The Motion of Puppets (20 page)

“Good night, my lovelies,” she said. “Welcome to your new home.”

The last lights went out in the house; the puppeteers retired to bed. Exhausted by the ordeal, the puppets stirred briefly, whispering carefully among themselves, making sure they were all present. From the floor below came a great snuffling, the sound of the new Worm readying for sleep. The Dog, who had not undergone the transformation, bounded into the tack room like a windup toy, a miniature pet that went from soul to soul, sniffing and whimpering, puzzled by old friends in new forms. Sometime before dawn, the little toy settled at the Old Hag's feet. He kicked his paws in his sleep, at chase in his dreams.

*   *   *

“They are all naked,” Egon said. “Naked as jaybirds, every man and woman. What sort of voyeur was this? What sort of game was afoot?” He flipped through Muybridge's
The Human Figure in Motion,
holding up a spread of images for Theo to see. In the seats across the aisle, a pair of teenage boys glanced his way every time Egon flashed another page. They had been watching with prurient interest ever since the train had crossed the border into Canada.

“They're not naked, they're nude,” Theo said. “He was an artist, interested in the body in motion, the way the muscles moved, the shape of the limbs.”

Egon was not impressed with the explanation and held up another sequence of two nude men dueling with swords. “Zounds. A fellow could be seriously hurt. So they didn't care—way back when—that this old roué was asking these nubile men and women to strip to their birthday suits so he could take pictures of them throwing a ball or playing leapfrog without a stitch or some chick doing the dance of the seven veils?”

“In the name of science, in the name of art.”

Behind his back, the boys whispered to each other and leaned in to take a closer look. The train rocked along the tracks, holding them in its constant rhythm.

In Montreal, Theo and Egon switched from the railway to the road, catching the bus to Québec City in the fading light of late afternoon. For the better part of the week, Egon had been pestering him to make the trip, to see for himself the strange attic in the abandoned toy store, working incessantly his theory of the puppets. Not that he was convinced—Theo went along to shut him up and to put his face in front of the police, remind Thompson and Foucault that he was still hoping.

As soon as the iconic hotel Frontenac appeared like a great birthday cake atop the hill, Theo realized his mistake. Images of Kay flooded his mind. Happy days when they had first arrived in June, her radiant smile, the color of her skin against her dress. Ducking in the passages under the ramparts into Vieux-Québec, she had grabbed his arm with both hands and looked into his eyes. “It's like a fairy tale.” And the excitement bubbling as they raced with their suitcases into the sublet apartment, twirled at the spaciousness of it, bounced from room to room, and threw open the shutters to let in the view of the Saint Lawrence, the cool air taking her breath. And then straight into the bedroom, barely pausing to shed their clothes. “
Baise-moi,
” she said, surprising him with her remembered French, and he was dumbstruck happy, mad with the marvel of her body, the way she hooked her legs behind his back,
my acrobat.
Wild with gymnastics that left him exhausted and panting, he laid his head against the slick of her chest and felt the cannon of her heart in his ear, thought he could die in the moment without another wish. He could picture her moving like a Muybridge sequence, a series of images, the woman as she rocks. And again, she ravished him later that same evening and first thing in the morning as though the novelty of this old place had unleashed a new Kay, abandoning all restraint, and he was helplessly in love.

“We'll go to the toy shop after midnight,” Egon said. “We check into our hotel rooms and have a bite. I'm famished.”

The sound of his friend's voice broke Theo's reverie, and he tumbled back into the hole of grief. “I shouldn't have come. I'm not ready to face it.”

“Buck up. I'll keep you safe.”

The little man patted his thigh, and the spell was broken.

Bellies full with rich food and beer, Theo and Egon waddled over to rue Saint-Paul in a thick fog that had settled in the Basse-Ville. The few people about at such a late hour appeared as shadows in the mist, and the ring of their shoes was muffled by the damp and cold. Looking down the street of lost dreams, Theo shivered in the October air. The quiet ate him and he disappeared into the scene, his mind a blank, barely registering his friend by his side or the closed and darkened shops and cafés they passed. Egon grabbed him by the wrist to stop him from walking right by the Quatre Mains toy shop, the painted letters on the sign cracked and faded.

