The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

by Jeffrey Ford

  “By the way, Mr. Piambo,” she said, “what were you doing out in that terrible rain on Sunday?”

  Her query caught me off guard for a moment, and when I recovered I asked, “How do you know I was out in the rain?”

  “Why, I saw you standing on Broadway. My carriage passed, and I only glimpsed you for a moment. It looked as if you were with that other artist, the one who does the seascapes, Ryder.”

  “You have seen me?” I asked.

  “Certainly. Last week you sat at a table at Delmonico’s drinking wine with your lady friend, Miss Rying. I was at the table next to yours.” She laughed then, briefly, as if as an afterthought.

  Her admission stunned me, and while emotions of betrayal and anger collided, I tried to think back to that night. When I looked around within my memory of the restaurant, I saw gowns and suits, cigar smoke, fine china, silver, and crystal, but everyone, even the waiters, was faceless. Then the door opened, and Watkin entered the room. I quietly gathered my things with trembling hands and left.

  A GIFT FROM A CHILD

  ON THE streetcar heading downtown, I finally took charge of my emotions and wondered if I had a right to feel so thoroughly abused by Mrs. Charbuque. She was playing me like a pennywhistle, and whatever visage I eventually concocted of her would have to manifest in some way a streak of sadism, but did it matter to our proposition whether she was engaged in spying on me? Was the sum of money she offered license enough for her to know every bit of my life? It struck me then that the aspect of the situation that distressed me more than any other was the fact that her presence was loose in the world, as if a bejeweled lamp once belonging to an ancient sultan had been rubbed and a mischievous djinn were now free. As long as I had known where she was, in that quiet room, situated behind that screen, the enigma was contained, and as frustrating as it might be, I could approach it on my own terms. She had been of equivalent status with, say, a character in a book, a figure out of mythology, and I was merely to be her illustrator. But now she roamed the world, and this notion ensured a certain physicality while at the same time negating a definitive location. She could have been anyone, the woman sitting next to me, the young girl passing outside on the street. I could not even discount disguise, so for that matter she could have been the streetcar conductor. Having gone to see Samantha on the stage innumerable times, I had witnessed convincing portrayals of women by men and vice versa. With the possibility of her being anyone, she was, potentially, everyone. My scalp prickled as I felt the fine tendrils of paranoia growing within and around me. I felt it on the back of my neck, in my stomach, with every beat of my heart, until I was trapped in a net of gazes, a thick web of stares. I was, undoubtedly, being watched.

  I scanned the faces of my fellow passengers, searching for telltale signs in each that he or she might be my patron. Long before my stop, I forsook the streetcar for the sidewalk, where I could escape the claustrophobic feeling that made it difficult for me to breathe. In the open air, I was somewhat less a specimen on display, and there was at least the illusion of freedom in personal locomotion. A woman, a complete stranger, leaving a dry-goods store, flashed me a brief smile and nodded. Why? I frowned disapprovingly at her, and she quickly turned away. Wherever I looked I found a pair of eyes trained upon mine, and the weight of these gazes eventually made me stop in my tracks. The throng moved around me like a stream around a large rock, and I turned in circles trying to see all those who were seeing me. To calm myself, I closed my eyes, and there, behind the screen of my lids, I had a sense that the entirety of the teeming metropolis had me in its sights.

  When I eventually felt steady enough to again open my eyes, I found standing before me a young boy of six or seven, wearing a cap and a threadbare coat. His round cheeks were red with the cold, and his smile showed the absence of at least three teeth. At first I thought he was begging, for he held his hand up toward me. Only when I was digging into my pocket for some change did I realize he was handing me a card.

  “I been paid,” he said, and shoved the square of paper into my hand.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “What is this?”

  Before I could finish my second question, he was gone, running off into the swirl of passersby. I turned to watch him, but in seconds he was lost amid the multitude. It quickly became evident to me that I was now literally making a spectacle of myself, blocking traffic on the sidewalk. I moved quickly forward. Only when I reached the solitude and safety of a bench in Madison Square Park did I inspect the gift from the child. Turning the white rectangle over, I noticed words rendered in ink, a message in desperate script. After I stared at it for a solid minute, the words registered their meaning.

