Art of Murder

2

Lines.

Her body was a sheaf of lines. Her hair for example: gentle curves down the nape of her neck. Or her eyes: ellipses containing circles. The concentric rotundity of her breasts. The faint line of her navel. Or the seagull print of her sex. She stroked herself. She raised her right hand to her neck, drew it down between her breasts and the tight knot of her stomach muscles. She embraced the curve of her biceps. As she touched herself, her body felt different. Life returned: soft surfaces she could press, change the shape of; outlines where her hand could pause, sweet labyrinths for fingers or insects. She recovered her own volume.

She felt like crying, as she had done when she said goodbye to Jorge. What could she see? A yellow mother-of-pearl skin. She guessed that any hypothetical tear, flowing down vertically from her eyelid to the corner of her mouth, would also trace a line. She was not sad, though she was not happy either. Her wish to cry came from a colourless feeling, a linear sentiment that the future would doubtless find a way of painting more clearly. She was at the beginning, at the starting line (the exact word for it), a twisted figure waiting in the world of geometry for an artist to select her and provide her with shading and definition. And then what? She would have to wait to find out.

Apart from that, her current state could be defined as gravity- free. The priming process had freed her of all ballast. She was barely aware of her own self. She was completely naked, and did not feel cold or even cool; she did not feel anything that might be called 'temperature'. Despite the discomforts of the journey, she still felt awake and energetic: she could have rested equally well doubled up on herself or standing on tiptoe. The mysterious combination of pills she had started to take on F amp;W's instructions had made her bodily needs almost vanish. It seemed wonderful to her not to be at the mercy of any of her inner organs. It was more than twelve hours since she had needed to go to the bathroom. She had not eaten – or felt like eating – anything solid since Saturday. She was neither nervous nor calm: she was merely waiting. Her whole state of mind was projected towards the future. For the first time in her life, she felt like a real canvas. Or not even that. Like a tool. A hammer, a fork or a revolver, she deduced, could understand her feelings better than another human being.

Her mind was clear and empty. Incredibly clear. For her, to think was like contemplating sand dunes in the desert. This too made her happy. It was not amnesia: she could remember everything, but none of her memories got in the way. They were there, in the library, lined up and within reach (if she wanted them, she could remember her parents, or Vicky, or Jorge) but she had no need to flick through her past to be alive. It was a tremendous sensation to feel she was someone else while still being herself.

The house was plunged in silence. She had no idea where they had taken her after the plane had landed at Schiphol. She guessed she must be somewhere not far from Amsterdam. The flight had lasted an hour or a little more, but an hour can be very long when you are blindfolded and unable to move. But time and Clara's body had got on well, and she had not experienced any discomfort.

She had been transported as artistic goods. This was the first time this had happened to her. Well, occasionally when she was in The Circle as an adolescent, she had been tied up with nylon string, had had her eyes blindfolded, been wrapped in padded paper and then put in a cardboard box. This was called the 'Annulling Test', intended to help the future canvas accept its condition as an object. But this was different: it was a real transfer. According to international law, any canvas that had been primed and given labels was considered artistic goods, even if it had not yet been painted. All the previous journeys she had made for work purposes had been as a person: she had been primed at her destination. This meant the artist saved on transport costs, any risk of damage, and on customs duties. Evasion of these payments by works of art who travelled as normal passengers and then were repainted in another country had not yet been classified as an offence: legislation was definitely needed. But Clara had been transported as artistic goods, with all the required paperwork.

She could not make out the shape of the ten-seater jet she climbed aboard at the end of the tunnel down which she had followed the uniformed man. Inside the cabin, a mechanic dressed in an orange overall was waiting for her. He never spoke to her by name. In fact, he hardly said anything at all (and besides, he did not speak Spanish). He led her with gloved hands (everyone used gloves to handle her once she had been primed) and helped her lie down on a padded couch with its back raised forty-five degrees and the word FRAGILE written in large letters on the leather. There was another lifted rail for her feet, which forced her to keep her knees bent. There was no need for her to take her top or miniskirt off. On the contrary: the workman wrapped her in another layer of plastic, this time a loose sleeveless tunic, and stuck warning labels in Dutch and English all over it. The only thing he removed were her shoes. She was strapped in her seat by eight elastic belts: one across her forehead, two under her arms, another round her waist, and a further four at her wrists and ankles. They were all amazingly soft. As he tightened them, the mechanic made sure they did not trap the labels on her right wrist and ankle. The only time he spoke was when he put her mask on. 'Protect eyes,' he said. Those were the last words she heard until they landed.

