“Returning a painting that was wrongfully stolen is one thing. Torturing a man is quite another.” Senlin said, and whether it was affected outrage or genuine conviction, Tarrou saw that Senlin was firm on this point. “I won’t let the Tower turn me into a tyrant.”
“You have no idea what the Tower will turn you into!” Tarrou laughed and swatted the air trying to dispel Senlin’s sudden piety. When Senlin didn’t flinch, Tarrou’s laughter turned to an uncomfortable haw. “Oh, it is too late. You are already insane. Do you have any idea what the Commissioner will do to a man caught stealing from him? Do you think your wife prefers a martyred husband to one that is gone but living?” Tarrou searched Senlin’s face for some healthy symptom of fear. Instead, he saw the Headmaster craning forward resolutely. “You mean to go through with it?”
“I do,” Senlin said.
Tarrou pulled a little silver flask from his white robe and bobbed it to his lips. “Your plan is bad. You do know that? If your plan were a horse, it would have three legs, two heads and no end to it.” He sucked his lips and screwed the stopper back on his flask. Senlin sat without argument, though Tarrou seemed to be waiting for one. The giant flinched first. “Oh, alright!” Tarrou said, “We’ll roll your horse to town, Headmaster, your rickety, unlikely horse.”
Tarrou stood abruptly and patted his pockets for his purse. “I will need a new suit. Something peacockish and horrible.”
From the outside, the Commissioner’s mansion resembled a lavish hotel. A colonnade led from the public street to the house. Each column was striped with a broad black ribbon. The white marble facade of the mansion beyond was festooned with green garlands hung above windows that glowed with electric light. Two files of immaculately presented customs agents stood by paneled doors that were as tall as the colonnade itself.
Senlin studied these features while he waited for his fellow conspirator to arrive. He was freshly scrubbed and pressed and brushed. He seemed nearly dapper, thanks almost entirely to the top hat which Tarrou had loaned him and insisted he wear, and still he might as well be wearing a fish monger’s smock for all the extravagance pouring past him. The fashion of the Commissioner’s guests was so intense and diverse it made Senlin wonder if he wasn’t about to blunder into a masquerade. And there were hundreds of them. Men in white wigs or tricornered hats escorted women with spangling tiaras and hoop skirts or exotic robes and jeweled turbans. He still wore his plain black waistcoat and narrow black trousers, which he had pruned of loose threads for the occasion. He looked more like a shadow than a guest. He could only hope that Tarrou’s opulence would be sufficient for them both.
And indeed it was. When Tarrou appeared, Senlin couldn’t decide if he looked more like a king or a king’s fool. His gold-embroidered pantaloons ballooned absurdly at his knees, his enormous hat looked like a cushion fit for a sheik’s throne, and his green felt shoes curled up at the toe. His beard and hair had been trimmed and waxed, and his skin still glowed from a recent soak. He bowed theatrically to Senlin. “Behold, the suicide of fashion! No, no, excuse me: the fashion of suicide!”
Senlin managed a wan smile. “I must warn you, I am appalling at parties. I’m accustomed to hiding behind my wife’s sparkling personality.” He straightened his narrow black tie.
“You’ll make a better impression on our host dressed as an undertaker. He’s not like his guests, all high as fireworks and dim as smoke. He doesn’t like sparkling personalities, no offense to your wife.” Tarrou said, clapping his friend on either shoulder. He pulled Senlin nearer and whispered though a showman’s smile. “The Commissioner is as good humored as a guillotine.”
“That is not comforting,” Senlin said, cringing down against his sharp collar. A numb, floating sensation filled his stomach. His courage fled and returned and fled again. “I feel a little ill.”
“You must exhaust your wife,” Tarrou said and laughed.
Chapter Seven
“The politics of the Tower are like garden politics, like neighbors bickering over the ownership of a plum tree. You may detect undercurrents of rivalry and feud, though none are very serious. Even so, it is best to have a supple opinion in matters of local governance.”
- Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, I. XIV
They joined the line of guests flowing through the doors, which were tall as oak trunks and stationed with butlers in white bibs and black tails. Senlin found their livery all too familiar.
