the van. Then he drives to a remote spot, wraps Annek in the plastic sheet, dumps her on the grass and strips her. Then he puts the cassette at her feet and drives another forty kilometres north, where another car is waiting for him.' ‘I don't buy that theory either.' ‘Why not?'
'Diaz is a ninny,' Miss Wood declared. 'He writes little poems, takes photos of landscapes and gets taken in by girls like Briseida. If he's involved in this, he wasn't alone.'
'But he was a very efficient security guard,' Bosch objected. 'Remember, we only choose the best for transporting paintings to their hotels.'
Tm not saying he was bad at his job. I'm saying he's a ninny. A country bumpkin. He can't have organised all this on his own.'
Soft knocks at the door, and a waft of perfume. The server was not a Trolley or any other proper piece of furniture, but a Decoration, a wretched thing that worked on Mondays (the day off for the works of art in the MuseumsQuartier) one of the objects dreamt up by the Decorative Arts Department to fill an empty room – and the lack of experience showed when it came to him serving their coffee. It took Bosch several seconds to realise it was a young male, about eighteen or nineteen years old. His hair was a symmetrical mass of blue-black scrolled curls pierced by silvery feathers. His long, tubular tunic in black velvet was cut almost too drastically at the back, and revealed the top half of a pair of black buttocks painted chestnut brown as was all the rest of the body. He placed two cups of coffee on the table. His make-up gave no clues as to what he might be thinking or feeling: it was the mask of a Polynesian warrior, a voodoo priest. The white label hanging round his neck read 'Michel'. The signature low down on his back was by someone called Garth. He was wearing ear-protectors.
When he turned towards Bosch, he got a good view of his hands: they glowed a deep bronze colour, with onyx fingernails.
'It's all too perfect, Lothar,' Miss Wood was saying. 'A second car waiting in the Wienerwald, false papers… in other words, a carefully laid plan. I could accept he might have been paid to take the painting to the Wienerwald, but even that seems farfetched to me.'
'So you want us to reject the 'Diaz' leg as well. That means the whole construction is in danger of collapsing…'
'We can't eliminate Diaz altogether. I think his role was that of scapegoat. What I can't understand is why he's disappeared.'
They could have hidden his body so that suspicion would fall on him, while the real criminal made his getaway,' Bosch reasoned.
Miss Wood had leaned forward to examine the ornament's lower back and the signature. The ornament stood perfectly still while she did so. The label said he could be touched, so Wood slipped a hand round his waist and down towards his gleaming bronze buttocks. Her expression, with her brows knitted intently, was that of an expert judging the value of a porcelain vase. As she was doing this, she responded to Bosch.
'That's the most likely theory. But my question is: where is he? The police have combed several kilometres round the area, Lothar. They've used dogs and all kinds of sophisticated search equipment. So where's Diaz's body? And where did they kill him? The van offered no clues at all: no signs of struggle, not a drop of blood. And consider this for a moment: he destroys the painting, then wastes time taking all her clothes off out in the wood, running the risk of being discovered. On the other hand, whoever it was, worked out a detailed escape plan and managed to divert all the suspicion on to the security guard who was looking after the work. Does that seem logical to you?' 'No, you're right, it doesn't.'
Miss Wood stopped fondling the ornament's backside. She raised her arm, got hold of the neck label and pulled it down towards her, obliging the ornament to lean forward so she could read it. As well as the model's name, the label gave details of the craftsman who made it, and its specifications. Bosch knew that April Wood bought ornaments and utensils for her London house. Despite an official ban on the sale of human handicrafts, it still went on, and many people of a certain social level bought them just as they did soft drugs.
When she had finished reading the information, Miss Wood let go of the label. The ornament straightened up, turned on his heels in the darkness and walked out noiselessly, his bare feet gliding across the thick black carpet. Miss Wood grimaced as she sipped her hot coffee.
‘I’m sure Diaz is dead,' she insisted. 'The problem is how his death fits in with everything else.'