  WHY ARE YOU SEEING MY WIFE?

  CHARBUQUE

  I quickly shot a glance over each shoulder and then scanned the park before me. When I again turned my attention to the message, I tried to see it in a new light, but still the words exuded a sense of menace, a definite threat. Rising, I slipped the card into my coat pocket and headed for the sidewalk. I hailed the first cab I saw, and went directly to my home. Once inside, I locked the door and checked each of the rooms.

  Sitting in the studio, I pondered that day’s events. It was becoming increasingly clear that Mrs. Charbuque was, in her subtle way, trying to undo me. How artfully she had dropped the news of her knowing my every move. “Is she paying for a portrait or for a subject to amuse herself with?” I wondered.

  Out of thin air, her husband had materialized to insinuate a new thread into the tapestry. I wouldn’t have been half surprised to find that she herself had written out the card and had Watkin find an urchin to deliver it. She obviously wanted me to ask her about her husband. Perhaps the whole exercise was as I had suspected earlier: a chance for her to tell her life, our meetings akin to attending confession. The twisted nature of the entire charade was mind-boggling.

  I determined then and there that I would not play the fool for Mrs. Charbuque. I would eventually ask about her husband, but not when she required it. She was not playing fair, and I no longer felt the need to do so myself. What I needed was some systematic plan of attack, an approach to discovering her countenance in a more definitive manner than simply conjuring it through her questionable autobiography. Also, I would begin to subtly drop a hint or two during our daily dialogues that I might know more about her than she suspected. For now, some of these morsels could come from the information imparted by Borne; others I would simply manufacture. What I wanted above all else was to shake her confidence as she had shaken mine.

  The tension of the afternoon settled upon me, but I tried to throw off my predicament, and set to work at the drawing board. On a large sheet of paper that covered the entire face of the board, I began illustrations for each of the characters and settings that inhabited her story so far, keeping each sketch small. I wanted to crowd them all onto one surface so that I could take them in at once. The house on the mountain, the optical magnifier, the face of her mother, her father, the tracker who was obviously tracking more than corpses. I also drew the wolf and the locket on a chain, the book of fairy tales opened to an illustration of Aladdin’s lamp, and entering the picture frame from the side was a single manly hand offering a card with a message written upon it. Filling the empty spaces between objects, I drew six-pointed snow crystals—no two alike. God could be fallible, but not Piambo.

  I worked rapidly, with a reserve of energy that had not made itself evident until I began. When I finally rose and backed away from the board, I stared at my depiction of all Mrs. Charbuque had told me. Like one of those antique paintings of the life of a saint, each saintly act depicted at one and the same time on the same plane as if time had been halted and history could be viewed as a single event, my drawings had captured everything from the broken-down couch in the study to the murder amid a stand of lonesome pines of Mrs. Londell and her lover by the warped crystalogogist.

  Unconsciously I had arranged the elements of the story in a great circle on th
e page. In viewing it, I smiled with satisfaction at the unplanned but perfect balance of the piece. Only after I had patted myself on the back, so to speak, did it become clear to me that at the drawing’s very center, around which everything else seemed to turn, there was a smaller circle of unsullied white. Of course, this emptiness was where the portrait of the child, Luciere Londell, belonged. It stared back at me.

  I was too weary to engage in one of my usual bouts of self-pity. The fact that I had accomplished anything at all toward the commission, had at least made some marks on paper, was enough for the time being. I set down the charcoal pencil and retired to my bedroom.

  I removed my shoes and was about to undress when I heard a noise emanating from outside the house, as if someone was walking on the stones just beyond my bedroom window. The fear I had felt earlier in the day returned immediately, and I stood stock-still, listening so hard I could feel my ears move. For an instant I actually considered getting down on my hands and knees and hiding beside the bed, but then from somewhere in the creeping paranoia, a stronger emotion of anger surfaced.

