Posted by dull thud on July 12, 2001 at 14:33:32:
Amsterdam, the guidebooks will tell you, is home to more museums per
square mile than anywhere else in Europe. An afternoon stroll through the oldest
part of the city, over the reproduction-medieval bridges and between the
drifting clusters of camera-waving tourists in matching raincoats, will take you
past huge galleries packed with the priceless works of the Old Masters or
telling the story of the city as a centre for the diamond trade.
A little further out, you’ll find the smaller, more special-interest museums. These might be dedicated to props from horror films, the magic of Cruyff, even underwear design. And as her supercolleagues went off to trawl the shops and cafes, Troia, in the mood for some culture, saw an advertisement in the local listings magazine and caught a tram to the suburbs.
She alighted in front of a limestone building. A board outside gave the name in several languages; the third one down was THE MUSEUM OF THE NAKED MAN. “Come inside,” the ad had suggested, “and wander through our unique sculpture hall. Representations of the male nude in every medium.”
Troia giggled. This was going to be good.
The door was locked. She rapped on it with the end of her spear. After a minute, it opened a couple of inches. A man in janitors’ overalls and his mid-fifties looked out. He said something in Dutch. Troia looked back. “Er, I’d like to see the naked men please,” she said simply.
The janitor narrowed his eyes as he dredged up his English lessons. “I’m sorry miss,” he said, “bot ve musseum iss clossed on Mondays.”
Troia stood her ground. “Well I’m here now, and I really would like to see the naked men. Please can I come in?”
“No. It is clossed.”
Troia rested the point of her spear on his fleshy nose. “Naked men. Now.”
He let her in.
Within minutes, Troia wished she hadn’t bothered. The sculpture hall was a huge disappointment. What the ad hadn’t mentioned was that the gallery was devoted to the male nude in late twentieth-century art. The works on display ranged from Moore-style pieces vaguely recognisable as reclining figures to bizarre forms slashed from tree trunks with a chainsaw. One piece, which the guidebook claimed balanced the ideas of body as tool and as source of pleasure, seemed to have been created by building a 1:72 scale model of a ferris wheel from coathangers and cake dough and then persuading a yak to sit on it. In fact, judging by the tufts of coarse hair in places you’d least expect them, that may well have been what happened.
Valid statements they might be, but none of them were quite what she’d been looking for. She turned to go. Blocking the doorway was a figure dressed from head to toe in black and clutching a guitar.
“You!” gasped Troia.
“Me,” agreed Chronic.
She raised her spear and edged toward him like a panther sizing up its prey. Chronic struck a single C#m7 and the weapon was torn from her grasp; it clattered pathetically against the far wall. “Unarmed, and without that helmeted ponce to protect you. You’re, like, so dead. Again.” He stepped forward. Troia noticed his pupils were twice their normal size. In desperation, she hurled Plaster cast of the artist’s feet (Konigsberg, 1957) at the string-slinger. A second jarring chord reduced it to powder in mid-air. Chronic chuckled to himself.
Troia glanced around the room for some means of escape. None was in evidence. Chronic was close enough for her to pick up the sweetish herby smell wafting off his clothes. “You really should have known. You come to Europe, fine.” Troia winced as he gently strummed something perilously close to Gimme All Your Lovin’. “But fancy walking right into the city where the very source of my power is sold openly in the coffee shops! That’s just plain stupid.”
She couldn’t deny it. Given that his strength increased with every toke, this was an exceptionally poor choice of destination. He seemed well-nigh invincible. By now Troia had backed against a seven-foot tall work in bronze and couldn’t go any further. Chronic was just toying with her. He picked out Cecilia Ann at half-speed and flashed a wicked grin. “I'm going to destroy you. I’ve been working up to this since yesterday morning, and I think I’m going to enjoy it immensely.” He switched to Steve’s bridge pickup and fretted for the start of Fire. He drew back his right arm.
And released his grip. “Have you got any food?” Troia shook her head. “Pity. Hey, get this. The last place I was in had fifty-seven different varieties. People were picking over them like the wine list.” He shrugged, coughed drily and smiled.
Troia sensed he was waiting for her to say something. “So you, uh, sampled them all?”
“Damn right.”
There was a long silence. “So… you’re going to kill me now, are you? Just like that?”
Chronic’s bloodshot eyes closed and opened once, twice, three times. “Am I?” His face hardened. “Yes, that was it. Prepare to die!”
Troia, helpless against such a formidable foe, prepared to die.
“Have you got any food? Or did I ask you that already?”
“No and yes.”
“Okay. Sorry.” Chronic sighed heavily. “Is it just me, or is it really hot in here?” He took a step back and pitched over like a felled oak, reducing a row of small terracotta figures to smithereens.
Again there was silence. Troia, her confidence flooding back, poked him in the ribs with the toe of her sandal. No response. The titanic quantities of grass he had consumed in the last twenty-nine hours had finally proved too much even for his bizarre metabolism. He started to snore softly. Troia retrieved her spear and held it to his throat while she considered her options. There came an idea she liked very much. She took a length of extension cable from the janitor’s cupboard.
Shortly after, she dumped Chronic’s clothes in a back alley, having left the
museum’s latest exhibit, Sleeping Beauty (Troia, two minutes ago)
dangling by its ankles from a streetlight. Maybe it hadn’t been such a waste of
time after all.