3 The Braque Connection (24 page)

We had just finished snacking on rice cakes when Phillip brought in the last forged painting. The toll this episode had taken on us was high. But it was Phillip who was affected the most by this. His distress was visible in the deepened frown lines, his downturned mouth, and the heaviness in his shoulders when he thought no one was looking. In the last eleven hours, he had personally contacted each of the owners of the paintings recovered from the warehouse. In a manner only Phillip could, he had reassured them of the security of the rest of their valuables.

I had thought it improbable, but he had managed to retrieve all the paintings, cajoling the owners to give him access to their homes if they were out of town. As the other Rousseau & Rousseau employees brought the paintings in, Colin was checking them. Each one so far was a forgery and had an underpainting on the back.

My attention was drawn away from my monitors and thoughts by Colin’s grunt as he sat down next to me.

“I don’t recognise any of the underpaintings as originally painted by the masters.” He kneaded the muscles in the back of his neck. “I think they’re all originals.”

“Painted as underpaintings? That’s odd.” I picked up my coffee mug only to see it empty. When had I finished another mug of strong coffee? “Here’s another oddity. Rousseau & Rousseau insures pieces of high value all over Europe, all over France. Concentrating the robberies around Strasbourg makes it firstly a very targeted action, and secondly easy for us to find. What was his rationale behind it?”

“Maybe he didn’t think we would find the paintings?”

An inelegant sound of disagreement escaped my mouth. “Maybe. I don’t know how we would have found the paintings if we hadn’t gone to the warehouse and Hawk hadn’t been killed.”

“Quite the elaborate setup for Kubanov to have planned.”

I thought about this. “That would be in character for him. He would’ve relished planning something like this, using his superior strategic planning skills. As we have studied him, he has also studied us. I’m sure Angelique freely discussed our habits, behaviour and conversations. From that alone he would have been able to obtain enough data to profile us.”

“Sick and twisted,” Vinnie said, leaning against the door.

“Maybe, but also very smart. My question now is what message is in those underpaintings.”

“Well, let’s go look at them, Jen-girl. Phillip sent me to get you. He has all the paintings set up in the conference room.” A half smile eased some of the seriousness from his face. “I must say it looks super-weird to have half the room with paintings facing forward and the other half showing the backs of the paintings.”

We walked into the conference room and my eyes widened. The wall to the right of the long conference table still held all the originals from Hawk’s warehouse. The wall to the left was no longer empty. Seventeen paintings were neatly arranged on the wall, not one hanging off centre. Phillip was good with that, a feat I greatly appreciated. Of the seventeen paintings, four were familiar. The other thirteen were the ones Phillip had collected from the clients’ homes. Under each painting was a life-size printout of its underpainting.

“You were right, Doc.” Manny startled me when he spoke. I had been completely absorbed by what I was seeing and I hadn’t noticed him in the room.

“I know.” Being right about the originals replaced by forgeries with underpaintings didn’t help solve the mystery though. “Now we need to understand this.”

I made my way from the one side of the wall to the other to get an overview of the underpaintings. Colin followed me, undoubtedly seeing aspects in the art I didn’t.

“These are truly exquisite pieces. This is a very talented artist.”

“Apart from waxing poetic about this criminal act, what else can you tell us about the paintings, Frey?” From Manny’s tone, I concluded that he was frustrated. Knowing him, it was partly because of his lack of expertise and insight, but mostly because he had to rely on Colin for said expertise and insight.

“Waxing poetic about this artist’s skill is, as a matter of fact, quite important, Millard.”

I was getting used to blocking their insulting arguments. I did it once again and walked along the wall a second time, looking for clues beyond the art. Colin was right. These paintings were exquisite. The painting I was in front of depicted a typical European old town. The cobbles of the streets were squares, the buildings tall, angular and squashed on top of each other. Yet it was distinctive. This was a specific street in some European town. It looked familiar to me, but I put it down to having travelled throughout Europe, mainly visiting the old towns.

I moved to the painting next to it. This was another cityscape, but of a city much more modern. It had skyscrapers and landmarks that would make it easy to identify the street portrayed. The next painting was more difficult to characterise. Only after studying it for a few minutes did I recognise what looked like a mansion next to a river. Tall trees surrounded the house, a circular driveway leading to the front door. The cubist shaping of it had obscured it into a work of beauty. Again I had a sense of familiarity. This time I didn’t dismiss it. I catalogued it and moved to the other paintings.

“These are all places,” I said after my third time along the wall. “Not one of these paintings is of a person or object. All these are places. Cityscapes and landscapes.”

“Hmm.” Colin came to stand next to me. “You’re right. What does that mean?”

