The Hypnotist

FOUR

The boy was only sixteen years old, but he stood over the fallen soldier with a look of total control and calm. The soldier writhed and moaned, a coward’s crying. Around them the battlefield was still; there were bodies everywhere. It seemed that these two were the last men left alive, except the boy wasn’t alive in the same way the soldier was.

The undead can’t be.

“Please,” the soldier begged. “I was only following orders.”

The look in the pale boy’s eyes said that had been the wrong answer. “All this…” He spread his hand out over the devastation. “And you didn’t even believe in the reason you were fighting?”

The wounded soldier stared up at him.

“You could have at least died a hero,” the boy said almost wistfully.

“There are no heroes anymore…” The bloodied fighter managed a disgusted snort.

The expression on the boy’s face was both an answer and a promise. “There will be, there have to be,” he whispered. And then the zombie turned and walked into the encroaching darkness.

For a few seconds there was total silence.

“And that’s a wrap!” Darius Shabaz’s deep voice boomed out, his French accent very much evident. “Bravo!”

The director watched the actors break character, the grips shut down the lights and the set become flat and two-dimensional again. This transitional time when fantasy became reality again always left him depressed.

Making the rounds, he thanked the cast and crew for all their hard work and invited everyone to the final wrap party later that evening.

“Masterful job, Mitch. Thank you, once again,” Shabaz said when he reached his director of photography.

“It’s your vision, Darius. We’ve got another winner here.”

At six-and-a-half feet tall and only 160 pounds, Shabaz towered over everyone and moved faster than any of them. He exuded so much energy one of his assistants once joked that she used to wait for the thunder to follow his lightning.

It took the better part of an hour to talk to everyone. It had been a long day-they’d started filming outdoors at six that morning to catch the early light-but Shabaz wasn’t tired. At fifty-three, he ran fifteen miles a week, lifted weights, never drank and was fanatical about what he ate. The silver threads in his thick black hair were the only outward signs of his age. Shabaz had been brought up to revere his body. “We are all we own,” his grandfather had always told him.

Outside the shooting stage, the sun was just starting to drop down and the orange groves that stretched out almost a mile in every direction were suffused with a warm glow. Glancing at his watch, he calculated that his driver would be getting back from Santa Barbara in twenty minutes and paced himself accordingly as he set off on his end-of-the-workday walk.

Shabaz had come to America to attend film school when he was seventeen, and while he retained his French citizenship, he’d never gone home again. He was directing by the time he was twenty-two and was responsible for one of the highest grossing horror pictures of all time by the age of thirty. Five years after that he started his own studio. He focused on supernatural plots about the dead coming back to life-vampires, zombies and mummies-but always for noble purposes.

While critics labeled him as a B movie director with messianic delusions, filmgoers ignored the negative reviews. Word of mouth kept people standing in line even in the dead of winter without complaining when a new Shabaz movie debuted. It was often remarked that fans preferred to see his films in theaters as opposed to renting them. It wasn’t just because his grand and gory visions were better suited to the big screen, but because seeing them in a roomful of people who collectively gasped was exhilarating.

Passing the main gatepost, Shabaz circled the compound, which included four soundstages, a theater, an editing studio, an employees’ gym, a day-care center, a medical building, a commissary and a dozen bungalows. His architect had relied on natural woods and stone so all the structures seemed to have sprung out of the earth and looked as indigenous to the landscape as the orange and eucalyptus trees.

Shabaz’s loop ended at the southwest corner where bungalow number six sat on the edge of a small pond. His office was here, along with a private screening room and a bedroom suite for when he stayed over. His olive-drab Range Rover was parked in the driveway, his driver leaning on the car, having a smoke.

“Hey, Mr. Shabaz,” the driver said, tipping his Shabaz Films baseball cap with its distinctive emerald-green lightning bolt.

“How badly did they soak us this time, Mike?”

“Not too bad. Everything was under warranty but the new tires. These were a couple of hundred dollars more, but they should last seventy-five thousand miles instead of twenty, which was all we got out of the last set.”

“Which means these will get us about forty-five?”

“If we’re lucky.” The driver grinned. “Are you going to be needing me tonight?”

Shabaz shook his head. “No, I’m working late, so either I’ll drive myself home or stay over. See you tomorrow.”

The driver doffed his cap for the second time and walked off toward the main parking lot while Shabaz inspected the new wheels. Or so it would have looked to anyone watching. In reality, he was checking to ensure no one was around. Even though there was nothing suspicious about a man taking a package out of his own car, he didn’t want an audience.

