From Black Rooms (14 page)

"protective custody." Calvin had said Amis would kil him if he knew that the artist had leaked the secret of Project Persephone. No doubt he would do the same to anyone else who'd learned that secret.

"Yeah." Natalie looped the canvas handles of the tote bag over her shoulder. "Keep me company." Serena nodded and accompanied her as she left the Volvo. When they entered the building, she took the lead, scanning the interior with the alertness of a soldier on point as they ascended the stairs to Calvin Criswel 's apartment. She motioned for Natalie to stand back, out of sight of the peephole, and listened at the door, before unlocking it with the keys she'd borrowed from Calvin. No one burst out to capture them when she pushed the door open. Serena leaned into the doorway, scanned the studio, then gave Natalie an al -clear nod. Letting out her pent-up breath, Natalie passed over the threshold and made a beeline for the drafting table where Calvin had said he'd left the Rembrandt-in-progress.

She didn't make it. Her skin crawled with the sting of sciatica, and she dropped to the lacquered pressed-wood floor with a smack, her limbs shivering in seizure. Struck dumb, Natalie could no longer cry out, but her lips stammered for her. "I...made...a mistake." She had, too. She'd been so worried about the obvious threats that might await her in this studio--Prashad, Amis, Evan--that she'd forgotten about the woman

Calvin had felt knocking. The one who had kil ed

herself here.

"I...want...to come...back," the suicide insisted with Natalie's voice, straining to solidify her mastery of the body she inhabited.

Serena shut the apartment door and rushed to straddle Natalie while she was stil prone, pinning her to the floor before the inhabiting soul could get her body upright. "Give 'em the mantra, Nat. Kick the bastard out, whoever it is."

Her friend sounded muted and remote, but her coaching served as a Heimlich maneuver for Natalie's psyche. The suicide had stunned her with the surprise ambush, but now Natalie reverted to her lifetime of training as a Violet, reiterating her protective mantra with

conditioned calm: The Lord is my shepherd; I shal not
want...

The dead tenant's soul receded like a wave of nausea, leaving Natalie woozy but stable. She pushed herself into a sitting position, chanting the Twenty-third Psalm in her mind to prevent the suicide from capturing control again. Serena braced her as Natalie took

shuddering breaths to clear her head. "Thanks for pul ing me out of that one."

Her friend grinned. "Don't mention it. Been there plenty of times myself."

Natalie shook her head and chuckled. "Simon would've flunked me out of the School for letting a soul sucker-punch me like that."

"That's okay. To the Maestro, we're al amateurs." Serena stood and pul ed Natalie to her feet. "Let's grab that picture and get out of this dump."

"Amen." Reorienting herself, Natalie turned toward the easel a few steps to her left. A life-study of a blond woman with a sheet wrapped about her hips in

neoclassic fashion, done in a rather bland modern style reminiscent of Modigliani, rested there. Another

painting lay atop the drafting table beside the easel, as if tossed aside in impatience. Even viewed edge-on, the canvas was obviously old, its tacked fringe discolored and darkened from centuries of exposure to air and light.

The face of the canvas, however, stil bore the sticky, honeyed shininess of fresh pigment, without the

yel owing and spiderweb cracking in its lacquered surface wrought by the passage of time. The picture hadn't yet reached the stage where Calvin could age it artificial y. A few of the disciples in the storm-tossed craft wore only pinkish smudges for faces, and the whitecaps of the waves lacked the undertones of black and green to give them the surge and swel of the original. But what Calvin had finished so astonished her that she nearly stopped reciting her protective mantra. Natalie marveled at the brushwork, mouth ajar in awe.
This wasn't Rembrandt, she thought. Calvin did all this
by himself.

Were it not for the missing details and the painting's newness, however, even an art historian would have had difficulty distinguishing Calvin Criswel 's virtuosity from that of the Dutch master. He hadn't merely

rendered his own version of the original composition, as most artists would have done. As nearly as possible, he had replicated the painting stroke for stroke: the wispy wash of gold that created the dim shafts of sunlight penetrating the dark clouds of the background; the white streaks that became the mist of sea foam lashing the boat; and, seated in the stern, the unperturbed figure of Christ--the only point of peace in the seascape's swirling turbulence. With ultimate audacity, Calvin had even counterfeited Rembrandt's signature on the keel, exactly as it appeared on the original.

