TWO MEN IN BROAD-BRIMMED HATS, ONE TALL, ONE OF AVERAGE HEIGHT, stood at the taxi stand at the east end of the Cimetière du Montparnasse, looking toward the entrance to the Catacombs across the square. One carried a black ship’s signal lantern with a Fresnel lens, which he held by his side as if no one would notice; the taller one had a long canvas quiver slung over his shoulder, from which protruded the wooden legs of an artist’s easel. Both wore long coats. Other than the lantern, they were conspicuous only in that they were standing at a taxi stand, at midday, with no intention of taking a taxi, and the shoes of the taller man were smoldering.
“Hey, your shoes are smoking,” said the cabbie, who leaned against his hack, chewing an unlit cheroot and scowling. He had already asked them three times if they needed a taxi. They didn’t. They were both peeping out from under the brims of their hats, surreptitiously checking on the progress of a little man in a bowler hat who was leading a donkey across the square.
“It is no concern of yours, monsieur,” said the tall man.
“I think he’s going into the Catacombs,” said the shorter one. “This may be it, Henri.”
“Are you two detectives?” asked the cabbie. “Because if you are, you are horrible at it. You should read this Englishman Arthur Conan Doyle to see how it is done. The new one is called The Sign of the Four. His Sherlock Holmes is very clever. Not like you two.”
“The Catacombs?” Henri pulled his pant legs up so that the cuffs hovered above his shoes, showing his gleaming brass ankles. “I’m finally tall and I have to go into the Catacombs, where it will be a disadvantage.”
“Perhaps the Professeur can design a new model powered by irony,” said Lucien, tilting his head so the brim of his hat lifted to reveal his grin. The Loco-ambulators had allowed them to follow the Colorman at a distance for over a week, without revealing Henri’s conspicuous height or limp, but now it seemed the steam stilts were going to become a distinct disadvantage.
“We have a little time.” Lucien set the lantern down and crouched by Henri’s feet. “We need to let him get ahead of us if we’re going to follow him down there. You there, cabbie, help me get his trousers off.”
“Messieurs, this is the wrong neighborhood and the wrong time of day for such a request.”
“Tell him you’re a count, Henri,” said Lucien. “That usually works.”
Five minutes later Toulouse-Lautrec, with his trousers rolled up and his long coat dragging the ground, led the way across the square. They’d given the cabbie five francs to watch the Loco-ambulators and showed him the double-barreled shotgun in the canvas quiver, borrowed from Henri’s uncle, to let him know what would happen to him should he decide to abscond with the steam stilts. He, in turn, charged them two francs for a guaranteed—more or less—complete map of underground Paris.
Toulouse-Lautrec unfolded the map until he had revealed the seventh level below the city, then looked to Lucien. “It follows the streets as if on the surface.”
“Yes, but with fewer cafés, more corpses, and it’s dark, of course.”
“Oh, well then, we’ll just pretend we’re visiting London.”
The city of Paris had installed gaslights for the first few hundred yards of the Catacombs, as well as a man at the entrance who charged twenty-five centimes for the pleasure of looking at the city’s bones.
“That shit is morbid, you know that, no?” said the gatekeeper.
“You’re the gatekeeper of an ossuary,” said Lucien. “You know that, yes?”
“Yes, but I don’t go down there.”
“Give me my change,” said the baker.
“If you see a man with a donkey, tell him I turn the gaslights off at dark and he’ll have to find his own way out. And report to me if he’s doing anything unsavory down there. He goes down there and stays for hours at a time. It’s macabre.”
“You know you charge people money to look at human remains, no?” said Lucien.
“Are you going in or not?”
They went down the marble steps into wide tunnels lined with stacked tibiae, fibulae, femurs, ulnae, radii, and skulls. When they reached the iron gate with the sign that said NO VISITORS BEYOND THIS POINT, Lucien knelt down to light the signal lantern.
“We’re going in there?” asked Henri, staring past the bars to infinite black.
