Art Kills. Eric van Lustbader
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teeth were outside his lower lip, as if he had been struck down like a mad dog. There was no question of him being alive. I could see that. When one has lived in Europe as I have, one comes to recognize death, which has a different significance than it does in America. In Paris and Venice, I had lived in apartments and villas where people had died, sometimes generations of them. The stonework, the small exquisite gardens, the interior beams are all infused with the blood of the dead, a patina that becomes one’s connection to history.
“For God’s sake, call the police!” I shouted to Dominic, the maître d’, who nodded as if waking from a trance and hurried into the restaurant.
The crowd, weaned on electronic voyeurism, pressed in, hungry for their view of the carnage. Through the mounting frenzy, I saw a pencil-thin man with a long El Greco face expertly making his way toward the inner edge of people. He never pushed or shoved people aside, but rather took advantage of the tiny pockets of space that developed within the jostling throng. At the edge of the curb, he flexed his knees and scooped up the briefcase Lenz had been clutching. Producing a handkerchief, he quickly wiped off the blood. In one fluid motion he was up and moving away. He walked neither quickly nor slowly, but in an altogether normal manner so as to not draw attention to himself.
Instinctively, I followed him. I was both outraged and intrigued. I remember thinking that if Lenz couldn’t do anything about this theft, I would. Not that I had any love for Lenz. As I said, he was a filthy little creature who made his dubious living off of people too ignorant to know that what he was purveying was often as phony as his Austrian accent. The weasel had been born in Canarsie; he’d never even set foot in Vienna, let alone been born and raised there as he claimed. And yet, looting the dead seemed to me so indecent, so despicable that I could not simply turn my back on it. I could hear my father, protector of the underdog, urging me on. Justice would be done, Lenz, even though in life he’d had no concept of the word himself.
Besides, I had a desire to find out just what it was Lenz had in the briefcase.
The man with the El Greco face ducked into a late-model Ford parked on Seventy-eighth Street. As he turned over the ignition, I hailed a cab. We went through the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse, with me following the Ford while giving elaborate hand signals to the cabbie. I’d tried English and French, but apparently he spoke only Farsi.
We emerged from the park heading west until the Ford ran the light on West End Avenue, leaving us stalled in traffic. I threw some bills through the scarred plastic divider, leapt out of the taxi, and, dodging cars, ran down the street. The Ford headed up West End and then made a hard left onto Eighty-third. I sprinted up the block, made the light, and crossed the avenue in time to see the man with the El Greco face double-park his car in front of an old pre-war apartment building. When he got out, I could see he held Lenz’s battered briefcase under one arm. He was holding it as if it was filled with eggs.
By that time, I was halfway down the block. I went into the building so close after him that he held the door open for me. I said something under my breath then rummaged in my handbag as if looking for my key. He opened the lock on the inner door, and, with another murmur of thanks, I stepped through after him. The lobby smelled of old lives, as if each separate scent was a sepia-toned snapshot of its long-ago inhabitants. There was no one in it but us.
I ducked into the mailbox alcove, turned right around, and peeked out. The man with the El Greco face stepped into the elevator, the door closed, and I sprinted across the lobby. I pressed the elevator call button as I saw the indicator stop at the seventh floor. When the elevator returned to the lobby, I took it up.
Arriving on the seventh floor, I was faced with another dilemma. Which apartment had my quarry gone into? There were five on the floor, which told me they had been spared the brutal downsizing some people called modernization. As I made my slow, careful circuit of the hallway, I noticed that one door appeared unlatched. Sure enough, when I turned the knob and pushed ever so gently, I found myself inside the apartment. It had one of those long entryways that led into the living room. Black-and-white photos of sleek-hulled ketch lined both walls. In one of them, I could make out the three faces of the crew standing just aft of the mizzenmast: two men and a woman. One man was older, the other two a generation younger. The older man looked familiar. I was racking my brains to put a name to his face when I heard a noise like the skittling of a baby’s rattle bouncing around the floor.
I went quickly down the hall and peered around the corner. The living room- all browns and taupes and beiges in a classic 1930s color scheme – looked comfortable and empty. Through the west-facing windows, the leafy trees of Riverside Park provided a frame for a lovely composition of the Hudson River and the New Jersey palisades that Frederick Church would have greatly admired. As I peeked out a little farther, I could see the open archway into a cozy-looking kitchen the color of butterscotch. Further to my right, a short hallway led straight to a bedroom. I froze. Through the open doorway, I could see two men struggling. One of them was the man with the El Greco face.
What the hell was going on?
I crossed the Oriental rug, took my high-heels off, and went down the inner hallway. The thin, bloodless lips of the man with the El Greco face were drawn back, revealing a set of tobacco-stained teeth that reminded me of my father’s antique ivory chess set. Breath hissed out between his clenched teeth in that odd skittling sound, sending a small chill down my spine.
I was also close enough to see that the other man was big and beefy in the manner of a professional wrestler or bodyguard. His bunched-up muscles put so many wrinkles in his suit jacket you would have thought it was made of crepe paper. Both men were concentrating so hard that I could have lifted my skirt and neither would have noticed.
The bull was in the process of strangling the man with the El Greco face. Not that I cared. On the contrary, I could feel the outrage that had brought me to this moment silently egging him on. Now that he was taking care of the man with the El Greco face, I turned my attention to finding Lenz’s briefcase. I had come this far; I wasn’t going to leave without it.
I saw it on the bedspread and leaned over toward it. Unfortunately, the man with the El Greco face chose that moment to expire, and the bull, no doubt seeing movement out of the corner of his eye, glanced up.
“Fuck” he said and reached for a gun I saw lying on the floor where I assumed the man with the El Greco face had kicked it. He was probably expecting me to go white in the face and yell “Eek!” Instead, I lunged toward him and, as the gun swung toward me, slammed him on top of the head with the heel of my shoe. He toppled over, making an odd mewling sound. As I reached over him, snatching up the briefcase, he grabbed the hem of my skirt. I could see from his expression that he was semi-conscious, so I drove my knee into the side of his head. I felt the contact all the way into my hip.
I had to pry his fingers off the material. Then I was out of there. In the hallway, I put on my shoes. Then, not wanting to run into anyone, I took the fire stairs all the way down to the lobby. Once or twice my knee, unhappy about the abuse I had subjected it to, nearly gave way. On the third floor landing, I stretched it out so that by the time I reached the lobby, it felt fine. I stayed inside the stairwell while an elderly couple shuffled through the lobby. They took so long I wanted to scream. I had no idea how long the bull would be unconscious, but I had no intention of being anywhere in the vicinity when he regained consciousness.
At last, the couple reached the elevator, and, striding across the lobby, I made my hasty exit. Out on the street, the sunlight seemed blinding, colors supersaturated. My heart was beating hard and fast in my chest, and, to my horror, my hands were trembling. I hurried to West End Avenue and hailed a cab.
All the way downtown, I watched in a daze the city blur by me as the taxi sped through midtown, Chelsea, the Village, and then into Soho. I was dying to know what was inside the briefcase, but after everything that had happened since I had first seen it, I felt an odd kind of superstition that compelled me to keep it closed until I was safely inside my apartment. I say “odd” because I am not by nature a superstitious person. I don’t give a fig about Friday the thirteenth or care if I step under a ladder or on a crack in the sidewalk. But in this case, two people were dead and another had been injured. Already, a certain aura had commenced to encircle this