In my cellar, I placed Jackie Hay in room number one, and Lisa Shine in number two, searched their pockets for keys and went to their apartment.
I confess that my career has occasionally forced me to appropriate where and when I can. The cost, you understand – van expenses, materials and so forth. I’m not quite a penniless artist living in a garret. A small trust set up by my father provides a modest monthly income, though not nearly enough. He also left me his surgical instruments, which I use to assist me in my work, and this house, which he himself had inherited. He was a surgeon and an anatomist in Berne, where I spent my early childhood. Like most boys, my wish was to follow in my father’s footsteps. I showed a keen interest in his work, attended his lectures, dissections. Alas, it was not to be. I became inured to the sight of human flesh post-mortem, but began to be fascinated by it as an art form. Art was fast becoming my passion. I studied in Vienna and Paris. But, as I have already averred, the art world spurns that which it does not understand, only to praise it when others and time have rendered it unique.
‘Grotesque,’ they said of my work. ‘Twisted’. Lesser talents garnered acclaim through subject matter found in a vase or a meadow. They played it safe. Cowards. No originality. Flowers need not be set in a meadow to attract the art-loving public. Other settings can attract artistic acclaim. As does notoriety. The cutting off of van Gogh’s ear is as much in the public consciousness as his Irises. I was a great disappointment to my father. And so endeth the personal history lesson, excluding reference to one period in my life to which I shall not refer. It was most disagreeable.
I found little in the way of cash in Jackie and Lisa’s apartment. I never take personal items, such as jewellery, and of course never televisions or anything of that nature. Selling them on might attract the police. I do however always take home videotapes.
Jackie’s and Lisa’s were particularly entertaining. I viewed them at home over a bottle of Chablis. The camcorder on a tripod in their bedroom – which I did help myself to (I had it in mind to film their final moments, which I could then study in detail in order to improve my technique) – had indicated that they were lovers. One tape showed them in bed with a third girl, a delicate little creature with blonde hair, sandwiched between them. I watched them for an hour or so and then an idea presented itself, and I decided to do what I had never done before: indulge myself. I compiled two copies of the tapes and addressed one to each of their mothers.
The fact of the matter was that I had selected the two models because I had never before painted a pair, only singles. And I wished for one particular piece, over and above December, to crown my collection. I was also anxious that when the finished work was eventually sent to a gallery of my choosing, its existence would be marked by something fresh and original. A unique provenance, as it were. It would not only depict two lovers, it would carry attached to it the story of how their mothers had been involved in its creation. I had a provisional title for it: Duet. Artists must name their work.
Then I went downstairs.
In each of their rooms I placed a very large wooden box, then went into room number three and raised a flagstone. The rats came out from below it – the large black variety that grow to eighteen inches, including the tail – up through a chute I’d made and into a hutch. I closed off the chute, emptied the hutch into the box in Jackie’s room, repeated the exercise until it contained thirty or so, bolted the lid, then did the same in Lisa’s room.
Rats were not my first choice, I feel it necessary to point out. I had initially considered Dorylinae as a method of extracting information. Dorylinae may be better known to you as army ants: nomadic predators spectacular in their hunting raids. They form a family group, the Formicidae, which divides into ten subfamilies. Their posterior abdominal stings inject venom which allows a colony to pick a rhinoceros clean in three days. On the march they will eat any living thing too slow to get out of their way. And therein lay my difficulty. My rooms afforded no sanctuary in which a model could get out of their way.
You see, and I concede that I have studied this only on a cursory level, though I have also had some experience from quarters that most people would rather not hear of, the art of interrogation appears to lie in applying the most pressure while creating the least pain. I’m referring to my own particular needs: pressure can be damaging emotionally, whereas pain is invariably damaging physically. Too much physical damage and the model’s natural beauty becomes scarred and diminished, and death may occur before information is extracted. Counterproductive. Time is also a factor. By allowing the model to witness the painful outcome of non-cooperation, it is not so much the pain itself but the thought of the pain which generates the most fear.
I had had in mind a variation of an old Native American method. Whereas they would bury a victim up to his neck in sand (ambient temperature courtesy of the parching sun), his mouth fixed agape to facilitate the unbroken flow of treacle from an anthill to his oesophagus, then smash the anthill, enabling the little fellows to eat their way along the trail (their advance to be assessed at his leisure) and find within him enough food to do them for the winter, I myself
