Senlin drew little attention as he passed unescorted through the halls of the Customs Offices. He felt optimistic. His gait was almost jaunty. Perhaps his plan wasn’t so awful after all. Perhaps it would work. He wondered what sort of question Kristof had in mind to ask, and whether it had anything to do with springtime.
Chapter Nine
“The longer you linger in the halls of Babel, the more strongly you will feel the pull of allegiances, of clans, kings, and guilds. A man who stands alone is generally thought a lost tourist or a rogue. Many have found the one is a natural sibling of the other.”
- Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, IV. XX
His high spirits quickly steamed away when he returned to Cafe Rossi.
He’d expected to find Tarrou huddled about a bottle amid a smattering of afternoon regulars. Instead, he found the patio deserted, save for one table where two buttoned-up customs agents sat. A pair of full wine glasses sat untouched before them. Senlin had seen many sotted agents in the past weeks, had seen them half peeled out of their blue coats, teetering and singing among the bathhouses, groping after the girls who sold cigarettes and oranges. Agents were far from moderate in their relaxations. These men did not look like they had come to unwind. They looked like a couple of owls, heads turning above rigid torsos, their eyes wide and scanning.
Senlin veered away from the patio gate. He tried to appear as if he had been casually diverted rather than chased off, but he sensed them watching his about-face. He felt as if his whole plot was written out on his back. The hair on his arms stood on end.
Ogier worked at his customary corner outside the cafe rail, but when Senlin began to approach him, the painter caught his eye, flared his own in warning, and then darted his glance toward the seated agents. Understanding his meaning, Senlin curved his path a second time, moving away and toward the shoreline of the reservoir.
Prickling with paranoia, Senlin stalked along the water’s edge. He wound his way around to Tarrou’s usual spot by the water, but his favorite lounging chair was empty. Senlin asked the attendant who rented the chairs if he’d seen Tarrou today, and the young man shook his head.
For a horrid moment, Senlin wondered if his friend was not avoiding him. Perhaps Tarrou had finally decided that the boorish headmaster brought more trouble than entertainment. Senlin could hardly remember a time when he’d felt more alone.
To keep from lurking about and drawing attention to himself, he found a bench with its back to the water where he could sit and keep an eye out for Tarrou or Ogier. A meandering peddler carrying a crate full of clanging bottles cried, “Four pence for a grip of grappa! Four pence for a grip of grappa,” over and over like a determined whippoorwill. The peddler stopped by Senlin’s bench, repeating his call until Senlin could stand it no longer. He told the peddler he would buy a bottle if the man agreed to take his song elsewhere. Senlin counted out four small copper coins and then briefly considered the remaining palm-full of change. It was all that was left of the small fortune he’d spent years saving. Years! And for what? To hang himself and lose his wife? He wanted nothing more than to uncork the bottle and drain it.
It wasn’t self-control that kept him from doing it, either. It was fear. He was afraid that when he climbed out of the bottle again, it would be as a hod.
Where was Tarrou? Probably scared off by the agents squatting on his patio, or sleeping off the previous evening’s celebrations. If Tarrou was off snoring somewhere, he’d picked a terrible time for it. Senlin needed his friend. He needed, of course, to ask him, plead with him if necessary, for a loan, but he also needed a foil for his thoughts. He still had to figure out how to smuggle in Ogier’s imitation and sneak out the original.
A half hour later, Ogier appeared through the stand of bathhouses that divided the mall from the shore. He toted his easel, paint box, and a sling of canvases. The burden made his hump seem more distinct and inconvenient. Red-faced, Ogier sat down on the opposite end of the bench without glancing at Senlin.
“What did you do?” Ogier said, wheezing softly. He lit a cigarette from a match he struck with his thumbnail. “Those agents were sitting there all day. Were they after you?”
“I hope not. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence,” Senlin said, though he doubted it. At least the painter was finally sharing in his dread. It only seemed fair. “Have you seen Tarrou?”
“No.” Ogier tapped his cigarette rapidly until the ember became an angry, orange cone. “I hope you aren’t counting on him. I told you, he is unreliable.” He rehung his stained hair behind the platters of his ears. “How are you making out?”
