The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque (34 page)

Throwing the hefty stack of money at Charbuque's head, I lunged for him. He was taken by surprise but managed to fire the gun. I felt the bullet whiz past my ear, but that did not deter me.

I was on him in a flash. Grabbing the bottom rung of his chair, I tipped it backward, and he sprawled onto the floor, the gun falling from his grasp. Before he could retrieve it, I booted him
Page 127

in the head as viciously as I could.

He was not unconscious, but he was groggy. Wasting no time, I searched my coat pocket for the small bottle of tincture of nutmeg that Watkin had given me. I found and opened it. Tilting my head back I

poured a liberal dosage into both eyes. It was immediately evident why the parasite that brought the tears found this solution inhos-pitable. My eyes stung as if being attacked by wasps. There was an infernal burning sensation, and no matter how much I rubbed them my sight would not clear. For all intents and purposes, I was totally blind.

I turned and ran for the door, but my sense of direction had abandoned me, sending me headlong into the wall, knocking me off my feet. I was stunned and scrabbling to my knees when I felt a boot force me back to the floor. Before I could make another move, the gun barrel was pressed against my cheek. I

could see nothing but could feel my hands being tied behind my back, my ankles being bound together.

Struggle was now useless.

Charbuque was winded. I could hear him heaving-"Your painting will burn with you, Piambo,"

he said, but there was something wrong with the voice. It modulated with the pronouncement of the words and ended in a higher register. My eyes cleared then, and I blinked them repeatedly to gain more focus.

What I saw was Charbuque across the room, leaning over to pick up the lantern. His glove was off, and the hand that reached down was most assuredly feminine, and when the locket swung out on its chain from inside the open collar of his shirt, I knew it was Luciere.

"I know who you are," I said.

"You know nothing," came the reply, but this time the voice was missing its gruff affectation. It was most assuredly the voice of Mrs. Charbuque.

The next thing I saw was the lantern smash and shat-ter against the back wall. Fiery oil flew outward, and each of the little puddles of flame took hold on the dry unvar-nished wood.

Strangely, before departing, Luciere leaned over, lifted the screen, and set it up in its usual position. "I don't want to have to watch you die," she said, and, with this, stepped over my body and left the room.

Blind Devotion

The flames spread quickly as I struggled against my bonds. Smoke billowed up, gathering against the ceiling like a storm cloud, and I knew that the entire house would soon be engulfed. I found it difficult to breathe, the heat from the fire making the air incredibly heavy. My plan was to roll onto my back and then bend my legs at the knees, bringing my ankles up within reach of my bound hands. I managed to get onto my back, and that was about all I could manage. That simple movement left me drained, and I

stared up at the ceiling and screamed for help with the little strength I had left.

My throat was soon parched from the heat, and my cries were little more than hoarse, whispered pleas. Eventually only my lips moved, producing no sound at all. I was disappearing. My money, infected as it was, was burning, my painting was being incinerated, I had stepped away from my daily life, lost my friend and my lover. I was, in all, now no more substantial than Charbuque. I imagined the fire consuming me and the combustion of my being offering little more than a dull burp. My original reason for having taken on the commission was to test my art, but as it turned out, much more had been tested and found sadly wanting. Then I thought I was hallucinating, for I saw Sabott standing over me, staring down, holding what looked like a palette knife.

"Master," I said.

"Good evening, Mr. Piambo," he said, but now I could see it was not Sabott. I blinked my eyes once and then once again, and the form above metamorphosed into Watkin. He was not holding a palette

knife but a long hunting knife. He grabbed me hard by the left shoulder and flipped my body over. In a moment, my wrists were free. Another pass with the knife and my ankles came apart.

He put the knife in a scabbard on his belt and helped me to my feet.

The fire was nearly everywhere in the room. It had crawled along the walls and now blocked the exit. Watkin was searching frantically with those pure white orbs for an avenue of escape.

