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family? Friends? ...'
    Bosch reeled off the details he had learned by heart from looking at the file a hundred times over the previous few days.
    'He's single, twenty-six years old, born in Mexico. Father died of lung cancer, mother lives with his sister in Mexico City. Oscar emigrated to the States when he was eighteen. He's athletic, enjoys sport. He worked as a bodyguard for Hispanic businessmen living in Miami or New York. One of them had a hyperdramatic work of art in his house. Oscar asked for information about it, then started as a guard in small New York galleries. Then he came to work for us. We helped him get on, because he was intelligent and a hard worker. The first important Foundation work that he was security for was a Buncher shown at the Leo Castelli gallery.' 'A what?'
    Miss Wood explained drily.
    'Evard Buncher was one of the founders of orthodox hyper dramatism, together with Max Kalima and Bruno van Tysch. He was Norwegian. During the Second World War he was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Mauthausen. He managed to survive. He travelled to London, where he met Kalima and Tanagorsky and began to paint his pictures on human beings instead of canvases. But he enclosed them in boxes. Some people say he was influenced in this by his experiences in the concentration camp.'
    This woman is like a computer, the policeman thought to himself.
    'They're small boxes, open on one side,' Miss Wood went on. 'The work is put inside and stays there for several hours.' She turned her head towards the wall behind her and pointed to the large photo on it. 'That's a Buncher, for example.'
    The policeman had noticed it as soon as he'd arrived, and had wondered what on earth it meant. Two naked bodies painted red were crammed into a glass box, which was so small they had to cling together in a complicated knot. Their genitals were visible, but not their faces. To judge by the former, they were a man and a woman. The enormous photo filled almost the entire wall in this room in the MuseumsQuartier. So that is meant to be a work of art, the policeman thought. And anyone could buy it and take it home. He wondered if his wife would want something like that decorating their dining room. How on earth did they manage to stay in those impossibly contorted positions for such lengths of time?
    He recalled the exhibition he had seen that same afternoon.
    As a detective in the homicide squad of the Austrian police force's Criminal Investigation Department, art had never particularly interested Felix Braun. Like all good Viennese, his predilection for art started and ended with nineteenth-century music. Of course, he had seen various hyperdramatic works of art exhibited in public in Vienna, but before that afternoon he had never been to a full exhibition.
    He had arrived at the MuseumsQuartier - the artistic and cultural centre containing most of Vienna's modern art museums -forty minutes before his appointment with Miss Wood and Bosch. Having nothing better to do, and given the special circumstances of the case, he decided to visit the exhibition in which the murdered girl had been taking part.
    It was being shown at the Kunsthalle. An enormous poster of one of the figures (he learnt soon after that it was Marigold Desiderata) filled the entire facade of the museum. The title of the exhibition was written in German in huge red letters: 'Blumen' by Bruno van Tysch. A simple enough title, thought Bosch. 'Rowers'. Before gaining access to the exhibition, every visitor had to pass through a metal detector, an X-ray machine, and an image analysis cabin. Of course, his police revolver set off the alarm at the first stage of the screening process, but Braun had already explained who he was. He pushed open double doors, and found himself in the inhuman darkness of art. At first he thought the exhibits were painted statues placed on pedestals. When he came closer to the first work, he could hardly believe it was a real flesh and blood person, a