“Can you get us out of here with that map?” Lucien whispered, his lips nearly touching Henri’s ear.
“Maybe if we turn the lantern up,” Henri whispered back. “The chambers are supposed to be marked for the streets above.”
The Colorman’s light stopped bouncing for a second and Lucien reached back to stop Henri. He slid the lens of the signal lantern closed. The donkey brayed and with the echo they realized that they were not looking down a long tunnel at the Colorman’s light but through a vast, open chamber. Ever so gently, slowly, using his palm to dampen the sound, Henri closed the breech of the shotgun. They froze with the faint click, but what they thought was the Colorman reacting to their presence was, in fact, his playing his lantern over a wall, revealing a heavy brass ring set in the stone.
The Colorman set down his lamp, grasped the ring with both hands, and backed away, pulling what appeared to be a piece of the stone wall with him. The painters scurried forward with the cover of the noise, then paused when the Colorman turned to pick up his lantern. They were barely fifty meters away now; every scrape of the Colorman’s foot, every snort of the donkey, sounded as if it were inside their heads.
The Colorman walked out of their sight, into a passageway or a room, perhaps, but the donkey waited by the open portal.
Lucien set the signal lantern on the ground, then leaned in until he felt Henri’s hat brim against the bridge of his nose and whispered, “Please, do not shoot me.”
He felt his friend shake his head, even heard him smile, something he hadn’t thought possible up until then, and they crept forward, shoulder to shoulder. When they were only twenty meters away, Henri paused and cocked one of the hammers of the shotgun. The donkey flinched at the sound of the click.
“Who is that?” said the Colorman. “Who is there?”
He appeared in the doorway, holding his lamp high. “Dwarf! I see you!” He pulled a pistol from his waistband and pointed it toward them. Lucien dived out of the circle of light cast by the lantern as the Colorman fired. The bullet ricocheted off the chamber walls, sounding like an angry hornet. The donkey kicked and bolted into the darkness, leaving a trail of frightened braying that sounded like the perverse laughter of a dying consumptive psychopath. Lucien rolled to his feet to see the flash of the second shot. The report set his ears ringing, and the echo was lost in the high-pitched tone.
“I see you, dwarf!” said the Colorman. He raised the lamp above his head and charged forward, leading with the pistol. He cocked the hammer and aimed, but instead of the sharp crack of the pistol there was the roar of a large-bore shotgun and the Colorman’s lamp exploded over his head, showering him and the stone floor behind him with flaming oil. He screamed, hideously, more out of outrage than pain, it seemed, and continued to advance, a walking pillar of flame, and to fire the pistol into the dark until it clicked, empty. Still he stumbled after his attacker into the dark.
“You fucks!” he growled, then he fell on his face and lay there sizzling, the flames jumping up and down his prostrate body—deep-blue flames.
By the light of the burning Colorman, Lucien could see Henri looking down on the corpse, the shotgun breech open, the gun draped over his forearm.
“Henri, are you all right?”
“Yes. Are you hurt?” He didn’t look from the Colorman.
“No. He missed.”
“At the last second I shot over his head. I was trying to frighten him. I didn’t mean to hit him.”
“You didn’t.”
“You won’t tell Juliette I was a coward, will you?”
“No, that would be a lie.”
“Do you mind if I take a sip of cognac? My nerves are somewhat jangled.”
“I’ll join you.”
“We are medicating,” said Toulouse-Lautrec. He pulled the silver flask from his inside pocket, unscrewed the cap, and handed it to his friend, revealing a distinct tremble in his hand. “Not celebrating.”
“To life,” said Lucien, toasting the rapidly blackening Colorman. He drank and handed the flask back to Henri. “I’d better get our lantern while I can still find it. I don’t relish the idea of trying to get out of here with the candles I have in my coat pocket.”
When Lucien returned with the lantern, Henri had already gone inside, had lit a candle, and was looking at the first of the paintings that were leaning against the walls in three stacks, sorted by size. Henri was playing the candle up and down a medium-sized portrait of a young boy with dark eyes and a dark shock of hair falling across his forehead.
“Lucien, I think this is a Pissarro. Bring the lantern. Look at it. It looks like Manet’s and Cézanne’s style rolled into one. I’ve never seen a Pissarro portrait that looked like this.”
“Well he’s painted with Cézanne since the sixties. It might be his influence on Cézanne you’re seeing.” Lucien opened the lens on the signal lantern all the way to fully illuminate the painting.
“But these dark eyes, haunted almost, the hair, this…” Henri looked from the painting, to Lucien, back to the painting.
“It’s me,” said Lucien.
“You? This is one of the paintings that Pissarro remembered painting that no one could remember seeing.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t remember posing for it?”
“No.”
“Well, you were only a boy. Childhood memories blur—”
“No. She said she had only been both the painter and the model twice; once was Berthe Morisot. I am the other. She was me.”
Henri stood in front of the largest canvas. The first was a raging seascape, the Sacré Bleu dominating the swamping of a ship.
“Turner,” said Henri. “I don’t understand. Was she a ship?”
