Babayaga: A Novel (22 page)

The rat ended up being useful. Through the unpredictable twist of spells, he had wound up capable of sniffing out any trail across every landscape and in all seasons, no matter how hard the frost or how flooded the roads. They had lost and found Max numerous times over the years, for at the first sign of real trouble he would always run off scared, disappearing for weeks, even months. But then he would pop up again, sniffing his way back to their side. His brother, too, the once innocent Andrei, who had found them at the campsite, proved to be bonded to Max by some tenuous but true sense of loyalty that made him, from time to time, a handy tool. Two bewitched brothers, she thought, each living a very different life from the one they had each intended, all because of a woman whose path they stumbled across, a woman they made the mistake of underestimating. Therein lies so much of history.

Elga pulled the car to a stop in front of the bank and looked down at the rat, who was now awake, sitting glumly in the girl’s lap. “It’s not so bad, Max. Think where you would have wound up if you’d never met us? A block of ice in some Siberian grave, tucked in with all those other bad Bolsheviks.” The rat did not answer.

Inside, Elga found the bank empty of customers. She walked up to the lone teller sitting at his window, a bright and ambitious young man named François Collet. Elga quickly went to work. It was merely a matter of transferring between accounts to cover some bills, she told Monsieur Collet—and cash, she needed some cash too. She had an account, but stupidly she could not remember the number. But she had already been there earlier that morning, did he not remember her? She was quite positive he had written the account number down for her. He smiled politely and said that he did not recall her but then again perhaps he did. He felt confused. The morning had been a busy one. He proceeded to look through the ledger. She hummed high and low notes, and clucked with her tongue. Anyone listening would have thought she sounded ridiculous. But François did not seem to hear her. He did, however, almost absentmindedly, hand over every franc note he had in his drawer, a considerable sum. He even waved as she waddled off, shouting after her,
“Au revoir, madame!”
And that was the very last day of François Collet’s once-promising career in banking.

XIII

Vidot found the morning and midday travel through the city infinitely easier than his original nighttime journey had been. He was almost proud of how quickly and completely he had acclimated to life as a flea. He hopped from soul to soul, pet to pet, tucking in for a bit of sustenance whenever he found himself on an undersized dog (the morning’s trial and error had taught him that small ones were the sweetest, though breed mattered too; beagles were the best, while basset hounds tasted bitter.) His biggest surprise was that he found every animal he rode on appeared to be completely free of all other vermin. He deduced that this was not actually the case, as there were telltale signs (red bites, raw rashes) that other creatures had been riding and feeding on the dogs. Mysteriously, though, there were no other fleas, ticks, or lice to be seen. He guessed that they were in fact there all around him, but laying low and hiding deep in the fur, as his arrival had no doubt come as a bit of a shock to these simpleminded creatures of habit. For, as unfamiliar with his condition as he was, he therefore undoubtedly moved, acted, and behaved himself like a very unusual and suspicious flea. I must be like a gorilla dropped onto a city street, causing pedestrians to scatter and flee, he thought to himself. This idea amused him greatly as, very quickly and with an almost military efficiency in his hops and small scurries, he steadily approached the station.

Time was of the essence, if only because he did not know how much time he had. All he knew was that the clock of a bug’s life ticked exceedingly fast and if he did not keep up his pace then the clock would run out. But he remained optimistic, reminding himself that he had raced against time on other important cases: running to Gare de Lyon to catch the fleeing embezzler Martel; dashing to the hospital to save the poisoned bride Castrillon; rushing so many places across the various landscapes of Paris that he wondered if he had not always lived his life like some wild, hopping flea.