There was a brief interval without darkness during the flight: the mask was lifted and she was offered a tall vertical line inserted in a hermetically sealed glass. She drank from it, though she was not thirsty. It was a fruit juice. She was able to see that outside, in the cabin and the rest of the world, night had fallen. While he held the glass up for her to drink, the mechanic also checked that none of the straps was too tight. He moved the labels around to avoid them chafing. Another man used a doctor's torch to check her stomach, and then they slightly loosened the central strap. She did not move (although she could have if she had wanted to) because she was not worried about having to stay in the same position the whole day if necessary. When they had finished all their adjustments, the two men put her mask back on.

She felt the landing as a foetus might experience being born on a fairground big wheel. It helped her understand there must be something intangible within us that gives us a sense of direction, of above and below, of acceleration and braking. The awareness that an arrow or a line might have. Inertia gripped her like a powerful dance partner, pushing her forward, then backwards. Then the violent rubber stamp of wheels on the ground. 'Careful… step… careful… step…'

They held her arms as she descended the steps. A wave of Amsterdam night air greeted her. Holland caressed her legs, lifted the edges of her plastic shroud, stroked her stomach and hot back. She felt encouraged to be received in this way by an unabashed, cool Holland that smelt of gasoline and jet engines. A gust of wind made her neck label swing out to the left.

They came to a stop in a distant zone of Schiphol airport. Flashing lights were the only decoration. At the foot of the steps another mechanic was waiting with a transport trolley. They were called 'capsules', and Clara had seen them before, but never travelled in one. It consisted of another stretcher like the one on the plane, with the back raised, and a plastic cover with holes in for her to breathe, covered in more warning stickers. When they zipped the cover over her head, she could hear no more noise, but could still see out through the plastic. They had removed her mask, and she felt a lot more comfortable than she had in the plane (she could stretch her legs, for example) although this did not mean much to her. The mechanic walked round behind her and started to push the trolley.

They went towards a long, low building beyond which she could see the tall, cool lines of the control tower. A sign – Douane, Tarief – flashed electronically. Muscular figures in tunics, others showing bare flesh, necks bearing orange or bright blue tags, faces with no eyebrows, their skin primed and shiny, a rainbow of hair colours, others again with bald, gleaming heads, youngsters of both sexes, adolescents, little boys and girls, beautiful monsters waiting in the intermittent lights in the darkness, canonic but unfinished images, models not yet sketched (she was particularly struck by one ineffable shaven and primed work in a wheelchair who turned its head to stare after her like a drugged alien being), all of them waiting in line to go through the customs. Many of them had been brought here on luggage trolleys, often without guards, because they did not need any special transport requirements. Clara was fascinated at the amount of trafficking in works of art that obviously went on in Holland. There was nothing like it in Spain, where artistic immigration, like so many other kinds, was strictly controlled. How much could each of those works cost? Even the cheapest must be worth more than a thousand dollars.

Her capsule went straight into the building without having to queue. Inside it was like a hangar with conveyor belts and long customs tables. Employees in blue uniforms raised their arms and reeled off precise instructions. Everything was studied, regulated, listed, considered. They wheeled her to a desk. Forms were stamped, labels checked. Then she was taken into an adjacent room, where they unzipped her cover. As they did so, a mixture of male and female perfumes overwhelmed her sense of smell. A silent, smiling couple wearing surgical gloves that matched the colour of their suits and with blue tags in their lapels (she remembered this was what the Conservation department wore) were waiting for her. The room was an office: a desk, two exits, an open door. Someone shut the door, and to Clara it seemed that for a second she had gone deaf.

'How are you feeling? OK? My name is Brigitte Paulsen, and my colleague here is Martin van der Olde. Can you get up? Slowly, there's no need to rush.'

This sudden burst of musical Spanish surprised Clara at first.

She had thought they would treat her as they had until now, as simply art material. Then she understood her reception. They were part of Conservation, and in Conservation they always tried to make the works feel at ease. She swung her bare feet down to the floor – the primed toenails reflected the strip ceiling lights – and stood up without help or any difficulty. 'I'm fine, thank you.'

