The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (16 page)

As usual, she was right; David relaxed his attention slightly. Before them, the museum rose like cliffs of white marble, surrounding them with its frozen, pompous statuary. The stone lions supporting the banister remained inert, as they would have in reality. David felt curiously detached, barely concerned by everything going on. The powder ran along his nerves, dulling the anxiety he’d normally have felt.

“There’s the first electronic eye,” Zenios whispered, indicating a kind of lens sticking out of the wall. “The whole area around the entrance lies within its field of vision. Nothing can get through the door without its immediately noticing and sounding the alarm. I’ll put it to sleep. Plug your ears so you won’t hear what I’m saying.”

Nadia pulled a tin of wax earplugs out of her pocket and passed them around. Zenios had approached the sensor, taking care to stay outside its range. From the movements of his lips, it was clear he’d begun droning his hypnotic suggestions. It took a while, then the eye began to blink. It teared up, and then its protective metal lid drew down with a squeak. At the same time, the gates opened. David took the plugs from his ears.

“We’re in,” Zenios sighed. “The eye is asleep. In its dreams, it’s still watching the entrance, and all is well. Remember, the hypnotic trance only lasts thirty minutes. If you’re out before it wakes up, it won’t remember a thing, and won’t be able to bring testimony against you.”

David nodded and pushed the gate aside. His footsteps echoed in the great glass atrium. The exhibit halls, harshly lit and yet deserted, were somehow unsettling.

“No time to waste,” said Nadia, clicking her stopwatch. “Professor, you take out the other three eyes in the main gallery and go on out without us, as planned. Are we good?”

The old man nodded and started immediately for the long exhibit hall on the ground floor. Jorgo was champing at the bit, tools slung across his chest in a bandolier. Nadia put a hand on David’s arm, squeezed his biceps.

“Don’t forget,” she repeated. “Paintings down here aren’t just colors splashed on canvas. Try not to be too shocked by what you find. If you panic, you’ll destabilize the world, and bring nightmare crashing down on us.”

At the other end of the gallery, Zenios was waving them forward with his arm. The second eye was asleep, its metal lid lowered. David tried to situate the painting in the museum. It was, he thought, at the far end of an endless corridor of varnished paintings, in an impasse of a room with no doors leading outside. But his facts remained hazy.
But I was the one who planned this job!
he thought, surprised. Nadia had taken the lead. She advanced with a firm step in her black leather, her face unreadable, sparing of gesture and expression.

“It is done,” Zenios announced, joining them. “They’re all asleep. Keep an eye on your watches. I’ll be waiting in the car.”

He walked on tiptoe, as if the floor burned his feet. It seemed he had but one desire: to get out of this mousetrap posthaste. Nadia turned away from him and oriented herself with the map from her pocket.

“Five hundred feet of hallway,” she said coolly. “
The Battle of
Kanstädt’
s all the way at the back. We’ll have to cross the entire length of the museum.”

They started walking, forcing themselves not to run, freezing whenever a car passed by the esplanade outside. The parquet let out a terrible creaking beneath their feet, and David wondered if the racket would wind up waking the optical sensors.
A masterpiece
, whispered a voice inside him.
A painting of inestimable value, unique in all the world. You’ve never stolen anything close to it before
. The Battle of Kanstädt
is your world’s equivalent of Soler’s white beasts. The symbol of a colossal work … as huge as the great dream out there on Bliss Plaza, the one that put an end to the war. If you can bring it back to the surface, you’ll be famous overnight
. He passed a hand over his face to check if he was sweating. His skin was dry. Thanks to the distancing powder, fear was turning into a feeling of curiosity and rather pleasant impatience.

