Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  When I finished helping a jubilant Maia (she’d earned enough on her share of the commission on Zach’s paintings to put the down payment on a studio in Williamsburg) clean up and had locked up the gallery, I found my father and Zach drinking champagne in the kitchen.

  “Join us in a toast, sweetheart,” my father crooned as I sat tiredly down at the table.

  “Of course,” I said, taking a Baccarat crystal flute (one of a set my parents had brought back from their honeymoon in Paris) from Zach’s steady hand. I gazed at my father and remembered how tense and worried he had looked five months ago, on the night I’d come home from John Dee’s shop with the silver box. Now, despite his gunshot wound and his week in the hospital, he looked happy and rested and glowing from the success of Zach’s show.

  “Here’s to a successful show,” I said, lifting my glass. “The paintings are amazing, Zach. I’m almost sorry to see them all go.” I meant it even though I knew that what we’d earned on our commission from the sales would go a long way toward paying off our debt and putting us on the road to financial stability. Zach had been that generous with his commissions and the prices had gone wildly high.

  “We’ve got more good news,” my father said, exchanging a look with Zach. “I just heard from Pierre Benoit at Sotheby’s. The Pissarros sold for twice their reserve.”

  “Really?” I said. “That’s great! Who bought them?”

  “An anonymous buyer,” Roman said. “So much for snow scenes not selling in a recession!”

  I thought of the mauve-and-blue-tinted snow in the Pissarros, remembering how on the night of the robbery I’d longed to slip into those snow-covered French fields, and I wished I could see the paintings one more time, but I raised my glass and said, “To Anonymous, then, whoever he or she may be!”

  We clinked our glasses, the old crystal chiming like church bells. Then my father said, “There’s something else strange. Anonymous insisted on sending us a gift along with his money. A package was delivered earlier today. I was so busy getting ready for the show I didn’t have time to open it.” He pointed to a wooden packing crate on the floor beside the safe door.

  “That is strange,” I said. “It must have been sent before the auction. Anonymous must have been pretty sure he was going to get the paintings. And why send the seller a present? I’ve never heard of that.”

  Roman shrugged. “Me neither. Why don’t we open it?”

  Zach got out a screwdriver from the tool drawer and went to work dismantling the wooden packing case. I searched the outside of the box for an address or shipping label, but there was nothing. It was clear, though, that the gift was a small painting, professionally packed.

  “Maybe it’s another Pissarro that he wants us to sell for him?” I wondered aloud as Zach removed the last layer of packing foam from the painting. I could see that the gilt frame was mid-nineteenth-century, but the front of the canvas was facing away from me and toward Zach.

  “Not a Pissarro,” Zach said. “A Vuillard maybe? There’s no signature. The subject’s Parisian, though. I’m sure I’ve seen the place before.”

  He turned the painting around and propped it up on a kitchen chair, just as he and my father had propped up the Pissarros that night in December. As on that night I felt as if the painting opened a window onto another place, but this time it was a rain-soaked park in Paris in shades of blue and lilac, lamplight gleaming on bits of marble statuary and the leaves of trees. A small stone church loomed dimly in the mist at the back of the park.

  “It’s pretty,” I said, moving closer to the painting. “An old church in Paris.” As I said the words, something pricked at my memory.

  “The oldest church in Paris,” my father said with a faraway look in his eyes as he gazed at the picture. “That’s Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Your mother and I stayed at an apartment nearby in Saint-Germain lent to her by one of her old friends—Marie Du something or other—after the war. When I came back from the galleries, I’d find your mother sitting in that church and then we’d have dinner at the café across the street. After the war the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was where one would go to listen to jazz or to Sartre and de Beauvoir arguing about existentialism . . .”

  My father went on for some time, reminiscing about the days he and my mother had spent in Paris in the fifties, and trips they later took there to buy paintings. I listened contentedly, gazing at the painting and sipping more champagne than I should have. By the time Zach went home and my father went up to bed, it was almost dawn. I continued to sit at the kitchen table and gazed at the painting as the gray light of dawn slowly stole across the canvas.

  A painting of an old church in Paris. That’s what Marguerite D’Arques had left for Will in her London lodgings when she left him. He took it as an invitation to find her—and eventually he had, by following a clue he found in the church that had led him to another clue . . . and then to another, until he traced her back to the pool beside the tower—to the place where she summoned the creature that made her mortal. Isn’t that where Will would have taken the silver box now? He said that he’d tried to retrace his steps over the years and failed, but maybe he’d found a way this time, and perhaps he’d wondered if I could follow the trail if I had the starting point.

  I reached into my pocket for my loupe, but brought out the lover’s eye instead. I’d taken to keeping it in my pocket and holding it up to my eye every once in a while, always hoping it would show me something other than the blank silver back of the brooch. I held it up now over the painting. For a moment I wondered if I’d gotten the loupe after all because I saw, as though through glass, the scene in the painting in front of me . . . the rain-slicked park, the stone church . . . but then I saw that the rain was actually falling and, as I watched, a dark-cloaked figure walked by, his boots stirring the lamplit puddle.

  I blinked and the vision abruptly faded. The brooch was opaque and the painting was still. Perhaps I had imagined it, or perhaps Madame Dufay’s eye, although damaged by smoke, had revived for a moment at the sight of a familiar place.

  I brought the painting upstairs and leaned it against the window behind my worktable so I could look at it while I searched the Internet. By the time the morning light had fully filled my studio, I’d reserved a seat on a flight to Paris. I looked up from my computer screen and noticed that the Poland Spring bottle that I’d brought back from Governors Island—the one I’d filled with the last of Melusine—was glowing in the light, as if it knew that it was on its way home. Then I looked at the painting. In full sunlight it glowed like an opal, each raindrop glistening as if the sun in my studio were actually shining on that rain-soaked park. Like the vision I’d had before, the illusion only lasted for a moment, but long enough for me to know that once I set foot in that park, I’d be on the path to finding Will Hughes and the Summer Country.