David Morrell - Burnt Sienna

Synopsis:

Once Chase Malone waged war. Now he creates beauty, living as a reclusive painter in Mexico. Until a rich man hires Chase to do his wifes portrait. And Chase finds out what beauty is really all about.... Derek Bellasar is an international arms merchant who lives in a fortress-like mansion on the Riviera. Sienna is his wife and the woman whose incredible beauty Chase Malone must somehow capture on canvas. Theres only one problem: Every time Bellasar has one of his wives painted, she dies. Suddenly, Chase is fighting a one-man battle against Bellasar and a private army of highly trained killers. At stake is Siennas life and more. Because the CIA has been using Chase to keep a blockbuster biological arms deal from going down. And with a mans evil threatening to devastate the world, Chase Malone must save a woman, save his life, and practice the art of war.

Thats my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive
Robert Browning

From Newsweek

That was a long time ago. I dont think about it, Malone claims. But if, according to the critics, his paintings celebrate life more than any artist since the Impressionists, one cant help suspecting that the sensuality in his work is a reaction to the nightmare he barely survived on the night of December 20, 1989, during the U.S. invasion of Panama.

A painter who was once a military helicopter pilot in the cutthroat competition of todays art world, that dramatic juxtaposition between Malones violent past and artistic present accounts for part of his mystique. But while his Marine background is exotic to some patrons, it also initially made critics skeptical that his work had merit. As Douglas Fennerman, Malones art representative, points out, Chase had to work twice as hard to earn his reputation. From that point of view, it doesnt hurt to have a soldiers background if you want to survive on the battlefield of the galleries in Manhattan.

Certainly Malone looks more like a soldier than any stereotype of an artist. Six feet tall, sinewy more than muscular, he has a sun-bronzed face and ruggedly attractive features. Interviewed on the beach near his home on the Mexican resort of Cozumel, he had just completed his daily exercise of a five-mile jog coupled with an hour of calisthenics. His sandy hair, bleached by the Caribbean sun, matches the color of the beard stubble that adds to his rugged handsomeness. Apart from the paint smears on his T-shirt and shorts, there is no hint of his place in the art world.

He is thirty-seven, but it isnt hard to imagine that he didnt look much different in his lieutenants uniform ten years earlier when his helicopter gunship was shot down by a Panamanian rocket. That happened at 2:00 A.M. on December 20, and while Malone refuses to talk about the incident, Jeb Wainright, the copilot who was shot down with him, remembers it vividly.

In the night, there were so many tracers and rockets flying around, not to mention flames shooting up from explosions on the ground, it looked like the Fourth of July. In hell. To soften everything up, we hit first from the air: 285 fixed-wing aircraft and 110 helicopters. Like a swarm of gigantic mosquitoes, with damned big stingers. Forty-millimeter Vulcan cannons, 105-millimeter howitzers, laser-guided antitank missiles. The works.

One of the principal targets was the headquarters of the Panamanian Defense Forces, a factorylike building in a shanty section of Panama City, called El Chorrillo,the little stream. The enemy put its headquarters there, U.S. military planners theorized, so that Panamanian troops could use the twenty thousand people in El Chorrillo as a shield.

And something like that happened, Wainright continues. When our choppers attacked the headquarters, the enemy ran for cover in the surrounding area. But we kept after them, and thats when Chase started shouting into the radio to tell our command post that civilians were under fire. They sure were. Almost at once, five square blocks burst into flames. Command Central didnt have a chance to respond before we were hit. I still remember my teeth snapping together from the explosion. Chase fought to keep control of the gunship. It was full of smoke, spinning and veering, all the while dropping. Chase is the best chopper pilot I ever saw, but I still dont know how he managed to get us safely on the ground.

The nightmare was only beginning. In the darkness, with the fire spreading from shack to shack, Malone and Wainright struggled to escape. As the twenty thousand residents of El Chorrillo swarmed in panic through a maze of alleys, Malone and his copilot were shot at by Panamanian forces as well as by U.S. gunships whose crews didnt realize American fliers were on the ground.

Then a bullet hit me in the leg, Wainright says. I have no idea from which side. While the civilians rushed past us, Chase rigged a pressure bandage on my leg, heaved me over his shoulder, and tried to get away from the fires. At one point, he had to use his service pistol against Panamanian soldiers holed up in a building. I later realized it took him until after dawn to get us out of there. We were slumped against a wall, soot falling all around us, when American tanks and flamethrowers showed up to level what was left of El Chorrillo. Two thousand civilians died that night. God knows how many were wounded. All twenty thousand lost their homes.

Shortly afterward, Malone left the Marine Corps.

Chase had always been drawing stuff when we werent training, Wainright recalls.Sometimes, instead of going on leave, he stayed in the barracks and worked on his sketches. It was obvious he had talent, but I had no idea how much until after he committed himself to trying to earn a living at it.That night in El Chorrillo, he made up his mind, and he never looked back.

A viewer will find no hint of violence in Malones paintings.They are mostly colorful landscapes.Their vibrant details, which are reminiscent of van Gogh and yet distinctly his own, communicate a passionate joy in the senses, a thrill of sensual appreciation for the natural world that perhaps only someone who has survived a face-to-face encounter with apocalyptic violence and death could be moved to depict....

As waves lapped at Malones sneakers, the sunset reflected off the Caribbean, creating a hue that seemed never to have existed before. He was conscious of the gritty sand beneath his shoes, of the balmy breeze against his thick, curly hair, and of the plaintive cree-cree-cree of seagulls overhead. Raising his brush to the half-finished canvas, he concentrated to get it all in not just the shapes and colors but also the sounds, the fragrances, and even the taste of the salt air: to attempt the impossible and embed those other senses in a visual medium so that the painting would make a viewer feel what it had been like to stand in this spot at this magical moment, experiencing the wonder of this sunset as if there had never been another.

Abruptly something distracted him. When Malone had been in the military, his ability to register several details at once had been a survival skill, but it was as an artist and not a soldier that he now noticed movement at the edge of his vision.

It came from his right, from a stand of palm trees a hundred yards along the deserted beach, near where the unseen dirt road ended. A shifting shadow became a squat man stepping onto the sand. The intruder raised a hand to shield his spectacles from the sunsets brilliance and peered in Malones direction. As the man approached, his dark suit revealed itself to be royal blue. The black of his shoes was soon covered with the white of the sand that he walked across. His briefcase, a chalk gray that matched his hair, had bumps on it ostrich skin.

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