43
Dieter Taub worked on his face with brooding care. Lips first. He tried for beauty, though he knew he fell far short. But it was the thought that counted. It had to be. It was the heart that loved. Not the body… Smudging lipstick, trying again, Dieter felt the anger boiling. He cursed all preternatural beauty, the futile places it led to. It led to weakness. Which led to a fouling of respect. Respect for love. Respect for duty. A weakness for beauty had led Dieter to choose Martin Bettelman from among so many malleable and too-eager men earning an hourly wage. Dieter should never have allowed himself to go anywhere near Martin. One brief night almost three years prior, following his lithe employee to the little club on a dingy street.
Dieter had been observing Martin on high-tech surveillance cameras for some time by that point. It was an unforgiveable loss of self-control, mixing business with desire. Dieter’s life was marked by these moments of indiscretion. Inside, they felt like explosions. Emotional explosions. Who would ever think it when Herr Taub sat down behind his gleaming desk?
But Martin had led to Fred. Eventually. After Justin. Adelhard. Some others. Dieter and Fred were a couple, a genuine pair. They understood each other, where they came from, what they needed. They understood passion’s need to rip the bottom out of everything you stand for — at least one night a week. Add a project demanding trust and nerve: stealing priceless art made for some deliriously wonderful sex. Would Dieter have found Fred if he had not followed Martin into Zup? Another time, another place? Life was fraught with chance. Chance made Dieter nervous. Nervous of weakness, loss of self-control. There was a horrid symmetry to it all.
If the accursed Martin Bettelman had possessed the tiniest jot of self-control, the French police would not have come into it. There’d be no trail to Zup. No reason to lose faith in Fred’s judgment and resolve.
There. Done. Lipstick should come last but Dieter needed it to be first. A clear statement was always a good starting point, and if nothing else, Dieter’s lips were clear.
Now Dieter drew the makeup pencil hard and dark along his hairless brow, fretful, comparing one against the other. Symmetrical? Not easy on a face like mine, he thought…
Symmetry may not be comforting, but it does let us see clearly.
The enterprise had been working perfectly. Like clockwork. A finely calibrated Swiss clock.
Did they need it? Of course they didn’t. They only wanted it. It helped them want each other. In that, it was one of life’s necessities. And they were good at it. Justin and a few carefully recruited others were the portal to the major transactions. Dieter and Fred acted as their own runners. Fred, mainly — he had the contacts, he found the buyers through shadowy fences in places one would never dream, while Dieter built their retail inventory, responding to requests passed along by Fred, or calculating trends amongst his well-protected clientele. Martin Bettelman had seemed a right choice, smart enough to obey the rule of silence, savvy enough to fulfill his part without needing every syllable spelled out. A nod and a wink at Zup. Martin would gather quietly indicated works from the storerooms he patrolled, repositories packed with the old bumped aside by the new, works selected on the unlikelihood of their ever being missed, let alone shown again. But all of them worth something to someone. Martin was paid well for his risk — which Dieter controlled at considerable risk to himself.
Arrogant Justin was the only real threat. They’d dealt with it. They’d have let the thing be a lover’s tragedy, with Martin strangling himself inside the frame. Not difficult to borrow his sidearm from his locker at the Kunst for a couple of hours on a Friday afternoon when Martin was off work. They would’ve dealt with Martin well before any investigation could get that far. Fred’s skills at legal obfuscation could have kept them safe from the damning claims of Marcus Streit, the fiddly words of so-called art experts, that sneaky provincial police officer. The client would have been disappointed, but appreciative. Clients value attention to risk and absolute discretion in the protection of their anonymity. They had got him the Snyders. He knew they could deliver. They would get him a Reubens when they arranged new talent — there was always new talent — when the time was right.
Meaning safe. Secure. Anonymous.
And precise. Dieter craved precision, had done since adolescence, when the nervous-making push and pull inside taught him to stay tighter than a drum. Until the inevitable explosion.
Dieter twitched. The tiny brush flushing out his lashes jolted minutely in his outsized fingers and left a blotchy fleck that wouldn’t do. He tried to flick it away and made it worse. He wiped his eye, and the tearing there, and started over.