'Mr Paul Benoit, director of Conservation at the Bruno van Tysch Foundation, is sorry he cannot be here in person, and has instructed me to welcome you to Holland,' the woman said with a smile. 'Did you have a good trip?'

'Yes very good, thanks.' 'I little Spanish,' the blond man said, blushing slightly. 'Don't worry,' Clara reassured him.

'Do you need anything? Want anything? Want to say anything?'

'No, I'm fine at the moment, and there's nothing I need,' said Clara. 'Thanks all the same.'

'May I?' the woman took hold of the label round Clara's neck.

'Excuse me,' said the man, lifting her arm with his gloved left hand, and catching her wrist tag in his right.

'Sorry,' a third man she had not noticed until now said, as he knelt on the floor to grasp her ankle label.

It's comforting when they treat you like a human being occa sionally, thought Clara. Everry being in the universe, as well as the majority of natural and artificial objects, likes being treated kindly, so Clara did not feel ashamed to think as she did. The parallel red claws of their laser beams sneaked out over the lines of the bar codes on her three labels. She kept her silent smile throughout their inspection, examining the woman closely. She decided she was pretty, but was wearing too dark a shade of make-up. She had also put too much rouge on: it looked as though she had been slapped hard on both cheeks.

Then they stripped her: they lifted her padded plastic tunic over her head, and removed the top and miniskirt. The ceiling lights rippled across her body like luminous eels.

'Are you feeling all right? Not nauseous at all? Tired?' While the woman practised her Berlitz Spanish, she felt Clara's pulse with fingers as delicate as a pair of tweezers. In the pauses, Clara could hear echoes of questions in another language from a nearby room. Had more artistic goods arrived? Who could it be? She was dying to know.

The Conservation team changed instruments and started to examine her with a sort of mobile phone that gave off a loud hum. She guessed they must be checking she was all of one piece. Armpits, ribs, buttocks, thighs, backs of her legs, stomach, pubis, face, hair, hands, feet, back, coccyx. They did not touch her with their instruments: these were like red-eyed crickets all chirruping on the same note a couple of centimetres from her skin. She helped them by raising her arms, opening her mouth, spreading her legs. She felt a sudden surge of panic: what would happen if they found something wrong? Would they send her back?

Another man had joined their group, but he stayed in the background, near the exit, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, as though waiting for the others to finish before it was his turn. He was a platinum blond with a firm jaw and reflecting glasses. He looked like a bad-tempered Aryan, and perhaps that is what he was. A mobile phone cable sprouted from his right ear. Clara saw the red tag in his lapel: he was a security guard. I should start recognising them: the dark blue label is Conservation, the red one is Security; Art is turquoise…

'All done,' said the woman. 'In the name of the Bruno van Tysch Foundation, I wish you a happy stay in Holland. Please, if you have any doubt, any problem, or if there's anything you need, call us. You'll have a number you can call Conservation on. You can ring at any time of the day or night. Our colleagues will be delighted to help.' 'Thanks.'

'Now we'll leave you in the capable hands of the security people. I should warn you that Security will not speak to you, so don't waste time asking them questions. But you can always talk to us.' 'What about Art?'

These simple words had a surprising effect. The woman's eyes opened wide; the men turned towards Clara and gesticulated; even the guard appeared to smile. It was the woman who spoke.

'Art?… Oh, Art does what it likes. Art has its own agenda, none of us knows what that is, and there's no way we could know.'

Clara recalled the long silences on the phone while she was being stretched, the clauses of the contract she had signed. ‘I understand,' she said.

'No, no,' the woman responded unexpectedly. 'You'll never understand.'

They gave her some plastic slippers which she hurriedly put on. So far she was not damaged, so why run any risk at the last moment? Then they put the plastic tunic back on. She realised they had not returned the top and miniskirt, but that was not important. The tunic moulded itself around her naked body. The security man set off and Clara followed him slowly, the plastic swishing as she walked along. They left by the back door. As they passed the next room, she thought she caught a swift glimpse of a naked old man with a primed body and yellow labels. His eyes were gleaming. Clara would have liked to pause for a moment and say hello to him, but the security man was striding off unconcerned. They soon came out into a silent private parking lot. The vehicle waiting had more than enough room for her. It was a dark-coloured van with a back door and two more up by the driver. There were no windows in the rear part, so that the canvas was protected from prying eyes. The back section had optional seating, but all of them had been removed except for one, to give her even more space. Clara could have stretched out on the floor easily without reaching the driver's seat, but instead she was strapped in by four seat belts that the driver snapped shut with his gloved hands. Clara found she was pinioned to the seat back.

