All the time he was speaking, Zebra kept his eyes fixed on Pinto’s face.
“That’s great, Zeke.” Although Pinto’s expression was characteristically beatific, Agnes caught the flicker of a shadow on his compressed lips.
“Oh, oh!” Minnie interjected, “happy family at twelve o’clock.”
They all turned to see a slender, elegant woman in a navy shift dress enter the cemetery with two immaculately dressed children.
“Do you think that little building down there is open?” Pinto asked. He pointed to the church dedicated to Saint Honorat at the far end of Sarcophagus Alley.
“Let’s go and see,” Ewan urged them. “We can’t afford to be overheard.”
They found the church door open. Inside, the air was dank and thickly grey. The floor was littered with cracked and overturned funeral urns and broken memorial tablets.
“Ugh!” Minnie exclaimed. “Can we keep it brief? This place is unhealthy, unwholesome, whatever.”
Only Zebra laughed, the sound made even more forced and hollow beneath the vaulted roof. “Okay, Minnie. Here goes. At 1:30 we arrive at the arena, either singly or in groups of two or three. I go in alone. Pablo and Perdita go in together, as do Ewan and Gerhard. Minnie and Agnes and Pinto make up the threesome because they have to hoist the largest banner. You all watch for my descent. I’ll be sitting on the very top row, almost directly opposite the main entrance. I’ll be wearing a bright red shirt.”
“No stripes?” asked Minnie in mock disbelief.
“No. Not this afternoon. The body armour’s lightweight but I need a long-sleeved shirt to obscure it and I don’t have any . . . never mind. Just remember the blood-red shirt, okay?”
Agnes shivered, but no one else seemed to notice his shift from bright to blood red.
“And when I’m down, the banners go up,” Zeke said.
“But how will you get away, Zeke?” It was Gerhard who voiced the concern that sat in their midst like a naked, wailing child.
“Well, there will be mayhem, right? They won’t be expecting anything like this to happen. So in the pandemonium, I’ll be able to slip away. And if I don’t, well, I haven’t committed a crime. It’s a legitimate protest. It’s an uprising urged by the heart. By the heart,” he repeated, the glow on his face apparent even in the sepulchral gloom of the defunct church.
“Let’s just look at this again, okay, Zeke?” Pinto stepped into the centre of the group, his arms flung wide. He resembled a monumental set of scales, like those held by blindfolded statues of Justice everywhere. He turned his palms upward to signal his transparency; his wide face was open and questing. “There are real risks for you, Zeke — physical and criminal risks. Why don’t we just do the banner protest? There are too many unknowns here for you to do the abseiling.”
There followed a silence so heavy Agnes felt it pressing on her eardrums.
Zebra took a couple of steps toward Pinto and reached up to place his hands on the large man’s shoulders. When he spoke, his mouth was level with Pinto’s chest. He had to tilt his chin upwards in order to look Pinto in the eye.
“I have to do this, Pinto. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do this. End of. Okay? It will be what it will be. But it will be done.”
“Leave it, Pinto,” Minnie said sharply. “It’s Zebra’s decision.”
Pinto frowned. His arms now hung loose at his sides.
“Is that it?” Minnie demanded. “That just leaves the masks, right? When do we put on the animal masks?”
“Well,” Zebra said, “I’m not wearing one because it might move and obscure my vision. But I guess just before you hold up the banners. Okay?”
They all nodded their assent except Pinto.
“Can we put them on now?” Minnie asked, sounding eager as a child at a party.
“I don’t know if that’s wise, Minnie,” Perdita said. “What if someone comes into the church and sees us?”
“I’ll keep watch,” Zebra assured them.
Agnes heard someone groan. Was it Pinto or perhaps Pablo?
“Come on,” Minnie chided them. “I want to go and get some lunch and a beer before I go to the arena. Besides, we have to know who’s wearing what mask.”
