Sacre Bleu (42 page)

She patted his hand, then placed the brush in his fingers. She propped up the little canvas on his chest and squeezed some of the blue color out onto it. “So you’ve told me. You don’t remember painting the nude, do you?”

He looked at her, distressed, as if his mind was already slipping away. He held the brush like it was a foul, foreign thing.

“Sketch me, Édouard,” she said. “You are the painter Manet. Now paint.”

And even as he protested, his hand began to move, the brush traced lines over the canvas. “But I’m dying.”

“That’s no excuse, love, you’re still and shall ever be the
painter
Manet. Now paint.”

He fell to sketching her, from the jawline up, the soft brush and creamy blue barely making a noise in the room as her face appeared on the canvas. She made it no easier on him, her smile broadening as he worked so he had to revise the sketch.

“Poor Suzanne,” said Berthe. “Victorine haunts her.”

“The passion she’s jealous of was for the work, not the woman,” he said.

“I know,” said Berthe. She
did
know. She’d been there. She had been Victorine Meurent in those times, modeled for those paintings. As Victorine she had seduced, enchanted, inspired, and ultimately killed him, for it was Victorine who had given him the syphilis. But he had never loved Victorine. It was as Berthe Morisot that she had inspired his love and his greatest painting. The painting that only she, Manet, and the Colorman had ever seen. The painting that had been stored in underground Paris for over twenty years.

“Do you remember now?” she asked, the blue starting to take effect.

“Yes. Oh yes.”

She took his hand and led him to the forest at Fontainebleau, where they rented a cabin with a sunroom and she posed on a daybed during the day while he painted, where they made love with the sun on their skin. She led him to a little inn at Honfleur, where the Seine met the sea, and there they drank wine in a café on the mirror-calm harbor, painted side by side, and walked the beach at sunset. She led him to a sunny villa in Provence, near Aix, and she smiled at him from under the brim of a white straw hat, her dark eyes shining like gemstones while he painted.

Only one other time had Bleu been both the model and the painter, both the inspiration and the creator, and not a woman, then. Berthe’s artistic talent had nothing to do with Bleu, and was profound, and out of time. Women didn’t paint, and if they did, they weren’t recognized for it. But Berthe had been accepted among the Impressionists from the start—had painted alongside them all. In the evening, when they retreated to the cabarets and cafés to discuss art, ideas, and theory, she would go home, sit with the other women, where it was proper, despite the fact that she was, as Manet had said,
the best of them.
Bleu had seen through Berthe’s painter’s eye, and seen Berthe through Manet’s eye, in his paintings. He adored Berthe, before Bleu possessed her and after she had left. He had gone to great lengths to arrange the circumstances for Berthe’s marriage to his younger brother, Eugène, just so he might be near her—all very proper and aboveboard. She the lady, he the gentleman of society. It was only when Berthe was inhabited by Bleu that Manet’s passion was able to manifest in art and love. Bleu, as Berthe, had taken the painter to places he would have never gone, even as she led him now.

They stayed in the South for a month together, painting and laughing and lounging in the blue shade of olive trees, until Suzanne returned to Édouard’s bedside with the tea.

“He’s gone,” Berthe said. “He was sketching, and then suddenly he gasped and he was gone. It was so sudden, I didn’t even have time to call for you.”

Suzanne stumbled and Berthe caught the tea tray and steered it away to the bureau, then was back at Suzanne’s side.

Berthe gently pried the canvas from Manet’s hand, smearing the oil sketch as she did, just enough so that it might have been an image of any woman.

“He called your name,” Berthe said. “He said he wanted to sketch you, and he began drawing with the brush, then he gasped and called your name, ‘Suzanne.’”

“S
YPHILIS HAS BEEN GOOD TO US,” SAID THE
C
OLORMAN.

“Very good,” Bleu said.

“Not satisfying, though,” he said.

“Speak for yourself.”

“It’s slow; sometimes you don’t want to wait and a pistol is better.”

“A pistol doesn’t always work for us, as you proved with Vincent,” said Bleu. Then it occurred to her that it might have worked perfectly. What if the Colorman had hidden the painting Vincent had made with the Sacré Bleu, the same way he had hidden the Manet nude? What if he’d shot Vincent to keep
her
from knowing the painting’s location? What if he had found some new trick to play on her while she was in a trance or in character and couldn’t watch him? He was sneaky to start out, and he’d had a lot of time to get sneakier. He might have been caching paintings away for years, and she would have never known.

“You need to get ready now,” said the Colorman. He closed the drapes and unfolded an oilcloth over their dining table.

“Really? You’re going to do it on the table?” asked Bleu.

“Yes. It’s a sturdy table. Why not?”

“Because you’ll have to stand on a chair—chairs. Dangerous. We should use the divan.” She started gathering cushions from the couch, and upon lifting the third one discovered a small, nickel-plated revolver stuffed in the gap by the arm. She quickly replaced the cushion before the Colorman noticed she had seen. “Or the floor,” she said. “The floor is best.”

She swept the oilcloth off the table and spread it out over the floor between the dining room and the parlor. As she undressed, she said, “I found Gauguin, the painter who shared Vincent’s yellow house in Arles. As soon as we have the blue, he is ours. He has a weakness for Polynesian girls.”

The Colorman stripped off his jacket, then unlaced his shoes and kicked them across the room. “I wondered why you picked this one. There is another painter, too, who bought color from me. Called Seurat, a theorist, though; he may be slow.”

“Gauguin will be fast. He had the vision he was going to paint before he even met this girl.”

