Sacré Bleu

“Really? You’re going to do it on the table?” asked Bleu.

“Yes. It’s a sturdy table. Why not?”

“Because you’ll have to stand on a chair—chairs. Dangerous. We should use the divan.” She started gathering cushions from the couch, and upon lifting the third one discovered a small, nickel-plated revolver stuffed in the gap by the arm. She quickly replaced the cushion before the Colorman noticed she had seen. “Or the floor,” she said. “The floor is best.”

She swept the oilcloth off the table and spread it out over the floor between the dining room and the parlor. As she undressed, she said, “I found Gauguin, the painter who shared Vincent’s yellow house in Arles. As soon as we have the blue, he is ours. He has a weakness for Polynesian girls.”

The Colorman stripped off his jacket, then unlaced his shoes and kicked them across the room. “I wondered why you picked this one. There is another painter, too, who bought color from me. Called Seurat, a theorist, though; he may be slow.”

“Gauguin will be fast. He had the vision he was going to paint before he even met this girl.”

“Good, we just need to clean up from the last one, then, yes?” The Colorman was nude now, except for a loincloth made of tattered linen, his bent spine and spindly twisted limbs making him appear like the product of a giant rat crossbred with a chanterelle mushroom. Coarse black hair like a boar’s peppered his umber skin. He was setting four small braziers around the oilcloth, building small charcoal fires in each. To the side, he had placed two round earthenware jars the size of pomegranates, each had a leather cord at its neck and a wide cork lid.

“No cleanup to do,” she said. She was nude now, too, standing aside as the Colorman prepared the site. “Vincent’s brother is taken care of.”

The Colorman turned slowly toward her, holding a long, black obsidian knife, the hilt wrapped with some sort of tanned animal skin. “The art dealer? You shot the Dutchman’s brother?”

“Syphilis,” she said. A smile then, looking shy on the naked island girl as she peeked out from behind a curtain of hip-length hair. “See, it’s not always slow, but slow enough to ask them questions before they die.”

The Colorman nodded. “Good, then we only have to shoot the baker and the dwarf and it’s all done.”

“Yes, that’s all,” she said. Damn it. This was not at all what she had expected. Not at all.

“I’m ready,” he said. “Lie down.” He uncapped one of the jars and hung it around his neck like a medallion.

She lay on her back in the middle of the oilcloth and stretched her arms above her head. The Colorman sprinkled powder into the braziers and a rich aromatic smoke filled the flat. Then he ran about the room hopping on chairs and turning down the gaslights, so that the girl was barely visible in the dim glow of the braziers. He began to chant as he stepped around her, waving the knife over her face. The chant didn’t consist of words, as such, but rhythms, animal sounds given meaning by cadence.

“No shagging the Vuvuzela,” said Bleu.

He stopped chanting. “What the fuck is a Vuvuzela?”

“That’s this girl’s name. No shagging her.” Sometimes the trance was so deep for both of them that when Bleu emerged she was relatively sure she’d been molested. There was never any proof. He was careful and covered his tracks, so to speak, but still, she suspected.

He looked a little disappointed. His thick brow hung over his eyes a little more than normal. “Maybe when we’re done you can leave her and I can frighten her, no?”

“Maybe. Make the color, Colorman.”

He laughed, a wheezing cough of a laugh, and resumed his chant. The girl’s eyes rolled back in her head and she convulsed several times in rhythm to the Colorman’s chant, then she went rigid, bent-backed, and locked that way; only her shoulder blades and her heels still touched

the oilcloth. The Manet painting began to glow then, a dim, throbbing blue light that shone over the whole room.

The Colorman chanted, danced his wounded-bird march, the painting glowed, and slowly, ever so slowly, the girl began to turn blue as the color rose on her skin. Even the soul-empty body of Juliette looked wide-eyed at the scene as the Colorman lay the blade of the black glass knife on the girl’s skin and began to scrape the blue powder.

The knife was sharp, but not so sharp that it would shave, and for all his broken-spider awkwardness, the Colorman wielded the knife with smooth precision, shaving the powder off of every surface of the girl’s body, even off her eyelids, and scraping it into the earthenware jar. He rolled her on her side and scraped the delicate curves of her back, rolling her again, back and forth, breaking into a sweat, so that the blue powder covered his own hands, his feet, his thighs. Meanwhile the painting, the masterpiece Manet that almost no one had ever seen, faded by degrees as the Colorman filled his jar. The painting—the passion, the suffering, the intensity, the skill, the time, the life that Manet had put into it, guided by his inspiration—all came out on the girl’s skin as the powder, as the Sacré Bleu. There was always more color from the painting than had gone into it. Sometimes a small painting might yield two jars of the color, especially if it had been created with great sacrifice, great suffering, and great love, for that, too, was part of the formula.

The Colorman chanted and scraped until the Manet painting was just a blank canvas. It had taken more than an hour. He capped the jar and unslung it from his neck, setting it by the blank canvas.

The girl relaxed by jerky degrees, like the tension being released in a spring with each click of some cosmic gear, until she lay flat again, peaceful. She opened her eyes, now the only bit of her body not covered in the flat, blue ultramarine powder—even her long dark hair was dusted with the color from the Colorman stepping on it as he worked. She turned on her side and looked at the Colorman, then at the blank canvas.

“Just one jar,” said the Colorman. He was rolling his glass knife up in a piece of rawhide.

She was exhausted, felt as if someone had dragged the very life force out of her, which, essentially, someone had. “But there is enough color for a painting?”

“For many,” said the Colorman. “Unless they paint impasto, like that fucking Dutchman.”

She nodded and climbed to her feet, stumbled, then caught herself. She looked at Juliette, who was looking back, as blank-faced as a mannequin. Bleu could hear footfalls outside on the landing. The nosy concierge, no doubt, brought up by the Colorman’s chanting, just as she thought.

“You want to share a bath?” asked the Colorman, leering at the island girl, his loincloth now covered in blue and looking rather more alert than it had during the making of the color.