Shabaz’s loop ended at the southwest corner where bungalow number six sat on the edge of a small pond. His office was here, along with a private screening room and a bedroom suite for when he stayed over. His olive-drab Range Rover was parked in the driveway, his driver leaning on the car, having a smoke.
“Hey, Mr. Shabaz,” the driver said, tipping his Shabaz Films baseball cap with its distinctive emerald-green lightning bolt.
“How badly did they soak us this time, Mike?”
“Not too bad. Everything was under warranty but the new tires. These were a couple of hundred dollars more, but they should last seventy-five thousand miles instead of twenty, which was all we got out of the last set.”
“Which means these will get us about forty-five?”
“If we’re lucky.” The driver grinned. “Are you going to be needing me tonight?”
Shabaz shook his head. “No, I’m working late, so either I’ll drive myself home or stay over. See you tomorrow.”
The driver doffed his cap for the second time and walked off toward the main parking lot while Shabaz inspected the new wheels. Or so it would have looked to anyone watching. In reality, he was checking to ensure no one was around. Even though there was nothing suspicious about a man taking a package out of his own car, he didn’t want an audience.
Inside the bungalow, he greeted the night guard on duty and proceeded to the screening room. With the door locked behind him, Shabaz walked down the aisle past the dozen black leather lounge chairs. The floor and walls were covered with industrial carpet in a subtle pattern of squares in different shades of gray, and in the low light it was impossible to tell that one of the panels was actually a door.
The room on the other side was paneled in similar modular squares, but these were constructed from a blend of concrete and additives engineered for maximum crush resistance. Each was only three inches thick but ten times as strong as an eighteen-inch-thick panel of regular formula cement. They were both fireproof and watertight; nothing but a full-out nuclear attack would destroy them.
There were three identical vaults on the lot, all with the same specs: twenty-five-hundred square feet and designed to withstand an earthquake-or as close to it as engineering could come. Shabaz had never corrected his architect’s assumption that film negative would be stored here as well as in the other two vaults. And since no one but the movie director had ever been in this room once it had been completed, the contents of this vault remained a secret.
Tonight, Shabaz didn’t focus on any of the precious art objects that lined the shelves. It was the easels set up in a semi-circle that commanded all of his attention. Four of the five had paintings resting on them-paintings that Shabaz, who had a connoisseur’s eye, believed were among the finest examples of each artist’s oeuvre.
View of the Sea at Scheveningen, by Vincent Van Gogh, was a gray-green, stormy painting: a turbulent emotional reaction to a cloudy, raw day at the beach resort near The Hague. Since the artist was known to paint en plein, it was not surprising that there were actual grains of sand mixed in with the paint that Shabaz had felt with his fingertips the few times he dared touch the impasto canvas.
Beach at Pourville, by Claude Monet, was as peaceful as the Van Gogh was violent. It had a lushness that made Shabaz feel as if he were breathing in the salty air. The lavender blue sky, the green sea and sandy shore were painted with a loose brush, but the overall impression was more transportive than a photograph could have been.
Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady was an evocative, mysterious painting. There was yearning in the dark-haired woman’s almond-shaped eyes and a certain petulance in her full lips. The deep green-blue background hinted at the forest, and in her light yellow dress, she might have been an unexpected and glorious wildflower.
The fourth painting, the smallest, was a jewel. The Renoir was only ten inches by twelve inches, but the bouquet of pink roses was so exuberant and lush, Shabaz had been fooled more than once into thinking their scent was perfuming the room.
Now there was a fifth painting to join the others.
Carefully Shabaz stripped away the butcher paper and multiple layers of Bubble Wrap, finally revealing a cacophony of colors. As if he were handling butterfly wings, he lifted the canvas and placed it on the only empty easel.
Stepping back, he took his first full look at the Matisse masterwork, View of St. Tropez.
The exuberant brushstrokes, which appeared so primitive up close, created a luminous beach scene when viewed from a few feet away. It was brighter and louder than the Monet-there was more joy in this painting, less contemplation. It might be the best of the lot.
His hands trembled, and he felt slightly nauseated. It had taken him over two years and had cost six million dollars to assemble this particular group of paintings. Step one of his plan was finally complete. His eyes drifted from one masterpiece to the next. Which one was he going to choose? Maybe the Renoir-perhaps the still life might be less intimidating.
It wasn’t the money that bothered him but the act he was about to commit. The cost was certainly substantial, but he’d paid far less for all of the paintings together than what any one of them was worth; fencing stolen paintings of this caliber was difficult. None ever sold for close to their real value. The Renoir was worth eight million, but he’d paid only a million. The Matisse would cost thirty-five million with a clean provenance, but he’d paid only two and a half.
Which one? Which one should he choose? Of all the paintings the Van Gogh was the most valuable, so he’d hold that one out as a carrot. The Klimt would be the least devastating loss.
A Williams-Sonoma shopping bag had been sitting in a corner of the vault for the past month. Inside was a single item, a Shun Kaji Paring knife that he’d purchased for $134.95 in cash. The time had come. Was it going to be the Monet or the Matisse?
Shabaz walked up to the Monet, then over to the Matisse. He paced between them slowly for the next ninety seconds.
Finally, he came to a decision. With the point of the knife mere inches from the canvas, Shabaz noticed the serene blues and greens mirrored on the blade. How on earth could he do this? Even the reflection was a masterpiece.
FIVE
“He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.”
– Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Lucian tore the page off the pad. Even before it landed on the pile of previously discarded drawings, his pencil was streaking across a new sheet with grace, authority and an economy of motion. The human face that emerged looked out at him, terror in her eyes. It had taken him less than fifteen minutes to bring the stranger to life, and although the portrait was more than competent, he wasn’t satisfied. Ripping the page off, he started again on a clean sheet.
It was the hour before first light when New York City was still gravely quiet-especially downtown, where he lived in an old, refurbished factory on Sullivan Street. The large loft had a separate sleeping area and bathroom but otherwise was wide open, with oversize windows facing north that offered a sliver of skyline, beautiful in the abstract, not hinting of the danger that was always lying in wait.
He stopped drawing, lifted his head up and listened to a car roar down the street, curious that such an ordinary sound could take on such ominous overtones. It was the hour when otherworldly visitations seemed possible even to someone who’d never believed in ghosts. Or in life after death. Or in God. Or in anything that he couldn’t prove. Lucian was a disciple of logic, of action and reaction. Long ago he’d trained himself never to waste any time looking backward, but that had changed in the two weeks since a still unknown assailant had discovered the hidden entranceway into the Memorist Society’s library and had lain in wait until Dr. Erika Alderman handed Lucian the paper that detailed a partial list of Memory Tools.