The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque (13 page)

Perhaps the whole exercise was as I

had suspected earlier: a chance for her to tell her life, our meetings akin to attending con-fession.

The twisted nature of the entire charade was mind-boggling.

I determined then and there that I would not play the fool for Mrs. Charbuque. I would eventually ask about her husband, but not when she required it. She was not play-ing fair, and I no longer felt the need to do so myself. What I needed was some systematic plan of attack, an approach to discovering her countenance in a more definitive manner than simply conjuring it
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through her questionable autobiography. Also, I would begin to subtly drop a hint or two during our daily dialogues that I might know more about her than she suspected. For now, some of these morsels could come from the

information imparted by Borne; others I would simply manufacture. What I wanted above all else was to shake her confidence as she had shaken mine.

The tension of the afternoon settled upon me, but I tried to throw off my predicament, and set to work at the drawing board. On a large sheet of paper that covered the entire face of the board, I began illustrations for each of the characters and settings that inhabited her story so far, keeping each sketch small. I wanted to crowd them all onto one surface so that I could take them in at once. The house on the mountain, the optical magnifier, the face of her mother, her father, the tracker who was obviously tracking more than corpses. I also drew the wolf and the locket on a chain, the book of fairy tales opened to an illustration of Aladdin's lamp, and entering the picture frame from the side was a single manly hand offering a card with a message written upon it. Filling the empty spaces between objects, I drew six-pointed snow crystals— no two alike.

God could be fallible, but not Piambo.

I worked rapidly, with a reserve of energy that had not made itself evident until I began. When I finally rose and backed away from the board, I stared at my depiction of all Mrs. Charbuque had told me. Like one of those antique paintings of the life of a saint, each saintly act depicted at one and the same time on the same plane as if time had been halted and history could be viewed as a single event, my drawings had captured everything from the broken-down couch in the study to the murder amid a stand of lonesome pines of Mrs. Londell and her lover by the warped crystalogogist.

Unconsciously I had arranged the elements of the story in a great circle on the page. In viewing it, I

smiled with satisfaction at the unplanned but perfect balance of the piece. Only after I had patted myself on the back, so to speak, did it become clear to me that at the drawing's very center, around which everything else seemed to turn, there was a smaller circle of unsullied white. Of course, this emptiness was where the portrait of the child, Luciere Londell, belonged. It stared back at me.

I was too weary to engage in one of my usual bouts of self-pity. The fact that I had accomplished anything at all toward the commission, had at least made some marks on paper, was enough for the time being. I set down the char-coal pencil and retired to my bedroom.

I removed my shoes and was about to undress when I heard a noise emanating from outside the house, as if someone was walking on the stones just beyond my bedroom window. The fear I had felt earlier in the day returned immediately, and I stood stock-still, listening so hard I could feel my ears move. For an instant I actu-ally considered getting down on my hands and knees and hiding beside the bed, but then from somewhere in the creeping paranoia, a stronger emotion of anger sur-faced.

"Ridiculous," I said aloud, and stormed over to the window. With real determination I drew back the curtain to reveal the portal filled with night. It hadn't registered with me that I had spent so long at the board. The dark-ness made me quail a bit from my intended mission, but I bolstered my courage, unlatched the pane, and swung it open.

A blast of cold night air swept around me and lifted the curtains. "Who's there?" I demanded.

"Shhhh," I heard in return. "Piambo, it's me."

I immediately recognized the voice of Shenz.

"Shenz, what in good God are you doing out there?" I asked.

"Shhhh," he said. "Quietly, Piambo. Whisper only. We are here because we did not want anyone to see us at your front door."

"Who is with you?" I asked, softening my voice.

By then my eyes had adjusted, and I saw Shenz step toward the window. In the light coming from the bedroom I could make out his face directly beneath me. From out of the shadows another figure slowly sidled up next to him—a large woman in a great black overcoat, wearing a flowered kerchief around her head. I squinted to see more clearly and noticed that this might have been the ugliest woman I

had ever seen. Her face had thick crude features and, upon closer inspection, a few day's growth of beard and mustache.

