The Curse of the Grand Guignol (15 page)

“Perhaps I can interest you in
another canvas,” he said hopefully, jealously guarding his rich
patroness from his fellow Splattereurs. Together, they
circumambulated the gallery admiring the other works of art,
leaving the doctor to light up a cigarette and nurse his outrage in
private. After a few calming breaths he began looking for an
ashtray when someone approached him with a pewter dish and caught
the finger of ash just before it fell.

“I remember you from last
night.” It was the red-headed artist with the fiery red beard. “You
were at the Hotel de Merimont.”

“Yes,” admitted the doctor,
feigning vague recollection. “I don’t believe we were introduced
but I recognize your smock and beret. What did you think of the
harpist?”

“I wasn’t really listening, to
tell the truth. Those sorts of posh soirees leave me cold. Can I
interest you in a painting?”

“I’m afraid modern art is not
for me. If you have anything from the English school I might take a
look.”

“What English school?”

“Constable, Landseer, Stubbs,
Gainsborough.”

“Never heard of it. What drew
you here today?”

Dr Watson indicated the Countess
with a nod of his head. “My travelling companion is mad about
modern art, yes, quite mad,” he repeated with emphasis.

“Is she rich?”

“Very.”

“Perhaps you could introduce
me.”

“Perhaps if I knew your
name.”

“Laszlo.”

“Unfortunately for you, Laszlo,
it appears your moustachioed friend has claimed her for himself.
You will need to sort it out with him. Whose idea was it to display
the marionettes?”

The red-haired artist glared
darkly at his copain. “Salvador. He’s full of crazy ideas. He says
the marionettes are our way of paying homage to our patroness,
Madame Hertzinger. She was tied to a balcony railing before she
fell to her death. Dangling over the edge, you see.”

“I see, yes, homage. Who tied
her to the railing?”

“Who else but a madman!”

Dr Watson hadn’t really been
expecting a cogent answer but it was worth a try. “Where did
Salvador get so many marionettes? Did he make them himself?”

“Ha! Not Salvador! There’s a
puppet shop around the corner. It’s closing down. The old man who
owns it is not long for this world. Everything is going cheap. You
can pick up a marionette for a song. Just turn left into the allée
des Bouffons. Are you sure I cannot interest you in a
painting?”

“Quite sure. Oh, my companion is
signalling to me. Perhaps we will meet again at the Hotel de
Merimont.” He sincerely hoped not.

Dr Watson offered his arm to the
Countess and together they strolled out of the gallery and turned
left into buffoon alley.

Monsieur Grimaldi was coughing
up blood into a spittoon when the little bell above the door gave a
tinkle. Quickly, he wiped away the red spittle using his frayed
sleeve. Years ago such behaviour would have appalled him but he was
past caring. He was worn out with the worry of dying alone and in
pain. His wife had died five years back – a chancre in the stomach.
One day she stopped eating and just wasted away. He blamed the
Panama Affair. His son had drowned at sea at the age of nine, swept
off the rocks by a rogue wave in the Bay of Naples. His daughter
had died in childbirth. She had been eighteen. His son-in-law
remarried six months later and moved to Provence. There was no one
left.

The puppets had solaced him.
They were like family. He talked to them at night after he closed
the shop and extinguished the gaslight. But now they were going
too. That crazy artist took all the good ones. Robbed him blind!
But what could he do? He couldn’t be bothered bartering any more.
What for? A few more francs? And who would he leave it to?

There were just a few of the old
puppets left now. Old like him. No one wanted them. They had sat on
the top shelf covered in dust for twenty years. Yesterday he
climbed on a chair and brought them down and dusted them off. How
miserable they looked. He almost cried.

“Monsieur Grimaldi is my name,
may I be of service?” He was dismayed to have any customers come
through the door let alone such respectable looking ones. A young
lady, impeccably groomed in a costume tailleur of marine blue
velveteen trimmed with white fox fur, and a mature gentleman in a
brown wool coat of good quality.

“I am interested in purchasing a
marionette,” said the lady unblinkingly, gazing at the empty
shelves.

“Of course, of course, but,
alas, as you can see most my stock has gone. I am closing down.
After twenty years in the business I will close my doors for good.
I have only a few old puppets left.”

