asked.

  Dixon tapped his finger on several images on the print.

  “Let’s start with the arrows,” he said. “As you can see, the weapon of choice here is the arrow. Supposedly, the arrow in Bosch’s work symbolized a message. This is what the scholars tell us. The arrow shooting from one individual to another meant the sending of a message. So there is that, and there is this.”