The journey was as brief as a dream. Through the front windscreen she could make out green road signs: Amsterdam, Haarlem, Utrecht; arrows, lines; phosphorescent signs. The night was streaked with power pylons, or perhaps they were telegraph posts, which caught the van's speeding headlights. The security man drove in silence. Clara soon realised they were not heading for Amsterdam. The lights she had seen when they left Schiphol airport began to die away, which must mean they had turned off the main highway. Now they were in the countryside. A sudden cold sensation gripped her. For just a moment she was filled with an absurd thought. Could they be heading for Edenburg? Would the Maestro receive her that very night? But what if all this was a dream, and it was not Van Tysch who was going to paint her, as she had been imagining since she found out who had contracted her? She scolded herself for thinking this way. A good painting had no right to get emotional. She had too much experience for that. She was a twenty-four-year-old canvas, for goodness' sake. She had started out with The Circle and Brentano had painted her on three occasions. Eight years in the profession was too long for her to give in to her nerves, wasn't it? I'll try to stay calm. You must feel distant from everything that happens to you. What was it that Marisa Monfort always said? Be like an insect. Like someone who has forgotten their own name. A linen canvas plaited with white lines. Someone once told her memories are lines on white nothingness: we have to rub them out, we have to be different, we have to not he.

She had no idea how long it was before she began to notice the van was slowing down. The headlights picked out scrawny trees. A track. She caught sight of wheelbarrows, rakes, buckets, objects that reminded her of the garden tools which helped her father enjoy the summers in Alberca. The man from Security drew up outside a hedge. He got out, opened the gate, then drove the van inside. Soon afterwards he had parked and undone Clara's seat belts. As soon as she stepped down on to the gravel in her plastic slippers, she realised this could not be Edenburg. But it did not seem to be any other town either. The lights showed it was some kind of market garden. To the right and left, she could see the night was not invulnerable, there were signs of civilisation, a row of lines which perhaps betrayed the presence of houses or factories, or even some kind of airport or small village. It was cool, and the wind was tugging at the edges of her tunic. The moon was a curved, clipped length of wire. She sniffed the air: it smelt of woods and marsh. The smell of the earth became distinct in her mouth, as if she were tasting it. She pushed back a fleck of hair from her eyebrow-less face. At her feet, her shadow on the gravel was dark and twisted.

The man from Security waited for her, and then the two of them walked towards the house. It was a small, one-storey affair, with a porch and little else of note, as though it were waiting for her to arrive to start to exist. The crickets were tapping out their night-time morse code. I'm sure all this will be very nice in the morning, but at the moment it's a bit scary, Clara thought. As they climbed the few steps up to the front of the house, the sound of the man's shoes on the wooden boards reminded her of a horror movie she had seen years earlier with Gabi Ponce.

There was a glint of keys. The inside of the house smelt of bathroom fresheners. There was a small hallway, with a staircase on the right and, to the left, a closed door. Clara suddenly noticed that the light switches to all the rooms were in the hall. The man flicked them on, and light filled the house, revealing what appeared to be part of a living room on the far side of the staircase: white walls, cream doors, a full-length mirror on a mobile frame, and a floor of white wood. Clara later discovered the whole house had the same parquet. The black lines of the gaps and the white of the boards made the floor look like a sheet of paper for calligraphy or for a study of perspective foreshortening. The closed door on the left opened into a simple kitchen. The other half of the living room stretched to the back of the house, parallel to the kitchen. A sofa, a faded carpet (once a crimson colour?), a small chest of three drawers that had a telephone on it, and another full-length mirror, were all the furniture she could see. Placed opposite each other, the two mirrors suggested infinity. There was only one ornament on the walls: a framed, medium-sized photograph. It was a very odd one. It showed the head and shoulders of a man facing away from the camera, on a black background. His dark, well-cut hair and his jacket blended in so well with the surrounding shadows that only his ears, the half-moon of his neck and the shirt collar were visible. It reminded Clara of a Surrealist painting.

