“Ex-comp? Marss-den Excomp?” He slapped his bony thigh and continued to laugh, a high reedy quiver broken by gasps. I moved back a step to let Danbury ask questions or administer CPR. She said a few words, then handed Marcel a photo of Hexcamp taken at the trial. The old man nodded.
“Oui, ’excomp.”
“Ask him about Hexcamp’s art, Danbury.”
She spoke a sentence or two. Marcel held a bone-white thumb and forefinger a halfinch apart and replied. Danbury asked a couple more questions and the old man repeated a briefer version of the cackle and the fingerspace gesture. This was followed by pinching his thumb and forefinger over his open mouth, as if dropping something in.
“Danbury?”
“Mr Duchamp remembers our Mr Hexcamp quite well, instructing him in figure drawing and perspective in particular, as well as painting.”
“And?”
“What he recalls most about Marss-den Excomp is his talent was about this much -” Danbury repeated the old man’s gesture, thumb and finger a half-inch apart. “He also referred to Marsden as a charming young man who firmly thought himself a misunderstood genius. And who probably went home at night and ate bugs.”
“Not a candidate for the well-adjusted club? See what you can get on Hexcamp’s mental state.”
Danbury fired strands of French at the old man. In Mobile I would have watched the interviewee’s eyes and body for reactions to words and phrases. Lacking that ability, I studied Danbury’s voice, her French an aural version of a mountain stream gliding over rounded stones.
“Ceci est fini!” a woman’s voice cawed.
The door behind us opened and Mme Badentier strode in, her high heels gunshots on the wooden floor. “Fini!” She clapped her hands, spoke rapidly to Danbury.
“We’re getting the bum’s rush,” Danbury said to me. “She thinks we’re tiring Marcel.”
I held two fingers up. “Two minutes,” I pleaded to Mimi. “Please.”
The woman crossed her arms and glared. “Non.”
Non I understood. Not knowing this, she repeated it.
I looked at the old man. “Another game?” I said, pointing at the board. “Chess, Monsieur Duchamp?”
The old man’s eyes lit with delight.
“Non, non, non,” the woman said, taking me under the arm and trying to pull me from the room.
“Mimi,” the old man said softly. She froze, turned to him. He looked at the door. “Quittez la chambre.”
Her eyes blazed at me and she spat a few words in French, not water over stones, but rocks against my head.
“She’s coming back in ten minutes,” Danbury said. “Hurry.”
Marcel reset the table, this time adding a corkscrew and empty snailshell to the mix. He checked beneath the table for another spider. Finding none, he advanced a white feather. I greeted it with my thumbtack. He grunted.
“Don’t piss him off. Lose, just take a few minutes to do it.”
“Ask him questions, Danbury. And hit him again with the vino.”
“Vin?” The old man’s eyes sparkled as Danbury poured a healthy shot into his glass. He tapped the glass with his finger, grinned at Danbury, said a few words.
“Oh shit,” Danbury said.
“What.”
“He wants me to smoke the damned pipe.”
“Fire it up. Bet they didn’t teach that in Jschool.”
Danbury made a face and lit the pipe. She puffed and hacked and gagged, tears welling in her eyes. “Scent of heaven, my ass,” she gasped. “It tastes like fried lint.” When it was burning strong, she lowered it to his face. He wafted smoke to his nose with his hand.
“Ah, l’odeur du ciel.”
Marcel and I moved and countermoved, tacks and feathers and shells shifting on the surface of the table. While we dueled in the smoke-filled air, Danbury kept up a running conversation with the old man, translating without missing a beat. She didn’t ask questions while Marcel pondered a move but after it, saving the most involved questions until he took one of my pieces, which made him more garrulous. It was the perfect response to the situation, probably as useful to a reporter as a cop.
I listened and fired questions back, simultaneously trying to ascertain the rankings of the items on the table, hoping to stay in the game long enough for Danbury to ask all the questions. It became rhythmic, dance-like. Danbury and I were almost in the zone Harry and I sometimes reached, knowing in advance how the other will act, even in a completely fluid situation.
I advanced a pen nib, and Danbury kept up her dual conversation. “He says Hexcamp had a crude vitality to his work. But he wasn’t masterful, more an illustrator than an artist. Hexcamp never realized his limitations, calling his critics liars and jealous of his talents.”
