‘No sale,’ she said shortly. ‘No business. I’m not interested.’
O’Toole foggily stared at his picture on the easel, trying to understand what was wrong with it.
‘But it’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘Look at it. Look at those flowers. It took me three days just to do those flowers.’
‘You’re breaking my heart,’ said Madame. ‘Ingrate. Traitor. You have another dealer now. Let him buy your obscene flowers.’
In the end, O’Toole had to reclaim his picture from Florelle and beg Madame’s forgiveness, almost with tears in his eyes. And Madame, contemplating the flow of landscapes which would be coming her way until O’Toole drank himself to death, almost had tears of emotion in her own eyes. The landscapes were bringing her at least 100 francs each, and the thought of 500 to 1000 percent profit on a picture can make any art dealer emotional.
Then Fatima entered the scene.
Fatima was not her name, of course; it was what some wag at the Cafe Hyacinthe had christened her when she had started to hang around there between sessions of modeling for life classes. She was a small swarthy Algerian, very plain of feature, but with magnificent, dark, velvety eyes, coal-black hair which hung in a tangle to her waist, and a lush figure. She was also known to have the worst disposition of anyone who frequented the cafe and, with a few drinks in her, the foulest mouth.
‘She’s not even eighteen yet,’ the bartender once observed, listening awestruck as she told off a hapless painter who had sat down uninvited at her table. ‘Think how she’ll sound when she’s a full-grown woman!’
She also had her sentimental side, blubbering unashamedly at sad scenes in the movies, especially those in which lovers were parted or children abused, and had a way of carting stray kittens back to her room on the rue des Saulles until her concierge, no sentimentalist at all, raised a howl about it.
So although it was unexpected, it was not totally mystifying to the patrons of the Cafe Hyacinthe that Fatima should suddenly demonstrate an interest in O’Toole one rainy day when he stumbled into the cafe and stood in the doorway dripping cold rainwater on the floor, sneezing his head off, and, no question about it, looking even more forlorn than any of the stray kittens Fatima’s concierge objected to.
Fatima was alone at her usual table, sullenly nursing her second Pernod. Her eyes fell on O’Toole, taking him in from head to foot, and a light of interest dawned in them. She crooked a finger.
‘Hey, you. Come over here.’
It was the first time she had ever invited anyone to her table. O’Toole glanced over his shoulder to see whom she was delivering the invitation to and then pointed to himself.
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you, stupid. Come here and sit down.’
He did. And it was Fatima who not only stood him a bottle of wine but ordered a towel from the bartender so that she could dry his sodden hair. The patrons at the other tables gaped as she toweled away, O’Toole’s head bobbing back and forth helplessly under her ministrations.
‘You’re a real case, aren’t you?’ she told O’Toole. ‘Don’t you have brains enough to wear a hat in the rain so you don’t go around trying to kill yourself in this stinking weather?’
‘A hat?’ O’Toole said vaguely.
‘Yes, imbecile. That thing one uses to keep his head dry in the rain.’
‘Oh,’ said O’Toole. Then he said in timid apology, ‘I don’t have one.’
Everyone in the cafe watched with stupefaction as Fatima tenderly patted his cheek.
‘It’s all right, baby,’ she said. ‘Someone left one in my room last week. When we get out of here you’ll walk me back there and I’ll give it to you.’
The whole thing came about as abruptly as that. And it was soon clear to the most cynical beholder that Fatima had fallen hopelessly in love with this particular stray cat. She began to bathe regularly, she combed out the tangles in her splendid hair, she showed up at the cafe wearing dresses recently laundered. And, surest sign of all, the little red welts and the bite marks once bestowed on her neck and shoulders by various overnight acquaintances all faded away.
As for O’Toole, Fatima mothered him passionately. She moved him into her room, lock, stock, and easel; saw to it that he was decently fed and clothed; threatened to slit the throat of the bartender of the Cafe Hyacinthe if he dared serve her man any more of that poisonous marc instead of a drinkable wine; and promised to gut anyone in the cafe who made the slightest remark about her grand amour.
No one there or elsewhere on Butte-Montmartre made any remarks. In fact, with only one exception among them, they found the situation rather touching. The one exception was Madame Lagrue.
It was not merely that paintings of nudes outraged Madame – in her loudly expressed opinion, the Louvre itself would do well to burn its filthy exhibitions of nakedness – but the knowledge that the degraded models for such paintings should be allowed to walk the very streets she walked was enough to turn her stomach. And that one of these degraded, venal types should somehow take possession of a cherished property like O’Toole—!
Madame recognized that the corruption had set in the day O’Toole appeared before her almost unrecognizably dandified. The shabby old suit was the same, but it had been cleaned and patched. The shoes were still scuffed and torn, but the knotted pieces of string in them had been replaced by shoelaces. The cheeks were shaven for the first time in memory, and, to Madame’s narrowed eyes, they did not appear quite so hollow as they used to be. All in all, here was the sad spectacle of a once dedicated artist being prettified and fattened up like a shoat for the market, and, no doubt, having the poison of avarice injected into him by the slut who was doing all this prettifying and fattening. It was easy to visualize the way Fatima must be demanding of him that he ask some preposterous price for this landscape on the easel. Well, Madame grimly decided, if a showdown had to come, it might as well come right now.
Madame glanced at the landscape and at O’Toole who stood there beaming with admiration at it, then wrote down on her scrap of paper the usual price of 20 francs.
‘Come on,’ she said tartly, ‘a vous la balle. Name your price. I’m a busy woman. I don’t have all day for this nonsense.’
O’Toole stopped beaming. Just before departing for the gallery he had been admonished by Fatima to demand 100 francs for this painting.
‘Simpleton,’ she had said kindly, ‘you’ve put a week’s work into this thing. Florelle told me a painting like this was worth at least a hundred francs to the old witch. You have to stop letting her bleed you to death. This time if she offers only twenty or thirty, just spit in her ugly face.’
‘Yes, this time,’ O’Toole had said bravely.
Now, with Madame’s flinty eyes on him, he smiled not so bravely. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, opened it again.
‘Well?’ said Madame in a voice of doom.
‘Would twenty francs be all right?’ said O’Toole.
‘Yes,’ said Madame triumphantly.
It was the first of her many triumphs over Fatima’s baleful influence. The greatest triumph, one Madame herself never even knew of, came the time Fatima announced to O’Toole that she would accompany him on his next sales meeting. If he didn’t have the guts of a decayed flounder in dealing with his exploiter, at least she, thank God, did. She watched as O’Toole, after giving her a long troubled look, started to pack his paints together.
‘What are you doing, numskull?’ she demanded.
‘I’m leaving,’ O’Toole said with a dignity that astonished and alarmed her. ‘This is no good. A woman shouldn’t mix in her husband’s business.’
‘What husband? We’re not married, imbecile.’
‘We’re not?’
‘No, we’re not.’
‘I’m leaving anyhow,’ said O’Toole, somewhat confusingly. ‘I don’t want anyone to help me sell my paintings.’
It took Fatima a flood of tears and two bottles of vin rouge to wheedle him out of his de
cision, and she never made the same mistake again. It was a lost cause, she saw. All O’Toole wanted besides the pleasure of painting was the pleasure of having a ready cash market for his paintings, and Madame Lagrue, by offering him one, had bought his soul like the devil.
Until she had to face this realization Fatima had merely detested Madame Lagrue. Now she hated her with a devouring hatred. Oh, to have revenge on the evil old woman, some lovely revenge that would make her scream her head off. Many a night after that Fatima happily put herself to sleep with thoughts of revenge circling through her head, most of them having to do with hot irons. And would wake up in the morning knowing despondently how futile those happy thoughts were.
Then Nature decided to play a card.
O’Toole was, as is so often the case, one of the last to learn the news. He received it with honest bewilderment.
‘You’re going to have a baby?’ he said, trying to understand this.
‘We are going to have a baby,’ Fatima corrected. ‘Both of us. It’s already on the way. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said O’Toole with becoming sobriety. ‘A baby.’
‘That’s right. And it means some big changes around here. For one thing, it means we really are getting married now, because my kid’s not going to be any miserable, fatherless alley rat. It’s going to have a nice little mama and papa, and a nice little house to grow up in. You’re not already married, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I’ll take my chances on that. And for another thing, we’re getting out of Paris. I’ve had my bellyful of this horrible place, and so have you. We’re packing up and going to my home town in Algeria. To Bougie where the kid will get some sunshine. My aunt and uncle own a cafe there, a nice little place, and they’ve got no kids of their own, so they’d give anything to have me help them run the joint. You can paint meanwhile.’
‘A baby,’ said O’Toole. To Fatima’s immense relief he seemed to be rather pleased with the idea. Then his face darkened. ‘Bougie,’ he said. ‘But how will I sell my paintings?’
‘You can ship them to your old witch. You think she’ll turn down such bargains because they come in the mail?’
O’Toole considered this unhappily. ‘I’ll have to talk to her about it.’
‘No, I will, whether you like it or not,’ said Fatima, risking everything on this throw of the dice. ‘I’ve got another piece of business to settle with her anyhow.’
‘What business?’
‘Money. We’ll need plenty of it to get to Bougie and set up in a house there. And it wouldn’t hurt to have a few francs extra put away for the bad times so the kid can always have a pair of shoes when he needs them.’
‘He?’
‘Or she. It’s even more expensive with a girl, if it comes to that. Or would you rather have your daughter selling her innocent little body as soon as she’s able to walk?’
O’Toole shook his head vigorously at the suggestion. Then he looked wonderingly at the mother-to-be.
‘But this money—’ he said. ‘You think Madame Lagrue will give it to us?’
‘Yes.’
Finally, he had found something on which he could express a firm opinion. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said.
‘Am I?’ Fatima retorted. ‘Well, simpleton, you leave it to me and I’ll show you how crazy I am. And get this straight. If you don’t let me handle that miserable old hyena my own way, I’ll turn you over to the cops for giving me a baby without marrying me, and they’ll throw you in jail for twenty years. Nobody does any painting in jail either. He just sits there and rots until he’s an old man. Do you understand?’
For the first time O’Toole found himself face to face with a presence even more overwhelming than Madame Lagrue’s.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘All right then,’ said Fatima. ‘Now get a nice big canvas ready. You’re going to paint me a picture.’
So it was that a week later, Fatima appeared in the Galerie Lagrue bearing a large painting clumsily wrapped in newspaper. Madame’s assistant, a pale, timid girl, tried to bar her from the office and was shoved aside.
Madame was at her desk in the office. At the sight of her visitor who came bearing what must be an original O’Toole, she quivered with indignation. She aimed a commanding forefinger at the door.
‘Out!’ she said. ‘Out! I don’t do business with your kind!’
Fatima summed up her answer to this in a single unprintable word. She slammed the office door shut with a backward kick of the foot, hoisted the painting to the easel and stripped its wrapping from it.
‘Is it your business to refuse masterpieces, harpy?” she demanded. ‘Look at this.’
Madame Lagrue looked. Then she looked again, her eyes opening wide in horror.
The painting was larger than any O’Toole had ever offered her before, and it was not the usual landscape. No, this time it was a nude. A ripely curved, full-blown nude with not an inch of her fleshy body left to the imagination. And with Fatima in a tight, highly revealing blouse and skirt standing side by side with the painting, there was no doubt in Madame’s shocked mind as to who its model had been. The nude was an uninspired pink and white, not swarthy as Fatima was, but it was without question Fatima’s body so painstakingly delineated on the canvas.
But that was only the beginning of the horror, because while it was Fatima from the neck down, it was, abomination of abominations, Madame Lagrue herself from the neck up. Photographically exact, glassy-eyed, the black flower pot upside down on the head with the dusty flowers sprouting from its crown, the stern face staring at Madame was Madame’s own face.
‘A masterpiece, eh?’ said Fatima sweetly.
Madame made a strangled noise in her throat, then found her voice. ‘What an insult! What an outrage!’
She came to her feet prepared to rend the outrage to shreds, and suddenly there was a wicked little paring knife gleaming in Fatima’s hand. Madame hastily sat down again.
‘That’s better,’ Fatima advised her. ‘Lay one little finger on this picture before you buy it, you old sow, and I’ll slice your nose off.’
‘Buy it?’ Madame refused to believe her ears. ‘Do you really believe I’d buy an obscenity like that?’
‘Yes. Because if you don’t, Florelle will take it on commission. And he’ll be glad to put it right in the middle of his window where everyone on Butte-Montmartre can see it. Then everyone in Paris. Those fancy Americans you do business with will see it, too. They’ll all have a chance to see it, bloodsucker, because I’ll tell Florelle not to sell it at any price for at least a year. It’ll be worth it to him to keep it in his window just to draw trade. Think that over. Think it over very carefully. I’m in no rush.’
Madame thought it over very carefully for a long time.
‘It’s blackmail,’ she said at last in bitter resignation. ‘Plain blackmail. A shakedown, nothing more or less.’
‘You’ve hit the nail right on the head,’ Fatima said cheerfully.
‘What if I submit to this blackmail?’ Madame asked warily. ‘Can I do whatever I wish with this disgusting object?’
‘Anything. If you pay its price.’
‘And what is its price?’
Fatima reached into a pocket and came up with a folded slip of paper which she waved tantalizingly just out of Madame’s reach.
‘The price is written down here, old lady. Now all you have to do is meet it, and the picture is yours. But remember this. Offer me one solitary franc less than what’s written down on this paper, and the deal is off. There’s no second chance. You get one turn in this game, that’s all. Prove yourself one franc too thrifty, and the picture goes straight to Florelle.’
‘What kind of talk is that?’ Madame demanded angrily. ‘A game, she says. I’m willing to do business with this creature, and she talks about games.’
‘Vulture,’ retorted Fatima. ‘Destroyer of helpless artists. Don’t you think everyone knows this is the way you do
business? A vous la balle, eh? Kindly dig your grave, artist, and bury yourself. Isn’t that the way it goes? Well, now it’s your turn to learn how it feels.’
Madame opened her arms wide in piteous appeal. ‘But how can I possibly know what you intend to rob me of? How can I even guess what it would cost to buy you off?’
‘True,’ admitted Fatima. ‘Well, I’m soft-hearted so I’ll give a hint. My man and I are moving to Bougie in Algeria, and we’ll need travel money for that. And some decent clothes and a trunk to put them in. And we want to buy a little house there—’
‘A house!’ said Madame, the blood draining from her face.
‘A little house. Nothing much, but it must have electricity. And a motor bicycle to get around on.’
Madame Lagrue clasped her hands tightly against her stout bosom and rocked back and forth in the chair. She looked at the nude on the easel and hastily averted her eyes from it.
‘Dear God,’ she whimpered, ‘what have I done to deserve such treatment?’
‘And,’ said Fatima relentlessly, ‘a little pourboire, a little money extra to put in the bank like respectable people should. That’s what I see in my future, old lady. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, so you shouldn’t have much trouble adding it all up.’ She held up the slip of paper. ‘But make sure your arithemetic is right. Remember, you only get one chance to guess what’s written here.’
In her rage and frustration Madame found herself groping wildly for elusive figures. Travel money to Algeria, 300 francs. No, 400. No, better make it 500, because rather safe than sorry. Another 500 should certainly buy all the clothes needed for such a pair of ragamuffins. Throw in 100 for a trunk. But a house, even a mud hut, with electricity! Madame groaned aloud. What, in the devil’s name, would that cost? Possibly 7000 or 8000 francs. And pourboire, the slut had said, and a motor bicycle. There was no use trying to work it all out to the exact franc. The best thing to do was call it a round 10,000.
The Specialty of the House Page 54