The bedroom was on the right. It was a big room, with a mattress on the floor and no other furniture. The mattress was a bright blue. A door led to the bathroom, already equipped for hyperdramatic needs. A couple of bathrobes were hanging on the back of the door.

The man had gone into all the rooms. Rather than showing her the house, he seemed to be inspecting it. Clara was looking at all the things in the bathroom when she saw a shadow over her shoulder. It was him. Without a word, he bent down and started to lift off the plastic tunic. She understood what he was trying to do, and raised her arms to help. The man finished removing the tunic, folded it up, and put it into a big bag. Then he bent down again and look off her slippers, which he stored in the same bag. Then he left the room, bag under his arm. She heard his footsteps across the floorboards, the door, the lock. She breathed in deeply as she heard the sound of the van engine fade into the distance. She left the bedroom and went to the front window just in time to see the pen of light drawing parallel lines across the darkness. Then everything was black again.

She was alone. She was naked. But she didn't feel at all bothered by this.

She went up to the front door and examined it. Locked. She tried the window and found it was locked too. She tried all the windows in the house as well as a back door she discovered in the living room, and found that none of them would open without keys. She preferred to think of it another way: she was not locked in, she was in storage. She was not alone, she was unique. Unique and stored in a locked house. She was a precious object.

She went into the living room and looked for the phone. It was cordless. She picked it up. A dead silence. She saw a dark blue rectangle next to the receiver, a card with a number on it. She guessed it must be Conservation's details ('You can ring at any time of the day or night') but it would be useless if the phone was not working anyway. She followed the cable back and saw it was properly connected. She tried again, tapping in numbers haphazardly. The phone was dead. She dialled the number on the card. As her finger touched the last digit, she heard the call go through. So it worked in certain cases. She hung up. She immediately knew what was going on. You can ring us, but only us. Of course.

She gazed around at the silence, the emptiness of the lined floor. The house was anonymous and naked, just like her. She ran her hands over the incredible smoothness of her primed thighs, the harsh rigidity of the labels attached to her body, and looked all around her. She needed to start from scratch, and that was where she was, at the start of everything, polished, smooth, reduced to a minimum, labelled.

Having nothing better to do, she approached one of the mirrors.

It was then that she discovered her body was nothing more than a sheaf of lines.

Her father's scrawny, angular features bent over her, distorted by their proximity: the majestic nose, the big square glasses in which she could see the reflection of an oblong copy of herself. He spoke to her in a voice that seemed to come from a long-lost recording:

'What a sad life, a sad life; the fact is, I've no idea why I was born. How I wish I had an objective, a goal in life like you do, that would help me understand why I was born, but above all why I vanished, daughter, it's so sad, why I had to leave when you were so young, when I did not know you properly. I'd like to know why I abandoned you so soon, why I can't live with you any more. Maybe all that, the bitter separation, is due to the fact that you have to be ready, because the cameras are waiting for you, the stage is set, the dialogue is written, and the lights… look how brilliant the lights are… all for you, my beautiful daughter. And the faces watching you, staring at you: the director, the producer, the make-up artist… Come on, on to the set. I'm looking at you, watching over you, I'm not going to close my eyes. I have to look at you forever, daughter…'

Her father poked out his tongue and anxiously licked his top lip. The tongue was a tiny line darting in and out…

When Clara woke up she was on the verge of tears, or perhaps had already been crying: it is hard to tell if there are no actual tears to give the game away. She remembered her dream vividly, although she had no idea what it meant. She often dreamt of her father: he was a figure who was always part of her consciousness, someone who visited her with astonishing regularity. Uncle Pablo had once confessed he also dreamt of him. He put it down to the fact that his brother had died. 'Dead people always appear when we dream,' he used to tell her, adding that our only possibility of eternal life was to figure in other people's dreams.

She was lying on the bedroom mattress in the bleary light of dawn. As she stood up, she was struck by the white plaster on the wall in front of her, and the lines on the floorboards. She was still naked apart from her labels, but neither the fact that she had no clothes, sheets or blankets to cover her, nor the three labels attached to her body, had been able to disturb her blissful sleep. She sat on the edge of the mattress with her feet on the floor and wondered what she should do next. It was then she heard voices.