He coughed to clear his throat
and ran a melancholy eye over the line of tawdry wooden puppets
lying forlornly on the counter like dead babies lined up for mass
burial after the Black Death. He’d seen a line of dead babies in
Treviso once. They died not from plague, of course, but whooping
cough. Every babe in the village was taken, none were spared. It
was a sad time for the mothers.

The lady ran a critical eye over
the meagre display and picked up one of the oldest puppets. “Tell
me about this one.”

“Ah, now, that one is
interesting. She was my first. She started me in the business. I
found her in a marketplace in Aleppo a very long time ago. She is
called Little Mary.”

“Little Mary?”

“The first puppets ever created
were all made in the likeness of the Virgin. They were all called
Little Mary. That’s how marionettes got their name, meaning little
Marys.”

“She looks antique.”

“More than antique - fifteenth
century.”

“What is this one with the
patches on his costume?”

“He is called Clown.”

She picked up the patchwork
puppet. “Clown is his name?”

“Yes, it is from the seventeenth
century. He is not funny. He is a brute.”

“He has a rabbit’s tail on his
cap.”

“Tail of the hare,” he
corrected. “It is the sign of the coward.”

She replaced it and moved along
the counter. “This Harlequin carries a stick?”

“It is called a batte or
slapstick; also it is a wand.”

“Magic wand?”

“Yes, magic.”

“Harlequin is a magician?”

“Magician, yes, comic fool,
perpetual lover, clever servant, romantic hero…he is whatever you
want him to be. He has changed over time. See here, this one has
the chequered costume, he is agile and handsome, but this earlier
one, he is less handsome, his costume was made of discordant
shapes, you see a triangle, a square, a diamond, a heart, a
rhombus, it is tricky to the eye. Watch as I make the
string-pulling.”

“He dances nimbly in your
hands!”

Monsieur Grimaldi acknowledged
the praise with a slight bow of his head and a brittle smile. “The
busy costume, it adds to the mischief-making. A good sudrahara or
neurospastos – sinew puller - can work wonders.”

“You said sinew, not string, as
if they are human?”

“To me, they
are
human.”

Dr Watson interrupted the
colloquy with a discrete cough. “I’ll be in the tobacco shop next
door if you need me.” The bell above the door gave a tinkle as he
exited.

The Countess inched along and
picked up another of the marionettes. “Do all Harlequin’s wear a
black mask?”

“Sometimes red, sometimes black,
they are devils. You know the story?”

Curious to learn more, she shook
her head. “Not really, tell me.”

The Italian string-puller paused
to cough into his handkerchief then picked up two marionettes, a
hooded monk and a black-masked harlequin with a crescent moon hat
like an up-turned boat. It was called a bicorn and had been made
famous by Napoleon. Deftly, he animated the two puppets as he
recounted the story.

“Long ago, a monk was being
chased by masked demons, emissaries of Satan. It was their job to
send the souls of the damned to hell. This is from the chronicle of
Vitalis. This is not the story of the struggle of good and evil. It
is the story of two evils.”

“It sounds like a pre-curser to
the Passion Play?”

“And the commedia
dell’arte.”

“Harlequin is a form of Arlequin
or Alichino, is it not?”

He was surprised she had made
the connection. “Dante’s Devil, yes. In the Germanic he was
Erlkonig. To the English he was Herla cyning, the Erlking. In the
chronicle of the monk by Vitalis, the demons were the familia
herlequin or familia herlethingi. The leader was herlequin or
hellequin. Today, he makes us a laugh. Are you interested to
buy?”

“Yes, I will take them all
except for Little Mary. She belongs here with you. My manservant
will pay you tomorrow when he comes to collect them.
Au
revoir
, Monsieur Grimaldi.”

Dr Watson was waiting for the
Countess in the allée des Bouffons.

“I bought myself a pipe. I know
it goes against the grain of medical understanding and everything I
have been brought up to believe about pneumatic health but I think
cigarettes might be the death of me. You should try cutting back
too, especially in public. It’s not done.”

