AftershocksEight: SurrealismWhen MacGyver poked his head in at the Phoenix art lab, he saw no sign of Laura Sandburg. He did see Veronica hovering somewhat anxiously near the main work area. Fully half a dozen of the paintings were out on easels, the most he’d yet seen out of the vault at the same time, arranged in a semicircle around Gordie Thompson, who was gesticulating energetically and talking a blue streak. Rafé was beside him, his face aglow, drinking in every word.
“Caravaggio? Effin’ drama queen. Just you look at what ‘e’s doin’ with that light. You’d hate ‘is guts if ‘e wa’n’t so effin’ talented. Stupid bugger copped it in a drunken brawl, but first ‘e ripped a hole right in the ceiling of the effin’ Church of Rome and let in some good honest light.” Gordie waved in the general direction of the art vault. “By the time we’re done with Oldy-Moldy Bucket-’ed in there, you’ll see what Rembrandt did with that same light. Jus’ effin’ bee-yootiful.”
Mac drifted over to where Veronica stood. Her eyes were getting even rounder and her expression was a cascade of incredulity; he had to fight hard to keep his own face straight.
“That Gauguin – ‘e was a bounder and a boozer, couldn’t stay off the sauce one minute longer than it took ‘im to find a new bloke to sponge drinks off’n. But ‘e could paint better sodden than most can paint sober. Titian now, ‘e’s something else again . . .”
“Maybe I shoulda taken art history in college instead of analytical chemistry,” Mac murmured. “It sounds a whole lot more interesting than I ever thought. I don’t think they taught it quite like this, though.”
“You stick your neb right in there and
look at them brushstrokes – it’ll be an effin’ century before you see brushstrokes to match them again.”
“That’s a pretty safe assumption,” Veronica replied. “If they had, I might not have specialised in the Impressionists.”
Gordie pointed emphatically at another canvas. “ ’ere’s Caravaggio again. You think them other saints looked like sanctimonious twits? Well, so did he. Out go the airy-fairy ponces, suddenly you’ve got them saints lookin’ like
real blokes, right down to the dirty nails an’ the sweaty armpits. ‘N course, the Pope thinks it’s vulgar, but the rich w*nkers can’t get enough of it. ‘e’s the first big fad of the effin’ seventeenth century, till ‘e p*sses off the powers-that-be and gets hisself done in.”
Veronica shook her head as if dispelling a mirage and turned to Mac. “What are you doing here? Didn’t you get my message?”
“I was half asleep when you left it – didn’t you want me to come by and talk to Laura?”
“She’s not here. She didn’t come in today at all. MacGyver, I’m really worried about her. She called in this morning, but she sounded awful. I was hoping you’d go see what’s up.”
Mac was puzzled when he reached Laura’s place; he’d thought she’d been housed at one of the apartments Phoenix kept for temporary contract consultants. His own living expenses were mostly covered by an open-ended version of the same arrangement. But her new address proved to be a high-rise condo tower with such ostentatiously tight security that he figured it must have been designed and built by a paranoiac.
There were cameras in the garage, the courtyard, and the lobby, and a one-way closed-circuit video system that allowed residents to screen visitors before they were permitted entry. Mac wondered if the lobby door handle was going to take his fingerprints and check them against the LA police files and the FBI records. As he rode up in the elevator, trying to ignore the watchful eye of yet another security camera, he mused on just what results that kind of check might produce.
When she answered the door, he took a really good look at her for the first time in several days, and saw why Ruth and Veronica had been so worried. Laura looked haggard and worn; she wore a limp track suit, and there were dark circles under her eyes. As she let him in, he saw that although she didn’t have a lot of personal possessions, what little she had was jumbled around, as if she’d never really settled in. The apartment looked cluttered and untidy. It didn’t fit with the image he’d held of her from their first meeting: elegant, composed, confident and self-assured, and able to give better than she got when they had begun to spar over the paintings and the priorities they represented..
But her smile was as warm as ever, and she seemed genuinely pleased to see him. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d be over at Phoenix – ” The shadows behind her eyes seemed to darken even further. “I – I was so relieved that you’d turned up safe . . . ”
“I just came from the art lab,” Mac replied. “I wish you’d been there. Veronica’s been worried about you. You okay?”