The sound came from the living room. There were at least two people, and they were speaking Dutch. They were laughing, shouting, from time to time. Perhaps the noise they had made coming into the house was what had woken her.

She did not think they could be people from Conservation or Security. Perhaps they were workmen who had come to install something, or cleaners (how absurd). It could also be the first hyperdramatic rehearsal, an improvised scene they were putting on for her benefit. Or perhaps it was the artist himself, the painter who had contracted her, who had come with his group of assistants to examine the material for himself. Whoever it was, she needed to prepare herself.

She went into the bathroom, urinated (her bladder was full to bursting, but she only now realised this), then washed herself carefully with wet paper towels. She rinsed her face with water, smoothed her hair (none of this was necessary: her face was already shiny clean, her hair looked perfect); for a few moments her mind wandered to thoughts of dresses, colours, accessories, ways of presenting herself to strangers, what the best combinations might be, until she suddenly remembered she was not in her own apartment, but somewhere in Holland, and that anyway she was a primed and labelled canvas and that she should appear exactly as she was to whoever had arrived at the house. She took a deep breath, walked across the bedroom, and opened the door.

Two men were walking to and fro between the front door and the living room.

The older of the two was struggling with a large canvas bag and did not see her as he went by. He had thinning hair, and wore a dirty T-shirt and jeans. He had long, hairy, almost ape-like arms. Behind thick glasses, his eyes looked like a pair of insects stuck in amber. But what caught Clara's attention was the turquoise-coloured label attached to a fold in his ‘I-shirt. Someone from Art, she thought with a shudder. He was the first member of that select circle she had ever met. She held her breath like a believer in the presence of one of the great patriarchs of her faith. So they were from the Art department of the Van Tysch Foundation, no less: assistants of the Maestro and Jacob Stein. They were not as she had imagined, with their ordinary-looking faces and rather ragged appearance, but still the sight of the label set her heart racing.

The other man seemed very young. He had just left a bag on the carpet, and was now busy raising the blinds over the back windows, flooding the room with the dawn light. He said something in Dutch and turned round. As he did so, he discovered Clara standing in the doorway. He stood looking at her. She smiled faintly, but thought that to present herself would be inappropriate. At that moment, the older man also dropped his bag on the floor, and saw her too.

'Well, well, well,' the younger man said in Spanish, taking a few steps towards her.

He was tall and tanned, with a crewcut of black hair. Clara liked his face: thick but well-defined eyebrows, sideburns curled like commas, a moustache and beard straight out of a Three Musketeers film. He was wearing African necklaces, earrings, bracelets and leather wristbands. The badges on his jacket were a compendium of slogans in Dutch. Beside him, the older man looked like the hunchback servant of a diabolical professor. The contrast between them could not have been greater.

They said something in Dutch, pointing at Clara. She stood quietly and calmly in the doorway, making no attempt to cover her naked body.

Once they had finished their brief dialogue, the younger one put his hand in his jeans pocket and took something out. It was a pair of pliers, with sharp, curved edges. He came over to Clara, smiling. Instinctively, she took a step backwards.

'The very first thing we do with anything we are going to prepare,' he said in a singsong Spanish with a South American accent, lifting the pliers to Clara's neck, 'is to get rid of the labels.'

Snip, snip, snip, and the three yellow pieces of cardboard fell at her feet.

She tensed her stomach muscles so that Gerardo could paint the eighth vertical line next to her navel. Gerardo wore rubber gloves and had a felt tip hanging round his neck which he used to write the number of the colour on her skin. She hardly felt him press as he wrote. Now he was using the felt-tip to draw an arabesque, a butterfly's wings under the eighth line: 8. Then he took off his gloves and started the timer.

The entire morning had been spent in the same routine. Clara was lying on her back on the chest of drawers, hands behind her neck and her legs dangling over the edge. She felt a little confused. She had always thought that the technique the Foundation's artists used must be more impulsive even than that of Bassan or Vicky, and yet here were the two men painstakingly testing colours all over her body. Gerardo was the one who painted her: he prised the lid off a tin, smeared some on his forefinger, drew a line on her stomach, then wrote the number under the line. After every three or four lines, he set up the timer and left her alone while he waited for the different colours – all of them shades of pink – to dry. Then he came back, opened another tin, and began the whole process all over again.