The vestibule seemed to stretch up about them like the walls of a gorge. Guests flung cloaks and overcoats at butlers, who were disappearing under the heaps. Brilliant electric chandeliers painted everyone with a halo, the light both beautiful and unnerving. He had read a little about electricity, had even seen a few crude models of generators which spat out sparks, short as an eyelash, but he’d never seen and hardly imagined electricity used in such abundance.
The high walls of the great lobby were shingled with artwork; the gilded frames began at the wainscot and climbed to the ceiling. This salon arrangement was crowded, but showed the hand of a curator. Indeed, the hall seemed more like the wing of an overstuffed museum than the entrance of a residence. As museums went, it outshone the most fabulous he’d ever seen.
Stationed intermittently along the wall, customs agents stood like lead soldiers, expressionless and severe, each holding the leash of a small, hairless dog. The crowd thinned here, as guests were careful to give the watchful dogs a wider berth. The breed most resembled a terrier in size and shape, though their naked pink skin piled and hung grotesquely at their jowls and haunches. The dogs, Ogier had explained the night before, were used to screen guests before they were allowed to enter the Commissioner’s atmosphere.
The Commissioner’s allergies were legendary. He was so sensitive, a single boutonniere in a shared room was enough to send him into a fit of sneezing and wheezing. If the dogs detected any trace of perfume, or tonic, or pollen, or any other pollutant, they would growl and nip at the offender, who would be unceremoniously frog-marched out the door and not invited to return. Such had been Ogier’s fate. His skin and clothes were permanently suffused with scent from living over a perfumery. He wasn’t allowed within a hundred feet of the Commissioner.
Senlin and Tarrou had carefully scrubbed themselves and their clothes in preparation for the evening. Though, Ogier had assured him, being scentless did not guarantee safe passage. The Commissioner had been known to feign an allergic attack when annoyed by someone in his company. He would say that some whiff, imperceptible to even the dogs, tickled his nose. The Commissioner was quite proud of his sensitivity. It was this that first inspired Senlin’s plot.
The slow pace of the procession, and the constant elbowing and shouldering that resulted, drove Senlin to seek the refuge of observational study. He scanned the works of art they shuffled past, all of which were sealed under glass to keep the paint from off-gassing into the Commissioner’s atmosphere. All styles and subjects were represented in the collection. Senlin recognized several of the artists from the rudimentary art lectures he gave his students.
Beyond the hall, a wide stair curled up to an immense ballroom. The glare from teardrop chandeliers made the pink marble columns and floors gleam like a carrousel. Black silk banners, emblazoned with a gold astrolabe, hung on the walls. Senlin had never seen the flag before, and he didn’t know what country it belonged to.
A string quintet played an exuberant waltz while couples bowed, spun and fairly smashed together on a dance floor that was overrun on all sides by spectators. He’d never seen anything like it. This was not like the crowds that piled around the dozy shore in the morning. There was no chance of blending in here. Everywhere he looked glances were being thrown, stares were being leveled, winks delivered; it was a great ogling madness. Through it all, butlers ferried silver trays of champagne flutes and hors d'oeuvres with the imperviousness of sleepwalkers.
Bouts of high laughter challenged the music’s dominance in the room. A yellow-haired woman c
limbed onto a grand piano, sitting unplayed under a white sheet near Senlin’s corner of the room. She hiked up the thick membranes of her petticoats, showing her white bloomers in a display of such vulgar gaiety, it made Senlin wince. His out of place expression made him stand out, and she locked her gaze on him, and with an expression between coy and aggressive, cupped her bust and pressed until her cleavage overflowed like a loaf in a bread pan. He tried to conceal his revulsion with a tight smile. The woman bit her thumb at him. Tarrou hissed at him to stop grimacing at everyone like a ghoul. He would’ve fled had it not been for Tarrou gripping his arm and forging a path onward, inward, deeper into the convulsing heart of the gala.
Tarrou moved through the party as if it were his own. He slapped men on the back, rallied pouting couples with bawdy jokes, and pestered every passing servant for a drink. He was, it seemed to Senlin, born for bedlam. Senlin worried that Tarrou would forget the plan and fall entirely into the arms of his old society. But amidst his flirtations, Tarrou continued to tug the Headmaster through collapsing gaps in the crowd, moving them ever nearer their goal.
