The Hypnotist

TEN

Tyler Weil herded the second-graders through the double glass doors of the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The children immediately responded to the hangar-size space and broke ranks. Some ran toward the sloping north wall where the thirty-foot-tall floor-to-ceiling windows looked out into the park; others wanted to see the shallow moat where copper and silver coins sparkled underwater. But the majority of them clambered up the stone steps to the eighty-two-foot-long Temple of Dendur.

When their teacher started to protest and tried to rein them in, Weil shook his head and said, “There’s no better way to interest them in art than to let them play around it and in it.”

The Met’s new director always looked forward to Tuesday mornings, when he left his fourth-floor office and gave these guided tours to schoolchildren. He felt that he was discovering the museum through their eyes in a way that would help him steward it.

Today’s group was special because among the children was Veronica Keyes, the granddaughter of a director of the museum’s board and one of its most generous benefactors. Nina and Veronica were regulars at the Trustees Dining Room for Sunday brunch.

The little girl was standing in front of the fifteen-foot-tall temple-not running around it, playing in it or ignoring it like some of the other kids, but surveying it. Nina had called him earlier that morning to ask him to keep an eye out for Veronica. As much as she loved the museum, she’d become distraught the past few times she’d visited, panicking when she walked into the main lobby, shrieking and wailing as if she were being chased or hunted. When Tyler had met the class at the school entrance earlier he’d been on alert, but Veronica had been fine.

Tyler found her by the moat, looking up at the temple, very contemplative for a seven-year-old.

“Do you like the temple?” he asked.

She nodded. “It came a far way.”

“Yes, all the way from Egypt. Do you want to see on the map?”

“Don’t you think I know where Egypt is?” she said, so indignant that Tyler had to swallow a smile. “It should have more trees around it,” she added.

“Why?”

“So the people who pray and make sacrifices here have somewhere cool to rest afterward.”

Nina often regaled the board of directors with Veronica’s precociousness. She read at a fourth-grade level already and devoured history books. “As if she’s on a quest to find out,” Nina had said.

“I’ll let the head gardener know and see if we can fit in a few more trees.”

“Can we go see the rocodial now?”

Weil smiled at the way she pronounced the word. “Yes, we can.”

Together they walked over to the moat surrounding the temple, where two boys were pointing to the stone sculpture of a small crocodile and making faces at the red granite, first-century-BCE crocodile.

“Have any of you ever seen a real crocodile?” Weil asked.

The taller of the two boys, whose shirt was pulled out of his pants and whose shoelaces were undone, shook his head without taking his eyes off the sculpture. The other, who had a bruise on his chin, said, “I did. In Florida. It had ginormous teeth. Can we see this crocodile’s teeth?”

Weil explained how it was a sculpture and static. “Just like in Florida, they had crocodiles in ancient Egypt, too. They lived on the banks of the Nile and were extremely dangerous-some even say the most dangerous creatures the Egyptians had to deal with.”

“Didn’t they have bears?” asked the child with the bruise.

“Don’t be silly, of course not,” Veronica said.

“Well, maybe they did,” the boy countered.

Before Weil could intervene, he felt the vibration of his cell phone against his hip.

It was his assistant saying it was urgent Weil meet Nicolas Olshling in the shipping department.

Weil had been director of the MMA for five months and this was his first potential crisis. A knot formed in the pit of his stomach as he searched the light-filled room for one of the teachers to let them know he needed to cut the tour short.

Five minutes later he was standing in the windowless shipping room of New York’s greatest museum looking at the contents of an unpacked crate, at what he could only describe as a tragedy, staring hypnotically into a lemon-yellow sun shining over a watery azure sea. The bright orb-or what was left of it-burned his eyes. He felt as if someone had just knifed right through his soul, even though it was the Matisse seascape that was no longer intact.

The painting that lay like a corpse on the stainless steel table had been slashed into ragged ribbons, the irregular strips of canvas attached only at the top to the stained wooden stretcher.