“Yes,” said Lucien.
Henri held the cabbie’s map up to the last gas lamp. “Some of these chambers are massive. Surely the Colorman will see our lantern. If he knows he’s being followed, he’ll never lead us to the paintings.”
“That’s why the signal lantern. We close it down until we can only just see beyond our feet, so we don’t trip. Keep it directed downward.” Lucien held a match to the wick, then, once it was going, adjusted the flame until it was barely visible.
“And how will we know which way he goes?”
“I don’t know, Henri. We’ll look for his lantern. We’ll listen for the donkey. Why would I know?”
“You’re the expert. The Rat Catcher.”
“I am not the expert. I was seven. I went into the mine only far enough to set my traps, that was all.”
“Yet you discovered Berthe Morisot naked and painted blue. If not an expert, you have extraordinary luck.”
Lucien picked up the lantern and pushed open the gate. “We should probably stop talking. Sound carries a long way down here.”
The arch that contained the iron gate was smaller than the rest of the vault and Lucien had to duck to go through. Henri walked straight through, until the easel he carried on his back caught the archway and nearly knocked him off his feet.
“Perhaps we should leave the easel here, just bring the shotgun.”
“Good idea,” said Henri. He pulled the shotgun from the canvas sleeve, then set the bag and the easel to the side of the gate in the dark.
“Breech broken,” said Lucien, thinking that the next time Henri tripped, the gun might discharge, taking off one of their heads or some other appendage to which they might have a personal attachment.
Henri broke the shotgun’s breech and dropped in two shells he’d had in his pocket, then paused.
Lucien played the hairline beam of light up and down his friend’s face. “What?”
“We are going into these tunnels to kill a man.”
Lucien had tried not to think of the specific act. He’d tried to keep the violence abstract, an idea, or better yet, an act based upon an ideal, the way his father had helped him through dispatching the rats when he was a boy and he’d find a suffering rodent still alive, squirming in the trap. “It is mercy, Lucien. It is to save the people of Paris from starvation, Lucien. It’s to preserve France from the tyranny of the Prussians, Lucien.” And one time, when Père Lessard had drunk an extra glass of wine with lunch, “It’s a fucking rat, Lucien. It’s disgusting and we’re going to make it delicious. Now smack it with the mallet, we have pies to make.”
Lucien said, “He killed Vincent, he killed Manet, he’s keeping Juliette as a slave: he’s a fucking rat, Henri. He’s disgusting and we’re going to make him delicious.”
“What?”
“Shhhhh. Look there, it’s a light.”
After only a minute out of the gaslights their eyes had adjusted to the darkness. In the distance they could see a tiny yellow light bouncing like a moth against a window. Lucien held the signal lantern so Henri could see him hold his finger to his lips for silence, then signal for them to move forward. He pointed the light down, so it barely cast the shadow of their feet. They followed the flame in the distance, Henri walking with a pronounced waddle to cover the heavy steps of his limp and to compensate for not having his walking stick.
At times, the flame would disappear and they found themselves trying to find some speck in the distance, and Henri remembered, as a very small boy, closing his eyes to sleep at night, only to see images on the back of his eyelids, moving like ghosts. Not afterimages, not memories, but what he was actually seeing in the absolute darkness of night and childhood.
As they stepped carefully, quietly, over the even, dusty floors of the underground, those images came to him again. He remembered seeing electric blue moving among the black, and sometimes a face would come at him, not an imagined specter, nothing that he had conjured, but a real figure made of darkness and blue that would charge him from out of the infinite nothing, and he would cry out. That was the first time, he realized, there in the Catacombs, that he had seen Sacré Bleu. Not in a painting, or a church window, or a redhead’s scarf, but coming at him, out of the dark. And that was when he realized why he would kill the Colorman. Not because he was evil, or cruel, or because he kept a beautiful muse as a slave, but because he was frightening. Henri knew then he could, he would, put down the nightmare.
“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.