Sacre Bleu (30 page)

“Don’t be so ominous, Henri. It doesn’t suit you.”

“It’s just that, Juliette—while I will help you find her, if you wish—I need to warn you—you may not want to find her.”

“Of course I want to find her, Henri. I’m a wreck without her.”

“I think you’re romanticizing your time with her. You were a wreck when you were with her, too.”

“I was painting.”

“That’s not the point.”

“That’s always the point.”

“She was definitely living with the Colorman.”

“Are you saying she was secretly his mistress? That can’t be. Who lets his mistress spend so much time with another man?”

“I’m saying they have an arrangement.”

“He’s her pimp, then? Is that what you’re saying? Are you saying that the woman I love is a whore?”

“You make it sound so sordid. Some of my best friends are whores.”

“That’s not the point. She is not a whore, he is not her pimp. You think everyone is a pimp. That’s why you always lose the game.”

Henri liked to play a game he called Guess the Pimp in the ballroom of the Moulin de la Galette. He and a group of friends (sometimes Lucien included) would sit at the edge of the crowded dance hall and try to guess which men in the booths were pimps tending to their girls and which were simply workingmen or rascals trying to make time with a pretty thing. They would place their bets, then one of the Moulin’s doormen would come by and confirm or disprove their suspicions. Henri almost always lost.

“Not her pimp,” said Henri. “I don’t know what he is to her, but what I need you to ask yourself is, what if you found Juliette and she didn’t know you?”

“What?”

“Lucien, you know after I followed her to the Colorman’s apartment, I spoke to him.”

“I know this, Henri. You thought he was lying about knowing Vincent.”

“I’m sure he was lying about Vincent, but what I didn’t tell you is I asked about Carmen.”

“Carmen? Why?”

“When I saw him outside of the Dead Rat, the day you ran into Juliette, I remembered seeing Carmen with him.”

“No!”

“You know I couldn’t remember much of my time with Carmen.”

“Absinthe,” said Lucien. “That’s why we sent you to your mother’s. It was for your own good.”

“Damn it, Lucien, it wasn’t the absinthe. You heard Dr. Gachet. Renoir, Monet, all of them have had these moments of memory lapse, of hallucinations, going back years. Renoir remembers the Colorman but nothing about him. You’ve had them, and you haven’t been drinking absinthe, have you? It’s the color. Something in the color. And it doesn’t just affect the painter. I
found
Carmen, Lucien. I found her and she had no idea who I was. She blamed it on a fever. She almost died after I left.”

Lucien felt his face go numb at the revelation, both over what he had done to Henri and what it might mean to him and Juliette. He, Maurice Guibert, and Émile Bernard had physically dragged Henri out of his studio, bathed him, dressed him, then Guibert and Bernard had taken Henri to his mother’s castle and stayed there with him until he sobered up.

“You were killing yourself, Henri.”

“I was painting.”

“We were trying to be good friends to—”

“She doesn’t know me, Lucien,” Lautrec blurted out. “She doesn’t remember ever having met me.” He ground his cheroot out on the floor (as Bruant not only allowed but required), then removed his
pince-nez
and pretended to wipe the fog from the lenses on his cravat. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say. Juliette may not even know you.”

“She will. We’ll go to the Batignolles now. We’ll save her—break whatever kind of hold the Colorman has over her. She’ll understand about my mother braining her with a
crêpe
pan. You’ll see.”

Henri shook his head. “You think I haven’t gone back? You were unconscious for a week, Lucien, and we were certain she was the cause. Of course I went back to where she lived. They are gone.”

“I thought you were drunk in a brothel the whole time I was out.”

“Well, yes, I was drunk, but I wasn’t always in a brothel. I took a taxi to their apartment—but I did take two whores with me in case of an emergency. The concierge said that when she checked on them one morning, the Colorman and the girl were just gone. Not a word.”

“We’ll find her,” said Lucien, realizing even as he said it that they’d both been this way before.

“Like we found her when she left two and a half years ago? Like I found Carmen after I came back from Mother’s?”

“But we did find them.”

“We found them because of the Colorman.”

“Then we’ll find the Colorman again.”

“We are painters,” said Henri. “We don’t know how to find things.”

“Speak for yourself. I’ll find her.”

Henri sighed and drained his beer, then looked to the bar. Bruant hadn’t returned from wherever he’d gone to fetch the ladder. The butchers still dozed in the corner. The barmaid had her head propped on her hands and was on her way to dozing off as well. “Fine, then. Let’s move your painting behind the bar. Then we’ll go see your friend Professeur Bastard.”

“Le Professeur? But he’s a lunatic.”

“I don’t think he is,” said Henri. “I think he is just eccentric.”

“Well his father was a lunatic,” said Lucien, draining the last of his beer as well.

“So is my father and so was your father.”

“Well, yes, he was eccentric.”

“Then shall we go see if Le Professeur has found the secret of our Colorman’s paints?”

“S
HOULDN’T WE BE GOING TO THE
A
CADÉMIE?” ASKED
L
UCIEN AS THEY MADE
their way down the back of the butte and through the Maquis. It was well past midday now and there was all manner of industry, from goat milking to rag picking to rat racing, going on in the shantytown. (Yes, real rat racing. The old Professeur had never been able to train his rats to perform
Ben-Hur,
but when he died, the junior Bastard gave the track and the race-trained rodents to some local boys, who started a betting operation. They were grown men now and had staged twenty races a day for nearly fifteen years. In doing so they had also managed to prove that even in the most squalid slum, full of bandits, beggars, whores, con men, lechers, drunkards, layabouts, and egregious weasels, it was possible to attract an even more unsavory element. Le Professeur Deux, pioneering the budding demi-science of sociology, had done a study.)

