Henri liked to play a game he called Guess the Pimp in the ballroom of the Moulin de la Galette. He and a group of friends (sometimes Lucien included) would sit at the edge of the crowded dance hall and try to guess which men in the booths were pimps tending to their girls and which were simply workingmen or rascals trying to make time with a pretty thing. They would place their bets, then one of the Moulin’s doormen would come by and confirm or disprove their suspicions. Henri almost always lost.
“Not her pimp,” said Henri. “I don’t know what he is to her, but what I need you to ask yourself is, what if you found Juliette and she didn’t know you?”
“What?”
“Lucien, you know after I followed her to the Colorman’s apartment, I spoke to him.”
“I know this, Henri. You thought he was lying about knowing Vincent.”
“I’m sure he was lying about Vincent, but what I didn’t tell you is I asked about Carmen.”
“Carmen? Why?”
“When I saw him outside of the Dead Rat, the day you ran into Juliette, I remembered seeing Carmen with him.”
“No!”
“You know I couldn’t remember much of my time with Carmen.”
“Absinthe,” said Lucien. “That’s why we sent you to your mother’s. It was for your own good.”
“Damn it, Lucien, it wasn’t the absinthe. You heard Dr. Gachet. Renoir, Monet, all of them have had these moments of memory lapse, of hallucinations, going back years. Renoir remembers the Colorman but nothing about him. You’ve had them, and you haven’t been drinking absinthe, have you? It’s the color. Something in the color. And it doesn’t just affect the painter. I found Carmen, Lucien. I found her and she had no idea who I was. She blamed it on a fever. She almost died after I left.”
Lucien felt his face go numb at the revelation, both over what he had done to Henri and what it might mean to him and Juliette. He, Maurice Guibert, and Émile Bernard had physically dragged Henri out of his studio, bathed him, dressed him, then Guibert and Bernard had taken Henri to his mother’s castle and stayed there with him until he sobered up.
“You were killing yourself, Henri.”
“I was painting.”
“We were trying to be good friends to—”
“She doesn’t know me, Lucien,” Lautrec blurted out. “She doesn’t remember ever having met me.” He ground his cheroot out on the floor (as Bruant not only allowed but required), then removed his pince-nez and pretended to wipe the fog from the lenses on his cravat. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say. Juliette may not even know you.”
“She will. We’ll go to the Batignolles now. We’ll save her—break whatever kind of hold the Colorman has over her. She’ll understand about my mother braining her with a crêpe pan. You’ll see.”
Henri shook his head. “You think I haven’t gone back? You were unconscious for a week, Lucien, and we were certain she was the cause. Of course I went back to where she lived. They are gone.”
“I thought you were drunk in a brothel the whole time I was out.”
“Well, yes, I was drunk, but I wasn’t always in a brothel. I took a taxi to their apartment—but I did take two whores with me in case of an emergency. The concierge said that when she checked on them one morning, the Colorman and the girl were just gone. Not a word.”
“We’ll find her,” said Lucien, realizing even as he said it that they’d both been this way before.
“Like we found her when she left two and a half years ago? Like I found Carmen after I came back from Mother’s?”
“But we did find them.”
“We found them because of the Colorman.”
“Then we’ll find the Colorman again.”
“We are painters,” said Henri. “We don’t know how to find things.”
“Speak for yourself. I’ll find her.”
Henri sighed and drained his beer, then looked to the bar. Bruant hadn’t returned from wherever he’d gone to fetch the ladder. The butchers still dozed in the corner. The barmaid had her head propped on her hands and was on her way to dozing off as well. “Fine, then. Let’s move your painting behind the bar. Then we’ll go see your friend Professeur Bastard.”
“Le Professeur? But he’s a lunatic.”