The Hypnotist

FIVE

“He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.”

– Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Lucian tore the page off the pad. Even before it landed on the pile of previously discarded drawings, his pencil was streaking across a new sheet with grace, authority and an economy of motion. The human face that emerged looked out at him, terror in her eyes. It had taken him less than fifteen minutes to bring the stranger to life, and although the portrait was more than competent, he wasn’t satisfied. Ripping the page off, he started again on a clean sheet.

It was the hour before first light when New York City was still gravely quiet-especially downtown, where he lived in an old, refurbished factory on Sullivan Street. The large loft had a separate sleeping area and bathroom but otherwise was wide open, with oversize windows facing north that offered a sliver of skyline, beautiful in the abstract, not hinting of the danger that was always lying in wait.

He stopped drawing, lifted his head up and listened to a car roar down the street, curious that such an ordinary sound could take on such ominous overtones. It was the hour when otherworldly visitations seemed possible even to someone who’d never believed in ghosts. Or in life after death. Or in God. Or in anything that he couldn’t prove. Lucian was a disciple of logic, of action and reaction. Long ago he’d trained himself never to waste any time looking backward, but that had changed in the two weeks since a still unknown assailant had discovered the hidden entranceway into the Memorist Society’s library and had lain in wait until Dr. Erika Alderman handed Lucian the paper that detailed a partial list of Memory Tools.

The list was gone, and Alderman had died of sustained injuries. Lucian had spent a week in the hospital with a concussion that caused dizziness and constant headaches. The symptoms the doctors feared most never manifested; he had no loss of memory, muscle weakness or paralysis-any of which would have suggested progressive brain damage. Arming him with powerful painkillers and telling him the headaches might take several weeks or months to completely resolve, the doctors had released him and cleared him to travel as long as he promised to rest when he got home.

Yesterday he’d tried to go back to work, but his boss, Doug Comley, had kicked him out, insisting that Lucian heed the doctors’ orders and spend at least another week recuperating.

His hand moved in long sweeps across the sheet of paper as he filled in the lines of the woman’s jaw, her neck, her collarbone. There was no conscious thought involved in the action; his hand was moving on its own. He was thinking about what else Comley had told him.

When Malachai Samuels was well enough to be interrogated about the list of Memory Tools that had been stolen from the Memorist Society during the murder of Dr. Erika Alderman, Matt Richmond was going be the agent to interview him, not Lucian.

Matt was the optimistic, energetic dynamo on their team. Lucian trusted him implicitly, but this wasn’t Matt’s case.

“That should be my interview, Doug.”

“How many reasons do you want why you’re wrong? Let’s start with the fact that you helped save the man’s life in Vienna. He knows that. You know that. Think there’s objectivity there? Next, you’re still recovering from injuries inflicted during the crime in question. You’re one of the victims, Lucian.”

“It’s still my case.”

“What happened in Vienna is the department’s case, Agent Glass.”

When Comley started addressing agents formally, it was time to back off, but Lucian couldn’t. “Are you removing me entirely?”

“No. You’re not off the case, but I don’t want you near Malachai Samuels.” He handed Lucian a file. “This is where we are. It’s everything we have. If you want my advice don’t even open it. Go home, Lucian. Sleep. Go to the movies. Read a book. Eat some good food. Call Gilly and talk to her, see if you can patch things up-”

“Because suddenly she won’t care that as soon as you let me I’ll be back working as hard as I ever did? Thanks, Doug,” Lucian interrupted. He put the folder under his arm and stood up.

“I want my agents to be committed, but at some point this stopped being your job and became your mission. And obsessions can be unhealthy.”

Lucian wished he appreciated his boss’s paternal efforts, but Comley wanted him married with two kids. On the other hand, he knew Lucian well enough to know how much he needed to review the file. It was disturbingly lacking in substantive evidence. While the Austrian police had been thorough, they had no suspects. The Memorist Society’s locked library had been violated via a tunnel running beneath the structure. Apparently Vienna had a complex underground: layers of ancient communities going back to Roman times that included burial sites, sewers and tunnels, making it possible to cross from one part of the city to another without going aboveground.

The file included hand-drawn maps showing a series of passageways that snaked through thirteenth-century Christian catacombs under the Karmeliterkirche-a baroque church in the Leopoldstadt area-and miles later wound up in the subbasement of the Memorist Society. From there, a staircase that was part of the original eighteenth-century structure led to a secret entrance to the library. The police had found evidence confirming that was how the perpetrator of the attack on Dr. Erika Alderman and Lucian Glass had gotten into and out of the locked room. Now, as he continued to draw, Lucian turned over the same litany of questions that had been plaguing him since he’d regained consciousness in the hospital. Who had attacked him? A member of the Memorist Society? Someone working for Malachai Samuels? Or someone working for Dr. Alderman in a convoluted plot of her own invention?

Ripping the sketch off the pad, he let it, too, fall on the floor and started again. Maybe this time he’d get the woman’s expression right. He could see her so clearly in his mind’s eye.

Although Lucian had stopped painting and quit art school after Solange’s death, he’d never stopped sketching. In his capacity as an FBI agent he drew suspects the way other agents took notes. But this was something new. Ever since the attack he had felt the need to draw these faces…was driven to it.

Once he’d come back to New York he’d sought out a neurologist, who looked at his X-rays and concurred with the doctors in Vienna: his injury wasn’t severe, he’d recover fully and the headaches would eventually subside. The neurologist didn’t think the early-morning sketching sessions were a side effect-he’d never encountered anything like it before but would investigate, and if he discovered any similar cases he would let Lucian know. He also suggested, because of Lucian’s medical history, that he visit a psychologist. Since he’d been violently attacked before, he might be suffering from PTSD. Lucian hadn’t followed up.

The face looking up at him now was suffused with fear but still not what he saw in his head. She might have been his tenth or his twentieth attempt-he’d stopped counting. There was always some elusive quality missing to his predawn sketches. Except he wasn’t drawing these women from life, so how did he know there was something absent? He’d never seen her or any of the others, so why did he feel as if he’d spent months looking at her?

Lucian had never been someone to feel fear, but in the days since his return from Austria, he woke up afraid, bathed in sweat, with his heart pounding. He’d lie in his bed feeling where his legs and torso and shoulders and spine met the sheets, aware of his naked body as if it were new to him-as if, while he’d been sleeping, he’d traveled off without it, left it behind, and was slipping back into it. He was relieved by its suppleness. He’d try to fall asleep again, but his need to draw was too strong, even though it was unreasonable. So he’d give in.

But it wasn’t quite giving in, because he’d come to crave the frenzied sketching the way some people craved sex. Even though he knew the process of rendering the faces wouldn’t end in orgiastic ecstasy but in despair, he was still addicted. While he couldn’t recollect the details of the nightmares that woke him, the faces of the women he saw during those dreams remained with him, their eyes filled with anger, sadness or fear, and the time he spent committing their pain to paper was wrenching. It was as if by exposing the darkness of these lost souls he was exposing his own darkness and forcing himself to look into an abyss that he had long since abandoned as unfathomable.

Of all the dozen people whose portraits he’d drawn over and over, two women reappeared more often than the others. He knew the texture of their hair and the exact arches of their brows. He knew how the shadows fell across their faces and the structures of their bones. And he knew they were accusing him. But of what?

As the dark sky gave way to the first rays of light, Lucian put down the pencil. The pile of discarded drawings was on the floor. He looked at them and then kicked them away.