The gold, L-shaped frame corner flashed as Emeline swung it around and up and into the man’s face. Its sharp edge sank into his right eye. Danzinger let go of her as he put his hand up to the source of the excruciating pain.
The restorer’s scream was endless, a long note of pure, unending anguish, and it echoed in Lucian’s ears as he jumped him, grabbed Danzinger’s gun out of his hand and threw him down on the ground. Cuffing him, Lucian kept him there on the floor with his knee shoved into Danzinger’s back, watching the man’s blood pool on the wooden floor as his wound bled out.
It was nine-thirty by the time the police finished taking statements, collecting evidence and closing out the murder scene. After they left, Lucian locked the front door, found a bottle of Scotch and some coffee mugs and poured drinks.
“I don’t want it,” Emeline said when he put one down on the desk in front of her.
“Drink it anyway.” He crossed the room and leaned against the door, as far away from her as he could get. He didn’t want to smell her damned perfume or see her pulse beating in her neck.
Like a child, she took the mug in both hands and sipped obediently. His own first gulp went down like barbed wire, but the next wasn’t as rough and the one after that was almost smooth.
“Thank you,” Emeline said. “You saved my life.”
“This time I knew what to do.”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“You mean you didn’t know what to do to save Solange?”
“No. I didn’t.” Lucian drank more of the Scotch.
“How did you know to come back inside?” Emeline asked.
“I saw Danzinger as I walked out. He was there by the door waiting. Just another customer. No reason to pay attention to him. I went back to my car, and then it hit me that if he had been just another customer, why was he waiting outside like that? Why would it matter if there was someone else inside? And it was too late. The store was closed. It was a hunch. Not nearly as clever as you reading old journals to figure things out.”
The gibe stung, and she blinked twice. She started to say something, then stopped. Finally, “Lucian, please, I want to at least explain something about that, about Andre and why-”
“I know. He’s all the family you have. You love him. I get it. Let’s not rehash this.”
“But you just saved my life.” Her voice cracked.
“That’s my job. To save things.”
“Things?”
“Just don’t ask me to forgive you for what you did. What’s so damn ironic about all this is…” Now he was shouting, yelling at her, or at himself, he wasn’t sure. “You made me see Solange again. Really see her. And I finally understood how I’d idealized her. Turned her into an impossible, perfect memory. The terrible irony is that I’d stopped wanting her. Do you understand? It was you I wanted-it was you. You! Isn’t that something?”
She bent her head and lowered her face into her hands. Her blond hair fell forward like a curtain, making the distance between them even greater.
Lucian ached to get out of there finally and for good, but he couldn’t leave while she was like that. The seconds went by. Her weeping was silent, but her back shuddered with each new sob.
“You did it for him? For a man who…” He couldn’t finish. He wanted to say something to hurt her, but he didn’t. He felt sorry for her, for her misguided effort. Lucian put his hand up to his temple to massage the pain. The gesture had become a habit.
But despite all the confusion, sadness and exhaustion, he didn’t have any pain. He hadn’t since yesterday evening. He just hadn’t realized it until now. It had disappeared at some point during the ambush, and in the ensuing hours it hadn’t returned.
No nightmares had woken him up that morning, either. No ghostlike women had haunted his dreams.
Finally, Emeline lowered her hands. Her face was blotchy, her eyes red and bloodshot. Her hair was disheveled. The familiar and very real scar above her eyebrow stood out in relief. In the framed mirror opposite the desk, she saw her own reflection and reacted, wiping away the tears, trying to smooth down her hair, and then attempted a laugh that sounded like a sob.
“Promise,” she said, “you won’t paint me like this…”
Her whisper reached out and grabbed hold of him. Words that no one but he had ever heard, words that could not have been written down in a diary or a journal or in a letter or repeated to anyone because they had been said only seconds before the woman who’d whispered them had died.
He didn’t move. Didn’t say a word. Tried to absorb what had just occurred. Attempted to reason it out. Reason all of it out. It was too much for now. Okay then. He just needed to reason part of it out. If…if there is reincarnation, he thought, it’s about forward motion. It has to be, or else we would all be forever stuck in the past.
“Please promise,” she repeated, “you won’t paint me like this.”
They were Solange’s last words coming from Emeline, but she was waiting for an answer, something Solange hadn’t been able do.
He was looking at her across the room and the distance between them did not seem as great as it had only seconds before. Lucian took a step closer. Both of them had been damaged, like the Matisse, like the sculpture of the god of sleep, but they were survivors, too, maybe more special for what had happened to them, as if what they had gone through had imbued them with something magical. And then the gap was closed.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As with the first two novels in this series, The Reincarnationist and The Memorist, there is a lot of fact mixed in with my fiction.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art certainly exists-I’ve been lucky to live in its orbit for my whole life and been able to spend thousands of hours there. While the facts about the museum’s history are a matter of public record, their security measures are not. But security experts have assured me the scenario in The Hypnotist is plausible (although I certainly hope not possible).
The American Wing exists as do the Islamic Art galleries, which were closed for renovation during the writing of this novel. Many of the paintings I’ve written about are either real or based on actual paintings, the names of which I’ve changed.
There is no record of Hypnos, the statue at the heart of this novel, but chryselephantine sculpture is well documented even though only fragments of these colossal works of art have survived. My thanks to Kenneth D. S. Lapatin for his help regarding these works.
Sadly, there is a billion-dollar industry in stolen art, all too often related to drug cartels and illicit arms deals. Cultural heritage concerns and lawsuits are rampant, and they’re fraught with the same issues I’ve written about.
Former special agent Robert K. Wittman, who changed the way the FBI treated stolen art, helped me craft this book’s version of the real Art Crime Team with his advice, but he’s not to be blamed for the places where I took artistic license.
Whenever possible, dates and descriptions of historical events are accurate as are most of the locales in New York City, my hometown. There is no actual Phoenix Foundation. The work done there is, however, inspired by the work done at the University of Virginia Health System by the real-life Dr. Ian Stevenson who studied children with past-life memories for over thirty years. Dr. Bruce Greyson and Dr. Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist, continue Ian Stevenson’s work today. (These fine doctors are not to be blamed for any of Dr. Malachai Samuels’s personality defects.)
Hypnosis does date back to ancient times, and sleep temples did in fact exist. There is a lot of fascinating evidence that hypnosis is a portal into reincarnation memories, and I’ve worked with several therapists who’ve used it with patients to help them discover their past lives.