Serena cast a cursory glance at the picture while keeping watch on the apartment door. "Wel ? That it?"

"Oh, yeah. This is it, al right." Natalie picked up the canvas by its edges, angling it this way and that to appreciate the way the layered textures of paint and glaze caught the light. Despite his notoriety as a forger, Calvin seemed like such a slob that Natalie had

underestimated his true skil as an artist. A tinge of envy tainted her admiration: his was the kind of

technique that got you into the Corps's Art Division.
I can't finish this, she fretted, feeling like a bar-band
singer forced to audition right after Pavarotti leaves the stage. Unless she summoned Rembrandt himself to help her, how could she hope to finish the fake wel enough to fool Carleton Amis? Even assuming she obtained the dead Dutchman's help, Natalie knew nothing about how to make a fresh fraud look centuries old. Her whole plan suddenly seemed impossible, insane...

She didn't have time for second-guessing, though, for Serena was already out the door and scouting the

stairwel . Natalie hustled to the only dresser in view and snatched shirts, underwear, and socks by the fistful and shoved them into the tote bag for Calvin, then returned to the drafting table for the painting.

"Just grab the thing and come on," Serena barked.

"Okay, I'm coming." Natalie carried the picture out of the studio with the delicacy of a col ector. "But you'l have to hold it on your lap while I drive and make sure nothing touches it."

Serena shook her head as she locked up the apartment and started down the stairs. "Just cal me the Human Easel."

When the voices of the two women withdrew from the studio and the door's dead bolt sealed them out with a reassuring shuck, Tranquil ity Moon inched her head out of the bathroom to make sure that she could safely emerge from her hiding place. After confirming that she was alone, she skittered on tiptoe to the front window, where she peeped through the gap between the dirty, speckled drop cloths that served as Calvin Criswel 's curtains.

On the street below, Tranquil ity saw two figures emerge from the apartment building and approach a maroon Volvo, its sheen dul ed with oxidization. The redheaded woman in the T-shirt and jeans handed a painting to her companion, a short-haired black woman in a business suit, who balanced the canvas on her fingertips as she opened the passenger door.

There wasn't much time. Tranquil ity scampered out of the apartment and down the stairs, pausing on the building's front doorstep until the red-haired woman swung behind the Volvo's steering wheel and started the car. As the station wagon made a U-turn and drove away, Tranquil ity stepped out onto the sidewalk and read the car's license plate, repeating the alphanumeric combination under her breath as if it were her own mantra.

She had no idea who these people were or why they had the keys to Cal's place, but she meant to find out. After Cal had freaked out and abandoned her in the studio, Tranquil ity had stood shivering in his lame Greek getup, her arms folded over her bare torso, for nearly ten minutes, hoping he would calm down and come back with a decent explanation for his weirdness. When he didn't, she tore the stupid bedsheet from around her waist, swearing, and went to take a hot bath to warm up. To kil time, she stayed in the water until her fingers looked like raisins, then got out, did her hair and makeup, put on her purple peasant skirt and corset top. Tranquil ity figured Cal had to return eventual y, at which time she'd give him a nice, juicy piece of her mind.

Lucky for her, she was stil preening in front of the bathroom mirror when she heard someone unlock the apartment door. Assuming Cal had final y slunk home, she was about to burst into the studio and give him a double-barreled lecture about acting like a psycho. But she stopped at the bathroom door when she heard two voices murmuring on the other side--both of them

female. What they said made no sense, but she had a feeling Cal could clear up the mystery for her. And she had a feeling these women could tel her where Cal was.

Tranquil ity hurried back upstairs to the apartment, where she looked up the number for the local police in Cal's dog-eared phone directory. She punched the

number on her cel phone's keypad and waited, twirling a ringlet of her blond hair around her index finger.

"Yeah...somebody hit my car and drove off," she said when the operator answered. "But I got their license number. Any way you could tel me how to find them?"
12

Something You Believe In

AWKWARD.

