Hangman (12 page)

The Scream

Vancouver

November 8

To the eye of a judge’s daughter, it was still a courthouse. Though banners promoting the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit hung between the Ionic columns soaring from the grand stairway up to the words VANCOUVER ART GALLERY beneath the cupola, Alex wasn’t fooled. This edifice wasn’t built to hang paintings; it was built to hang people.

The fence at the top of the stairs was a blatant clue. It secured the original entrance to safeguard the art. A public building that bars the public from its doors is suspect. Long flanking wings ran east and west, with access to the gallery now off Hornby Street, where Alex spotted another clue as she rounded the corner. Someone had tried to cover it with a blending color, but the word POLICE was still etched above the door that once led to the holding cells beneath the prisoner’s dock. The accused went in presumed innocent and came out, after trial by their peers, as cons destined for the gallows.

The Rattenbury courthouse.

Back when the law had fangs.

Replaced by the kinder, gentler law courts a few blocks south after Canada did away with the noose in 1976.

To the mind of this judge’s daughter, clues were everywhere. Convicts went to the gallows because they left clues behind for detectives to follow back to their human source. Convicts were saved from the gallows because police left clues behind for lawyers to twist into reasonable doubt. A lesson Jackson Hunt had taught his daughter well was always to keep an eye peeled for that telling clue that hid the solution to any mystery.

Clues …

Clues …

Clues …

Always watch for the clues.

The clue that lured Alex here today was the clue of the mask from
The Scream.

A green awning guided her in from Hornby Street. The walkway was flanked by a pair of evergreens. The fountain beyond dated from those deadly days when the noose was loose; it was raised in 1912 by the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire as a colonial monument for King Edward VII, now KING DEDWARD EVIL, thanks to graffiti additions. With changing times the relic had become a civic nuisance, and it was trundled about until it had ended up here as a butting bowl for cigarettes. The entrance to the gallery was by a door in the colonnade that ran from the rear of the west wing to the south wing, known as the Annex. Another relic from the past greeted her inside: a plaque thanking the Women’s Auxiliary for its support of the old gallery from 1943 to 1979. The ladies had been retired in less sexist times, for the gallery was now
run
by five women, with the support of a lonely male.

Alex maneuvered through paintings on dollies to reach the reception desk. Once signed in and issued a security tag, she continued on toward the Annex stairs, past a vase of sunflowers arranged like Van Gogh’s, except they were plastic. On her way up the marble staircase, Alex glanced out the windows of the second-floor landing to enjoy the autumn colors in Robson Square. Outside, street kids lounged casually on the steps of the rear portico, beneath columns rising to the roof line of the Annex, inscribed across which was PLACED UPON THE HORIZON (CASTING SHADOWS). True, you can’t get much artier than that, though Alex suspected whoever foisted that nonsense on the taxpaying public had smoked too much weed.

Phelan Phelps was a work of art too.

Alex found the librarian in the midst of a made-for-TV movie shoot on the third floor. How any man in this day and age dared sport an ascot at his throat she had no idea, but poofed and puffed beneath his chin, Phelps was a cravat-sporting kinda guy. The billow of paisley was nestled in the neck of his Dior shirt, which was striped with threads of spun gold complementing the gold links through his French cuffs. His fine-boned hands were manicured to perfection, and his coif was manicured too. One look at Phelps and you knew the librarian
knew
his art.

“Mr. Phelps?”

“Yes?”

“Alex Hunt.”

“Alex? My, my. I expected a man.”

Was that disappointment in his silky voice?

“You got my message?”

“Yes.”

“About Edvard Munch?”

“Thank you.”

“Pardon?”

“For pronouncing his name ‘moonk.’ I tire of those who pronounce it ‘munch.’ Munch is what we do to candy bars.” He cast her a smile akin to the one in history’s most famous painting.

“Am I interrupting?”

“Certainly not. I while away time waiting for you among these philistines.”

“What are they filming?”

“I don’t think they know. I’m told it’s a courtroom drama set in Savannah, Georgia. The courtroom is supposedly on the ground floor, so special-effects wizards raised scaffolding outside to plant a garden with appropriate vegetation beyond the windows. I’m sure they’re currently plotting how to change the weather.”

“Why not film in Georgia?”

The librarian shrugged. “The Canadian peso makes it cheaper to move Georgia here?”

The Annex, Phelps explained as they descended to the library on the second floor, attends to the administrative needs of the gallery next door. Because one of those needs is money, and Vancouver is Hollywood North, the new gallery decided
not
to renovate two of the old courts, which could be rented to movie companies for easy cash. The courtrooms retain the majesty of the past, with “banjo” windows and wainscoting and carved judges’ benches. Neither has a prisoner’s dock because both were civil courts, so they meet the requirements of American justice.

“Let’s hope this lot doesn’t expect money back,” sniffed Phelps. “They contracted for a courtroom and a cell in the basement. Did you notice the tap gushing water outside?”

“Yes, beside the lion. Washing the front plaza.”

“No, it was bilging water from the basement after last night’s storm. The cell for the film is currently flooded.”

Damn, thought Alex.

She had misread the clue.

The library that once supported the courts now stored the art gallery’s books, prints, and history. High windows faced east to greet each new day, and except for parallel rows of shelves advancing from the door, the librarian and his assistant had the vault to themselves.

“A conspiracy is afoot,” said Phelps, “to relegate me to the basement. The board wants to entice Gucci and Saks Fifth Avenue into my realm. Have you read Wells’s
The
Time Machine?
I was born an Eloi. Am I to live as a Morlock?” He raised a plucked eyebrow.

“I get it,” replied Alex.

Phelps U’d her around to the bookshelf facing the side wall. He paused for effect as he reached for a text and stopped short.