They had not told her their names: she had read them on their turquoise-coloured labels, next to their photos. The young one was Gerardo Williams. The older man, Justus Uhl. Clara supposed they were assistants of the main artist. Gerardo spoke Spanish very well, despite a certain Anglo-Saxon accent. She thought he could be Colombian, or maybe Peruvian. Uhl never spoke directly to her, and his way of looking at her and dealing with her was considerably more curt than Gerardo's.

On the windowpane, between her body and the sun, an insect was buzzing against the glass: its shadow made a line, a trait, across her absolute nudity. The timer went off, and Gerardo returned.

'Once we've decided on the exact tone, we'll make tests on your whole body,' he said, choosing another tin and lifting the lid. 'We'll use a porous body stocking, it's quicker. Have you ever used one before?' 'Yes.' 'Oh,' he said with a smile. ‘I w as forgetting you're an expert.' 'I'm no expert, but I've been working for several years as

…'

'Don't talk… wait a moment. Stretch out more. With your hands held together above your head, as though you were an arrow. Like this.'

She could feel his cold finger sliding down her stomach. Then the timer again. If she closed her eyes, she could guess the number by the sensations on her skin: a curl, a line, a gap. As he was writing, his hand sometimes brushed her sex.

'You're from Madrid, aren't you?' Gerardo asked, busy prising open the lid of another tin of paint. She nodded. 'I've never been to Madrid, believe it or not. In Spain I only know Barcelona. Someday I must go to Madrid.' 'Where are you from?'

'Me? From here and there. I've lived in New York, Paris, and now Amsterdam…' 'You speak very good Spanish.'

From her stiff position on the chest of drawers she could see his eyebrow arch modestly. He loves being praised, she thought. Tm very good at everything, darling.' To Clara, it did not sound like a joke. ‘I can see that.'

'Well, the truth of the matter is that my father is Puerto Rican

… this blasted tin won't open. It's shy.'

She smiled. Could there be any tin capable of resisting D'Artagnan? she thought. She watched him frown, flush with effort, grimace. His biceps were inflating like balloons.

'Uf, that's it.' As he was scraping out a sample with his finger (flesh pink like all the others, it was hard to tell the difference) he spoke to her again. 'Have you been to Amsterdam before?'

'Yes.' She recalled a trip she had made years earlier with Gabi Ponce, an adventure with rucksacks and worn-out trainers. 'I saw several works by Van Tysch in the Stedelijk.'

She could feel the cold line of paint: the first of a new row under her navel. 'Do you like Van Tysch?' Gerardo asked.

He still had his finger on her stomach. Was that an ironic gleam in his dark eyes? she wondered. 'He fascinates me. I think he's a genius.'

'Stay still for a minute. That's it… all done. I'll leave you for a bit while these dry, OK?… It's a beautiful day outside. Do you know where we are? In one of the cottages the Foundation uses for working on canvases. It's south of Amsterdam near a town called Woerden, not far from Gouda. Yes that's right, Gouda. Mmm… the cheese. Do you know this area?' – Clara shook her head. 'Further to the south there are some really pretty lakes.' He stared out of the window, then said something that really surprised her. 'Down there among the trees there's a fantastic landscape. You'd look wonderful posed there, among the trees, painted in flesh and light-pink tones.' He pointed to a spot Clara could not see from her horizontal position. 'Are you going to paint me?'

She liked his broad smile when she said that. His mouth was perhaps a little too big, but his smile showed how pleased he was.

'No darling, I'm only an assistant, as my label says. Justus is an assistant as well, but a senior one. We're only in the background of the photo. And we don't even appear with the important people at press conferences…' 'Is Van Tysch going to paint me?'

Gerardo stripped off the gloves and threw them into a bag. Clara could not see his face as he replied. 'All in good time, darling. Patience is a virtue in works of art.'

At that moment, something happened. Uhl arrived and started shouting furiously at Gerardo. His annoyance was clear.

The younger man flushed and stepped back. Clara could see it was Uhl who was in charge, and that perhaps he had criticised his assistant for talking too much to her – she was only a canvas, after all. Then Uhl turned round and stared at Clara's body stretched out on the chest. Clara gazed back at him uneasily. She hated the way those distant eyes scrutinised her from the far end of the tunnel of his glasses. She watched as he raised a finger like a knife and brought it down over her stomach. She told herself she would not move an inch unless they told her to. She tensed her muscles and waited. What's he going to do now?