“What are they up to?”
“Gordie was giving Rafé a lesson in art history.”
And you’re dodging.“That must have been – interesting.”
“Oh, yeah.” Mac saw the shadows lighten on her face, and breathed a bit more easily. He wondered whether to chase after the question she hadn’t answered.
Not yet – time enough.“Addie must have been overjoyed to see you were safe,” Laura remarked.
Mac frowned in confusion. “Actually, she wasn’t there – I think she and Stephanie were off somewhere together. Why Addie?”
“You really don’t know?” Laura shook her head, smiling. “Addie’s got a full-blown crush on you.”
“
What?” MacGyver exploded. “Oh, gimme a break! I’m twice her age!”
“You think that matters? It only ups your value as a trophy. She also lusts after Bono, David Bowie, and Kurt Cobain.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.” Laura began to giggle, and Mac shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair, not getting the joke.
“Laura, can I ask you something about the collection?”
She raised an eyebrow, and for a moment the old sardonic look was back. Mac felt a delighted satisfaction seeing the expression. “What’s up?” she asked.
“There’s something that’s been eatin’ at me, and I finally put my finger on it. The paintings – they were Frau’s private collection, stuff that had been confiscated from Jewish families. Sam Bolinski said she was one of the SS officers’ wives who ‘went shopping’ in the loot. But there’s something funny about it. Didn’t you tell me something about Hitler’s taste in art not bein’ that great? Kind of old-fashioned?”
“Well, yes, more or less. Even with all the great treasures of Europe to choose from, his taste was terribly pedestrian. He revered the accepted Old Masters – especially the Renaissance and Baroque artists that he could classify as ‘Aryan’ – and he particularly hated the Moderns.”
Laura had been sitting on the couch, shoulders hunched and arms wrapped around her. Now, distracted by her favourite subject, she uncurled, reaching for a thick book of colour plates that sat on the coffee table, flipping through it as she spoke. “Hitler thought the Impressionists were decadent, and the Post-Impressionists were even worse.” She paused at a reproduction of Van Gogh’s
Starry Night, her fingers tracing the burning whorls that filled the sky. “It didn’t save them from the looting, though. Goering was only too happy to snatch them up – it was better than their being burned, I guess. I told you about the destruction of the ‘morally repugnant’ works.”
Mac leaned over the back of the couch to look over her shoulder, his face thoughtful. “The painting you just passed – ”
Laura flipped to the previous page. “Monet. One of his harbour scenes. I’ve always loved how he handled water.”
“That favourite picture of Stephanie’s is one of his, right? Have you got a date for it yet?”
“It’s not in his
catalogue raisonée, but I’m tentatively dating it at 1900.”
“And there’s that other one you said was supposed to have been destroyed – ”
“The Renoir. Circa 1905.”
“Yeah. And that’s just it. There’s a few paintings in our collection – Frau’s, I mean – that just don’t fit. They’re the wrong period. Aren’t they?”
“MacGyver, you keep claiming you don’t know anything about art. When did you get into art history?”
“This isn’t art history! It’s basic math.” Mac gestured as if trying to pick numbers out of the air. “The dates you keep mentioning – sixteenth, seventeenth, early eighteenth century – and then suddenly it’s the twentieth century. That’s a
real big jump. It’s a hundred and fifty years! It doesn’t
fit. And then there’s Addy’s pet picture, the one that was supposed to have been lost when Berlin was bombed towards the end of the war.”
“The Flakturm Rembrandt, yes. It’s a late Rembrandt; circa 1650. Dieter’s still waiting to hear back from the current director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. Mac, what are you getting at?”
Mac sat down on the couch beside her, shaking his head. “I don’t know. I just know there’s something – but I can’t put my finger on it. How did Frau get hold of those three pictures, when they’re so far outta line with the rest?”
The shadow crossed Laura’s face again, a cloud dimming the sun. Mac looked at her with concern. “I’m sorry. This is all really hard on you, isn’t it?”
