Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,34

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.

CHAPTER 12

“At this time of day, there is nobody out.” Vienna dragged Alex and Astrid to one of the sets of french doors in the living room of her pensione. She opened the doors, and they stepped out onto the balcony. Alex pulled his jacket a little tighter as the breeze blew in. The mid-morning was cold and gray, and below, a great square was empty except for a newsstand where an attendant rearranged magazines and helped himself to a Fresca from one of the refrigerator units.

Astrid looked around. “I thought these kinds of apartments—uh, pensiones—were usually hotels.”

“This one was.” Vienna nodded. “But when we moved from Seville, my mother fell in love with it.”

The pensione that Vienna Cazorla shared with her parents took up two entire floors of an ancient building in the Chueca neighborhood in Madrid. Vienna’s mother was traveling to visit her brother up north, leaving the place to just Vienna and her dad. It was a cavernous apartment of sculptures and fresh flowers, and Alex heard parrots talking somewhere. He had the sense he could get lost here.

Behind Alex, Sangster and Armstrong were turning Vienna’s dining table into an op center. “Okay,” Sangster called.

Alex turned to see that Sangster had found butcher paper and had laid it out across the table, while Armstrong had a few Polidorium computers plugged in and sitting to the side. The teacher was writing key words with a marker.

“Where did you find butcher paper?” Vienna asked.

“At the butcher’s in the square.” Sangster underlined the word CUSTODIAN. “Your dad pointed it out to me when he went back to work.” He paused. “Okay. Let’s talk about the janitor.”

“Well, he shows up for one reason and one reason only,” said Alex. “Doesn’t want to fight, doesn’t want to talk. All he does is put an X on the painting.”

“Exactly marking a place where the painting has been altered,” said Astrid.

“Is there something important about the woman in the blue dress?” Alex asked.

Armstrong was tapping away and stopped to scan an article on the painting. She held up a hand. “They’ve actually been written about. There’s a poem—”

“Plath,” Sangster said. “Sylvia Plath, yeah, it was a…that’s right, she wrote a poem called “Two Views of a Cadaver Room” about the couple in the corner. She was impressed with them because they’re blissfully unaware of their approaching death.”

“It’s a common thesis,” Armstrong offered.

“Yeah, but what does it mean?” Alex wrung his hands. “Be of good cheer? Be blissfully unaware?