"Hello," she said in a deep voice.

I said nothing but moved back a bit.

"Piambo, this is our passage into Ossiak's warehouse," said Shenz, pointing to her.

"I thought you said the locksmith was a gentleman," I said.

Shenz quietly laughed, and his companion smiled. "He is in disguise," said my friend. "Say hello to

Mr. Wolfe."

The Reminder

It was a cold, moonless night with a light mist in the air that made haloes around the street lamps.

We walked a good way downtown, Shenz and I on either side of Mr. Wolfe, before we came upon a hansom cab waiting for us at the curb on Seventeenth Street. We entered the car-riage, and without a word the driver spurred the horses forward at a great pace. Inside the compartment, we found two oil lanterns and two crowbars.

Up to that point in our journey, no one had spoken. My nerves would not allow me to contain myself any longer, though, and I whispered, "Do you have your ring of keys, Mr. Wolfe?"

Shenz, who sat next to me, shoved me in the ribs with his elbow. I turned, and he shook his head, silently admon-ishing me for having spoken.

"There is no ring of keys," said Wolfe. "I'm the ring of keys." He held up his open hand, knuckle side out, before my face. It was a rather squat, round mitt, the fingers like sausages, but from their tips grew exceedingly long nails that had been precisely trimmed to the thinnest width. At their very ends, those of the pinky and ring bearer were cut in a serrated pattern, the thumb bore a three-inch hat pin, and the remaining index and middle sported erup-tions of nail that evidently would fit a lock's baffles.

He made a fist, leaving the thumb protruding. "I call this one the Reminder," he said, adjusting his kerchief with his other hand. I looked quickly to see if that one also had keys for nails, but from what I

could see, they appeared trimmed short in the normal manner.

"Once I shoved this darling all the way up a man's nostril and tickled his brain. He didn't laugh, but I

did. From then on, he bothered me no more. Last I heard he was refusing all sustenance, wasting away to a skeleton, counting the stars." Wolfe pulled his hand back in a flash and licked the tip of the

Reminder. "I think I can still taste the memory of his first kiss," he said, and broke into a bel-lowing laugh.

"Get ahold of yourself, Wolfe," said Shenz.

"Beg your pardon, sir," Wolfe said, and slumped back in his seat like a reprimanded child.

After leaving the carriage, with crowbars and lanterns, and walking two more blocks south to Fulton, we finally came to the warehouse with the white circle on it. As Borne had predicted, the sign was faded but still fairly leg-ible. The building was made of brick, one tall story with two grimy windows in the front. On the hasp of the huge oaken door was a very rusty padlock.

Wolfe had barely seemed to touch the ancient device before he was holding it in his hand.

"Sometimes these old ones take a little longer," he said, pushing open the door. The hinges wailed like banshees, and we waited and watched up and down the block for a good five minutes before entering.

They complained miserably again as I shut us into the dark expanse. Shenz lit a match and ignited the two lanterns. He adjusted their wicks to lessen the glow and then handed one to me.

With that odd light shining up to illuminate his face, my colleague appeared truly satanic. We could not see very far into the shadows even with the lanterns, but I squinted and began to make out that we were surrounded by rows of shelves con-structed of iron scaffolding and planks.

"Let's see what we can find," said Shenz.

With great trepidation, I set off down an aisle. Wolfe followed closely, and I wasn't sure which was more daunt-ing, the dark or having him behind me carrying a crowbar. I stopped at one of the many crates and whispered, "Give this one a go." He wedged the end of the bar into the frame of the crate and gave one quick shove. The box cracked open, and a large object, obviously made of glass, fell to the cement floor and shattered.

Wolfe and I exchanged looks, mine I'm sure exhibit-ing more concern than his. I squatted down in order to bring the glow of the lantern around the fallen object. As I descended, a putrid stench rose from the scattered contents, which only then could I see had been partially liquid.

Soon enough the culprit came clearly into view.

I fled that aisle, knowing it was the repository of Borne's legacy, and began searching down another.

All the time I could hear Shenz breaking into and rifling through distant boxes.

