The Muralist: A Novel

by B. A. Shapiro

  “Okay, okay,” Mark said. He’d follow her, stay out of sight, make sure she was okay. “You go by yourself. I’ll take care of the squares.”

  Alizée’s eyes narrowed. “If you follow me, if you don’t hide the squares, I’ll never forgive you.”

  Mark bowed his head in defeat. “I’ll be waiting at my place.” She knew him too well.

  46

  ALIZÉE

  Dusk was seeping out of the city. The sky was almost completely black, starless, leaden with heavy clouds she couldn’t see. It was four thirty in the afternoon, but it felt like midnight. She moved quickly, hurrying from lamppost to lamppost, from one splatter of tepid light to the next. Her shoulders hunched against the sharp wind, her light jacket doing nothing to protect her. But she had a ticket and the papers to take her to Varian Fry. Mark had Montage. It was going to be all right.

  When she returned from France with her family, the whole Long fiasco would be forgotten. She’d retrieve the squares and put the mural back together again. Humpty Dumpty. It wouldn’t be perfect, not as good as if it were whole, but stitching the pieces would give it another dimension, a gravitas it might lack without it. Yes. She would make it even more powerful than before. Mix up the pieces. The way Hans Hofmann had mixed up her tissue papers, rearranging them to increase the intensity.

  A blast of cold threatened to steal her hat, and she clamped it down hard on her head. All the king’s men hadn’t been able to put Humpty back together again, but that was just a nursery rhyme.

  She was almost to the apartment. She would make it back well before Sy got off his shift. Good. No. She stopped. She didn’t have the squares. Her hands and arms were free. She should have grabbed her politicals and reversals when Mark took Montage. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. It was so important to concentrate. “Merde!” she yelled into the night as loud as she could. Then she flung herself around and retraced her steps.

  An angry, acrid smell brought her back to the world. She had no recollection of her trip across town but recognized she was only a few blocks from her flat. It was as if she’d been sleepwalking while she was awake. She heard sirens in the distance, noticed a strange glow in the sky ahead, tried to comprehend what all her senses were screaming. She began to run, but she already knew it was too late.

  When she reached her building, the entire structure was engulfed in flames. The heat was intense, as was the smoke, and the firemen kept yelling and pushing people to the other side of the street. How could this have happened so fast? She’d been gone less than an hour.

  She thrust her way to the front of the crowd. She recognized a number of her neighbors, most swathed in blankets, faces streaked with soot, either crying or staring in glazed fascination as their homes were destroyed. The black night was now filled with light, but it was a harsh, orangey light, flickering and mean.

  Someone grabbed her arm, and she turned into Lee’s fierce bear hug. Lee was sobbing. “Oh, oh, I . . . I . . . I thought you were in there. I was on my way home, and I saw it, and you didn’t come in today . . . I . . . I’m so happy to see you.”

  Alizée patted Lee’s shoulder, craning her neck to take in the scene, trying to understand, knowing the answer but not allowing herself to think it. She stepped out of Lee’s embrace. “What happened?” she asked Mr. Schmidt.

  He opened his hooded eyes wide and puffed out his chest. “Went off with a tremendous boom. Like a train roaring into the building. Or maybe a plane falling from the sky. Only good thing, they think everyone got out before the fire got down the stairs. Good thing you weren’t home. Being on the top floor and all. I was the first in the hallway. Called up really loud. Banged on some doors.” Mr. Schmidt shook his head and clucked. “And it’s a damn good thing. Never seen anything go up so fast. A miracle, it is. A damn miracle.”

  “It came from the fourth floor?” she whispered. “My floor?”

  Mr. Schmidt shrugged and pointed to the flames rising high into the night sky. “Don’t much matter now.”

  She followed his finger. It did matter. This was her fault. She crumpled to the sidewalk. They had come for her.

  Lee crouched beside her and gathered her up. “It’s okay, sweetie,” Lee murmured. “It’s okay. You’ll come stay with me. I’ll take care of you. It’ll be fine.” She pushed Alizée’s hair from her forehead. “Stay as long as you want. I’ll lend you some clothes. We can be roommates. For as long as you need.”