'We still haven't considered the Competition and Rivals.' Bosch riffled through his papers. 'I have to admit this is where I get lost, April. I can't find anything. The people behind BAH, for example, are not up to much. You know Pamela O'Connor wrote a book about Annek.. .'
'The Truth About Annek Hollech,' Wood concurred. 'Pretentious nonsense. What she does is use Annek as an example to denounce the use of underage models in supposedly obscene works of art.'
'We're also investigating the Christian Association Against Hyperdramatic Art; the International Society For Tradition and Classical Art; the European Society Against Hyperdramatic Art…'
'You're leaving out the real competition,' said Wood. 'Art Enterprises, for example, has become a serious enemy. Stein says they would do anything to throw a spoke in our wheels, and, in fact, they are taking investors from us. Just imagine if what happened to Deflowering is only part of a master plan to discredit our security system.'
'But that doesn't fit in with what happened. A bullet in the back of the head would have had the same effect. Why all the sadism?' 'What do you mean exactly?' The question filled Bosch with horror.
'Good God, April, he cut her up with… look, here is the autopsy report. Braun sent it to me this morning. Look at these photos… the lab tests confirmed it: whoever it was used a portable canvas cutter
… do you know what that is?… a saw with a cylindrical handle and serrated edges that fits into one hand. Artists who still work with canvases and old picture restorers use them to change the size and shape of paintings. It's a powerful gadget – with the right fittings, you can cut a normal tabletop in half in five seconds… and he made ten cuts with it, April…'
Wood had lit one of her ecological cigarettes. The dark green smoke produced by the vaporising of coloured water that was guaranteed harmless, curled up towards the ceiling. Bosch remembered when it had become fashionable to use these fake cigarettes in order to give up smoking. He had succeeded in giving up thanks to the classic nicotine patches, and regarded this other method as unnecessarily showy.
'Look at it this way’ she said. 'They want public opinion to think that Oscar Diaz was raving mad. So, if they can say we take on psychopaths to look after our most expensive works of art, then no one will be able to trust us, and so on and so forth.'
'But if that was what they were after, why on earth didn't they kill her before they cut her up? According to the autopsy report, they sedated her with an intramuscular injection of a neuroleptic drug, probably using a hypodermic pistol to the back of her neck. The dose was strong enough for her not to be able to defend herself, but not to anaesthetise her. I don't get it. I mean… and forgive me for insisting, April, but it seems to me… if all this was simply a bit of theatre, why go so far? The murder would have been just as regrettable, but… it would have been… there would have been… I mean, imagine I wanted to pretend it was the work of a sadist… Well then, first I get rid of her, I inject her with something, anaesthetise her… then I do all the other things… but there's a limit that never… Money has got nothing to do with it, April. I won't make any more money by doing that. There's a limit which…' 'Lothar.'
‘Don't tell me they only did it for money, April! I may be getting old, but I'm not completely gaga yet! And I am experienced: I used to be a police inspector, so I know about criminals… they're not as sadistic as all those films would have us believe. They're human beings… I'm not saying there are no exceptions, but…' 'Lothar.'
'That guy wasn't trying to fool anyone: he wanted to do what he did, and in just the way he did it! We're not facing some underhand ruse by the competition – we're trying to track down a monster!… He cut her face and left her writhing while he made ready to… to cut her breast off!… Would you like me to read you the report…?' 'Lothar,' came the weary, deep voice. 'Can I say something?' 'Sorry.'
Bosch had difficulty recovering control of his emotions. 'Come on, kid, calm down. What's got into you?'
Miss Wood stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. She lifted her hand; leaving a green thing there, a steaming, crushed broad bean. She exhaled the last of the green smoke through her nostrils. The Dragon's Poisonous Breath.
'She was a painting. There's no need to look any further than that, Lothar. Deflowering was a painting. I'll prove it to you.' She pounced on one of Annek's studio photos and thrust it in Bosch's face. 'She looks like an adolescent, doesn't she? She has the shape of an adolescent, when she was alive she walked and talked like an
