The Hypnotist (18 page)

Victor Keither couldn’t hear what the man on the other end of the phone was saying with the sounds of construction all around. “Hold on, let me find someplace I can hear myself think.” The foreman of the renovation of the Metropolitan’s Islamic wing moved away from the activity and stepped into the partially constructed sleep temple. Keither was always drawn to one area on a job. So far this structure was only a skeleton of what it would become, but it already felt like a sacred space. Once it had stood in Greece and been used by the sick and infirm who came to pray and be healed. Now, block by block, it was being reconstructed from hundreds of those original stones. The first time Victor had seen the rough, chipped granite he’d imagined the man who, over two thousand years before, had built it.

It was things like that, like wondering about that ancient builder, that made Victor appreciate his job. His buddies who worked regular sites didn’t get what was so different about the Met, and he’d long since stopped trying to explain. Your religion was a private thing, wasn’t it?

“Okay, I can hear myself think now,” Victor said as he leaned
against the plaster wall and rested his eyes on the circle of stones. “Who is this?”

“It’s Mac. Mac Wyman—”

Victor didn’t need to hear anything else. This was the third time Wyman had called and tried to recruit him for the firm that had stolen so many of Phillips’s crew. Victor knew he was a good foreman, but there were other qualified men in New York. He wasn’t that special.

Taking off his helmet, he ran his hand through his orange hair. “I told you before, I’m not interested. I have to get back to work, so—”

“I’m offering a very serious signing bonus here.”

“Even if I was looking for a new job, I wouldn’t want to work for someone who does business your way.”

“What do you mean? We do business the old-fashioned way, Vic. We pay for the best craftsmen and workers we can find.”

“No, you overpay for them.”

“You may think so, but to us they’re worth it. And you’d be worth it to us, too. What if I told you the signing bonus would pay for your son’s first two years of med school?”

For a second Victor was caught off guard. How did Mac Wyman know about any of that? Maybe one of the guys who used to work for him who had gone over to Wyman had told him, but…

“Vic? Are you still there?”

“Victor.” No one called him Vic.

“So what do you say, Victor? You interested in coming down and talking to us?”

He wished he could say yes. It would make his life a damn sight easier to screw his principles and his loyalty to Phillips—except it wasn’t really about principles or loyalty, was it? It was about where he went to work and what he did when he got there. He wasn’t stuck building apartment buildings or banks;
he’d spent his career helping rebuild the Metropolitan Museum of Art, doing something that mattered to him, something that made him proud.
Pride goeth before a fall,
he thought, smiling, remembering his father’s habit of quoting homilies whenever he had an important decision to make.

“I’m not interested.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, Victor.”

“Hey, Keither, we have a problem with some wiring that isn’t on the plans.” His chief engineer had found him and was in the doorway with a scowl on his face and a sheaf of blueprints in his hand.

“I have to get back to work, Mr. Wyman.”

At the end of the day, as usual, Victor stayed behind after the crew left and walked the exhibition area, slowly and methodically inspecting the site. Yellow pad and pencil in hand, he took notes, stopping sometimes to mark an area on the wall with a piece of blue chalk. For the past few weeks, the inspections had taken longer than usual. This was something else he could blame on the turnover. It was to be expected, but that didn’t mean he accepted or appreciated it. He’d always put his crews together carefully, balancing each man’s strengths against another’s weaknesses, but with so many men leaving there were gaps.

Finally he reached the room he saved for last each night, the room where he’d escaped earlier to take Wyman’s call. He sat down on the wooden crate in the center of the round building that would bridge the Islamic and Cypriot exhibition spaces.

Victor put his hand on one of the cold granite blocks. He’d never heard of a sleep temple before this job, but he’d looked them up.

Ruins of these early hospitals had been found in ancient Egypt, the Middle East and Greece. Some dated back as far as four thousand years ago. According to ancient texts, ill and
troubled people came here to be healed. Instead of doctors, priests worked with the sick using chants, prayers and mesmerizing objects to focus attention. Once the patients fell into a deep, meditative sleep, the holy men gave them subliminal suggestions. When they awoke, the priests analyzed their dreams and prescribed treatments for ailments—both physical and psychological. It was the earliest known use of hypnosis.