  “Ridiculous,” I said aloud, and stormed over to the window. With real determination I drew back the curtain to reveal the portal filled with night. It hadn’t registered with me that I had spent so long at the board. The darkness made me quail a bit from my intended mission, but I bolstered my courage, unlatched the pane, and swung it open.

  A blast of cold night air swept around me and lifted the curtains. “Who’s there?” I demanded.

  “Shhhh,” I heard in return. “Piambo, it’s me.”

  I immediately recognized the voice of Shenz.

  “Shenz, what in good God are you doing out there?” I asked.

  “Shhhh,” he said. “Quietly, Piambo. Whisper only. We are here because we did not want anyone to see us at your front door.”

  “Who is with you?” I asked, softening my voice.

  By then my eyes had adjusted, and I saw Shenz step toward the window. In the light coming from the bedroom I could make out his face directly beneath me. From out of the shadows another figure slowly sidled up next to him—a large woman in a great black overcoat, wearing a flowered kerchief around her head. I squinted to see more clearly and noticed that this might have been the ugliest woman I had ever seen. Her face had thick crude features and, upon closer inspection, a few day’s growth of beard and mustache.

  “Hello,” she said in a deep voice.

  I said nothing but moved back a bit.

  “Piambo, this is our passage into Ossiak’s warehouse,” said Shenz, pointing to her.

  “I thought you said the locksmith was a gentleman,” I said.

  Shenz quietly laughed, and his companion smiled. “He is in disguise,” said my friend. “Say hello to Mr. Wolfe.”

  THE REMINDER

  IT WAS a cold, moonless night with a light mist in the air that made haloes around the street lamps. We walked a good way downtown, Shenz and I on either side of Mr. Wolfe, before we came upon a hansom cab waiting for us at the curb on Seventeenth Street. We entered the carriage, and without a word the driver spurred the horses forward at a great pace. Inside the compartment, we found two oil lanterns and two crowbars.

  Up to that point in our journey, no one had spoken. My nerves would not allow me to contain myself any longer, though, and I whispered, “Do you have your ring of keys, Mr. Wolfe?”

  Shenz, who sat next to me, shoved me in the ribs with his elbow. I turned, and he shook his head, silently admonishing me for having spoken.

  “There is no ring of keys,” said Wolfe. “I’m the ring of keys.” He held up his open hand, knuckle side out, before my face. It was a rather squat, round mitt, the fingers like sausages, but from their tips grew exceedingly long nails that had been precisely trimmed to the thinnest width. At their very ends, those of the pinky and ring bearer were cut in a serrated pattern, the thumb bore a three-inch hat pin, and the remaining index and middle sported eruptions of nail that evidently would fit a lock’s baffles.

  He made a fist, leaving the thumb protruding. “I call this one the Reminder,” he said, adjusting his kerchief with his other hand. I looked quickly to see if that one also had keys for nails, but from what I could see, they appeared trimmed short in the normal manner.

  “Once I shoved this darling all the way up a man’s nostril and tickled his brain. He didn’t laugh, but I did. From then on, he bothered me no more. Last I heard he was refusing all sustenance, wasting away to a skeleton, counting the stars.” Wolfe pulled his hand back in a flash and licked the tip of the Reminder. “I think I can still taste the memory of his first kiss,” he said, and broke into a bellowing laugh.

  “Get ahold of yourself, Wolfe,” said Shenz.

  “Beg your pardon, sir,” Wolfe said, and slumped back in his seat like a reprimanded child.

  After leaving the carriage, with crowbars and lanterns, and walking two more blocks south to Fulton, we finally came to the warehouse with the white circle on it. As Borne had predicted, the sign was faded but still fairly legible. The building was made of brick, one tall story with two grimy windows in the front. On the hasp of the huge oaken door was a very rusty padlock.