“Good, we just need to clean up from the last one, then, yes?” The Colorman was nude now, except for a loincloth made of tattered linen, his bent spine and spindly twisted limbs making him appear like the product of a giant rat crossbred with a chanterelle mushroom. Coarse black hair like a boar’s peppered his umber skin. He was setting four small braziers around the oilcloth, building small charcoal fires in each. To the side, he had placed two round earthenware jars the size of pomegranates, each had a leather cord at its neck and a wide cork lid.

“No cleanup to do,” she said. She was nude now, too, standing aside as the Colorman prepared the site. “Vincent’s brother is taken care of.”

The Colorman turned slowly toward her, holding a long, black obsidian knife, the hilt wrapped with some sort of tanned animal skin. “The art dealer? You shot the Dutchman’s brother?”

“Syphilis,” she said. A smile then, looking shy on the naked island girl as she peeked out from behind a curtain of hip-length hair. “See, it’s not always slow, but slow enough to ask them questions before they die.”

The Colorman nodded. “Good, then we only have to shoot the baker and the dwarf and it’s all done.”

“Yes, that’s all,” she said.
Damn it.
This was not at all what she had expected. Not at all.

“I’m ready,” he said. “Lie down.” He uncapped one of the jars and hung it around his neck like a medallion.

She lay on her back in the middle of the oilcloth and stretched her arms above her head. The Colorman sprinkled powder into the braziers and a rich aromatic smoke filled the flat. Then he ran about the room hopping on chairs and turning down the gaslights, so that the girl was barely visible in the dim glow of the braziers. He began to chant as he stepped around her, waving the knife over her face. The chant didn’t consist of words, as such, but rhythms, animal sounds given meaning by cadence.

“No shagging the Vuvuzela,” said Bleu.

He stopped chanting. “What the fuck is a Vuvuzela?”

“That’s this girl’s name. No shagging her.” Sometimes the trance was so deep for both of them that when Bleu emerged she was relatively sure she’d been molested. There was never any proof. He was careful and covered his tracks, so to speak, but still, she suspected.

He looked a little disappointed. His thick brow hung over his eyes a little more than normal. “Maybe when we’re done you can leave her and I can frighten her, no?”

“Maybe. Make the color, Colorman.”

He laughed, a wheezing cough of a laugh, and resumed his chant. The girl’s eyes rolled back in her head and she convulsed several times in rhythm to the Colorman’s chant, then she went rigid, bent-backed, and locked that way; only her shoulder blades and her heels still touched the oilcloth. The Manet painting began to glow then, a dim, throbbing blue light that shone over the whole room.

The Colorman chanted, danced his wounded-bird march, the painting glowed, and slowly, ever so slowly, the girl began to turn blue as the color rose on her skin. Even the soul-empty body of Juliette looked wide-eyed at the scene as the Colorman lay the blade of the black glass knife on the girl’s skin and began to scrape the blue powder.

The knife was sharp, but not so sharp that it would shave, and for all his broken-spider awkwardness, the Colorman wielded the knife with smooth precision, shaving the powder off of every surface of the girl’s body, even off her eyelids, and scraping it into the earthenware jar. He rolled her on her side and scraped the delicate curves of her back, rolling her again, back and forth, breaking into a sweat, so that the blue powder covered his own hands, his feet, his thighs. Meanwhile the painting, the masterpiece Manet that almost no one had ever seen, faded by degrees as the Colorman filled his jar. The painting—the passion, the suffering, the intensity, the skill, the time, the life that Manet had put into it, guided by his inspiration—all came out on the girl’s skin as the powder, as the Sacré Bleu. There was always more color from the painting than had gone into it. Sometimes a small painting might yield two jars of the color, especially if it had been created with great sacrifice, great suffering, and great love, for that, too, was part of the formula.

The Colorman chanted and scraped until the Manet painting was just a blank canvas. It had taken more than an hour. He capped the jar and unslung it from his neck, setting it by the blank canvas.

The girl relaxed by jerky degrees, like the tension being released in a spring with each click of some cosmic gear, until she lay flat again, peaceful. She opened her eyes, now the only bit of her body not covered in the flat, blue ultramarine powder—even her long dark hair was dusted with the color from the Colorman stepping on it as he worked. She turned on her side and looked at the Colorman, then at the blank canvas.

“Just one jar,” said the Colorman. He was rolling his glass knife up in a piece of rawhide.

She was exhausted, felt as if someone had dragged the very life force out of her, which, essentially, someone had. “But there is enough color for a painting?”

“For many,” said the Colorman. “Unless they paint impasto, like that fucking Dutchman.”

She nodded and climbed to her feet, stumbled, then caught herself. She looked at Juliette, who was looking back, as blank-faced as a mannequin. Bleu could hear footfalls outside on the landing. The nosy concierge, no doubt, brought up by the Colorman’s chanting, just as she thought.

“You want to share a bath?” asked the Colorman, leering at the island girl, his loincloth now covered in blue and looking rather more alert than it had during the making of the color.

“One minute,” she said. Bleu padded to the kitchen, leaving powdery blue footprints on the parquet floor. She wiped her hands on a tea towel, then returned to the parlor. “Did you light the fire under the water?”

The Colorman grinned. “Before we even started.” He was folding up the oilcloth, coaxing the last of the blue powder into its creases so he could pour it into a jar.

“Good,” she said. “Then we can clean up.” She went to the writing desk in the foyer, listened—yes, the concierge was still out there—then she pulled a roll of bills out of one of the desk’s pigeonholes, took it to Juliette, and stuffed it in the girl’s bag.

“Your hat,” said Bleu to the Juliette doll. “The one with the black chiffon band and train.” The hat was on the oak hall tree by the door and Juliette retrieved it and put it on. When she turned back around, Bleu was placing the jar into Juliette’s bag on top of the money.