A chimpanzee (Minnie), chow dog (Pinto), gazelle (Perdita), stag (Pablo), polar bear (Ewan), lion (Gerhard) and Siamese cat (Agnes) suddenly manifested themselves amidst the despoiled funerary tablet and jars. The seven masked figures joined hands and raised them in a spontaneous salute.
Zebra laughed as they divested themselves of their disguises, blinking in the dimness.
“That’s it!” he exulted. “We’re on. We’re rolling.”
“We should leave here a few at a time,” Perdita suggested.
“Me first,” said Minnie. “See you guys at 1:30.”
Perdita and Pablo left next, then Ewan and Gerhard.
Zebra stood staring wide-eyed at Pinto and Agnes. Twice he started to speak and twice he failed.
“Zeke?” Pinto prompted.
“I have something I have to tell you two,” he said.
Agnes’s breath was a-flutter in her throat. Was he going to reveal his fear to them and ask for reassurance? Or had the tomb-like surroundings reminded him all too chillingly that his risk could be fatal?
“Okay, here goes. Of everyone that was here today, you two were the closest to Camel. Apart from me, of course.”
Agnes started to demur.
“Don’t say anything, Agnes. I know about your time with Camel. He told me.”
Her hand flew to her mouth.
“He liked you, Agnes. He liked you a lot. Do you know what he said about you?”
She thought she had never wanted to hear anything so badly. Yet she could feel her vanity squirming in apprehension of some clumsy, well-intentioned remark about her appearance.
“He said when he looked in your eyes he could see your soul dancing on the shore beside blue, blue water. Dancing. ‘So joyful and clean,’ he said.”
It was not at all what she’d expected. She immediately hugged these words to herself.
“And Pinto,” Zebra continued, “you know how much Campbell looked up to you. ‘He’s a rock,’ he’d say. ‘Pinto is probably the most moral man you and I are ever going to meet.’”
Pinto spoke very slowly, as if he had weighed each word on the judiciary scale Agnes had imagined him holding earlier: “Zeke, I really appreciate that, but I want to tell you I don’t think you should go through with the jump now. Why don’t you just leave it out? Let’s do the straightforward placard protest outside the arena as Perdita suggested.”
“Yes, I do have to do it, Pinto. I have to do something . . . something irrevocable. I mean an act that makes an absolute mark in our history as a group; something that holds people transfixed, even for a moment. That flight down into the ring is my chance to create a memorial for Camel that he would stand up and cheer about. And that means big and risky and unexpected. It means an act that burns into people’s consciousness and makes them really think about the disgusting ways we treat animals. A bold, irrevocable action is my only possible response to his death. So I’m going ahead. And I want you both to stop asking me to reconsider because you’re hurting me by doing that.”
He stared at them defiantly, his mouth set in a grimace that made him look prematurely old, and even more fragile and spent than before. She turned to Pinto, wanting him to speak the wise words that would pull Zebra back from the brink.
Pinto said resignedly: “If you’re absolutely resolved on this, Zeke.”
“I am, Pinto. I absolutely am. Like unshakeable. And I can feel Camel with me in this. I really can. There’s something else,” he said. “Another reason I must do this. It’s about the wire that killed Campbell.”
“What?” Agnes asked in alarm.
He looked at her with hollowed eyes. “No,” he said, “not now. I can’t tell you now. Later, though. Yeah, later.” He shook himself as if he must physically throw off
this line of thought, then extended his arms. “Give me a hug for luck,” he said.
They all three embraced.
“Take care, Zeke,” Agnes whispered into his neck.
“You know I will.” Then he was gone.
Agnes looked up at Pinto beseechingly. He shook his large head so ponderously he looked like a personification of Melancholy.
“What can we do, Agnes? We can’t tie him up or drug him. We can’t thwart his will and interfere with what he sees as a moral imperative, tied to his enduring love. I am sorry, Agnes. I am truly sorry, my dear.”