Theo pressed his face against the window, opaque as a television screen. Nothing to be seen, nothing but faint memories of when Kay had delighted in the toys on display. A phantom hand pressed against his back from the times she had to lean into him, holding herself from leaping through the looking glass.

“This way,” Egon said, motioning for him to follow. “That's just the surface of things.”

Turning sideways, he crabbed his way along a narrow alley, the passage tight and claustrophobic. When they came to the end, Egon shrugged a messenger's bag from his shoulder and produced a small flashlight. Theo turned on the app on his smartphone, which cast a beam and threw into relief the rear entrance, a few sticks of broken furniture littered about like bones. Someone had locked the door. With a crudely fashioned pick, Egon forced the lock and they were quickly in the back room. Dead center sat a table, dark and massive as a tomb, and along the walls rows of shelves and cubbies were coated with dust and debris. They sleuthed their way into the showroom and found the staircase, the treads creaking disconcertingly under their weight. Pale light from the streetlamps shone through the front windows, but they headed for the dark side. Egon crossed himself like a lapsed Catholic at the closed door. A thread of light glowed at the jamb.

“Here goes nothing,” he said. “If those puppets come spilling out, make way. My legs may be short, but I'll knock you over like a bowling pin.”

The room appeared just as Theo had imagined from Egon's description. A chair lay on its back, two legs in the air, and a tumble of books and boxes were strewn on the floor behind it. A rumpled pillow sat on the unmade bed, and beside it on the night table stood a nearly empty bottle of whiskey. Tacked to the walls were Egon's circus pinups and Victorian postcards. An aroma of fried onions hung in the air. In the ceiling, a rectangle opened to the attic.

“Up there,” Egon whispered, shutting off his flashlight. “But I'm sure the hatch was closed when I left. It nearly took off my thumb when I was escaping.”

“Well, it is open now, so perhaps your memory is at fault.”

“Or perhaps they opened it again.…”

“Don't be absurd.”

“Just be careful.”

“What do you mean be careful? You don't suppose I'm crawling up there by myself?”

“Let's be practical,
mon ami.
First, I could barely reach the attic on the top of a stack of boxes and books on top of the chair. When it all came tumbling down, I nearly killed myself.”

The fallen chair and the hole in the ceiling made the room look like a crime scene, a botched suicide without the twisted rope, without the body hanging from the beams. Theo listened for a sign from above, a rustle in the attic, but the room was cold and silent. Beside him, the little man bounced on the balls of his feet.

“Okay, okay, though I'm not sure if this isn't a big mistake.” Theo righted the chair and stood on the seat below the opening, finding his reach too short to hoist himself up. Watching from below, Egon found the thickest book nearby and handed it to him, and after an abortive try, Theo finally pulled through the opening and rolled away from the edge across the dirty floor. The diffused light made it impossible to see more than shapes and shadows, so he called for Egon to throw him the flashlight.

He had expected monsters, but they must have been hiding or fled the scene. Here and there, small footprints and handprints appeared in the dust, but these he guessed were Egon's. The long string hanging from the ceiling brushed against him like a spider's silk, and when he tugged on it, the light came on and revealed no puppets, no giraffe with a broken neck, no toys at all.

“There's nothing up here,” Theo hollered down. “Just a bunch of boxes and some old books.”

“Are you sure? There should be an army of satanic dolls. Heads that can talk. Dummies that can reach out and grab you.”

“You want to come up and check for yourself? All this way for nothing.”

“I swear they were there. Someone must have come got them. Or maybe they ran away. Check in the boxes at least.”

The first carton he opened held scraps of cloth, tiny dresses and miniature coats, a bag of funny small hats, and at the bottom an armory of wooden swords, popguns, and slapsticks. When he cracked the seal on the second box and folded back the lid, he gasped at what was inside—dozens of tiny hands with carved and articulated fingers and thumbs. Another box was filled with eyes, glass and marble and painted ping-pong balls, all staring back at him, the irises gleaming in the light of the bare bulb. A box of wigs, a box of tiny circus props, a wooden hoop, a lion tamer's whip, a juggler's balls and clubs and rings.