My nib fell to the salt cellar. Danbury kept translating.
“Hexcamp fancied himself a roué, a playboy. But again he deluded himself. He was a…a…”
The old man cackled at Danbury and made a circle with his left thumb and forefinger, thrusting his right forefinger through it. After several repetitions, he clamped down with his left hand, trapping his finger. He giggled, that high keening sound, followed by a few more words.
“Translation, Danbury.”
“Hexcamp was a slave to, uh, pussy. Evidently he needed to dominate women in public, be dominated by them in private.”
I answered a paperclip thrust with my button parry. “How does Marcel know this?”
Danbury spoke. Marcel replied briefly, aiming his hands at one another, opening and closing them quickly. I heard the sound paree.
“It’s Paris, everyone gossips,” I ventured.
Danbury grinned. “Damn. You’re learning the language.”
Marcel spun a matchbook in a circle. I jumped it with an eyedropper. He whispered merde, bumped the eyedropper with his cork and spoke several more sentences.
“He says Hexcamp’s charm, his words, his lovely face, drew women like moths. But the women were always burned.”
Badentier’s snailshell took my candle nub. “By Hexcamp?” I asked.
“Vin,” the old man bayed.
Danbury jumped for the bottle and refilled his glass while translating. “By another woman; she’d let the new women stay for a few days - fresh toys for Marsden - then send them packing. It was the woman who herself drew Hexcamp like a moth. He loved her fire and sought it. She held his heart in her hands, alternately kissing and biting it. It drove him insane with need.”
I took his eraser with my button. Danbury froze, cocked her head. “I hear the elevator. It’s not been ten minutes.”
“Maybe metric minutes are shorter. Ask about the woman. Who was she?”
He set a thimble behind my bobbin, flicked the bobbin from the table. My pieces were disappearing. He traded sentences with Danbury.
“One of a circle of friends of Hexcamp’s. Some students, some the usual crowd of Paris drifters. They blew in like gypsies, stole what they could, then scattered like leaves.”
“What was her name, Danbury?”
I met his breadcrust with my watch crystal. He snorted, then zoomed in a bottlecap from the far edge of the board and dropped it over my watch crystal. He started laughing, wiggled a gnarled forefinger at me.
“Echec,” he said. Check.
“The damned cap,” I said. “I never saw it coming.”
Danbury turned an ear toward the door. “Footsteps outside. Madame is closing in.”
“Did the woman have a name, Danbury? Ask him.”
As Danbury leaned in with her question, the door opened and Mimi strode across the floor like a bee-stung Amazon. She grabbed us by our arms and pulled us toward the door with surprising strength. The table tipped, wine slashed across the floor. Danbury yelled, “What was the name of the woman? Hexcamp’s woman?”
But Marcel was studying the wet floor, perhaps planning his next game. Mimi hustled us into the anteroom. The door to Marcel slammed with the concussion of a shotgun blast. Her long finger twitched at the front door. “Out.”
“Please,” I begged the statue of her face. “One more question, une question.”
She walked to the door to the hall, opened it. “Non.”
“You were there, weren’t you?” I said. “At the academy? You’ve always cared for your brother in one way or another?” We were in the hall. Danbury spun my words into French. The woman stared at me. I saw fear in her eyes.
I said, “You were there, Mimi. I see it in your face. Tell her the truth, Danbury. We’ve come five thousand miles because people are dying and I don’t know why.”
Danbury spoke as the door squeezed shut. The building went quiet as stone. “I think we’ve worn out our welcome,” she said quietly.
We shuffled down the hall to the elevator. Our diminutive operator was nowhere in attendance, a rolled-shut paper bag left in his place. I opened it to discover a croissant and a single white ballet slipper. After several halting attempts - and one terrifyingly fast two-floor descent - I deposited us on the first floor.
“Watch your step. Where to now, Danbury?”
“You have to meet with some local cops to make the nut on the grant, right?”
We headed out the door. I shrugged. “It would make the chief happy. The accountants, too. Might as well do something.”
She pulled out her notes, flicked her hand in the air, and had a cab in front of us in seconds.