The inventory at Mulheimerstrasse was a bread-and-butter sideline, a steady and solid hedge against disaster at the high end. Indeed, a source of gloomy comfort as the Federer catastrophe grew beyond saving. Thanks to Martin Bettelman, their bread and butter had been thrown into the Rhine. A shocking waste. Worse, the French fool had not even been stealing from them! This muted shoemaker was as unknown to Dieter and Fred and all their contacts as it was to the French inspector. Martin’s rash freelance adventure had put everyone at risk.
And with his gun! Martin must have come for his gun just before the closing Friday evening. It was very much against the rules.
It was worse than that. If Martin Bettelman had remained discreet, Marcus Streit would not be somewhere in a pile of scrap metal, crushed to pulp inside a car that was now compressed to the size of a radio. Josephina could have remained in her support role, helping to deflect Fred’s deft legal manoeuvres ever further off the mark… Poor dumb Josephina, the only woman since his mother with whom he could share shoes. A shameless charade, to be sure. But Dieter did not enjoy killing. He was not a monster. He was civilized. Respectable. Very private. Very Swiss. He was exactly what they’d always told him to be.
But he would always do what needed to be done.
The French inspector was an interesting woman. In other circumstances Dieter sensed he would have liked her. Lucky, too. He had not been concentrating properly that wretched night on the docks, half-blinded as he’d been with anger and the need to punish Frederik Rooten. Fred’s louche lack of constancy. Fred’s ugly lust for that oversized buffoon. And Dieter had been more than angry when he’d sliced that grotesque Frenchman’s ear to get that stud for Fred. He’d been in no small amount of agony from a bullet in his buttock. He’d been struggling with a severe pall of encroaching disappointment, hoping against his battered hope. For Fred.
Dieter’s heart was delicate, always struggling from the tug of war within. And, inevitably, didn’t Fred’s disrespect bring on the doubts about Fred’s judgment?
Yes, mein herr. These messy tears…this bloody mess!
Dieter’s fears for their client’s best interests crashed head-on into Fred’s wrongheaded decision to face the media on behalf of the witchy frau. It left Dieter in a sheltered bow in a chestnut tree in a Gellert park on a sunny morning in November, service rifle trained. Perfect concentration that day. Yes, sick to his stomach and crying like a baby all that night, and all that lonely weekend; but never missing a day at work. Not Dieter Taub. The client had sent a politely coded note commending his sense of duty, his ability to act. Dieter took it to the toilet at the office and ripped it into pieces before flushing it away.
Threw up one last time and carried on, empty and alone.
No more dancing. No more Zup. Fred completed the soul’s dark circle, so inevitable in Dieter’s life.
If Dieter hadn’t followed Martin Bettelman. If Martin hadn’t loved that damned angelic boy.
Seeing that face on Della’s monitor — deathly pale, exquisitely white, obscured in adolescent rags but unforgettable — Dieter Taub had finally twigged. That boy had been at Zup. Once, last summer. Martin had brought him in to show him off. His new toy. Robert. It was hard to see a fragile waif having the wherewithal to take Martin’s gun and use it. But Dieter knew all too well how several fortunes’ worth of beauty could bring a man to kill.
Adding just a hint of liner, Dieter finished his eyes. Nothing extravagant. He could not afford to be noticed today, and maybe never again. He opened the little compact, padded on the powder. Too much, far too much, an effect made worse by the unseemly overlay of blush. But it was not night out there, it was just past noon. And it was an effect most people automatically looked away from.
The cheap wig ensured this. Dieter Taub fitted it with no joy at all.
Then he put on his clothes, took the market bag and went out the door.
Where the right side of Greta’s shapely bottom clenched in pain with each quick step.