Inside the bungalow, he greeted the night guard on duty and proceeded to the screening room. With the door locked behind him, Shabaz walked down the aisle past the dozen black leather lounge chairs. The floor and walls were covered with industrial carpet in a subtle pattern of squares in different shades of gray, and in the low light it was impossible to tell that one of the panels was actually a door.

The room on the other side was paneled in similar modular squares, but these were constructed from a blend of concrete and additives engineered for maximum crush resistance. Each was only three inches thick but ten times as strong as an eighteen-inch-thick panel of regular formula cement. They were both fireproof and watertight; nothing but a full-out nuclear attack would destroy them.

There were three identical vaults on the lot, all with the same specs: twenty-five-hundred square feet and designed to withstand an earthquake-or as close to it as engineering could come. Shabaz had never corrected his architect’s assumption that film negative would be stored here as well as in the other two vaults. And since no one but the movie director had ever been in this room once it had been completed, the contents of this vault remained a secret.

Tonight, Shabaz didn’t focus on any of the precious art objects that lined the shelves. It was the easels set up in a semi-circle that commanded all of his attention. Four of the five had paintings resting on them-paintings that Shabaz, who had a connoisseur’s eye, believed were among the finest examples of each artist’s oeuvre.

View of the Sea at Scheveningen, by Vincent Van Gogh, was a gray-green, stormy painting: a turbulent emotional reaction to a cloudy, raw day at the beach resort near The Hague. Since the artist was known to paint en plein, it was not surprising that there were actual grains of sand mixed in with the paint that Shabaz had felt with his fingertips the few times he dared touch the impasto canvas.

Beach at Pourville, by Claude Monet, was as peaceful as the Van Gogh was violent. It had a lushness that made Shabaz feel as if he were breathing in the salty air. The lavender blue sky, the green sea and sandy shore were painted with a loose brush, but the overall impression was more transportive than a photograph could have been.

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady was an evocative, mysterious painting. There was yearning in the dark-haired woman’s almond-shaped eyes and a certain petulance in her full lips. The deep green-blue background hinted at the forest, and in her light yellow dress, she might have been an unexpected and glorious wildflower.

The fourth painting, the smallest, was a jewel. The Renoir was only ten inches by twelve inches, but the bouquet of pink roses was so exuberant and lush, Shabaz had been fooled more than once into thinking their scent was perfuming the room.

Now there was a fifth painting to join the others.

Carefully Shabaz stripped away the butcher paper and multiple layers of Bubble Wrap, finally revealing a cacophony of colors. As if he were handling butterfly wings, he lifted the canvas and placed it on the only empty easel.

Stepping back, he took his first full look at the Matisse masterwork, View of St. Tropez.

The exuberant brushstrokes, which appeared so primitive up close, created a luminous beach scene when viewed from a few feet away. It was brighter and louder than the Monet-there was more joy in this painting, less contemplation. It might be the best of the lot.

His hands trembled, and he felt slightly nauseated. It had taken him over two years and had cost six million dollars to assemble this particular group of paintings. Step one of his plan was finally complete. His eyes drifted from one masterpiece to the next. Which one was he going to choose? Maybe the Renoir-perhaps the still life might be less intimidating.

It wasn’t the money that bothered him but the act he was about to commit. The cost was certainly substantial, but he’d paid far less for all of the paintings together than what any one of them was worth; fencing stolen paintings of this caliber was difficult. None ever sold for close to their real value. The Renoir was worth eight million, but he’d paid only a million. The Matisse would cost thirty-five million with a clean provenance, but he’d paid only two and a half.

Which one? Which one should he choose? Of all the paintings the Van Gogh was the most valuable, so he’d hold that one out as a carrot. The Klimt would be the least devastating loss.

A Williams-Sonoma shopping bag had been sitting in a corner of the vault for the past month. Inside was a single item, a Shun Kaji Paring knife that he’d purchased for $134.95 in cash. The time had come. Was it going to be the Monet or the Matisse?

Shabaz walked up to the Monet, then over to the Matisse. He paced between them slowly for the next ninety seconds.

Finally, he came to a decision. With the point of the knife mere inches from the canvas, Shabaz noticed the serene blues and greens mirrored on the blade. How on earth could he do this? Even the reflection was a masterpiece.