  Alizée’s eyes remained fixed on the soaring conflagration. A bee was buzzing in her ear. She shook her head to make it go away. Her parents. Their laboratory.

  “What you’ve lost you’ll paint again,” Lee continued crooning. She rubbed Alizée’s back with wide swirling motions. “It can all be remade. Nothing’s irreplaceable but people. Nothing but people. And you’re fine. All your neighbors are fine. All your people are fine.”

  Had she heard what she thought she’d heard? She tried to focus on Lee’s face and failed. She blinked, tried again. How could Lee say such a thing? How could she even think it? Her parents were dead. And all her people were far from fine.

  Something huge crashed through the building with a roar, sent up a wild flurry of sparks, sent Alizée back to another fire. To the smoldering ruins of her childhood. She grabbed hunks of her hair, yanked on it, just as she’d done then. She heard a shriek, a wail, a keening, and realized the sounds were her own. Just as they had been then.

  Lee grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, gently at first and then harder. “Don’t do this. It’s going to be okay. You’ve got to stop this. This isn’t the end of the world.”

  Alizée broke from Lee’s grasp and started punching her. Just as she’d punched at Mrs. Clouatre, the bearer of bad tidings, that long ago afternoon. “Are you crazy?” she cried. “Crazy mad? Crazy crazy?” One part of her recognized that Lee knew nothing about how her parents had died, was only trying to help, but the fury was so strong, a living thing inside her, and she was lost between there and here, then and now. “They’re dead!” Alizée howled, pummeling Lee’s shoulders. “Oh my God. Oh my God. They’re dead!”

  What felt like a hundred hands grabbed at her. She elbowed and kicked and tried to wrestle away from them. She broke free and sprinted toward the building, raced up the outside stairs, ignoring the smoke, the heat, swinging with superhuman strength to keep her path clear.

  Maybe they were still alive inside. She could still save them. She pushed through the arms and lunged toward the front door. Then everything went black.

  47

  LEE & MARK

  Lee pulled Mark into the hallway, closing the door of her apartment softly behind her. “Jack had some pills he called horse tranquilizers. Said he takes two and they knock him out for the whole night, so I gave her half of one. She didn’t want to take it, but I forced her. She should be sleeping well into tomorrow.”

  Mark sat down on the top of the staircase and stared into the shadowy depths below. After a few minutes, he asked, “So do you think this was it? A real breakdown?”

  Lee joined him in the narrow space. “I’m no doctor,” she answered carefully, “but yeah, I guess. The shock of the fire on top of the exhaustion on top of the Louise thing on top of her family on . . . I guess I’ve got to say on top of her, her instability.”

  “She gave me those squares before the fire.” Mark’s voice was gruff with concern. “Said something about Montage being destroyed. You don’t think . . . ?”

  “No, I don’t think,” Lee said with all the surety she could muster. “Alizée would never do something like that. The rest of her work was in there. And someone might have gotten hurt.” But what did she know?

  “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  She hesitated.

  “Tell me,” he said more insistently.

  Lee let out a long breath. “She was babbling, not making any sense—”

  “That’s not so surprising, right?” he interrupted. “Given the circumstances?”

  Now it was
Lee’s turn to stare into the stairwell. Maybe she’d gotten it wrong. Overreacted in the intensity of the moment. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was a normal reaction to a shocking experience.

  “But you don’t think so,” Mark said.

  She shrugged. “I’ve never seen anyone watch their home burn down before.”

  “What else besides the babbling?”

  Lee tried to reconstruct the events through a less emotional prism. “When she first got there, she was pretty calm, asking people what had happened. The usual stuff you’d expect. But then she kind of dropped to the ground and started moaning.”

  “Moaning?”

  “Yeah, she kept saying ‘No, no, no,’ which I guess also isn’t that strange, but all of a sudden she started crying, but more than crying, howling. It was the kind of crying you’d do if you just found out someone you loved had been killed. Like a mother with a dead baby. It was scary. People started moving away.”

  “And?” Mark pressed.

