A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (32 page)

Owen then saw his shadow imprinted on a Sheetrock panel. He didn't remember making that imprint, but no one else could have left a six-eight trace. Kurt had spotlit the image and hung it upside down, so that it dominated the room like an anti-crucifix.

Owen took two steps and then jumped and gripped hard on either end. He swung with the piece, temporarily suspended by the framing wire, then jerked down, dropping his weight and snapping the suspension cables that held it aloft. He landed squarely on two feet and brought the panel down with him, cracking it in two over his knees. He threw the two halves to the side and turned around.

Kurt clapped. He sat in his wheelchair, twenty feet away, crowned by life-size gelatin-silver prints of Owen being wrenched: Owen naked with his arms to the side, electrodes wiring his fingers to a car battery; Owen flat on the ground, carving out the very splint of wood on display and wearing a nylon braided leash that ran from his red neck to Brigitte's hand; and to complete the triptych, a full frontal shot of him on the spool with Saskia and Brigitte in wet clothes licking his leg, clawing his ribs, and offering him to the camera with cupped hands.

Hal circled around Kurt and Owen like a boxer working a heavy bag. The only noise was his shutter slicing in a continuous whirr. The two escaped models came sliding up in bathrobes. They nestled in next to Eva & Adele, who for the first time weren't smiling. The models running through the halls of Basel had corralled half of the fair's attendees. Billionaires with light-up LED bar coasters, Hal's idea, continued to file in. The ring was closing. Altberg stood next to Zeale, calculating the cumulative net worth of the hemisphere. The white party was here, now washed ultramarine and shoaling together like glittering fish. Louise Bourgeois was the eye, whispering which way to move and what Lady Percy and her followers should be looking for in the performance.

The last echo of Kurt's clap died in the rafters. Hal released the shutter and checked the exposure value on his camera. For a moment, there was total silence.

Kurt cracked his neck—two quick pops on the right side, three slow cracks on the left—locked the brakes of the wheelchair, and slapped a palm on each armrest. Hoisting himself like a gymnast on a pommel horse, he swung open his legs and then clapped them together in front of him as he leapt to the ground. He stuck the landing, rose to full height, and pumped his fists to the sky. He looked around, expecting a roomful of applause, but satisfied with shock, awe, and silence.

With three long strides Kurt closed half the distance between himself and Owen. Those first steps were quick and decisive, Kurt still trusting that he was the biggest presence in Europe. But once he reached Owen's shadow, he slowed, eventually to a stop.

The ring of spectators clamped shut. Each movement, however slight, annealed the three rows of tailored jackets, five-figure pantsuits, bathrobes, and all variety of uniform. The crowd, now malleable, expanded with Owen's inhale, contracted in a tight flex with his exhale. All filtered blue and the crowd breathing through gritted teeth, wheezing like the blue jets of a flame. Though they were all prepared for violence, no one expected the suddenness and finality of the show.

—I stand for art. While the world stands idly by. The role of—

Owen's white eye and fast approach truncated Kurt's monologue. Kurt kept his arms to his side, squinted with every muscle of his face, and clenched his teeth in anticipation of Owen's looping right fist. Hal, inches away, focused on Kurt's jaw, shutter whirring to capture the punch.

Owen swung wide of Kurt's ear then jerked him forward by the base of the neck. Kurt mouthed the air once, like a goldfish, in the quarter second it took Owen to hook the frayed cuff of his own left sleeve with two fingers of his right hand, locking the choke. Owen sliced his left forearm in front of Kurt's trachea. Kurt could breathe well enough to sneer and spit out a few expletives, thinking he would be fine.

But this was a blood choke. Kurt's victory of breath was meaningless. Like a gaping fish on a deck, he needed circulation, not air.

Owen compressed both carotid arteries and twisted his right wrist until Kurt went from flushed to thundercloud blue. The stitching on Owen's left sleeve held. He hanged Kurt high, pinning him against the wall, jolted him up and then slammed him into the photo of Owen on the floor with a dog collar around his neck. Mere inches separated Owen's ulnae. Kurt's neck in between.