“That’s the wrong question.” I frowned in impatience. “The right question is where these places are.”

“Any ideas, Frey?”

I walked to the other side of the table to put some space between me and the paintings. Often I saw things better from a distance. I stared at the paintings, recalling my feelings of recognition. What was it about those few paintings that made me feel like I knew them?

“Do you agree, Jenny?” Only when Colin touched my elbow did I realise he was talking to me.

“Sorry, I wasn’t listening. What did you say?”

“I said that it is ten o’clock, we haven’t eaten dinner yet, and I think we should go home.”

“No.” I pulled my elbow out of his hold. “There is something about these paintings. I need to figure it out.”

“Frey is right, Doc.” Manny pushed himself out of his chair. I hadn’t even seen him sit down. “We can get back to this, bright and early tomorrow morning.”

“Vinnie’s made dinner.” Colin infused his tone with appeal as if Vinnie’s dinner was a prize most coveted. I smiled.

“Go home, Genevieve. We’ll get back to this in the morning.” Phillip looked exhausted. “An art restorer from the Museum of Fine Arts is loaning me his handheld x-ray machine. He’ll bring it tomorrow and we’ll check all the paintings with it then. He said they can’t loan us their larger machines, but the handheld ones are adequate alternatives. We can use it and analyse the results tomorrow.”

“You should also go home and sleep.” I was concerned about the dark rings under his eyes.

“I’m sure Vinnie’s made enough for you to join us.” Colin’s invitation was so unexpected, we all looked at him in surprise. “What? I’m being nice.”

“You inviting me too, Frey?” There was a hint of good humour in Manny’s tone.

“Oh God. If you really have to come, then I suppose you can. If we don’t feed you, you will most likely eat another packet of those wretched shortbread cookies you keep bringing into the office.” Colin sounded highly inconvenienced, but I saw past it. He was not just being polite. He had seen something that had escaped my notice. Manny’s diet, anyone’s diet was of no interest to me. But maybe Manny needed a good meal, as we all did after today.

Since I was outnumbered, I agreed to go home to rest, but planned to be back early morning. I needed to spend more time in front of these paintings.

Chapter NINETEEN

Some people needed minutes to hours for the waking process to be completed. I generally needed only five minutes to reach a state of complete wakefulness. Not now. Something wrested me out of my sleep into instant vigilance. For a moment I lay frozen, my eyes closed, wondering what had caused this. It hadn’t been a dream giving me some insight into the case. It had been something more elemental, a primitive reaction to looming danger.

Since Colin had taken to sleeping in my bed, it had been noteworthy that his presence had not kept me awake, or even worse, woken me whenever he moved. His steady, deep breathing assured me that he was fast asleep and had not been the cause of my heart beating fast in anticipation. Of what I didn’t know. I opened my eyes, not surprised that only the light from the city and the moon were casting a soft glow in my room. It was still night.

“You’re awake. Good.” A raspy voice to my left activated my adrenal glands to inject fight-or-flight hormones into my system. “Hello, Genevieve.”

There was a third and more common reaction to danger: freeze. Except for swinging my head to the left, I had very little control over my muscles. I wasn’t sure I could even lift my hand to fight or move my legs to flee. This paralysis I had experienced six months ago when we had saved the president’s son.

Sitting on the bed next to Colin’s sleeping form was a man dressed in dark colours. The meagre light in the room revealed his bald head, but it was his features I recognised. Kubanov. And he was pronouncing my name in the French way I loathed.

“So good of you to wake up, dear. Hopefully you will be able to chat with me this time.”

The last time Kubanov had made a surprise appearance next to me, I had been unable to speak, unable to warn others of his presence. I was not going to allow it to happen this time. I inhaled to wake Colin up, to call for Vinnie or to shout loud enough for the neighbours to hear.

“Ah, ah, ah.” Kubanov waved a gun back and forth on each sound. On a chuckle he pointed it at Colin’s head, leaving only five centimetres between Colin’s temple and the end of the barrel. “Don’t make a sound, Genevieve. I have no problem shooting your lover’s brains out.”

“Why is Colin not waking up?” I was surprised that my mouth managed to form words. I was completely numbed by fear. Unwilling to give Kubanov that kind of power over me, I sought for calm, but it was painfully difficult when concern about Colin’s unresponsive state was drawing me towards panic.

“I gave him a little something. Don’t worry, it is not nearly as strong as what I gave you before. This will only let him sleep really well for a few hours.”

“What do you want?” My voice was stronger even though my anxiety for Colin grew. How many times a week could one body effectively deal with being drugged like this? I took a deep breath and switched on Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 3 in E Flat Minor in the back of my mind. As background music to this newest trial, it might serve to give me the presence of mind I would need to retain as much as I could. Giving myself the goal of observing, absorbing and cataloguing put me in control. This was what I was good at. Even when I was limited by bad lighting.

