Sara Paretsky - Body Work

“Did you leave through the back door here? Did you notice anyone in the alley?”

“We steer clear of the alley. Drunks, smokers, druggies, not our scene. Time to stretch, Lee.”

The two disappeared, shutting the door firmly in my face. I hate it when people do that. I made a ferocious face-that would teach them a lesson-and went onto the stage. The crowd noise dipped for a moment as people thought I might be the start of the act, but when they saw I was just inspecting the equipment the babble rose again.

I touched the mike and didn’t get electrocuted. I inspected the webcam and wasn’t sprayed with noxious gases when I pressed the ON button. I turned it off and moved to my position at the back of the room.

Petra zipped by with a trayful of drinks. She shot me an anxious look.

“I haven’t killed Olympia,” I assured her. “Yet.”

A moment later, Olympia herself appeared onstage carrying a tray of paint cans and brushes. The crowd noise grew more intense again. Catcalls began rising, demands for the Artist to get onstage at once.

The lights dimmed, went out for the usual thirty seconds. When they came back up, the Body Artist was on the stage. She was, as always, nude, but I joined in the gasps and applause from the audience at the artwork covering her. No wonder it had taken the unknown Rivka six hours to paint her. A lily stem grew from the Artist’s vulva, but instead of a flower it sprouted Nadia Guaman’s head, which covered Karen’s breasts. Karen’s left arm was painted black, the right arm white: colors of mourning in the West and the East. A cypress branch drooped along her white shoulder; on the black shoulder a field of poppies grew.

The Artist stood and turned around. An angel covered her back, its wings spread across her shoulder blades. Its head was bent in grief; in one hand it held a pomegranate, but the other carried a sword.

I looked at Rodney, who was scowling. He snapped his fingers in Olympia’s direction. She went to his table and bent so that the feathers at her cleavage brushed his ear-an erotic gesture that seemed wasted on both of them. He was angry; the club’s owner was trying to placate him.

On the stage, the Body Artist stood with her back to us, her head lowered. She must have had a mike in her upswept hair because her voice carried easily through the room.

“A beautiful, tormented spirit went home today. To Jesus, if you believe He’s the Resurrection and the Life. To the great goddess, if that’s how you think of life beyond these frail coverings of skin and bones. Nadia Guaman, who briefly honored my body with her art, was slaughtered last Friday night. Tonight, I offer up my body in tribute to her.”

The Artist held her arms wide. The angel’s wings lifted, their feathers flowing down her arms. The young men, now anonymous, feminine, in their burkas, each took one of her outstretched hands.

No one in the audience moved or spoke until Rodney pushed his way to the stage. He grabbed the paint cans and with large strokes began to put his usual work, letters and numbers, on Karen’s buttocks. His gestures were so aggressive that his painting looked like an assault.

“S-O,” he wrote. “1154967!352990681 B-I 50133928! 405893021195.”

I copied the codes into my handheld, even though I didn’t expect to decipher them. As Rodney painted, Karen said, “In today’s news, the Taliban in Pakistan publicly flogged a seventeen-year-old girl. Her brother was among the floggers. She was accused of using her body as she chose, not as the men around her wished. In other news, two hundred twenty thousand girls under the age of eleven were raped in America last year. If Nadia is in heaven now, or someplace like it, we know she will intercede on behalf of all assault victims.”

The audience began to stir restively, and some people booed. It wasn’t clear whether they were booing the Artist or Rodney. When Rodney finished his work, he threw down his brush.

Karen came to the lip of the stage. “For those of you who come regularly, you know that I don’t interfere with your art. I respect all sincere efforts at self-expression through painting. Tonight is different. Rivka is going to clean the canvas and re-create our work.”

“Just as long as you broadcast my painting first, bitch.” Rodney grabbed the Artist and dragged her across the stage to the webcams.

Rodney couldn’t hold her and operate the cameras at the same time, and the two dancers refused to move when he commanded them to photograph his work. Olympia pushed through her audience to the stage and held Karen while Rodney operated the camera.

Rodney nodded in satisfaction and left the stage. Karen wrenched herself free of Olympia. She grabbed a brush and painted a long red stripe that ran from Olympia’s nose, down her cleavage, and onto the black leather jacket that opened below Olympia’s breastbone. The Artist dropped the brush on the floor and strode to the back of the stage, where she disappeared behind the curtains.

The crowd cheered and yelled, so Olympia pretended to take it in good humor. She signaled to someone behind the bar to turn up the houselights.

“We never know what the Body Artist will produce for us when she appears, but we all know by now it will be entertainment we won’t see anywhere else in Chicago. We here at Club Gouge respect art and artists, and we’re contributing tonight’s profits to a scholarship that Columbia College has set up in Nadia Guaman’s honor.”

The images of death and innocence disappeared from the plasma screens on the stage. They were replaced by blue-and-white shadowy dancers, as a hot beat began pounding through the speakers. As always, the end of the Artist’s performance signaled a frenzy of drinking. For ten minutes or so, the waitstaff were moving like crazed ballerinas from table to bar to table. Several couples hopped on the stage and began to dance. Olympia quickly directed her staff to move the paints and webcams out of the way. Whatever kept the customers happy…

I scanned the room, hoping to spot some of Chad’s buddies in the mob. As far as I could tell, none of them had come. Rodney was still at his solitary table, working on what looked like his seventh beer. Although the room was so crowded that thirty or forty people were standing along the perimeter or even on the stage looking for seats, Rodney’s sullenness created a force field that no one wanted to cross.

Beyond him was a table of men who looked incongruous in this club setting-four men in their forties, in well-cut business suits. As I stared, I realized one of them looked vaguely familiar. And he was watching me in turn. Of course: Prince Rainier Cowles, the lawyer who’d been at Nadia’s funeral-had it been this afternoon? It felt like a hundred years had passed. I squirmed through the bodies around me to his side.

“Mr. Cowles! V. I. Warshawski. We met at Nadia Guaman’s funeral this afternoon.”

His brows contracted. “What are you doing here?”

I smiled down at him. “It’s a cold night, on top of a cold and stressful day. I thought an evening at an art club would cheer me up. How about you?”

A man at his table laughed. “Is that what you call this place? I would have said skin joint. I thought about sticking a twenty up that girl’s sunshine, but no one else was doing it.”

“That would have been artistic and creative of you,” I said. “And a bold statement of leadership.”

The speaker frowned at me, but before he could fire back, one of his tablemates said, “That’d be good for the annual report, Mac. We go into danger zones that no one else dares enter.”

“We should buy a piece of her tail.” Mac looked at me as if to emphasize that he was directing his crudeness at me. “Did you write down the Web address, Cowles? I’d like her tits where I could look at them from time to time.”