  “And then she got this crazed expression in her eyes. Her whole face changed, and she didn’t even look like herself. She started grabbing hunks of her hair, trying to pull it out. And I mean really trying. All the time she kept getting more hysterical, crying louder and louder. Screeching, I guess.” Lee closed her eyes and pictured Alizée at that moment. No. She wasn’t overreacting. Alizée had gone mad.

  “So I started shaking her,” Lee continued. “I thought maybe I could shake her out of it. Or shake it out of her. Get her to see it wasn’t as bad as all that. I kept telling her everything was going to be okay. Over and over.

  “And that’s when, well, that’s when she sort of snapped. She started punching me, yelling at me, calling me crazy. Screaming that everyone was dead.” Lee’s throat felt thick, and tears pressed hard and scratchy in her eyes. She took a wavering breath. “But no one was dead,” she whispered. “And it was only a fire . . .”

  Mark bowed his head. “How did she get knocked out?”

  “That was the craziest part. All these people were trying to keep her from hitting me, including the firemen, and she, I don’t know how, but she just burst out like she was Superman, knocking everyone away, and ran into the building. Apparently, when she got inside, she ran headfirst into a wall.” Lee couldn’t stop the tears any longer, the image of Alizée as a madwoman was just too awful. “It was so scary,” she sobbed. “I . . . I didn’t know what to do.”

  Mark wrapped his arms around her just as she’d wrapped her arms around Alizée a few hours earlier. “You did everything right,” he said. “Everything you could do.”

  Lee didn’t say anything, grateful for his kindness.

  Mark spent the night on the floor alongside Lee’s couch so that when Alizée woke he’d be there if she needed him. Which he was sure she would, even if she refused to admit it. He’d slept little, but Alizée had been dead to the world since Lee had handed him some blankets and a pillow to create a makeshift bed for himself. For hours at a stretch, Alizée hadn’t moved, her breathing barely discernible. More than once, he’d checked her pulse to make sure she was still alive. Maybe Jack hadn’t been kidding, and his pills actually were horse tranquilizers.

  The morning was late in coming, winter solstice only days away, and Mark wished it would remain night forever. Asleep, except for her blooming bruises, Alizée looked as she always did, like an untroubled girl. Awake, he knew that was not going to be the case. He didn’t want to face the day ahead, didn’t want to see Alizée in such a state, didn’t want to force her to do what must be done.

  The time without her would be agony for him, not having her close, his touchstone, his heart. But it would be worse for her if she stayed. He sat up and dropped his head to his raised knees, cushioning it with his crossed arms. His beautiful, talented girl, tormented from both within and without. What was to become of her?

  There was a soft tap on his shoulder. Mark looked up to find Lee holding out a cup of coffee. He’d been so deep into his thoughts that he hadn’t heard her, hadn’t even known she was awake.

  “Here,” she whispered. “I’ve got to get to the warehouse. There’s some bread and jam in the icebox.” She threw a look at Alizée’s still, pale form, at her face, swollen and streaked a painful purple. “Call over there if you need me. I can be back here in twenty minutes.”

  Mark took the cup and thanked her, although he knew he wouldn’t be able to eat anything.

  Lee leaned down and kissed his cheek. “I’m sure she’ll be better today.”

  They looked at each other in silence, clearly thinking the same thought: How could she be any worse?

  48

  ALIZÉE & MARK

  She swam upward through mud, groggy, nauseated. Her head pounded. Her entire body hurt. Where was she? A fire. Maman. Papa. No, not them. But fire. Flames inside her nostrils. Smoke piercing her lungs. Another fire? At her flat. In New York. Not Cambridge. Not her parents.

  She caught a flicker of light. Closed her eyes. Kept her breathing at a still-sleeping tempo. Lee’s. Mark looking out the window. His back was to her. If he saw she was awake he’d want to talk. Talk. And more talk. No talking. Too exhausted to talk. She shifted her weight. Pain seared through her skull, and she moaned involuntarily.

  She heard Mark drop to his knees next to the couch. “Alizée?” he said. “Are you awake? It’s me, Mark. Can I get you anything? How are you feeling? Are you okay?”

