Briseida Canchares woke up with a gun to her head. Seen from so close up, the barrel looked like a small metal coffin pressed against her temple. The finger on the trigger had its nail painted viridian green. Briseida looked up the bare forearm and discovered it belonged to a blonde woman. It was the emerald-eyed cat dressed in the tiny camouflage outfit who had asked Roger for a light at the Roquentins. It had happened while she was looking at the painting Invisible Orbit by Elmer Fludd, and a guard had immediately come over and warned the woman: 'You can't smoke here, miss. The smoke gets in the paintings' eyes, and makes them cough.' She had given Roger a crooked smile as she handed him back his lighter. Then she had vanished into the crowd and Briseida had not seen her again. Until now.
The blonde woman was dressed in the same combat gear, and smiled in the same way. The only difference was the gun. She raised a finger to her lips, still training the pistol on Briseida (I'm not to speak, Briseida translated this to mean) then signalled with her other hand (I'm to get up). She suspected it was all a dream, so she obeyed, because she liked doing fascinating things in her dreams. She pulled back the sheets and stood up. The gun pressed to her temple moved as she did, as if her head were made of metal and the pistol were a magnet. Briseida turned to the side and placed her feet on the cool carpet of Roger's apartment floor as delicately as a space module landing on the moon. She was completely naked, and felt a bit chilly. It was still night (she didn't know the exact time, because the alarm clock was on Roger's side of the bed), and the room was lit only by the bedside lamp. She remembered having gone to bed very late and sharing moments of enthusiasm and struggle with Roger (that mouth of his, with its aftertaste of vintage champagne and velvety Havana cigar, his tongue a green marijuana rug) before night covered them in its cloak of drunkenness and… That's right. Where was Roger?
She discovered him sitting at the far end of the room. All he was wearing was the ring on the little finger of his left hand. The same ring that had left marks on Briseida's backside, but which he said he could not remove because that brought bad luck. He had got it in some remote corner of Brazil, stealing it from a shaman who could tell people's secrets. It contained a tiny emerald that glinted in its setting like a jungle-green drop of pus. According to Roger, it had great powers, although he was not sure exactly what they were. He claimed there were only five or six jewels like it in the whole world. What an incredible guy Roger was. A bit of a bastard too, of course, but Briseida had never met anyone with that amount of money who wasn't also a bastard.
At that moment it seemed not even the ring's powers could help him. A pincer in the shape of a hand was clamped so fiercely on his jaw his cheeks were puffed up. The pincer-like hand belonged to a spectacular woman, similar to the blonde but much more impressive, like the ones Roger liked to fuck only at weekends. She was jabbing a silver-plated military pistol into his throat. Its barrel made his Adam's apple stand out starkly. This woman was wearing baize-green jacket and trousers, olive-green kerchief and beret, and pistachio-coloured gloves. One of her legs was thrust between Roger's thighs (perhaps her knee was crushing his genitals, and this was causing the look of desperation on his face), the other was firmly planted on the floor in shooting position. She was not looking at Roger but at Briseida, as if it were up to her to decide what she should do next. Her eyes were of the kind it is hard to forget. The kind, thought Briseida, you stare into a second before you see nothing any more.
Even so, she had to admit that the make-up and the combination of greens (jacket-trousers, gloves-beret, eyes-shadow) were perfect. A paramilitary catwalk! Pret-a-porter terrorism! What prevented police SWAT teams, army commandos or any other ad hoc armed group keeping up with the demands of fashion? Briseida wondered.
The blonde woman was still signalling to her to stand up. She glanced over at Roger, who raised his hand as if to say: Do as she tells you, so she got up from the bed, still keeping her eyes on everyone in the room.
Are they burglars or cops? Have they come to kidnap Roger? Let's see. What did we get up to? Last night we were at that party…
God, how her head hurt. She could not think straight. Perhaps that was because of the mix of alcohol, hashish and pills she had taken at the Roquentins. Besides, the scene before her was so odd that the terror she could feel starting to beat in her chest was still muffled. It looked as if it had all been set up by the God of Art: a combination of the fascinating – the blonde in her camouflage outfit; the ridiculous – Roger and her stark naked, still clammy from their dense dreams; and the absurd – the heavily made-up model in her combat gear. It was like a Cezanne painting in green – cobalt green, military green, turquoise green, green carpet, apple green of the bedroom walls. If she were to die young, thought Briseida, she would choose exactly this green moment.