“What I want, my dear Genevieve, is for you to suffer like me.” His laugh was wheezy and manic. A painful cough stopped that disturbing sound and it took a few minutes for him to recover. “How delightful that I managed to sound like a clichéd Hollywood baddie.”

“Why are you here?” I narrowed my eyes, my focus solely on him. A few things registered at the same time. Firstly, his bald head. Kubanov’s profile would not have predicted him shaving his head. I wondered if there was another reason for the change. Secondly, his posture. He was sitting at an angle on the bed as if he truly were visiting with us, but something looked off. The lack of proper lighting was debilitating and fast becoming frustrating. I couldn’t see the smaller muscle movements in his face. Nor could I see his other hand disappearing onto his thigh and covered in shadows.

“I’m here for many reasons.” He adopted a wistful tone. “But mostly, I just want to have a little chat with my favourite person.”

“Who’s that?”

Again he laughed until he coughed. “Priceless. My favourite person is you, Genevieve. I’m hurt that you don’t know this.”

His hand holding the gun to Colin’s head was outlined enough for me to notice the slight tremor. Kubanov was not nervous. He was sick. My eyes were drawn to the weapon in his hand. Again I loathed the low light for not affording me a good enough view.

I didn’t answer his absurd statement. Not because I didn’t know what to say, but because I was concerned about the steadiness of the weapon in his hand.

“Really? You have nothing to say to my compliment? I’m devastated.” His hoarse whisper drew my eyes away from the slightly trembling gun to his face. “Oh well, have it your way. Tell me how you liked your body art.”

“It was simplistic.” I chose my words with great consideration. Kubanov would not take an insult to his intelligence well. “Too easy to decrypt. As was the website. Too easy.”

Success. His body stiffened, his head pulled back and there was an audible quick intake of air. “You think you are so smart, Genevieve. There is so much more to that tattoo than what you think. Have you not learned that there are always layers on top of layers on top of layers of everything?”

“Like the forged paintings?”

“Yes, of course. You found them.” A minute change in his tone made me look really hard at his expression. I didn’t know if I imagined the
risorius
muscles lift his mouth into a smirk. What was he feeling smug about? “I was a little bit disappointed, if I have to tell you the truth. It had been a lot of fun replacing all those paintings, leaving those rich idiots none the wiser.”

“Of course you got only the best to replace those paintings for you.”

“You think Hawk did that?” The cough resulting from his laughter was so strong this time, his hand holding the gun started shaking. My mouth went instantly dry with fear for Colin. “For someone so smart, you can sometimes be really naïve. Hawk was a terrible thief. He was only good at one thing and that was importing illegal goods. And storing things. Those were the qualities I used him for. Not for his cat burglar skills. He soon became redundant.”

“And then you killed him.” This time I did see his reaction. “Okay, so you had him killed. You wouldn’t get your hands dirty, not with someone like Hawk.”

“I would’ve preferred that he had stayed useful a little longer.” He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug, not believing his own words. “I also would’ve preferred that you had not found those paintings so soon. But you found them and now you’re wondering about the underpaintings, aren’t you?”

“They are beautiful.” I knew from Angelique’s comments that this would antagonise Kubanov. I infused awe in my tone. “Not only the original paintings, but even the underpaintings are such exquisite pieces, I wouldn’t mind having them in my home.”

By the time I finished he was shifting on the bed. “That is not beauty. That is perversion. Putting whatever you see into squares and calling it art is a deviance. No brain sees things like that. Any artist claiming that cubism is a different perspective of vision is wrong! Brains like that are sick.”

I almost smiled. “And you think I have a sick brain.”

“Of course you do. I won’t deny enjoying your intellect. It is quite a challenge, but you’re sick. You are a weakness and a sickness in society. And you people are the weaker of the species. If we were in our basest, primal nature, you would never have survived. Only the strongest survive.”

“Just like you are the strongest and are surviving?”

He jumped up and pushed the gun against Colin’s head, his movements stiff and unsteady. I had pushed too far. Another rush of adrenaline spread through my body, adding to my fear and desire to escape into the safety of Mozart and my mind.

“Continue mocking me, Genevieve. I will splatter your boyfriend’s brain matter all over you and this room.”

“I wasn’t mocking. I was asking.” Despite my best effort, I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice. I needed to change his focus. “I have another question for you. How did you get in? Oh, make that two questions. Have you also drugged Vinnie?”

