The Triumph of Death (9 page)

The Prado Museum in Madrid, a vast, light gray palace lined with columns and plants, well-manicured lawns, and trees, had three entrances. The first, Puerta de Goya Alta, was for tourists. The second, the Puerta de los Jerónimos, was for groups, and the third, Puerta de Murillo, was for reservations and guests. At six
A.M.
on Tuesday morning Alex found himself in Spain going in the third way. They had four hours before the museum opened.

Alex, Astrid, and Sangster left Armstrong reading in the Spanish-loaned van at the curb in front of the Atocha Metro stop and crossed the busy avenue in front of the museum at a run. As they neared the Puerta de
Murillo, Alex could hear morning birds calling in the trees, and he could see a man in a suit walking down the steps to meet them.

As they approached, Alex whispered to Sangster, “So they’re actually going to let us look at it?”

“It’s a favor from the government.”

“Do you guys have agents in every government?”

“Not an agent, in this case,” corrected Sangster. “A friend who owes us a favor.”

“
Buenos dias,
” the man said as he approached. He was tall, with silver hair and glasses and a neat mustache. Alex had the vague sense that they’d seen him before. They stopped in the shadow of the columns before the Puerta de Murillo. “Come, come, we have not much time if you want to get a good look.” The man gestured for them to follow. He led them up wide steps to a large wooden door that lay half open. “We have set aside space in the lower level, where the jewels are kept.”

“Are you the curator?” Alex asked.

Sangster said, “Alex, this is Federico Cazorla, Minister of Foreign Affairs.”

Alex shook the man’s hand, and just as he was marveling that for some reason they were going to be led around by a minister, he lit on the man’s name. “Cazorla?”

“Alex!” came another voice, and he looked ahead to see a girl just coming out the door. She was smoothing down a brown dress that perfectly complemented a familiar green scarf on her neck. Her brown hair was shoulder-length, wavy, and lush. It had grown since he had seen her last. The girl ran and nearly tackled him, throwing her arms around him and kissing each cheek.

“Vienna,” Alex said, smiling. “I had no idea you were back in…”

“Back home? Of course.” Her voice was husky and lush.

Alex turned to Astrid. “This is Vienna Cazorla; she used to be a student at Glenarvon-LaLaurie.”

“Except that it wasn’t originally called Glenarvon-LaLaurie. Just LaLaurie, until Alex blew up his own school and the students were thrown together.” Vienna’s huge eyes crinkled when she talked and held him momentarily spellbound. The scarf moved with her throat, and Alex remembered the scarf had once been alive, a magical curse that bound her to put Alex in harm’s way as surely as it held her head to her shoulders. She was still wearing it, and he wondered if it still held her in thrall, or if she just loved scarves.

Astrid introduced herself and Vienna kissed the air next to each of Astrid’s cheeks. She took Astrid and Alex
by the arms and led them in, ignoring the adults. “Alex, I didn’t know you would be bringing a friend.”

“I gotta say, I didn’t know I’d even be here!” Alex replied. “And now I can’t believe
you’re
here.”

“I live here,” she said cheerily. “How long are you in Madrid?”

“A day at most. The Polidorium has six days to stop the end of the world, I think,” he said casually.

Vienna nodded. “So, you’ll be staying at my pensione tonight. You won’t begrudge a friend the opportunity to be hospitable. Will you?”

Alex smiled. He’d forgotten about Vienna, the arm-sweeping, flirty vivaciousness of her. They all looked back at Sangster.

Sangster shrugged. “I think that sounds swell.”

“You hear that?” Alex asked, smirking. “Swell.”

With that settled, they stepped into the museum, and Alex was immediately overwhelmed by the expansiveness of the place—just the first hall was massive, with long red-and-gold carpeting and vaulted ceilings, and paintings stretching back as far as the eye could see. All was deserted other than a small army of custodians wearing blue overalls, walking mopping buckets and sweeping with wide cloth brooms.

“This is the jewel of
la ciudad
.” Vienna slowed them
expertly as Minister Cazorla pulled ahead. “
El Prado
houses over 7,600 paintings, over a thousand sculptures, and several thousand more works of art of various kinds. Most are in storage, but nearly two thousand works are on display. It is the largest art museum in the entire world.”

“You are
really
enjoying this,” Alex said.

“
Por supuesto,
I am just getting star—” Vienna looked up as an alarm suddenly rang out.

“What’s that?” Alex asked.

“Someone broke a laser alarm,” said the minister, and they all started to run. Alex watched as red lights began to flash, and he heard heavy locks clicking shut on doors as they moved closer to a stairwell.

As they covered the eighth of a mile or so until they reached the second-floor wing that housed the Bruegel, Alex heard voices. Security guards in black suits emerged from nowhere and pushed past them, and by the time they reached
The Triumph of Death
, there was a crowd of about twenty.

The minister called out to a bald man in a black suit, “Tomás,
que tal
?”

“That’s your curator,” Sangster said, as Tomás looked them over and then back at the painting.

The curator said,
“No se, pero alguien la toco.”

“He says someone touched the painting,” Vienna offered. Alex slipped out of her grasp and edged around the crowd to get his first look at
The Triumph of Death
.

The painting was five feet wide and four feet tall, in a massive wooden frame, and lit up by aimed track lighting. Alex looked down the wall past a hundred other works to see small red lights, lasers that would sense if someone got within inches of the canvas.

“Did they damage it?” Alex asked.

Vienna shook her head. “It does not look like it.”

Alex looked at Sangster. “Why would someone mess with the same painting we were coming to look at?”

“Yeah, I’m wondering the exact same thing,” Sangster said.

Tomás was in a fury, questioning the guards. He called over a custodian, who entered from the far hall, and interrogated him. The custodian, about twenty, handsome and green-eyed, looked profoundly shocked. Alex gathered that he hadn’t seen anything. Tomás turned back to the minister and started speaking rapidly in Spanish.