"Follow me,"

he said, stepping for-ward and lifting my chair from the floor. "When I clear the window," he called over the roar of the flames, "you've got to move fast because the incoming draft will fan the fire." I didn't have time to so much as nod. He ran at the window to the right, the only passage not choked off by the blaze, and tossed the chair. The glass shattered, and he yelled,

"Now!"

Yet I stood helplessly dazed until I felt his hand on my back, shoving me. When I reached the opening I dove, my arms out in front of me. It seemed as if I flew for a few seconds before coming down hard on the sand outside the house. I had only enough time to roll clear before Watkin followed, landing only a few inches from me. After help-ing me to my feet, he supported me with an arm around my shoulder, and we made our way to the top of the dunes.

There we sat, watching the inferno below us.

"Thank you, Watkin,' I said.

"My apologies, Piambo. I was on my way to town to try to find you and warn you to be on your guard. I knew things were coming to a head. As soon as I got over to the dock, I asked if anyone had seen you and they told me you had taken the ferry. I told the oarsman I would double his pay if he would take me back immediately." He put his hand to his eyes and, one after the other, plucked out the white prosthetics that had been the false proof of his blindness. "I won't be needing these anymore," he said, and tossed them away.

"Can you explain any of this?" I asked.

"I'll try," he said, and turned to look at me, his face lit by the fire from below. I couldn't believe it, and still can't upon recollecting it, but I swear, Watkin was cross-eyed.

"I loved her, Piambo. I loved her as if she was my daughter, but by the time she hired me to help her, she was already damaged, I'm afraid."

"Damaged?" I asked.

"Troubled," he said. "She was already more at home behind the screen than in the everyday world.

There, she had a sense of power and confidence, and her perform-ances reinforced that feeling.

Still, I

could tell she was not right and was moving always closer to a crisis."

"London?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "She was weakened by the tour. I thought the travel would do her good, but it only exacer-bated her mania. She took physically ill, and in that time had a breakdown."

"And was Charbuque a lover who left her?" I asked.

"There never was any Charbuque save in her mind," said Watkin. "She concocted Charbuque, not as a lover. She did not want a lover, she wanted a persona she thought would give her the same power and confidence in the world that she had behind the screen. From what she knew of the world, one had to be a ruthless, manipulative man to be safe.

"What brought it to a head was that one day a clean-ing woman at the hotel we were staying in came to her room. The maid did not know she was behind the screen, and Luciere watched through her secret pinprick as the woman pulled the stopper from the ancient silver lamp, something Luciere had never dared do, and sniffed the opening. The maid most likely thought it held expensive perfume and dabbed it on her neck before going about her chores.

"Twenty minutes later, the woman sat down in the chair facing the screen and began to cry, and you know what happened next. Luciere watched the woman expire before her eyes. She wanted
Page 129

desperately to help her but could not venture out from behind the screen. The police ruled the death the result of disease but were still skepti-cal about it. We had to leave London quickly.

"Luciere did not want to accept responsibility for the death of the woman, so she invented Charbuque and a whole story to go along with him. From time to time, he would surface. Since I had worked in the theater, she begged me to tell her about costume and disguise, and I did. She made herself

up to be a man. Eventually, in 1886, she settled upon the guise of the writer Robert Louis Stevenson because she read his novel

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which came out that year.

Charbuque was her Mr. Hyde. You see, they were the Twins.

Sometimes she would go months without a visit from him. But each time he came, he had more power. She would go out at night in that getup and do terrible things to surrogates as a way of hurting her feminine self. In order to regain her power behind the screen, she would hire painters, all men, and play with their minds. They are so egotistical, they make perfect subjects,’

she told me. The best that can be said is that she suffered a grotesque sickness. It is truly beyond explanation."

"Was this recent spate of murders the first time she used the Tears of Carthage as a weapon?" I asked.