They reached the end of the gallery at last. The painting in its heavy gilded frame suddenly seemed as vast and unbudgeable as a building façade. It was a gigantic work executed in a very eighteenth-century style that packed in a mind-boggling hodgepodge of men, cannons, horses, foot soldiers, and cavalry. Smoke from salvos hovered in an acrid layer over the landscape, and entire battalions maneuvered in its shadow. From one side of the frame to the other, thousands of miniature men were busy running, charging, dying, and each of them had been painted with an almost hallucinatory eye for detail. Nothing had been left out: not the bicornes, the buttons on the frock coats, the insignia on the
uniforms. Each soldier had a face distinct from that of his companions, entirely his own. And each face reflected a specific emotion: fear, anger, rage, cowardice, despair, exhaustion. It was a fabulous work of truly terrifying mastery. Black-jacketed guardsmen confronted red-jacketed guardsmen in a tumultuous and pitiless contest in the middle of a muddy field that the pounding of artillery had turned into a lunar landscape. All those swords, those pikes, gave off a wounding gleam. A cavalry charge hurtled down a hillside, sending chunks of peat flying; cannonballs tore through the air, fleeing to meet mounts, shattering the breastplates of riders, scattering heads and limbs in their wake. David blinked, dumbfounded by so much turmoil.

All three of them were breathing hard. The painting was a window onto another world, a well from which rose a fearsome draft that threatened to knock them off their feet at any moment. The frame seemed a rim they didn’t dare lean on, for fear it might suddenly crumble. David knelt slowly, praying the parquet wouldn’t creak at the touch of his knees. Jorgo had opened his satchel and pulled out a bulging medical kit, which he unrolled on the floor, revealing bottles, vials, and syringes.
How many people were there?
David thought frantically.
How many animals? Hundreds
 … 
thousands?
Suddenly he realized he’d dreamed too big. Even with all three of them, they’d have a hard time wrapping up in twenty minutes. Nadia had already grabbed a syringe, stuck it into a bottle. Jorgo grabbed a big spray bottle full of topical anesthetic solution and began squirting the painting to numb its skin. But the haze floating over the battlefield tended to catch the fine droplets.

“You sure you want to do this?” Nadia asked, taking a step toward the painting, syringe in hand. “David? We can still go right now, leave all this behind. This is too big for us. It’s not going to end well.”

His thoughts exactly, but then, bracing himself against his fear, he filled his syringe in turn and moved toward the bottom right corner of the painting. A horse there had been struck by a hail of bullets, its rider toppling backward, futilely brandishing his saber. A handsome bit of painting in which the hooves of the slaughtered animal reared and struck at the smoke in a kind of whirlwind where a few ghostly figures could be glimpsed. The black holes in the man’s breastplate clearly indicated that he would be dead before he hit the ground. Foot soldiers were running round the horse, bayonets lowered. Their eyes were closed. The great mêlée boiling over the crucible of the plain pitted companies of somnambulists against each other, whose lethal acts were carried out in the heart of a deep slumber. David leaned forward, looking for generals atop the traditional hillock overlooking the carnage. They were also sleeping, feet in stirrups, only pretending to survey the struggle, and their horses were sleeping too, knees locked in equine fashion. It was as if some enchantment had struck them in mid-action, suspending the flow of time, arresting them in unconsciousness like the courtiers in Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Nadia appeared to register no surprise at the spectacle. Leaning on the edge of the tediously ornamented frame, she’d already jabbed a horse in the thigh, injecting a few drops of sedative into the substance of the painting.

“Maintain a light touch,” she whispered. “The important
thing is not to wake them up. Watch out—the haze is keeping the local anesthetic from settling in right.”

“But—” David stammered. “They’re all sleeping! Did you see that? It’s incredible—a battle where all the soldiers have their eyes closed! You can’t tell until you’re right up close to it! It must be some kind of allegory, right?”

“What the hell are you babbling about?” Nadia snapped. “They’ve got their eyes closed because it’s nighttime—time to sleep! Down here paintings need sleep too, just like people. Stop babbling and drug them. If we don’t put them all under, they’ll wake up with a start as soon as we start moving the painting.”

She did not stop inoculating as she spoke. The tip of the syringe came and went like the stinger on some insatiable insect. She pricked horses in the croup, men in the shoulder, devoting only one or two seconds to each. Jorgo was doing the same. He’d tackled the other half of the painting and was working on the enemy army, anesthetizing squadrons on the march, charging horses. When the syringe was empty, he pierced the rubber seal on another bottle and filled it back up.

