The Art of Death (20 page)
Authors: Margarite St. John
The Drive South
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
After his last office appointment on Wednesday, Anthony Beltrami stopped at his estate lawyer’s office and then a jewelry store before driving to Indianapolis.
Madeleine had finally responded to his text. She told him that she and her ApEx staff were working late to finish the figures they’d created for the Halloween market, oversized and elaborate mannequins for the shopping malls and town centers that mounted seasonal displays. The figures had parts activated by motion. When triggered, their eyes lit up, their mouths moved, their bodies swayed. Some spoke and howled and screamed like banshees. Some spewed smoke out of their ears or vomited sparkling dust clouds. Some bled. Their skin was so realistic -- just begging to be put to the test -- that spectators would have to be kept behind decorative barriers so they couldn’t touch the figures.
All the mannequins were unique to the Halloween market by depicting recognizable historical figures. Mary Queen of Scots, for example, was kneeling with her head resting on a stool. A masked executioner stood over her, axe at the ready. At a signal, the axe swung down and severed her head. Her head rolled off, mumbled a few words as the eyes glared into the middle distance, and her little yappy dog emerged from under her red skirt. Then all three figures magically snapped back into place.
The figures would sell for thousands of dollars and require teams of technicians to install them.
Production was complicated, Madeleine complained. There had been glitches with the prototypes. For months, the figures had been rejiggered and tweaked to death, so to speak. But with one last desperate push, perhaps an all-nighter, the ApEx staff could finally send the revised final specs off for quick retooling, manufacture, and distribution. Otherwise, ApEx would lose its investment in animatronics.
The drive south was not quite as thrilling as Anthony had hoped. The Fiat Cabrio looked edgy enough, but its appeal was quickly wearing thin. It didn’t roar or growl like a lion or accelerate like a cheetah. The leather wasn’t baby-soft. It wasn’t long, low-slung, and lethal like the rockets he coveted in his youth -- a Maserati, Bugatti or Lamborghini. The interior blinked at him with confounding gadgets and distracting digital displays that made him feel as if he’d passed his sell-by date.
And there was no beautiful woman in the passenger seat.
The beautiful woman he wanted in that seat now worried him. Madeleine never answered his pointed questions about why she was painting his portrait when he wasn’t dead yet and had no plans for an early exit. She responded to his texts on every subject except the one that obsessed him. In fact, she responded on every other subject with so much detail that he knew she was tormenting him.
The very idea of death made his heart race. He did not read obituaries the way other people did. He did not attend visitations or funerals or comfort mourners. Solicitations for life insurance and funeral plots, which made him furious, were immediately shredded. He did not like patients who were drowning in grief or wanted to talk about their own fear of death.
When at the age of three his younger brother died of meningitis, death became the monster under his bed. He had stared at his brother’s corpse with heart-stopping fear. When he broke down, his mother, mistaking his emotion, had comforted him with the prospect of heaven. That’s where his brother was. Someday Anthony would join him. The whole family would. There would be no more sickness, no more death.
When he tearfully confided to his mother that he wasn’t crying for his brother, but for himself, she slapped him. The slap accomplished nothing other than confirming that, if his mother was right, he would have to spend eternity with his boring family praying and listening to choir music. His mother’s slap solidified his fear of death, not for others but only for himself. As a child who’d lost his only brother, Anthony was not entirely convinced that heaven existed, much less that it would be pleasant. Golden streets and pearly gates sounded cold and hard. Eternal bliss with the angels was preposterous. The nuns who taught him to recite the catechism were no more convincing. Even as an altar boy, going through the motions of the mass with the priest, he remained a skeptic. Everything he ever read in his long studies to become a psychiatrist reinforced the unhappy conviction that heaven was the construct of foolish, hopeless minds. Faith in the afterlife was indeed the opium of the masses.
In Anthony’s world of profound thinkers, soul and spirit were hypotheticals that didn’t lend themselves to scientific verification. Flesh was flesh. Once it died, it returned to dust, and the mind, which had been tethered to the flesh, scattered like dust motes in the wind. He didn’t want his mind to scatter into useless fragments, but he was utterly convinced that it would. The prospect was dreadful. There was no comfort anywhere.
The fact that his lady love was a woman obsessed with death was therefore a puzzle. Madeleine had taunted him about it more than once. The only sense he could make of it was that being with Madeleine was like getting a flu shot every day. Her obsession immunized him from his lifelong fear of the inevitable. Talking with Madeleine about the dead in the context of art, toys, and cold cases meant he didn’t have to think about death as lights out, food for worms, dust in the wind.
But the painting in his guest bedroom reawakened all his fears.
So what was it that Madeleine, the artist blessed with a sixth sense, knew about his future?
Was he going to die soon? With that thought in mind, he had changed his will hours after seeing the painting to make Renzo his beneficiary instead of his alma mater. At least he would leave some familial good will behind.
The very next thing he did after that was to visit Will Jewelers to buy an engagement ring for Madeleine. He did that despite the fact that his fear of marriage made his heart race almost as much as his fear of death. Furthermore, Madeleine would not make an easy partner; three husbands had found her impossible. But if he proposed, perhaps she would stop tormenting him. And if she accepted, he might get enough control of her to live a reasonably happy life. Then she’d join Renzo as an heir to his modest fortune.
He didn’t want to know what the painting meant. A vision of the drug courier’s ugly face floated into his mind. That sinister man was deadly serious about collections. Maybe by joining Madeleine in Indianapolis he was escaping an unhappy fate in Fort Wayne.