“Smoking will soon be the
epitome of sophistication,
mon ami
. Next century no woman
will be caught dead
sans
cigarette. It will be like a soiree
minus music, an orchestra without strings, a night sky devoid of
stars…”

“Yes, yes, well, my chest is
starting to feel tight again, the way it did when I had bronchitis,
and I’m always out of breath, especially after a cigarette. I only
have to go up a flight of stairs and I’m panting, and if I’m
smoking at the same time it is worse.”

“I thought your cough improved
after we landed in Biarritz?”

“It did, briefly, but now the
weather is turning and, well, I really felt it when I was walking
with Monsieur Radzival earlier today. I got the impression he felt
sorry for me and slowed his stride – his legs are much longer than
they look. I was struggling to keep up. When we stopped at the top
of the embankment and I suffered a coughing fit I actually checked
my handkerchief to make sure I wasn’t coughing up blood.”

“You need to see a specialist as
soon as we return to London.”

He nodded as he handed her up to
the landau. “Yes, I know just the chap – Dr Lun. He was a godsend
during Mary’s last days.”

“Why don’t you go to London at
once,” she suggested, picking up on the reference to Mary. It made
her think he was more worried than he sounded. She tried to put a
positive spin on her next statement. “I can handle things here in
Paris on my own. Besides, nothing will happen until the eighth of
December and it might be all over by then anyway.”

“Saint Pierre de Montmartre,” he
directed to the coachman before clambering in, glancing back at the
curious little shop as he slammed the carriage door. Monsieur
Grimaldi was taking down the little cardboard sign hanging on a
nail inside the door, probably for the last time. It said OPEN on
one side and CLOSED on the other. “It was that poor sickly
shop-keeper that finally decided it for me. Going back to a pipe, I
mean. His skin looked grey and I don’t think it was due to the bad
light.”

She noticed he didn’t reply to
her London suggestion and decided not to pursue it. He would only
get his back up. “What sort of pipe did you buy?”

He pulled his purchase out of
his pocket and showed it off. “A calabash.”

She studied the sharp downward
curve of the shaft and the upward curve of the large bowl. “I don’t
believe Sherlock ever smoked a calabash.”

“That’s precisely why I chose
it. He preferred a briar pipe, and sometimes he smoked a clay one.
Most calabashes are made from gourds but this one is mahogany. It’s
more difficult to clean but easier to pack. The tobacco is drier,
the smoke cooler, and it sits very comfortably in the mouth and
hand. I bought some aromatic tobacco from Syria.”

“Latakia?”

“Yes, that’s the one. An
interesting blend of spices which I was assured by the tobacconist
did not include opium. I shall try it out tonight after dinner. Did
you buy any marionettes?”

She tried not to smile at his
naivety. “All of them except Little Mary. Fedir will pick them up
and pay for them tomorrow. First, he will buy an old leather travel
trunk from a pawnbroker to put them in.”

“Good grief! You really felt
sorry for that poor old man. What are you going to do? Store them
in the attic of the pied-a-terre?”

“I plan to gift them to Monsieur
Crespingy. I will send his gift to him at
le Cirque du Grand
Guignol.
I will time the gift to arrive for when everyone is
present, perhaps just before the curtain rises, perhaps on the
night of the eighth of December.”

“Good God! That will stir the
hornet’s nest!”

“I want to throw a fire-cracker
back-stage and then watch how everyone jumps.”

“You think a trunk full of
marionettes will do the trick?”

“I’m banking on it.”

Saint Denis lost his head on
the topmost point of Paris, the hill of Montmartre, in the year 250
AD. Undeterred, he picked it up and walked six miles preaching to
the unconverted until he finally dropped dead. A shrine was erected
on the site. It was still drawing pilgrims to this day.

Père Denys did not look like the
sort of man who would ever lose his head, not that he wasn’t a
martyr to the Christian church, but he was too amiable to ever put
anyone off-side, including Roman imperators, invading Visigoths,
angry Vandals, hordes of American tourists and Countess
Volodymyrovna. He was about to lock the heavy doors to Saint Pierre
de Montmartre when two people pushed against him.

“I wish to make confession,”
announced the Countess urgently, placing a substantial donation in
the poor box just inside the door that convinced Père Denys to hear
her sins.