instead of portraying the view, he tried to sketch his dream.
He tore off several sheets before he was satisfied with the general design. When he finally felt he'd gotten it right, he began to fill it in.
'It really does look like a nightmare,' Monika said when she came out onto the terrace with her book.
Janek stopped drawing. 'I don't have the hand for this.'
'No one expects you to draw like an artist, Frank. Just try to make it schematic.'
'This is pretty much it,' he said. He pointed to a small table set before the portrait. 'I think the objects were here.' 'Well, that's something, isn't it?' 'What do you mean?'
'You never mentioned a table before.'
Janek nodded. She was right; he hadn't mentioned it because be hadn't remembered it.
'Well, they had to be set out on something, didn't they?'
Monika smiled. 'Keep drawing, Frank. Sooner or later you'll work it out.'
By the end of the afternoon he had not resolved the objects in terms of their shapes, but he had positioned them, indicated by X's, in a straight line on the table.
He showed the sketch to Monika. She studied it. 'The arrangement's strange,' she said. 'Maybe that's important.'
'What do you mean?'
She shook her head. 'The way everything is lined UP, the table, the painting, the niche. It's hieratic, almost like the aspe of a church. The table could be the altar. And the objects-' He leaned toward her. 'Yes?'
'They're equally spaced, symmetrically set out. Almost like relics.
Or offerings
'Offerings to the portrait?'
She thought about that. 'Perhaps. But I think it goes deeper.
Suppose, instead of the portrait, there was something else in that niche, a sculpture or a painting of Christ on the cross. You wouldn't say the gold chalices on the altar were offerings to the painting. You'd say they were offerings to Jesus or God.'
Janek sat up. 'That's it!' he said. 'What I saw were offerings to the woman in the picture.'
'Who is she?'
'Beverly told Aaron it was a portrait of her mother, who died a few years ago,' He paused, then pointed to the table in the sketch. 'I don't think there was a table here. I think I saw something else. Something like a table, but with a different shape beneath. I'll try and draw it.'
He turned over a page of his pad, then started feverishly to draw. She stood behind him as he tried out a shape, crossed it out, tried another and still another.
'In the police photos there wasn't anything beneath the picture. Aaron thinks it took him about two minutes to reach me after he heard my shot.
Beverly got to the bedroom just after I fell. If there was something there, she'd have had time to move it.'
He drew an oval, then drew a rectangle over it.
'if she moved it, it couldn't have been very big,' Monika said.
'I think it was big. But maybe it was lighter than it looked.
'Where could she have hidden it?'
He shrugged, drew a bookcase, then redrew it so its bottom half stuck out. 'It could have been portable, on wheels, or something like a card table that folds up.' He drew an angry slash across the page.
'Shit, I don't know! '
Monika, behind him, massaged his shoulders. 'Let it go for now, Frank. You've done enough today.'
'It's so maddening. I can almost see it. But not quite.'
'Of course, it's maddening. Like forgetting someone's name even when you can see his face.' 'Exactly!' 'What do you do when that happens?' 'Rack my brains till I come up with his name.' 'if that doesn't work?'
'I forget about it awhile.' 'Then?'
'It usually comes to me later when I'm thinking about something else or doing something strange like eating peas.
'When you're consciously thinking about something else. Meantime, the subconscious part of your brain is processing the problem. You can let the same thing happen here, let your subconscious take over and do the work. Eventually the solution will come, probably sometime tonight.'
'Then what?'
'Then on to the next problem. You see, the wonderful thing about drawing an encrypted dream is that it gives you a chance to break down a big fiddle into smaller and more manageable parts. What you want to do is get the table right, then go on to the objects.'
He gazed at her. 'Anyone ever tell you you're terrific?'
'Oh, all the time,' she said. 'My patients are always telling me that.'
'You're kidding!'
She smiled. 'Shrinks are used to hearing endearments. But when I hear them from you, Frank, I know they're real.'
That night they ate dinner in the house, then drove down to the village to walk. A Mexican boy with gleaming teeth approached them on the street. He showed them a tray of handmade silver jewelry. When Monika showed interest in a pair of earrings, Janek bought them for her.
The boy held out a cracked piece of mirror so she could look at herself as she put them on.
Later they stopped outside a modest bar that fronted on the beach. There was a light breeze that made the palms sway and churned up the, smooth surface of the Gulf. Someone was playing a piano inside. 'Looks like a decent saloon,' Janek said.
The place was half filled. The high season wouldn't begin until Christmas. Janek and Monika took a table between the bar and the pianist, a young black woman with a red scarf tied around her head. She was playing the kind of restful dinner music that doesn't require much attention.
Janek grinned. 'I'm glad we could have this week together.' He paused. 'Do you really have to fly home on Christmas?'
'I wish I didn't,' she said. 'But I have patients wai ting and an early class the following day.'
He looked at her. 'I usually spend my holidays alone.'
She leaned across the table and kissed him. 'Not this year.'
When the waiter brought their margaritas, Monika asked him in Spanish about the pianist. The waiter said she was a gringo. 'But a nice one,' he added. Janek turned to look at the piano.
'I wonder
'What?'
'That table I drew, the table that wasn't a table-I wonder if it could have been a piano.' He took a sip from his drink. 'I don't see how it could have been. A piano's much too big. Hard to hide a piano even if it's on wheels.' He took another sip. 'Still, it had that piano shape, like a little upright, you know, with the objects arranged on the top just below the bottom edge of the painting.'
He summoned the waiter, borrowed a ballpoint, made a quick sketch on his cocktail napkin. He turned it so Monika could see. 'Something like that,' he said.
She stared at the sketch. 'Didn't you tell me the portrait seemed bigger in the dream than in Aaron's photographs?' Janek nodded. 'We know the portrait didn't change. It's the same one you saw. But suppose there was a piece of furniture just under it, something that because of its scale made the picture seem bigger than it was.'
Janek nodded. 'Take that piece of furniture away, and the portrait would appear smaller. it's still life-size, but in the dream it looms over everything.' He thought a moment. 'Suppose it wasn't a real piano. Suppose it was a miniature or a model. That would be enou h to confuse the scale, at least at a quick glance. And if it was a miniature piano, she could have hidden it.'
'Hidden the relics, too, dispersed them around the room.' 'Yes..
. the relics.' Janek finished off his drink. 'I like that word. Relics offered up to the image of her mother in the little chapel she constructed in her bedroom niche. Consecrated relics, you could say, or sanctified ones. Perhaps
