Blow (8 page)

Meanwhile, Brutessa tore through the stage wall and grabbed Giacomo by his belt loop and Chloe by her skirt strap. You could tell Brutessa was in a state she didn’t recognize, the way she kept turning in circles, wheeling the two around her, looking for something in the chaotic scene to give her a clue. It was rejection or, more specifically, the ipecac feeling of being rejected by her first crush, Giacomo. Brutessa would have slobber-knocked any pirate who said so, but she was experiencing her second emotion. She didn’t like it. After all,
her thoroughly silted-over heart had to make room for a jilted part.

Poor Chloe got the worst of it. She was getting yanked around like a Beanie Baby on a metronome. But before Brutessa could fight off the befuddling feeling of feeling and get her bearings enough to break Chloe’s femur, she fell off the stage and began pummeling the first thing that got in her way. It was a booth of potpourri sachets. She slammed into it and thrashed around so wildly that a miasma of fragrant dust flew into the air. Suddenly, the already-hysterical craftsmen all stopped and screamed in pain, “Agh, my eyes! I might never collage again!” The frenzied pirates didn’t know what to do, other than try to punch the pain out of their own heads. Pulverized anise, orange peel, and lavender may sound nice, but they kick the crud out of your sinuses.

After that, everyone needed to sit down for a while. Prince Kaiser took the opportunity to pull a knife on Chloe and Giacomo. He brandished the short ivory dagger at both of them and motioned them to walk backstage, into the Black Forest.

When they reached a safe distance away from the fairgrounds and entered the royal hazelnut orchard outside the castle, Chloe ventured a question. “Did you really kill an entire elephant for that letter opener?”

The prince responded in French and said it was hippo. Baby hippo, actually. Said the ivory is whiter before they spend all that time in swamp water. (I end up feeding the little guys wheatgrass smoothies from a straw.)

Giacomo said, “I don’t know what you just said, but is that real ivory? Really? Is that necessary?”

The prince said it was, in Italian this time, and followed up by threatening to have both of them executed on his castle lawn if they ever upstaged him again. Giacomo and Chloe stopped walking at the same time and said in their own languages, “Wait a minute. You speak Italian?” “. . . French?”

The prince nodded
sí
and
oui.

Then the two together again: “Can you tell her I think she’s the cutie-patootiest?” “. . . he’s the bubby-wubbiest?”

The prince’s dimples filled with displeasure. He knew he was hopelessly outmatched by a force of unimaginably destructive power: puppy wuv.

He had no choice but to stand there, while they sent each other butterfly kisses, translating their sweet nothings. “Okay, now tell her I love the way she does her hair.”

Strawberry blond and dazzling, in case you were wondering.

When he finally got fed up with it, the prince prodded them on, and they walked again, through the brambles of the Black Forest, to the castle of the Bavarian royal family. It seemed to settle on everyone involved that a life-altering event had happened. The prince was on the path of an international hostage crisis and a coup to give him power over mortality. In its course, many innocent human beings with a lifelong passion for scrapbooking could have been murdered. Giacomo and Chloe both knew their fathers were somewhere back at the fairgrounds. They themselves were also prisoners, but their young love made them feel invincible.

As they walked under the portcullis, into the grand entryway, Chloe said, “Why don’t you just hire Vlad the Regaler? I’ve seen him dance a breathtaking ballet. Maybe he could perform it in reverse.”

The prince gave her the news — what happened to Vlad, the once most beautiful legs in all the world. When Chloe took that fall from the balcony, Vlad, like all of us that night, was struck with horror. But for Vlad, it became a crippling obsession.

Deep down, he knew that the chandelier had been meant for him. He knew I was there to get his autograph. And where anyone else would have been relieved to be passed up, Vlad was overburdened with the injustice that someone as innocent as Chloe had taken his place.

Vlad quit the Saint Petersburg Dance Company mid-tour and hired a carriage to Moscow. He refused to come out at the inns along the way but suffered alone in his little cage for months. The racking guilt broke him slowly over the course of the trip. At first his confidence, his performative energy, the desire to please, all dissipated into nothing. Then gradually his hamstrings began to atrophy, his elegant posture drooped, and his taut stomach became a belly from compulsive overeating. Every once in a while, I’d visit and take a few things. It felt like I was robbing the same house over and over.

By the time the carriage arrived in Moscow, the world’s premier dancer emerged an ugly, ill-kempt slob. No one knew this but the royals of Europe, who required an excuse as to why Vlad would not be dancing at their courts. Everyone else was told the dancer was on vacation, indefinitely, and that all physical trainers with strong backs and minimal gag reflex should inquire for employment.

Chloe wept when she heard this, and Giacomo held her as she did. Then he looked over her shoulder at the prince and whispered, “I heard a lot of Vlad’s name in your talking. You gonna hire him or what?”

T
HE NEXT DAY
opened on a grim reality. Prisoners were paired with a collaborative partner and housed in lavish rooms all throughout the castle. A full English breakfast was served to them as they lay in their four-post beds. Slices of cantaloupe were provided, as well as granola yogurt parfaits, for any captives who preferred lighter fare. A page boy was assigned to every room, and dry-cleaning services were available upon request. In the evening, hostages would endure turndown service, which came with chocolates, optional tuck-in, and a few chapters of their favorite storybook.

Oh yeah, it was a real Día de los Cuervos.

