Being Invisible by Thomas Berger Page B

his voice a girlish rhythm.
    “Will you look at that? Either the wind managed to open that door, or, more likely, someone had concealed himself and then, when the coast was cleared, seized one of the pieces and ran out.” He was silent for a moment before lifting his thick chin to the ceiling and shouting, “Carla! Where are you!”
    Babe came through a door in the rear, a door that was almost concealed, flush-fitting as it was and of the same off-white as the walls.
    She was wearing a dirty blue smock. “What’s the trouble?”
    “I could wish you would stay on the qui vive,” said Guillaume. “If you don’t mind.”
    “I was just crating the—”
    “I know very well what you were doing,” Guillaume said. “But all the same I wish you had been keeping an eye on who comes and goes out here. Now somebody has gotten in and swiped something.”
    She was dismayed. “My God, what?”
    Guillaume turned away, his chin still held high. “How do I know? Take inventory. Let’s hope it was just the wind.”
    “What wind?”
    “Honestly, Carla.” Guillaume turned back with a reproachful lower lip. “You don’t listen to anything I say. The buzzer sounded, I came out, and no one was here. Ergo, it was either the wind or a sneak thief, wouldn’t you say?”
    Babe glanced around the exhibition space, which consisted at this moment of one large room, though by means of movable partitions it was sometimes made into two or even three enclosures.
    “Must have been the wind then,” said Babe. “I don’t see anything’s missing.”
    Guillaume’s hands rose to his hips, a gesture that given his build did not suggest the maidenly: he might have reacted that way to a penalty call at the ten yardline. “That’s your idea of an inventory?”
    Babe sighed, groaned, and then said heavily, “ All right, Cleve ,” and in a dramatic plod went methodically around past each of the exhibits, which in most cases were mounted atop white, shoulder-high columns and seemed to be human organs molded from the same material, wax or plastic and amazingly lifelike, of which the show-window Zirko had been fashioned. The nearest to where Wagner stood consisted of a familiar complex of five fingers joined to a palm. This had such verisimilitude as to cause him queasily to look for the bloody stump: it was as though the hand had been cleanly severed at the wrist and mounted upright on the column. The label below read: ARTIST’S LEFT HAND . Wagner had to admit it was a remarkable piece of work: in addition to the lines which palmists trace there was a scar of a healing cut at the base of the thumb, and on the reverse were prominent blue veins and even two dirty fingernails.
    A more disquieting piece was just beyond. At the ends of thin vertical rods were two little spheres. The accompanying card read: ARTIST’S EYES . They were brown-irised and bloodshot. Detached as they were, they could have been anybody’s, but on a pillar just beyond was a nose that, deeply pitted above each flange and with sprouts of hair from each nostril, really was a dead ringer for Zirko’s. Next was a right foot, with what looked very like an incipient ingrown nail on the big toe.
    Babe meanwhile had made a brisk inspection tour. “Nothing’s gone,” she announced. “How could it be? Somebody making a quick grab would have to take the stand and all: Siv’s got everything tightly anchored.”
    Guillaume was still in place. “ Hmmm. ” His murmur was rich. He was jowlier than when Wagner had seen him last. Finally he said, “Frankly, I don’t understand this at all. ” His voice had almost returned to normal. Suddenly he showed a radiant grin. “But then who does?” He did have a boyish charm. He returned to the office.
    Apart from the soiled smock, Babe was perfectly groomed as always. Indeed the smock was unprecedented to Wagner. It was also too large: the cuffs were rolled at the wrists. Surely it was a borrowed garment. Since he was invisible,