That was the word that came to Calvin's mind as he slouched on Natalie Lindstrom's sofa, his head encased in Reynolds Wrap, and avoided the stare of the violeteyed little girl and the silver-haired guy with the stun gun, seated in the chairs about three feet in front of him. Although they hadn't been introduced, Cal deduced from the old guy's resemblance to Natalie that he must be the family patriarch. Mr. Lindstrom seemed to think that lowering his weapon would be a dereliction of duty, so he ended up propping his elbows on his knees as his arms got tired of holding the gun aimed at Calvin's chest. Over an hour had snailed past since Natalie and her friend departed, and yet no one had worked up the nerve to say anything. The silence

accumulated in the room like leaking gas that would ultimately suffocate them al .

Cal blew breath out through his lips with a braying sound and lightly snapped his fingers as he slapped his right palm against his left fist. Awkward as the

Lindstrom family's silence was, he preferred it to the vying of disembodied voices in his head.

Staring at his hosts was not only rude but also nerveracking, so Cal al owed his attention to meander around the living room to learn whatever he could about

Natalie Lindstrom. His gaze alighted on prints of works by Monet and Georgia O'Keeffe and framed posters

from Gigi and Singin' in the Rain, which showed that she had good taste in movies as wel as art. But there were other pictures hanging on the wal s that he did not recognize--mostly stark black charcoals or soft pastels, and a few oils, as wel .

The quality of the compositions made Cal wonder if these were some of the posthumous col aborations the Violet had done with her Al -Star Team of past masters. The works displayed a unique vision and originality, however--something Cal easily recognized and

envied, since he had none. Here was a massive red rose opening like a womb to reveal the profile of a human embryo in its heart. There was a character study of a homeless derelict dozing on a bus-stop bench while the Expressionistic cityscape of wal s and street lamps curved over him as if they were waves about to break. And if Cal needed further proof that these were

Lindstrom originals, there hung the most striking example of al : a portrait of the little girl as a toddler, her violet eyes both innocent and aged, as if she'd seen an entire lifetime's drama during her brief existence. In the bluish background behind the girl lurked another portrait--a transparent figure who shared the child's facial features yet had the body of an adult man. The male mirage enfolded the girl in arms of glass.

Calvin was speculating on the identity of the portrait's second subject when Mr. Lindstrom cleared his throat.

"Sorry about this." The old guy shifted the stun gun to his left hand so he could flex a cramp out of his right. "I plan to order some pizza as soon as my daughter gets back. You're welcome to join us."

Cal nodded at the man charged with blasting him if he made the wrong move, unsure how to take this peculiar combination of hostility and hospitality. "Um...thanks." Mr. Lindstrom smiled at the girl sitting cross-legged in the chair next to him. "Cal ie here likes pepperoni and olives, but we could get one with whatever you want." Cal gave a sheepish grin. "Pepperoni and olives sounds great to me."

The girl pul ed her legs up to rest her chin on her knees, peering at him with those violet irises, which now seemed enormous. "Your eyes are weird. Are you real y a Violet?"

Her grandfather looked both shocked and amused.

"Cal ie!"

She kept staring at Calvin. "Wel ?"

"Sort of. I guess." He smoothed the crinkled foil on his head, remembering the voices.

"My mom works with famous painters and she used to help the police catch murderers, too. What do you do?" Cal suddenly missed the silence. "I'm an artist. And I guess you could say I've also...been involved with law enforcement."

"Real y?" The girl sat forward, al owing her feet to dangle over the edge of her chair. "Did you know my dad? His name's Dan Atwater. He was an F.B.I. agent." Cal's gaze flicked to the translucent man in the portrait of Cal ie on the wal . "I can't say I did... The girl's interest dimmed. "I didn't think so. He's been dead a long time. I can't even talk to him now that he's gone to the Place Beyond--"

Mr. Lindstrom returned the stun gun to his good hand.

"Kiddo, I don't think you should bother Mr.... I'm sorry, what was your name?"

"Criswel ." Cal stifled a laugh, thinking it hilarious that his captor should be worried about offending him. "But feel free to cal me 'Cal.' Everyone does. And she isn't bothering me, real y."

"See?" Cal ie said to her grandfather with told-you-so satisfaction.