Then she found her eye sliding back to the middle painting. It was the largest, at least three feet high in its blond-wood frame. It was a conventional enough representation, the usual Holy Child portrait, with his archaic outfit, his staff, his little basket. She found herself noticing the intricacy of the woody vines the artist had used to frame his central figure, the detail, unobtrusive yet meticulous. They drew her attention gradually inward to the child himself.
The eyes, huge and dark, no longer looked so clown-waif tacky. They seemed to stare deep inside her, responding to her, recognizing her for who she really was, approving. Forgiving.
Odd, she thought. The skin, pale cheeks blushed faintly pink, seemed alive. It was as if she were looking at a real being through a window. Despite the lifelike quality the painting was not photorealistic. It went beyond that. It transcended the appearanceof reality while seeming to reveal...truth.
"It's fantastic," her mouth said before she even knew she meant it.
"Thanks," he said.
She looked at the other paintings. Each had a similar impact, but no two quite the same. She found them utterly compelling. She realized she was looking not just at remarkable skill for an artist so young, but authentic genius. He somehow used an idiom of bad taste and cutesiness to reach down and grab the viewer's soul. The semblance of vulgarity actually induced the viewer to let down her guard.
She realized she was holding her breath. After she set it free, she turned to the young man and said, "It's amazing how you've managed to capture such an overwhelming sense of innocence."
"Thank you," he said with a self-deprecating laugh. "I had a good model."
She raised a brow at that. A woman of about Annja's age, height and build suddenly appeared at Byron's elbow. She was pretty, without makeup, with big pale gray eyes, and hair dyed into a rainbow cockatiel crest. Had Annja been insecure about her own appearance she might have hated her on sight.
"Hi," she said to Annja. "Please forgive me, and thanks so much for coming out and supporting us, but I have to steal our guest of honor. Byron, the Travel Channel video crew is here."
Byron gave Annja a helpless shrug. "I enjoyed meeting you, Ms. Creed. I'd better go."
"Can I have your card?" Annja asked. Suddenly her mind was crowding with questions. She feared losing the chance to ask them.
"Sure." He gave her one embossed with a thumb-size reproduction of the main Santo Niño image.
Out in the main space a middle-aged man with a knobby face and disheveled russet hair had commenced playing an acoustic guitar. He sang a song that seemed, implausibly, to have to do with hunting tigers. A large, mostly young crowd was clapping and singing along on the choruses.
"Billie here does some great stuff," Byron said, nodding to the rainbow-haired woman. "There's some of her paintings hung in the main room. You should check them out."
Billie patted his cheek. "He's sweet, as well as pretty," she said. She firmly grasped his elbow. "Now quit stalling and come with me." With a last, apologetic smile over her shoulder to Annja she hustled him off into the large space.
Regretfully, Annja watched him go. Some of the crowd in the next room began elbowing each other and pointing. Byron Mondragón was clearly the man of the hour.
Annja's amber-green eyes, scanning right across the crowd, slammed to a halt and tracked back. She focused on a suddenly familiar form.
Father Robert Godin was wearing his scuffed bombardier's jacket open over his black silk shirt and dog collar. The Jesuit was smiling and talking to someone. He didn't seem to notice her. He had the friendly, easy face of an old hound dog. But his eyes were the eyes of a cat.
"Son of a bitch," Annja said. Half under her breath. And half not. She didn't really care if he heard her. She smelled a rat.
She turned, pushed back into the front gallery, then out into the main room. A quick glance into the main room showed no sign of Godin. She didn't waste much time searching. She felt a sudden strong desire to be gone from there.
I knew I should never trust a Jesuit, she thought. Why is he following me?
Outside it had come down almost pure night, with only a bloody line along the horizon above the river, some purple streaks in the sky and magenta underbrushings on a few clumps of cloud overhead. She made her way upstream of a fresh crowd streaming into the compound and headed out the narrow half-concealed gate right onto Broadway.
She strode down the half block as fast as her long legs could carry her without appearing to hurry. She wondered now at her reaction. After all, Godin had expressed an interest in the Holy Child. Indeed, he had given her the impression he had a professional interest, as it were. He might have come to Chiaroscuro for the same purpose she had. Quite innocently.
Innocent, she thought. She snorted. A Jesuit. Right.
She turned right on the side street and walked quickly toward her parked Honda. Fishing in her jeans pocket for the key, she heard a car's tires squeal as it turned off Broadway. Its engine snarl crescendoed as it accelerated behind her.
Without knowing why, she launched herself in a long dive, just clearing the ornamental but still perilous spear tips topping a wrought-iron fence sprouting from a hip-high wall of whitewashed brick.
As she fell to the neat but dry lawn behind it the white front of the cinder-block house strobed yellow as an automatic weapon yammered at her back.
Chapter 12
Glass exploded from behind security bars on the house's big front window. The slats of the venetian blinds behind made musical twangs as bullets plucked them like strings.
The car roared by. Cautiously Annja raised her head. Her heart hammered in her chest, and her pulse was drumming in her ears. She hardly believed in drive-by shootings in the real world. She couldn't imagine gangbangers targeting her.
Unless the shooting was connected with the recent attacks on her in Mexico City and the none-too-distant campus of UNM. But that's conspiracy theory! she insisted.
And this was lethal and immediate reality. The vehicle was an American muscle car of some kind, low-slung and painted dark. She saw its brake lights go on just short of the next corner. Then it accelerated backward toward her.
For a moment she lay frozen, unsure what to do. The car screeched to a stop right in front of the house. The doors swung open. Young men in long plaid shirts piled out. They carried guns. Serious guns. Short, blocky MAC-10s with stub barrels, shotguns with barrels sawed back to the end of the pump action.
"Where'd she go?" the driver asked in Spanish.
"I think she went over the wall," the one getting out the passenger door replied.
A whistle came from the direction of Broadway. Annja looked that way to see a small knot of young men rounding the corner from the north. In the shine of the streetlight she saw they were similarly attired to the five who had emerged from the car. And similarly armed.
Gotta go, Annja thought as the thugs from the car approached the front fence with cocky assurance.
She leaped up and sprinted east, down the block away from the traffic on Broadway. The lights and the witnesses drew her like a siren song. But the second contingent of bangers had her thoroughly blockaded.
A dry rosebush clutched a low chain-link fence on the far side of the house's empty driveway. Annja was hurdling wall and bush before her hunters even reacted by shouting startled curses and raking the house front with random gunfire.