“Just bits and bobs packed away,” he said. “A bunch of body parts, but no bodies.”

“I tell you they were up there. You don't see them? A talking head or two?”

Theo took out his smartphone and snapped some pictures of the contents of the attic. He had wanted to believe in Egon's story and was disappointed in equal measure for himself and for his friend, but it seemed little more than a nightmare, a delirium brought about by too much drink or too little company. “The assembly has disassembled. They were sad to see you go. I'm coming down.”

On his way to the hatch, he tripped when his foot struck an object on the floor and kicked it across the room, two pieces parting and skittering in different directions. Theo crawled on his hands and knees to fetch them. Two pale blue shoes, women's heels, one whole and one broken. Kay had worn such a pair. He cupped them in his hands the way he had once held her feet.

 

16

A half-eaten baguette stuffed with
jambon
and mozzarella sat on Foucault's desk. He set the shoes next to his sandwich and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. Theo and Egon eased into the chairs facing him, anxious to begin, but they were all waiting for Thompson to arrive. The shoe with the broken heel leaned against the upright shoe. In the stark light of the police office, Theo was more convinced that the pair had belonged to Kay. The policeman regarded them indifferently, as if they were ordinary shoes and not a clue to her disappearance. He seemed more interested in his interrupted lunch.

“You must forgive my colleague,” Thompson said as he entered the squad room. “If he doesn't get fed by a certain hour, he gets crabby and fickle.” He came around the desk to shake hands with his visitors. “What's this I hear about shoes?”

They told him three versions of the story. In the first, innocently enough, they had returned to the toy store, remembering how Kay had loved it so, and seeing it abandoned, they tried the door and rummaged around inside, and came across the discarded pair of shoes. “I am almost certain,” Theo told the detectives, “that these are the ones she was wearing the night she vanished. She liked to wear them with her yellow sundress.”

“But why would your wife have gone into the toy shop after midnight?” Foucault asked.

“It was on the route between the cirque and our flat. I don't know, perhaps someone was after her and she needed a place to hide. Perhaps that's why she broke a heel, she was running away from him.”

“A very distinctive color,” Thompson said, picking up the broken-heeled shoe. “If these are hers … The right size, I assume?”

“I don't know what size she wore—we had only been married a short time, so it is hard to say.”

Foucault finished chewing another bite from his sandwich. “But you don't know for certain. Could be a random pair of lost shoes.”

The second version peeled back another layer to the story. Egon began with a confession—that he had gone back alone and broken into the Quatre Mains well after Theo had left town. That he had found the matchbook with the cryptic SOS. Theo dug the matchbook from his wallet and handed it to Thompson.

“‘Help,'” the detective read aloud. “‘Get me out of here.' Is this your wife's handwriting, Mr. Harper?”

“Hard to say. Normally, she didn't print like that; in fact, I don't think I ever saw her printing.”

Thompson handed the matchbook to Foucault, who inspected both sides with mild curiosity. “Have you ever been to this Les Déesses in Montreal? Some sort of gentlemen's club,
monsieur
?”

“Of course that's her handwriting,” Egon said. “Just as those are her shoes. I'm telling you, she was at the Quatre Mains.”

The sergeant flipped the matchbook next to the shoes. “It could be a clue. Or it could be a joke. A random bit of trash in an abandoned store. Perhaps this is a note from a stripper to one of her customers?
Les liaisons dangereuses.
”

Thompson asserted his authority. “We will look into it, obviously. But unless you could be sure there is a connection to your wife—”

“I tell you she was there,” Egon insisted. “The place is haunted. I heard them. I seen them.”

“Seen whom?” Foucault asked.

“The puppets. The ones who took her.”

“He doesn't mean it,” Theo said. “Just his imagination running away.”