chapter 11
“They will allow us one hour with the painting,” Sangster said as they stepped through a heavy metal door and into a vault of stone and steel. Alex found Astrid and Vienna standing next to glass cases displaying more jewels than he had ever seen. “This is the jewel collection of the Grand Dauphin Louis, son of Felipe V,” Sangster explained. “The vault is open to visitors during the day.”
A white rolling table on wheels sat in the center of the room with a heavy wooden cover over it. It looked like a gurney. “Is that the painting?” asked Alex.
“Yes.”
“What are we doing with it?”
“Scanning it.”
“Hasn’t it been scanned?” Alex said. “It’s in every art book we’ve looked at.”
“This is not your ordinary scanner,” Sangster replied.
Tomás the curator and Minister Cazorla conferred for a moment, and then Tomás turned to an electronic keypad on the wall at a second door in the back. A glass case of rubies, diamonds, and gold swung open slowly to reveal a circular metal door seven feet high. The curator tapped a long code into another keypad, and then Alex heard a series of heavy clicking sounds buried deep in metal.
With a pneumatic hiss the second door opened inward, swinging wide to reveal a vault. Sangster and Cazorla held either end of the gurney and lifted it over the lip of the door.
The room within was sterile and cold, and in the center stood a tall frame that looked like an airport metal detector. The frame itself had four spindly metal arms half folded, hanging there like the door expected to defend itself. Tomás looked back at the gurney and pressed a button on the inside of the frame. The frame widened slowly, sliding along tracks in the ground, until Tomás seemed satisfied it was wide enough.
He nodded to the two men and they rolled the gurney the rest of the way, stopped it at the edge of the frame, and slowly removed the wooden cover. Now the five-foot-wide painting lay between the metal posts, naked on the table.
When Tomás touched a button on the side, Alex heard a churning sound and watched as the painting lifted slowly off the table, borne by countless tiny Plexiglas posts, until the painting seemed to float a half inch off the tabletop.
“You’re making a 3-D image of the painting.”
Sangster nodded at Alex’s guess as the robot arms unfolded and began to sweep slowly back and forth, all the way down the table and back up and over, again and again, streams of red laser light faintly visible from the glowing edges of the arms. The arms crawled like a spider over the painting as the frame slowly moved along its tracks.
“We need to know everything,” Sangster said. “What might be painted under it and what might be hidden in it. This is the best way we have of capturing the entire painting.” He turned and pointed to a display screen on the wall behind the frame, which was now showing the entire Triumph of Death at twice its normal size. Alex was once again filled with horror by the images of the people with their mouths open, screaming. But this time he could see the countless brushstrokes.
Alex saw a shimmer coming from the painting again. “You said the guy left a message.”
Sangster nodded and asked Cazorla something, who turned to Tomás. The curator spoke and Cazorla translated as he directed their attention to the screen.
“This is the painting. We can display different layers of it already. We’re just getting more details now.” The image shifted, and the entire painting seemed to lift toward them and away, revealing white and gray pencil strokes underneath. “These are the original pencil drawings underneath, the guides that Señor Bruegel used.”
Now the layer of colors and brushstrokes lowered back over the pencil marks and seemed to recede. A new image came into view in the lower right corner, looking like spray paint on the screen—the mark left by the custodian, a simple X. Tomás fiddled with the controls to sharpen the image. “This is this morning’s addition to the work,” Cazorla said, sounding annoyed.
“We saw it the moment your man ran,” Sangster told Alex.
“X marks the spot?”
“We’ll be able to remove it, gracias a dios,” Cazorla said. “It is a very mild hair spray.”
Alex looked at Sangster. “I don’t get what this is about. The custodian was not one of the Scholomance. Not Hexen. And he wasn’t an amateur. And he left this just as we got here. So what is the message?”
“We’re not sure, but he was careful not to damage the painting,” Sangster said.
Tomás suddenly let out an agitated curse.
The curator waved a hand, looking at a computer screen nearby, and then sent the image to the main screen.
The camera zoomed in again on the corner of the painting below the X, and the X lifted away as the curator dismissed that layer. Now Alex saw two human figures, a man and a woman singing as a skeleton crept up behind them. “No es azul,” Tomás said in what sounded like shock.
“It’s not blue,” Vienna translated from over by the wall.
“What does that mean?” Alex asked.
Tomás spoke rapidly in Spanish, and Cazorla said, “He says there’s a layer of paint, very thin, on the woman’s dress. It’s—you see, it has always been blue.”
“And it is blue,” Alex said, confused, looking at the woman, whose dress was indeed a blue-colored satin.
“But the blue is new,” Minister Cazorla said. “Or, not so new, but newer than the painting.”
Tomás shifted his hand in the air as if estimating and spoke while Vienna translated. “He says it’s a modern pigment, probably less than fifty years old.” The curator tapped a few buttons and, in the computer image on the screen, the layer of blue color on the dress lifted off and away.
The woman’s dress was a sort of burnt red underneath.
They all stood staring. “So,” Alex said, “someone changed the red dress to blue.”
“Right,” Cazorla answered. “That is stunning. This is an amazing discovery.”
“But just so we’re clear,” Alex said, “this alteration that the custodian marked for us was probably done fifty years ago.”
“Give or take.”
A bell chimed and the sweeping arms retracted themselves and lay silent. Tomás was still enrapt at the image of the blue dress. But it didn’t get them any closer to stopping the Triumph that the Queen had in mind.
“That’s it,” Sangster said. “We’ll take the image and look at it. We need to go.”
“Wait.” Alex gestured toward Astrid. “She said maybe she could get something off it. Can she touch the painting?”
The curator and Minister Cazorla conferred briefly, and then Cazorla nodded to Sangster. “The corner flap only. Not on the surface of the painting.”
Astrid nodded and asked them all to stand back. She approached the painting as though it were a patient in a hospital bed. For a long time she waited at the edge of it, her bare hand at her side, her fingers twitching.
Who was this girl? Why was she here?
Suddenly Astrid’s hand shot out and she touched the edge and closed her eyes, the many peculiar pigtails in her hair quivering above her thin neck. She whispered, “An assignment. A secret contract to make a painting. The master painter, traveling in his peasant’s hood, left in the middle of the night, disappeared to a place unknown to him, a castle of great black towers, somewhere far from home. His patrons told him what they wanted, showed him visions of the Triumph, and rewarded him well.”
Astrid shook her head and then let go of the painting.
“So it’s confirmed.” Sangster nodded slowly. “The painting was to be a guide.”
The team had a mystery now. They also had a confused curator eager to get everything back to normal.
Within half an hour, they were far from the arriving museum crowds, and at the palatial pensione of Vienna Cazorla.