Senlin briefly explained his plan, the setback of the solarium, concluding with the hours spent under Kristof’s eye. “He went through my bag like a hound.” Senlin thought of how Kristof had checked his sleeves, and how he’d snuck up behind him like a cat, and of his familiarity with the armaments of the Ararat. “He could be a drunk, or he could be an admiral, for all I know.”
Ogier didn’t seem overly pleased with any of it. “How will you sneak the copy in?”
“Is it off the stretcher?” Senlin asked, and Ogier nodded. “Perhaps if I folded it...”
“It’s a painting, not a newspaper!” Ogier said, his voice cracking with alarm. He quickly regained his tone. “No. The creases will show. They’ll spot the copy in a moment. Besides, I don’t want the original returned in squares. You can roll it, but under no circumstances should you fold it. I’d rather not have it at all.”
“Well, it hardly matters. And I still have to figure some way to get Kristof out of the room.” Senlin squeezed the long bat of the grappa bottle. The bland label that wrapped it appeared to have been drawn by hand, though not by a very talented one. The solution to both problems came to him abruptly. “Do you have the copy with you?”
“Of course,” Ogier said, and pulled a small rolled up canvas from his sling of supplies. “It’s the best I have. I only had a few sketches and my memory to work from. I don’t know how much scrutiny it will stand up to.”
“Pound knows what his collection is worth, but I don’t think he really knows the pieces half as well as you think. Your copy may hang on the wall for years before anyone notices, if anyone ever does.”
“You think this is a permanent solution?” Ogier asked.
Senlin shrugged. “Even if Pound does suspect the copy for what it is, what would he have to compare it to? Of course, if he does get suspicious, you’ll be the first person he visits.”
“That has occurred to me. It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” Ogier said.
“Good,” Senlin said with a tight smile. Inside, he was boiling again. Ogier was willing to risk everything, including his life, including Marya’s life, for a single painting. To Ogier, Senlin was nothing but an errand boy. If Ogier decided to go back on his word and not divulge what he knew of Marya’s circumstances, Senlin would have no recourse but violence. Perhaps Tarrou had been right. Perhaps he was running at the wrong end of the rabid dog. If Senlin and Tarrou surprised the painter at his rooftop apartment, they could make him confess…
Unbidden, an image of a red-hot brand flashed to mind. He again saw the nurse, or rather the awful woman pretending to be a nurse, press the seething iron against Edith’s smooth skin. The nauseating smell of burning flesh was so fresh in his mind it was almost palpable.
Senlin suppressed the memory with a shudder. He was ashamed to have even considered such a thing. When he looked at the artist again, his anger toward the man had fled, and what he felt most of all was pity. Here was another man who had been made desperate by his love. He took a deep breath and said, “It must be done tomorrow. Would you lend me a couple of matches and a bit of wax?”
“I have a stub of a candle. Will that work?” Ogier asked and Senlin nodded. As the painter handed over matches and the stub, his expression clouded. “This is where I first saw your wife, on this very bench.” The confession seemed to trouble him. Had his conscience finally been pricked
? Had it dawned on him that he was essentially holding a woman hostage?
“I am risking my life for your painting,” Senlin said. “Before I go to face capture and execution, tell me, is Marya alive and safe?”
Ogier scowled down at the cobblestones looking every bit as wretched as Senlin felt. “Yes,” he said finally. “Meet me here at five tomorrow. Have my painting. Not a crease, now.”
The next morning, Senlin presented himself again to the registrar of the Customs Offices. No escort was offered him, and he was left to retrace his path from memory, which had been sharpened by fear. The halls felt a little more pinched and the agent’s expressions a little less glancing today. He felt like the cheating student tormented by the scrap of paper tucked in his sock. Only his stubborn poise kept him from breaking into a trot.
He was relieved when he found the solarium and almost glad to see Kristof, leaning on the rail, eating a croissant. He held the long bars of his mustache up with one hand as he shoveled his breakfast in with the other. Senlin presented his bag for inspection, and Kristof nosed through it sleepily, still chewing, his jaw sawing slowly like a cow. When Kristof saw the full bottle of grappa rolling at the bottom of the satchel, he pulled it out and examined the hand drawn label.
