a drink?' 'No, thanks.'
'I'm preparing my little talk for next week. There's going to be a big retrospective of the French open-air school. There are papers, round tables. I'm also responsible for the conservation of thirty of the works, among them ten underage ones. I'm trying to arrange for the minors to be on show for less time and to have more substitutes. And I still haven't received the site inspection reports. It's in the Bois de Boulogne, but I need to know exactly where. Well…'
He gestured as though to excuse himself for talking about his own problems. There was a pause. Oslo, who was trying to avoid an embarrassing silence, was relieved when Miss Wood began to speak. 'You're doing well as Chalboux's adviser, I see.'
'I can't complain. French natural-humanism started modestly, but now it's fashionable all over Europe. Here in England we're still reluctant to import it, because of Rayback's influence. And because we tend not to worry so much about other people. But some English artists are already changing their attitude, and have joined the humanist tendency. They've suddenly discovered they can produce great works of art and still respect human beings. In general though it's very difficult here.'
Oslo talked in his usual even tone, but April Wood could detect the emotion behind it. She knew it was something close to his heart. A moment later, his features relaxed.
'Well, I suppose you haven't come all the way from London to learn about my menial responsibilities. Tell me about you, April.'
April Wood began reluctantly, but eventually spoke much more than she had intended. She began with a few details about her private life. Her father was in his final hours, she told him, and they had phoned her urgently from the hospital to tell her death could come at any moment. She was very busy in Amsterdam but had felt obliged – that was the word she used, 'obliged' – to come to London for a few days, in case anything happened. Yet she was not wasting her time. From her London home she had been able to send faxes and emails, and held lengthy talks with specialists all over the world, as well as with her own team. And she had decided finally to ask Oslo for his help. But she preferred to come and see me, he thought with a sudden rush of emotion.
'We're in crisis, Hirum,' Miss Wood said. 'And time is running out.' 'I'll do whatever I can to help you. Tell me what's happening.'
In less than five minutes, Miss Wood explained the situation to him. She did not go into all the details, but left them to his imagination. Nor did she tell him the titles of the works that had been destroyed. Oslo listened in silence. When she had finished, he asked anxiously: 'What works were they, April?' Wood looked at him for a while before replying.
'Hirum, what I'm going to tell you is absolutely confidential, as I'm sure you understand. Apart from a small group we've called the 'crisis cabinet', nobody knows anything, not even the insurance companies. We're preparing our ground.'
Oslo nodded, his black, sad eyes wide with concern. Miss Wood told him the title of the two works, and there was silence again. The muffled sound of the waterfall in the garden could be heard through the glass windows. Oslo was staring down at the floor. Eventually he said:
'My God… that poor child… that little girl… I'm not so sorry for those two criminals, but that poor little girl…' Monsters was just as valuable, if not more so, than Deflowering, but Miss Wood was well aware of Oslo's ideas. She had not come to discuss them.
'Annek Hollech…' Oslo said. 'I last talked to her a couple of years ago. She was charming, but she felt completely lost in that terrible world of human works of art. It wasn't just that lunatic who killed her. We all contributed to her murder.' He turned to face Wood. 'Who? Who can be doing this? And why?'
'That's what I want you to help me find out. You're considered one of the most important specialists in the life and work of Bruno van Tysch. I want you to tell me names and motives. Who could it be, Hirum? I don't mean the person destroying the canvases, but the one who is paying for their destruction. Think of a machine. A machine programmed to annihilate the Maestro's most important creations. Who would have the motive to programme a machine like that?' 'Who do you think it could be?'
'Someone who hates him enough to want to do him as much harm as possible.' Hirum Oslo leaned back in his chair, blinking.
'Everyone who has ever met Van Tysch both loves and loathes him. Van Tysch succeeds in producing masterpieces precisely because he creates that kind of contradiction in people. You know the main reason why I left him was because I found out how cruel his working methods were. 'Hirum,' he used to say, 'if I treat the canvases as people, I'll never make works of art out of them.''
Who am I telling this to, Oslo thought. Look at her sitting there, her face sculpted in marble. My God, I reckon the only person who has ever managed to really move her has been Bruno van Tysch.
'It's true that life hasn't helped him to be any different. His father, Maurits van Tysch, was probably even worse. Did you know he collaborated with the Nazis in Amsterdam?…' ‘I heard something to that effect.'
'He sold his fellow countrymen, Dutch Jews; he handed them over to the Gestapo. But he was clever about it; he made sure there were hardly any witnesses left. So nothing could ever be proved against him. He knew how to swim with the current.
Even today there are some people who question whether Maurits was a collaborator. But I think that was the reason why, immediately after the war, he emigrated to the tiny, peaceful town of Edenburg. It was there he met that Spanish woman, a child of Spanish Republican exiles, and they got married. She was almost thirty years younger than him, and I've no idea what attracted her to Maurits. I suspect he had the gift his son inherited twice over: the ability to dominate other people and turn them into marionettes for him to use for his own ends. A year after Bruno was born, his mother died of leukemia. It's easy to imagine how this embittered Maurits still further. And he took it out on his son…'
'As I understand it, he was a painting restorer.'
'He was a frustrated painter,' Oslo said with a wave of his arm. 'He took on the job of restoring pictures in Edenburg castle, but his dream was to be an artist. He was not much good at either task. Do you know, he used to thrash Bruno with his paintbrushes?'
‘I don't know anything about my boss' life,' April Wood responded, smiling briefly.
'Maurits used long-handled brushes to reach some of the paintings hanging high up on the castle walls. Apparently, he never threw away the worn-out brushes. I don't think he kept them specially to thrash Bruno with, but that's what he did.' 'Did Van Tysch tell you this?'
'Van Tysch never told me anything. He's as silent as the grave. It was Victor Zericky who told me. He was Bruno's childhood friend – perhaps his only friend, because Jacob Stein is nothing more than a worshipper. Zericky is a historian who still lives in Edenburg. He gave me a couple of interviews, and I managed to get a few facts from him.' 'Go on, please.'
'Everything could have ended there: a child mistreated by his parents who later perhaps might have become another restorer and frustrated artist… worse even than Maurits, because Bruno couldn't even draw properly,' Oslo giggled nervously. 'Whereas we know his father could… Zericky showed me some water-colours Maurits did that Van Tysch had given him: they're very good… But then the miracle happened, the 'fairytale' as the Foundation's history calls it: Richard Tysch, the North American millionaire, crossed his path. And everything was changed forever.'
Wood was writing some of this down in a notebook she had taken out of her bag. Oslo paused, and gazed out of the window at the encroaching dusk in the garden.
'Richard Tysch was the person who made it possible for the Maestro to become the boss of an empire. He was a madman, a useless and eccentric millionaire who inherited a fortune that he threw away and several steel firms he sold as soon as his father died. He was born in Pittsburgh, but he saw himself as the direct descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers, those Puritan pioneers to the United States. He was obsessed with finding out about his family. He investigated where his name came from. Apparently, the Van Tyschs of Rotterdam split into two branches during the heyday of the Dutch West India Company. One ancestor went to North America, and founded the line that became steel and business barons. Richard Tysch wanted to find out about the 'other branch', the European side of his family. At that time, the only two people of that name were Bruno's father and his Aunt Dina, who lived in The Hague. In 1968, Tysch went to Holland and paid a surprise visit to Maurits. He had been planning just a short, uneventful visit. He wanted to talk to Maurits about art (he had learnt he was a restorer), pick up some mementoes, and return to the United States loaded down with photos and historic 'roots'. But then he met Bruno
