“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.
AS 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.
“Here you go,” the cabbie called as he pulled up in front of the darkened cabaret. “Twenty francs.”
“Wait in that alley.” She tossed her head toward the next corner; a wave traveled down her long, blue-black hair with the gesture. “I’ll pay you when I’m finished.”
“You’ll pay me now, if you want me to wait.”
Bleu reconsidered trying to lure him into the cab for a tumble, then snapping his gritty neck. Certainly the island girl didn’t have the seductive charms of Juliette, but men were pigs and could be depended upon to give in to their most base instincts, which is why she felt the need to slaughter one now and then. Perhaps she shouldn’t have played the leprosy note quite so hard. She really didn’t want to leave a corpse in a waiting cab and then have to drive herself across the city, which would undoubtedly attract attention.
Yes, life was hard for a woman in Paris, harder still if you were several women. She sighed, a heavy, existential sigh that would become all the rage in Paris in fifty years.
“Half now,” she said, handing up a ten-franc note. “Half when you take me back to boulevard Saint-Germain. Now wait for me around the corner.”
The driver scoffed at her and left the cab sitting where it was.
“Fine,” she said. The dolt didn’t know enough to be afraid. She’d show him.
She strode up to Le Mirliton’s double oak doors and kicked them at the center of the jamb. The plan, the picture she saw in her mind, what should have happened, was that the doors should have splintered around the locks and sprung open, for despite the diminutive size of her current body, she was very, very strong. What actually happened was the doors, held closed by a padlock and chain threaded through the door handles inside, flexed a bit, gave just enough to absorb the impact of her kick, and she landed on her ass on the sidewalk, while the doors remained quite intact.
The taxi driver laughed. She leapt to her feet and growled at him.
“Maybe you should just knock,” the driver said. “I’ll wait for you around the next corner.” He snapped the reins and the horse clopped a half a block and turned down a narrow street.
A stained glass and oak transom over the two doors had been left open a crack. She eyed it, then shimmied up the front of the right door, using the hinges for footholds; popped the transom open; and slid into the cabaret headfirst, turning a somersault in the air and making a catlike landing on her feet, but with her skirt upturned over her head.
“Oh là là!” A man’s voice, somewhere in the dark.
She fought the tangle of her skirt down, even as she realized that her island girl was wearing no knickers and had just treated the room to a full display of her exotic bare bottom and bits. The child really had been an innocent.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said to the bartender, who had apparently been sleeping on the floor behind the bar and had popped up like a surprised puppet when he’d heard her kick the door, just in time to see her stick her landing sans culottes.
He was young, and even in the dark she could see he was lean and handsome, with a shock of blond hair that fell over one eye and a red waistcoat that made him appear a bit like a sleepy yet dashing outlaw.
“Bonsoir,” she said, so as not to be impolite. She was across the bar in an instant. She stretched up and kissed the surprised bartender chastely on the lips, just a peck, then snatched a bottle out of the well and hit him over the head with it three times fast. Miraculously, the bottle did not break. The bartender, however, was quite unconscious and bleeding from his scalp in two places. Enchantment and seduction were fine means of persuasion, but when time is short, an awkward but quick concussion could better serve a girl’s purpose.
“Sorry,” she said. “Accident. Couldn’t be helped.” No wonder the Colorman always said that; she felt much better about having bludgeoned the bartender, who had really done nothing more than oh là là her naughty bits. She bent and kissed him on the cheek, then leapt up onto the bar to inspect the Blue Nude.
She could just reach it, and she gently touched the paint at the edge. Still tacky, even after weeks. Damn Lucien, using stand oil cut with clove oil for a medium—it might take months to dry completely. She wouldn’t be able to razor it off the stretchers and roll it up; she’d have to take the whole bloody life-sized thing.
Standing on a chair on the bar, she was able to unhook the painting and get it down without marring the paint. She found the key to the padlock and chain in the barman’s pocket and was standing on the sidewalk with the painting less than five minutes after she’d exited the cab.