“Grappa. Very good.” He patted the bottle affectionately and placed it back in Senlin’s bag. “Take off your boots and pull up your pant cuffs,” Kristof said wearily, as if this were the same routine of their previous encounter. Senlin did as he was directed, hopping awkwardly on one foot as he stripped his boots. Kristof peered into the boot barrels, and then waved Senlin to his seat before the easel.
The morning proceeded much as it had the day before: the sun prickled his neck; Kristof circled the room, listless as a vulture; and the girl in the painting hesitated near the shore.
At noon, Senlin unpacked a lunch of potato dumplings and cured dates. Kristof seated himself cross-legged on the floor, presuming that Senlin would again be willing to share, which he was. Kristof was delighted to see the tall grappa bottle liberated from Senlin’s satchel. Kristof drank from the bottle as if he were dousing a fire. Senlin took a much shorter draw while Kristof sucked on his brandy-dewed mustache.
They ate in silence. Senlin repeatedly took a small drink from the bottle, before passing it Kristof, who always drank more deeply. Kristof finished Senlin’s lunch, and again produced his own, which he devoured with mechanical swiftness. Senlin sipped the unrefined brandy and gazed at the world outside. Distance transformed the Market below into one of Ogier’s paintings, a scene of daubs and colors devoid of hard edge. It felt as if he had climbed onto another Earth.
Kristof climbed unsteadily to his feet, his ears red as tomatoes under the unruly gray fringe of hair. His mustache hung crookedly to accommodate a smirk. He gave Senlin a stuttering heel-stamp salute, marched unsteadily to the door, and leaned his back against it. Slowly, he slid to the floor, lowering his cap as he went. He laced his pudgy fingers over the shelf of his gut and soon began to snore.
Fearing that the agent was staging a ruse, Senlin crept across the lustrous parquet floor, wobbling on tiptoe. If Kristof woke, he decided, he would ask to be shown the restroom. The barrel of the guard’s pistol had been turned upward by the man’s collapse, and the oiled iron barrel seemed to wink at his approach. After a few skittish advances and retreats, Senlin reached down and swatted the tip of the man’s spit-polished boot. Kristof gave no sign of waking.
Satisfied that the rotgut had done its work, Senlin returned to the painting. Popping Ogier’s canvas free of the gilded frame took little effort, but removing the canvas from its rigid wood stretcher where it was held by dozens of staples proved to be a challenge. He undid his belt, pulled it from his pant loops, and used the prong of the buckle to pry loose the wire horseshoes around the edge of the painting. He kept one eye on the snoring Kristof as he labored.
He’d smuggled Ogier’s copy in by rolling it around the long grappa bottle, the back of the canvas facing out. For all intents and purposes, it looked like an oversized label. He had affixed the canvas to the bottle with a nearly imperceptible seal of wax, and then redrawn the crude label in pencil. The result was reasonably convincing: it looked like the swill anyone might buy on the street.
Now, Senlin unfurled the copy and fitted it to the newly empty stretcher. Replacing the staples proved more difficult than he’d expected. His fingers quickly began to throb from pressing staples back into place. If one became stuck, Senlin was forced to go through the nerve-wracking process of tapping the staple with the butt of the wine bottle. The chore took a quarter hour to finish, and erasing the label took another few minutes. But in the end, the painting appeared straight, flush and centered when viewed from the front.
The back of the painting was another matter entirely. If it were ever removed from its frame, his hackwork would be immediately apparent. There was nothing to do about it now. He could only hope the painting would hang with its back to the wall for decades to come.
He scrolled the original around the dark bottle with the painting facing in. He softened the nub of wax he’d brought with Ogier’s match, and rubbed it on the seam to seal the new, blank wrapper in place. He didn’t have time to redraw the label’s heraldry, and he doubted that Ogier would forgive him for defacing even the reverse of his masterpiece. Senlin could only pack the bottle back in his satchel and hope that Kristof didn’t peer too closely when he conducted his exit inspection. With any luck, the man would be too drunk to uncross his eyes.