It was a shame this aesthetic impression faded a little when the blonde woman pushed her towards the men waiting in the dining room.
They pinioned her arms, and pushed her down on to a chair in front of what appeared to be a blank computer screen. Briseida had shouted out as she was being hustled into the room, and had apparently broken some code of silence, because a few seconds later she heard noises and words in Dutch from the bedroom, then more noises in the corridor. But the next words were in English and were directed at her.
'Don't do that again,' Fascinating Eyes Blondie said, bending over her. 'And don't try to stand up.'
She could not have done so even if she had wanted to: two pairs of iron gloves were forcing her down on her seat.
'Here's a glass of water. Drink some if you like. I'm going to press a key on the computer and a person will appear on the screen to ask you some questions. Reply loudly and clearly. Don't avoid any of the questions, and don't take too much time over them. If you don't know the answer, or want time to think about it, say so. We know you speak good English, but if there's something you don't understand, say so too.'
The blonde pressed a key, and the face of an elderly man, bald except for some white tufts above the ears, appeared on the screen. In the top left-hand corner there also appeared an insert of a young woman with tanned brown skin, hair the colour of coal, prominent cheekbones and plump lips, gripped by the shoulders and arms by four gloved hands, and with naked breasts. Briseida realised it was her. They were filming her and sending the images in real time to heaven knows what damned spot on the planet. Diagonally across the screen from this, a timing device ticked off the seconds.
Hallucinatory effects produced by the chaotic consumption of toxic products: that was how Stan Coleman, her unforgettable, wealthy (and asshole) professor of Contemporary Art at Columbia described all the strange things that happened after an orgy of soft drugs. That was what this must be. It could not really be happening to her.
'Good morning. I'm sorry if we've disturbed you, but we need to know something urgently, and we're counting on your generous cooperation.'
The man spoke English with an undeniable continental accent, perhaps German or Dutch. At the bottom half of the screen, his neck and the knot of his tie were obscured by subtitles of what he was saying in French and German. Briseida did not need any more languages to feel terrified.
'We know a lot about you: you're twenty-six, born in Bogota, have an art degree from a New York university, you father is his country's cultural attache at the United Nations… Let's see, what else?' The man bent forward, and for a few seconds the screen became a globe featuring his polished bald head. 'Ah yes, you're engaged on a research project for the university about painters and their collections… this year you have been in the Netherlands to study the objects Rembrandt collected in his house in Amsterdam. And now you're in Paris, with our good friend Roger Levin. Last night you went with him to a party at Leo Roquentin's. All this is correct, isn't it?'
Briseida was about to answer yes when the fairy godmother of computers dissolved the image with an explosion of green flashes and replaced it with another face: a thin woman with her hair cut in a boyish bob, wearing dark glasses. Her subtitles were in green.
'Hello there, I'm the bad cop.' Her accent was more English than the man's, and her voice was more disturbing. Her smile was like a scythe blade. 'I just wanted to say hello. Some place Leo Roquentin has, doesn't he? I think the salon is from the eighteenth century, and the ceiling frescoes were painted by the maestro Luc Ducet and tell the story of Samson and Delilah. In the west wing, in a room with two ceiling roundels, the story of the Flood is depicted, from the building of the Ark to the return of the dove with the olive branch in its beak. We know Leo Roquentin very well… His HD collection is also excellent, especially the Elmer Fludd paintings in the main room. But they are just the tip of the iceberg. Did you take part in the art-shock that was going on in the huge basement underneath the mansion? It was called Art-Chess, and was created by Michel Gros. Twenty-four young people of both sexes, and plastic material… the figures, completely naked and painted in various shades of green, are pieces on a thirty-metre-square chessboard. The guests suggest the moves they should make. Any piece that gets taken is handed over to the guests to do what they like with. You didn't play the game? Of course, your little friend Roger mustn't have told you anything about it. You would have simply seen the paintings upstairs: the art- shock was for a select few. Leo astonishes them with these interactive performances, then offers them irresistible
