Sacre Bleu (38 page)

“I went to Giverny,” Lucien said. “Monet says the blue color can stop time. Literally stop time for the painter.”

“Oh,” said Henri. “So what you remembered, when the Professeur hypnotized you, with the trains, that happened?”

“Yes,” Lucien said. “Monet really painted six paintings in a half an hour. To him it was hours. The Colorman told him what would happen that day. But before then, and after, the color always came by way of his wife, Camille.”

“But she died, didn’t she?” said Henri.

“Monet says they all die, Henri. There’s always a woman and she always dies.”

Henri twirled his cigar in the crystal ashtray, paring off the snowy powder of ash and punishing the ember, daring it to go out. He looked over his
pince-nez
at Lucien, studying the baker as if he were a painting, analyzing the brushstrokes that formed his eyelashes. Lucien feigned a cough and looked at the table, unable to hold his friend’s gaze.

“Not always,” Henri said, his voice soft, the voice of a friend, not the outrageous painter Toulouse-Lautrec. “They don’t always die. Carmen went away. She’s fine. Juliette went away, before, and she came back. Maybe she’ll come back again.”

“But you said yourself that Carmen nearly died. What if Juliette is sick somewhere? What if the Colorman has locked her up? Who knows what he does to them?”

“Carmen knows,” said Henri. “We could ask her what the Colorman does, where he goes.”

“But she doesn’t remember anything.”

“And neither did you, until the Professeur did his parlor trick with the blue watch.”

“We don’t have any more blue.”

“Yes we do, Lucien. We have your
Blue Nude.
Remember how Renoir reacted when he saw it? It was as if he were transported back to his Margot. We’ll ask Carmen to remember while she’s looking at your painting.”

“I will try anything, Henri, but won’t seeing Carmen be painful for you?”

“If she remembers me as I remember her, no. If not, well, I’ll be heartbroken, but she’s a redhead, it’s to be expected. Tomorrow morning you can get your painting from Bruant and bring it to my studio. That gives me time to do some sketches for Salis and run by the brothel at rue d’Amboise for some light evening debauchery. In the morning, I’ll go to the Marais and bring Carmen back to question her before the
Blue Nude.
Perhaps Le Professeur will help.”

“He’s gone away, exploring some newly discovered cave in Spain.”

“Do you know if he fixed my mechanical stilts?”

“I know he had been working on them. He said he would leave them at your studio. They weren’t there?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been there. I wanted to have breakfast before I started work.”

“She’s both a clown and a lesbian. At the same time! Art weeps for the missed opportunity.”
La Clownesse Cha-U-Kao au Moulin Rouge
—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1895

T
HE
C
OLORMAN UNLOCKED THE DOOR AND WALKED THE
M
ANET SIDEWAYS
into the flat. It was dark, not a single gaslight was lit, yet he could see Juliette by the moonlight streaming through the windows. She stood at the stove, stirring something in a pot. It smelled like stew, lamb maybe.

“
Chérie,
why are you standing in the dark like a ninny? Come look at what I have. I’ll bet you don’t remember this one.” He leaned the painting against the wall, then took a box of matches from the mantel, climbed on a chair under one of the gas sconces, turned the valve, and lit a match. Even on the chair, he could not reach the lamp. Somewhere there was a brass extension rod that a match could be clipped on for lighting the overhead lamp, but he wasn’t going to find it in the dark.

“Come help me.”

She dropped her spoon and moved across the room in awkward, mechanical steps. She took the match from him and held it to the mantel, which sizzled into a white-hot glow.

She stepped back and stood there, still holding the lit match. The Colorman blew it out before it burned her fingers. She wore the periwinkle dress. A note was pinned on ruffles at her bosom. It read
DO NOT BONK THE JULIETTE
in bold yet elegant script.

The Colorman sighed and climbed off his chair. So Bleu had moved on to another body.

The Colorman said, “The concierge wouldn’t let Étienne come upstairs, the bitch. But I left some carrots with him in the stable. And I got a new pistol.” He pulled the small revolver from his waistband and waved it in the air like a tiny broken buckaroo.

Juliette said nothing, but turned to watch him as he tucked the pistol away and went to the stove to taste the stew.

“You remember this Manet?” He moved the painting into the light. “Berthe is nearly as pretty as you, eh? Darker eyes, though.”

Juliette blinked, that was all. He knew she wasn’t going to answer. This kind never talked, which, truth be told, he liked better than when Bleu was in residence. Although this was a rare occurrence, happening only when she created a model from scratch. Most of the time she just moved from one body to another, even back and forth, often leaving the person whose body she had used confused and unable to remember where she had been while Bleu was in control. Sometimes, however, as she had with Juliette, Bleu simply found the meat, a corpse (this one had been a drowned woman in the morgue on Île de la Cité) and she would shape it into a whole new living, breathing creature. Juliette had never existed before Bleu made her, so when Bleu moved on, the Juliette shell became little more than a doll. She could move and would take instructions, do simple tasks, and she would eat, drink, and go to the lavatory without being prompted, but she had no will of her own.

“I didn’t need the note,” said the Colorman. He went back to the stove and ladled out two shallow bowls of the stew. He placed the bowls on the table and went back to the kitchen for spoons and a baguette. “Come, sit. Eat,” he said.