The swap complete, Senlin sat again with the easel before him, his notebook casually open on his lap, the sunlight lapping warmly at his nape and the tips of his ears. Having stared so long at the original, Senlin immediately recognized the copy for what it was: an inferior vision. The copy was by no means artless, and had he never seen the original, it might have even seemed a work of modest accomplishment. But he had seen the original. In the imitation, the girl’s proportions seemed a little inelegant and dwarfish. The water, though heavily highlighted, appeared flat. The once magnificent, tantalizing shadow beneath her seemed now an inconsequential gloom. The composition, palette, and style were all similar to the original, but Senlin could understand, almost, how Ogier had become obsessed with the one and indifferent to the other.
It was a half hour more before Kristof snorted himself awake. He roughly cleared his throat and rubbed his mouth. His eyes winked and slowly returned to a concerted blinking. Rising in the same leaning fashion that he had descended, he straightened his cap and pulled on the hem of his coat. He resumed his circuit around the room as if he had never paused.
When he came up behind Senlin seated before the forgery, the agent stopped. Senlin felt the man’s presence swell behind him. Perhaps it had dawned on Kristof that Senlin had been too generous with the brandy, suspiciously generous, in fact. Kristof might, even at that moment, be moving his hand to his grip of his flintlock, was even now sighting the back of Senlin’s head, ready to earn the commendation that awaited him. Senlin squeezed his eyes shut.
And he stayed like that until Kristof’s voice forced him to steal a glance over his shoulder. He found Kristof leaning on the rail, staring indolently down at the Market, his head rolling dreamily from side to side. “I would’ve liked to have been a merchant. The travel, the exotic, sunburnt women, the fresh beef, the rain and the puddles...” Kristof said, breaking his long silence. “I have never tasted a fish that wasn’t salted or drowned in oil.”
“You were born in the Tower?” Senlin said, relieved that Kristof seemed oblivious of the forgery.
“Of course. In the House of Pell, long may it stand…” The agent pointed up with his thumb, and then flicked the tip of his nose with it. “My mother had hoped I would climb a little higher over the course of my career. Become a Chancellor or a Duke or a Lord of Port. But it turned out that I wasn’t very good at bowing and scraping, and that was two thirds of high society, though I liked the other third,” he said with a wink and
a drinking gesture. “And now, Mr. Mud-Boots, I’m ready to ask my question.”
A little charmed by Kristof’s confiding tone, Senlin replied, “Alright.”
“I was a lookout on the Ararat. I kept her from running into trouble: wind shear and pirates. I had the eyes for it and a head for understanding the signs: bird swoops and cloud breaks and the little funnels that devil the sands... Personally, I don’t care one way or another if you want to steal the Commissioner’s painting, Mr. Mud-Boots. But I am curious, are you toadying for the House of Algez, or are you a lone wolf?”
Senlin nearly leapt up, but managed to only stiffen his back a little. He kept all trace of surprise from his voice. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Kristof turned to face Senlin who still craned awkwardly around in his chair. His mustache seemed now a theatrical frown. “Look, I’m tired of making life easy for Commandant Snot. He has made life so tedious for me.” Senlin recognized a seditious bitterness in Kristof’s expression and it gave him a glimmer of hope. “Every post I draw is twice as dull as the last. If I turned you in, I don’t doubt Pound would reward me by shifting my patrol to the Fountain toilets.”
Kristof sounded almost sober now, though he still sawed a little on his feet. “I know you aren’t an Ostrich because your arms aren’t branded. If you came up from the dirt, you must be fairly clever, probably quick with a bribe or handy with a sidearm.” The fact that Kristof’s estimation flew so far above Senlin’s accomplishment came as a surprise. But this surprise was quickly trumped when Kristof drew his pistol, though without much haste. “Your boots were stitched in Algez. I saw the “A” stamped on your insole. Which may mean nothing; Algez boots are sold here and there, I hear. It may be a coincidence. Or it may mean that your credentials were forged and you’re a spy of the House of Algez.”
Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1) Page 19