In Greece most of these structures were built in honor of the god of medicine, Asclepius, but there had been a few built to honor Hypnos, the god of sleep. The stones didn’t reveal which god this temple had been dedicated to, but the museum planned on installing a sculpture of Hypnos from its own collection.

When Deborah Mitchell, one of the Islamic department’s curators, had needed measurements for the statue’s base, Victor had been given the rare chance to see the colossal god dating back to the fifth century BCE.

Hypnos was incomplete and stripped of most of his decoration, but Victor was astonished by his power and mesmerized by his still-intact eye, the obsidian orb veneered with ivory and inlaid with moss-green chalcedony. It wasn’t quite human, but it seemed alive. Or was it that he felt more alive looking at it?

Deborah had told him that although Hypnos had most likely been created for a sleep temple, it was improbable it had been made for the actual temple they were re-creating. “It would be too much of a coincidence,” she had mused, “for them to be reunited two thousand years later, so many thousands of miles from where their journeys began.”

But working on the rotunda, Victor had a lot of time to study its proportions and had come to believe the sculpture
might
have been made for this temple. He’d taken measurements to prove his theory and discovered that the stone edifice and the statue were proportionately perfect for each other based on the
golden mean—the equation created by the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. He hadn’t told Miss Mitchell yet, but he planned to soon.

Victor had grown up in a religious household and had been an altar boy, but it wasn’t until he started working at the Met that he realized what he loved about going to church wasn’t the liturgy or the service or the idea of God. It was the building that made his spirit soar—the towering ceilings, the astonishing stained-glass windows that threw jewel-colored reflections on his hands if he held them out at the right angle, the elegantly chiseled stone ornamentation. He’d never built a church, but he often felt that working at the Met was as good. The galleries here held art created in the name of not just one God, but all gods, both ancient and modern. There was as much that was holy here as in any cathedral.

Out on the street, Victor stopped to light a cigarette. It was a bad habit but one he couldn’t quit. Just as he stepped off the curb, a bus pulled out. He didn’t see it coming—his eyes had been on the flame igniting the tobacco. As he watched the bus that had come so close to hitting him drive off, he took a deep drag on the smoke, felt the first rush of nicotine surge through him and headed for the subway.

Descending into the subterranean station, Victor pulled his headphones out of his pocket and pushed the buds in his ears. He was listening to a suspense novel by Steve Berry, and he picked up where he’d left off that morning, with the narrator reading a tense scene in a tight voice:
Malone gripped the automatic and waited. He risked one glance around the niche where he and Pam were hiding.

Walking down the platform, he passed a short woman with strawberry-blond hair who was wearing tight-fitting blue jeans and carrying a designer purse. He stopped a few feet away, where it was empty and quiet.

The shadow continued to expand as the gunman drew closer.

A twentysomething guy was heading Victor’s way. There was nothing exceptional about him—baggy jeans, running shoes, laces untied, oversize green T-shirt, some gold chains around his neck, a baseball hat and a knapsack. He stopped near Victor and examined a movie poster on the wall that featured a man standing at a window, holding a gun trained on the viewer. The kid pulled a quarter out of his pocket and started tossing it in the air.

As Victor watched the coin glint in the station’s lights, he sensed a slight trembling coming up through the soles of his shoes. He always felt the oncoming train a full minute before he saw its lights.

The kid tossed the coin again, higher this time, and took a small step back to catch it.

In Victor’s ears the narrator’s voice continued, tense and anxious.
He wondered if his attacker knew there was no exit. He assumed the man did not. Why else would he be advancing? Simply wait out in the gallery.

Ten feet away, a middle-aged man wearing filthy chinos and a dirty white shirt that had sweat stains in triple rings under the arms ambled toward the end of the platform.

Victor peered into the dark tunnel, watching for that first shimmer from the train’s headlights, knowing from the increasing ground tremor that it was imminent.

The kid with the backpack tossed the coin higher this time and almost missed catching it.