The Blue Nude was nearly as wide as she was tall, and the only way she could carry it was to hook the very tips of her fingers onto the inside of the top stretcher frame and hold her hands over her head while she stepped sideways down the sidewalk. She performed that awkward waltz for a half a block, until she got to the corner where the cab had turned, only to find a street that was empty of all traffic in general, and a waiting taxi in particular. The greasy cabdriver had abandoned her to the deserted, wee hours of the morning, with no way to get the painting home.
“Oh balls,” she said. Now she’d have to find some other way of getting the Colorman’s mind off of Lucien.
Twenty-one
A SUDDEN ILLNESS
LUCIEN WAS BREATHLESS.
The whore said, “Oh, Monsieur Lessard, I have seen your painting at Le Mirliton. It is so beautiful.”
Lucien bent over and braced his hands on his knees while he tried to catch his breath. The three whores in the brothel parlor were all waiting for him to say something. He’d just run all the way from Bruant’s cabaret, where he’d found the front door open, the bartender unconscious on the floor, and the Blue Nude gone.
“Toulouse-Lautrec?” he gasped.
“Fourth room at the top of the stairs,” said a tall, blond whore in a pink negligee. “Your bread is very good too, but I think you should have a go at painting.”
Lucien nodded his thanks for the advice and tipped his hat to the ladies before bounding up the swooping staircase.
The fourth door was locked, so he pounded. “Henri! It’s Lucien. The Blue Nude. It’s gone!”
A rhythmic yipping noise with bedspring-squeak counterpoint emanated from behind the door.
“One moment, Lucien,” called Henri. “I’m boinking Babette and if she comes I get a discount.”
The yipping and squeaking paused. “He does not.”
“Ah, she is such a tease. My allowance has not arrived this month, so I am—”
“He’s a little short!” the whore giggled.
“Oh, I will have my revenge now.”
“Would you two hold still!”
“Feel my wrath, tart!”
More squeaking, more giggling. It sounded like there was more than one woman in there.
Lucien felt as if he might faint, more from anxiety than the lack of breath; his pulse pounded in his temples. He fell forward, allowing his forehead to rest against the door. “Henri, please! Someone has stolen my painting. We need—”
The door was yanked open and Lucien fell headlong into the room.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Lessard,” said Mireille, the short, plump whore from Lucien’s last visit. She stood over him, naked but for an oversized black beret. Several colors of oil paint streaked her body here and there and she was brandishing a wide bristle brush loaded with Naples yellow, much of which had found its way to her nipples.
“Get off me, you horny puppet,” said a different woman’s voice from the bed.
Before Lucien could look up there was a thump and Count Henri-Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was lying on the floor before him, quite naked, except, of course, for his hat and pince-nez. (He was a count, for fuck’s sake, not some crazed cannibal pygmy!)
“Lucien, you look distressed.”
“I am distressed. Someone has taken the Blue Nude from Le Mirliton.”
“And you’re sure it wasn’t Bruant? Perhaps he took it to a private showing. There’s been quite a buzz, you know. I heard Degas himself was interested in coming to look at it.”
Lucien moaned.
“I know how you feel,” said Mireille. “My painting is ruined.”
Lucien turned his head just enough to see that she was standing next to an easel, on which was propped a number thirty canvas painted with crude figures that looked to Lucien like dogs fighting. He moaned again.
“Oh my.” A woman’s face—a cute brunette with improbably large brown eyes—popped over the edge of the bed and looked down at Lucien. “He sounds forlorn, Henri. Shall I get him a drink or suck him off or something?”
“Lucien, have you met Babette?” Henri said.
“Enchanté, mademoiselle,” Lucien said, returning his forehead and his gaze to the carpet. “Thank you, but I think I will stop breathing soon. Very kind of you to offer, though.”
“Please, Lucien,” said Henri. “My treat. While I am currently cash-poor”—he glared up at the grinning Babette, daring her to reprise her “short” joke—“my account here is in very good standing.”
“Not anymore,” said Babette. “Not after you had us up all night trying to charge up your fancy mechanical shoes.”
