The Hypnotist

THIRTEEN

Driving past the monumental, seventeen-foot-tall sculpture by Noguchi that stood like a sentry on Fifth Avenue and Eightieth Street, Lucian pulled into the underground parking garage abutting the Metropolitan. Locking the doors, he walked through the dark, cavernous space to the museum entrance-an ironically unceremonious access to the structure that was the largest and most comprehensive art museum in the western hemisphere.

The brass-framed glass doors opened into the entryway to the children’s museum. The only artwork here was an eight-foot-long, four-foot-wide and three-foot-tall reproduction of the Parthenon. Lucian looked at the kids crowded around it, ogling the colorful statues on the frieze and peering in through the columns to the elaborate miniature of Athena. He could still remember coming here on school trips and always looking at that magical model.

For Lucian, the Met wasn’t just filled with artwork; it was a treasure trove of memories. He’d taken his first painting classes here when he was only six. He had come with his parents every Christmas for the tree lighting and to see the Neapolitan Baroque crèche, a fantastic diorama perfect in every detail down to sparkling streams, goats and barking dogs. He’d taught himself anatomy in high school by sketching the Met’s great classical sculptures and had ultimately been admitted to The Cooper Union with a portfolio of those drawings. And he’d brought Solange here the first time they’d gone out together. Walking through the galleries that day, they’d each passed a test they hadn’t known they were taking. Their zeal for art was the first thread woven into the fabric of their passion for each other.

While she’d looked at paintings, he’d stolen looks at her lovely face-perfect, he’d thought, except for the strange, pale crescent-moon-shaped mark above her right eyebrow that she covered with bangs. She had been self-conscious about the scar and made up different stories about how she’d gotten it. From a vicious babysitter with a knife when she was five. From a French poodle that had leaped up and taken a bite out of her when she was still a baby. From an incident with a hammer when she was trying to hang her first painting at school. From the devil, signaling she’d sold him her soul so she could paint better.

He’d never found out the truth.

One afternoon she’d taken him to see her favorite painting, Martin Johnson Heade’s Approaching Thunderstorm. It was a foreboding landscape with blackening clouds over an even darker body of water and a lone boy on the shore staring out into the tense sky. “All I want to do,” Solange had said fiercely, “is to be able to paint with this much authority and purity. That’s what every artist I respect does-synthesizes a moment or emotion down to its essence. No frivolity.”

Lucian didn’t often dwell on his memories of her-it had happened a long time ago-but Hawkes had asked him if he’d ever lost anyone he loved, and now he was here, where they’d spent so much time together.

Solange still stood out from the other women he’d known. How could she not? Their relationship had been cut short, never having the time to sour or turn. Their year together was like a living thing trapped in amber, protected for eternity by its method of destruction.

Walking up the simple, unadorned marble staircase from the downstairs level to the first floor, he remembered that, after seeing the Heade that day, they’d gone back to his dorm room. It was their first time, and after she’d undressed, she stood in front of him naked. Before he could reach for her, she asked him to draw her. As his hand streaked across the page he forgot how much he wanted her and became consumed with creating his version of the lithe body standing before him. She’d laughed with delight at his skill in orchestrating the charcoal’s movement. The sketch wound up being more assured and alive than anything he’d ever done.

It was a lesson that caused him to look at every piece of art differently from then on. What made something matter on paper or canvas was the intensity of the rage or obsession, the ardor or the excitement of its creator. The urgency to take the moment in, process it and give it back to the world transformed by a singular vision-that was what elevated effort into art.

On his way to meeting Olshling, Lucian walked by centuries-old naked warriors and athletes, immortalized in gleaming marble. Each was a living history of the artists and the models and the journeys of the pieces themselves. Even if their stories had been lost, like his with Solange would be when he was no longer alive to recount it, anyone moved by this art was being touched by the lives of the people who had created it, posed for it, bought it, sold it and treasured it-and even those who had stolen it.

Tyler Weil, Nicolas Olshling and a half-dozen other museum personnel blocked Lucian’s view, but whatever they were looking at had drained all the energy out of the room. He felt as if he’d walked in on a wake.

“Agent Glass, thanks for coming.” Olshling came over to greet him and left enough of a gap for Lucian to see a riot of colors-bright lemon, sharp green, cool blue. He stepped closer and stared down at the serrated streamers and threads of canvas. He was doing his job, listening to Olshling explain, while examining a brutally vandalized painting.

“It’s a Matisse.”

Lucian glanced up. The speaker was a woman in her seventies who had her arms crossed across her chest and was regarding him with hostility. Usually people’s reactions to him didn’t matter, but this woman was making him uneasy. He turned back to the painting.

Yes, even in ruins, the artist’s hand, palette and brushstrokes weren’t just recognizable-they were unmistakable.

“The painting has quite a history,” Tyler Weil said. “It’s entitled View of St. Tropez, and it’s been in the FBI’s national stolen art file for about twenty years.”

Lucian had seen this painting only in photographs. Finally looking at it, staring at it, despite everything it symbolized for him, he didn’t react. All he could think of was that the photographs he’d seen had not done the painting justice, even in this damaged state.

Then, suddenly, bile rose in his throat and his stomach spasmed. Lucian didn’t exhibit any outward sign of his inner turmoil. What was that Einstein quote William Hawkes had told him? Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. But Lucian didn’t believe in God, either.

Everyone in this room might be aware that this painting had disappeared twenty years ago, but Lucian was the only one who knew the day and the hour. He knew it almost to the minute, because this was the masterpiece that had been stolen by an unknown assailant who had tricked his way inside a well-protected framing gallery, brutally stabbed two teenagers and fled the scene. Solange had died that day because she’d still been at the store waiting for Lucian while he’d been in his studio, playing so hard at being an artist he’d forgotten what time it was.