The problems arose if you decided to leave your room — a dwarf would yank your head backward until it touched your ankles. Or if you tried to go on a hunger strike — a dwarf would pretzel you like before and feed you scones like a mother eagle. Or, worst of all, if you decided not to do your art — a dwarf would inspire you, which involved a pile of how-to art books, a two-ton wench, and a size-zero French maid outfit. Don’t ask. Just feel bad. Those how-tos are brutal. Aside from the disemboweling and all. Even back then, those who could did, and those who couldn’t sold short cuts.

Speaking of which, three things happened at this time that not only set the stage, but escalated the tension, for the climax that would follow. Then the dénouement. Me. The first thing was that Babbo and Pierre were partnered together in the north tower. Their fates were entwined from then on. Either the two geniuses would work together or they’d become unfortunate founding fathers in the sport of BASE jumping. And if everyone was facing facts, they’d admit that these two were the prince’s only hope for an Objet worthy of d’Awesome!

Could anyone realistically expect the team-up of the doily twins and the funnel-cake guy to come up with something prettier than heaven? Really? The découpage gal took a fatal dose of glue when she found out her life was in the hands of an urban renewal artist. And frankly, I thanked her. Saved me time later on.

An old widower came close with a pipe-cleaner exhibit that incorporated his roommate’s balloon animals, but even that fell just short of eternity’s holy light. Close, though. I shook the man’s hand after Dimple Pimple fed him bleach and fast-tracked the paperwork to see his wife.

The rest of the craftsmen were playing against the clock. They had to stall their executions by pretending their work wasn’t finished and wait for Pierre and Babbo to bail them all out.

Obviously, that plan didn’t work out for a lot of folks. The prince was arrogant, but he wasn’t an idiot. He was a vain, irreverent, entitled puke stain on human history, with an upper-class sleaziness that no amount of hot tubs or sponge baths could wash off. He had that frat-kid, lad-mag, guy-guy misogyny about him. He thought he could dance. I hated his penmanship, I really did. And his red leather pants. He used to say he
loved
women, like,
all
women, womankind, the female form, and there was nothing wrong with that. He thought that was intelligent discourse. (It isn’t, and there
is
something wrong with that, you chlamydia-ridden mule.)

Okay I’ve lost my place.

. . . But he wasn’t a complete idiot. Stalling didn’t work for the imprisoned artists. Each morning he and Brutessa took the horse-drawn cart through the massive halls of the castle, evaluating progress. The complex was so gargantuan that it took most of the day. The castle was as large as a city. The halls were more like indoor highways, four lanes, sidewalk, and billboards that told you which exit to take for the southwest stables. If you were traveling by foot between kitchens, it was best to pack salt tablets to stave off dehydration.

And now, for this, the Prince Kaiser’s greatest ambition, every single room in every wing was occupied by a pair of artists. Bards played lyres to the interpretive dancing of their partners. Potters spun their wheels, and muralists tried to paint the creations as they spun. A sausage maker and a pickler made a discovery the world wouldn’t soon forget. The hairstylists worked themselves into a corner real quick, except for the one who was paired with the doll maker, and the one with the juggling bear.

It was pretty much a mad soup. The prince was throwing in every ingredient he could think of, figuring he’d hit the right combination eventually. And until that happened, it was awfully fun seeing how many times Brutessa could fold a person in half.

As I said, everyone knew that the only conceivable chance of success was in the creation of a vase full of quilted flowers and painted marbles — a pairing so sublime that every tomb in Old Timey Europe would be left empty. The perished would rise, for heaven’s advantage would be no more, brought low by the hands of two men — great and mighty in craft.

Except the problem was that the two buzzards were quibbling the whole time about which one of their kids seduced the other one and ruined the chances of a classy wedding.

The next thing that happened was that Chloe escaped the castle and Giacomo got his skull cracked by Brutessa and fell into what they used to call “a mortal sweat.”

W
HEN
G
IACOMO AND
Chloe were imprisoned, Prince Kaiser Dimple Pimple forgot to have them separated. Not for propriety, mind you. This was the same prince, after all, who kept mermaids in his bathtub. He should have separated them because of Brutessa.

He just assumed that the pirate queen would forget all about Giacomo as soon as he was out of her sight. So he’d locked them both in the northeast wing, which technically wasn’t a wing so much as a buttressed outcrop on the cliff side of the castle. It had been boarded up ever since the suspicious passing of Dimple Pimple’s parents. The secret wing was where the prince grew up, a lonely brat with room after room dedicated to building blocks, trampolines, and merry-go-rounds. Now the abandoned dark halls felt like a haunted
carnevale.

But the prince had underestimated the strength of Brutessa’s first emotion. She had become a broken-down machine. A killing machine, but still. Among the land pirates, the rumor was going around that she had lost her edge. But it wasn’t that. She’d just changed her focus. She was still the pirate queen, but now she wanted Giacomo as her king.

And so Brutessa boiled the thought of killing Chloe in her stomach, until finally she decided to act. Brutessa drove a cart at full gallop to the northeast wing and sent a giggly keelhauler crashing through the boarded-up double doors.

A mile farther up the grand corridor, past the hall of naked bathtub portraits from the prince’s childhood, and then she reached Chloe’s room. When she bashed open the door, she saw Giacomo, wrapped in Chloe’s arms, drawing a plan for escape. Brutessa would have been horrified, but she’d never been horrified before, so she just let out a gurgly hiccup. In the silent second before Brutessa went manic, Giacomo whispered one of the only French words he had learned into Chloe’s ear. “Sugarlips,” he said, but Chloe knew it meant, “Run.”