No, he didn’t want to know whether he was going to die soon or not. But he had to know.
Birthday Gift
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
A few minutes after seven, just as Anthony entered his 23rd floor corner suite in the Conrad Hotel, he finally got another text from Madeleine. He set down his travel bag, threw his garment bag on the bed, and turned on a table lamp near a chair so he could read the text more easily.
She would join him with two of her colleagues and Arnaud Valois at The Eagle’s Nest at nine o’clock. She’d made a reservation for five. If he got to the restaurant early, have champagne on ice ready for her. She’d need every drop, though in fact she would share. LOL. The meeting to finalize the Halloween figures was going swimmingly, much faster than planned, but she was exhausted. Celebration was in order. Dieter and Shelley were joining them. He’d like them.
Anthony frowned when he read those names. Had Madeleine forgotten that he’d already met them? Dieter was a nerd, his boiled-egg eyes darting here and there as if spies lurked around every corner. His face, deeply pitted from a youthful struggle with raging acne, was neither quite shaven nor fashionably stubbled and his lips were perpetually wet. But he was a computer genius worth his weight in palladium, or so Madeleine said. And Shelley. What could any serious man say about her? She was the eternal cheerleader, uttering frothy sentiments in a little-girl voice that grated on the nerves. But she was a graphic artist worth her weight in pixels and hyper text, or so Madeleine said.
Anthony returned to the long text. Madeleine had much to tell him, not just about ApEx and its triumphs but about their future. Perhaps he could start researching the best place to stay on the Liguria coast for a few weeks in August. She needed a vacation. By then she could afford it. She’d not only have money from a windfall (which he knew to be Dan Belden’s insurance policy) but profits from ApEx’s excursion into animatronics. Liguria would be her treat.
A few minutes later Anthony received a text from a number he didn’t recognize. He scrolled to the end of the long message. The message was from Babette. She asked if a few minutes before eight-thirty he would drop over at Les Trésors de Babette. Arnaud would only meet him at the alley door because he didn’t want to turn on the gallery lights and make passersby think the place was still open. Arnaud would hand him a package, which he’d be tempted to open. But she’d been admonished to warn him to resist until the 23rd. After Arnaud locked up and took care of a few things, he’d join Anthony and Madeleine at the restaurant. She herself was
dévastée
that she couldn’t make it.
Anthony turned on more lights and hung up a suit and a couple of shirts in the closet. Madeleine’s clothes were already there and six pairs of her shoes were neatly arranged on the floor. He then placed his pajamas, socks, and underwear in the bottom drawer of the dresser. Madeleine would already have commandeered the top drawers.
He walked into the bathroom to see if his face needed any little adjustment. Madeleine’s cosmetics were scattered across the counter, so he hung his toiletry bag on the back of the door. He spritzed a few drops of Acqua di Parma Colonia on his neck, checked his ears, eyebrows, and nose for stray hairs, smoothed his goatee, brushed his teeth, and vigorously washed his hands.
Then he descended to Tastings on the first floor, where a wine tasting was in progress. The little tapas plates that accompanied the wine kept his hunger at bay. He sat alone near a window to watch the street.
He kept track of the time. The walk to Babette’s art gallery wouldn’t take long, but he wanted to return in time to stow the package in the suite upstairs and then still reach The Eagle’s Nest before nine. He hadn’t decided whether to peek at what was inside the package Arnaud handed him. June 23 was his birthday, so he knew whatever it turned out to be was a birthday present from Madeleine. Who would know if he peeked? He hoped the painting, which it probably was, showed a still life or a landscape. There were enough human figures in his guest bedroom.
No Show
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
It was almost nine-thirty before Madeleine began to wonder where Anthony and Arnaud were. Her two colleagues Dieter and Shelley had arrived at The Eagle’s Nest first but forgotten to order a bottle of champagne. Once it arrived and she had helped herself to a generous glass, her mood gently deflated from the manic excitement at ApEx. Her colleagues’ animated conversation further distracted her from worrying about the absence of Anthony and Arnaud.
Dieter and Shelley were proud of the Halloween figures and stunned by the big orders that had arrived from two different high-end outdoor shopping malls in Scottsdale and another in Miami. Perhaps ApEx should focus on animatronics instead of facial reconstruction kits and other scientific toys. It was an exciting development that generated other ideas. Perhaps theater sets were worth thinking about. Animated displays of cave men and dinosaurs for natural history museums. So many possibilities! The potential for imagination and money gave the three of them a lot to talk about.
When the waiter asked if they were ready to order or still waiting for two more in their party, Madeleine sighed with frustration. She didn’t know Arnaud’s habits, but Anthony was never late for anything, so why hadn’t he arrived? She dug frantically through her Michael Kors tote. Shelley asked her what she was looking for.
“My cellphone. I need to call Anthony. But I can’t find it. I must have left it at the office.”
“You want me to run back for it?” Dieter asked.
“No. It’ll take too long. Would you call him?”
“Sure. What’s the number?”
Dieter tapped in the number, then looked up. “Voice mail. What’s the message?”
Madeleine reached for the phone. “Anthony, where are you? You’re late. We’re going to order our food, but if you get this message, come over anyway. At least you can have dessert. Arnaud’s not shown up either.”
Madeleine returned the phone to Dieter with an expressive shrug. “Anthony never answered my earlier texts, so maybe he couldn’t make it or he had a flat tire on the road or stopped at his favorite cigar bar and forgot the time. Or maybe he and Arnaud went somewhere. I’ll find Anthony later.”