She could feel Uhl's rough finger as it brushed her primed skin. He was not wearing gloves, and was the first person to touch her with his bare hands. The finger drew a line down her stomach. Clara was unsure whether this had any real purpose or was simply a way of distracting himself while he thought. She felt the finger travelling round her sex and could not avoid flinching. The finger was drawing invisible lines. The sensation did not so much excite her as lay siege to her excitement. She held in her stomach muscles and stayed as rigid as possible. The finger moved up her body, and drew a horizontal eight – or the symbol of infinity – around her breasts. Then it carried on up to her neck, her chin. She could hardly breathe. It reached her mouth, separated her lips. Clara helped by opening her jaw. The intruder felt for her tongue. And then, as if it had discovered all it needed, it withdrew.

They left her on her own. She could hear them chatting unconcernedly out on the porch.

What did Uhl's exploration of her body mean? Was it a way of judging the texture of her skin? She did not think so. She had felt quite uncomfortable during his examination.

When the timer went off, Gerardo appeared in her line of vision once more. He was wearing a fresh pair of gloves, and picked up another tin of paint.

'Justus is the boss,' he whispered. 'He's a bit special, but you'll get used to him. Which one is it now? Oh yes, shade 36.'

At midday they called her to eat. A plastic tray like an airline one was on the kitchen table. On it was a chicken and salad sandwich, a yogurt, an Aroxen juice, and half a litre of mineral water. She ate alone – the other two had their meal out on the porch. She was barefoot and naked, with a palisade of twenty-five, flesh-coloured and numbered lines painted on her stomach. After a rapid visit to the bathroom, the afternoon went on with no breaks. They painted another forty lines, this time on her back. The calendar of a shipwrecked sailor. The last of them climbed the curve of her buttocks. They left, came back to study the effect, occasionally took photos. Clara tried to convince herself that all this was a preamble, that the following day things would be different. She could not allow herself to admit that her first day of work for the Foundation was disappointing.

At a certain point, it began to grow dark. She still hadn't seen the landscape around the house.

'Don't have a shower tonight or put anything on over the lines,' Gerardo warned her. 'Lie down on your back on the mattress with the timer beside you. It will go off every two hours. Each time it does, turn over, just like a Spanish omelette.'

'Aha, OK.' 'We'll be back early tomorrow morning.' 'Aha.'

Tour dinner is in the kitchen. And remember: when you hear the timer, over you go.' He gestured with his hands. 'Like an omelette.' 'That's right.'

Gerardo's eyes shone as he smiled at her. Uhl's voice called to him, and he hastily left the room.

It happened in the middle of the night, the second time the alarm went off.

Face down on the mattress, Clara woke from her light sleep. As she turned over, her eyes still unfocused, she realised the colour of the darkness was changing.

It was very rapid, no more than the blinking of an eye. She turned her head to look out of the bedroom window on her left. All she could see were shadows, the outlines of trees and branches, yet she was sure that an instant before those shadows had been different. She leaned up, pressing her elbows into the mattress. Held her breath. Listened intently. Was that footsteps she could hear, near the window? It was hard to know, because the wind was whipping the tree branches.

She searched the darkness with her gaze. She saw her naked legs, stretching out like two parallel lines. There were only three things in the bedroom: her, the timer, and the mattress. Behind her back, the timer was ticking off the seconds.

She stood up, and walked cautiously over to the window. It was completely dark outside. It's incredible how scary darkness like this can be in the middle of the countryside, she thought. Her skin wanted to pull on its body stocking of fear, but the primer made it impossible. The window was a world of black lines. She went up to it. For a fraction of a second, a monster with yellow features floated before her eyes – but she knew she was only seeing her own reflection, so was not startled.

There was nobody out there, or at least no one she could see. She listened. The wind rustled the branches.

She protected her body with her hands, and went back to the mattress. She lay down on her back. Her heart was pounding like a hammer in her ears.

She remembered the afternoon she had left her apartment to be primed. The feeling she had just had was like that earlier one, only much more intense.

She was sure someone had been looking in at her through the window just before the timer went off.

Someone who was outside the house, in the middle of the night, keeping watch on her.