“They’re light sleepers,” Nadia whispered, a fine sweat gleaming on her brow. “It’s a very old painting, which means it doesn’t need much sleep. Plus, the period frame is crippled with rheumatism, which the crossbeams in back can feel. That means the work could wake up at any moment, and in a bad mood. You can imagine the problems that would cause …”

David couldn’t imagine a thing. He found himself suddenly paralyzed with terror, and the syringe between his fingers began
to shake. Finally, he made up his mind to inject the great rearing horse, repeating to himself,
This is madness! Sheer madness!
When the needle sank into a soft, fibrous mass reminiscent of striated muscle, he almost let out a cry of horror. It was as if he’d just injected a real horse. A … real? horse, but two-dimensional, and no more than four inches tall.

“Faster!” Nadia panted, “faster!” She was right. Why was he wasting time being astonished? He was in the dream world, and anything was possible. Anything!

“This is a very powerful tranquilizer. Don’t use too much,” the young woman repeated. “Two drops for horses, one for people—that’s enough. Get it right, or you’ll poison them. If they die, they’ll rot; a black patch will form on the painting’s surface and oxidation from decomposition will make a hole in the canvas. If that happens, the painting will be worthless.”

David felt his pulse swelling the veins at his temple. Briefly, he tried to imagine the death of a figure in a painting: first the colors fading away, then the bristling blisters of fermenting paint, mushrooms forming beneath the glaze. An ugly little rot that spread like sickness from the foot of a tree and ended up making a personshaped hole …

He jabbed and jabbed, trying to be as fast and efficient as his companions. He was abruptly ashamed to have dragged them into such folly, ashamed of abusing his influence over them. They’d obeyed without protest, like docile slaves, resigned as soldiers who make it a point of honor never to challenge an order. Lost in these thoughts, he jabbed a horse too hard; for a split second, its eye
opened. The flash of white from the painting’s surface made David back up a few steps, hair standing up on the back of his neck, but already the eyelid had closed again.

“Ten minutes,” Nadia announced, her voice flat. Empty bottles of tranquilizer piled up at the foot of the painting. Jorgo swore. He’d just snapped his needle on a cavalryman’s breastplate. David could no longer see what he was doing. He jabbed, jabbed, and jabbed away, saturating the canvas even as he tried to control the force of the plunger. Two drops for animals, one drop for people … but there were so many men, so many horses! And the dead? The ones lying in the mud, a shattered sword in their hands? And the animals gutted by bullets? Did he have to drug them too? Not daring to interrupt Nadia with stupid questions, he jabbed at random, knocking out the living and the dead alike. The painting blurred before him. All those tiny bodies in uniform, in serried ranks, those sleepwalkers halted in the middle of a killing blow, bayonet brandished, saber raised, not even taking a seat at night to rest their weary bodies.

In the same emotionless voice, Nadia continued to lay out the curious rules governing the lives of paintings. “If you see a horse or a man lie down, it means you’ve given them too much. They won’t necessarily die, but if they make it, there’s no guarantee they’ll take up the exact position they were in before they passed out. So you understand the scope of what I’m saying: if so much as one figure,
a single figure
, changes position, we’ll find ourselves with a different painting on our hands—a fake, a copy. If just one of these soldiers leaves his spot and crawls into a ditch to sleep better,
The Battle of Kanstädt
will no longer match up with pictures
in art history books or museum catalogs. You get me? Make sure none of these soldiers collapses when you pull out your needle. If that happens, try to force them back up by massaging the canvas top to bottom with the tip of your finger. Usually that’s enough; reflex kicks in, and they instinctively assume their poses again.”

David’s head was buzzing. From the nervous sweat moistening his palms, he knew the distancing powder wasn’t working anymore. He needed to stop what he was doing and take a pill, but he didn’t dare break the rhythm. He couldn’t afford the luxury. Still, he feared a nightmare might form and capsize the operation. This was the first time he’d ever mounted a theft of such scope; till now, he’d just been a small-time hoodlum robbing window displays, local jewelry stores. The painting was something else, the guarantee of a magnificent object, a work as powerful as that of Soler Mahus. This time, he wouldn’t go back up carrying a mere knickknack doomed to die in quarantine. No container would be big enough to accommodate the product of his dream. The museum would have to take exceptional measures, dispatch all its specialists on the double … Marianne could keep her advice, her sermons, and go back to sleeping in her suitcase like a good little boarder. This time, there would be no more doubting his talent; the great dream on Bliss Plaza would be but a bouquet of wilted daisies beside what he was about to snatch from the deep.