Laura tried to laugh, but it was a brittle failure. “Is it that obvious?”
“Well, yeah.”
Laura pushed the book of colour plates away. “I wish I’d taken that job in New York – only I don’t, really. I’ll never have another chance like this again. But it’s hard – ”
“Pete and Ruth leaned on you pretty hard to stay.”
“Oh, they make a great team. Pete talks you into a corner, and Ruth makes sure there’s a comfortable chair and a nice view. You’re stuck. And then you have to live with it.”
Laura’s eyes grew distant. “Sometimes, I look at the paintings and they’re everything art has always been to me – the very pinnacle of human hopes and vision, the breath of history caught on canvas so that the generations to come can understand that we’re not alone. And on other days, I look at them and all I can see is Frau Brandenburg’s face, sneering at me as if I was some kind of disgusting animal. I hear her voice, calling me a ‘Jewess’.” She picked up one of the sofa cushions and wrapped her arms around it. “Maybe for you, having someone hate you enough to want to kill you is all in a day’s work. Maybe it’s something you get used to. Not me.”
“It isn’t, you know,” Mac replied softly. “Something you get used to. You shouldn’t.”
Laura hugged the pillow to herself tightly, looking blankly out at nothing at all. “Veronica and I went out to an Italian restaurant . . . well, we tried to. I tried. The smell of the garlic hit me and I went into a full-blown panic attack. I was so humiliated. And all poor Veronica could do was haul me into a taxi and get me home.”
She closed her eyes with a look of pain. “From the moment that man pulled the gun on me – I’d never even seen a real gun before, can you believe it?”
“It didn’t seem real?” Mac asked gently.
“I wish. No . . . there was never a moment when it didn’t feel horribly real. Since then, sometimes it feels as if nothing else is real, or ever has been.” Laura pushed the pillow away and wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. “I can’t stand it. It’s horrible. How can you
live like this? Every morning I look into the mirror to see if I’m still there.” The tears were now sliding freely down her cheeks. “I tried talking to my therapist about it, but I couldn’t say anything. I just sat there and cried. I haven’t been back since.” She looked around the apartment as if seeing the mess for the first time. “I haven’t really been anywhere since.”
Mac reached out a hand to her. “Laura, there’s a lotta hate in the world, but most of it isn’t personal. You don’t have to listen to it, any more than you have to pay attention to city sounds, or to someone’s awful music on the radio in the car next to you.”
She turned to him, her face suddenly fierce. “Mac, stop right there. I know you’re trying to help – but
please, don’t try to come up with something to say that’ll fix it. You
can’t. Give me some credit.” She drew a deep breath. “Just – tell me how
you live with it.”
“Well, um . . . like I said, you – I – can’t take it personally. I guess I was still pretty young when I found out there were people who didn’t even know me who were still willing to kill me for one reason or another. I guess I figure that’s their problem, not mine.” He threw up his hands. “Honestly, most of the time, I just don’t think about it at all. I guess I’m not real good at looking backwards.”
“Improvising, huh?”
“Well, yeah. If something works, I don’t like to spend a lot of time afterwards thinking about what I might have done differently. Whatever it was, I did it. I don’t usually have a lot of time, anyway.” He shrugged and made a face. “I used to be way cockier.”
“What happened?”
“I got lucky too many times.”
MacGyver glanced at Laura as he spoke, and, incredibly, saw her face twitch with the ghost of a smile. He suddenly heard what he’d said, and flushed scarlet. “Um, bad choice of words there . . . ” Mac looked around desperately, trying to think of something else to say, something to change the subject.
Laura suddenly found herself giggling; in a moment, she was laughing, although the laughter had an hysterical edge to it. She buried her face in her hands and rocked back and forth as the dam broke and the laughter turned into savage tears.
She tried to stop the torrent, to choke back the sobs, but she felt Mac’s arms go around her and pull her close. She leaned into the sanctuary and let go for the first time in what felt like years.
MacGyver held Laura as she cried, rocking her gently and stroking her hair until the storm began to pass. He tried not to be too aware of the feeling of her body in his arms – the warm scent of her skin and the softness of her hair between his fingers. In spite of his best efforts, his own body responded strongly, and he tried to shift his position surreptitiously so it wouldn’t be so noticeable.