Lucien surfaced from his sea of woes for a moment to raise an eyebrow at the prostrate prostitute above him. “What?”
She tossed her head toward the corner of the room, where Professeur Bastard’s steam stilts stood gleaming like the lower half of a lonely mechanical man. “He says that they are powered by suction, yet all night we sucked and sucked while he stood on them and they never worked.”
“We took turns,” said Mireille. “To charge them up.”
Lucien looked to Henri. “They’re steam powered, not vacuum.”
“Le Professeur’s note said these were the improved version.”
Lucien shook his head, buffing his forehead on the rug in the process. “He mentioned something about building a clockwork set, not vacuum powered.”
“Well, we tried that, but having one’s manhood wound like a clock key is less pleasant than it initially sounds.”
“Monsieur Henri,” said Babette. “You deceived us!”
“That is not true, my little bonbon,” said Henri. “I am an artist, not an engineer, such things are a mystery to me, and in my defense, absinthe and cocaine were involved.”
“And laudanum,” giggled Mireille, poking Lucien in the ribs with her toe, as if making him party to some inside joke.
Babette vaulted off the bed, landed with a bit of a bounce, snatched a silk robe from the bedpost, and wrapped it around herself. “Monsieur Henri, I am a professional. I cannot abide such unethical behavior.”
“Chérie, it was a favor for a friend.”
“You will be receiving my bill,” she said, stomping out of the room, nose in the air, letting loose a hint of a giggle when she said, “Good day, monsieur!”
Mireille watched her colleague’s melodramatic exit and seemed to be searching for what to
do next. After a second of the two painters looking at her, waiting, she said, “I can’t work with you people. You are shit as models!” She turned on a heel and marched out of the room, head high, her paintbrush leaving a yellow arc on her thigh as she went.
Henri sighed and said, “I’m teaching her to paint.”
“Trousers?” Lucien replied. “Please.”
Henri retrieved his trousers from a chair and slipped them on. “We should get coffee. If we’re to find your painting, I fear I will be forced to sober up and a hangover is likely to descend very soon.”
“You think we can find the painting?”
Henri pulled on his undershirt, and when he had replaced his hat, said, “Of course, you know the Colorman had to have taken it. We’ll get it back from him.”
“The bartender said it was a young girl. A Tahitian girl, he thought. I don’t even know where to start looking. Without the painting, we have no way to find the Colorman, or Juliette. I’ve lost my best painting and the love of my life.”
Henri turned slowly from the dresser, where he had been collecting his watch and cuff links, and sat on the red velvet vanity stool. “And we won’t be able to use your Blue Nude to help restore Carmen’s memory to ask her.”
“That too,” said Lucien.
“I’m sorry, Lucien,” said Toulouse-Lautrec, genuine sadness in his voice. “Perhaps we should have a cognac to console ourselves. Shall I call the ladies back?”
Lucien sat up on the floor, leaned back against the bed. “I haven’t painted anything since she left. I’m not even a baker anymore. Régine is finishing the bread today. That painting was not only the best I’ve ever done, it’s the best I’ll ever do. Nothing. I have nothing. I am nothing.”
“That’s not so bad,” Henri said. “Sometimes, during the day, when there are no men here, and it’s just the girls, they forget I’m here. They brush each other’s hair, or whisper about times when they were young, or they wash out their stockings in a basin. They nap in each other’s arms, or just collapse on a bed and snore like puppies, and I sit in the corner, with my sketchbook, saying nothing. Sometimes the only sound is the scratching of my charcoal on the paper, or the gentle splashing of water in the basin. This becomes a world without men, soft and unthreatening, and the girls become as tender as virgins. They are not whores, as they would be if they took a step outside, or as they will be when they are called downstairs again by the madame, but they are nothing else, either. They are between. Not what they used to be, and not what they have become. In those times, they are nothing. And I am invisible, and I am nothing too. That is the true demimonde, Lucien, and the secret is, it is not always desperate and dark. Sometimes it is just nothing. No burden of potential or regret. There are worse things than being nothing, my friend.”