Sacre Bleu (52 page)

“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.”

“Y
OU KILLED
M
INETTE
!”

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.”