She held her stride. Now, Dieter, he moved slowly. He had to, the wound on his buttock still smarted deeply if he moved too fast. But Greta proceeded apace, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, brisk and businesslike, past Josephina’s tired colleague — who stood there gazing up at the wrong floor! No wonder anyone with anything of value to protect turned to the private sector. Did the poor man even turn to look? Greta did not risk a coquettish glance behind as she turned the corner. She brushed a finger under her blue eye. Was that another tear, welling in response to a humid December wind? Or was it from a heart that had been pushed too far? A burned-out FedPol agent might have been surprised to know Greta’s sense of futility was equal to his own. If these things can be compared. He would certainly have feared Greta’s anger.
Finally: the source of all her grief.
Greta knew she had missed Robert by a matter of hours, possibly minutes, the day she’d gone to Martin’s apartment and found it empty. The spectacle of paintings floating in the Rhine on the evening news had shattered the numb shell that formed after Fred. They said Robert’s distraught mother threw them in the river? The French were truly absurd. That little faggot had to kill Martin and steal their contingency assets. Beautiful Robert was the cause of everything. If his silly mother knew how Greta was going punish Robert for bringing all this waste and pain…
If, if, if.
Turning down Mulheimer, Greta flashed a smile for the Turkish grocer standing at his door, enjoyed the aroma of soup passing the Hungarian café. She wished she were younger. If Greta were younger, the world would be different. She knew this. The younger boys were so much more comfortable in their shoes. Perhaps she would even be able to enjoy that music. It was surely Adelhard’s horrendous noise that pushed her patience past its limits that awful night at Zup. If, if if. But you can’t go backward, Greta knew.
She let herself in and climbed the long, steep stairs.
Halfway up she paused and tamped sweat from her pancaked brow.
Halfway up, halfway in between. It took a lifetime to know oneself. Perhaps it took two.
Regardless of her fury, Greta was wanting to look her best for the beautiful boyish man.
***
He was sitting on Martin’s cheap divan, hands folded in his lap, for all the world like he was awaiting his turn at the dentist. He was contemplating his latest prize, propped in a patch of sunlight against the opposite wall. A naked boy kneeling by a stream. Adoration V. Swiss. Early Modern, verging on naïve. A variation on Adoration III. Same boy with the bowl-shaped mop of hair. Dieter Taub had often paused to wonder at it as he toured operations at the Kunst. At that moment the natural light (as opposed to museum lighting) enlivened the steely blue in the artist’s flowing water.
‘Robert?’
He barely glanced as the visitor entered then softly closed the door. He was not worried, or, better to say, not interested in the reaction he provoked.
Greta found herself irked by his blasé indifference. She announced herself again. ‘Robert?’
He turned. His beauty was disarming. It left a mortal shaking. Worse, he seemed to know it. An edge of sunlight showed the limpid eyes, not so much shocked as disgusted. ‘What are you trying to prove?’ he asked in French. He meant Greta’s meticulously over-made eyes and face and hair.
Rude. Thoughtless. An angel’s fatal flaw? It left Greta feeling unnatural.
A girl’s instinctual reaction was defensive — she took three strides and punched Robert in the face. ‘Well, you’re no angel, either!’ And she kicked him hard in the back where he lay, curled defensively on the floor.
Greta knelt, too aware of the tight skirt riding high with the movement on her nylon-covered thighs. She laid her market bag down and cupped his jaw, forcing him to face her. It was true. Up close, the beautiful thing was just another man. A bloodied nose, probably broken by a highly trained fist, blackening creases around his clenched eyes as his nerves struggled to contain the pain: these things revealed a normal man. She touched his nose. He winced. Definitely broken. She asked, ‘Why that one?’ She meant Adoration V.
Robert did not respond. He tried to look away. Greta held his fragile face firm in one hand, grasped his puny shoulder with the other. ‘Talk to me, mon beau.’ The angel’s eyes briefly flickered, then closed. Greta shook him. ‘Why that one?’
Robert’s tearing eyes stared into hers. ‘Because it’s me,’ he murmured.
‘Because it’s you?’
‘I see myself.’
‘Isn’t that romantic.’ Greta drew her thumb along a stream of tears discolouring the deathly white cheek, leaving a pinkish trace. Releasing her grip, he lay motionless as she carefully removed the unframed painting from her market bag. ‘And why not this?’ she asked. ‘This painting has caused a lot of trouble.’