“He told me he would be home today,” said Henri, who snatched up his walking stick and tapped on Le Professeur’s weathered plank door with the brass pommel. There was the sound of steam being vented, as if several espresso machines were all winding down at once, and the Professeur Émile Bastard opened the door and stepped awkwardly out of the doorway, nearly bumping his head on one of the open ceiling rafters.

“Gentlemen. Welcome. Come in, please. I’ve been expecting you. Lucien, so good to see you.”

“And you,” said Lucien.

Toulouse-Lautrec limped in but looked over his shoulder at Lucien and whispered, “I stand corrected. He
is
a lunatic.”

Lucien nodded in agreement as he shook hands with Professeur Bastard. The Professeur was a very tall man—his thin, aquiline aspect put one in mind of a tweedy wading bird of some sort, an academically inclined egret, perhaps—but today he stood at least a foot taller than his normal height. He had to duck under each ceiling joist as he led them into the parlor in halting, careful steps. Bastard was wearing some kind of stilts under his trousers, fitted with shoes to appear to be his own feet. They crunched hazelnut shells strewn across the floor as he walked.

“Gentlemen, please sit down.” Bastard gestured to two chairs, then reached into his trouser pocket and activated some sort of switch. Again there was the sound of gases venting, and Bastard lowered into a sitting position in a series of pneumatic jerks.

Lucien and Henri did not sit, they just stared. While Le Professeur
was
sitting, he wasn’t sitting
on
anything. He was simply maintaining a sitting position in midair, like one of those annoying street performers one encountered around Paris who were always walking in the wind, or climbing imaginary stairs, or getting trapped in invisible boxes from which they could only be extracted by the donation of a ten-
centime
piece or a
gendarme
with a billy club.

“Sit, sit, sit,” said Le Professeur.

“But, monsieur?” said Lautrec, waving at the Professeur in the manner of a magician presenting a freshly bisected assistant. “You are—”

“I am quite comfortable,” said Bastard. He reached into his pocket, clicked some sort of switch, and with a hiss and a click, he stood to attention, his head barely missing a ceiling beam. He lifted his trouser cuffs to reveal, extending from his shoes, a leg-shaped frame of brass rods, with pistons suspended in the center. “What do you think?”

“You are certainly tall,” said Henri.

“I built them for you,” said the Professeur. “They are entirely too tall for me. They’ll still have to be fitted to you, but I think you’ll find they function quite efficiently.”

“For what?” asked Henri.

“For effortless ambulation, of course. I call them Loco-ambulators, or steam stilts.”

There was another hiss of steam being released and Lucien thought he smelled something burning.

“Help me out of them, I’ll show you.”

With the Professeur’s instruction, they first lowered him to the floor, so he was sitting splay legged, then helped him unfasten leather straps and buckles until he was able to wriggle out of his trousers, leaving the steam stilts on the floor and the Professeur to pace in his underwear and socks as he lectured.

“I had noticed, when you visited before, that walking came to you with great difficulty and pain. Given your royal lineage, I deduced that this problem was one caused perhaps by your parents having been too closely related by blood.”

“And I fell off a horse and broke my legs when I was a boy,” said Henri, somewhat amused by the Professeur’s pompousness, despite that he was wearing a tailcoat and no pants. (The tailcoat had concealed a small condensation chamber that was part of the steam stilts and rested across the small of the back.)

“Just so,” said the Professeur, charging on, lifting the steam stilts to their feet as he spoke, so they stood there, a gleaming bronze skeleton (sans torso) with its trousers around its ankles. “I thought to relieve you of some of the effort, since you live on Montmartre, and climbing stairs and hills obviously caused you pain. At first I thought,
wheels,
but soon I realized that not only would wheels be conspicuous in company, they were useless on stairs. I designed the first set of walkers with Tesla motors, but the battery that would be required to run the machine would have been so heavy as to preclude your actually accompanying your legs.”

“So my legs might have gone out drinking without me?”

“Possibly,” snapped the Professeur. “Then it was clear that combustion was the only way to release enough energy to power you and still have the machine compact enough to be concealed. Steam was the answer. I designed the steam stilts so that by merely making the movement you normally make by walking, your legs would activate a series of switches and valves that extend and contract these pistons. You put out no more effort than if you were moving your legs underwater.”

“I see,” said Henri. “Now I must ask you, before you go any farther, and this is important: Do you have any brandy or cognac in the house?”

“Is something burning?” asked Lucien.

“Ah, the boilers are in the shoes,” said the Professeur. “They burn powdered coal at a low smolder, but unfortunately there is some wasted heat. If you stand in one place for long, there is a danger of charring the rug.”

Henri had begun to chuckle and was trying to conceal his amusement.

“At first, I wasn’t sure how to shield your feet from the heat, then I thought, Of course, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec wouldn’t mind being a bit taller. We’ll simply extend the rods of the calves so that you are suspended above the heat of the boilers, and
voilà!
You are six feet tall.”

“But everyone knows I have short legs. Would you have me leave Paris so I could use your walker?”