“She doesn’t have to be the model, she just has to be the artist’s obsession,” Lucien said, deadpan, pronouncing a fact, nothing more, a chilly calm coming over him as he was beginning to realize the impact the muse had effected on his life, on so many lives.
Lucien knelt to flip through the stack of smaller paintings. The first a Monet, a field of lupine. The next he didn’t recognize, something Flemish, a peasant scene, old. The third was Carmen Gaudin, Henri’s Carmen, sitting splay-legged on the floor, the top of her blue dress pulled down, revealing her nude back, hair pinned up, the same red scimitar swoops of fringe across her cheeks, the same pale skin, but unlike every picture he had ever seen of her, she was smiling, looking coquettishly over her shoulder at the painter, looking upward in false modesty. Lucien knew the look. He’d seen it dozens of times on Juliette’s face, but only Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had ever seen it on Carmen Gaudin. He pushed the paintings back in place as if he were slamming the cover of a forbidden book and stepped back.
A moment later, Carmen looked over her shoulder. La Toilette—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1889
Toulouse-Lautrec leaned the large Turner forward until he could see the painting behind it, then nearly dropped the Turner and fought to catch it.
“Oh my,” he said.
Lucien jumped to his side and gazed at the painting, a nude woman reclining on a divan draped with ultramarine satin.
“She is a large but a very fetching woman. I don’t think I would have thought of her as a redhead before, more of a chestnut brunette, but then, her hair is always up in a chignon when I see her. With it down, here, where it trails over her hip, yes, she is very fetching indeed.”
Lucien set the lantern down at Henri’s feet and snatched the lit candle from his hand, splattering wax over the painting. “Burn them,” he said, turning and walking out of the room. “Burn them all. Use some of the oil from the lamp to start them.”
“I understand your consternation, but it is very well painted,” said Henri, who had picked up the lantern and was still studying the nude.
“It’s my mother, Henri.”
“Look, it’s signed. ‘L. Lessard.’”
“Burn it.”
“Don’t you want to see the others? There may
be masterpieces here that no one has ever laid eyes on before.”
“Nor will they ever. If we see them we may not be able to do this. Burn them.” Lucien stepped out of the chamber and stood in the large vault, where blue flames were still playing across the tarry remains of the Colorman. He shivered.
Henri flipped the Turner back into place in front of the nude of Madame Lessard, then stepped back. “I killed the Colorman, I don’t think it’s fair that I have to burn the paintings, too. It seems sacrilegious.”
“You’ve always said that you come from a long line of accomplished heretics.”
“Good point. Come, hold your candle so I can see. I’m going to have to extinguish the lantern for a bit so I can pour out some oil.”
A minute later the small chamber glowed like a glassblower’s furnace, the light from the flames licking out into the large vault and dying with the snap of a serpent’s tongue. Black smoke moved across the ceiling in inky waves.
Henri read the map by the light from the fire. “If we follow this wall, it will take us to the passage and stairs that lead to the next level.”
“We should go, then.”
“What about the Colorman’s donkey?”
“There’s no telling how far he’s run, Henri. We’ve barely enough lamp oil to make it to the surface as it is. Perhaps he’ll find his own way out. He’s been down here before.”
Toulouse-Lautrec folded the map and set out along the wall, using the unloaded shotgun as a crutch and limping badly now that stealth was no longer required.
“Are you in pain?” Lucien asked, holding the lantern high so his friend could see ahead.
“Me? I’m fine. This is nothing compared to killing a man and burning a room full of masterpieces.”
“I’m sorry, Henri,” Lucien said.
“But even that is nothing compared to the possibility that you may have shagged your mother and killed your father.”
“That is not what happened.”
“Well, then, what happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think your mother would pose for me? My interest is only as a painter.”
“YOU KILLED MINETTE!”
They were the first words he said to Juliette when they found her waiting at Henri’s studio.
“Who?” she said.
“Minette Pissarro. A little girl. I loved her and you killed her.”
“It was you or her, Lucien. One of you had to pay. I chose her.”
“You said that the Colorman chose.”
“Yes, and he wanted you. I talked him out of it.”
“You’re a monster.”
“Well, your mother is a whore.”
“Only because you possessed her, too.”
“Oh, you know about that?”
“I saw the painting.”
“So the Colorman is dead? Really dead? I thought I felt him let go.”
“Yes,” said Henri. “I shot him. And the paintings are burned. You are free.”
“That little bastard, he told me he used the nude of your mother years ago.”
“So you killed my father, too?”
“What? Pfft. No. Silly. No, of course not. You know, Lucien, your father was a truly lovely man. He loved painting. Truly lovely.”
Henri said, “Since you have been Lucien, and you have been Lucien’s mother, then technically, he has slept—”
“My father died in his studio,” Lucien said. “And none of his paintings were ever found. Explain that.”
“Hey, look at these!”
“That is not going to work,” said Lucien.
“What were we talking about?” asked Henri.
“I didn’t kill your father, Lucien. It was his heart. He just died. But he died doing something he loved.”
“Painting?”
“Sure, let’s say painting.”
“My sister Régine has gone through life thinking that my father was cheating on my mother.”
“When, in fact, he was cheating with your mother,” said Henri.