“Uh-oh,” Sangster said.

“What?”

Vienna whispered huskily, “The curator is worried, and he doesn’t want us to remove it and look at it. It
all seems strange now.”

“Tell him it’s important.”

Vienna frowned at Alex. Like that was gonna happen. “How would you say it? Papa has got this.”

Minister Cazorla spoke with ease now, using a soothing but firm tone. Alex got the gist of what he was saying: this is important; these people are here on an assignment, and the painting is untouched, and anyway we have a chance to look at it.

While the minister was explaining the situation, Alex looked back at the painting. As he moved closer, he caught a flicker of light off the painting’s surface. He stepped to the side, looking at it as it hung there. The flicker was odd, not covering the whole painting. “Huh.”

Sangster heard him. “What?”

“I don’t know. Something isn’t ri—”

Alex took a moment to take in the whole room. The custodian caught his eye again, moving around the corner with his mop and broom. Among the cleaning fluids and utilitarian white canisters in his bucket Alex saw a shiny brown can. It caught his eye because it didn’t fit; it looked—grocery-store-bought, not like something a custodian would clean a museum with.

He began moving toward the custodian slowly to get a better look.

For a moment he saw the image on the spray can. It was a picture of a man with a model head of thick brown hair. It was hair spray. Spraying that on a painting would leave a shiny film.

They were just at the corner and Alex called, “Excuse me.”

The custodian looked back. “
Que? Lo siento, no
…”

“Is that hair spray?” Alex made a motion of spraying his head as he walked closer to the man.

Without another word, the custodian slung the bucket at Alex and it clattered toward him, barely missing him.

The custodian turned and ran, his hat flying off as he really started to move. He was still carrying the mop. It was clearly meant to be used as a weapon.
Who are you?
Alex thought.
You’re not a vampire and you’re not one of us, so who are you?

The blond custodian reached an exit door to a stairwell and slid to a stop next to it. He looked back at Alex as he slipped something out of his pocket. Alex felt adrenaline flood through his chest.

Don’t let it take you. What’s going on?

He’s got something in his hand. It’s a—

It looked like a deck of cards. The custodian took less than a second to swipe it across the magnetic sensor next
to the door and the door opened. Of course. Because the door had been locked by the alarm, and this guy was prepared to unlock it. But if he wasn’t stealing, what was he doing?

Alex heard the others running behind him with the alarms still blaring. The man got through the door, and Alex moved fast to get in behind him. In the stairwell, the man ran up the first flight of stairs and started to turn as Alex took off after him. The door closed, and Alex suddenly heard pounding on the metal exterior as the others reached it, unable to pass.

“Hey! Stop! Who are you?” Alex cried.

The custodian turned at the first landing and swept around with the mop, catching Alex in the chest. Alex felt the air rush from his lungs as the mop bashed him back against the wall. The man let the mop drop as Alex kicked it aside and jumped, grabbing for the man’s ankles.

The man went down silently, already rolling. He was an expert, and as he spun Alex’s grasp weakened. He kicked up, smashing Alex in the ear as he went.

Within seconds, they were up again and running. They covered three flights before Alex heard the first-floor door opening down below, the security guards finally producing their own key cards.

The man reached the top of the stairs, swiped his card at a door, and pushed, running. Alex went after him, this time barely catching the door as it started to close.

They were on the roof of the main hall of the Prado Museum. Chill morning air swept over the gravel as Alex picked up speed.

“What are you doing? Who are you?” Alex called again.
I can run just as fast as you can.
He didn’t have a go package with him or he would have seriously considered shooting the guy with a wooden bolt. But that didn’t seem right. Alex did have climbing gear in the tear-away lining of his jacket; maybe he could just grapple the guy. But no, that might injure the stranger’s neck or something, and murder was not on Alex’s list of ambitions. Vampires were dead already and didn’t count, but this man was definitely human.

They rounded a rooftop utility building, and Alex took in the breadth of Retiro Park beyond the building, a carpet of trees with a huge pond, just across the lawn of the museum.

And there was a flat, colorful object flapping next to the edge of the roof. It was hard to recognize until the guy stopped next to it and began to reach down.
No way.

The custodian crouched for a moment, grabbed a long, curved aluminum tube, and lifted it. An entire
hang glider, thirteen feet across, swept up around him.

“Oh,
come on
!” Alex shouted as he tried to close the distance.

The custodian looked back wordlessly and leapt. For a moment he began to fall, and then Alex watched from the edge of the building as the glider caught the air, taking the custodian out over the lawns, swooping up and disappearing behind the trees of Retiro Park.

Alex put his hands on his knees.
You have got to be kidding.
“It’s not that easy, Quiet Man.” He could run back down the stairs, but the doors were liable to give him trouble. Alex studied his surroundings, feeling each second of indecision tick away his chances of catching the stranger.

They were four stories up, and the wall was slick stone, leading down at intervals to french doors with small balconies. Perhaps he could climb down. But it would take too much time.

No, no. He looked out across the lawn and saw a light pole about thirty yards away. He reached into his Polidorium-issued jacket and pulled back a Velcro flap, producing a small hand-held grappling gun. It had a miniature hook and an air tube, but he wasn’t sure if it would reach far enough.

He brought up the grappling hook and aimed at one
of the arms of the light pole.

“It won’t reach,” Sangster said, running up behind him. Alex heard the rest of them coming now, too. “That’s fifty feet at least and that thing won’t shoot past thirty—plus there’s gravity.”

Alex lowered his arm, consciously willing the surge of adrenaline to drain away. “Who the heck was
that
?”

“I don’t know,” Sangster said. “But he left a message.”

“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.