  Wolfe had barely seemed to touch the ancient device before he was holding it in his hand. “Sometimes these old ones take a little longer,” he said, pushing open the door. The hinges wailed like banshees, and we waited and watched up and down the block for a good five minutes before entering. They complained miserably again as I shut us into the dark expanse. Shenz lit a match and ignited the two lanterns. He adjusted their wicks to lessen the glow and then handed one to me. With that odd light shining up to illuminate his face, my colleague appeared truly satanic. We could not see very far into the shadows even with the lanterns, but I squinted and began to make out that we were surrounded by rows of shelves constructed of iron scaffolding and planks.

  “Let’s see what we can find,” said Shenz.

  With great trepidation, I set off down an aisle. Wolfe followed closely, and I wasn’t sure which was more daunting, the dark or having him behind me carrying a crowbar. I stopped at one of the many crates and whispered, “Give this one a go.” He wedged the end of the bar into the frame of the crate and gave one quick shove. The box cracked open, and a large object, obviously made of glass, fell to the cement floor and shattered.

  Wolfe and I exchanged looks, mine I’m sure exhibiting more concern than his. I squatted down in order to bring the glow of the lantern around the fallen object. As I descended, a putrid stench rose from the scattered contents, which only then could I see had been partially liquid. Soon enough the culprit came clearly into view.

  I fled that aisle, knowing it was the repository of Borne’s legacy, and began searching down another. All the time I could hear Shenz breaking into and rifling through distant boxes.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Wolfe as I motioned for him to attack another crate.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “Amateurs,” said Wolfe, handing the crowbar over to me. He turned and wandered off into the dark.

  I opened three more crates on my own, each one containing thousands of the same little slips of paper. Written on them was either the word yes or the word no. I could only wonder at what banal manifestation of paranormal science I was gazing and marvel at the dizzying depths of foolishness that had directed the course of Ossiak’s incredible fortune. The entire journey to the warehouse was quickly beginning to seem pointless to me when Shenz called me to him in an excited voice, more a hiss than a whisper.

  I navigated the dark maze of shelves, holding my lantern out before me until I saw the corresponding glow from my friend’s.

  “Here we are,” he said as I approached him. He held his lantern up next to a crate that had the name Londell written across its planks in grease pencil. There were two other such crates to the left of this one.

  “Shall I?” I said to Shenz.

  “Get on with it,” he said.

>   I placed the crowbar and pushed forward with all my might. Two of the planks squeaked violently and then popped free onto the floor. A surge of white crystals spilled through the opening, glittering in the lantern light and forming a small dune at our feet. I knelt down and grabbed some of the odd snow in my hand. It was completely dry.

  “These are the prepared specimens from the father’s research,” I told Shenz, lifting a fistful and securing it in my coat pocket.

  “Like fairy dust,” he said. “The old crank was certainly busy.”

  I rose and pried off the other planks of the crate to gain fuller access. After handing Shenz the crowbar, I reached one arm in and swept more of the fossilized crystals onto the floor. Eventually I felt solid objects protruding through the white. The first thing I pulled out was a book. Shenz set down the crowbar and took the volume from me. He brushed it clean against his coat in order to read the title.

  “Fabulous Tales from Around the World,” he said, and turned it for me to have a look. There was an illustration embossed on the cover—a scene of a djinn, cohering, headfirst, out of a stream of smoke issuing from a lamp shaped like a boat.

  I said nothing but stared in disbelief long enough for Shenz to prompt me to continue. The next item I uncovered was a stack of paper tied up in string. Once out in the light, though, the sheets that made up this small package showed themselves to be green and cut in the shapes of leaves. Each one had a question written on it. “Will Clementine go before the rain?” “Is it right?” “Billy?”

  “Where are the damn answers? That’s what I’m looking for,” said Shenz.

  I reached back into the crate to see if I could find something less obscure, and my hand closed around the crown of a circular, broad-brimmed hat.

  “I’m underwhelmed,” said Shenz at the sight of it, not knowing the story as I did.

  “What of this, though?” I said, hauling forth a heavy fur coat that smelled like a horse stall.