The Last Family

36

“What now?” Laura said as she surveyed the five agents who were standing on the porch. Reid, behind her, was looking over her shoulder.

“I don’t want to alarm you,” Thorne said. “Martin has been in New Orleans in the last few days.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Come in. The three of you standing there like that, I was thinking you were going to tell me something had happened to Paul.” She smiled nervously. What a strange thing to think… to say.

“I was just going to make some coffee,” Reid said, turning and going off down the hall.

Thorne cleared the door, followed by Woody and Sean, leaving the two local agents on the porch. “Paul had ordered us to move in closer. In light of Martin’s possible presence, nothing else makes sense.”

“How about the porch? I could get a desk and some cots and a phone line.”

“This isn’t a joke, Laura. The man is-”

“Don’t say dangerous, Thorne,” Laura said. “Make yourselves at home. You don’t have to sell me.”

“More surveillance agents are coming on to watch the exterior. We’re going to put a few uniforms around the streets near the house.”

“There’s Reid’s room for your guys, and I can move Reb in with Erin, so that frees two more single beds. You can bivouac the national guard in the yard if you’d like, just keep them out of my studio.” She turned and walked into the studio. “Make yourself at home. I have work to do.”

“Laura. My orders are not to allow you or the children out of the house for the next forty-eight hours. We’re going to start with the trip home from school today.”

“Who gave the orders?”

“Paul.” Thorne leaned close and whispered to Laura. “Martin is in Florida waiting for someone we know he’s meeting with. But there’s a chance a partner may try something to keep us off his trail. Kidnapping one of you is a distinct possibility-even killing someone.”

“I see. Just forty-eight hours?” She tried to imagine her life back in her control. Forty-eight hours and she’d be free? She decided she could stand almost anything for forty-eight hours.

“Within forty-eight hours everything should be over.”

“I suppose he wants to move us.”

“Well, we feel we can watch you here just as well as anywhere. And we’d have to expose you while we moved you. We’re going to have dogs go over the house and property to check for any… unusual things.”

“I would have assumed the idea is for you guys to be conspicuous. At least I hope so. A few troopers milling around won’t bother me in the least. I’ll explain it to the children.”

Thorne followed Laura into the studio. He stood and stared at the three large canvases on the far wall. One, the centerpiece, was of Reid standing in a mountain meadow at night surrounded by young sheep and illuminated by the light of a fire, which was out of frame to the right-based on the light fall and the shadows. In his right hand, held at midpoint, was a tall staff, carved over with scales, with the triangular head of a serpent at its topmost point. The base of the staff, which ended in the grass, was actually a gleaming spear tip, which reflected the firelight, a golden orange. Two freshly born lambs, their translucent skin accented with rivers of blue vein, were cradled in the hook of his left arm. One rested its head against Reid’s chest and had a look of peace, while the other was in a state of wide-eyed terror. In the shadows of the trees, barely visible as lighter-shadow shapes, were a pack of wolves, their eyes lit orange. One of the wolves, the one in the foreground, was very large, and his eyes were bright-yellow points on an otherwise featureless, and singularly sinister, form.

“Jesus,” Thorne said. “That’s one very amazing picture. Sure ain’t Disney.” Laura looked amused. “What does it mean?”

“Nothing much,” she said absently. “Well, maybe that shepherd who bears some resemblance to Reid is protecting his sheep from wolves. It isn’t so very deep.”

“You got the idea from literature?”

“I got the idea from the way he was standing when he exited the shower one day and struck that pose. I thought… Am I embarrassing you, Thorne? — I’m divorced four years now.”

“Oh, no-hellfire, Laura. I live in L.A. It’s just the shock is all… I mean, seeing the man naked like that.”

“That’s strange. Naked, you say? Yes, must be some sort of coincidence. Maybe it’s because he was naked while he posed.” She laughed, and it was a full, relaxed sound.

“I didn’t mean… Laura, I’m no judge of art, but-you got your kids here.”

“Reb and Erin have both known the details of the human anatomy for several years.” She fought the urge to laugh out loud.

“What would you do if Paul saw it?”

“Thorne! Paul and I haven’t spoken in years. What makes you think he cares if I paint nudes?”

“He cares.”

“About what?”

“About you, the children.”

“How can you tell? Because I sure can’t.”

“I can just tell, that’s all. You don’t know what it took to get him out of that place. He almost had a nervous breakdown at the idea of leaving. Until we told him you and the kids were in danger, he wouldn’t hear of it. Take my word.”

Laura studied Thorne for a few long seconds. “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you? You believe it, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“How does he look, Thorne? How does he seem now?”

Reid entered with a tray of coffee and set it on the table.

“Thorne, coffee?” he asked.

“No. We were discussing the painting.”

“They don’t have male nudes in Los Angeles, it seems,” Laura said, laughing.

“Sure they do, we have lots. No place more loose than Hollyweird. But, Reid, doesn’t it make you nervous to have this up on a wall? I mean, in all your natural splendor, and all for the world to see? I mean, you’re no mystery anymore.”

“No. But I have to admit that the thought of this hanging”-he realized he was pointing at the genitals and smiled at Thorne-“this painting hanging in some Bavarian industrialist’s great room and being stared at by strangers for the next three or four centuries is hard to handle. Maybe being the twisted fantasy of some young lassie not yet born. I’ll be some dead and dusty memory, but this thing will be exactly as it is now. That’s the strangest part to me. For the time that canvas lasts, I will always be thirty-something.”

“Just like Jack Benny,” Laura said.

“What do you think of the others?” Reid asked.

“I hope you won’t take this question wrong, Laura, but what do you get for a painting like this?” He pointed at the picture of Reb in a toga with Wolf, standing on the steps of a ruined temple. Wolf was staring at the viewer, and there was a dead asp, belly up, under the dog’s paws-blood-red where the serpent’s flesh had been shredded by the dog. Reb’s skin was translucent, like that of the lambs in the painting of Reid, the blue veins showing. The dog’s eyes were crystalline blue, interchangeable replicas of his master’s.

“I’m not sure,” Laura said. “They’re asking one hundred twenty-five for this series of three.”

“That seems really cheap,” Thorne said. “Maybe I can buy one of my dog, Sambo? Not this big, though. I wouldn’t have a place to put it in my apartment. Maybe horizontal instead of vertical, and love-seat size instead of sofa. Is that about the same money, huh?”

“Or you could take a photograph of the dog and use the difference you’d save to buy a new Rolls convertible,” Reid said.

Thorne’s mouth opened, and he stared dumbfounded for a split second. Then he laughed. “You mean a hundred twenty-five thousand?”

Laura smiled. “I know it’s obscene, considering the people you could feed with that.”

“Jesus,” Thorne said. There was a new respect in his eyes. “Could you teach me how to do that?” The light mood was broken by the sight of the two agents carrying boxes down the hall toward the stairs.

“I’ll show them where to put that,” Laura said, leaving the ballroom.

“She’s very talented,” Reid said. “They’ll bring ten times that someday.”

“A million dollars! Jeez.”

“It isn’t out of the question.”

“Well, it’s out of my question and answer.” Thorne turned to look at Reid. “I keep thinking that we’ve met before.”

“You’ve met all of me,” Reid said, indicating the painting.