"I think so," he said. "When we returned to the States, she had me research what the substance in the lamp could be. A young fellow from Greenwich Village, a scholar of such things, told me of its origin and how it had been used in antiquity as a weapon. And fool that I was, I could refuse her nothing. I told her, which makes me as guilty as she."

"Where will she go now?" I said. "She seems to have made a full break, leaving her screen behind to burn."

"I don't know, but now I owe it to the world to stop her. I can't let this go on. Too many have suffered; too many have lost their lives."

I had a thousand more questions for Watkin, but he rose and swept the sand off his trousers. "I will find her before she kills again, Piambo," he said, his determination punctuated by the partial collapse of the roof. There was a loud groan, a crash, and then a million sparks flew into the air and were carried away on the wind.

He looked as if he was making ready to leave, so I asked him one last thing. "Did you ever see her?"

"Of course," he said, and took my hand and shook it-"Good-bye, Piambo. Forgive me." He turned and walked out eastward across the dunes where there was nothing but beach. I watched him until he was swallowed by the night.

Then I was alone. It started to snow, and I could not help but wonder if what had just transpired was also not just an enormous red herring. I had nothing left save my life, but I deemed this the perfect condition for an artist seeking to create something beautiful. As I headed back through the snow toward the shacks to look for shelter for the night, it seemed to me that the flakes were falling two by two, in perfect pairs.

My Self-Portrait

The next day, after making my way back to the La Grange, I telephoned the local police and told them everything I knew. They told me that just the previous evening they had heard from Detective Sills in New York. Two days later, John and a few other men from the force came out to Babylon to search for Mrs. Charbuque and Watkin. It was good to see my old friend, and we spent a night drinking whiskey at the Copper Kettle before he had to be off in search of his quarry. I asked after Samantha, and he told me she was fine. I had hoped perhaps she had sent a message with him, but none was forthcoming.

When all the hullabaloo associated with the strange case had finally died down, I made a decision
Page 130

to stay on instead of returning to the city. It was my desire to paint for a few months the natural scenes I had become so enamored of during my time at the carriage house. Father Loomis made me a deal. He offered to let me stay in the studio free of charge if I would paint an altarpiece for him. I told him I would, but the theme must be from Genesis.

"Very well," he said. "You can do me a favor, though."

"And what is that?" I asked.

"When you paint Eve, give her the face of the woman in your other painting, whoever she was,"

he

said.

I made the priest this promise but did him one better, because I painted both Adam and Eve so that they bore the visages of Mrs. Charbuque.

Except for missing Samantha so terribly, I had what was really quite an idyllic life. After moving my things from the La Grange to the carriage house studio, I set up a daily routine. In the mornings I walked through the woods and down by the bay carrying my sketchbook, making preliminary drawings for landscapes I would later execute. The weather was colder than ever, and I could not take the easel outside. In the afternoons I worked on the church altarpiece. After eating dinner and having a glass of wine with Loomis, I returned to the studio to light another fire and two oil lamps and create, from my sketches and my memory, those scenes I had witnessed on my morning walks.

Landscape painting was new to me. Gone were the fig-ures and the need to render an expression precisely. In the manner in which I approached them, these pieces were more fluid in nature, offering greater room for interpre-tation. I was not working in the classical style or the Pre-Raphaelite or the

Impressionist. There wasn't a moment's thought about where I might sell them or to whom. I was simply painting what I felt and what I saw. The experience was most liberating. After a few weeks I lined them all up against the walls of the studio and was amazed to see that they represented my thoughts and emotions more vividly than any portrait might have. They were, in a sense, all together, my self-portrait.

It was near the end of November, and I was in the church one afternoon laboring on the image of

Satan as the serpent. My snake had a human face, and in honor of Shenz, I used him as the model. I had just finished his beard when the doors of the church opened wide and two men from the local funeral parlor entered pushing a wheeled cart upon which sat a coffin. Usually such a deliv-ery was attended by the deceased's loved ones. Today, however, the casket was accompanied only by the two deliverymen and the priest.