There was one problem: he still did not know what he would do once he arrived at the station, but even that did not bother him. He knew the station’s rhythms and hours, when the officers came and went, its every corner and corridor, and he knew that, at the very least, he could find safe harbor there. If he got hungry, he thought, he could simply go suck some blood off the skull of that cow-witted Maroc. That fool had it coming. It still nagged at Vidot that the station had not told the truth about his disappearance to Adèle. Maroc was most likely stalling, hoping Vidot and Bemm would miraculously reappear so that he would not have to face the scandal of losing two policemen. Such things did not look good on one’s record. So Maroc was probably trying to buy some time. It was understandable, but it was not right, and as hurt as he was by his wife’s adultery, Vidot did not like to see her deceived by an ass like Maroc. He wondered if she would be worried and if Alberto would comfort and console her. Vidot did not like where such thoughts went. And so, like many men who have troubled lives at home, Vidot energetically hopped off toward his office.

Luckily, it was a pleasant day and his journey was proceeding nicely. Things were not so bad, and the farther he got away from Alberto and Mimi Perruci’s apartment, the more content and confident he felt. He understood that some other souls might be panicked or even overwhelmed with grief at the thought of being trapped in a small insect’s body, but, he thought, these were generally the same people who felt cursed when there were only plain croissants at the market, or complained when the lunch waiter was slow. Whereas he believed life, any life, was a curious adventure, and if you merely kept your wits about you and stayed alert and in motion, you could find your way to a satisfactory conclusion. Instead of feeling cursed, he amused himself by thinking of how his hops resembled the arcing phrase marks on music sheets and, in fact, how he was not so unlike that American actor Bobby Van who had hopped so memorably through an entire small town in the film
Le Joyeux Prisonnier
.

Of course, this was no musical comedy. He remembered his fallen friend Bemm. While he had not known the young man well enough to be able to guess what Bemm felt about their peculiar metamorphosis, he did know how Bemm had responded to the crisis, standing right beside him, wholeheartedly jumping and following him through the streets, seizing hold of every house pet and rodent’s belly with panache and gusto, both of them swinging like magnificent twin Tarzans through this immensely unpredictable and oversized wilderness. Too bad what had happened, it was tragic really, but Vidot had long ago learned one must not grieve too hard for the loss of comrades in action. The battle of life rages constantly on, and while Bemm was gone, Vidot had been fortunate enough to survive. Ah yes, he thought, and now I am once again in control of my own destiny. All I really have to worry about now is time, and time simply happens whether we worry about it or not.

At that moment his journey took a very sudden and dramatic turn. Momentarily lost in his philosophical reflections, Vidot was caught unaware when the plump and delicious little mutt upon which he rode was suddenly plucked up and shoved against the dog walker’s chest, trapping him by pressing him snugly against the fabric of the owner’s wool coat. Vidot squirmed, but the pressure was tight and he could not get loose. He heard a door slam and felt them ascending a staircase. He counted five flights until he heard the keys rattle as they entered an apartment. Vidot was not particularly worried, he was sure that this was only a temporary detour, and when the dog needed to go out again, as small dogs often do, he would once again be free. It was a setback, to be sure, but he did not believe it would impact his race against the clock. What happened next, though, was as vexing and disturbing as it was utterly astounding.

Released from the owner’s tight grasp, Vidot had every intent of immediately leaping free, hoping to find a high perch from which to survey the situation. Instead he found that, bizarrely enough, the dog was being held down beneath a white hood made of what appeared to be old parachute fabric. Stranger still, leaning over the mutt was a fat-faced man with a pair of spectacles made of magnifying lenses, who possessed the largest, greenest eyes Vidot had ever seen. The man’s pupils looked enormous and distorted behind the lenses; Vidot felt as though two immense tropical planets were descending down upon him. The man’s fat fingers busily worked through the fur, in a deft and practiced manner. The sight was so bizarre that Vidot found himself frozen with fear, cowering behind a follicle of dog hair like a frightened soldier crouched behind a cannon-blasted tree. But the all-seeing big-eyed man quickly found him, pouncing upon him with the tweezers and almost crushing him as he lifted Vidot off the prone beagle, dropped him into a test tube, and firmly corked the top. The man handed the test tube to his accomplice, a woman many years past young who, as she stared into the vial to make sure he was alive, appeared vaguely familiar to Vidot. As he tried to place her in his memory, she placed him on a rack on a high shelf surrounded by a long row of other fleas trapped in their own tiny vials.