“And she thinks she caused the death of my sister Marie. That was you then, wasn’t it?”
“Remember how much you like these? Mmmmmm, touch them.”
“Button your blouse, Juliette, that is not working.”
“But since you’re offering,” said Henri. “While you two are talking—”
“Oh, all right,” Juliette said, turning aside and pulling her blouse closed. “Marie’s death was convenient. I didn’t cause her to fall off the roof, but when she did, it served the purpose, she became the sacrifice. Poor Père Lessard didn’t have to die for the Sacré Bleu. That was that bitch Fate.”
“Fate is a person, too?” asked Henri.
“No, that’s just an expression. And yes, Lucien, yes, yes, yes your sister’s life was the price for the Sacré Bleu. I’m sorry. And I’m not a monster. I love you. I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you.”
“And you possessed me.”
“To know you. No one knows you like I know you, Lucien. I know how much you loved your papa. Really know. I know how Minette’s death broke your little heart. I know your passion for painting, like no one else will ever know. I know how it feels to be hit in the head, morning after morning, with a perfect baguette. I was there when you discovered the magic, elastic properties of your willy. I—”
“That’s enough.”
“You are my only and my ever, Lucien. I’m free now. I am yours. Your Juliette. We can be together. You can paint.”
“And what will you do?” asked Lucien. “Work in the hat shop?”
“No, I have money. I’ll model, for you. I’ll inspire you.”
“You’ve given him syphilis, haven’t you?” said Toulouse-Lautrec.
“No, I haven’t. But it appears Monsieur Lessard needs to consider our good fortune. Dear Henri. Dear, brave Henri, you have some cognac around here, don’t you?”
“But of course,” said Toulouse-Lautrec.
Twenty-eight
REGARDING MAMAN
LUCIEN WAITED A WEEK AFTER THE COLORMAN WAS DEAD, FOR HIS ANGER to cool, before he was ready to tell Régine that their father had not been a philanderer and that she was not responsible for their sister Marie’s death. The trick was how to tell her without revealing the entire bizarre story of Juliette and the Colorman. He’d been faithful to his duties at the bakery, letting his sister sleep late and relieving her at the counter as soon as the baking was done, which went a long way in lightening her disposition.
It was Thursday morning, around ten, when the push of the day was already past, and he heard her singing a sweet song to herself as she swept the crumbs from behind the counter, when he decided to share the news that he thought might relieve her of a lifetime of guilt.
“Régine, Maman is a slut,” he said. “I thought you should know.”
“I knew it,” said an old man who had been sitting at one of the high tables by the window, so still up until that point that he’d become part of the furniture.
“You just mind your own business, Monsieur Founteneau.” She turned so abruptly to Lucien that had the broom been her tango partner she would have snapped his neck. “Perhaps in the rear,” she growled.
“Oh, I’m sure she likes it that way, too!” said Monsieur Founteneau. “You can tell by the way the slut waves it around.”
Lucien stepped gallantly between his sister and the customer. “Monsieur, that is my mother you are talking about.”
“Don’t blame me, you brought it up,” said Monsieur Founteneau.
Régine grabbed Lucien’s sleeve and dragged him through the curtain into the kitchen. “Why would you say such a thing? And in front of a customer.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve been waiting to tell you. I don’t mean that Maman is a slut, I mean that she is the slut.”
“She could come down the stairs any second and if she kills you, I’m not going to save you again.”
Régine started to walk away. Luci
en grabbed her arm and spun her around. “I will tell you, but you must not mention it to Maman.”
“That she’s a slut?”
“That she was the woman you saw go into Papa’s studio all those years ago.”
Régine slapped his hand off her arm. “Go away, Lucien. You’re being silly.”
“Did you really get a good look at her? The woman in the studio with Papa.”
“No, you know I didn’t. That’s why Marie was up on the roof—to look through the skylight. But I know it wasn’t Maman. She was away visiting Grandmother.”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“The woman I saw had long red hair. She was wearing a blue dress I’d never seen before. Don’t you think I would recognize my own mother? Why are you saying these things, Lucien? I’ve known about Papa and the slut for—”
“I found Papa’s journal. When I was cleaning out the storeroom. He wrote all about Maman coming to him in the studio. Spending days at a time there.”
“But she hates painting. She never said a good thing about Papa’s painting. Let me see this journal.”
Lucien hadn’t quite thought this all through. He thought that once he’d told Régine about their mother being the strange “other” woman she’d be so relieved that—well, he hadn’t expected to be questioned. “I can’t, I burned it.”
“Why would you burn it?”
“Because it contained embarrassing secrets about Maman and Papa.”
“Which you are telling me now. I’m going to ask Maman about it.”
“You can’t. She doesn’t remember.”
“Of course she would remember. Papa died in that studio. Marie died trying to look into that studio. She may not want to, but she’ll remember.”
“No she won’t, because she was taking opium. Lots and lots of opium. Papa wrote about it. He wrote about how she would take opium and come to the studio and they would make love for days and days. But she doesn’t remember any of it. There, now you know.”
“Maman was taking opium and none of us noticed?”