She was unclear what exactly he was sorry for or about — the countless lamentable aspects of the lives of humans and of animals? At this moment, these seemed to her so overwhelming she felt a base urge to crawl inside one of the large overturned funeral urns and sleep away all the days ahead. Part of her was desperate for an absolute retreat. She was more and more afraid that Zeke’s planned leap was a willed self-sacrifice and that his motives were dangerously muddied. There’s something about the wire that killed Campbell. And in an hour he would be wearing his own wire, swinging down into a ring of butchery.
But Pinto was right. How could they stop him? She must simply follow through and play her own meagre part in the plan, praying it would all turn out well.
“We should go,” she said. “I’ll see you at the arena’s main gates at 1:30.”
“Yes.” Pinto squeezed her hand.
They walked together in silence down Sarcophagus Alley, blinking in the Provencal sunlight that assailed their eyes even through their protective lenses.
Outside the grounds they parted company. Agnes watched Pinto walk away, taking a simple pleasure in observing his long stride and the breadth of his back and shoulders. His sage green shirt was the same colour as the plane trees’ foliage. She found this visual rhyme consoling.
At 12:45 she climbed the three steps of the little museum across the street from the arena. Thirty minutes should give her ample time to study whatever relics of Van Gogh’s famous room it held. This could not be the original Yellow House, with its yolk-thick paint scraped away. The building was too small and, besides, she had a vague recollection that Vincent’s house in Arles stood on a corner, not in a tight row like this slim two-storey edifice.
She was aware how trifling, if not otiose, were these thoughts. Nevertheless, they served her goal of self-distraction. She must keep her disabling anxiety about the looming protest at bay. An unsettling disquiet kept nudging her that their scheme was not only rash, but also arrogantly egotistical. Just as she was opening the museum door with its long vertical insert of plain glass, she suddenly saw the folly behind Zebra’s practice descents in the high-school gymnasium. Why hadn’t she and Pinto grasped the obvious — that the stands in which Zeke rehearsed were empty?
His faith in his jump was puerile. Because she loved him dearly as a friend, she hated to use this particular word in judgement. Yet it was achingly apt and just as applicable to her and everyone else in the Ark. How could they have been so blind? Across the road in the mammoth arena, the tiers will be teeming with spectators of all ages, turning to talk to a neighbour, gesturing with out-flung arms, standing up suddenly or changing places, shifting a child from one knee to another. No one in the Ark had even considered that there might well be babies and toddlers and elderly people in the crowd: a whole host of the vulnerable and innocent.
“Mademoiselle?”
A woman, whose thick, glossy black hair was swept back from her face and rolled in classic Arlesian style, peered at Agnes from her seat behind a small spare table. There was little else in the room other than a few wrought-iron stands displaying art postcards for sale.
“Billet?” The woman waved a ticket at Agnes, then gestured to the staircase in the room’s back right-hand corner.
Agnes stood looking at the custodian, mired in indecision. It was not even 12:50. If she went to the arena now, all she would do is pace and grow more and more anxious waiting for the others to come. She must be supremely calm and reasoned when she attempts to enlist their help in stopping Zeke. “We’ve set a Juggernaut in motion,” she rehearsed mentally, “a blind, insensate machine for destruction. Either Zeke will get hurt or he’ll injure someone in the stands. Or both. This isn’t the way to get our point across.”
She felt better for having composed this little speech. A tour of whatever lay upstairs would help settle her, just as in her original plan. Except that now her goal was to obstruct rather than advance the Ark’s agreed-upon scheme.
When she purchased her ticket, the woman had some difficulty counting out the change. Twice she made an error and sighed in frustration. When at last she had it right, she frowned and rubbed the furrow between her brows with her forefinger. Was the custodian perhaps suffering from migraine, or was she beset by some family worry? Agnes stepped quietly and quickly away to the stairs in the corner. When she reached the first landing, she heard voices. She had not realized there were other visitors in the museum and so she carried on up cautiously lest they collide in the perilously compact staircase. It was as well she did, for the room in which she emerged was very small indeed — far too small to accommodate her comfortably, along with the tall man and woman who stood staring at what Agnes could only characterize as a stage set.
