Picture This

‘Kill you and make it look like an accident. Or maybe disappear you, so one day I find myself knocking on your door and no one’s home, and no one will be home ever again. Miss Latisha, you need to wise up. That out there is an expensive job. Someone is serious.’

‘Don’t worry, Henry, I got angels on my side.’

‘Like that’s going to help.’

‘You know how to use that rifle?’ Latisha indicated the rifle Henry had forgotten he was still holding.

‘No,’ he admitted sheepishly.

‘So that ain’t gonna help either.’

*

Nevertheless, once Latisha had climbed the stairs to her own apartment she double-locked the front door and placed the dusty old gun her grandmother had given her on the bedside table. She then dropped to her knees to pray. Tomorrow she knew she’d have to venture out and be the Statue of Liberty for a day for Miss Thomas.

Chapter Eighteen

It was their third photo shoot and again Susie had managed, with the help of Muriel and Alfie, to duplicate Klimt’s distinctive art nouveau aesthetic. Her own body had been made up for the shoot and was currently hidden under a dressing gown. She stepped back and surveyed the assemblage; all the extras were in position on the stage they’d built with its different hidden levels. On the left side of the massive gorilla figure, a fur-covered sculpture that represented the god Typhoeus, stood the three raven-haired women who were meant to represent Typhoeus’s gorgon daughters, only now they were dressed as Jackie Kennedy lookalikes while the god himself had been transformed into King Kong.

Above them there was a pendulously breasted extra made up as Morticia Addams – Death, in the original Klimt work – while the faces of the two other characters who were, in the original, grouped behind Death – Sickness and Madness – were actually painted on the flat backdrop, which was draped in ornate fabric with a pattern that matched the original Klimt decoration. Stage right of King Kong was the gap where Susie herself would be positioned as the redheaded naked figure of Lust. Behind Lust sat a naked Marilyn Monroe lookalike in a large cane chair, personifying Klimt’s depiction of Wantonness, while standing below was the African-American woman whose real name she now knew was Latisha Johnson.

Glancing over, Susie studied the black woman, who stood there impassively with her large hands wrapped around the torch, the crown of the Statue of Liberty framing her wide sculpted face. It was brilliant casting, Susie had to admit; Latisha Johnson had a kind of natural authority that most people would find intimidating, although Susie did not. She still hadn’t revealed that she knew Latisha’s real identity. She would wait until after the photographic session and then confront her. But it was hard to stay professionally objective when you were convinced someone was spying on you. On the other hand, it had a strange symmetry. To Susie it seemed fated that Maxine’s last weeks would somehow intrude and invade her own work.

Making art was powerful magic, and she believed in the predictive power of including images or events in a painting; the idea that by creating them you were somehow helping them to come into being.

‘Susie, you ready to go?’ Alfie asked from the other side of the lights.

She turned back to the camera. Nearby, Muriel waited patiently, holding her heavy wig of long red hair in the art nouveau style of Klimt’s women, while Alfie ran around the edges of the set adjusting the lights.

‘That’s it, a bit more shadow on the left… Perfect,’ Susie instructed.

Alfie stepped back and she stood over the tripod to look into the viewfinder. Now it was obvious how important the lighting was; the effect was breathtaking. Susie had wanted the lighting to be as shadowy and sinister as possible without losing too much detail. Whereas in the original mural the figures were flat – more pictorial than three-dimensional – now the breasts, the buttocks, the sharp angles of the thin arms and elbows of the three brunette triplets threw shadows, hanging in front of the draped and painted backdrop like living, breathing sinister wax figures. Only the pitch-black massive torso of King Kong seemed to swallow light, offset by two beams streaming out of the holes that were his eyes; these were the primary light source for the whole image. The white teeth in his open mouth now formed the skyline of Manhattan, including the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Light shimmered on the large breasts and belly of the Statue of Liberty, catching at the gleaming lights of her crown and at the Klimt-like gold bracelets, waistband and thread in the fabric of her tube skirt; the whole appearance was luxurious, disturbing and transgressive all at once.

‘I love it,’ Alfie murmured. ‘It’s so wrong and so right at the same time.’

‘Exactly,’ Susie confirmed.

*

It was empowering, being dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Now that she was truly inside a living work of art she began to understand the excitement of it. It was as if Susie Thomas had made a story out of the original flat painting, had made those mythical creatures into three-dimensional living sculptures.

The artist reminded her of some great female magician transforming a rabbit into a lion. She’d made something inherently American out of something inherently European, a great billboard of American icons – Jackie O, King Kong, Marilyn Monroe, Morticia Addams, the Statue of Liberty. If Gustav Klimt had based the mural on Beethoven’s music, Susie Thomas must have based her version on George Gershwin, Latisha reflected as she stood up there on the stage, thinking that there was a rhythm to the placement of the figures in the scenario that reminded her of jazz, and it didn’t get more American than that. But it was the artist’s confidence and sheer mastery that was most impressive; she was the largest and most controlling personality in the room. It was seductive. No wonder Maxine had fallen in love with this woman, Latisha ruefully acknowledged.

‘Looking good, folks.’ Susie’s voice rang through the studio. ‘Almost there, so if everyone can be patient and hold their breath. Marilyn? Can you tilt your head a lot more to the right?’ she instructed the blonde extra, then glanced back to the other side of the King Kong figure. ‘The Jackie Onassises – you three look great, but, Morticia, can you hunch your shoulders a little more and give the camera your best death stare.’ The raven-haired extra hunched herself like a zombie and glowered in Susie’s direction. ‘Brilliant. Now if you can just hold that thought as I take my position.’

Muriel placed the wig on her. It was heavy; it piled up over her head and fell down to her hips – but wearing it immediat

ely transformed her psychologically. She felt just like the beautiful but lewd figure of Lust – no doubt based on a favourite prostitute or lover of Klimt’s – as she dropped the dressing gown, walked behind the set and climbed up the steps built specially into the back of the huge ape-like figure to take her position on the stage. She then rested her tilted head on her right knee so that she was exactly mimicking the position of Lust in the original.

‘Can I have a reading on my position?’ she asked Alfie.

He glanced down at the image of the panel. ‘You have to place the left hand around your right ankle, then the other hand over that, and Marilyn should be leaning towards you so that she’s framing the area behind you,’ he instructed.

Both Susie and the Marilyn lookalikes adjusted their positions.

‘Okay. Ready, Alfie, for a trial shot?’