As agreed, Tarrou escorted Senlin to the spot where Ogier’s masterpiece hung, lonely, between the balcony doors. The enormous balcony seemed to attract young dandies and adventurous women. They flew in and out like swallows from a barn. But there was a small gap in the migration where the painting hung, and it was here that Tarrou finally deposited Senlin.
“I might be gone a little while. I have a lot of hands to wrench and bygones to rehearse. I haven’t shown my face at one of these comedies in months. Be patient. Take a drink. Take three.” And with that, Tarrou disappeared into the mass of skirts and coat tails.
He felt as if he’d found the party’s fireplace, and the thought reminded him unexpectedly of Edith. He flinched at the memory. Behind him, dancers careened with unsteady elegance. He turned his attention to Ogier’s painting. He stared into it as if it were a fire.
The painting was, as he’d been told it would be, small: fourteen inches tall and eight inches wide. The thick gilded frame, which doubled the painting’s size, almost enveloped it. The style was immediately recognizable as Ogier’s. A young girl in braids and a white swimming dress faced the blue reservoir. The water stood just at her ankles. Other bathers stood further out, but she seemed removed and alone. The girl was the subject and the center of it all. Her back was turned at the viewer. Even without seeing her face, Senlin could sense her hesitation. She seemed to be deciding whether to go further out or stay near the shore. A bright, white paper boat dangled loosely from one hand. Though the mirrored light was dazzling, the girl’s dark shadow spread under her like a hole. She seemed to hover over deep water. It was odd and beautiful...
He was startled from his reverie by Tarrou’s broad hand on his shoulder. He turned to face a small, slight man in a closely tailored gray suit. The cuffs of his pants were set so high that his socks showed. A lock of sterling hair, delicate and stiff as a fishing hook, curled on his formidable forehead. His eyes were the color of wet mortar, and his pale, wax-white skin made him look like a black and white print of a man. “Mr. Senlin,” the man began in a high, sing-song voice, “I hear I have you to thank for Tarrou’s reappearance. You’ve done what a dozen invitations could not.” He stamped his boot and gave Senlin a little ironic bow.
“May I present his imminence, the Commissioner Emmanuel Pound,” Tarrou said with a grander, more swelling bow, though it seemed to Senlin every bit as ironic as the Commissioner’s.
Senlin had been warned against trying to shake the hypersensitive Commissioner’s hand and so he bowed too, but as sincerely as he could. Coming up again, he said, “You have a most fantastic collection, Commissioner. I congratulate you.”
“Yes. This Ogier is a favorite.” He pronounced, Ogier’s name differently than the artist, hardening the “g” and making the whole sound like it was being gagged upon. “Appraised at three hundred mina.” The amount was staggering. Senlin could’ve built a second and third schoolhouse for the amount. “A bargain, I know. It’ll double in value, I promise you, before I’m done with it.” The Commissioner tapped his lower lip as if it was a secret and he was taking Senlin into his confidence. Senlin doubted that the Commissioner wanted any estimate of his fortune kept secret, but he tapped his own lip just the same. He wanted to win the man’s confidence, so he would play the parrot. “Tarrou tells me you are an art scholar?” the Commissioner said, leaning backward as if to study Senlin from a new angle.
“I have penned a few essays.” Senlin then went on to expound, peppering his speech with little proofs of his expertise. He knew enough to affect an accomplished art scholar, though really most of what hung on the walls was new to him. When the Commissioner mentioned a particular artistic movement Senlin wasn’t familiar with, he vehemently dismissed the entire thing as hack-work. It was a tactic his poorer students used; they mocked the subjects they’d failed to study.
The Commissioner quickly agreed. “I don’t trust critics who like everything. If everything is good, nothing has any value. Without garbage, there is no gold, is it not so?”
“Absolutely true,” Senlin lied. “But this piece,” he turned again toward Ogier’s painting, “‘Girl with a Paper Boat,’ this is something remarkable. The character of your local light seems to have inspired a novel style. It’s primitive, perhaps, but evocative and precise in its way.”