She took in the absolute fakery at a glance. It was Van Gogh’s room all right, but rendered in painted plywood and Bristol board, right down to the bed covers and rush-seated chairs. Her first reaction was an irritated disappointment. She felt she had been duped and was on the verge of leaving when the percipience and sensuousness of the exhibit began to work on her. She retreated to the landing to give the couple time to finish their viewing without her observing them. It was now 1:00 PM
Some minutes later, the couple started down the stairs. Agnes pressed back against the wall of the tiny landing to give them space. The man glanced at her and shrugged his shoulders and she returned to the exhibit, determined to draw all she could from its clever artifice.
All the elements of the familiar painting were there, including the shuttered window above the bed and the blue door at its foot. Except that neither was real. Like the bed and the little nut-brown table and chairs, they were flimsy, colour-saturated artifacts that drew attention to their own theatricality. Agnes looked long and hard and savoured the point. He was never interested in a simplistic mimesis; what he wanted to get on the canvas was the very instant of collision between the eye and thing seen. Thus lines trembled. Colours throbbed. The light juddered. Not a dead copy, then, but an actual drama-in-the-making where the molecules kept dancing. She thought if she stood here long enough, the stage set would begin to shift and float.
She glanced at her watch and relished her small victory. She had managed to forget about the looming action at the arena for a full seven minutes. Shortly she will leave and take up her stance to watch for the arrival of the first of her cohorts. She will make them see the dangers. Of course she will. It is all so very clear to her now.
She still had enough time to satisfy her curiosity as to what was in the two glassed-in cases on the far wall, a little removed from the main exhibit. In the first she found a much-stained, palm-sized palette, wooden-handled brushes with splayed tips and tubes of paint, contorted from being squeezed dry. The multilingual names on the labels had a pungency that brought him close: Karmin, Blue Cobalt, French Ultramarine. The second case contained remnants of his other obsession — little bottles of vermouth, cognac and absinthe. She remembered the speculative diagnosis in the booklet she’d bought at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole that Van Gogh’s heavy alcohol consumption probably exacerbated his manic states and epileptic fits. She hoped he’d never really had to suffer delirium tremens. To shake so uncontrollably that one could not hold a brush — what worse fate could there be for an artist, other than blindness?
And what about the plague of self-disgust that severe hangovers inevitably seemed to spawn, at least in her limited experience?
A nasty, doleful, poking creature crouched on her shoulder the morning after her worst indulgences, relentless in its censure. If you drank enough, that kind of daily self-excoriation might well drive you insane.
As if in clinical confirmation, her eye slid involuntarily over the razor which also hung in the display case, along with a pipe and pencil box with a sliding door. It struck her as odd that there was no identifying text with any of these artifacts. She would like to know where they were found. Then it dawned on her that here too she was perhaps being duped. These old tubes of paint and liquor bottles could have been anyone’s, plundered from junk shops and refuse sites in Arles or Avignon. The possibility that nothing whatsoever in these cases actually belonged to Van Gogh made her furious. The little display of artists’ paraphernalia seemed to her a much more despicable deception than passing off some manufactured, but admittedly witty stage scenery as “Van Gogh’s Room.”
She wondered how many others had stood here feeling cheated or simply foolish. Not that it mattered now. It was 1:15 and time for her to go.
Downstairs, the woman was no longer at her desk. Agnes assumed she had stepped out a moment for some air.
Then the impossible happened. As she grasped the smooth round door-knob and tried to turn it, she met only resistance. An instinctive panic rose to her throat. She tried again, attempting to turn the knob first clockwise, then counterclockwise. But it remained solidly unyielding. She pressed her full weight against the handle in some magical effort to warm and cajole the unfeeling mechanism. She heard a frantic note when she called out — “Hello! Can you help me, please? I can’t open this door.”
Hunting Piero Page 23