The unkempt man who looked as hungry as he looked strung out stopped near the woman wearing the tight jeans.

The glimmer of ambient light far down the tracks appeared. The voice in Victor’s ear stressed the hero’s tension as he tried to evaluate the danger he was in.

But he’d learned long ago that people who killed for a living were plagued with impatience. Do the job and get out. Waiting only increased the chances of failure.

The train sped closer. Victor leaned forward slightly to see if it was a local or an express, the way he always did.

The kid tossed the coin again just as the man in the khakis lunged for the strawberry-blonde’s bag, grabbed it and took off with surprising agility and speed—more like a professional athlete than a mugger.

The kid had thrown the quarter way too high this time. As he stepped back, estimating where it would come down, he wound up in the path of the mugger who, determined to get away, used both of his arms to push through the space between Victor, on the edge of the tracks, and the coin-tossing kid.

Victor felt a sudden, strong push and tried to keep his balance, tried to grab out for something to hold on to, but there was nothing to reach for but darkness. He slipped off the edge of the platform just in time for the train’s blunt nose to slam into him. He flew up, still conscious as he rose above the train, and then gravity grabbed hold of him.

The conductor felt the impact and braked immediately. The train had been slowing and came to a full stop just a few feet too late for Victor, who was crushed to death on the tracks while the voice of the narrator continued playing in the dead man’s ears.

Witnesses questioned by the transit police that evening were in conflict over what they had seen. The blonde whose bag had been pulled off her shoulder said that she’d been watching the man who took her purse and that he’d slammed into the deceased, clearly by accident.

A businessman wearing a bow tie said that there had been a
third person involved, a kid with a knapsack who had shoved the mugger away and in doing so had pushed him into the man on the edge of the tracks.

There were three other people who had slightly different versions of what had occurred, but none who suggested that the unfortunate incident had been anything but an accident.

The next-day stories in the papers mentioned that Victor Keither left behind a wife of twenty-four years and two sons: a twenty-one-year-old who was going to NYU medical school in the fall and a sixteen-year-old who had always said that when he grew up he wanted to build museums like his father.

They didn’t mention that his death now left open the position of foreman on the renovation of the Islamic wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On Wednesday morning the museum’s board of directors were assembled in the conference room around a large oval table made of rare zebrawood and ebony, being briefed by the FBI. At each setting was a Lalique tumbler and water pitcher, an Egyptian cotton napkin, a Limoges plate and Puiforcat silverware. Down the middle of the table were platters of miniature buttery croissants, golden-brown
pains au chocolat
and salvers of fat strawberries, shiny apples and glistening green grapes in arrangements borrowed from the Henri Fantin-Latour still lifes in the galleries below. None of the dozen men and women who comprised the august body of policymakers had yet taken anything to eat—they were all too astonished by what they were hearing.

Tyler Weil, who’d called this emergency meeting, the first of his tenure and the first in the museum’s last decade, sat at the head of the table explaining the situation. Doug Comley, in a pressed navy suit, crisp white shirt and carefully knotted striped tie, was on his left, and Lucian Glass, who was unshaven and wearing his usual black jeans and T-shirt and looked even more haggard and exhausted than usual, sat on his right.

“This is going to be an extremely sensitive negotiation, and I wanted you all to understand what we’re planning.”

“Before we go there, are you saying you haven’t even figured out why on earth this lunatic wants to exchange these four masterpieces for a sculpture?” Jim Rand interrupted. He was an impatient man in his seventies who was the CEO of a holding company that owned one of the largest advertising agencies in the world and had donated enough money to the Met in the past five years to have a gallery named after him.

“No one will fault us for making the exchange. The Van Gogh alone is worth a dozen Greek sculptures,” Nina Keyes said. The five-carat diamond earrings she wore bounced in sync to the vehemence of her response. “Just give them the sculpture.”

