Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Samira Ahmed

  “What are you doing?” Alexandre stands in the doorway with a book in his hand. He puts it on the counter and walks over. “This breaking French antiques thing is getting to be a habit. I’m going to have to report you as a menace to the Minister of Culture.”

  “What?”

  Alexandre points to the cabinet. The upper part of the door is off its hinge, and it’s leaning forward at a precarious angle.

  “Oh crap. Sorry. I was trying to get behind it.”

  Alexandre grins, amused, but also raises an eyebrow. “Why?”

  “There’s a door.” I point behind the cupboard. “I hope this cupboard isn’t on the historic register,” I say, wincing.

  “Don’t worry, it’s hardly a national treasure. But that door behind it—I’ve never seen that. Step back for a second.”

  I step aside, happy to give Alexandre the chance to pull out the cupboard or fall on his ass trying.

  Alexandre wraps his long arms around the entire cabinet and first tries to lift it out, then resorts to dragging it forward, which works. I step up and help guide the cabinet far out enough into the kitchen so that we can slip behind it. The door is painted the same dull white as the rest of the kitchen and is much smaller than a standard door. It looks like someone painted right over the seams. I wiggle my fingers through the doorknob hole and pull. There’s some cracking, but it doesn’t budge.

  “Hang on,” Alexandre says, then grabs a dish towel from the counter and hands it to me. “Use this. That looks like a sure way to get splinters.”

  I lay the small towel along the bottom edge of the hole, place my hand on it, and try pulling again. “God, a million layers of paint are gluing this shut. Why would they do this?”

  “A careless paint job? And then when whoever redid this kitchen saw it, they probably figured it was easier to stick the cabinet here.”

  “Grab a knife,” I say. Alexandre hands me one, and I chisel through some of the paint on the side of the door. “Can you reach the top?”

  Alexandre slips into the small space next to me. I hand him the knife, and he wedges it between the door seam and wall, working his way from left to right, inching closer to me. Dust and paint fall around us. If this were a movie, Alexandre being pressed up next to me as motes of dust waft down on us from above might be full of romantic tension, but in reality it’s a little gross—a potent brew of adrenaline and endorphins and sweat and dust amidst the mouse droppings.

  Alexandre draws his arms down and gently grips my shoulder. “Ready?”

  I nod. I’m not ready, though. This little hobbit door could be another empty promise, but my heart races anyway. I may still be uncertain about sharing Leila’s story with the world, but I can’t deny how desperately I want to know all of it—know her.

  We step out of this small space to give the door room to open. Alexandre fits his finger through the doorknob hole and tugs. The door creaks and groans and gives way. It scrapes against the floor, swollen from the heat and from being shuttered for decades.

  The door stands ajar, and we peer into the space. It’s a dusty, cobwebby old storage room.

  We have to duck our heads to squeeze through. There are cardboard boxes stacked against the walls and an old wooden trunk with what looks like drapes piled on top. A wooden table with two chairs stacked on top is pushed up against the back wall. We step farther into the space, making sure we don’t trip on anything, and shine our phone lights into the darkness.

  I spy a set of wooden frames leaning against the wall beneath the windowsill and step over to take a look. The canvases are grimy, and some are damaged. They’re mostly amateur portraits and scenes of the grounds in bloom. Some of the wooden frames are cracked and empty. As I flip through them, cobwebs stretch and break between the frames.

  I turn to Alexandre. “I wonder how long this stuff has been in here?”

  He’s investigating the trunk, which appears to be filled with old textbooks. He shrugs, then sends a beam of light from his phone across the space. It catches on an object on the wall, hidden in a shadowy corner.

  “Oh, merde alors,” Alexandre whispers, almost reverently.

  I reach toward a small rectangular painting inset in a simple but substantial wood frame.

  I suck in my breath. It’s her.

  Leila

  I write these words years hence, as time seems to fold in on itself. Where once the images of your red lips and dark curls and the feel of your rein-coarsened palms against mine faded into the creases of my mind, I find those images renewed, that touch reimagined. Time is funny in this way, a fickle master. But I can only believe it means that soon I will join you, my love, in the jannah of our dreams. Will I find you there? Did you wait for me? Does time pass achingly as it does on earth, or is there no time at all?