“I agree. I have impeccable taste.” the Commissioner said and signaled Senlin to continue with a slight roll of his wrist.
“I would love to write an essay on its novel palette. Here, for example...” Senlin leaned nearer the thick pane that sealed Ogier’s painting, and as the Commissioner leaned in to follow his point, Senlin affected a series of abrupt, spasmodic sneezes.
Horrified, the Commissioner flew backward into Tarrou with his arms thrown over his face. Gray eyes bulging from his smooth doll’s head, he shrieked for his guard. The barks of his dogs rang over the noise of the room.
Gasps and stifled cries rippled through the waltzers. The band stumbled, faltered and sawed to a halt. Blue-breasted agents appeared from several directions. Very quickly, Senlin found that he was surrounded. One of the agents presented the Commissioner with a pewter tray that carried a black rubber gas mask. Two gold foil filters protruded from the cheeks of the mask like blunt tusks. With the deftness of a reflex, the Commissioner Pound fitted the mask over his head and cinched it tightly against his face. Dark lenses, large as the lids of jam jars, hid his eyes. The Commissioner had gone from obvious to impenetrable in the span of a few seconds. How could Senlin pander to a man who had no visible expression? There was no time to fret over it.
Senlin hurried to explain: “I’m not ill, Commissioner, I assure you. I’m only sensitive to scent.” He produced a handkerchief and blew his nose delicately, almost noiselessly. “This may sound absurd, but I think someone has gotten perfume on your painting.” Senlin dabbed at his eyes, sneaking a glance at the Commissioner as he performed. He saw nothing behind the blackened lenses. The mask distorted the Commissioner's breathing, even as he threatened to hyperventilate. The room seemed to be listening and leaning in.
The Commissioner’s breathing gradually returned to an even swell and whoosh. After a moment more, he uncurled and raised a single finger, signaling the ensemble to resume their play. The music broke the tension in the room: a laugh escaped, the woman atop the piano gave a tentative kick, and the party recommenced. Everyone, it seemed to Senlin, was quite accustomed to the Commissioner’s fits and had learned to handle them efficiently.
Still in his gas mask, the Commissioner exited onto the large balcony, the agents sweeping Tarrou and Senlin along behind him. Since his fate wasn’t clear, Senlin tried to appear as if this were all part of a tour. The young men and women canoodling along the parapet saw the agents and the masked Commissioner and quickly drained back into the ballroom.
When the Commissioner finally removed his mask, Senlin found that the
diminutive and allergic tyrant was scrutinizing him. He held the expression of a man squinting into a heavy wind. “It seems we share more in common than just our appreciation of the Arts,” the Commissioner said at last. Senlin fought to remain straight-faced, though a chill ran up from his stomach to the top of his scalp. Of course he hadn’t smelled even a trace of perfume on the painting, but he gambled that the Commissioner would go along with the charade rather than risk his standing as the Bath’s most sensitive nose. Hoping the man’s vanity extended even to his failings, he had made a contest of a flaw.
“As ingenious as Ogier’s work is, it has all been tainted by perfume. His studio lies above a lady’s boutique. All his work is soaked to the atom in scent. I’d hoped the glass would contain it. A pity. I will have to sell it before it’s had time to mature.” Pound straightened his collar and waved the agents away with another roll of his wrist.
“Commissioner Pound,” Senlin hurriedly interjected. “The work may be salvageable.”
“I’m sorry, Professor Senlin, but I don’t take risks when it comes to my sinuses.”
“Then allow me. Let me suggest a simple deodorizing process. A technique I’ve necessarily had to learn.” Senlin dabbed his handkerchief at the corner of one eye. “If it doesn’t work, then auction the work. But it would be a pity to lose it unnecessarily.”
The Commissioner returned the stiff silver lock on his forehead to its former glory, the rubber gasket of his terrible gas mask having upset its shape. “I am suspicious of good samaritans, Mr. Senlin.”
“I have ulterior motives, of course. While the painting is being defumed, I’d like to study it and, with your endorsement, write an essay on it.” Senlin tried to sound as if he were making a minor confession.
Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1) Page 17