Nearby churches took several minutes to disagree on the meaning of three p.m. as we crossed the road to the address Danbury had received. The buildings lining the wide avenue were brick, long and slender and between four and six stories tall. Some windows held flowerboxes, flat smiles of red and yellow and white. We turned up a short flight of concrete stairs from the sidewalk to a large wooden door. Danbury pressed a buzzer, announcing us into an electronic box. The lock on a glass door buzzed and we pushed through. There was a small elevator to the right and I entered, jumping in fright when a voice at my waist asked, “Are you going up or going down?”
I looked down and saw a dwarf. He was the elevator operator, something I thought existed only in black-and-white movies. He wore a well-appointed dark beard, round brass-framed glasses, and a uniform similar to a bellhop’s. Oblivious to my stare, he closed the grated door as Danbury stepped aboard.
“Though I offered the choice of up or down,” he continued, “I admit there is no down, at least not so far as this floor is concerned. Your choices are between floor one and floor five. I can stop in between floors, if you wish. I must advise that it makes exiting the elevator difficult.”
“You speak English,” I said, ridiculously. He spun a small wheel and we rose, wheels squealing beside us and cables rattling above.
“No, I’m speaking Chinese. You’re only hearing it in English. Floor?”
“We’re going to five,” Danbury said.
“To see Monsieur Badentier or Madame? If it is the latter you may prefer I stop between floors.”
Danbury looked down. “I’ve spoken with Mme Badentier a time or two, monsieur. She seems rather difficult.”
Our operator considered for a moment. “Having sex with a taxicab is difficult. Mme Badentier is impossible.”
“We are actually here to see Monsieur Badentier,” I said.
“No matter. You will see her. She is inescapable.”
The floors passed by. The elevator trembled. “What is he like?” I asked. “Monsieur Badentier.”
“He picks times and places that make him happy. He will want to play. I advise you to play. I offer one thought: the commonplace will never win.”
We reached the top and stopped abruptly. The operator retracted the grates. We stepped into a narrow hall with a door at the end. The dwarf engaged the Down mechanism.
“In an elevator traveling near the speed of light,” he said, disappearing into the floor, “we would all be much shorter. Even me.”
Danbury pulled me from staring at the departed elevator and led the way down the hall. The door swung open with my knuckles poised to strike. Behind it stood a sixtyish woman who redefined “severe”. Critical, perhaps.
Her face was white and heart-shaped, chin tapered to a point, an improbably long neck. Jet-black hair was pulled straight back and anchored. Her lips were thin and reddened. She flared her nostrils, as if gauging us by scent, then pulled the door open, a flick of her head bidding us enter.
Mimi Badentier wore a full-length dress as black as her hair and embellished at the swooping décolletage with small opaline stones reminiscent of eyes. Around her long neck hung a pendant, the eye motif again. I was reminded of Cerberus, and hoped she was less diligent in her guardianship of Le Monsieur.
Danbury said a few words. When she pointed to me and said, “Monsieur Carson Ryder,” I held out my hand. Madame studied it like a curiosity until it returned to my care. Mimi pointed a long finger at a pair of chairs against the wall and we sat. She spoke a few words and disappeared behind the brown door. Danbury said, “She’s going to announce us to L’Homme Grand. Sit tight.”
Danbury pulled Le Monde from her outsized purse and read as I scanned the room. There was a small, neatly kept desk in the corner, a rack of books, a grandfather clock against the wall. When Mimi left, the clock seemed to tick louder.
When I was young, five perhaps, and we’d moved to a temporary setting while my father worked some engineering miracle, our furnished rental house had a grandfather clock. I recall how it focused attention on the silence of our home by cutting loudly across it, like a lighthouse calls attention to the dark. My child’s mind had invented two-beat phrases to accompany the tick-tock swings of the pendulum, filling the darkness with imagined sounds.
Tick-tock
Don’t walk
Tick-tock
Old sock
Tick-tock
Hard knock. Door lock, don’t talk…
I wanted to cross the room, open the case, grab grandfather by the pendulum and throttle him into silence. When I didn’t, he mocked me for another five minutes, until the door opened and deposited Mimi in the room.
“Monsieur Badentier will see you now.”
“Merci,” Danbury said, returning the paper to her purse. “Come on, Ryder. Let’s meet the great man.”
We started toward the room. The woman stopped Danbury, spoke in a whisper for a minute. The woman tapped her watch. Danbury looked at me, raised an eyebrow.
I said, “We’re on a time budget?”
“She’s leaving for the market after our introduction. When she returns our time is up. She figures twenty minutes. But that’s not the big story. Seems Mr Badentier takes little fits from time to time, imagines he’s famous French painters. I guess today we’re talking to a guy named Marcel Duchamp. You familiar with that one, Ryder? He someone famous?”
“Sacré bleu,” I said.