Vidot looked down and watched as the man and the dog remained wrapped up together in the fabric, clearly a method designed to make sure no flea escaped. The man, hunched over his work, removed the fleas one after another and handed each bottled captive to his assistant, who then lined them up next to Vidot. Soon there were more than twenty test tubes on the rack, each one possessing a single flea. But to what end? What were they up to? Were they some odd variety of home scientists? Microbiologists? Curious collectors? Culinary experimentalists? The detective had no solution. Finally, the jowly man emerged from his labors, freeing the little dog to his food bowl and neatly folding up the parachute tent.

It was when the man took off his magnifying spectacles that Vidot realized with a jolt exactly who his captors were. What a strange and startling coincidence. It was Billy and Dottie, the theatrical English pair who had so transfixed and thrilled him with their carnival flea circus when he was only a boy. Now, thirty years on, here they were again, still busy at the old game. Vidot immediately began hopping about in his test tube, immensely thrilled by the wonder of it all.

After he calmed down, he proceeded to carefully observe the two through the rest of the afternoon, growing increasingly impressed with the tender harmony of their existence. Having finished their labors with the fleas, Dottie went and opened a bottle of wine. Meanwhile, Sir Billy donned a smock, set up an easel, and waited for Dottie to come sit before him. As Billy painted his wife’s portrait, Vidot looked around the tiny, cramped apartment and discovered that the room was filled with what were perhaps hundreds of paintings of Dottie, canvases documenting her in every mood and era. There were other subjects tucked in among the portraits, rooftop views, country landscapes, and small still lifes, but the vast majority were of the progressively aging lady who sat before him now. The styles had changed, from realist to collage to Cubist to the melancholy style that was Billy’s manner now, one that Vidot was not versed enough in to identify by name, but which he would perhaps call exceptional realism. It was as though as they began to approach the end of their life together Billy was trying to capture every small pore, every subtle detail of the woman he so clearly cherished. Or perhaps it could be that after a lifetime of staring at tiny fleas through his giant glasses, Billy lived wholly in an exaggeratedly magnified world.

Clearly, Vidot realized, the flea circus had only been a sideline for the couple, a way to cover costs until their paintings found a market. With the support of a canny dealer, a popular gallery, or a passionate private collector, they would have long ago left this downtrodden existence behind them. Perhaps they had dreamt of moving into a much larger flat or a mansion like Rodin’s, or of sailing off as Gauguin did to some distant exotic land where they could devote themselves completely to their art. But judging from the canvases stacked ten deep in every corner of every shelf, Billy’s paintings never sold. And so the circus lived on.

After about an hour, with much of the canvas still in a rough state, Dottie went to sit beside her husband. Billy kissed her forehead. She gave his hand a warm squeeze and looked over his progress, pointing out the parts she liked, and planting more affectionate kisses onto his cheek. Her husband blushed with pride. Their perfect affection almost broke Vidot’s heart as he remembered all the agonies of his own cursed marriage, painfully recalling the succumbing sounds of ecstasy his Adèle had made as Alberto held her down and crushed her in his strong arms. Vidot tried to blot out those terrible thoughts and focused instead on the simple harmony here, the smiling, loving, eternal couple, together so long, imbued with such gentle, artful, and considerate spirit, who now rose, hand in hand, from their quiet idyllic contentment to turn their attentions to the orderly arrangement of vials containing fleas that sat on their shelf.

And here the real horror began.

XIV

Will followed Oliver into the jazz club. It was early in the evening but the chairs were still turned over up on the tables while the service staff sat in the far corners, smoking and idly chatting, apparently in no hurry to get the place ready for the night. The room smelled of cleansers and stale smoke. Oliver led Will to a red-leather back booth where they found three black men in matching blue suits sitting with their drinks, playing knock rummy. Oliver slid into the booth next to them, and Will looked around for a chair.

“Hullo, boys. Cigarette? Sorry, all I’ve got are Gitanes.” Oliver held out the pack and they all politely refused. Oliver took one and lit it. “Flats. Kelly. Red. This is Will. He’s an adman, but he’s a good egg too.”