“It’s not that simple, Nina. If it gets out that we negotiated or capitulated we leave ourselves open and vulnerable to who knows how many more criminals.” Hitch Oster was chairman of the board. His father, a real-estate mogul, had been on the board, as had his father before him. There were half-a-dozen old masters that had discreet plaques beneath them that read, “A Gift of Milton Oster.” But Hitch wasn’t just fulfilling a family tradition. He was passionate about the museum and its holdings and the importance of the institution. “Museums of our caliber—the Louvre, the British Museum, the Uffizi—we’re all encyclopedias of art and humanity. We’re the crown jewels of civilized nations. We afford everyone of every socioeconomic level the chance to engage with, learn from and be elevated by the objects on display. We do not negotiate.”

“Rules will cripple you every time,” Nina responded.

“We will get the paintings back without the museum being compromised in any way,” Comley said. “And we’d like to fill you in on how we’re planning to do that.”

“Can’t you just legally confiscate them?” Rand asked.

“Why didn’t you do that already?” Nina asked. “You said you were with the paintings for twenty minutes.”

Lucian stopped himself from massaging his temples. He’d taken some pain pills a few hours ago, but they were wearing off. The headaches were always worse when he was stressed. Or hungry. The fruit looked good, but none of the platters were near him. “We don’t just want the paintings. We want the man who spearheaded this effort.” He was furious when he thought about what had happened yesterday…
they
should have—no,
he
should have—expected that a man smart enough to get this far would have every contingency covered.

“Are you saying he was able to get the paintings away from a whole team of FBI agents without being followed?” Rand asked dubiously. “How did he do that?”

Lucian explained as succinctly as he could: as he had feared, the agents in the parking garage, in front of the hotel and in the lobby who were waiting for a signal noticed the hotel guest who left, carrying two ordinary suitcases, four-and-a-half minutes before Lucian got back to his room and called to alert them, but they had no reason to be suspicious. Later, on the hotel’s videotape, they were able to watch the muscle man from the upstairs hallway, the elevator, the lobby and out front where the doorman helped him into a taxi. With the suitcases in the trunk, the cab drove off.

“So you didn’t get the paintings or a lead on who’s behind this?” Rand asked.

“Did this guy just take a chance that there’d be a taxi waiting downstairs?” Hitch asked.

“Probably not. On the tapes we examined there was a car idling in front of the hotel that drove off about sixty seconds after the taxi pulled out. If there hadn’t been a taxi just dropping
someone off, our suspect would have probably jumped in that car.”

“What about that car?” Nina asked.

“The plates were stolen the day before from a Jeep belonging to a lawyer who lives in Santa Monica.”

“So basically—” Nina’s voice was strained “—you don’t know anything really?”

Victims got angry; Lucian was used to it. “We know the paintings are real and that whoever owns them bought them to trade them, which means the owner is probably not a typical collector. We know the governments of Iran and Greece both have requested the return of this same sculpture to their respective countries, making it possible that one of them is behind this. The law firm of Weil, Weston and Young has been engaged by the government of Iran to ensure that the exchange happens, and we have—”

“What the hell?” Rand turned the full force of his ire on the museum’s director. “Why didn’t we know about that?”

Weil folded his hands on the table as if needing to feel the wood under them. “My office sent each of you a letter to that effect, which you should have received last week. My father and I are not on speaking terms now and haven’t been for fifteen years. I only just found out about this myself from the museum’s law firm.” He spoke with his usual calm, but when he moved his hands, Lucian noticed that there were impressions of moisture where they’d rested.

“Your father’s law firm is working for the Iranian government, which is trying to take a famous piece of sculpture away from us? There’s a major conflict of interest here,” Rand said.

“No, actually, there isn’t,” Hitch Oster intervened. “Weil’s explained that he doesn’t have any dealings with the firm, he is not employed by them and doesn’t benefit by association with
them, and in no way should this impact us or our faith in him. Now,” he said, dismissing Rand, whom he clearly didn’t have much respect for, and turning to the three men at the head of the table, “how are you going to get us our paintings?”

“I’d like to bring in someone for you all to meet,” Lucian said as he got up and walked out of the room.

Deborah Mitchell looked up when the door to the conference room opened and Lucian stepped out.

“They’re ready for you,” he said.