Jose Somoza - Art of Murder

The truth of it, Mr Lothar Bosch, is that this youngster of hardly thirty, who could be your daughter but is your boss, this soulless skeleton, has completely hypnotised you. 'April,' said Bosch. 'What?'

'I was thinking that maybe Diaz leads a double life. Maybe he has two voices inside his head, one normal, the other not. If he is a psychopath, there would be nothing odd in the fact that he behaved properly with friends and colleagues. When I worked for the police, I had some cases of…'

Mozart rang out from the table. It was Miss Wood's mobile. Even though her features did not alter in the slightest as she took the call, Bosch was aware something important had happened.

'AH our problems are over’ she said as she switched off her phone, smiling in that disagreeable way of hers. That was Braun. Oscar Diaz is dead.' Bosch leapt from his seat. They've caught him at last!'

'No. Two anglers found his body floating in the Danube early this morning. They thought it was the carp of their lives, a Guinness Book of Records carp, but it was Oscar. Well, all that was left of Oscar. According to the preliminary report, he had been dead more than a week

… That was why they wanted to keep his body hidden.' 'What's that?'

Wood did not reply at once. She was still smiling, but Bosch soon realised it was a tremendous rage that was paralysing her. 'It was not Oscar Diaz who picked up Annek last Wednesday.' This affirmation threw Bosch into confusion.

'It wasn't…? What do you mean?… Diaz turned up at the agreed time last Wednesday, chatted with his colleagues, identified himself, and…' All at once he came to a halt, as though forced to brake before coming up against the stone wall of Miss Wood's gaze.

'It's not possible, April. One thing is to use resin to escape the police, but it's quite another to imitate someone so well that you deceive everyone who knows them, who sees them every day, the colleagues who greeted him on… on Wednesday… the security screens… all of them… to be able to pass off as someone you'd have to be a true specialist in latex. A real maestro.' Wood was still staring at him. Her smile froze his blood.

'That bastard, whoever he may be, has made fools of us, Lothar.'

She said these words in a tone Bosch recognised perfectly. She wanted revenge. April Wood could forgive other people being intelligent, just so long as they were not more intelligent than her. She could not bear any opponent to do anything she had not thought of. In the heart of this slight woman burned a volcano of the blackest pride and will to perfection. Bosch understood, with the kind of sudden certainty which sometimes grasps the deepest, most hidden truths, that Wood had slipped her chain, that the guard dog would hunt down her adversary and would not relent until she had him in her jaws.

And not even then: once she had him, she would chew him to bits.

'They've made fools of us… fools of us…' she went on in an almost musical whistle, scarcely separating her two rows of perfect white teeth, the only white showing in the darkness of the room. A white slash on a black background.

A point is not really a shape. Anyone who thinks a point is round is mistaken. A point exists in so far as interconnecting lines exist. Yet lines and everything else, all other shapes and bodies, are made up of points. A point is the essential invisible, the unmeasurable inevitable. God himself may be a point, solitary and remote in His perfect eternity, thinks Marcus.

Marcus Weiss is holding up an invisible point between his closed fingers. Friends, this is more complicated than it seems. The gesture is: left hand held out, palm of the hand facing upward, five fingers forming a little summit. If the tips are close enough together, the hole in the middle disappears in the curves of flesh. And there, right in the middle, is the point Weiss is holding up. You think it's easy? Think again, friends, it's really complicated.

When she first started her sketches, Kate Niemeyer put a ping-pong ball on the tip of his fingers. In the next sketch, the ball was replaced by a marble; after that a bean, and then a pea, just like in children's stories. Finally, Kate decided there should be nothing. 'The idea is the ball is still there, but invisible. You're offering it to the public. People will look at you and ask: what's he got between his fingers? That will catch their attention, and they'll come closer.' Marcus understands that curiosity is a terrific bait for any artist who knows how to use it.

'That afternoon, he had been holding up the invisible point for several hours. A girl with blonde curls, orange dress and red glasses (one of the last visitors) had stood up on tiptoe to see what Marcus was hiding in his fingers. Weiss was unable to see her expression when she eventually realised there was nothing there – as a work of art, he was forced to continue looking straight out in front of him, his eyes painted white. He wondered what on earth such a small child was doing in the gallery, where the works were meant to be for adults. Marcus would have banned himself to children under thirteen. He had no children of his own (what painting could have?), but he felt a great respect for them, and considered his 'attire' as Niemeyer's work far from suitable for them: he was completely naked, his body spray-painted bronze, his penis and testicles (hairless, visible) a matt white colour, the same as his eyes. A crown of yellow and blue feathers with purple tips, shaped like an Aztec plume or a tropical bird's crest, covered his brow. His crafted muscles, shaped over the years with the patience of a carpenter, shone individually with a metallic bronze, throwing off shifting shadows and glints under the halogen lights.

Tired of holding up nothing, he was pleased it would soon be time to close. He realised the gallery had shut when he saw the maintenance man for Philip Mossberg's Rhythm/Balance come into the room. Rhythm/Balance was the painting on show opposite him. It was a seventeen-year-old canvas called Aspasia Danilou, painted in gentle, almost washed-out colours, which hid nothing of her anatomy. Her pubic hair was visible, because Mossberg always used non-depilated canvases for his works. Aspasia blinked, stirred, handed the satin sheet she had been holding in her left hand to the technician, and skipped off to the bathroom, waving to Marcus as she left. Until tomorrow, Marcus, see you then; of course you will, we'll be staring at each other all day – Beautiful Aspasia was not a bad canvas. Marcus thought she would go far, but she was only seventeen and this was her first original. When she had arrived in the gallery, he had tried to pick her up, but she had made several excuses and systematically refused his advances, until he was forced to realise that, in some areas of life, Aspasia already had considerable experience.

Marcus was Kate Niemeyer's work Do You Want to Play With Me? He was priced at twelve thousand euros, and was not sure he would be sold. He was the last to leave the gallery. There was no technician to help him, no one came to take his plume of feathers off: he had to make his own way out. The hand he used to hold nothing up with hurt a little. The whole arm, in fact.

'Au revoir, Habib.' 'Au revoir, Mr Weiss.'