Kurt's combat boots skidded the floor in two parallel lines running from the wheelchair to Owen's shins. He wound up and kicked at Owen's knee, groin, but it didn't matter. He tapped Owen on the back and then began hammering down on Owen's spine. The beats came muted and rhythmic like the patter of fingertips over covered ears.

Owen found Stevie in the background of the photo. Blurred from profile to turning away, caught in doorlight, retreating in disgust. Owen saw white.

After two kicks landed and did nothing, Kurt lost the focus of his struggle. He looked to Altberg, who was smiling. He looked to Hal, who was still taking pictures.

Owen leaned into the choke. Ear to ear with Kurt, Owen ground his own forehead into the picture on the wall, looking at the reflection of the crowd behind him as the glossy print fireworked with the flashes. Owen sliced his left arm even farther across Kurt's throat. Five seconds and Kurt would pass out, ten seconds and he might be dead. But Owen was in pure space, stomping down time whenever it bubbled up under his feet. Unable to count the seconds, he had no way of knowing how long the choke was on and the flow of blood to Kurt's brain blocked.

Kurt's kicking stopped. Owen had been holding him up, pinning his weight into the wall, so there was no telling when exactly Kurt went limp. Owen dropped the body. Head, shoulders, arms, and hips all landed in the same heap and simultaneously struck the left armrest of the wheelchair, which flipped over as if it had been hit by a tossed trash bag of half-filled bottles and cans.

Altberg pawed at the wheelchair, making a halfhearted attempt to lift it from Kurt's body but clearly waiting for someone else to step up and do the actual work. Hal waved him out of the frame and kept shooting until the memory card was full. He fumbled the reload and missed the shot of Owen parting the crowd of toreadors and sprinting away.

For the first time in Owen's life, he found the part of a curtain. The Desai installation was empty and he strode into the main gallery. He sprinted past million-dollar art without anyone so much as telling him to slow down. Ahead, he saw guards in blue berets adjusting the volume knobs of their walkie-talkies. He would have to outrun information.

Which was impossible. Two police with guns were at the main door. He ran straight toward them. Four palms told him to stop. When he was closer, the one on his right told him to stop running. Owen slowed to a fast walk. One guard put his hand on a Taser. The other stepped forward and grabbed Owen's lapel.

Owen picked up a marble head and threw it into the air, forcing them to catch it and release him or let the artwork crack on the ground.

Owen knew the rule for fighting more than one person: Throw your first punch at the guy you haven't been looking at. It wasn't quite a punch; Owen planted his right foot and shoved the larger cop on his blind side. The officer took the brunt of Owen's assault without so much as a stagger, his chest a springboard that sent Owen careening toward the door. The officer he had been looking at caught the falling head.

Into the night. Owen circled behind a crowd of tourists and waited for a whistle or a gunshot. A carousel crowd circling around him, heads tilted back and laughing theatrically. Half the faces lit with cell phones. A parking lot attendant in a navy windbreaker yelled. Just before the fair, Owen had stashed his bag on top of a hexagonal kiosk. He was now at the kiosk, jumping up and swiping for his bag's handle. He caught it and ran away before the report echoed throughout Basel.

The Rhine pulled him downhill. The mass of tourists and art elite clogged in front of a stopped tram.

Then someone grabbed his left hand.

He sank.

The eddies, the electric, and her voice. He sank further.

—Easy. This is your little burned-out ring. Just stay calm.

The tram darted away, and the crowd vectored out like an asterisk. Stevie pulled him into the largest current.

—I killed Kurt.

—What?

—I killed Kurt.

She pulled him away from the tourists, who may not have all spoken English but could all comprehend
killed
. They veered to the Wettstein bridge to the left bank of the Rhine. The bridge was at least a quarter mile. If police came in either direction, he'd have to jump.

—You're fine. They staged it. He's done that before. At first it was like someone shattered an aquarium. People spilled out the main entrance, flopping all around, gasping and lost. I thought you set the place on fire until security started shouting for a doctor. But they were being filmed too.

—What?

—Look, I think Kurt planned all of this, but we've still got to run. I thought we could take a kayak a quarter mile downstream to the French border and get a friend to meet us. Then I had a better idea.

—You don't understand. He's dead. No more.