We followed Mimi through the door. The room was perhaps fifty feet in length, a quarter that in width. Add the twelve-foot ceiling and you had the proportions of a shoebox. Paintings were stacked against the walls, some boxed, some loose. In the far corner several canvases were covered with an old dropcloth. The only light came from a large window at the far end, opening across the vista of Paris. The room was thick with the scent of linseed oil and pipe tobacco.
My eyes took several seconds to adjust to the dim light. I saw a bed at the far end, backlit by the window. In the bed a small man lay propped up on pillows, motionless. We approached. At first it seemed the only living portion of the old man was his eyes, black and bright and riveted on our passage across the room. His mouth resurrected, stretching from flat line to wide arch of smile. His voice box kicked in with a hoarse rasp of what I took to be pleasure. Thin arms lifted from the bedclothes and waved us closer. I looked at Mimi Badentier. She did not appear pleased.
A black marble-topped table perhaps a meter square stood between us and the old man. He suddenly sat fully erect and spun to face us. He wore a heavy woolen robe, purple, and his bare legs dangled over the side.
“Les oreillers,” he said, his eyes never leaving Danbury and me. His sister moved to him and adjusted the pillows to prop him in our direction.
“Pantoufles,” he directed, and she knelt and tucked his white feet into brown leather slippers.
“Vin,” he said next. Sister Mimi reached behind one of the canvases and produced an almost-full bottle of red wine, and a wineglass.
“Trois verres,” he snapped. Mimi reddened and produced two more glasses. As she filled the glasses I studied the table. It seemed a repository of detritus: a wine cork, salt cellar, bottle cap, several colored buttons of mother-of-pearl, a thimble, white feather, earring, and so forth. All items were approximately equidistant, as if an attempt at order was under way. At the edge of the table was a ceramic ash tray, its pipe rest cupping a well-worn briar.
The man pointed to the pipe and made some command to his sister. She twitched at his words, then set down the glasses and lifted the pipe to her lips. She struck a kitchen match and fired up the dottle, clouds of gray smoke pouring forth. After several seconds of puffing, she held the pipe low. Badentier leaned his face into the rolling plume of smoke, breathed deeply.
“Ah, l’odeur du ciel.”
She set the pipe in its holder, shot us a hot eye, spun, and retreated silently from the room, her turbulence roiling the smoke in the air. I saw the man staring at the table and followed his eyes to a small spider crossing the table slowly, seemingly numbed by smoke. It crawled to the edge and retreated to the underside.
I smiled at the old guy. “Howdy, Marcel.”
He stared at me without expression, then shivered a finger at the black tabletop and said several words.
Danbury looked at me. “He says he wants to play.”
I studied the pile of refuse on the table, tried to make sense of it. Marcel took a sip of vino and seemed to enjoy my confusion.
“Pardon me?” I said.
He raised a puckish eyebrow. I looked at the objects on the table and searched my memory. “He wants to play chess,” I said finally. “Marcel Duchamps quit his art career at its height and studied chess, claiming it was the only true art.”
Danbury stared at the junk-filled table. “You’re saying this stuff, this table…is his chessboard?”
The old man nodded at the bits of detritus, waved his hand like a benediction. “Echecs,” he said. “Shess.”
“It appears that way.”
He spoke again, followed by a wink at Danbury. She gave me a grim smile. “He says if you win, he’ll talk with us. If you lose he’ll take a nap.”
I looked at Marcel. He had turned away, an enigmatic smile on his lips. I reached to the table and pushed a thimble two inches ahead. The old man shot his arm to the table, set a finger atop a button and slid it to my left. I countered by moving my coiled pipecleaner to face his feather. He shifted a matchstick. I retreated the salt cellar. He moved a paperclip, I advanced an earring. His pen-cap fled. I chased it with a nutshell. He studied, looked perplexed, then quickly switched positions of a bolt and eraser.
“I think he castled,” I said.
“Do something.”
I advanced my button to his penknife. The old man raised his face and smiled wickedly. Danbury whispered, “I think you’re tanking.” The old man brought his nail into play and in three swift moves took my nutshell. He emitted a short bark of laughter and set a cork beside my earring.
“Shaques,” he announced.
“I think he’s saying Check, pogie.”
I studied the table, sweat gathering beneath my arms. Marcel watched me carefully, his dark eyes unblinking. My heart was the loudest sound in the room. A motion caught my eye: the spider that had previously crossed the table reappeared on my side. I watched its halting progress, an idea forming. I set my finger in the path of the spider and it crawled aboard. I set the smoke-woozy arachnid in front of the cork. Badentier leaned forward, transfixed. The spider hesitated, scuttled right, corrected left, then climbed atop Badentier’s piece and stopped. The old man’s eyes widened.
“Dada shah-mat,” I said, recalling shah-mat was the original word for checkmate, Persian. The spider had created a random occurrence, a dadaist checkmate. Only a Marcel Duchamp could appreciate the beauty of the moment.
“Alors,” he said, shaking his head. He tipped his cork in surrender. The spider staggered away. The old man looked at me and raised a gray eyebrow, inviting questions.
“Marsden Hexcamp?” I said.
He started laughing.