Juliette went to the table, sat down, and began to eat.

“Slowly,” the Colorman said. “It’s hot. Blow on it.” He showed her how to blow on a spoonful of stew before eating it and she followed him in the gesture, blowing on it exactly four times, as he had, before putting each spoonful in her mouth. A drop of brown gravy ran down her chin and dripped onto the tablecloth.

The Colorman climbed down from his chair, snapped up her napkin from the table, and tucked it into the high collar of her dress, taking the care to smooth the bib over her breasts several times to make sure it was secure.

“There, you won’t ruin your dress. See, I didn’t need the note.”

She stared blankly at a spot in the middle of the table but smiled faintly after she swallowed each bite. She really was lovely. And so pleasant to be around without Bleu inside being sarcastic and barking rules. He knew he needed to respect Bleu’s wishes, however. There had been a few times when he had not, and she’d found out, and he’d woken up on fire, which was unpleasant. But they did need a maid, didn’t they?

“Maybe after supper, you can do a little cleaning,” he said. He tore off a piece of bread and tossed it in her bowl. She picked it up and nibbled it like a squirrel worrying an acorn.

The note only said not to
bonk
the Juliette. It didn’t say she couldn’t clean the flat. And it didn’t say that she had to be wearing any clothes while she cleaned, did it? No, it did not.

“You can clean and I’ll see if I can frighten you,” said the Colorman. “If Bleu isn’t back by morning, you can come with me to Montmartre to shoot the baker and the dwarf. It will be fun.”

He’d forgotten how much he liked it when Bleu left one of her empty shells wandering around the house. Except for the being set on fire, of course.

A
S IT TURNED OUT, FINDING ANOTHER PAINTER HADN’T BEEN THAT DIFFICULT.
She’d found the perfect one, one she’d known before, known his desires, but for him to be of any value, she needed the blue, and to get that, she needed to get to Montmartre, and as it turned out, getting a taxi at midnight in the Latin Quarter was very difficult indeed, especially if you were a fourteen-year-old Polynesian girl, which is how Bleu currently appeared.

The taxi driver was snoring in his seat, the horse was dozing in his harness.

“Excuse me, monsieur,” she said, tugging gently at the cuff of the cabbie’s trousers. “Excuse me.”

The taxi driver’s head lolled in a full circle before he identified where the voice was coming from, despite the tug on his cuff. Sleeping
and
drunk.

“Can you take me to Montmartre, please, monsieur?” she said. “Boulevard de Clichy. I’ll need you to wait while I pick up something, then return here.”

“No, that’s too far. It’s late. Go home, girl.”

“I can pay.”

“Fine, twenty
francs.
”

“That’s robbery!” She stepped back to get a better look at the cab-driving pirate.

“Or we could work something out, my little chestnut,” said the cabbie with a lecherous sneer that, if not practiced, showed great natural ability.

“I’m worth twenty
francs,
then? How about we have a tumble in the back of your cab, you give me the twenty
francs,
then I’ll hire a sane taxi driver to take me to Montmartre for two
francs
and I’ll send the rest to my mother in Tahiti, who has leprosy?” Bleu lifted her very plain gray skirt and gave the cabdriver a look at her ankles, resplendent in brown wool stockings. “How about it?”

“Twenty
francs?
I could have ten girls in Pigalle for twenty
francs!
”

“I thought it seemed generous of you, but I am just an ignorant island girl who probably doesn’t have leprosy, what do I know?”

“Fuck off, girl. It’s late.”

“Exotic island beauty,” she said, teasing, showing a little more ankle, and in the process releasing the full seductive power of a brown woolen sock. “Woo-woo,” she said, thinking that might be something an exotic island beauty might say. “
Oh là là,
” she said.

“I’m tired. I’m going home for the night,” said the cabbie.

“Look, you were the one who said we could work something out. That was your idea,” said Bleu.

“I was still sleepy and hadn’t gotten a good look at you. And that was before I knew about your mother’s leprosy. Twenty
francs.
”

“Fine,” she said, climbing into the cab. “But I’m not paying you until you bring me back here. Take me to the cabaret Le Mirliton on avenue de Clichy.”

To be a woman at all, in these times, was to be treated like an object, of either scorn or desire, or both, but it was certainly easier making your way around Paris as a beautiful brunette dressed as a proper lady than it was as an island waif barely scratching womanhood. In retrospect, she might have been hasty in changing so soon, but she needed to divert the Colorman’s attention from Lucien, and the best way to do that was to convince him that she had found a new painter, one for whom this little Tahitian girl was the model of perfection.

The streets were nearly deserted so it took only a half an hour to get across the city to the base of Montmartre. A half an hour of the horses’ hooves on the cobbles, the smell of coal smoke, horse shit, yeast from loaves proofing in the bakeries, garlic, soured wine, and meat grease from last evening’s cooking, plus the pervasive odor of dead fish and something deeply green rising in the fog off the Seine. In the back of the hack she bounced like an echo in a rolling pumpkin as the cabbie seemed determined to hit every rut and pothole in the city, and she was giggling at the absurdity of it by the end, which saved the driver’s life.