The beaten eyes looked, then looked away. ‘It’s not me.’
Contemplating the shadowy image, Greta agreed, ‘No…it’s not you.’
‘Ugly,’ Robert whispered.
‘Ugly?’ The painting was shades of brown and gold and green. It was unknown and likely justly so. But it was not ugly. It was a shoemaker. ‘You killed him because it was ugly?’
No reply. A dead-like stare.
‘Eh? Talk to me, my beautiful Bob.’
‘Ugly,’ Robert repeated in a breath.
Greta tapped his broken nose. Robert cried out, jerked violently away.
Greta easily rolled him back so they were face to face. ‘Answer the question, Bobby.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
A flick of a finger to the bridge of his nose. A scream. ‘You’ve hurt me far more than I can ever hurt you. But I can hurt you a lot. Your client rejected it and so you killed him… Bobby?’
‘I’m not Bobby.’ So sullen.
‘Sure you are.’ Greta was perplexed by his defiance. ‘To me, you’re a beautiful Bob.’
‘Fuck off,’ he whispered. She touched his nose. He flinched, blurted. ‘I have no client!’
‘Come on, Bobby. Who wanted this shoemaker? Who was it for?’
‘No one! …for me!’
Greta sighed. ‘Don’t lie. It’s too late to lie. How much were you going to make?’
The angel lay there, tears flowing, breathing hard against the pain. When it calmed, he muttered, ‘Martin brought it.’
‘To sell to you, for you to sell. To whom?’
‘No. To give. To me.’ Obviously was none too subtly implied.
Greta jolted. ‘A gift?’
Robert’s bleak stare signalled yes.
‘Because Martin loved you. Martin loved your delicate ass… Well, that sounds right.’ She put two thick fingers and large thumb firmly around a fine French nose, now bent and pulpy, pinky blue. ‘Tell me about it. Tell me about killing Martin. You know, I was thinking of killing him myself.’
Robert wouldn’t answer.
‘Eh, my Bobby?’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘But I will. Bobby.’ A slight toggle. Robert gasped. ‘Tell me how this love story ends.’
‘Call me by my name or go to hell!’
‘Hell?’ Greta twisted hard, Robert screamed, she put her free hand over his mouth and told him, ‘You’ve no idea, Bob.’ As Robert shook and writhed, Greta held him fast, repeating, ‘My name is Bob. Beautiful Bob. I love beauty and I don’t like pain.’ Several times, like a rhyming song from a children’s tale. My name is Bob. Beautiful Bob. I love beauty and I don’t like pain…
Till finally Robert lay still, exhausted by pain, and breathed. ‘I didn’t kill him.’
‘No? Who did?’
‘It was dark. It happened so fast. I…I just ran.’
Greta patted the sweat-soaked, silky head. ‘I don’t believe you, Bobby.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Did you love him? Did Bobby love Marty?’
‘I love myself.’
‘Bon. Down to the nut of it. And Martin’s gift just wasn’t right.’
‘I didn’t want that ugly thing. It has nothing to do with me.’
‘Poor Martin. You’re a mean little bastard, aren’t you? Eh?…my beautiful Bob.’
‘Don’t call me that, you bizarre old hag!’
Too insolent. It earned him a hard slap that broke his perfect mouth.
Robert spat a tooth, more blood. ‘I hate that thing.’
‘And you told him.’
‘Yes, I told him!’
‘And you broke it.’
‘It’s ugly. Like you.’
Greta grabbed Robert by a knot of sweaty hair. ‘And you killed him.’
‘No! No! No!’
‘And then you come up here and help yourself to the rest of Martin’s art.’
Now Robert’s eyes opened wide and fixed on Greta’s. ‘Why leave them here? Martin said they came from cellars where no one ever saw them. I thought, now that Martin was…’ He shrugged again. Dead. ‘So I took them home. For my collection.’
‘But they’re not yours, my Bobby.’
‘Are they yours?’