  Each of these decades apart has felt like centuries, nay, an eternity of days, each one ending in the same way, as I looked for the last time upon the shores that were once home. On the land where our love blossomed. On the dusty earth where your blood fell. Each night when my eyes closed, there was the old heartache, made new again. Each night the wound, refreshed, in the stillness of my room.

  I will away now to quieter shores, where I hope the lapping waves will carry you back to me as they once carried me away. I will admit I am afraid. For though I trust in the life after this one, I have moments of doubt that perhaps we shall not be reunited. Yet I try and keep my faith like the damask rose you once gave me, ever in bloom.

  Khayyam

  I am frozen in place, even as Alexandre inches ahead, awestruck. It’s too impossible to be real. Like a character has walked out of a book, out of my imagination, and into real life.

  A wooden frame the size of a cookie sheet showcases a canvas with a dark-haired woman, her raven tresses falling in waves down her shoulder. She’s standing to the side of a fountain, her face in profile. Even in this poor light, I can make out her dark scarlet lips and the olive-brown tones of her skin. We’ve never met, but I think I’d know her anywhere. “She’s . . . she’s . . .”

  “Luminescent,” Alexandre finishes my sentence. “It’s the Delacroix mastery of color and light.” His light follows the length and curve of Leila’s figure. “See how even in profile, her features are really refined? And the embroidery on the robe?”

  When we shine our light closer to the canvas, we see the midnight-blue of the robe or dress she is wearing is deep and rich. The silk cascades in folds along her body and onto the ground below, concealing her feet as she stands gazing into a fountain. The robe slips ever slightly from her shoulder and is bordered all along the hem with golden stars. Her left hand casually grasps a silver dagger at her side, its cream-colored handle showing between her fingers. It’s the dagger that’s sitting in my living room right now.

  Alexandre gasps. “The dagger.”

  “I know,” I whisper.

  I honestly can’t tell if this is real life or a dream—lately everything I hope for slips through my fingers, making hope feel too fragile, too dangerous, to believe in.

  My heart races. I have to remind myself to breathe, because I think I stopped the minute a beam of light passed over Leila’s face. She’s young. Maybe nineteen or twenty in this portrait, though the Leila we glimpsed in the letters was older, middle-aged. This is the Leila of Byron’s poem. She was beautiful and strong, and she deserved more than what life offered her. She was barely older than me. And alone.

  “Leila’s entire life, she was forced to hide,” I mumble, my voice cracking. “Who the hell shoved her in this dark corner with a bunch of junk?” My voice grows louder with my anger. “Let’s bring her into the light.”

  Alexandre squeezes my shoulder. “I couldn’t agree more,” he says, then gently lifts the small painting off the wall.

  We duck back through the door, Alexandre clearly taking care not to bump into anything. I wipe down the s
mall kitchen table and then line it with paper towels, creating a semi-clean spot to rest the painting. We lean in closer. My breath is heavy, labored, like the weight of this moment is finally hitting me. Bending over the table, I search for the distinctive Eug. Delacroix signature but can’t find it. It could be hidden beneath the frame, faded, or maybe he never signed it. But it has to be a Delacroix. I hope.

  Alexandre steps away from the table and sinks to the floor. “I can’t believe . . . finally. Finally, there’s a chance. My family . . . we have to authenticate it first. X-rays. Multispectrum analysis. But the brushstrokes, the romantic nostalgia, the kind of dreaminess about the scene—it definitely feels like some of his later paintings.”

  I take a seat next to him and nudge him. He smiles. I smile back. Then giggle. He starts laughing, too. Nerves, I guess? I said there was a weight to this moment that made it hard to breathe. But weirdly, there’s a lightness to it, too. A joy. A disbelief.

  A thought occurs to me, something I remember from researching art provenance and authentication. “The back of a painting. We have to examine the back.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Art historians learn as much from the back of the canvas as they do from the actual painting.”