“Your big gorilla bodyguard? No, he left.” His posture relaxed marginally as he turned his head to the bedroom door. “Dukwicz! Come in here, would you?”

I wasn’t able to stop the gasp that escaped me. Soft footsteps sounded across my living space before a large male body filled the doorway. It was Dukwicz, the scarred man from the warehouse video, the man who had kidnapped and punched me. The light coming from my living room caught the side of his face, highlighting the raised scar on his jaw. The hypertrophic scar.

I was confident in my assessment that Kubanov would not hurt me. He needed me alive and well to continue playing his mind game until it had reached its conclusion. But Dukwicz? He would enjoy hurting me. Fear of having them in my home gave way to deep terror. I knew the darkness at my periphery was not from the night. It was from panic rolling in to take over.

With strength I hadn’t known I possessed, I fought back the fear. Having Colin unconscious next to me had the same effect as the last time we had been in a similar situation. I felt the irrational need to protect him. I turned up the volume of my mental Mozart playing and slowed my breathing.

“Good day, Doctor Lenard. Such a pity I didn’t get to beat you up again when I offed Hawk.” Dukwicz’s smile was malicious, his voice deep and steady as if breaking into my apartment was an everyday event. “You should really spruce up your security. It’s as bad as that little cottage in England. Too easy.”

I saw the deception cues as he laughed softly at the ease of breaking through Vinnie and Colin’s security measures. But there was also triumph. He had enjoyed taking on the challenge and winning. Dukwicz nodded once when I didn’t say anything and disappeared into my apartment again. I was going to clean every single centimetre to remove their presence.

“Dukwicz has been watching your little love nest for some time now. He loves your decor, especially your clocks. And he knows your gorilla quite well, he says.”

“His name is Vinnie.”

“When your
gorilla
left on some rendezvous an hour ago, Dukwicz phoned me to make use of this opportunity. He had been watching you going in and out of your apartment, so it took him only two minutes to get me inside. Some security system you have here, Genevieve.” Kubanov couldn’t possibly have known how much the French pronunciation of my name agitated me. His continuous use of it fed into my annoyance, pushing back some of the fear. I grabbed onto it. Anger was a powerful motivator.

“Not only is Dukwicz really good at disposing of redundant things, he is very gifted at entering places.” He looked at the gun and then at me. “I have something to give to you, but you must promise to behave. Else I will get Dukwicz to dismantle lover boy.”

“I won’t move or scream.” I assumed that was what he had meant by behave.

“Good.” He put the gun in a holster on his belt and called Dukwicz again. “Bring me the stuff.”

Only the knowledge that Kubanov would ruthlessly execute his threat kept me from placing my hand on Colin’s chest to feel the steadiness of his heartbeat. His touch always calmed me and I wondered if me touching him would have the same effect. That thought was immediately forgotten when Dukwicz walked into my bedroom and handed Kubanov a large bouquet of flowers. I felt sick to my stomach. I didn’t need any light to know the flowers in the crystal vase were red daffodils.

“I can’t say I was surprised that you didn’t accept my birthday gift. Having something delivered is terribly impersonal. That was why I brought these––to make sure you don’t feel that I’m neglecting you. I’ll put it over here.” He walked to the large wooden chest of drawers, moved a Peruvian statue out the way and carefully placed the flowers in the middle. He stepped back. “Ah, beautiful.”

“Flowers are usually given for a reason. Either to celebrate, to commiserate, to apologise, to thank or to connect. I know my birthday isn’t the real reason. Why are you giving me those flowers?”

“I would say it is a little of all those reasons. It is just a little token before the other gift.”

“You have more gifts for me?” I was horrified.

“Not here and not now, but soon. It will be my way of saying you’re special, but not nearly as clever as you think you are.”

“Are you planning to hurt only me? What about your other enemies? Surely a man of your calibre has plenty of people who might be more an enemy to you than I am.”

“But you’re not my enemy, Genevieve.” He took a step closer to the bed. “You are the closest I’ve ever had to an equal. Everyone else has always been too easy to outwit, outplan and oust.”

“In your tone I hear genuine respect and in your body language I see no deception. If what you are saying is true, why target me?”

He walked slowly to my side of the bed, his gait halted as if hiding great discomfort, pain. He stopped by my side and placed an object on the duvet covering my chest.

“You can look at it when I’m gone.” He tilted his head to the side, his face completely in the shadows. “You are a worthy adversary, Genevieve. You asked me earlier what I want. The truth is that what I want is no longer available to me. Lacking that option, I’ve had the last few months to come up with alternatives. Outthinking, outplaying and outsmarting you seemed like a delightful challenge to go straight to the top of my list. Twice you have beaten me. There will not be a third time.”