"What are you looking for?" asked Wolfe as I motioned for him to attack another crate.

"I'm not sure," I said.

"Amateurs," said Wolfe, handing the crowbar over to me. He turned and wandered off into the dark.

I opened three more crates on my own, each one con-taining thousands of the same little slips of paper. Written on them was either the word yes or the word no.

I could only wonder at what banal manifestation of paranormal science I was gazing and marvel at the dizzying depths of foolishness that had directed the course of Ossiak's incred-ible fortune.

The entire journey to the warehouse was quickly beginning to seem pointless to me when Shenz called me to him in an excited voice, more a hiss than a whisper.

I navigated the dark maze of shelves, holding my lantern out before me until I saw the corresponding glow from my friend's.

"Here we are," he said as I approached him. He held his lantern up next to a crate that had the name

Londell written across its planks in grease pencil. There were two other such crates to the left of this one.

"Shall I?" I said to Shenz.

"Get on with it," he said.

I placed the crowbar and pushed forward with all my might. Two of the planks squeaked violently and then popped free onto the floor. A surge of white crystals spilled through the opening, glittering in the lantern light and forming a small dune at our feet. I knelt down and grabbed some of the odd snow in my hand. It was com-pletely dry.

"These are the prepared specimens from the father's research," I told Shenz, lifting a fistful and securing it in my coat pocket.

"Like fairy dust," he said. "The old crank was certainly busy."

I rose and pried off the other planks of the crate to gain fuller access. After handing Shenz the crowbar, I reached one arm in and swept more of the fossilized crystals onto the floor.

Eventually I felt solid objects protruding through the white. The first thing I pulled out was a
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book. Shenz set down the crowbar and took the volume from me. He brushed it clean against his coat in order to read the title.

"Fabulous Tales from Around the World,"

he said, and turned it for me to have a look. There was an illustration embossed on the cover—a scene of a djinn, cohering, headfirst, out of a stream of smoke issuing from a lamp shaped like a boat.

I said nothing but stared in disbelief long enough for Shenz to prompt me to continue. The next item

I uncov-ered was a stack of paper tied up in string. Once out in the light, though, the sheets that made up this small package showed themselves to be green and cut in the shapes of leaves. Each one had a question written on it. "Will Clementine go before the rain?" "Is it right?" "Billy?"

"Where are the damn answers? That's what I'm look-ing for," said Shenz.

I reached back into the crate to see if I could find some-thing less obscure, and my hand closed around the crown of a circular, broad-brimmed hat.

"I'm underwhelmed," said Shenz at the sight of it, not knowing the story as I did.

"What of this, though?" I said, hauling forth a heavy fur coat that smelled like a horse stall.

"I'll take that," said Wolfe, who suddenly appeared from out of the darkness behind me.

I handed him the coat, and he took his off and put the new one on.

"Like a glove," he said, modeling it for Shenz.

He then brushed past me and lifted the hat where I had let it fall. Removing his kerchief, he placed the broad-brimmed lid upon his head. "Gentlemen," he said, "this is the most pathetic heist I can ever remember participating in. Jars of shit, a children's book, and crates of dandruff.

I'm very disappointed."

"That makes three of us," said Shenz.

We opened the other two crates with the name Londell written across them. The second held only snow. Inside the last, at the bottom, beneath all manner of strange opti-cal equipment, I found an old daguerreotype. In faded shades of brown, it showed a picture of Mrs. Charbuque's screen facing an

audience of men in suits, some smoking, some drinking.

"Her screen," I said to Shenz, and pointed at the pic-ture.

"Who is she?" asked Wolfe. "The Dog Girl?"

"What are you getting at, Wolfe?" I asked rather defensively.

"Look here," he said, and used the Reminder as a pointer. "What do you make of that?"

Shenz and I both squinted to see what he meant. Then I saw it. At the extreme right side of the screen, at mid-level, the hand of someone hiding behind it was clutching its frame as if to reposition that panel. Something of the forearm was also visible, but no part of that appendage appeared to belong to a human being. The hand was like a paw, and it and the rest of the arm that could be seen were covered with thick dark hair.