The worst of Laura’s weeping had ebbed, and she felt him shift. He heard her breath catch and felt her shoulders tighten, and knew he was busted.
That’s the problem with liking really smart women. They’re way too hard to fool.Mac murmured softly into Laura’s ear. “Do you want me to leave?”
Her fingers tightened on his shirt, where the bright blue cloth was mottled with damp patches from her tears. “No. Please. Stay – if you want to . . . ”
“Want to?” Mac breathed. He cupped her face in his hands, moved his mouth to hers and kissed her.
MacGyver was in a good mood when he headed for the hospital the next morning, even though he expected Ruth to be in a difficult frame of mind –
okay, just plain cranky – following Pete’s expected talk with her about the Brandenburg files. A peace offering seemed like a good idea: Mac was certain Henry Collins would still have the flower angle covered, but he remembered Ruth had a weakness for sweets, and stopped on the way to Cedars-Sinai to pick up an oversized box of chocolates.
“Whaddya mean she’s not here?” Mac’s good mood imploded in an instant, leaving a coppery taste of sick dread in his mouth. Rawlings, the security guard, looked miserable and shrugged helplessly.
“She was ambulatory, and had access to her purse and street clothes – she must have left on her own, but I can’t figure out why! We only noticed she was missing about twenty minutes ago, when Annie – the nurse here – came back to see if she was feeling any better.”
“She’d had a rough night and was in a good deal of pain,” Annie interjected. “I finally got her to let me give her something for it; she should have been resting peacefully. The last thing I expected was that she’d start wandering!”
“Whoa,” Mac said. “She got dosed with painkillers? I thought she didn’t like them.”
The nurse gave him a long-suffering look. “She didn’t. She hated them – said they made her woozy. When she did have to take anything, I always checked back within half an hour to make sure she was all right.”
Mac shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense.” He was hurrying along the corridor towards Ruth’s empty room, Annie and Rawlings trying to keep up with him.
Rawlings gestured towards the exit door at the end of the corridor. “We think she may have gotten out that way.”
“Didn’t you have a second guard stationed out there?”
“Not any more. The door can’t be opened from the outside without a passkey, and it was decided that keeping a guard there was too conspicuous – it would draw attention.”
“How hard would it be to get hold of a passkey?”
“The director assured me that they were scrupulously careful with issuing and tracking them – ”
“Bull,” snapped Annie. “Cr*p, Bertie, you should’ve asked someone on the staff about that! There are more passkeys for that door floating around than
anyone can keep track of. The staff uses that side door for cigarette breaks all the time, since they can’t smoke inside.”
“I never saw anyone – ” Rawlings began.
“They didn’t use the door when it was guarded! The usual joke is that they’re called ‘passkeys’ because they’re always being passed around!”
“Aw,
great,” Mac muttered. “Schrödinger’s cat has its own cat door.” The sick feeling in his mouth had settled down into his stomach. When he looked around the hospital room, bright with sunshine and glowing with colour from the latest wave of fresh flowers, its very neatness seemed a threat, as if Ruth had been tidied out of the way, all signs of her presence erased. Mac looked at the bed and frowned.
“If she was in bed when you last saw her – why’s the bed made up?”
Annie looked from Mac to the hospital bed. “You call that made? Any nurse on my shift who tried to make a bed that way would get a fast lesson in how it’s supposed to be done. Somebody just pulled the covers back up is all.”
“Did they,” Mac muttered. He hurried over to the bed, looked around it carefully, and then turned the bedclothes down, revealing a folded slip of notepaper.
“Rawlings, have you called the cops yet?”
“Not yet . . . I wasn’t certain . . . ”
“Do it.
Now. And then call Pete.”
Mac grabbed a Kleenex from the box beside the bed and swathed his fingers before he carefully lifted the note and unfolded it. His stomach twisted and he tasted bile as he read the brief scrawl on the paper.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.
That is quite an education in art! LOL! 
Mac....Puuuuuurrrrrrrr......*Slurp*