  “Yes,” says Alexandre. “Delacroix didn’t sign all his paintings—”

  “On the front,” we say together and stand.

  Alexandre steps over to the painting and lifts it up gently by the edges of the frame. I move closer. The back of the canvas is dark, a dirty beige. There’s a yellowed piece of paper affixed to the top of the exposed wooden frame. It’s small—maybe the size of a credit card. Faded black cursive on the back reads: Cherchez la femme, trouvez le trésor. There’s no signature, no other words, no date. Celenia Mondego would probably say it hardly counts as evidence, but she’s sitting behind a desk somewhere, and I’m here right now. For me, it is enough.

  Alexandre’s face erupts in a huge smile, every tooth showing. He carefully rests the painting on the table, then wraps his arms around me. Without even thinking about it, I return the hug but cast my gaze back to Leila and the fountain she’s staring at. I’d missed it while I was busy staring only at her.

  Oh my God.

  “Alexandre, holy crap. The fountain.” I pull myself out of the hug and bend over the painting again. “The last letter. The one from Dumas to Leila, from the Baudelaire book. Show it to me.”

  “Okaaaaay. But why?” He pulls out his phone from his back pocket and begins scrolling.

  “Hurry up. Please.”

  He scrolls faster, clicks, and then hands the phone to me.

  I read out loud from the last note Dumas wrote to Leila, “Happiness is like the enchanted palaces we read of in our childhood, where fierce, fiery dragons defend the entrance and approach. That’s from Monte Cristo, right?”

  Alexandre nods.

  “The dragon . . . defends . . . the entrance,” I say slowly. “He guards it from anyone who might try and trespass.” I get goosebumps as I say the words; I finally see the pieces clicking into place. “Look closer.” I point to the fountain. “That’s the fountain from the garden. That little dragon is guarding Dumas’s happiness. Or, I dunno, maybe Leila’s. It doesn’t matter, because that fountain must be where the Leila cache is hidden.”

  “This is the Leila cache. Cherchez la femme, trouvez le trésor. We looked for the woman and found the treasure: the painting.”

  “I swear, I know your great-grandfather better than you. For Dumas, the treasure wasn’t the Delacroix; the treasure was Leila. Her story. Whatever it is she gave him.” I walk toward the door and beckon Alexandre to follow.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The garden. To find the dragon that’s guarding Dumas’s happiness.”

  The Bassin du Dragon juts out from the stone wall below the Château in a sunken garden. My heart thumps in my ears as we take the steps two at a time, skidding across the gravel to the basin.

  Facing the fountain, actually looking at it this time, I see there are three rectangular sides. Two have carved medallions of lions’ heads that once must have spewed water into the small basins directly underneath. But the center panel, the one I’m looking at, sports a sculpted faun’s face. As with the lions, a small semicircular basin sits right below the faun, ready to catch any water. But what we’re here for crouches below the faun, our little dragon on its own pedestal that would’ve emptied into the large basin at the foot of the fountain. Ferocious, with wings back, teeth bared, body at the ready, guarding this place from any who may try and trespass.

  Alexandre steps right into the dry basin and bends down by the dragon, feeling around the stone. Unlike the two sides, this front piece is decorated with long, fernlike leaves carved behind the dragon and stalks that look like they could be . . .

  “Birds of paradise.” My mom’s favorite flower. Alexandre is occupied with his task, so I say it louder. “Birds of paradise.”

  Alexandre shifts to look at me. “So . . .”

  “This has to be the place that Dumas talks about in his deathbed letter to Leila—his paradise on earth. Where his love is evergreen and Paradise eternally in bloom. The birds of paradise flowers are sculpted, always in bloom.”

  There’s this look of delightful disbelief in Alexandre’s eyes, and the space between us feels full of possibilities. For a second, it seems like he might kiss me. But I tense, and my body sways back slightly.

  “You’re amazing,” Alexandre says. “This is it. I can feel it. The dragon, the birds of paradise, even that.” He points to the carved head above the medallion. “I think it’s Pan. Dumas was a huge mythology buff—there are references to myths throughout Monte Cristo.”

