“Exotic island beauty,” she said, teasing, showing a little more ankle, and in the process releasing the full seductive power of a brown woolen sock. “Woo-woo,” she said, thinking that might be something an exotic island beauty might say. “Oh là là,” she said.
“I’m tired. I’m going home for the night,” said the cabbie.
“Look, you were the one who said we could work something out. That was your idea,” said Bleu.
“I was still sleepy and hadn’t gotten a good look at you. And that was before I knew about your mother’s leprosy. Twenty francs.”
“Fine,” she said, climbing into the cab. “But I’m not paying you until you bring me back here. Take me to the cabaret Le Mirliton on avenue de Clichy.”
To be a woman at all, in these times, was to be treated like an object, of either scorn or desire, or both, but it was certainly easier making your way around Paris as a beautiful brunette dressed as a proper lady than it was as an island waif barely scratching womanhood. In retrospect, she might have been hasty in changing so soon, but she needed to divert the Colorman’s attention from Lucien, and the best way to do that was to convince him that she had found a new painter, one for whom this little Tahitian girl was the model of perfection.
The streets were nearly deserted so it took only a half an hour to get across the city to the base of Montmartre. A half an hour of the horses’ hooves on the cobbles, the smell of coal smoke, horse shit, yeast from loaves proofing in the bakeries, garlic, soured wine, and meat grease from last evening’s cooking, plus the pervasive odor of dead fish and something deeply green rising in the fog off the Seine. In the back of the hack she bounced like an echo in a rolling pumpkin as the cabbie seemed determined to hit every rut and pothole in the city, and she was giggling at the absurdity of it by the end, which saved the driver’s life.
“Here you go,” the cabbie called as he pulled up in front of the darkened cabaret. “Twenty francs.”
“Wait in that alley.” She tossed her head toward the next corner; a wave traveled down her long, blue-black hair with the gesture. “I’ll pay you when I’m finished.”
“You’ll pay me now, if you want me to wait.”
Bleu reconsidered trying to lure him into the cab for a tumble, then snapping his gritty neck. Certainly the island girl didn’t have the seductive charms of Juliette, but men were pigs and could be depended upon to give in to their most base instincts, which is why she felt the need to slaughter one now and then. Perhaps she shouldn’t have played the leprosy note quite so hard. She really didn’t want to leave a corpse in a waiting cab and then have to drive herself across the city, which would undoubtedly attract attention.
Yes, life was hard for a woman in Paris, harder still if you were several women. She sighed, a heavy, existential sigh that would become all the rage in Paris in fifty years.
“Half now,” she said, handing up a ten-franc note. “Half when you take me back to boulevard Saint-Germain. Now wait for me around the corner.”
The driver scoffed at her and left the cab sitting where it was.
“Fine,” she said. The dolt didn’t know enough to be afraid. She’d show him.
She strode up to Le Mirliton’s double oak doors and kicked them at the center of the jamb. The plan, the picture she saw in her mind, what should have happened, was that the doors should have splintered around the locks and sprung open, for despite the diminutive size of her current body, she was very, very strong. What actually happened was the doors, held closed by a padlock and chain threaded through the door handles inside, flexed a bit, gave just enough to absorb the impact of her kick, and she landed on her ass on the sidewalk, while the doors remained quite intact.
The taxi driver laughed. She leapt to her feet and growled at him.
“Maybe you should just knock,” the driver said. “I’ll wait for you around the next corner.” He snapped the reins and the horse clopped a half a block and turned down a narrow street.
A stained glass and oak transom over the two doors had been left open a crack. She eyed it, then shimmied up the front of the right door, using the hinges for footholds; popped the transom open; and slid into the cabaret headfirst, turning a somersault in the air and making a catlike landing on her feet, but with her skirt upturned over her head.
“Oh là là!” A man’s voice, somewhere in the dark.
She fought the tangle of her skirt down, even as she realized that her island girl was wearing no knickers and had just treated the room to a full display of her exotic bare bottom and bits. The child really had been an innocent.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said to the bartender, who had apparently been sleeping on the floor behind the bar and had popped up like a surprised puppet when he’d heard her kick the door, just in time to see her stick her landing sans culottes.
He was young, and even in the dark she could see he was lean and handsome, with a shock of blond hair that fell over one eye and a red waistcoat that made him appear a bit like a sleepy yet dashing outlaw.
“Bonsoir,” she said, so as not to be impolite. She was across the bar in an instant. She stretched up and kissed the surprised bartender chastely on the lips, just a peck, then snatched a bottle out of the well and hit him over the head with it three times fast. Miraculously, the bottle did not break. The bartender, however, was quite unconscious and bleeding from his scalp in two places. Enchantment and seduction were fine means of persuasion, but when time is short, an awkward but quick concussion could better serve a girl’s purpose.
“Sorry,” she said. “Accident. Couldn’t be helped.” No wonder the Colorman always said that; she felt much better about having bludgeoned the bartender, who had really done nothing more than oh là là her naughty bits. She bent and kissed him on the cheek, then leapt up onto the bar to inspect the Blue Nude.
She could just reach it, and she gently touched the paint at the edge. Still tacky, even after weeks. Damn Lucien, using stand oil cut with clove oil for a medium—it might take months to dry completely. She wouldn’t be able to razor it off the stretchers and roll it up; she’d have to take the whole bloody life-sized thing.
Standing on a chair on the bar, she was able to unhook the painting and get it down without marring the paint. She found the key to the padlock and chain in the barman’s pocket and was standing on the sidewalk with the painting less than five minutes after she’d exited the cab.
The Blue Nude was nearly as wide as she was tall, and the only way she could carry it was to hook the very tips of her fingers onto the inside of the top stretcher frame and hold her hands over her head while she stepped sideways down the sidewalk. She performed that awkward waltz for a half a block, until she got to the corner where the cab had turned, only to find a street that was empty of all traffic in general, and a waiting taxi in particular. The greasy cabdriver had abandoned her to the deserted, wee hours of the morning, with no way to get the painting home.
“Oh balls,” she said. Now she’d have to find some other way of getting the Colorman’s mind off of Lucien.
Twenty-one