“The name of that artist, Ms. Hunt?”

“Moonk,” she replied.

He plucked
Munch: The Scream
from the bookshelf.

“Painting or lithograph?”

“Lithograph,” Alex said.

Phelps opened the book to page 88 and held it out:

“What you see,” Phelps said, “is the most recognizable image of fear, pain, and outrage in the history of art. To see
The Scream
is to hear its cry. No need to take Art History 101 to grasp what Munch is saying. What he achieved in his signature work is the direct communication of hysteria.

“The painting dates from the fall of 1893. The lithograph from 1895. From the first day it was displayed in Berlin at the close of that century, Munch’s howling homunculus has provided the screaming meemies in stressed people everywhere with the perfect image of how they feel about whatever is driving them up the wall. Whatever the cause, here’s one thing you can do: clap your hands over your ears and scream your head off.

“We recently had an exhibition of Munch prints here. With it came a side exhibit called ‘
The Scream
and Popular Culture,’ a collection of kitsch demonstrating how this image has become
the
universal icon of angst. ‘A scream a day keeps the shrink away,’ read the caption on a poster with multiple images of Munch’s print.
The Scream
was on sale as a key chain, a stress ball, a mouse pad, a fridge magnet, a tie, an inflatable doll, and a whoopee cushion that—
Eeeeeeeee!
—let out a scream when you sat on it. Macaulay Culkin adopted the pose in the ad for
Home Alone.
An American bank printed checks with
The Scream
on them. A feminist button featured the image with a quote from Margaret Atwood: ‘Men are afraid of being laughed at. … Women are afraid of being killed.’ Whatever your angst, be it fear, pain, or outrage,
The Scream
vents it. Who today doesn’t have things to scream about? Taxes, traffic, school, politicians, Monday morning, bullies, abuse, advancing age, a worsening sex-per-week ratio. One look at
The Scream
and you think, Yes, that’s how I feel! Which explains why—except for the Mona Lisa—Munch’s howler has become the most published, appropriated, caricatured, parodied, and down-right popular high-art image since we evolved from apes.”

Phelps let out an exaggerated sigh. “So much fuss about a picture of a woman who has lost her earrings.”

Alex laughed.

“I stole that line,” said Phelps.

“Oscar Wilde?”

“No, Dame Edna. The question you posed in your message was, What does
The Scream
mean? Well, that depends on your point of view. Thanks to pop culture, it means everything and nothing today.”

Phelps began to close the book. “I trust that answers your question?”

Alex stopped him. “Actually, I was hoping for Art History 101.”

“How deep do you want to go?”

“To the bottom,” she said.

“May I ask why?”

“You’ve read about the Hangman? Police believe the killer wore a
Scream
mask in Seattle and left a similar mask on the victim here. Obviously, Munch’s icon speaks to the Hangman. I’ve come to you for an inkling as to what it says.”

“
The Scream
as a clue to murder?” Phelps’s interest was piqued. “The place to start is with the artist’s place in history. Edvard Munch, 1863 to 1944. Munch marks a pivotal point in Western art. ‘I paint not what I see, but what I saw,’ he wrote. That distinction is subtle but crucial, Ms. Hunt. Before him, painters viewed the world around them for inspiration. After Munch, they turned inward, to the landscape of their minds and souls.

“In a world where God is dead, only the individual remains to fill the void. What Freud did was liberate the tormented self. What Munch did was illustrate the torment released from our heart of darkness. Obsessive and nightmarish, his work augured the twentieth century so completely that even with its end a hundred years later, the howls of outrage, pain, and fear captured in Munch’s
Scream
still echo. Does the Hangman hear the screamer’s shriek as his own?”

“Do we know Munch’s inspiration?” Alex asked.

“Yes, an ancient Inca mummy on exhibit at the Paris World Fair of 1889. Excavated in Peru, it was found bound in a fetal position inside a large clay jar. With its gaping eye sockets and open mouth, it had survived the ravages of time with its fear intact. A macabre reminder of the horror of death, that relic made a deep, lasting impression on Munch. A few years later, the artist fashioned that antiquity into his icon of angst.”

“
The Scream
is Death incarnate?”

“That’s why it works.” Phelps flipped to notes in the appendix of the book. “For Munch’s esthetic inspiration, we have his own words.”

Alex read the note above his finger:

I walked along the road with two friends. The sun went down—the sky was blood red—and I felt a breath of sadness—I stood still, tired unto death—over the blue-black fjord and city lay blood and tongues of fire. My friends continued on—I remained—trembling with fear. I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.

“How
The Scream
works is as fascinating as why,” said Phelps. “The diagonal lines of the bridge leading to other people cannot hold back the sagging curves of the sky or the wavering lines surrounding the overwrought mind of the Screamer. The upright figures he/she/it passed a moment before on the bridge are disinterested peers central to the horror. They refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming anguish they just witnessed. See how they have turned their backs on the screamer?”

“I see a woman.”

“I see a man,” said Phelps. “What the screamer represents is an asexual wraith, an apparition of a living being portending his or her death. The eyes are wide open, but peripheral vision is lost. The hands are clasped over what must be ears on a skull-like head. The narrow ellipse of a mouth screams directly at the viewer. The body lacks the ramrod uprightness of the figures in the background, and as it loses human anatomy, the torso twists like a worm into an S-curve conforming to and extending the curves of the warped landscape. The net effect is a pathological loss of self.

“
The Scream
captures a psychotic experience. It is an objectivization of subjective sensation. The open issue is what caused the loss of identity? The bridge leading to nothing is a simile for death. But is it death in the past or death in the future that wrenches this scream from the screamer?”