  “Pan is the god of nature, right? The guy with the flute, surrounded by nymphs?”

  “Exactly. Nymphs aren’t goddesses. They’re divine spirits on earth—young, beautiful maids who never aged.”

  “Leila,” I whisper. “The beautiful spirit.”

  The strange juxtaposition of all these elements isn’t lost on me. The dragon guarding the palace of happiness, the birds of paradise, and Pan. It’s a hodgepodge, like a lot of Dumas’s writing. Like Leila’s story, like mine. Like all of ours.

  “But this place was built before Leila disappeared from Dumas’s life.”

  “The main house, yes. But not all the grounds. Dumas could have easily commissioned this fountain later; even if he was going bankrupt, he could’ve found a sponsor to pay for it or one more creditor. Also, this fountain hasn’t worked in decades. Maybe Dumas made sure it never did because it’s not a fountain. It’s a hiding place. It would be very Dumas to build this in honor of her.”

  We set back to work feeling around the stone, checking for tiles or crevices that might give. The large basin’s floor is pretty broken up. We can even pull up chunks of it to expose the hollow underneath. But there’s nothing there but old, moss-covered pipes and bugs. Alexandre sticks his fingers into the mouth of the dragon and then moves to Pan. He also checks the god’s pointy ears. I slide over to investigate the fish carved below the lions.

  The fish on the left side turns out to be . . . a fish. The lion medallion above doesn’t yield any secrets, either. I move to the right, stepping around Alexandre, who is now pulling at the dragon’s teeth. I would like to believe I’m the Veronica Mars of art world sleuthing, but right now, I’d say we’re a little more Scooby-Doo, believing that a dragon tooth is going to be the lever that reveals a secret chamber, and I’m getting hungry again, so a Scooby snack sounds good right about now.

  I squat in front of the fish on the right—its tongue sticks out, mocking me, because upon close examination, like its mate, it proves to be a carved fish. This is starting to feel ridiculous. I sigh. Alexandre and I exchange a look that’s a cross between a three-year-old who inadvertently popped their birthday balloon and a WTF-are-we-even
-doing eye roll.

  I stand up face-to-face with the lion on the right panel. That’s when I notice this lion isn’t carved into the stone like the other one. It’s metal. Brass or . . . ? Looks like it was once painted over—a dull gray to match the stone—but the chipped, weathered paint reveals a brownish-green. Copper, maybe?

  I run my fingers over the lion’s face and mane, about the size of a dinner plate. It’s not sculpted into the fountain like the rest of the figurines. “Alexandre,” I say under my breath as I trace my fingers over the edges, hitting the groove of a nail—no, a small screw, then another. “Alexandre,” I say louder, “we’ve got to get this lion’s head off.”

  He joins me, and I point to the screws. We each begin madly working on one screw at a time. Twisting, pulling. Alexandre gives up and tries simply lifting off the entire lion’s head.

  “We need tools,” I say. “We can’t pull out screws and bolts with our fingers. There’s all this rust and—”

  Alexandre rushes off before I can finish. “There’s a janitor’s closet!” he yells as he runs up the stairs toward the Château.

  I take a seat on the edge of the stone basin, resting my chin in my hand. Evening is approaching, and it’s been an exhausting and exhilarating day. I still need to text my parents, and regardless of whether we find anything in this fountain, the entire world is going to know at least part of Leila’s story tomorrow. Secrets will be revealed. But not all of them.

  Knowing how excited my parents get over even the tiniest of academic revelations, I can only imagine the uproar this will cause in the worlds of art and literature—in France, in England, with Ottoman scholars. And maybe even with the judges of the Art Institute’s Young Scholar Prize.

  The world can be turned upside down by a chance encounter. Or, in my case, one calculated by Alexandre’s Uncle Gérard and carried out by Alexandre. Still. It makes my brain hurt to think about how little control we have over events in our life despite how hard we try to control everything. How hard I try to control everything.