‘Mine?’ Greta let go of Robert’s bloody face and sat there on the floor of Martin’s secret lair, staring at the stolen Hodler. As it will, artistic beauty calms: A naked boy kneeling by a river. A naïf. Humble. Pure. And nothing like this bizarrely twisted Robert — beyond the surface, no resemblance at all. Robert was in deep denial if he believed he saw himself in Adoration V.
…After a time, Greta mused, ‘All I ever wanted was a cuckoo clock.’
‘Mon Dieu!’ Robert rolled his puffy eyes. He cared nothing for Greta’s hopes and dreams.
Provoking Greta to slap him hard across an ear. ‘Rude, rude cretin!’ Robert curled into a ball of pain. Greta lectured crossly, ‘Do you know how many people I had to kill? And all because you did not have the grace to accept a little gift from silly Martin.’
‘Go to hell!…just go to hell.’
‘Why couldn’t you have just said thanks and kissed him?’
‘It was ugly!’
‘None of this would have had to happen.’
‘Leave me alone!’
‘Alone. I want to be alone. Is that a joke?’ The clichéd plea echoed, burning through Greta’s heavy-handed maquillage. Greta has to say that because that’s what Greta always says. But only to Fred — who was dead, because of this whiny, selfish French baby. ‘Are you laughing at me? Eh, my lovely Bob? You think I’m such a joke?’
‘Don’t call me that!’
Greta leaned close enough to kiss the exquisitely defiant face. ‘Fuck you. Bob…Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob!’ Robert swung a feeble fist. Greta caught him by the spindly wrist and stood, hauling him up, hugging him tight, embracing him like a dancer. The bashed-up eyes gazed back, morbid, indifferent. Greta whispered, ‘I am going to fuck you, Bob. Then I’m going to break this thing again, right over your beautiful head. You ready for that, my Bobby?’
Greta meant the refurbished shoemaker.
Who ignored them both. Glowing, pouring tea…
Lifting Robert and spinning him in an embrace, Greta moaned, ‘Oh, my Bobby. My selfish little bastard!’ Turning him, turning him over and over like so much pastry on a board, ripping Robert’s proletariat top from his porcelain back. ‘My self-centred fucking angel, and why not?…so white, so perfect, so — ’
Greta stopped, clasped the scornful, silent mouth and kissed it. Deep, wet, tasting blood, looking for reaction. Very aroused herself now. Robert dumbly shook his head, No…
Greta said, ‘Believe me, Bob, you don’t want to be alone. All the art in this ugly world’s not worth it.’ But it was definitely Dieter who threw Robert down on the divan, ripped his belt open, yanked his fly down, hauled Robert’s pants off in one swift brutal motion. ‘Look at you!’ And, lifting Greta’s skirt, always very proud in this erotic thrill. ‘Look at me. Mm? Are you ready for it? Do we have a perfect fit, my Bob? Eh? Cat got your tongue?’
Greta was needing a response. Was getting nothing but a frightened moan. This passive thing was making Greta rage. She rolled him over and yanked him forward. The man/boy/angel screamed with pain as Deiter shoved himself inside, frenzied, shoving, grunting, ‘Go, Bob, go!’ Or words to that effect in German as the FedPol cop came through the door, gun drawn, aghast at the sight. And so clearly scared.
Greta, bucking, bellowed, ‘Have you no shame? Get out! Get out!’
Instinctively, Franck Woerli retreated a step, affording Dieter Taub the chance to rip the automatic from the holster positioned under Greta’s left breast. And fire.
Woerli fired too — though it could well have been just muscles. The shot went through Taub’s mouth and he fell over. Still on top of, and well inside, a suddenly frozen angel.
***
When he dared to extricate himself, Robert Charigot lay there touching himself, bringing his bloody fingers up to his perplexed eyes. The other man, slumped in the doorway, did not register in his calculations. He may even have still been alive, but Robert was not interested. Putting himself back together as best he could, taking his new painting, he stepped around Inspector Frank Woerli, and inched his painful way down the long stairs. He left the shoemaker. He hated it. He only wanted to get home, back to his room with Adoration V.
But Robert Charigot passed out on the street, waiting for the bus.