—Breathe. There are about fifty cops around here, and after the few alarmists finished screaming, all of the radios said to ignore the distress call, that it was all part of the show. As far as the cops are concerned, it's all dismissible as art.

—He's dead.

—I can guarantee that Kurt would never actually become a martyr; he would only pretend. I'm sure the whole thing was staged.

—He wanted me to punch him. Hal was taking pictures. Kurt can walk. The whole wheelchair thing was a game.

—I'm not waiting around until you start making sense. We need to get you out of Basel. So. Breathe. And take this.

Stevie handed Owen a yellow carbon with some numbers scrawled in boxes and a lackadaisical signature at the bottom.

—What's this?

—This is how you avoid life in prison. We're going on a cruise.

Owen squinted at the typed header of the carbon:
VALHALLA RIVER CRUISES
. He still didn't quite understand.

—We're sailing the Rhine from Basel to Amsterdam. Six days. Nothing but mouth-breathers—people that police ignore. These are the people you want to be with right now.

—I can't pay for this.

—We're booked. You're holding the receipt. I booked us a cabin. The money is spent.

Owen drifted for several blocks. People were definitely pointing. Stevie had said she bought us
a
room. Plural
us
, singular
a
. The tremor in his hands had stopped. One excitement had canceled the other. Her scent cleared everything. And what was it? Soap? Dove soap? It was as if every other thought, every other association he had ever made, was grime he needed to wash away. This one smell was the thumbed water hose that revealed the purer, paler goose-bumped self that he had forgotten.

Owen jumped when a car's headlights swept the wall before them. He shook himself into a panic and realized people must be watching.

—Keep talking to me. You'll look less suspicious. We are just walking and talking about art. Actually, fuck art. Let's talk about music. Keep talking. Our boat is just there, under that bridge. It leaves in an hour.

—You told me the police radios were reporting that nothing happened.

—I might have made that up to calm you down. They were definitely saying something. You know, numbers, crackles, ventriloquist-mouth stuff. Whatever they said, there were about fifty police cars headed straight for Messe Basel with their sirens blaring, about five minutes before we met. You didn't hear that?

—I never hear anything when I'm walking.

She took his palm in both of hers.

—It'll look much less suspicious if you kiss me and tell me I'm a genius.

Owen kissed her.

—You're still shaking. It's fine. There weren't fifty cops.

—Then why did you say that?

—There were probably forty, forty-five tops? Let's hang back, then slink on board. Can you slink?

—I'll try.

Stevie and Owen were now behind a foam of elderly tourists flowing through the bottleneck of the gangway plank and onto the Christmas-light-lit Valhalla River Cruise ship
Saga
.

T
he
Saga
was a double-decker ship—they used the word
ship
but it was built for rivers, not oceans; specifically, the
Saga
was built to navigate Europe's two great rivers: the beautiful blue Danube and the majestic muddy Rhine.
Barge
would be a more accurate term for the
Saga
. If Interpol was after Owen, agents would be combing the barges—but only barges that admitted to being barges. Stevie was betting the agents would avert their eyes from a barge in drag.

Officially, everyone on this trip was booked from Zurich to Amsterdam. Buses had brought the flight-weary passengers from Zurich this afternoon. Most were ready to float—even if the ship wasn't yet moving. The naturally bold, and those emboldened by the dictates of the itinerary, spent the day tromping from one riverside souvenir shop to another in search of the Platonic cuckoo clock and a good deal on a Swiss-made watch.

Stevie and Owen sat on the quay until the last of the senescent trudged up the plank. An east wind blew the welcoming reception from starboard, where the gangway met the quay and where they were now walking. The diffusion of the welcoming ceremony, coupled with the fact that everyone else on board had begun this tour yesterday with a bus from Zurich to Basel, gave Owen the chance to sneak on board with none of the passengers noticing and only two crew members, both of whom Stevie had already met, smiling nervously.

Spotlights from hot halogen bulbs bounced off the receptionist's whitened teeth and twinkled off the brushed aluminum appurtenances and walnut veneer of the welcome desk. The receptionist explained to Owen and Stevie that their cabin was on the lower deck. He looked once at Owen, winced at Owen's eye, and directed the rest of his comments to her.