  She kept her eyes shut. So many questions. So much noise. Too much noise. She affected a small sigh and settled into the pillow. He’d think she’d cried out in her sleep. Leave her be. His hand was cool on her cheek. She snuggled in tighter.

  “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” he said. “Time to rise and shine.”

  She didn’t move.

  “I’ve spent enough nights with you. I know you’re awake. Might as well open your eyes.”

  She sighed, this time for real, and looked up at him. He knew her too well.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked again, clearly relieved.

  “Headache.” She touched her forehead. A lump the size of a golf ball. She tried to sit, but Mark gently pushed her down.

  “Going to have a real shiner, too,” he said with a thin smile.

  Disembodied images flashed at her. Mr. Schmidt. Arms. Lots of arms. Lee. The crash of falling timbers. Had this actually happened? Had she dreamed it? There was no doubt her pain was real. “How?”

  “According to witnesses, you ran into a burning building and smack into a wall.”

  Burning building. Right. Her burning building. Smoke. Thick, black smoke. But no wall. She reached for the memory, but the farther she stretched, the faster it shattered. Leaving her empty but for the throbbing soreness.

  Mark went to the sink and filled a glass with water, returning with it and a couple of aspirin. “Take these,” he ordered.

  She did as he asked, lay back against the pillow with another moan.

  He took her hands in his. “I’m so, so sorry this happened. What a crushing piece of bad luck. But don’t worry, we’ll have you back on your feet in no time.”

  She tried to ferret out his meaning through her wooziness. “It wasn’t bad luck.”

  He hesitated and then, with the false lilt in his voice one uses with a child on the verge of a tantrum, asked, “You think it was good luck?”

  “Of course I don’t think it was good luck.” She bolted upright, which hurt like hell, and she dropped back down just as quickly. “I don’t think it was luck at all.”

  “Not luck?” His eyes widened as he caught her meaning. “Oh, Zée, you don’t think someone did it on purpose?”

  “Why wouldn’t they? After Louise ratted to the WPA? To the cops?” How could he not understand this? It was so obvious. Then she remembered it wasn’t Montage or the WPA. It was far worse than that. The police must have gotten Nathan to rat her out. They were after her, the fire was their warning: We know what you’ve done and you’re going to pay. Oh baby, are you going
to pay.

  Now Mark ran himself a glass of water. He downed the entire thing, refilled it and sat in the chair across from her. “It was probably the furnace. An electrical fire. Some other mundane cause.”

  “They wanted to punish me,” she insisted. “To destroy Montage,” she added so he wouldn’t think it was anything else. He might have read about Long in the paper, might put it together.

  Mark swallowed hard. “Whatever it was, you need some rest, some care. You need to get away from here. Maybe go to the countryside—”

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here until I leave for—” Vigilance. She couldn’t let him trip her up. “Until we’ve hung Montage,” she said triumphantly.

  He covered his face with his hands. “We’re not hanging it.”

  “What are you talking about? The fire has nothing to do with the plan.”

  “Did you forget that you—”

  “You can’t back out now. Montage has to be seen. Mrs. Roosevelt said so.”

  Mark dropped his hands. “Mrs. Roosevelt doesn’t know Montage exists.”

  Whoops. That was Turned. Here it came: Alizée needs help, Alizée is sick, Alizée has to go to the sanatorium.

  “You cut Montage into squares,” Mark said, his voice flat. “Sixteen squares. Don’t you remember?”

  Squares? Squares? It came tumbling back. Mr. Fleishman. Sy Lubin. The ticket to Marseilles. She was to sail in a couple of days. She had to think. What to do. Think. “Did you hide them like you promised?” she challenged him. Time. Time. She needed time. “Did you?”

  “Yes,” Mark said. “They’re safe. Where no one would ever think to look.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Behind my canvases. Taped to the back, in envelopes, between the stretchers. Lee’s going to do the same. Bill and Jack, too.”

  She nodded, pleased. That was a good hiding place. Poor, sweet Mark. He loved her, and she loved him. But now was not their time, and she had to let him go. A tear rolled down her cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered.