Bluebeard (18 page)

He stood and faced me. I had not budged from the top of the stairs. The new rubber heels I had put on my old broken shoes were cantilevered in air past the lip of the top step, so reluctant was I to come any farther into this dumbfoundingly complex and mirrored environment.

Gregory himself was only a head and hands now,
since his caftan was black. The head said to me, “I was born in a stable like Jesus Christ, and I cried like this:”

From his throat came a harrowing counterfeit of the cries of an unwanted baby who could do nothing but cry and cry.

My hair stood on end.

     
D
AN GREGORY
, or
Gregorian
, as he was known in the Old World, was rescued from his parents when he was about five years old by the wife of an artist named Beskudnikov, who was the engraver of plates for Imperial bonds and paper currency. She did not love him. He was simply a stray, mangy animal in the city she could not stand to see abused. So she did with him what she had done with several stray cats and dogs she had brought home—handed him over to the servants to clean and raise.

“Her servants felt about me the way my servants feel about you,” Gregory said to me. “I was just one more job to do, like shoveling ashes from the stoves or cleaning the lamp chimneys or beating the rugs.”

He said he studied what the dogs and cats did to get along, and then he did that, too. “The animals spent a lot of time in Beskudnikov’s workshop, which was behind his house,” he said. “The apprentices and journeymen would pet them and give them food, so I did that, too. I did some things that other animals
couldn’t
do. I learned all the languages spoken there. Beskudnikov himself had studied in England and France, and he liked to give his helpers orders in one or the other of those languages, which he expected all of them to understand. Very soon I made myself useful as a translator, telling them exactly what their master had said to them. I already knew Polish and Russian, which the servants had taught me.”

“And Armenian,” I suggested.

“No,” he said. “All I ever learned from my drunken parents was how to bray like a jackass or gibber like a monkey—or snarl like a wolf.”

He said that he also mastered every craft practiced in the shop, and, like me, had a knack for catching in a quick sketch a passable likeness of almost anybody or anything. “At the age often I myself was made an apprentice,” he said.

“By the age of fifteen,” he went on, “it was obvious to everyone that I was a genius. Beskudnikov himself felt threatened, so he assigned me a task which everyone agreed was impossible. He would promote me to journeyman only after I had drawn by hand a one-ruble note, front and back, good enough to fool the sharp-eyed merchants in the marketplace.”

He grinned at me. “The penalty for counterfeiting in those days,” he said, “was a public hanging in that same marketplace.”

Young Dan Gregorian spent six months making what he and all his co-workers agreed was a perfect note. Beskudnikov called the effort childish, and tore it into little pieces.

Gregorian made an even better one, again taking six months to do so. Beskudnikov declared it to be worse than the first, and threw it into the fire.

Gregorian made still a better one, spending a full year on it this time. All the while, of course, he was also carrying out his regular chores around the shop and house. When he completed his third counterfeit, however, he put it in his pocket. He showed Beskudnikov the genuine ruble he had been copying instead.

As he had expected, the old man laughed at that one, too. But before Beskudnikov could destroy it, young Gregorian snatched it away and ran out into the marketplace. He bought a box of cigars with the genuine ruble, telling the tobacconist that the note was
surely
genuine, since it had come from Beskudnikov, engraver of the plates for the Imperial paper currency.

Beskudnikov was horrified when the boy returned with the cigars. He had never meant for him to actually spend his counterfeit in the marketplace. He had named negotiability simply as his standard for excellence. His bugging eyes and sweaty brow and gasping proved that he was an honest man whose judgment was clouded by jealousy. Because his brilliant apprentice had handed
him the ruble, his own work, incidentally, it really did look like a fake to him.

What could the old man do, now? The tobacconist would surely recognize the note as a fake, too, and know where it had come from. After that? The law was the law. The Imperial engraver and his apprentice would be hanged side by side in the marketplace.

“To his eternal credit,” Dan Gregory said to me, “he himself resolved to retrieve what he thought was a fatal piece of paper. He asked me for the ruble I had copied. I of course handed him my perfect counterfeit.”

Beskudnikov told the tobacconist a preposterous story about how the ruble his apprentice had spent on cigars had great sentimental value. It was a matter of indifference to the tobacconist, who traded him the real one for the fake.

The old man returned to the workshop beaming. The moment he was inside, however, he promised Gregorian the beating of his life. Until that time, Gregorian had always stood still for his beatings, as a good apprentice should.

This time the boy ran a short distance away and turned to laugh at his master.

“How dare you laugh at a time like this?” cried Beskudnikov.

“I dare to laugh at you now and for the rest of my life,” the apprentice replied. He told what he had done with his counterfeit ruble and the real one. “You can
teach me no more. I have surpassed you by far,” he said. “I am such a genius that I have tricked the engraver of the Imperial currency into passing a counterfeit ruble in the marketplace. My last words on Earth will be a confession to you, should we find ourselves side by side with nooses around our necks in the marketplace. I will say, ‘You were right after all. I wasn’t as talented as I thought I was. Good-bye, cruel world, good-bye.’”

     
C
OCKY
D
AN
G
REGORIAN
left Beskudnikov’s employ that day, and easily became a journeyman under another master engraver and silk screen artist, who made theatrical posters and illustrations for children’s books. His counterfeit was never detected, or at any rate was not traced to him or Beskudnikov.

“And Beskudnikov surely never told anyone the true story,” he said to me, “of how he and his most promising apprentice came to a parting of the ways.”

He said he had so far done me the favor of making me feel unwelcome. “Since you are so much older than I was when I surpassed Beskudnikov,” he went on, “we should waste no time in assigning you work roughly equivalent to copying a ruble by hand.” He appeared to consider many possible projects, but I am sure he had settled on the most diabolical one imaginable well before my arrival.

“Aha!” he said. “I’ve got it! I want you to set up an easel about where you’re standing now. You should then paint a picture of this room—
indistinguishable
from a photograph. Does that sound fair? I hope not.”

I swallowed hard. “No, sir,” I said, “it sure isn’t fair.”

And he said, “Excellent!”

I have just been to New York City for the first time in two years. It was Circe Berman’s idea that I do this, and that I do it alone—so as to prove to myself that I was still a perfectly healthy man, in no way in need of assistance, in no way an invalid. It is now the middle of August. She has been here for two months and a little more, which means that I have been writing this book for two months!

She swore that the city of New York could be a Fountain of Youth for me, if only I would retrace some of the steps I had taken when I first got there from California so long ago. “Your muscles will tell you that they are nearly as springy as they were back then,” she said. “If you will only let it,” she said, “your brain will show you that it can be exactly as cocky and
excited
as it was back then.”

It sounded good. But guess what? She was assembling a booby trap.